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Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.Once again, the MMSD and State of WI are going in the wrong direction regarding education. Much more on "Credit for non-MMSD courses.When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."
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Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers of both parties will unveil a series of sweeping pension and benefit reforms Monday that could affect every public employee in New Jersey while saving the state billions of dollars, according to four officials with direct knowledge of the plan.The proposals would require workers and retirees at all levels of government and local school districts to contribute to their own health care costs, ban part-time workers at the state and local levels from participating in the underfunded state pension system, cap sick leave payouts for all public employees and constitutionally require the state to fully fund its pension obligations each year.
Details of the four-bill package to be introduced Monday were provided to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity because the four officials were not authorized to speak in advance.
The proposals go further than several past efforts at reining in taxpayer-funded pension and benefit costs, and if enacted would represent a major early victory for the new Republican governor and Democrats who control the state Legislature. But supporters anticipate an angry response from public employee and teachers unions that wield considerable power throughout the state -- though lawmakers argue rank-and-file workers would have safer pensions than before.
Christie's office declined to comment, as did top Democrats and Republicans involved in crafting the bills.
All sides had made their feelings clear last month, when Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) announced the upper house's intentions to fix a system that would otherwise "go bankrupt." Lawmakers of both parties pledged their support, with Christie saying "bipartisan action is critical to reforming a broken pension and benefits system."
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North Carolina has dropped the teaching of United States History before 1877 for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just dropped year one.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history "more relevant" to their students because it will be "closer" to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S. History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? The public high school student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship) read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don't read history, and don't know any history from any other source, of course anything that happened "back then" seems not too relevant to their own lives, whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: "the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child's imagination."
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives. Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s, perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student's comfortable confinement to his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance with which they arrive into our care.
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Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who's always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called "cognitive fluency." Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
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David Davenport, Gordon Lloyd:
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan call their $4 billion program of education reform grants the Race to the Top. A more accurate title would be the Race to Washington, because their program culminates a stunning decade in which school policy decisions have been wrested from local and state control to become matters of federal oversight. With the possible exception of Texas - where Gov. Rick Perry is resisting federal education grants with all their strings - no state has been left behind in the race to federalize education.It's easy to miss this important power shift because few of us notice, much less worry about, constitutional processes during a crisis. But, as presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" because, he continued, it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before. And that's precisely what is happening in education as we complete a transfer of money and power to Washington to oversee our schools, in violation of the 10th Amendment, a couple of hundred years of history and common sense.
There is a disturbing pattern of Washington using crises to consolidate power. First we declare war on a problem, which shifts things into crisis mode. Remember the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, the war on terror? Now we have a war on underperforming schools, so naturally Washington needs to step in and nationalize standards and tests.
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OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy -- a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student -- that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school's social worker, literally carried him to the principal's office, where he again crawled under a chair.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio - The leader of the country's largest university thinks it's time to re-examine how professors are awarded tenure, a type of job-for-life protection virtually unknown outside academia.Ohio State University President Gordon Gee says the traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor's output over quality.
"Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer," he told The Associated Press. "In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything."
Plenty of people have raised the issue over the years, but Gee is one of the few American college presidents with the reputation and political prowess -- not to mention the golden touch at fundraising -- who might be able to begin the transformation.
Still, some professors are already skeptical.
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Decision favors plaintiffs in court challenge of Seattle math text adoptionStatement from Laurie Rogers:
Last year, Seattle Public Schools adopted the Discovering math series despite valiant opposition from parents and math professionals, despite poor assessments of the Discovering series' rigor and adherence to the new state math standards, and despite the fact that OSPI did NOT ultimately recommend the Discovering math series.
In response, three people filed a lawsuit, saying that Seattle didn't have sufficient supporting evidence for its adoption, and also that the Discovering series was associated with an INCREASE in achievement gaps.Recently, a judge agreed with the plaintiffs and - while stopping short of telling Seattle to cease and desist in their adoption - told Seattle to revisit its adoption. The district can continue to use the Discovering series, and Seattle administrators have stated their clear intention to do so.
Nevertheless, the court decision is momentous. It sets a precedent for districts across the country. When board members can't justify their adoption decisions, the people now have legal recourse.
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Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, via a kind reader's email.
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You can bet that the state Department of Public Instruction won't carry out its threat to withhold a bazillion dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because MPS is not showing as much urgency as desired about making changes. (What in the world would make DPI think that?)That doesn't mean the threat is not an important matter and that it isn't part of developments that could have a real impact. DPI leaders might be able to turn this into a way to force MPS to take more energetic steps, especially around special education and struggling students of all kinds.
The fact that DPI has the power to make a threat like this illustrates forcefully the changing picture of power when it comes to MPS. In fact, assuming a contract is signed in the next few days with Gregory Thornton, the School Board's choice to be the new MPS superintendent, he will be only one of a roster of chief executives over aspects of Milwaukee schools, as I see it.
Here's a guide to some of the folks at the center of the action these days:
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Our last article summarized the current state of research on teens and risk. That research demonstrates that teenagers do not suffer from some special inability to reason. Larry Steinberg and other researchers explain the steep rise in risk-taking behavior that comes with puberty by elaborating the interplay between two brain systems. The social-emotional system, which develops robustly in early adolescence, seeks out rewarding experiences, especially the sensation afforded by novel and risky behavior, and is also activated by the presence of peers. The cognitive-control system, which undergoes its great burst of development in later adolescence, evaluates and governs the impulses of the social-emotional system.During the years of greatest risk-taking, which peak somewhere around the age of 16 and during which the presence of peers greatly increases risk-taking, the adolescent brain is like a car with a powerful accelerator (the sensation- and peer-seeking social-emotional system) and weak brakes (the risk-containing cognitive-control system). That being the case, it's clear why some common approaches to reducing risk-taking by teenagers--explaining why drunk driving is dangerous, asking them to pledge to abstain from premarital sex--don't work very well.
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The outlook for new teachers is dim this year, prompting Chandler school officials to limit their recruiting efforts to science, math and special-education teachers for the first time.Although other teachers are not being turned away, the Chandler Unified School Districts is focusing on hard-to-fill science, math and special-education teaching jobs for its Feb. 18 recruiting fair.
"This is our first year . . . . . we're not having a general recruitment fair because of there are fewer needs, fewer positions openings than in the past," said Laura Nook, the district's human-resources director.
The district doesn't yet know how many new teachers it will need next school year. Demand depends on student enrollment, the number of returning teachers and whether the Arizona Legislature again cuts K-12 funding to balance the state budget.
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Admissions officers more than a year ago started noticing something odd about the Facebook groups built around their incoming classes: The creators weren't newly admitted students. Or current students. Or alums. Or anyone with any tie to the universities.Brad J. Ward, who then worked in the Butler University admissions office, began to compare the groups from colleges across the country -- including Georgetown, Virginia Tech and George Washington University -- and realized they were all created by the same handful of people. "There's something going down on Facebook. Pay attention," he wrote on his blog, Squared Peg, in December 2008
With help from admissions workers across the country, Ward traced these individuals to College Prowler, a Pittsburgh-based company that publishes campus guidebooks, and a not-yet-launched roommate-matching Web site called MatchU, started by a recent college graduate named Justin Gaither.
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A King County Superior Court judge today ruled the state does not provide ample funding for basic education then directed the Legislature to establish the cost of providing all Washington children with a basic education and establish how it will fully fund such education with stable and dependable state sources.In his oral ruling this morning in McCleary v. State, also known as the "Basic Education case," King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick also indicated the state's 2009 education funding measure (HB 2261) could be a means to satisfy this direction. The court e-mailed the entire 73-page ruling to counsel immediately following the hearing.
"Judge Erlick rightly recognizes in his ruling the Legislature's authority to set education funding policy," said Attorney General Rob McKenna. "The Legislature took positive steps with its 2009 education funding reform efforts, and we understand the decision to suggest those reforms could be the basis for progress in this case.
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Influencing practice and policy in science education is what drives ASU's Julie Luft and has led to her distinguished service to K-12 science teacher education and renowned research contributions to the field. She considers her recent call from Congress to testify about the status and future of science education to be among her most notable achievements.Luft delivered her first-time testimony before the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee at the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Education Hearings that took place Feb. 3-4. She was joined by Craig Strang, associate director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California-Berkeley.
The purpose of the hearing was to inform Congressional subcommittee members about the status and future direction of STEM education in the K-12 sector. STEM education is considered vital to maintaining the United States' leadership in the rapidly advancing world of science and technology. In her testimony, Luft emphasized the importance of inquiry in teacher education and professional development, and the need for more federal funding to support science organizations involved in research and development. She also stressed the unintended consequences of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which has limited the amount of inquiry-based instruction in K-12 science classrooms.
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This is going to be awkward, but someone has to tell you, so it may as well be me: you're kind of a loser. You know that feeling you sometimes have that your friends have more friends than you? You're right. They do. And you know how almost everyone at the gym seems in better shape than you, and how everyone at your book club seems better read? Well, they are. If you're single, it's probably a while since you dated - what with you being such a loser - but when you did, do you recall thinking the other person was more romantically experienced than you? I'm afraid it was probably true.The only consolation in all this is that it's nothing personal: it's a bizarre statistical fact that almost all of us have fewer friends than our friends, more flab than our fellow gym-goers, and so on. In other words, you're a loser, but it's not your fault: it's just maths. (I mean, it's probably just maths. You might be a catastrophic failure as a human being, for all I know. But let's focus on the maths.)
To anyone not steeped in statistics, this seems crazy. Friendship is a two-way street, so you'd assume things would average out: any given person would be as likely to be more popular than their friends as less. But as the sociologist Scott Feld showed, in a 1991 paper bluntly entitled Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do, this isn't true. If you list all your friends, and then ask them all how many friends they have, their average is very likely to be higher than your friend count.
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Last week the Capital Times ran a story about how Tom Hardin, the head coach of forensics and drama at James Madison Memorial High School, plans to retire from coaching at the end of the season. There was even a follow up blog by the Capitol Times reacting to the discussion of the story.More here.As an assistant coach for Memorial forensics and debate program for several years, I read the paper and the comments in the online version with a more critical eye than others. It's worthwhile to point out that I am extremely biased on this issue. Tom Hardin and Tim Scheffler taught me how to be a speech and debate coach and gave me a job that supported me throughout my post secondary education.
My responses to the news and comments are as follows:
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Opponents of a controversial sex ed bill passed by Wisconsin legislators last week warn that if Gov. Jim Doyle signs the bill into law as he has promised, some local school districts will stage a revolt against the measure by ignoring it or dropping their human growth and development curriculum entirely."Did the state in its zeal to impose its own way even think about the consequences? Because a lot of districts are just going to just walk," predicts Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin.
The proposed new law would require any Wisconsin public school district that offers a course in human growth and development -- or sexual education -- to teach students about sexually transmitted diseases and methods of safe sex, including contraception. Under current law districts can choose to provide only instruction focusing on abstinence or chastity.
The proposed new law doesn't require school districts to offer such courses at all, however. School districts can drop their sex ed classes completely rather than comply, which is what Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, says her organization will encourage them to do in upcoming mailings. "This is a Planned Parenthood dream come true," Appling says about the bill. "They have taken options away from local school districts. Now the choice is something Madison says is best or to have no human growth and development classes at all, which, quite honestly, is the better choice."
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In an action that's likely to be repeated across the state, the West Bend School District is preparing to take contract negotiations with its teachers to arbitration, potentially among the first districts to do so since the Legislature removed teacher salary controls that held sway in Wisconsin for 16 years.Related: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards".District negotiators and representatives for the West Bend Education Association have their first mediation session scheduled for next week, the first step they need to take before they can proceed to binding arbitration.
Administrators say they would prefer being able to resolve their issues with the teachers union by settling a contract through the mediation process. But they also say they are willing to go to arbitration if needed.
"We're not afraid of it," said Bill Bracken, labor relations coordinator for Davis & Kuelthau, which is representing the school district.
Other districts apparently aren't afraid either. At least a couple of school districts outside southeastern Wisconsin are getting ready to certify their final offers after already going through the mediation process, indicating binding arbitration is probable, said Scott Mikesh, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
On Friday, the Elmbrook School District and its teachers union announced they were filing for mediation help in their contract negotiations, although Assistant Superintendent Christine Hedstrom said the two sides were not filing for help with the state and won't automatically go to arbitration if they reach deadlock.
It would be interesting to compare contracts/proposals among similarly sized Districts.
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In my recent post, Race to the Top?: Part I, I described the academic achievement rat race in which students near the top of the educational food chain strive maniacally to win (or at least finish). I argued that the emphasis on testing by former President Bush's No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and continued with President Obama's Race to the Top initiative (RTTT) has only exacerbated the problem better characterized by the title of the powerful new documentary by Vicki Abeles, Race to Nowhere. This post, in contrast, explores how RTTT impacts those students and schools at the other end of the educational food chain, those who are just trying to survive in the turbulent sea of American public education.The first mistake that this administration made was to call education reform a race. Races connote winners and losers. Yet, we need to ensure that all our students and schools are winners. I think a more appropriate name for this initiative is "Climb to the Top" because the focus should be on how to get to the top.
The administration's second mistake was to continue Bush's initial mistake of focusing on testing; instead of being a tool for education reform, testing has morphed into the end-all, be-all of said reform. Yes, assessment is essential for determining the effectiveness of programs such as RTTT, aimed at achieving something as ethereal and elusive as education reform or the more tangible goal of closing the education and economic gaps between the haves and have-nots. At the same time, improved test scores should not be the ultimate objective of education reform.
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AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran. Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they're doing.The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn't work like a von Neumann model with an active processor and passive memory. It has, in a simplified sense, a processor per fact, one per memory. If I hold up an object and ask you what it is, you don't calculate some canonicalization of it as a key into an indexed database. You compare it simultaneously to everything you've ever seen (and still remember). Oh, yeah, that's that potted aspidistra that Aunt Suzie keeps in her front hallway, with the burn mark from the time she ...
The processing power necessary to to that kind of parallel matching is high, but not higher than the kind of processing power that we already know the brain has. It's also not higher than the processing power we expect to be able to throw at the problem by 2020 or so. Suppose it takes a million ops to compare a sensed object to a memory. 10 MIPS to do it in a tenth of a second. A modern workstation with 10 gigaops could handle 1000 concepts. A GPGPU with a teraops could handle 100K, which is still probably in the hypohuman range. By 2020, a same priced GPGPU could do 10M concepts, which is right smack in the human range by my best estimate.
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Judge Julie Spector's decision [69K PDF], via Martha McLaren:
THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:Melissa Westbrook has more.FINDINGS OF FACT
1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District's high school basic math materials.a. A recommendation from the District's Selection Committee;
b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;
c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was "mathematically unsound";
d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;
e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;
f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;
g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that W ASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;
h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;
1. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;
J. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;
k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;
I. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.
3. The court finds that the Discovering Series IS an inquiry-based math program.
4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there IS insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board's decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;2. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;
3. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;
4. This court has the authority to remand the Board's decision for further review;
5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a
Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately
characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Dated this 4th day of February, 2010.
Seattle Math Group Press Release:
Judge Julie Spector today announced her finding of "arbitrary and capricious" in the Seattle School Board's May 6 vote to adopt the Discovering Math series of high school texts despite insufficient evidence of the series' effectiveness.Judge Spector's decision states, "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering series."
Plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools, Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fifth grader, and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, had filed their appeal of the Board's controversial decision on June 5th, 2009. The hearing was held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
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The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.Jay Matthews has more.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.MARYLAND: A model in AP access, achievement.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
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Skylar Shafran, a turquoise headband on her brunette head and a pink princess shirt on her string-bean frame, is standing on a chair in her living room, shifting from left foot to right. She has already gulped down a glass of orange juice and nibbled on some crackers; she has also demonstrated, with extemporaneous grace, the ability to pick up Hello Kitty markers with her toes. For more than an hour, she has been answering questions to a mock version of an intelligence test commonly known to New York parents as the ERB. Almost every prestigious private elementary school in the city requires that prospective kindergartners take it. Skylar's parents, Liz and Jay, are pretty sure they know where they're sending their daughter to school next year, but they figure it can't hurt to get a sense of where she sits in the long spectrum of precocious New York children. And so, although it wasn't cheap--$350--they've hired someone to find out. Skylar has thus far borne this process with cheerful patience and determination. But every 4-year-old has her limits.David Shenk has more."What is an umbrella?" asks the evaluator, a psychology graduate student in her mid-twenties.
"To keep me dry."
"And what is a book?"
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U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to travel to Alabama next month to help Gov. Bob Riley persuade lawmakers to pass legislation allowing charter schools, Riley said Wednesday."As a Republican I've always pushed for charter schools . . . but when I say it, it doesn't have the legitimacy and credibility that the secretary of education and president of the United States has," Riley said after meeting with Duncan Wednesday afternoon in Washington.
President Obama's administration is preparing to hand out more than $4 billion to help states improve their public schools, and those without charter schools -- like Alabama --- are at a competitive disadvantage for the money.
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In a valiant attempt to defuse the ideological conflicts between the reformist and traditionalist wings of the liberal education wonketariat, Matthew Yglesias argues that this disagreement is not not ideological at all. Rather, it is an artifact of past decisions about educational structure:Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it's really not an ideological debate at all. I think the only reason it's taken on an ideological air is that unions have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general. But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that system and didn't want to change to a degree-based system. Because unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right ideological atmosphere but it's all very contingent.This is a very interesting thesis, but ultimately I think it's wrong. There is a reason that unions kill merit pay, and it's not because they just happened to solidify in an era when merit pay was out of fashion.
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Two months back, tiny Lincoln University attracted worldwide media attention when it threatened to withhold diplomas from overweight students unless they took a special fitness class.Under its 2005 policy, which the Philadelphia area school rescinded in December after weeks of criticism from activists and the media, students with body mass indexes (BMI) over 30 were required to take a one-credit class called "Fitness for Life" in order to graduate from the historically black college. A person with a BMI of 30 is considered obese under health guidelines.
We'll get back to Lincoln. But the controversy made me curious about the role our schools are playing in our children's fitness and whether they are having any impact in the so far losing effort against the obesity epidemic.
When I went to high school in the early 1970s, phys ed was a requirement: three periods a week, if memory serves, through junior year. Team sports reigned. The athletic kids would park me on the offensive line during flag football and tell me to stay out of the way on the basketball floor. Let's not even bring up Greco-Roman wrestling.
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Twelve central Ohio schools are among the worst 5 percent statewide.Their academic struggles mean they are eligible to receive federal money to help them transform or start over. A list of these schools was released yesterday by the Ohio Department of Education.
Six Columbus City Schools buildings are on the list of the worst-off, as are four in Cleveland and 16 in Cincinnati. Several charter schools -- six of them in central Ohio -- also made the "top" rung on the list.
"No one is going to like the fact that they're on this list," said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit KidsOhio, which studies education issues. He's been monitoring stimulus-related spending and improvement programs. "But this is not just a 'label and leave it' approach. These schools are in for some pretty intensive care."
These schools all have a large number of poor students and have been mired in academic difficulties for several years.
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Wisconsin's Superintendent of Public Instruction took the first formal step Thursday toward withholding millions of dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because of the district's failure to show progress on improvement actions ordered by the state.Superintendent Tony Evers officially notified the district that he would seek to "reduce to zero" all administrative funds and defer all programmatic funds that MPS currently receives to serve low-income children, unless the district could prove that it's made progress in key areas of its corrective action plan.
"I don't believe appropriate progress has been made in benchmark areas," Evers said in an interview. "I can't stand by and wait any longer."
The state issued corrective action orders to MPS last summer because of the district's failure to make adequate yearly progress on state test scores for five consecutive years under the No Child Left Behind law.
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There's not much young blood in the Warwick school system and according to a top administrator - that's costly.There are currently 1,051 teachers in the Warwick School Department. Out of those teachers, 865 - or 82 percent of the department - rank in the top three "steps".
All things considered, those highest paid teachers earned an average of $75,400 last year - according to Rosemary Healey, the school department's Director of Compliance. That number represents compensation but excludes benefits such as health care and pensions.
Those 865 teachers earned a combined pay of $65,220,792.36. The school department's total budget this fiscal year, which runs from July 1 until June 30 of this year, is just under $170 million.
The number includes a teacher's base pay, longevity, and stipends paid to teachers for having attained various educational achievements - including a Master's Degree or Doctorate, or advanced certifications.
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We have received several letters over the last few days. I am posting here all of them for which I have received the author's permission for your review. I had to reformat them for this forum, so i apologize if anything got mangled in the process:____________________________________________________________________________
Dear School Board Members,I am writing to urge you to keep 4th grade strings and specifically Jill Jensen on board in our schools. I know how difficult and painful the process of making budget cuts is--if anything, we would all like to see more programs available to our kids, let alone cut what we already have. I am fairly new to Monona, having moved here a year and a half ago, and have been extremely impressed by the 4th and 5th grade performances organized by Jill. It is obvious that she puts in many extra hours and goes far above and beyond her duties as a classroom teacher, because it is one thing--and hard enough--to teach a group of kids the mechanics involved in learning to read and perform music. It is another thing entirely to connect with children so closely and so well as to inspire obvious the joy and enthusiasm for performing that I have seen bursting forth in every one of their concerts that I have attended.
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The Asbury Park Press slams the Marlboro Board of Education for taking a hard line with the local teachers union during contract negotiations and then, apparently, folding after two years of an escalating impasse. If only it were that simple.Here's how it works in N.J.: as the end of a typically-three-year contract approaches, a school board, represented by an attorney, and the local NJEA chapter, represented by NJEA reps, exchange proposals and proceed with negotiating everything from minor changes in contract language to salary increases and contributions (or not) to health benefits. If the two sides reach an impasse (usually once they hit salary and benefits, but sometimes over a seemingly insurmountable semantic technicality), they call in a state-appointed mediator who proposes a compromise. If one or both sides reject the compromise, they go to a state-appointed fact-finder who recommends a settlement. (Here's Marlboro's fact-finder's report.) If that doesn't work, they go to someone called a super conciliator, who writes up a lengthy resolution to the impasse. None of these interventions are binding.
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A bill that would prohibit school districts from paying the salaries of teachers who leave the classroom to engage in union activities cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday.Several Utah school districts now pay a portion of their local union presidents' salaries even though they no longer teach, and the union pays the rest of their salaries according to contract agreements. Sen. Margaret Dayton's bill, SB77, would prohibit districts from paying those on association leave and require that if a teacher or employee leaves "regular school responsibilities" for association or union duties that the employee, association or union reimburse the district for that time.
Dayton said the bill is about "keeping taxpayer dollars allocated for education in the classroom."
Others, however, opposed the bill, saying the decision should be left up to local districts. Local union presidents have said that many of their duties, such as representing teachers on district committees and resolving conflicts, benefit both the union and the district.
"The functions [they] carry out are things the district would have to have people do or reassign staff to do," said Susan Kuziak, of the Utah Education Association.
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via a kind reader's email:
Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison. Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas
Late last week I had an interesting telephone conversation with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She called with a comment on a post in which I suggested she be more careful of her public words--like her statement that some of the teachers she fired hit or had sex with kids--in order to make sure she stays in her job and applies her considerable skills and knowledge to fixing our failing school system.I suggested she apologize for offending teachers with her words so that we could get past this point and back to helping kids.
She said, in essence, that she is not going to do that. She said she wished that the Fast Company magazine item that sparked the controversy had included her statement that many of the teachers she had to fire for budget reasons were good people. But, she said, she was not going to compromise her methods or her beliefs. Some teachers did hit kids and have sex with kids, she said. She thought that was something people should know. It was important to root out such behaviors.
She had taken the chancellor job, which she did not seek, with the understanding she would do things her way. She had seen many big city superintendents do the more conventional thing, watch their words and try not to offend. She thinks that approach has not been successful.
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On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
February 3, 2010
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, "I've got some real problems."
"Like what?" I asked.
"The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don't know how to block or tackle, then can't read the playbook and they can't follow their assignments."
"That does sound bad. What is your record this season?"
"The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties."
"Also," he told me, "During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !"
"Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?"
"No, I don't know them."
"Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?"
"No, I really don't have time for that sort of thing."
"Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?"
"No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?"
"Absolutely," I said. "They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!"
"That is a start, I guess, but I don't think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame."
"Well," I said, "what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?"
"I could do that, I guess, but I don't know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort."
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don't know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don't really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see...]
===========
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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TJ Mertz comments on Monday evening's Madison School Board 2010-2011 budget discussion (video - the budget discussion begins about 170 minutes into the meeting). The discussion largely covered potential property tax increases. However and unfortunately, I've not seen a document that includes total revenue projections for 2010-2011.
The District's Administration's last public total 2009-2010 revenue disclosure ($418,415,780) was in October 2009.
Property tax revenue is one part of the MMSD's budget picture. State and Federal redistributed tax dollars are another big part. The now dead "citizens budget" was a useful effort to provide more transparency to the public. I hope that the Board pushes for a complete picture before any further substantive budget discussions. Finally, the Administration promised program reviews as part of the "Strategic Planning Process" and the recent referendum ("breathing room"). The documents released to date do not include any substantive program review budget items.
Ed Hughes (about 190 minutes): "it is worth noting that evening if we taxed to the max and I don't think we'll do that, the total expenditures for the school District will be less than we were projecting during the referendum". The documents published, as far as I can tell, on the school board's website do not reflect 2010-2011 total spending.
Links to Madison School District spending since 2007 (the referendum Ed mentioned was in 2008)
Further, the recent "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
Ed, Lucy and Arlene thankfully mentioned that the Board needs to have the full picture before proceeding.
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via a kind reader's email: 14MB PDF:
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin's school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education's Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President's challenge to make education America's mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin's education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin's application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
- Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
- Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
- Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
- Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
- Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin's strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America's Race to the Top.
- Raising standards -- joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
- More useful assessments -- changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
- Expanded data systems -- including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn't in education.
- More support for teachers -- both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
- Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
- An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
- Turning around our lowest performing schools -- enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
- Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
- Investing in STEM -- Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
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Stanford's successful effort to exempt itself from Santa Clara County's new rules on underage drinking has put a focus on the university's growing effort to curb alcohol abuse on campus.The county's new ordinance, which took effect last year, makes it easier for police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs. It can mean a fine of up to $1,000 plus costs anytime the police are called in.
About 95 percent of Stanford's 6,600 undergraduates, many of them younger than 21, live on campus in university-owned housing. As the landlord, the school could have found itself facing plenty of potential liability under the new county rules.
But the financial question didn't play a role in the university's attempt to persuade county officials to free Stanford from the regulations, said Jean McCown, the school's director of community relations.
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IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union's officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don't think that she means business, or maybe they don't care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state's cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
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y husband decided to send me a couple of links to various STEM articles which then led me to even more interesting links. If you are interested in this subject from a state and national level, here are some links. Happy reading!Apparently, Ohio is waaay ahead on this stuff so many of this articles are about different projects in that state.
- From Government Technology magazine, an article about a new STEM school in Ohio.
- From the University of Cincinnati (a key sponsor of a lot of these schools), an article about FUSION (Furthering Urban STEM Innovation, Outreach and New Research).
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So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them -- stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.
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The woman being tapped to run the Minneapolis School District will take part in four meetings this week to meet the community.Bernadeia Johnson has been an administrator in Minneapolis for a few years - most recently as deputy superintendent. These meetings will be the first time she faces the public as the only candidate for the top job after current superintendent Bill Green retires in June.
The school board announced earlier this month that Johnson was its only candidate for the job. She had long been considered a leading candidate, but the move still surprised some people for its suddenness. It means Minneapolis won't conduct a national search or even consider a list of a few semi-finalists, as St. Paul did last year.
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In the brave new world of data-driven education reform, most states have learned how to talk the talk. Start with "global competitiveness," add in some "longitudinal data" and "transparency," garnish with "accountability" and serve.But far fewer states are committed to more than the language of reform -- a reality made clear by the applications submitted last week to President Obama's Race to the Top grant program.
Race to the Top is the crown jewel of the Obama administration's education reform agenda and the largest-ever discretionary federal grant program for public schools. (In his State of the Union address this week, the president proposed adding an additional $1.4 billion to the pot of $4.35 billion.) The hope is that fiscally strapped states will make changes to ineffective policies and present comprehensive reform plans to be competitive for grants of up to $700 million. Indeed, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that around a dozen states have changed laws or policies in response to the program thus far.
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Last Friday, NEA heralded the release of its annual Rankings & Estimates report by sending out a press release (embargoed until today) that claimed "inflation over the past decade has outpaced teachers' salaries in every single state across the country." This didn't sound right to researcher Jay P. Greene, so he scrutinized the report and couldn't find a single statistic to back up this claim. On the contrary, NEA's numbers revealed that teachers' salaries had increased 3.4 percent over the past decade, after adjusting for inflation.
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All the candidates for governor are being invited to share their education views with Get Schooled readers. As each piece comes in and is published here, it will be added to a category called Governor 2010. I urge you to read all the pieces.Here is what GOP candidate Jeff Chapman submitted:
By Jeff Chapman
It is a fact of life that today's children must have access to a first-rate education if they are to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to compete successfully in a modern, technological society.
It is also true that the quality of education in America, Georgia included, has, in too many cases, not kept pace with the demands of an increasingly complex world. High drop-out rates, low scores on achievement tests and poor classroom discipline are just some of the signs indicating that we must do better in preparing today's youth for success in college and the workforce.
What are some of the steps we could take to promote quality education and help ensure that every Georgia student has the opportunity to succeed?
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Voters Tuesday will choose reform plans for 30 Los Angeles-area schools in an election like no other.For one thing, the voting age could dip to 14. Undocumented residents are welcome. Some people will get multiple votes. Ballot stuffing is expected.
And did we mention that each contestant will actually be competing in seven simultaneous elections? And that the results could be meaningless?
Whoever said democracy is messy could have been thinking of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The subject of the election is singular: Groups inside and outside the school system are competing to run 12 persistently low-performing schools and 18 new campuses. The purpose of the balloting is for different voting blocs to select their favored bidder. Each bloc will be tallied separately, including parents, high school students and school employees.
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I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via this 17MB mp3 audio file CTRL-Click to download or read the transcript. Parent and activist Schatz founded WCATY and is, most recently author of "Grandma Says it's Good to Be Smart".
I enjoyed visiting with Ellie and found the conversation quite illuminating. Here's a useful segment from the 37 minute interview:
Jim: What's the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there's the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.Ellie: [32:52] I think there's no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I've served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: "This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it's an excellent curriculum. But that's not enough."
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, "We're going to turn the pages at the same time, and we're going to write the answers in the same way." It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that's why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it's going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
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Jacques Steinberg, via a kind reader's email:
p>Lisa Foderaro writes in The Times’s Metropolitan section that efforts by Princeton University to curb grade inflation are “now running into fierce resistance from the school's Type-A-plus student body.”The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton's walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.'s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
In nearly 100 comments and counting, reader response on the issue of grade inflation has been fierce. For a sense of how one important arbiter -- Yale Law School -- interprets undergraduate grades, I draw your attention to this comment, from Asha Rangappa, the dean of Yale Law (and a Princeton graduate.) -- Jacques
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Virtual schooling can be an educational choice with particular benefits for some students with disabilities. The recent study "Serving Students with Disabilities in State-level Virtual K-12 Public School Programs" by Eve Müller, Ph.D., published in September 2009 by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE)'s Project Forum, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, surveyed state education agencies nationwide regarding their virtual K-12 public school programs:
Eleven states described one or more benefits associated with serving students with disabilities in virtual K-12 public school programs. These include:
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Governor Tom Kean & Governor Brendan Byrne:
Q: The governor's advisory panels made a number of recommendations, including a possible freeze on the salaries of teachers and other public employees. Given that contracts are involved, could this be done?BYRNE: We have to get over this attitude of "not on my back." We have to get it across that everybody has to make sacrifices in order to make this work. It's not going to if all hell breaks loose every time you try to eliminate one fireman. It's not going to be easy.
KEAN: I don't think people yet have an understanding of how bad things are.Comprehending a $10 billion-$12 billion deficit in a $30 billion budget is difficult, if not impossible. Everybody is going to be making sacrifices, not just scattered employees.
BYRNE: It's nice being in Washington for a day, where the talk is in trillions.Q: Politically speaking, is taking on the teachers and state employees a fight worth considering simply because of the message it sends?
KEAN: We haven't any choice. We have wonderful public employees, but they get paid more than anybody in the country in similar positions. We simply can't afford to do that anymore.
BYRNE: People think this is a minor problem, and it isn't.
KEAN: In previous years, governors and legislators have been able to paper over the problem. They've done so irresponsibly, by increasing debt to much more than it ought to be. Now this is coming home to roost, and we've all got to deal with it.
BYRNE: And that will include cutting things that are dear to our hearts, and that's tough.
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IN CALIFORNIA the students are revolting--not against their teachers, but in sympathy with them. The state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has cut $1 billion, some 20% of the University of California's budget, as he tries to balance the state's books. Fees may rise by a fifth, to over $10,000. Support staff are being fired; academics must take unpaid leave.That is part of a global picture in which cash-strapped governments in the rich world are scrutinising the nearly 5% of GDP they devote to education. Those budgets may not be the top candidates for the chop, but they cannot fully escape it.
Just before Christmas the British government said it planned to reduce spending on higher education, science and research by £600m ($980m) by 2012-13, just as a chilly job market is sending students scurrying to do more and longer courses. The trade union that represents academic staff claims that up to 30 universities could close with the loss of 14,000 jobs. A House of Commons select committee is investigating the effects on British science.
Even where education spending has not been slashed, it may face a squeeze as short-term stimulus spending ends. America's $787 billion Recovery Act passed by Congress nearly a year ago included $100 billion for education. More than half is to be spent this year, meaning that the budget will have to be cut in 2011. A study by the Centre for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, published on January 18th, found that half of American states will have spent all of their stimulus money for education by the end of July. Cuts will follow. Privately funded schools and colleges have seen their endowments and donors' enthusiasm wither.
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The state's budget mess is a ticking time bomb and now Illinois residents can watch as it explodes.A Web site launched by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago displays a ticker that counts up Illinois' debt. On Friday evening, the number was around $128,586,300,000 and swiftly on the rise.
The Web site IllinoisIsBroke.com keeps track of the state's growing deficit.The civic committee isn't in the business of political endorsements, so don't ask them who those candidates are. However, President Eden Martin said he hopes voters take a better look at the individuals running for office.
"If there's a kind of public irritation that becomes strong enough, I think there would be enough support for fundamental reforms," Martin said.
Martin blamed changes to the pension system in 1995 that put Illinois on a path toward bankruptcy. To fix the problem, the committee proposes the state reform pensions so they are comparable to the private sector, meaning fewer benefits, a later retirement age and a less generous cost-of-living adjustment.
But Martin knows that's no easy task and understands why some politicians prefer the status quo.
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The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers' unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law's commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation's 14,000 school districts.
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The housing boom has left the sprawling school district based in this former rail town on the Little Miami River with gleaming new buildings and a dilemma over how to keep them funded.Three times in the past 15 months, voters have rejected levies that would have kept the Little Miami School District in the black. Each time, the district fell further behind and had to ask for more. On Tuesday, voters will face the biggest request yet--a new real-estate tax that amounts to $519 per $100,000 of assessed value, nearly twice the rate rejected in November.
Backers say the levy, combined with already deep cuts, is the only way to prevent a fiscal emergency that would force a state takeover of the schools. "It's the downturn of an entire community. People are going to start looking at moving and your property value is going to go through the floor," said Julie Salmons Perelman, a 44-year-old part-time veterinary technician with three children in the schools, who sat stuffing bags filled with campaign literature one morning last week.
Bill Nicholson, 54, a longtime opponent of the levies, calls the rising requests in the face of repeated rejections "insanity." In the past, he has argued on behalf of people with fixed incomes, but he recently lost his own job as a consultant in the perfume industry. "How can I cut a budget of zero" to pay more taxes, he asked.
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A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students' permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the "fair use" practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some "ownership rights" in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn't hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don't profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
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Abstinence-only education has been a frequent point of contention between conservatives and liberals.Conservatives, particularly religious ones, have argued that young people need to be taught the moral dimension of sexual activity as part of abstinence education and urged to avoid sex until marriage.
For those reasons, liberals and many health and education professionals have argued against abstinence-only education. Many of them have preferred comprehensive sex education.
Now a new study indicates that abstinence-only education works even when it doesn't have a moral component.
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President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposes to boost education spending 9% to advance its overhaul of federal school-funding policy that has emerged as a rare patch of common ground for the administration and some Republicans.At the same time, Mr. Obama is using his 2011 Education Department budget proposal to signal plans to revamp the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind policies, which have stirred opposition from some teachers and school administrators. Mr. Obama states his intention to scrap the Bush-era accountability standards for a new system to be negotiated with Congress. Administration officials say that talks with Congress on how to revamp the No Child law remain preliminary.
Most of the additional $4.5 billion in spending proposed for the Education Department is slated to fund competitive programs, making the budget a key part of an administration bid to transform how local school officials interact with the federal government.
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On the second page of the Post's Metro section, and on this Web site, you see the results of the 12th annual Washington Post survey of high school student participation in college-level tests, what I call the Challenge Index.The ranked list of public schools -- both the Washington area version in the Post and the national version in Newsweek each June -- gets lots of attention, but the outrage and acclaim usually swirls around the issue of whether ranking schools is good for you. With much support from Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate teachers around the country, I think it is. But how can you use it?
I invented the list to show that some schools in good neighborhoods don't deserve their great reputations, and some schools in poor neighborhoods don't deserve their terrible ones. Opening up AP and IB courses to everyone who wants to work hard -- the philosophy of the teachers who inspired me to do this -- is a relatively new idea. Ten years ago, most schools in the United States did not let students take these courses unless they had strong grade point averages or teachers' recommendations.
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My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras. Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
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Why is a child born in northwest Los Angeles four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child born elsewhere in California?Medical experts have pondered for years why autism rates have soared nationwide, and why the disorder appears to be much more prevalent in certain communities than in others. Now, some recent studies that zero in on California may shed some light on these baffling questions.
A new autism study shows clusters of high autism rates in parts of California. WSJ's health columnist Melinda Beck joins Simon Constable on the News Hub with more.
Researchers from Columbia University, in a study published in the current Journal of Health & Place, identified an area including West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and some less posh neighborhoods that accounted for 3% of the state's new cases of autism every year from 1993 to 2001, even though it had only 1% of the population.
Another recent study, from the University of California, Davis, published in Autism Research, also found high rates of autism in children born around Los Angeles, as well as nine other California locations. Autism, usually diagnosed before a child is 3 years old, is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication and repetitive behavior.
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You're invited to spend a fun and lively evening at Broadway West --
the Friends of West High Drama's largest fundraiser and social event of the year!
Saturday, February 6, 2010 • 7-10 pm
Alumni Lounge in the UW's Pyle Center (next to the Red Gym at 702 Langdon Street)*
$30 for one adult • $50 for two adults • $10 per West High student
Tickets will be available at the door, but advance reservations are greatly appreciated
• Enjoy a variety of fabulous theatrical and musical performances,
along with art exhibitions, by some of West's highly talented students
• Eat, drink, and be merry with other West parents, theater friends, and students
• Hors d'oeuvres, desserts, and a cash bar will be available,
with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages
• Bid on great live-auction items, auctioned by the always-hilarious Tom Farley
• Relax in our casual, but festive lakefront venue, with its 270-degree view of Lake Mendota
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
• If you'd like to make a last-minute donation of a fabulous live-auction item, please contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com. All donors will be recognized at the event and acknowledged in writing. We can assist with a pick-up if needed.
• Reserve your tickets to attend Broadway West: $30 for one adult; $50 for two adults; and $10 per West High student. If time permits, fill out the form below and mail it back to us. Or just show up! You can purchase tickets for the same price at the door.
• Make an online donation: If you cannot attend, but would like to support West drama in your absence, consider making a contribution using the form below or online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama
Thank you for your support -- this will undoubtedly be an evening to remember!
Questions? Contact us at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com.
*Parking is available on Lake and Langdon Streets, in the Memorial Union surface lot, and in the Helen C. White, Lake Street, and Lucky Building ramps.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - CUT HERE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Make checks payable to FMPS-Friends of West High Drama. Complete and return this section with your payment to: Marcia Gevelinger Bastian, 4210 Mandan Crescent, Madison, WI 53711. Pre-paid tickets will be ready for you at the door of the event. If time does not permit an advance ticket purchase, just show up! You can buy tickets for the same price at the door.
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve adult tickets: _____ one at $30, or _____ two at $50 = (total) $ _____
($20 of each $30 ticket is tax deductible.)
_____ Yes! I'd like to reserve West student tickets: (number) _____ at $10 each = (total) $ _____
(Student performers get in free.)
_____ I enclose a tax-deductible contribution in the amount of $ _____
(You can also donate online through the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools at https://fmps.org/donate.asp?pt=drama)
_____ Yes! I'd like to donate a live-auction item. I'm contacting FWHD at friendsofwestdrama@yahoo.com to discuss it and to arrange a pick-up if needed.
Name(s): _______________________________________________________________________________
Address, City, State, Zip: _________________________________________________________________
E-mail: ________________________________________________________________________________
Phone (in case we have questions): _________________________________________________________
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Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.There are many ways to learn, not all of them require traditional methods or expensive "professional development".Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.
Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service's mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.
According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson's International Education business, China is the world's largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.
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via a kind reader. Math 627K PDF:
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.English Language Arts 3.6MB PDFEnglish Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
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Kurt Kiefer:
Attached are the most recent results from our MMSD value added analysis project, and effort in which we are collaborating with the Wisconsin center for Educational Research Value Added Research Center (WCERVARC). These data include the two-year models for both the 2006-2008 and 2005-2007 school year spans.Much more on the Madison School District's Value Added Assessment program here. The "value added assessment" data is based on Wisconsin's oft-criticized WKCE.This allows us in a single report to view value added performance for consecutive intervals of time and thereby begin to identify trends. Obviously, it is a trend pattern that will provide the greatest insights into best practices in our schools.
As it relates to results, there do seem to be some patterns emerging among elementary schools especially in regard to mathematics. As for middle schools, the variation across schools is once again - as it was last year with the first set of value added results - remarkably narrow, i.e., schools perform very similar to each other, statistically speaking.
Also included in this report are attachments that show the type of information used with our school principals and staff in their professional development sessions focused on how to interpret and use the data meaningfully. The feedback from the sessions has been very positive.
Table E1 presents value added at the school level for 28 elementary schools in Madison Metropolitan School District. Values added are presented for two overlapping time periods; the period between the November 2005 to November 2007 WKCE administrations, and the more recent period between the November 2006 and November 2008 WKCE. This presents value added as a two-year moving average to increase precision and avoid overinterpretation of trends. Value added is measured in reading and math.
VA is equal to the school's value added. It is equal to the number ofextra points students at a school scored on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across the district A school with a zero value added is an average school in terms of value added. Students at a school with a value added of 3 scored 3 points higher on the WKCE on average than observationally similar students at other schools.
Std. Err. is the standard error ofthe school's value added. Because schools have only a finite number of students, value added (and any other school-level statistic) is measured with some error. Although it is impossible to ascertain the sign of measurement error, we can measure its likely magnitude by using its standard error. This makes it possible to create a plausible range for a school's true value added. In particular, a school's measured value added plus or minus 1.96 standard errors provides a 95 percent confidence interval for a school's true value added.
N is the number of students used to measure value added. It covers students whose WKCE scores can be matched from one year to the next.
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So should we, as Paul Krugman suggests, spend another trillion in stimulus if it helps growth? No, because, as I have written for a very long time, and will focus on in future weeks, increased deficits and rising debt-to-GDP is a long-term losing proposition. It simply puts off what will be a reckoning that will be even worse, with yet higher debt levels. You cannot borrow your way out of a debt crisis.This Time Is Different
While I was in Europe, and flying back, I had the great pleasure of reading This Time is Different, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, on my new Kindle, courtesy of Fred Fern.I am going to be writing about and quoting from this book for several weeks. It is a very important work, as it gives us the first really comprehensive analysis of financial crises. I highlighted more pages than in any book in recent memory (easy to do on the Kindle, and even easier to find the highlights). Rather than offering up theories on how to deal with the current financial crisis, the authors show us what happened in over 250 historical crises in 66 countries. And they offer some very clear ideas on how this current crisis might play out. Sadly, the lesson is not a happy one. There are no good endings once you start down a deleveraging path. As I have been writing for several years, we now are faced with choosing from among several bad choices, some being worse than others. This Time is Different offers up some ideas as to which are the worst choices.
If you are a serious student of economics, you should read this book. If you want to get a sense of the problems we face, the authors conveniently summarize the situation in chapters 13-16, purposefully allowing people to get the main points without drilling into the mountain of details they provide. Get the book at a 45% discount at Amazon.com.
Buy it with the excellent book I am now reading, Wall Street Revalued, and get free shipping.
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Kurt Kiefer & Lisa Wachtel [1.4MB PDF]:
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.Much more on Infinite Campus and the Madison School District here.Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some of the issues related to enhancing the use olthese tools among staff, parents, and stUdents. This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
- About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
- Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
- Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
- Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience.
- Seventy percent of teachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
- Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack o!familiarity with them.
- Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie leaming management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
- About one third of parents with high school stUdents use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal. Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
- Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
- About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year. About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
- Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
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Superintendent Dan Nerad 80K PDF.:
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012. The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.Related:During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs and utilizing fund balance. The State 2009- 2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of 2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc., worked to prepare a financial forecast for 2010- 2011.
The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama plans to submit to Congress on Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits, according to congressional sources and others with knowledge of the document.To put people back to work, Obama proposes to spend about $100 billion immediately on a jobs bill that would include tax cuts for small businesses, social safety net programs and aid to state and local governments. To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation's largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.
Despite those efforts, the White House expects the annual gap between spending and revenue to approach a record $1.6 trillion this year as the government continues to dig out from the worst recession in more than a generation, according to congressional sources. The red ink would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011, but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama's policies.
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British education may be down in the dumps over government spending prospects, but in the US the picture is rather different.This week President Barack Obama announced a big cash boost for schools and for university students.
In his state of the union address, President Obama announced a $4bn (£2.5bn) increase in federal spending on elementary and secondary schools.
That is a rise of over six per cent, one of the biggest rises for years.
He also announced an even bigger cash increase in student aid to provide more federal grants for poor students and to ease the impact of student debt repayment.
In future, graduates in the US will be "forgiven" their outstanding federal loan debt after 20 years or, if they enter public service, after 10 years.
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You ask whether things have changed -- since math wasn't being taught well 40+ years ago either. You're absolutely right on that, but I believe it's only gotten worse over the years, as more and more math phobic people have gone into the field of education. These people never understood math well, so their teaching had to be based on rote following of procedures, etc. Then came "new math", which was an effort to reinvent math and make it more accessible. That bombed, and the efforts to reinvent continued.What happened is that eventually those bright, math-phobic folks took over the education establishment. They reinvented math to be gentler, kinder, and more fun. Some of the hallmarks are: Small group problem solving, with students figuring our their own solutions to challenging problems. Visiting many topics for only a few weeks each year and moving on, regardless of whether any real mastery was attained. The thinking was/is that students will revisit the topics again in successive years, and will painlessly absorb the concepts. This turns out to be an extremely inefficient way to teach math, so, in order to have enough time to do all these hands-on projects in groups, the explanation of the underlying structure of math and and practice with standard algorithms have all been chucked.
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Last year Seattle Public Schools selected new, "inquiry-based" math textbooks. Now there's a lawsuit against the district over the Discovering Mathematics series of textbooks.Do you have a child in school who is using the new textbooks? What is your experience with inquiry-based math education? KUOW's Ross Reynolds is planning a show on Wednesday, February 3 in the 12 o'clock hour. We'd like to hear from you by Wednesday morning. Share your experience with KUOW by filling out the form below, or call 206.221.3663.
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After a day of knocking on doors chasing fleeting leads, Carlos Lopez and his partner finally heard welcome words: Yes, a resident confirmed, the man they were seeking lived in this house and would be home that evening.Mr. Lopez, a former police detective, now does gumshoe work for what he calls a more fulfilling cause: tracking down long-lost relatives of teenagers languishing in foster care, in desperate need of family ties and in danger of becoming rootless adults. That recent day, he was hoping to find the father of a boy who had lived in 16 different foster homes since 1995. The boy did not remember his mother, who had long since disappeared.
Finding an adoptive parent for older children with years in foster care is known in child welfare circles as the toughest challenge. Typically, their biological parents abused or neglected them and had parental rights terminated. Relatives may not know where the children are, or even that they exist. And the supply of saints in the general public, willing to adopt teenagers shaken by years of trauma and loss, is limited.
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Alliance for Excellent Education:
Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community's economic, social, and civic health.Business owners and residents--in particular, those without school-aged children--may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools.
Indeed, everyone--from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners--benefits when more students graduate from high school.
Nationally, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. That adds up to almost 1.3 million students annually who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also an economic argument for helping more students graduate from high school.
To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of the nation's fifty largest cities and their surrounding areas. Using a
sophisticated economic model developed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economics firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, the Alliance calculated economic projections tailored to each of these metro regions.
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I think I have about as good a handle as anyone on the reasons to feel depressed about the Milwaukee school situation. I've been giving talks to groups around the city fairly often lately. I jokingly refer to it as my Spreading Gloom tour.Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago.But at heart, I still am optimistic. Why?
Because I've had the privilege of visiting some schools lately that offer hope. There are too few of them, but they exist. You find them in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, among the private schools supported by public vouchers, and among the charter schools that operate outside MPS. I expect to feature some of them in upcoming columns.
Because there is ample reason to believe that other urban school systems are doing better than Milwaukee. Every school district that is dominated by children coming from impoverished settings has big struggles. But other cities are showing more success and exhibiting more energy than we are, and I don't know any convincing reason why Milwaukee needs to be behind the pack so often. Certainly, this could be changed if we did the right things.
Because things have to get better in terms of the educational success of kids for the city, the metropolitan area and even the state to thrive, and I somehow think awareness of that will eventually create enough pressure to bring improvement.
And - my specific subject for today - because of a new book.
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More than a third of sex crimes against juveniles are committed by juveniles, according to new research commissioned by the Justice Department.Juveniles are 36% of all sex offenders who victimize children. Seven out of eight are at least 12 years old, and 93% are boys, says the study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The report comes as states toughen penalties for adult sex offenders and wrestle with how to handle juveniles.
"They are different from adult sex offenders," says study co-author David Finkelhor. They are more likely than adults to commit sex offenses in groups, and their victims are younger and more likely to be male.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from the transcript of a television interview made public Friday afternoon.The excerpts, e-mailed to reporters, quoted Duncan as giving an evaluation of the effect of the 2005 hurricane on the city's schools.
Martin was quoted as saying to Duncan: "What's amazing is New Orleans was devastated because of Hurricane Katrina, but because everything was wiped out, in essence, you are building from ground zero to change the dynamics of education in that city."
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The Green Bay Area Public School District is losing students to open enrollment by a three-to-one ratio. Now, during a pivotal few weeks, it's launching a major multi-media campaign.Current Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad formerly served in the same position in Green Bay. Much more on open enrollment here.Statewide, applications for open enrollment begin Monday and run through the first part of February.
For school districts everywhere, it's a critical time to keep -- and gain -- students.
The Green Bay district is wasting no time in getting its message out. From the classroom to your TV screen, it's an all-out multi-media blitz to highlight the district during a very vulnerable few weeks.
Beginning Monday, a TV ad hits the airwaves advertising what the Green Bay school district says it can offer current and potential students.
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I was reading the comments in an earlier post about the new assignment plan and there were many comments about the rigor or lack there of at Rainier Beach High School. I would like to dispel the myth that Rainier Beach does not offer rigor to the high achieving student. If you have a high achieving 8th grader and are in the RBHS attendance area, here is just a sample of what you can expect:In math as a Freshman, you will start in at least Honors Geometry with Ms. Lessig who is our best math teacher. Once you get through that, you will take Honors Advanced Algebra with me, then Pre Calculus with Mr. Bird (a math major in college) and then as a Senior, you take AP Calculus with Ms. Day, a highly experienced and skilled teacher. As a bonus, in either your Junior or Senior year, you get to take AP Statistics with me. All of these classes are demanding and well taught by teachers who know what they are doing and are passionate about teaching math.
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Few know the consequences of Hong Kong's rapidly ageing population as well as public schoolteachers. They are in the front line, wondering how to keep the schools they work for open - and their jobs - as student numbers dwindle. Innovation comes to the fore in such situations and competition to maintain enrolments to stave off closure with gifts and gimmicks is keen. But as much as enterprise is to be lauded, efforts should not be about enticing children with giveaways, but better educating them. Education is not the natural first thought for teachers whose jobs are on the line. They know that when student numbers in a form drop below 61, the Education Bureau starts taking action. In the past five years, five public secondary schools and 72 primary ones have been forced to close. A total of 31 secondary classes have been cut this academic year.Government-subsidised secondary schools have taken a lead in trying to reverse the trend. They cannot conjure more students from the shrinking pool but can lure them away from one another and look to new arrivals. Tactics vary from handing out free notebook computers to recruiting through booths at railway stations to hiring public relations consultants so that images can be overhauled.
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One area of the federal government that could see more money is education as the president is proposing to spend as much as $4 billion more nationally next year on schools.With state funding at a standstill and facing possible cuts, the prospect of any new money for schools gives the federal government more power in setting the terms.
Even $4 billion more from the federal government will not change the fact that the nation's schools get a lion's share of their money from their states.
But state budgets are pinched -- Minnesota's deficit tops a billion dollars - and that's just for the remaining five months on this current fiscal year.
The Lakeville district's budget is 80 percent state money, and Superintendent Gary Amoroso predicts that portion will stay flat for at least four years. Even as costs for things like health care and teacher pay keep increasing.
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David Randall & Asher Hawkins:
College and university endowments in the United States and Canada collectively lost $93 billion during the 2009 fiscal year, according to a study jointly released Thursday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund, which manages investments for nonprofit institutions. In a sign of how deeply the pain was felt throughout higher education, the study found that the average institution lost 18.7% after fees.The report's findings were the grimmest since 1974, when the average college lost 11.4% of its endowment.
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Bruce Murphy, via a kind reader's email:
A story in last week's Shepherd Express claimed that Wall Street hedge managers are part of a secret conspiracy favoring mayoral takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools in order to privatize the schools. It's complete nonsense, the sort of fake news that any smart reader will see through.The key people pushing for mayoral takeover of the schools has been no secret: It includes Gov. Jim Doyle, Mayor Tom Barrett, Common Council President Willie Hines and a
number of Milwaukee-area Democratic legislators, including state Sens. Lena Taylor and Jeff Plale and state Reps. Jason Fields and Rep. Jon Richards. None of them have offered any support for privatization in their statements. Nor does the proposed legislation have any language that would in any way privatize the schools.
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MR. ALLEN: Welcome to POLITICO's video series: "Inside Obama's Washington." I'm Mike Allen, Chief White House Correspondent, and we're here at the Education Department with its leader, Arne Duncan. Mr. Secretary, thank you for having us in.SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, thanks for the opportunity. Good to see you.
MR. ALLEN: The President has announced a freeze for a big slice of spending. How's that going to affect education?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, education's always been a priority for the President, so we feel very, very good about where we're going to net out. We're always going to make tough choices, and things that aren't working, we're going to stop investing in. But things that are working, we want to continue to push very hard.
MR. ALLEN: And what's an example of something where you believe you can pull back, something that's not working?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, the budget will be forthcoming next week, but there will be a number of things where if we're not seeing the results we want for children, we think we have a moral obligation not to just perpetuate the status quo, but to invest scarce, scarce dollars in those priorities that are really making a difference in students' lives.
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So you think you can run a Los Angeles school? Make your case. You've got 10 minutes.Would-be school operators are taking part in a kind of Los Angeles Unified School District reality contest, presenting proposals this month at forums on campuses across the district.
It's the next step in an unfolding process through which groups inside and outside the system are bidding to operate 12 low-performing schools and 18 new campuses, serving some 40,000 students.
The Board of Education approved the strategy in August, and the winners for each school will be chosen before March.
Amid intense competition, the bidders are determined to add popular support to their portfolios. Parents will vote for their favorite bidders, although their choices won't be binding on district officials.
At Jefferson High south of downtown, at least 400 people braved last week's storms to hear staff members offer their plans for revamping the campus. They are competing against L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's team.
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Public flagship universities provide excellence to students who cannot afford high-quality private institutions. Yet many of these universities direct aid to wealthy students who will attend college without it. Meantime, many high-achieving minority and poor students wind up in lesser institutions or do not attend college at all. In fact, some low-income students who literally cannot afford to attend college without a grant must find a way to finance the equivalent of 70 percent of their family's annual income. Some flagships are stepping up to the challenge and focusing on access and success. An account of their performance and progress appears at the end of this report.
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This Dallas suburb, a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city's more diverse downtown.
Last month, the district's school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.
The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.
"We want to go to our neighborhood school," said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.
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Being deeply entrenched in all things money, I see first-hand the link between quality education and real, lasting economic success. The better schools you attend, the greater the chance you'll find and prepare for work that will provide satisfaction and financial stability. This is not to say that other factors (such as parent involvement) don't count or that some people don't overcome the odds and attain wealth and happiness without attending or graduating from college, but I'm talking the basics here: kindergarten though high school.The sad fact is that California public schools are in jeopardy. Many are wonderful now, but as the Chron's Jill Tucker reports, 113 million in funding cuts over two years will change all that. Teachers are facing lay-offs, class size will swell to unmanageable numbers, and programs that make schools appealing to students will be slashed. Want to make kids dislike and devalue formal learning? This will do it. And as a society, we can't afford to have children reject education. Those who do are more likely to make poor financial and lifestyle choices when they reach adulthood, draining the resources of the population at large.
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I am one of the three plaintiffs in the math textbook appeal. I am also the white grandmother of an SPS fifth grader, and a retired SPS math teacher.Mr. Westneat grants that the textbooks we are opposing may be "lousy," but he faults us for citing their disproportionate effect on ethnic, racial, and other minorities. He states that we can't prove this claim. I disagree, and West Seattle Dan has posted voluminous statistics in response to the column. They support our claim that inquiry-based texts, which have now accrued a sizable track record, are generally associated with declining achievement among most students and with a widening achievement gap between middle class whites and minorities.
We've brought race and ethnicity (as well as economic status) into this appeal because there is ample evidence that it is a factor. True, this is not the 80's, and true, in my 10 years of experience teaching in Seattle Schools, I found no evidence that people of color are less capable than whites of being outstanding learners. However, in my 30+ years as a parent and grandparent of SPS students and my years as a teacher, I've developed deep, broad, awareness of the ways that centuries of societally mandated racism play out in our classrooms, even in this era of Barack Obama's presidency.
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When the Obama administration first proposed having states duke it out for a share of a $4 billion education-reform fund, critics expected the whole enterprise to either be largely ignored or dissolve into political infighting. But instead, the Race to the Top competition has proved so successful in motivating states to accelerate their education-reform efforts that the administration has new plans to offer such competitions on an annual basis. President Obama will also announce tonight that the Department of Education will be offering a new competition to push states to create more and better preschool programs. During a briefing Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the country doesn't "need any more studies" to prove that high-quality preschool education can significantly close the achievement gap between rich and poor. Instead, he said, the country just needs to offer such programs to more kids. The president "wants to dramatically increase access and give kids a level playing field," Duncan said. "If kids don't come to school ready to learn and ready to read, it's very tough for even the best kindergarten teachers to close that gap." During the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly promised that he would expand early education programs but has focused little attention on the issue during his first year.
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WHEN the Federal Government's My School website goes live this morning, I will give a little internal cheer.It will be a little victory for transparency, a little win for democracy and a little tick in the box that shows the Federal Government is deadly serious about improving education standards.
It will also be a little kick in the shins for those who would rather the mountain of compiled information the Government already has - and has had for some years - remains buried under layers of bureaucracy far from public view.
I will be happy because I want to know about the statistics around the performance of the schools in my area. I want to see the spots that need addressing and the areas where they are leading the way. Like most thinking parents out there, the information made available this morning will not be the sole premise on which I will judge those schools, those teachers or those students. Those who have been bleating about the way in which the students, teachers and schools will be judged must view parents as shallow and mushroom-like.
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Michelle Rhee, the tough-talking D.C. schools chancellor, is used to taking her lumps from the press, the teachers' unions, and city politicians as she tries to overhaul one of the nation's worst public-school systems. But this week she's been under siege after a controversial quote about teachers molesting students made it into print. Rhee is fighting back, but the whole episode highlights a bigger problem in districts all over the country: why can't a school system fire teachers who abuse kids or don't bother showing up for work? In D.C., as in many other cities with "progressive" employee discipline procedures, school officials can suspend such teachers but can't terminate them.
The latest uproar began with the publication of a short "update" item in the Feb. 1 issue of Fast Company, in which Rhee seemed to say that the 266 teachers laid off last fall during the system's budget crunch had histories of abusing students, corporal punishment, and chronic absenteeism: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" Rhee is quoted as saying.
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Sex offenders who prey on children strike fear into the hearts of parents. That does not make it any easier to find a balance between protecting the community against these heinous crimes and upholding the rights of offenders who have paid their debt to society. One of these rights is privacy, which is key to a fair chance of rehabilitation. Reconciling this conflict is one reason Hong Kong has yet to follow other jurisdictions in maintaining a confidential sex offenders' register that can be accessed by employers of people who work with children.Meanwhile, the Education Bureau's power to deregister teachers provides a degree of protection because no one can teach in our schools without a valid registration certificate or permit. Parents are entitled to assurance that this screens out applicants who pose a known risk. It is disappointing therefore that the bureau has declined an opportunity to give it, without infringing privacy. It has refused our request to simply say how many of at least 31 teachers and classroom assistants known to have committed sexual offences in the past 10 years are still registered and how many are working in schools. As a result, lawmakers, parent and child protection groups have rightly raised concerns about the vetting procedures.
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How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan's effort to win money from the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it's among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state's Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
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Can an algebra textbook be racist?That's what was argued Tuesday in a Seattle courtroom. Not overtly racist in that a book of equations and problem sets contains hatred or intolerance of others. But that its existence -- its adoption for use in Seattle classrooms -- is keeping some folks down.
"We're on untested ground here," admitted Keith Scully.
He's the attorney who advanced this theory in a lawsuit challenging Seattle Public Schools' choice of the Discovering series of math textbooks last year.
The appeal was brought by a handful of Seattle residents, including UW atmospheric-sciences professor Cliff Mass. It says Seattle's new math books -- and a "fuzzy" curriculum they represent -- are harmful enough to racial and other minorities that they violate the state constitution's guarantee of an equal education.
It also says the School Board's choice of the books was arbitrary.
Mostly, Mass just says the new textbooks stink. For everyone. But he believes they will widen the achievement gap between whites and some minority groups, specifically blacks and students with limited English skills.
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Online college education is expanding--rapidly. More than 4.6 million college students were taking at least one online course at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. That's more than 1 in 4 college students, and it's a 17 percent increase from 2007.Turns out it's the economy, stupid.
Two major factors for the soaring numbers in the 2008-2009 school year are the sour economy and the possibility of an H1N1 flu virus outbreak, according to the seventh annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning report, titled "Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States in 2009." But, the survey's authors say, there is a lot more work to be done, and there's huge potential for online education to expand, especially at larger schools.
"For the past several years, all of the growth--90-plus percent--is coming from existing traditional schools that are growing their current offerings," says Jeff Seaman, one of the study's authors and codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College. Seaman's coauthor, Elaine Allen, who is also a codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group, added that community colleges, for-profit schools, and master's programs have seen significant growth in online offerings.
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G.P. "Bud" Peterson, president of Georgia Tech, sat down with writers at the AJC today and made clear that he did not support the pending legislation in the Georgia General Assembly to allow guns on college campuses. (We talked about other education issues that I will write about later.)Under a bill in the House, Georgia gun owners with conceal carry permits could bring their guns everywhere except the courthouse and the jailhouse. The restrictions on churches and campuses would be lifted.
Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson says "absolutely not" to guns on his campus in an interview Wednesday with the AJC
"Absolutely not," said Peterson, who was appointed as the 11th president of Georgia Tech in April after serving as chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In addition, Peterson has held various positions at Texas A&M University and taught mathematics, physics and chemistry in Kansas.
In other words, this man has been around students and on campuses all his life and he doesn't believe that guns will better protect students.
But let him do the talking.
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Although public charter schools are required by law to admit all students who apply, a common criticism is that charters fail to enroll enough special education students. Statistics show that public charter schools have proportionately smaller special education enrollments than conventional public schools, but recent trends suggest the difference will continue to dwindle.According to the Center for Educational Performance and Information, 13.6 percent of students in conventional schools in the 2008-2009 school year were enrolled in special education programs, compared to 9.6 percent in charter schools. While a difference still exists between charter and conventional schools, special education enrollment is rising quickly in charter schools.
Since the 2000-2001 school year, the proportion of charter school students enrolled in special education programs grew by 76 percent. Charter schools served nearly four times as many special education students at the end of the last decade as they did at the beginning.
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President Obama is apparently about to tell the nation he wants to freeze federal spending for three years in several areas, including education. I like the idea. I would also support cutting back entitlement payments for financially secure geezers like me, and find ways for everyone to make some sacrifices for our country.I agree.I can hear the objections. We can't fix our economy by shortchanging our kids. They are our future. True, but we don't have much evidence that spending more money on their schooling has had much effect on what they have learned. The most exciting and productive schools I have studied are driven by ideas, not bucks. If they need money for special projects, they find it. But the power of their teaching comes from the freedom they are allowed to help with their students, as a team, in ways that make the most sense to them.
More money often prevents that from happening. It has strings that force teachers to do stuff, and spend time on paperwork, that doesn't work for them. The recent history of the stimulus funds used for education makes this clear.
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Thousands of protesters showed up at New York City's Brooklyn Technical High School on January 26 to protest against the closing and reorganization of 19 public schools. Three hundred parents, teachers, students, and local politicians testified that the closings were arbitrary and ignored the struggles and successes taking place in these buildings. The hearing went on until after 2:30 in the morning, when the Panel for Educational Policy, whose majority is appointed by Mayor Michael "Money Bags" Bloomberg, did exactly what it planned to do at the start; it voted to rubber stamp the closings.The panel's decision will mean phasing out six comprehensive high schools, including Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens, Paul Robeson and William Maxwell in Brooklyn, and Alfred Smith and Christopher Columbus in the Bronx. This is part of Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein's campaign to replace the comprehensive high schools with small mini-schools and charters. Since 2002, Bloomberg/Klein has closed, or is in the process of closing, over ninety schools. What the Mayor and Chancellor were unable to explain was why if smaller schools are the panacea for educational problems six of the schools being closed in this round were small high schools created in previous rounds of school reorganization.
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Here's a Spark's Notes version of Gov. Christie's Education Subcommittee Report, which constitutes a list of recommendations to improve public education in N.J. Some are considered "early action," i.e., to be completed within 90 days. The rest have a whopping 6 months for completion. Okay: maybe it's more of a wish list, but it gives any reader a clear sense of Christie and Schundler's agenda.We've divided these 17 pages of pre-K through 12th grade recommendations (there's another 8 on higher education) into 3 basic categories: School Finance, School Reform, and NJ DOE Oversight.
School Finance:
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The federal government's controversial website giving information on the performance of all schools will go live from this Thursday.www.myschool.edu.auThe site, called My School, will provide profiles for almost 10,000 schools and will allow parents to compare schools in their area as well as statistically-similar schools in other regions.
In navigating the web page, parents will be able to look at the profiles of their child's school which includes the numbers of students, teachers, attendance rates and the percentage of indigenous students.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard made no apology for the introduction of the website.
"I'm passionate about this and I believe this is the right direction for this country," she told Sky News on Monday.
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Independent policy think-tank the Grattan Institute has added to growing criticism of the Federal Government's My School website, saying it will not give an adequate assessment of a school's performance.My School, scheduled to be launched tomorrow, has already come under heavy criticism.
The Education Union says it will unfairly stigmatise disadvantaged schools, and the Secondary Principals Council says it fails to include crucial data about school funding.
However, several parent groups have supported the proposal to provide information on school performance.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says it will provide parents and the community with accurate information, allowing them to be their own judge.
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A year ago, the life Demetria Overstreet and her family knew slowly began to fade.
Her husband, Lenzie, was diagnosed with kidney failure and had to leave his job to begin treatment.
With its main money-maker out of work, mounting medical bills and three children to care for, the family saw its financial problems beginning to build.
At one point, their home's gas and electricity were turned off. Car payments lagged. And at times, the family survived on eating hotdogs and chips.
"It was depressing, especially when my son would come home and said 'Momma, nothing comes on,' " Overstreet said, referring to the electricity.
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Martha McLaren, DaZanne Porter, and Cliff Mass:
Today Cliff Mass and I, (DaZanne Porter had to be at a training in Yakima) accompanied by Dan Dempsey and Jim W, had our hearing in Judge Julie Spector's King County Superior Courtroom; the event was everything we hoped for, and more. Judge Spector asked excellent questions and said that she hopes to announce a decision by Friday, February 12th.Associated Press:The hearing started on time at 8:30 AM with several members of the Press Corps present, including KIRO TV, KPLU radio, Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, and at least 3 others. I know the number because, at the end, Cliff, our attorney, Keith Scully, and I were interviewed; there were five microphones and three cameras pointed towards us at one point.
The hearing was brief; we were done by 9:15. Keith began by presenting our case very clearly and eloquently. Our two main lines of reasoning are, 1) that the vote to adopt Discovering was arbitrary and capricious because of the board's failure to take notice of a plethora of testimony, data, and other information which raised red flags about the efficacy of the Discovering series, and 2) the vote violated the equal education rights of the minority groups who have been shown, through WASL scores, to be disadvantaged by inquiry based instruction.
Realistically, both of these arguments are difficult to prove: "arbitrary and capricious" is historically a very, very difficult proof, and while Keith's civil rights argument was quite compelling, there is no legal precedent for applying the law to this situation.
The School District's attorney, Shannon McMinimee, did her best, saying that the board followed correct procedure, the content of the books is not relevant to the appeal, the books do not represent inquiry-based learning but a "balanced" approach, textbooks are merely tools, etc., etc. She even denigrated the WASL - a new angle in this case. In rebuttal, Keith was terrific, we all agreed. He quoted the introduction of the three texts, which made it crystal clear that these books are about "exploration." I'm blanking on other details of his rebuttal, but it was crisp and effective. Keith was extremely effective, IMHO. Hopefully, Dan, James, and Cliff can recall more details of the rebuttal.
A lawsuit challenging the Seattle School District's math curriculum went to trial Monday in King County Superior Court.Cliff Mass:A group of parents and teachers say the "Discovering Math" series adopted last year does a poor job, especially with minority students who are seeing an achievement gap widen.
A spokeswoman for the Seattle School District, Teresa Wippel, says it has no comment on pending litigation.
KOMO-TV reports the district has already spent $1.2 million on Discovering Math books and teacher training.
On Tuesday, January 26th, at 8:30 AM, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector will consider an appeal by a group of Seattle residents (including yours truly) regarding the selection by Seattle Public Schools of the Discovering Math series in their high schools. Although this issue is coming to a head in Seattle it influences all of you in profound ways.In this appeal we provide clear evidence that the Discovery Math approach worsens the achievement gap between minority/disadvantaged students and their peers. We show that the Board and District failed to consider key evidence and voluminous testimony, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously by choosing a teaching method that was demonstrated to produce a stagnant or increasing achievement gap. We request that the Seattle Schools rescind their decision and re-open the textbook consideration for high school.
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As his title hints, Louis Menand has written a business book. This is good, since the crisis in American higher education that the Harvard professor of English addresses is a business crisis. The crisis resembles the more celebrated one in the US medical system. At its best, US education, like US healthcare, is of a quality that no system in the world can match. However, the two industries have developed similar problems in limiting costs and keeping access open. Both industries have thus become a source of worry for public-spirited citizens and a punchbag for political opportunists.Clusty Search: Louis Menand - "The Marketplace of Ideas".Menand lowers the temperature of this discussion. He neither celebrates nor bemoans the excesses of political correctness - the replacement of Keats by Toni Morrison, or of Thucydides by queer theory. Instead, in four interlocking essays, he examines how university hiring and credentialing systems and an organisational structure based on scholarly disciplines have failed to respond to economic and social change. Menand draws his idea of what an American university education can be from the history of what it has been. This approach illuminates, as polemics cannot, two grave present-day problems: the loss of consensus on what to teach undergraduates and the lack of intellectual diversity among the US professoriate.
Much of today's system, Menand shows, can be traced to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades after 1869. Faced with competition from pre-professional schools, Eliot had the "revolutionary idea" of strictly separating liberal arts education from professional education (law, medicine, etc), and making the former a prerequisite for the latter. Requiring a lawyer to spend four years reading, say, Molière before he can study for the bar has no logic. Such a system would have made it impossible for Abraham Lincoln to enter public life. Funny, too, that the idea of limiting the commanding heights of the professions to young men of relative leisure arose just as the US was filling up with penurious immigrants. Menand grants that the system was a "devil's bargain".
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A week ago, President Obama announced that he is planning to spend $4.4 billion on his Race to the Top education program. If you missed the news, don't kick yourself. Obama's entire education reform plan had been largely overshadowed by the yearlong health care debate, the economy, Afghanistan and other big-ticket news items.It's unfortunate, since this may be the most impressive reform his administration has accomplished in the past year.
Obama announced Race to the Top in July. The program awards grant money to states on a competitive basis, based on their implementing education reforms that include assessment standards, turning around worst-performing schools, and recruiting and rewarding quality teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has met with education leaders throughout the country, working tirelessly to get state education leaders and providers, legislators, reform groups, unions and others to support reforms that will bring true accountability and competition to our nation's public school systems.
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School districts across Minnesota got word Tuesday that the state will withhold some of their funding in coming months.Withholding payments will free up some of the state's cash so it can pay its own bills. Today's action is in addition to more than $1 billion in delayed payments to schools that were announced last summer.
School districts get their funding from the state in the form of twice-monthly payments.
Today's move means both payments in March and one in April will be smaller than expected for many districts.
State finance officials predict they won't have enough money in the bank during those months to meet their cash flow needs. So, the state will hold back a total of $423 million from schools. All of it will be paid back in May.
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Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation's education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.The boost that the Administration's Race to the Top initiative - which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education - has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration's biggest domestic policy success of 2009 - all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What's more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept - in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth - to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate - for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
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Beth Moss (running for re-election unopposed) 311K PDF.
James Howard (running against Tom Farley) 432K PDF.
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39MB mp3 audio. I recorded this from Monday evening's video stream. Unfortunately, the sound level was quite low. Notes and links on the 2010 State of the Madison School District here.
566K State of the District PDF.
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Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don't hurt the feelings of kids who don't earn awards.Ah, yes. One size fits all education uber alles.This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:
I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be "too hard," not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of "survival of the fittest" still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more "adapted" to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
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Many of you have been asking me about the fate of Ashley Payne, the Barrow County high school teacher who lost her job over her Facebook page and whose experience sparked a national debate about Internet privacy, anonymous e-mails and teacher rights.One of the Facebook photos that a "parent" complained about in an anonymous e-mail
The legal case is proceeding. Ashley Payne's lawyer just deposed the principal and assistant principal. She is fighting to get her job back.
I asked attorney Richard Storrs if Barrow ever traced the source of the incriminating e-mail that led to Payne being called in by her principal in August and told to consider resigning rather than face losing her teaching license. Under that pressure, the 23-year-old UGA honors graduate says she felt she had no recourse but to resign - a mistake according to veteran teachers.
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Laura Meckler & Jonathan Weisman:
President Barack Obama intends to propose a three-year freeze in spending that accounts for one-sixth of the federal budget--a move meant to quell rising voter concern over the deficit but whose practical impact will be muted.To attack the $1.4 trillion deficit, the White House will propose a three-year freeze on discretionary spending unrelated to the military, veterans, homeland security and international affairs, according to senior administration officials. Also untouched are big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The freeze would affect $447 billion in spending, or 17% of the total federal budget, and would likely be overtaken by growth in the untouched areas of discretionary spending. It's designed to save $250 billion over the coming decade, compared to what would have been spent had this area been allowed to rise along with inflation.
The administration officials said the cap won't be imposed across the board. Some areas would see cuts while others, including education and investments related to job creation, would realize increases.
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A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.
Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.
Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time -- those judged to have some chance for improvement -- though they come and go throughout the academic year.
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AFP:
After his Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" spotlighted climate change, Davis Guggenheim is hoping to do for the US public education system what he did for the environment.Guggenheim's new film, "Waiting for Superman," is vying for honors in the Sundance Film Festival's US documentary competition, and offers a searing look at the problems facing schools and colleges in the United States.
Like the Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth," Guggenheim's film utilizes graphs and animated charts intercut with interviews with students and educators to illustrate the sector's woes.
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Tom Vander Ark:
There are interesting parallels between charter schools in the US and affordable private school in India. Both focus on the urban poor, promote choice, and often develop within an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Whether it's New Orleans or Hyderabad, there are a dozen accelerants that promote access and quality:1. Incubation support for new/existing operators with multi-campus potential. including planning support and seed funding (e.g., New School Venture Fund, Charter School Growth Fund, NY Charter School Center). Mumbai-based Dasra incubates social entrepreneurs but with limited access to seed capital.
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New Jersey Department of Education, 3MB PDF:
In New Jersey, we are proud to be ranked among the top 5 NAEP performers in reading, writing, and mathematics. We are proud to have invested so successfully in admired and effective early childhood programs, high-quality charter schools, and high school redesign. We are proud to see the success of our efforts.Scott Bauer:However, while we are making inroads to close the achievement gap, we also recognize that more work is needed to prepare all of our students for the demands of the global economy. The existing minority achievement gaps and the gaps for economically-disadvantaged and non- disadvantaged students are unacceptable. There is an urgent need for these further reforms.
The landmark Abbot decisions over the last three decades in conjunction with the creation of the new school funding formula in 2008 solidified New Jersey's commitment to equitable school resources and ensuring that all student sin the State have access to needed resources. Although this has been a significant step, we have not yet achieved outcomes commensurate with the State's investments in education in all districts. Furthermore, we have not yet solved the problems of how to place great teachers and leaders in struggling schools and districts.
Eleven Wisconsin school districts want nothing to do with a highly touted federal grant program that could direct thousands of dollars to their classrooms.The districts were the only ones out of 425 that refused to take part in the state's application to receive money under the nearly $4.5 billion Race to the Top grant program.
That means if Wisconsin is awarded the $254 million it seeks, the 11 districts won't get a cut, and the money they would have gotten will go to the remaining schools.
That's just fine with Mary Dean, administrator of the Maple Dale-Indian Hills School District just north of Milwaukee. She said the requirements under the state's Race to the Top application were too onerous for her 500-student district to comply with, so instead of giving itself the option of declining to take part later, it decided not to participate at all.
"We really had too many questions, too many unknowns," she said. "We thought the costs would outweigh the benefits."
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Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
In classrooms across Wisconsin, students learn mathematics, reading, social studies, art, science, and other subjects through integrated projects that show great promise for increased academic achievement. The catch: the collaboration between students and teachers often involves multiple academic subjects, which can present licensing issues for school districts.Related, by Janet Mertz: "An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria""There is no question that parents and students want innovative programs," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "The reality of some of today's educational approaches requires that we look at our licensing regulations to increase flexibility and expand routes to certification to ensure that these programs are taught by highly qualified teachers."
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The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.
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Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child's health and behavior?
Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess -- sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.
Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some teachers say there are fewer behavior problems.
"Kids are calmer after they've had recess first," said Janet Sinkewicz, principal of Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. "They feel like they have more time to eat and they don't have to rush."
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Trying to address a major ethnic and racial achievement gap, the school could divert funds from before- and after-school science labs filled mostly with white students. The plan has sparked debate.Related: English 10.Aaron Glimme's Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn't officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases.
In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful.
Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High's science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics.
Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state.
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High school seniors are applying to selective colleges around Washington in record numbers this year, particularly to schools with reputations for meeting the full financial needs of admitted freshmen. The trend suggests that the weak economy has driven applicants to schools that offer a bigger bang for the tuition buck.A surge in applications is not what admission deans expected this year, after a fiscal downturn and a flattening population of college-age students.
But applications to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are up 13 percent over last year, with a projected pool of 18,150 students competing for 1,235 seats in the freshman class. The University of Richmond received 8,500 applications for 805 slots, a 9 percent increase. Applications are up 6 percent at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and 3 percent at George Washington University in the District. The University of Virginia fielded 22,396 applications, an all-time high. The College of William and Mary, too, expects a record number of applicants.
"It shouldn't be happening, should it?" said Bill Hartog, dean of admissions at Washington and Lee. "My take on it is, financial aid, financial aid, financial aid."
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My family has much experience in higher education, not all of it happy. I spent six years as an often struggling undergraduate and grad student. My journalist wife did ten years in higher ed, including three of what she considered hard labor as a visiting professor. Our kids add another 11 years, with the youngest child about to sign up for three more. Please don't ask me what that will cost.American colleges and universities are the great strength of our education system. They are revered around the world. But those schools put heavy stress on our families, since getting into, paying for and graduating from the ones we most want often exceeds our capabilities. We need to know more about what they are doing to us, so I am happy to see washingtonpost.com launch two higher education blogs: College Inc. by Daniel de Vise and Campus Overload by Jenna Johnson. Let me celebrate that event by grumbling about what I consider higher education's five biggest blind spots:
1. College privacy rules are a mess. They are difficult to understand and infuriating when they exacerbate a family crisis. I have heard many stories about students getting into trouble, and their parents being among the last to know. University officials will sometimes take pity on a frantic dad and reveal important things in the kid's personal file. But why can't we have more reasonable procedures? Academics who fear intrusive helicopter parents should read the National Survey of Student Engagement report, which reveals that the children of such people do better in college than kids like mine, who didn't hear much from us.
2. Professors know too little about what high schools are doing to prepare students for their classes.
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As I mentioned previously, for the past couple of months I have been part of a coalition group to form a joint values statement for parents/community groups to give to the School Board, district and SEA. The groups include Campana Quetzel, Seattle Council PTSA, Successful Schools in Action, CPPS, Stand for Children, the Alliance for Education and others. Organized by the League of Education Voters (our leader is Kelly Munn of LEV), we sought to create a streamlined document that is simple and basic.Here's a link to that document, "Give Every Child a Great Education: A Community Value Statement in Support of Public Schools". We will have, at this writing, shown the document to nearly all the Board members, SEA leaders and school district leaders.
Here is a link to the district's opening remarks about the negotiations.
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Since we're talking about school choice--and the role of the teachers' unions not only in preventing needed reform, but in keeping parents from choosing to place their kids in good schools that are good fits for them--check out the trailer above.The story of teachers' union intransigence when it comes to the extremely time-sensitive matter of kids' futures urgently needs to be told. And finally, with films like this one and like The Cartel (which attracted a nasty, tellingly defensive hit piece from the New Jersey Education Association), that story is beginning to be told.
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Liz Heron, Elaine Yau and Fox Yi Hu:
More than 30 teachers and classroom assistants have been convicted of sex offences in the past 10 years - but the Education Bureau will not say if they are still working in the city's schools.Since January 1, 2000, at least 31 staff have been convicted of offences ranging from indecent assault of their pupils to secretly filming girls getting undressed for a dance class.
The catalogue of convictions and the names of the offenders was compiled by the Sunday Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) and presented to the Education Bureau, which was asked what action had been taken against the offenders.
But the bureau, responsible for registering teachers and advising schools on vetting prospective staff, refused to say how many of the 31 were still registered as teachers and how many were working in schools.
A spokeswoman also refused to explain why it would not release the information to the public. She did say 13 teachers were deregistered from 2006 to 2008 and seven of these had been convicted of sex offences.
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Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad will present the "State of the Madison School District 2010" tomorrow night @ 5:30p.m. CST.
The timing and content are interesting, from my perspective because:
History is moving rather fast in South Africa. In June the country hosts football's World Cup, as if in ultimate endorsement of its post-apartheid progress. Yet on February 2 1990, when the recently inaugurated state President de Klerk stood up to deliver the annual opening address to the white-dominated parliament, such a prospect was unthinkable. The townships were in ferment; many apartheid laws were still on the books; and expectations of the balding, supposedly cautious Afrikaner were low.I sense that the Madison School Board and the Community are ready for new, substantive adult to student initiatives, while eliminating those that simply consume cash in the District's $418,415,780 2009-2010 budget ($17,222 per student).How wrong conventional wisdom was. De Klerk's address drew a line under 350 years of white rule in Africa, a narrative that began in the 17th century with the arrival of the first settlers in the Cape. Yet only a handful of senior party members knew of his intentions.
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
In summary, I'm hoping for a "de Klerk" moment Monday evening. What are the odds?
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Picture a Milwaukee Public Schools high school that college-bound students are clamoring to attend. The school has grown from 100 to 1,000 in six years. Its program is rigorous, its test scores are strong. Hundreds are on a waiting list for admission for next year.
You might think MPS leaders would look at the meteoric rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan College Preparatory School on the far south side and say, "Terrific! This is an opportunity. What can we do to satisfy the obviously huge appetite for what this program has to offer?"
Or, if you were perhaps a bit more cynical, you might think MPS leaders would look at the Reagan situation and say: "OK, who screwed up? Who allowed this school to grow so fast? Can we get a lot of these parents to switch their kids to other high schools where - for some reason - there is no waiting list?"
Reagan arguably has provided the biggest shot in the arm that MPS has gotten in the last decade or so. It provides a rigorous International Baccalaureate program for all its students - "We have one vision, one mission, one focus - IB," says Julia D'Amato, the principal and chief driver behind Reagan's success. Reagan is working with other MPS schools to develop a kindergarten through high school IB continuum in MPS.
But in recent months, Reagan has had to fend off an attempt to cap its enrollment and it has been ordered to reduce sharply the number of students next fall who do not fall into the special education category. Reagan leaders clearly feel frustrated by how much work is going into protecting their success from MPS leaders.
"All the buzzwords that are supposed to make a successful school, that's what we have here," says Mary Ellen McCormick-Mervis, one of the school's administrators. "If we're doing everything right, why not help us?"
Parent meeting set
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In discussions of "effective" teaching, we often hear about the "objectives" that teachers should spell out and repeat, the "learning styles" they should target, the "engagement" they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide--all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: "No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!"
Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson's content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students "on task," reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.
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When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, came to the Sundance Film Festival here this week, it wasn't movies on his mind, it was education -- your kids' education.A new documentary, "Waiting For Superman," by director Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") looks at what Gates and Guggenheim say is a U.S. public school system in shambles.
"The quality of our educational system is what made America great. Now it's not as good as it was, and it needs to be a lot better," Gates told Reuters after the film's premiere on Friday.
"Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, 'Waiting for Superman' by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way," he said.
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The person who posted this video on YouTube said this fight happened 1/5/10... that's some way to say Happy New Year.I know some of you readers cannot stand when I post video of US acting the fool... well that's life. Here's some reality for US to look at for the next 30 seconds and do something about OUR kids.
It's one thing to see these young girls fighting so viciously. It's a damn shame to see ALL the other kids are cheering on this ish. Where's the teachers and what took the security so long? I know this isn't going on everyday, but this ish is getting tired.
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When Gov. Jim Doyle announced last April that $366 million in federal stimulus money was headed for Wisconsin schools, the stated goal from Washington was to help children with disabilities and at-risk students in poor schools -- "while stimulating the economy."But it's unclear if the almost $12 million distributed to the Madison School District, with a third of that going to teacher training and coaching, will accomplish those goals.
"I think at the end of this period we will have spent a lot of money and I don't know what we'll have to show for it," said Lucy Mathiak, vice president of the Madison School Board. "Professional development is a really nice thing, but how do you even measure the in-class result?"
About $1 million of the Madison district's $11.7 million in stimulus money will buy technology for schools, welcomed by school officials. Programs for students with behavioral and mental health needs will be beefed up as well, and the district estimates about 40 new short-term jobs will be created.
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One staff member at a Springfield charter school told state education investigators he felt so pressured by his principal last spring to improve MCAS scores that, in order to keep his job, he helped one student write an essay for the test.Another staff member said he was fired after he accused the principal of encouraging cheating, while another staff member observed a colleague pull some students away from watching a movie so they could fix answers on their tests.
The findings, released yesterday by state education officials, offer the first public glimpse into the specific cheating allegations that have been leveled against Robert M. Hughes Academy, which was ordered last winter to improve its scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests to avoid being closed.
Previously, Mitchell Chester, commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, had said only that the cheating, described as pervasive and systemic, was orchestrated by the principal and carried out by several adults at the school, which teaches 180 students in kindergarten through grade 8.
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The most interesting session I attended concered Kewaskum schools program they call "People over programs". I have long noted that compared to the private sector, school district management structures are very weak - the Kewaskum program deals with this problem by focusing on high professional standards for their staff. I was encouraged to see an alternative model that acknowledges this issue and attempts to address the problem directly.Along similar lines I hear a presentation from the Janesville schools - they are working with a management consulting firm (that is donating their services) to develop standards of professionalism and accountability in management. The Superintendents evaluation is published on the district website with progress toward specific measurable goals.
I also attended a session with ideas about using incentives with HRA's to reduce health insurance costs, and a session about district consolidation - I think that looking at collaborative or consolidated support services with neighboring district might be a way to save money.
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Parents wishing to send their children to a different school district next year will be able to participate in the open enrollment program the first three weeks of February.Learn more about full and part time Wisconsin open enrollment here.From Feb. 1 through Feb. 19 parents can apply for their children to attend a public school other than the one in which they live. Last school year, more than 28,000 students participated.
Participation in the program has grown each year since it began in 1998 when just 2,500 were enrolled.
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Cassie Frankel seems an unlikely martial arts warrior.The sophomore at West High heard about the Mixed Martial Arts Club from her chemistry teacher and decided to give it a try. The group meets Thursdays at noon, learning and practicing a variety of fighting styles, including boxing, wrestling, judo and jujutsu.
"I like that it's an individual sport because I'm not that athletic," Frankel says during a break in practice. "It's more about how your body works." She likes boxing best: "I feel really tough with the boxing gloves, even though they're pink."
Frankel acknowledges the controversy over teaching kids to fight. But, she says, "I think it's a good idea because if you know how to fight you're less likely to get hurt."
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The January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic features a noteworthy article titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? Although the article does not focus on gifted education per se, it is still worth a close read. The article discusses specific attributes that excellent teachers with exceptional track records tend to display in the classroom. (It is important to note that these attributes are based on research that was conducted by the nonprofit organization, Teach for America, which advocates for teacher reform. It is also important to note that the group's research focuses solely on teachers who work in underperforming school districts where the primary goal in the general education classroom is to get students to perform at or above grade level.) The article outlines several specific recommendations that the organization makes for recruiting and hiring successful teachers, particularly in underserved communities.For those of us in the gifted education community, the traits identified in the article may be ones that we should perhaps consider first before we consider any additional teacher characteristics that might be specific to gifted education. (See my previous blog entry titled, Training and Competencies of Teachers of the Gifted.)
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Two weeks ago I explored the possibility that high schools could challenge all students, gifted or otherwise, without having gifted programs. Quaker Valley High School outside of Pittsburgh, for instance, seemed able to create new opportunities for a variety of kids by ignoring standard procedures that had outlived their usefulness, such as homework requirements or rules against taking more than one course in the same period.One wise reader said, in effect: Yeah, but that will never work in elementary schools.
As if by fate, I received an email shortly after from Susan Ohanian, a delightful teacher, speaker, author and blogger whose work I love, even when she is portraying me as a test-addled idiot. We may disagree on policy issues, but we have shared tastes about what good teaching looks and sounds like. In her email, she described how she brought a free-form gifted non-program to an elementary school in Troy, N.Y.
Here is what she said. Don't forget to take a look at her blog at susanohanian.org.
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"Few appreciate brilliance, but everyone appreciates clarity."I came up with that line on Twitter, and thought . . .
Why waste it there?
Here's the quick and clear guide to clarity in writing:
Short
Short words are the rule that makes your exceptional words sing.
Short sentences make powerful points faster.
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SOUTH AFRICA spends a bigger share of its GDP on education than any other country on the continent. Yet its results are among the worst. Fifteen years after apartheid was buried, black children continue to receive an education that is vastly inferior to most of their white peers. Instead of ending inequality, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) promised, the country's schools are perpetuating it.For Graeme Bloch, an education expert at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, his country's education system is a "national disaster". He says around 80% of schools are "dysfunctional". Half of all pupils drop out before taking their final "matric" exams. Only 15% get good enough marks to get into university. Of those who do get in, barely half end up with a degree. South Africa regularly comes bottom or near the bottom in international literacy, numeracy and science tests.
University heads increasingly complain about students totally unprepared for higher education. Employers bemoan a dearth of skilled manpower, yet--by some measures--one in three South Africans has no job. A study of first-year students by Higher Education South Africa, the universities' representative body, found only half the 2009 intake to be proficient in "academic literacy" and barely a quarter in "quantitative literacy", while no more than 7% were deemed to have the necessary mathematics skills.
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588K PDF, Dan Nerad, Superintendent:
Dear Members of Our Community, The mission of the Madison Metropolitan School District is as follows:This report will be presented at Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting.Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.A year ago, a group of community and school staff members committed time to develop a revised Strategic Plan for the school district. As part of this, our mission statement was revised. This plan was approved by the Board of Education in September 2009 and will be reviewed and updated annually. For the foreseeable future, the plan will serve as our road map to know if we are making a difference relative to important student learning outcomes and to the future of our community. To make the most difference, we must continue to partner with you, our community. We are indeed very fortunate to be able to educate our children in a very supportive, caring community.As a school district, our highest priority must be on our work related to teaching and learning. For our students and the community's children to become proficient learners and caring and contributing members of society, we must remain steadfast in this commitment.
Related to our mission, we have also identified the following belief statements as a district:
Purpose of this report
- We believe that excellent public education is necessary for ensuring a democratic society.
- Webelieveintheabilitiesofeveryindividualinourcommunityandthevalueof their life experiences.
- We believe in an inclusive community in which all have the right to contribute.
- Webelievewehaveacollectiveresponsibilitytocreateandsustainasafe environment that is respectful, engaging, vibrant and culturally responsive.
- Webelievethateveryindividualcanlearnandwillgrowasalearner.
- We believe in continuous improvement in formed by critical evaluation and reflection.
- We believe that resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.
- Webelieveinculturallyrelevanteducationthatprovidestheknowledgeandskills to meet the global challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
The purpose of this State of the District Report is to provide important information about our District to our community and to share future priorities.
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Trying to make sense of the 2009-10 education budget and a year when everything went topsy turvey?This 20-page report looks at how California got to this point and leads you through the cuts, funding delays, and policy changes that lawmakers implemented in 2009 to address a state budget crisis that just kept getting worse. It also explains the impact on local education agencies, including the changed rules around many K-12 programs such as Class Size Reduction.
Some key messages from the report:
- California has struggled with creating sound state budgets since the early 2000s, so the national economic downturn hit the state particularly hard.
- K-12 spending cuts have been a major part of the budget solutions and were accompanied by substantive changes in how education funds are allocated, including some new flexibility.
- Local school agencies must absorb funding cuts, address cash flow challenges, and plan carefully in order to avoid insolvency.
- Going forward, Californians may either have to accept the "new normal" of continued education reductions or push for schools to be exempted from further cuts as another bad year begins.
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CBS 2's Mike Flannery recently received a little one-on-one time with Mayor Daley when he interviewed the mayor while riding along in his town car. The crux of the interview was about the future of Northerly Island and if a casino would be built there, to which Daley replied, "It's strictly a park, always will be; because it belongs to the people." He also reiterated comments from his verbal spat with Han Solo last week, saying that he's "very proud" of his decision to bulldoze Meigs Field to create Northerly Island and that it was all part of the Burnham Plan. When asked if he felt it was one of his major accomplishments, Daley responded, "No. No, I think the schools are."
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Ever seen the Advanced Placement Grade Report for your high school? I thought not. Most people don't know it exists. That is why I have so much pleasure going over the reports. It is like reading the principal's e-mails, full of intriguing innuendo and secrets that parents and students aren't supposed to know.Although these subject-by-subject reports rarely appear on public Web sites, some schools will show them to me if I ask, for the following reasons: 1. I am very polite; 2. no reporter has ever asked for them before, so there are no rules against it; and 3. they don't think anyone will care.
They are wrong on that last count. The AP Grade Report allows the public to see which AP courses at a school produce the most high grades, and the most low grades, on AP exams. You can gauge the skill of the teachers and the nature of the students who take various AP subjects.
This region's schools have made AP (and the similar International Baccalaureate, which provides comparable reports) the most challenging and influential courses they have. On Feb. 1, The Post will publish my annual rankings of Washington area schools based on participation in these tests, written and scored by outside experts. Students who do well on them can earn college credit. Many people would be interested in the actual results (different from the participation figures I use in the rankings) if they were readily available. To my surprise, that is beginning to happen.
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Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey -- dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.National K-12 Foreign Language Survey. Verona recently approved a Mandarin charter school.But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.
Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world -- and paying part of their salaries.
At a time of tight budgets, many American schools are finding that offer too good to refuse.
In Massillon, Ohio, south of Cleveland, Jackson High School started its Chinese program in the fall of 2007 with 20 students and now has 80, said Parthena Draggett, who directs Jackson's world languages department.
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Pennsylvania's application for a piece of the $4 billion federal Race to the Top money calls for Philadelphia to "turn around" 76 low-performing schools by 2012-13 -- eight schools in 2010-11, 40 the following year, and 28 in 2012-13.
That is close to a third of all schools in the District. Such schools will be required to adopt one of four drastic reform strategies approved by the US Department of Education.
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One out of every five U.S. teenagers has a cholesterol level that increases the risk of heart disease, federal health officials reported Thursday, providing striking new evidence that obesity is making more children prone to illnesses once primarily limited to adults.A nationally representative survey of blood test results in American teenagers found that more than 20 percent of those ages 12 to 19 had at least one abnormal level of fat. The rate jumped to 43 percent among those adolescents who were obese.
Previous studies had indicated that unhealthy cholesterol levels, once a condition thought isolated to the middle-aged and elderly, were increasingly becoming a problem among the young, but the new data document the scope of the threat on a national level.
"This is the future of America," said Linda Van Horn, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who heads the American Heart Association's Nutrition Committee. "These data really confirm the seriousness of our obesity epidemic. This really is an urgent call for health-care providers and families to take this issue seriously."
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One Wisconsin Now argues:One Wisconsin Now does extensive voter data collection and mining for certain candidates.** UW-Madison is receiving nearly $18,000 from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute -- which One Wisconsin Now calls a "conservative think tank" -- for the polling project to cover a part of Goldstein's salary.
** Poll results showed a 46.6 percent to 42.4 percent statewide opposition to private school vouchers. However, due to political concerns, it appears WPRI President George Lightbourn was able to keep these numbers from being played up. In the end, references to statewide opposition to private school vouchers were not used in a press release touting the poll. Instead, a press release talking about the poll results put out on the UW-Madison website included only figures from Milwaukee County, where the majority supported vouchers.
"This is a lesson about the credibility and the trustworthiness of materials produced by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute," Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, says in the press release. "If polling results don't fit its pro-voucher agenda, then those polling results are erased from the final analysis. Most unfortunately, the UW is now tied directly to this manipulation to serve the political agenda of WPRI."
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Tom Farley Jr., the brother of the late comedian Chris Farley, is emerging as perhaps the oddest candidate for local public office since Will Sandstrom.First there was the confusion he caused in announcing on Twitter last September that he was running for lieutenant governor as a Republican. He later backtracked, saying he was merely considering the idea, a claim undercut by the words he'd used: "I'm in." (His announcement of candidacy has apparently been unTwittered.)
Farley later announced his candidacy for Madison school board; he's running for an open seat against James Howard, an economist with the Forest Products Laboratory. Commenting on the Advocating on Madison Public Schools (AMPS) blog, Farley sought to distance himself from the notion that he is a Republican merely because he announced his plans to run for office as one.
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Kristy (Christiane) Henrich, Marblehead High School Class of 2010
"Civil War Medicine" paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review
Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.Evaluating the Legacy of Civil War Medicine; Amputations, Anesthesia, and AdministrationI put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.
Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.
A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn't end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.
For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.
I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I'm not sure if it actually was...
Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.
I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.
This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.
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Michael Bonds, President, Milwaukee Board of School Directors [1.3MB PDF]:
January 18, 2010via The Milwaukee Drum.
Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702Dear Governor Doyle:
As President of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, I am writing to express my disappointment with your cynical statement regarding Wisconsin's Race to the Top (RTT) application. In your release, you predict that the application will fail because it does not include mayoral control of the Milwaukee Public Schools District (MPS). You also argue that the Legislature's refusal to adopt your mayoral control proposal in Milwaukee will cost other school districts millions of dollars.
Since mayoral control is not a requirement for Race To the Top dollars, your statement can only be interpreted as a political attempt to tum the rest of the state against MPS and to intimidate legislators who oppose mayoral control into supporting your proposal.
The facts are as follows:
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National pro-privatization organizations led by former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Joe Williams and backed by Wall Street hedge fund managers are emerging as a driving force behind the mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).Williams is the executive director of the affiliated groups named Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Education Reform Now (ERN), based in New York City. ERN has a nine-month-old chapter in Wisconsin, and DFER has branches in Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and New Jersey.
The Wisconsin state director of both groups, Katy Venskus, has been lobbying in support of the pro-mayoral takeover Senate Bill 405, authored by state Sen. Lena Taylor and state Rep. Pedro Colon.
Venskus also has organized a group of Milwaukee business leaders--including Julia Taylor of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, Tim Sheehy of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and Tim Sullivan of Bucyrus International--to push for a mayor-appointed superintendent of MPS with enhanced executive powers.
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Youth are spending more time with nearly every form of media than ever, according to a report released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They spend more hours on the computer, in front of television, playing video games, texting and listening to music than an adult spends full-time at work.The only media young people aren't soaking up, the study says, are newspapers, magazines and other print publications.
Youth spend more than 7 1/2 hours a day using electronic media, or more than 53 hours a week, the 10-year study says. "And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours."
Affirming parents' fears, the study showed those habits ripple throughout a youth's life. Those who were big media consumers were more likely than kids and teens who are only seldom in front of a screen to earn average or poor grades in school. Those who use more electronic media get in more trouble, and say they are often sad.
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The Obama administration's main school improvement initiative has spurred education policy changes in states across the nation, but it is meeting with some last-minute resistance as the first deadline for applications arrives Tuesday.Thousands of school districts in California, Ohio and other states have declined to participate, and teachers' unions in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida have recommended that their local units not sign on to their states' applications. Several rural states, including Montana, have said they will not apply, at least for now, partly because of the emphasis on charter schools, which would draw resources from small country schools.
And Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said last week that his state would not compete for the $700 million that the biggest states are eligible to win in the $4 billion program, known as Race to the Top, calling it an intrusion on states' rights.
Still, about 40 states were rushing to complete applications for the Tuesday deadline, the first in the two-stage competition. The last-minute opposition is unlikely to derail efforts by most of those states to win some of the federal money.
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The State Board of Education voted on Tuesday to support Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca's campaign to sharply reduce the number of school districts in Vermont.The board avoided setting a specific number of school districts. But it made it clear that it backs the idea of reducing the present 290 local school districts to a much smaller number of larger, regional districts.
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United Van Lines 2009 Migration Pattern Map
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President Obama announced plans yesterday to expand the Race to the Top education program, which invites states to apply for slices of a $4 billion pie of additional school funding. Last year Obama launched the program with two major messages: (1) We need to locate effective teachers by studying student data, and (2) we need better standards to keep some states (ahem, Mississippi) from setting their education bar so low that they gut the word "standard" of all meaning.In future iterations, Race to the Top will allow not only states, but also individual districts, to apply for additional federal funding. This change makes sense for two reasons. The first is wholly practical. Most school funding comes from local property taxes, and accordingly education policies, and their success, can vary dramatically on a district-by-district basis within a state. The second reason this makes sense for the administration is more political. Appealing to individual districts provides a way to circumvent governors like Texas's Rick Perry who don't want to accept additional education funds.
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*** Keep School on Dedicated Path in Meeting Goals
*** Get Teachers and Students to Know Each Other
*** Move All Students Toward Success
*** Have Strong School Leaders and Governing Boards
*** Support and Train Good Teachers
*** Create Small School for Connectedness and Community
*** Continually Measure Student Progress
*** Work to Create Parental Involvement
*** Get Around the Obstacles
A lot of the success in a school depends on intangibles, says Marcia Spector who heads Seeds of Health in Milwaukee. Energy, drive, a genuine commitment to high goals, working hard, and a street-smart sense of how to work with kids, how to work the bureaucracy, and how to run the school are all important. Yes, it is hard work, but it's worth it. In fact, it's actually fun, says Spector.
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channel3000, via a kind reader:
A new Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school will open this fall in Verona.Smart and timely. Much more, here.The Verona school board voted 4-3 on Monday night to approve the school, making it the first of its kind in the state.
The school will be called the Verona Area International School. It will have two halftime teachers, one who teaches only in English and the other who teaches only in Mandarin. Math, science and some social-science classes would be taught in the Chinese language. Students will spend half the day learning in English and half in Mandarin Chinese.
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Grover is not real sanguine with current education policy ideas, such as Mayor Tom Barrett's bid for a takeover of Milwaukee public schools. Fundamentally, smaller school districts (500 kids) should be the goal, and structural changes will never trump upbringing and parental involvement in their children's education, he said.Smaller districts certainly make sense, including places like Madison."The difference between the kid headed to a Milwaukee school and one in Whitefish Bay is what they bring to the school house door," he said. "The aspiration level of the parents is key. They want the best for their kids."
As for the contest to succeed Jim Doyle as governor in 2010, Grover isn't sure Barrett can be tough enough but suggests he'd be an improvement.
"Jim Doyle started out life at third base and thought he hit a triple," Grover said, using an aphorism to denote "an elitist west side (Madison) upbringing."
"Barrett is absolutely a decent human being. I have the feeling he won't be as aggressive as he will need to be. He's almost like Barack (Obama) ...'Let us reason together.'"
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Kudos to the country's two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia's next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state's next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it's especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
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The advisory committee Gov. Haley Barbour appointed to study K-12 school consolidation voted Monday to hire an outside consulting firm, using $72,000 in private funds from unnamed sources.Bringing on board a Denver-based firm that specializes in public education systems and policies will allow the committee to have data-driven discussions as opposed to ones mired in emotion and politics, said Johnny Franklin, Barbour's education policy adviser.
Committee Chairman Aubrey Patterson, the CEO of BancorpSouth Inc., said he did not have permission to release the names of the one individual and two organizations that have agreed to pay the contract with Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Inc.
He described the donors as "interested supporters of public education" and would not say where the donors were from.
Monday's meeting at the Capitol marked the initial gathering for the Commission on Mississippi Education Structure appointed in late December to study the best way to go about consolidating the state's 152 districts.
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A new Yale admissions video released Friday starts as most campus tours do: an uncomfortable question-and-answer session with an over-caffeinated admissions officer. Some kid asks what year the school was founded. A dowdy mom elbows a nerdy dad.And then a sultry young woman in a red sundress in the back row asks: "Why did you choose Yale?"
There's a reflective pause. A reflection piano overture. Reflective looks around the room. And then -- bam! -- the boring admissions video turns into a musical. The admissions officer serenades the no-longer-bored students: When I was a senior in high school, colleges called out my name. Every day I debate where to matriculate, but every place seemed the same. Yet after I went through the options, only one choice remained. I wanted to hail from a college called Yale . . . .
It feels like an episode of Glee, the popular TV show that overnight made it socially acceptable and even sexy to sing in the high school show chorus. Those involved admit they watched the movie "High School Musical" for inspiration. And since the video was posted on YouTube on Friday evening, it has been viewed nearly 50,000 times.
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A recent Times article described how China is stepping up efforts to lure home the top Chinese scholars who live and work abroad. The nation is already second only to the United States in the volume of scientific papers published, and it has, as Thomas Friedman pointed out, more students in technical colleges and universities than any other country.
But China’s drive to succeed in the sciences is also subjecting its research establishment to intense pressure and sharper scrutiny. And as the standoff last week between Google and China demonstrated, the government controls the give and take of information.
How likely is it that China will become the world’s leader in science and technology, and what are the impediments to creating a research climate that would allow scientists to thrive?
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There is increasing talk these days about making every school in the district a "quality" school. The New Student Assignment Plan has increased the frequency, volume, and urgency for this bumper sticker talk. But despite those increases, there has not been much increase in action or even understanding of the goal.Indeed....Everytime I hear someone spout this talk about "every school a quality school" I stop them immediately and ask them what they mean by that. What is a "quality school"? How will we know one? I pretty much tell them that if they cannot accurately define a quality school then they should just shut the hell up about it. I hate it when people use words without knowing what they mean.
So, for the record, I have my own idea about what is a quality school. It is a school where the students are taught - at a minimum - the core set of knowledge and skills that they should be taught at their grade level and they learn it. It's a school in which students working beyond grade level are appropriately challenged with more rigor, meaning accelerated lessons, more ambiguous ideas, more complex ideas, a wider range of contexts, or a deeper understanding of the ideas. It's a school were the students who are working below grade level are given the early and effective interventions they need to get to grade level. In short, students are taught at the frontier of the knowledge and skills and are brought at least to grade level. There are plenty of examples of such schools here in Seattle.
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Jessica Fender & Jeremy Meyer:
Colorado education officials will unveil a reform proposal today that asks for $380 million in federal Race to the Top funding, but they are missing a key plank regarding teacher evaluations that will likely give other states a leg up in the contest.Colorado's P-12 academic standards.
Months of work have led to a nearly 150-page plan that touches on nearly everything, including incentives for top teachers, resources focused on failing schools and sharing data across the state.But while Colorado's application vows to address such issues as teacher performance, tenure and dismissal through a commission born today of an executive order from Gov. Bill Ritter, other states with more advanced teacher-tracking systems have put their evaluation plans into law.
Colorado began the competition as a front-runner, but analysts say the lack of guidelines for tenure and dismissal will likely hurt the state's chances at being among the first chosen for a share of the $4.35 billion program. As many as 45 states nationwide are revamping their K-12 systems to compete for hundreds of millions in stimulus dollars that will be granted in two rounds of competition.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien has spearheaded Colorado's Race to the Top effort and said she would rather have the support of teachers and their union than forge ahead with a plan that schools are unhappy with.
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The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that's always in crisis. The academy is too distant from the concerns of everyday life, or else it's too politically engaged. The academy has become completely irrelevant, except for the fact that it's too relevant. We ought to be grateful to our universities for this. Academic wrongheadedness is one of the few things people across the political and cultural spectrum can agree upon.One popular way of describing the failure of the contemporary academy is to complain that it no longer produces special things called "public intellectuals," so it is either a great relief or a rule-proving exception to read a blazingly sane take on the academy's troubles by one of the few professors who pretty safely deserves the term. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas manages to do many things in four short essays--describe the changing self-conception of the university, identify the difficulties behind curricular reform, and analyze the anxieties of humanities professors. But the book's chief accomplishment is its insistence that what we take for academic crises are probably just academic problems, and they are ours to solve.
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Jacob Gershman & Barbara Martinez:
New York, home of the nation's largest school district, is on the verge of rejecting key components of the White House's education effort amid a state fight over charter schools.The Democratic-led legislature, with heavy backing from teachers' unions, is behind a law that critics, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, say will curb the growth of charter schools.
Tuesday is the deadline for states to submit initial bids for a slice of the $4.35 billion that is up for grabs under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" competition, which is intended to coax policy concessions such as opening charter schools and getting approval of merit-pay systems through stubborn legislatures.
Late Monday, New York Governor David A. Paterson and lawmakers were negotiating a compromise to salvage the state's application for the first phase of the contest. Although it is seen as unlikely that Albany leaders will strike a compromise by the deadline, it is expected that New York will submit a bid either way.
The maximum amount that New York could win is $700 million and it is unclear if program's financial lure will be enough to forge a breakthrough.
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We argue about testing in the US, but the focus on and stakes related to testing is much higher in China and India where the tip of the human funnel is the 12th grade exam; to a large life options hang in the balance. In the US, there are lots of options and second chances; not so in India and China. As a result, the singular secondary focus is marks leading to success on the exit exam.Yesterday, I visited an expensive private school in Hyderabad. The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program looked familiar and rich. I dropped in on a primary teacher staff meeting that was informed by student work.
However, it was a different picture in the middle grades where the school abandoned IB for the Cambridge curriculum. Students sat in rows quietly plowing through workbooks while teachers sat at their desk. It was among the most stifling middle grade programs I've ever seen.
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Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn't the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don't belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.
So we find it a heartening coincidence that on the same day Yaffe ordered Kim's firing, the president of the American Federation of Teachers called for new procedures making it easier to remove bad teachers. Randi Weingarten, who has been one of the more progressive teachers union leaders, said the AFT would develop a proposal, with the project overseen by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the federal government's "pay czar" on executive compensation.
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WHY are the young so disappointing, when it comes to their manners, dress codes, or knowledge of the canon of Western civilisation? Ask a British or American conservative, and he will blame the left: the 1960s vintage teachers who disdain dead white guys like Shakespeare, the college campuses where Derrida and deconstruction have displaced reading actual literature or the egalitarian ethos of "all shall have prizes".Ask someone from the left, for example in Britain, and they will trace the rot back to Thatcherism: the hostility to pure research, the focus on commercially-driven vocational education (all those degree courses in golf course management or marketing, elbowing aside history or Ancient Greek), or the dumbing down of examinations by ministers who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Luc Ferry, a prolific French philosopher and former education minister in the conservative government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has a new book out, "Face à la crise: Matériaux pour une politique de civilisation", offering a distinctly Gallic view of the problem: the fault lies with globalisation.
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Many of the nation's public universities eliminated courses and raised tuition last year, but the salaries and benefits of their presidents continued to rise, though at a slower rate than in years past, a new study has found.In its ninth annual examination of the pay of 185 public university leaders, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Monday that the median rose to $436,111 in 2008-9, an increase of 2.3 percent when compared with the year before. (When adjusted for inflation, The Chronicle said, the median increase was 1.1 percent.)
By contrast, in the previous four years, The Chronicle said, public university leaders' salaries and benefits rose, on average, by at least 7.5 percent each year, and, in 2005, by 19 percent.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor of The Chronicle, said in a statement that while the increases of past years had "riled parents, students and politicians," it was most likely "the bad economy and the fiscal crisis facing many states" that "finally put a halt to these large pay increases."
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As New York finalizes its application for the federal Race to the Top program, a proposal to end the cap on the number of charter schools has been promoted as key to our success in getting these new federal funds. But promoters of this proposal are ignoring two other critical issues: The small role that charter schools play in the Race to the Top application, and the fact that city charters are not serving a representative sample of our neediest students.Mulgrew is the president of the United Federation of Teachers.Despite the heated rhetoric from charter proponents, the fact is that the charter cap accounts for only eight of the 500 points New York can earn on its Race to the Top application.
What's more, Race to the Top guidelines state that charter schools should "serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students." But the evidence is clear that New York's charter schools are actually becoming a separate and unequal branch of public education.
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"Good audience skills are imperative," Danielle Johnson reminds her restless 10th-graders as one, Raquel, nervously fiddles with her laptop before holding forth on her project portfolio at City Arts and Technology High School (known as CAT), a charter school of 365 students on a green knoll above the blue-collar southern reaches of Mission Street in San Francisco."I decided to use the story of my mom getting to this country as an immigrant," Raquel says, moving into her personal-memoir segment, sniffing back tears as a blurry photo of her mother at age 18 appears on the screen. "I had never asked my mother about how she got here."
CAT exemplifies President Obama's push to seed innovative schools that demand much from all students, echoed by Sacramento's $700 million reform plan that goes to Washington this week. How to bottle the magic of CAT teachers like Johnson - listening carefully to each teen, strengthening each voice with basic skills and motivating ideals - is the challenge facing would-be reformers.
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President Obama and his aides, like their predecessors in the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, are attempting to force states to comply with rigid federal standards in order to qualify for so-called "Race to the Top" stimulus funds.During a visit to Madison last November, President Obama outlined the $4.35 billion program in great detail and Gov. Jim Doyle quickly embraced its agenda. The Doyle administration is going after $254 million in Race to the Top money, and Wisconsin schools, which have suffered sharp cuts in promised state funding, could use it.
But the money comes with strings attached. To qualify for the money, states are pressuring school districts to agree to abide by the new standards. Last Monday, the Madison School Board voted 5-1 to do so.
In fairness, many of the requirements are good ones. But tailoring education policy to fit agendas set in Washington is a bad approach. And it is especially bad when school districts with traditions of excellence start trimming their sails and altering their approaches in order to satisfy the whims of distant bureaucrats.
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Crystal Yednak & Katie Fretland:
As Illinois jockeys for position as a leader in education reform with a $500 million application for Race to the Top money, the state's inability to pay current bills makes educators skeptical of Illinois's capacity to take on such new initiatives.One major concern is that should Illinois succeed in the national competition for Race to the Top money, it might not have the ability to finance the long-term costs of any new programs once the federal money has been spent.
A $4.35 billion federal grant competition, Race to the Top, intends to reward states that promote innovations in education. While new money would seem to be a boon for Illinois schools, educators who have seen other programs ramp up only to be shut down are concerned about it happening again.
State Representative. Suzanne Bassi, a Republican from suburban Chicago who sits on the House appropriations committee for education, said she feared what would happen to any new Race to the Top programs in a few years.
"The federal funds run out, and we all of sudden can't do anything about it," Ms. Bassi said. "Then it falls on individual districts, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
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Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state's investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.Closing the Talent Gap: A Business Perspective (January 2010) 3MB PDF.Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways -- not all of them monetary -- to improve public education, and therefore our state's chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story "than in the state of Florida?"
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the "education wish list" of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
Updates, via a Steven M. Birnholz email:
"Political, Business Leaders: Overhaul Education in Fla." Lakeland Ledger
"Business groups propose major changes to education," Daytona Beach News Journal.
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Last year's stimulus legislation (American Recovery and Recovery Act of 2009, a/k/a "ARRA") provides a one-time boost (to be spent for the 2009-10 and 2010-2011 school years) in federal funding for students with disabilities in elementary and secondary schools under IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), Part B.
According to the State of Wisconsin's stimulus tracker web site, IDEA Special Education Grants to the states under ARRA totaled $11.3 billion (for context, "regular" IDEA Part B appropriations were $11.51 billion in 2009 and in 2010, according to the New America Foundation's 2010 Education Appropriations Guide). Wisconsin has received ARRA IDEA Part B funding of $208.2 million, with $6.199 million to the Madison Metropolitan School District.
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The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.The federation's president, Randi Weingarten, set the contrast quite effectively with a speech last week in Washington, in which she offered a proposal to reform teacher evaluation. She not only echoed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's call for evaluation systems that take student achievement into account but also expressed support for "a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers."
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
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Just what we need, more charter schools.oth Gov. David Paterson and the state Legislature need to be shown the woodshed. The so-called Race to the Top federal education initiative that we're being rushed into accepting by the governor would lift the cap on the number of charter schools in this state and in the process throw teachers under the bus for the failures of inner-city public education. It's another chuckleheaded set of directives from Washington. The big Bush push, No Child Left Behind, left a lot of kids behind, and school districts and even states that became disenchanted with education policy that never matched funding for the mandates involved. Race to the Top is headed for the same dust heap, but not before we pay through the nose for it.
And once again New York is panting to go along with the feds because of extra stimulus money available, up $700 million possibly, maybe, if we're one of the winners of the race. On the other hand and by way of perspective, we spend more than $20 billion a year in this state on public education. So essentially we're giving up our right to set our own policy, as flawed as it is, for a short-term handout. How New York of us.
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Ronald Reagan must be grinning in his grave.Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento's plan echoes Washington's own reform strategy - built on President Obama's surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools.
Oddly mimicking Reagan's game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento's agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance.
"This is about parental choice in public education," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan.
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A lot of back and forth in Rhode Island over Race To The Top. The teachers’ union there is not down with the Obama Administration’s requirements around teacher effectiveness. But they apparently also can’t live with the idea that after three years of an unacceptable evaluation a teacher would lose their license. The standard they want is, seriously, five years of poor evaluations. Given what we know about the effects of under-performing teachers – especially on low-income youngsters — this stance is literally pick jaw up off floor time…
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We applaud Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums for refusing to join the Race to the Top parade by not signing the letter by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson ("Dellums ducks out of mayors coalition," Chip Johnson, Jan. 5).Dellums should not be whipsawed into the frenzy just to run after more federal and state dollars that will do little to address the major issues of educational equity that we need in Oakland.
I was asked for the Oakland Education Association's opinion on the proposed letter and concurred with others that it would be a mistake to sign it. The lure of a minuscule amount of money is not justification for further decimating a compromised program in Oakland schools, especially when that money comes with serious strings attached.
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Since it began in 2004, the Baltimore Talent Development High School has posted some impressive graduation rates and achievement scores, among other things.Even more notable, efforts by educators at nearby Johns Hopkins University to replicate the school's gains in dozens of other locations have also met with some success. Slowly, the network of Talent Development High Schools is helping student groups that often seem most at risk.
But good news at the high school level is unusual. Despite vigorous calls for change and a host of major reform efforts, encouraging results have been scarce. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores - considered the "Nation's Report Card" - tend to be stagnant for high-schoolers, even when they rise for elementary school students.
Only about half of low-income and minority students in US high schools graduate, and many of those who do are unprepared for college. The isolated examples of success often fail when administrators or education reformers try to reproduce them on a large scale.
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For years, Kiplinger's has been advising parents that one way to keep higher-education costs under control is to have their kids attend community college for a year or two and then switch to a four-year school. This year, they finally listened to us -- with a vengeance.Community colleges are packed to the gills, and students are flocking to state institutions across the board. The average annual sticker price for a four-year public school remains a tad over $15,000 -- less than half the tab at a private institution. In our exclusive rankings of the 100 best values in public colleges, nearly 40 percent charge in-state students less than the average price, reports Senior Associate Editor Jane Bennett Clark.
There's nothing like a financial crisis to get families to focus on how much they're paying for big-ticket items such as college expenses. Surprisingly, they haven't always done that. In 2008, a survey of parents and students by Sallie Mae found that when deciding whether to borrow for college, a whopping 70 percent said a student's potential postgraduate income did not factor into the discussion.
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Last week, the nation's press reported something that most teachers found unbelievable: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that teachers should be evaluated by their students' test scores.Teachers hate this idea because they know that teachers are not solely responsible for their students' scores. The students bear some responsibility, as do their families, for whether students do well or poorly on tests. District leaders bear some responsibility, depending on the resources they provide to schools. Teachers also are aware that the tests are not the only measure of what happens in their classrooms and that even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that we need better tests. There is a fairly sizable body of research demonstrating that test scores are affected by many factors beyond the teachers' control.
I was surprised too when I read the headlines and the press accounts.
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A requirement to negotiate plans to overhaul Iowa's lowest-performing schools with teacher unions prompted the Davenport School District to abandon its support of state efforts to nab a portion of $4.3 billion in federal funds, its top leader said today.Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent, said the Iowa Department of Education went beyond federal rules in its application for up to $175 million of federal Race to the Top dollars by requiring districts with state-identified low-performing schools to agree with teacher unions on plans to overhaul them.
Currently, school boards and administrators have the sole authority to make those decisions.
"What you are going to have is unions determining intervention models for schools," Almanza said. "If you can't reach an agreement (with the union), the district loses money for the school. There are no penalties for anyone else, and the kids lose."
The Iowa Department of Education also excluded parents, students and the community from the decision-making process, which goes against the intent of U.S. Department of Education, Almanza said.
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A San Diego school vice-principal saw an 11-year-old's home science project (a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics), decided it was a bomb, wet himself, put the school on lockdown, had the bomb-squad come out to destroy X-ray the student's invention and search his parents' home, and then magnanimously decided not to discipline the kid (though he did recommend that the child and his parents get counselling to help them overcome their anti-social science behavior).When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student's backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.
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Randal Archibold:
The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell "I Got Shot in South Central" T-shirts.Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls "the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations" of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.
On the right, Los Angeles's biggest jail, "the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.," as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard's command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours.
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Members of the public got their first chance Thursday to listen to and ask questions of the man likely to become the next superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, during back-to-back interviews Thursday at the district office.The contenders - Robert Alfaro, Stacy Scott and Gregory Thornton - all hail from outside Milwaukee, all have served in a variety of administrative posts in large and smaller districts, and all say that MPS can significantly improve its quality of instruction.
No candidate revealed specific knowledge about Milwaukee's issues, or specific thoughts on how to solve its challenges, and most of the discussion steered toward generalities: supporting good teachers, making room for the arts, encouraging communication with parents.
A community stakeholder group that included Mayor Tom Barrett interviewed the candidates in closed session Thursday afternoon, and the full School Board was scheduled to interview the candidates again in closed session Thursday night.
Before the end of the month, the School Board will take a final vote so that the new superintendent can be named by Feb. 1, Board President Michael Bonds said.
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A number of folks have asked why, like 2009, there are two uncontested seats in this spring's Madison School Board election. Incumbents Maya Cole and Beth Moss are running unopposed while the open seat, vacated by the retiring Johnny Winston, Jr. is now contested: Tom Farley (TJ Mertz and Robert Godfrey have posted on Farley's travails, along with Isthmus) after some nomination signature issues and an internal fracas over the School District lawyer's role in the race, faces James Howard [website].
I think we've seen a drop on the ongoing, very small amount of school board activism because:
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Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from.I knew I would enjoy that, and I have--I've been doing it ever since. I'm the doctor that students get sent to see if they have a writing problem that their professor thinks I can fix. As a bonus, I've made many friends--from Uganda, Uzbekhistan, India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Iraq, Nigeria, Poland, China, Colombia and many other countries. Several young Asian women, when they went back home, sent me invitations to their weddings. I never made it to Bhutan or Korea, but I did see the wedding pictures. Such beautiful brides!
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The Princeton Review's 100 "Best Value Colleges" list for 2010 is based on data compiled and analyzed by The Princeton Review, the education services and test-prep company known for its annual college listings.The analysis uses the most recently reported data from each institution for its 2009-10 academic year. The top 10 public and private "Best Values" are ranked; the rest are listed alphabetically.
FULL STORY: Can getting a degree be affordable?
The Princeton Review selected the schools based on surveys of administrators and students at more than 650 public and private college and university campuses.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan entered some of the most contentious debates in college sports on Thursday when, in a speech at the N.C.A.A. convention, he called for stricter consequences for college teams that do not graduate their athletes and said the N.B.A.'s age-minimum policy sets up young athletes for failure."Why do we allow the N.C.A.A, why do we allow universities, why do we allow sports to be tainted when the vast majority of coaches and athletic directors are striving to instill the right values?" said Duncan, who was a co-captain of his Harvard basketball team and played in an Australian professional league from 1987 until 1991.
He said his time as a college athlete was one of the most valuable periods of his life, but feared the N.B.A.'s age rule, which requires that a player be at least 19 years old and at least one year removed from high school before entering the league, does a disservice to athletes.
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According to the Florida Department of Education, Manatee High School was not a place parents should have wanted to send their children in 2006. The Bradenton-based school received a "D" rating on the state's A-F scale of academic performance that year while failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind proficiency standards for the fourth year in a row. At the same time, Boca Raton Community High School was flying high, having just earned its second straight "A" rating and being named among the best high schools in the country by Newsweek magazine.But while Manatee got dismal marks from state and federal accountability schemes, it was actually quite successful in a number of important ways. It graduated a higher percentage of its students than Boca Raton and sent almost the same percentage of its graduates off to college. Once they arrived on college campuses, Manatee graduates earned higher grades and fewer of them failed remedial, not-for-credit math and English courses than their Boca Raton peers.
In other words, D-rated Manatee was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida's accountability systems didn't measure college and career success in 2006, nobody knew.
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Smart and timely. The Verona School Board will vote on the proposed Chinese immersion charter school Monday evening, 1/18/2010 - via a kind reader.
Documents:
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Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance, via a kind reader's email [View the 146K PDF]
On August 27, 2009, State Superintendent Tony Evers stated that the State of Wisconsin would eliminate the current WKCE to move to a Balanced System of Assessment. In his statement, the State Superintendent said the following:Wisconsin's Assessment test: The WKCE has been oft criticized for its lack of rigor.New assessments at the elementary and middle school level will likely be computer- based with multiple opportunities to benchmark student progress during the school year. This type of assessment tool allows for immediate and detailed information about student understanding and facilitates the teachers' ability to re-teach or accelerate classroom instruction. At the high school level, the WKCE will be replaced by assessments that provide more information on college and workforce readiness.By March 2010, the US Department of Education intends to announce a $350 million grant competition that would support one or more applications from a consortia of states working to develop high quality state assessments. The WI DPI is currently in conversation with other states regarding forming consortia to apply for this federal funding.In September, 2009, the School Administrators Alliance formed a Project Team to make recommendations regarding the future of state assessment in Wisconsin. The Project Team has met and outlined recommendations what school and district administrators believe can transform Wisconsin's state assessment system into a powerful tool to support student learning.
Criteria Underlying the Recommendations:
- Wisconsin's new assessment system must be one that has the following characteristics:
- Benchmarked to skills and knowledge for college and career readiness • Measures student achievement and growth of all students
- Relevant to students, parents, teachers and external stakeholders
- Provides timely feedback that adds value to the learning process • Efficient to administer
- Aligned with and supportive of each school district's teaching and learning
- Advances the State's vision of a balanced assessment system
The WKCE serves as the foundation for the Madison School District's "Value Added Assessment" initiative, via the UW-Madison School of Education.
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
14 January 2010
In the early 1960s, I was fortunate enough to work for a while at the Space and Information Systems Division of North American Aviation in Downey, California, which was building the command modules for the Apollo Program. I was quite impressed by the fact that, although I was basically a glorified clerk, when I left the company to work for Pan American World Airways, they invited me in for an exit interview.
The interviewer asked me about the details of my job--what I liked and didn't like about it. He asked me if the pay and benefits were satisfactory, and whether my immediate boss had done a good job in supervising me or not (he was an Annapolis graduate and had done a first-rate job). The general goal of the interview seemed to be to find out why I was leaving and if there was anything they could do to keep an employee like me in the future. This took place in the middle of a very high-pressure and a multi-billion dollar effort to get to the moon before the end of the decade. North American Aviation also had the contract for the Saturn 5 rocket at their Rocketdyne division. But they made the time to talk to me when I left.
Tony Wagner of Harvard, in his book, The Global Achievement Gap (2008), reports on a focus group he held for recent graduates "of one of the most highly-regarded public high schools," to ask them about their recollections of their experience of the school. This was a kind of exit interview two or three years later. When he asked them what they wished they had received, but didn't, in school, they said:
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."This was of particular interest to me, because of my conviction that the majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious research paper. When I asked Mr. Wagner if he knew of other high schools which conducted focus groups or interviews with recent graduates, he said he only knew of three.
I would suggest that this is a practice which could be of great benefit to all our public high schools. Without too much extra time and effort, they could both interview each Senior, after she/he had finished all their exams, and ask what they thought of their academic experience, their teachers, and so forth. In addition, schools could hold at least one focus group each year with perhaps a dozen recent graduates who could compare their college demands with the preparation they had received in their high schools.
Lack of curiosity inevitably leads to lack of knowledge, and it is to be lamented that our high schools seem, in practice, not to wonder what their graduates actually think of the education they have provided, and to what extent and in what ways their high school academic work prepared or did not prepare them for their work in college. Mr. Wagner points out that:
Forty percent of all students who enter college must take remedial courses...and perhaps one of every two students who start college never complete any kind of postsecondary degree.The Great Schools Project, in its report Diploma to Nowhere in the Summer of 2008, said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial classes each year when they get to college, and the California State Colleges reported in November of 2009 that 47% of their freshmen are now in remedial English classes.
As national concern slowly grows beyond high school dropouts to include college "flameouts" as well, it might be time to consider the benefits of the ample knowledge available from students if they are allowed to participate in exit interviews and focus groups at the high school which was responsible for getting them ready to succeed academically in college and at work.
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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Mary Ann Zehr, via a kind reader's email:
Participation in Head Start has positive effects on children's learning while they are in the program, but most of the advantage they gain disappears by the end of 1st grade, a federal impact study of Head Start programs says.Lindsey Burke:A large-scale randomized control study of nearly 5,000 children released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week shows that a group of children who entered Head Start at age 4 benefited from a year in the program, particularly in learning language and literacy. Benefits included learning vocabulary, letter-word recognition, spelling, color identification, and letter naming, compared with children of the same age in a control group who didn't attend Head Start.
Benefits for children who entered Head Start at age 3 were even stronger. By the end of Head Start, the group that had entered at age 3 showed gains in most of the language and learning areas that the 4-year-old group had, but also showed benefits in learning math, pre-writing skills, and perceptual motor skills.
Andrew Coulson:After some prodding, yesterday the Obama administration released the long-overdue first grade evaluation of the federal Head Start program. As expected, the results show that the $7 billion per year program provides little benefit to children - and great expense to taxpayers.
The evaluation, which was mandated by Congress during the 1998 reauthorization of the program, found little impact on student well-being. After collecting data on more than 5,000 three and four-year-old children randomly assigned to either a Head Start or a non Head Start control group, the Department of Health and Human Services found "few sustained benefits". From the report:
Related: 4K and the Madison School District.A day after it was released, here’s a roundup of how the mainstream media are covering the HHS study showing that America’s $100 billion plus investment in Head Start is a failure:
[...crickets...]
Nada. Zilch. Rien du tout, mes amis.
That’s based on a Google News search for ["Head Start" study]. The only media organs to touch on this topic so far have been blogs: Jay Greene’s, The Heritage Foundation’s, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the one you’re reading right now.
Okay. There was one exception. According to Google News, one non-blog — with a print version no less — covered this story so far. The NY Times? The Washington Post? Nope: The World, a Christian news magazine. And they actually did their homework, linking to this recent and highly relevant review of the research on pre-K program impacts.
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Wisconsin received an above-average grade for overall educational quality, although it ranked toward the bottom of the nation in efforts to improve schools by establishing grade-level academic standards and holding schools accountable, according to a report released Thursday.The annual "Quality Counts" report, by national trade publication Education Week, gave the Badger state a C-plus for the overall status of its schools and improvement efforts. That was slightly higher than the grade given to the nation - a C - and ranked the state 16th among all the states and the District of Columbia.
Wisconsin fared best in the annual report for its school finance system and in a category the publication calls "chance for success," which measures factors from employment rates to kindergarten enrollment in states. The state was ranked ninth and 11th, respectively, in those areas, drawing B grades in each.
The state's lowest ranking came in the area of standards, assessments and accountability, with a C grade placing it 42nd in a category where 20 other states received grades of A or A-minus.
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Hundreds of students attending Beverly Hills schools will have to find new campuses in the fall after a unanimous school board vote late Tuesday ended special permits for many children who live outside the city.Following more than four hours of debate that lasted until almost midnight, the board agreed to allow all current high school students to continue applying for permits each year, an action that won applause from a packed, emotional but civil crowd at Beverly Hills High.
Seventh graders will be allowed to graduate from middle school next year. But students in elementary school and eighth grade will not be allowed to return to district schools for the 2010-2011 academic year unless their families move into the city.
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Students, parents and lawmakers lobbied Wednesday for more diversity in Texas' social studies curriculum, before the state board of education adopts new classroom standards that will determine how history is taught for the next decade.In more than six hours of public testimony, dozens of people took their chance to help shape the way millions of Texas school children learn topics from the Roman Empire to the entrepreneurial success of billionaire Bill Gates.
The public hearing sets up a tentative vote Thursday on the new standards. But, as usual in votes before the conservative-led board, the wide-reaching guidelines are full of potential ideological flashpoints.
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The Los Angeles school district paid $200 million more in salaries than it budgeted last year even as it laid off 2,000 teachers and hundreds of other employees, according to an internal audit.Auditors so far have unearthed no wrongdoing, but officials are puzzled, concerned and perhaps even a little embarrassed.
"We've been in the process of cleaning it up," said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who said his staff is verifying the size of the discrepancy and will, over time, determine how much relates to incomplete accounting and how much to something more serious.
The issue emerged in an audit, completed in December, on the arcane subject of "position control."
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Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots "change," he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people's hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama's organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama's community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama's connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.
Yet a critical blindness links Obama's activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for "change" in Chicago's Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn't the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago's youth violence will prove as useless as Obama's activities were 25 years ago.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial, via a kind reader's email:
Bold plans for a new kind of middle school in Madison deserve encouragement and strong consideration.The proposed Badger Rock Middle School on the South Side would run year-round with green-themed lessons in hands-on gardens and orchards.
The unusual school would still teach core subjects such as English and math. But about 120 students would learn amid a working farm, local business and neighborhood sustainability center.
Money is tight in this difficult economy. And the Madison School Board just committed to launching an expensive 4-year-old kindergarten program in 2011.
But organizers say Badger Rock wouldn't cost the district additional dollars because private donors will pay for the school facility.
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By Daniel Willingham
I have written (on this blog and elsewhere) about the importance of background knowledge and about the limited value of instructing students in reading comprehension strategies.To be clear, I don't think that such instruction is worthless. It has a significant impact, but it seems to be a one-time effect and the strategies are quickly learned. More practice of these strategies pays little or no return. You can read more about that here.
Knowledge of the topic you're reading about, in contrast, has an enormous impact and more important, there is no ceiling--the more knowledge you gain, the more your reading improves.
In a recent email conversation an experienced educator asked me why, if that's true, there has been such emphasis on reading strategies and skills in teacher's professional development.
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Every American leader, from Barack Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger, would agree that if there's one lifelong lesson to be learned from the implosion of the housing market, it is that before you sign on the dotted line, you'd better know what you're getting yourself into. You'd better ask clarifying questions. You'd better read the fine print. And you'd better make absolutely sure that there are no hidden clauses or trap doors that take you and those dependent on you to the dog house.While our local districts are comprised of well intentioned, highly educated and reflective leaders who are doing their best to find resources to fill the budget shortfall, we are perplexed that some districts agreed to submit a "Memorandum Of Understanding" with the Governor's Office to participate in California's application for the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program. Many of our local teachers' associations hope that since more than half (60%) of school systems in California did not sign on to the State's MOU, that there is change in the RTTT program language so that district leaders, teachers, parents and stakeholders can work together with their local districts to come up with solutions that are based in research-supported strategies for all.
Earlier this month the governor signed California's RTTT legislation that includes: promoting national education standards, using test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers and principals, lifting a cap on charter schools, and allowing parents to transfer their children out of the state's lowest performing schools -- while providing no provision for transportation costs -- leaving this last piece a true hollow victory for parents.
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Gov. Rick Perry has refused to compete for up to $700 million in federal education money.
He announced today that the state will not try to snag any of the competitive "Race to the Top" funds that many other states have been going after for months."Texas is on the right path toward improved education, and we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children's future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington, virtually eliminating parents' participation in their children's education," Gov. Perry said in a prepared statement.
The Perry camp argues that the grant isn't enough to implement the kind of reform needed for almost 5 million schoolchildren in the state.
Posted by Jim Zellmer at 1:02 AM | Comments (0) Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
The state Board of Education today heard from a bipartisan panel of experts as they prepare a series of recommendations to rectify the state's school funding issues.
I asked Head of the Class readers for suggestions to help solve Michigan's school funding issues, and folks earned straight A's.I'll round up these suggestions and send them off to my friends at the state Education Department. Meanwhile, I'll share some of the best here. Not saying I agree with everything readers submitted, but some thoughtful -- and thought-provoking -- responses.
This came from Lord Nelson:
"The state and schools must get on the same fiscal year calendar. This has been a major problem for years.
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Morning folks, I am running this op-ed on the Monday education page that I assemble each week for the AJC. Written by UGA professor William G. Wraga, it raises some interesting questions about whether the charter school movement has been co-opted by privatization proponents.By William G. Wraga
The original intent of charter schools, to increase the professional autonomy of teachers so they could explore innovative ways to educate children and youth, has given way to other agendas that have grafted onto the movement.Increasingly, charter school policies have been influenced by market ideology that treats the movement as a vehicle for privatizing public schools.
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In my Fairfax County neighborhood, there are two elementary schools within half a mile of each other. The school that my children attended has an all-day kindergarten; the other one offers kindergarten half a day. The school with the half-day program, however, has other benefits, though, such as smaller class sizes in the early grade.So, I've often wondered, which students were better off in the long run: the full-day program graduates or the half-day students who got more individual attention from their teachers?
Research, as it turns out, doesn't offer much guidance on that question. Some studies show that full-day kindergarten programs, used in most school districts to give disadvantaged students a leg up on their better-off peers, do just what they're intended to do.
Even though the poorer full-day students started out school trailing behind the more advantaged peers in half-day programs, academically speaking, they finished out the year a month ahead. Other studies, however, suggest, disappointingly, that the disadvantaged students lose their edge later on in elementary school.
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via a kind reader's email:
A State of the District presentation will be made by Superintendent
Daniel Nerad to the community at a Board of Education meeting on Monday, January 25 at 5:30 p.m. in the library of Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. The presentation will be the meeting's sole agenda item.All community members are welcome to attend.
The presentation will provide an overview of important information and data regarding the Madison School District - including student achievement - and future areas of focus.
The visually-supported talk will be followed by a short period for questions from those in attendance.
The speech and Q&A period will be televised live on MMSD-TV Cable Channels 96/993 and streaming live on the web at www.mmsd.tv. It will
also be available for replay the following day at the same web site.For more information, contact:
Ken Syke, 663-1903 or ksyke@madison.k12.wi.us , or
Joe Quick, 663-1902 or jquick@madison.k12.wi.usKen Syke
Public Information
Madison School District
voice 608 663 1903; cell 608 575 6682; fax 608 204 0342
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Today at the National Press Club AFT President Randi Weingarten is calling for reforms to due process for teachers. You can’t do much better than Sawchuk’s take on it here, but Washington Post and Jay Mathews, USAT, and Bob Herbert also write on it this morning. And although the text isn’t online yet here’s Weingarten herself over at the Huffpo. Update: Text on the AFT site now (pdf).
First the good: This is an important acknowledgement from Weingarten and one with some big implications. She deserves credit for that. For a long time the union line on all this has been that it’s not hard to rid the field of low-performers, the problem is lousy administrators and a blame the teachers mindset. This isn’t all wrong by the way, administrators are not just chompin’ at the bit to rid schools of under-performing teachers. The problems are systemic ones. But by laying this on the table Weingarten is opening the door on that conversation more than a crack and pulling the rug out from under a lot of folks. That’s important. By calling the process “glacial” the genie is out of the bottle, perhaps more than Weingarten herself may realize.
In addition, bringing in Kenneth Feinberg is important. He demonstrated an ability for reasonableness in thorny situations. And because he has no aspirations within education he has no reason to pull any punches. Perhaps most importantly, with Feinberg you get the sense that if this is all a big ruse, that will become clear. He doesn’t seem like someone with a lot of patience for misdirection plays and so forth. In other words, involving him increases the accountability.
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Ray Pinney over at New Jersey School Boards Association predicts that “moving the school board member elections to November, along with eliminating the vote on the school budget (if the budget is at or below cap), will occur in the next legislative session.” The benefits: moving school budgets to the Fall buys times for the Legislature to “find a solution to the budget crisis”; voter turnout will increase; it's cheaper than holding a separate April election. The deficits: “board members are concerned about the encroachment of party politics in a nonpartisan arena of education.”
The Record also chimes in, listing many of the same benefits as Pinney but painting NJEA as the loser if the bill passes through the Legislature:Critics, including the New Jersey Education Association and state School Boards Association, worry that it will turn school board elections into partisan affairs. Officially, elected school boards are not affiliated with any political party. School board elections are supposed to focus on educational issues, not party dominance, these critics argue.You know where we stand.
Maybe so. But currently, the teachers union appears to have more financial involvement than political parties do in school board elections, according to a report by the state Election Law Enforcement Commission. Statewide, about 9 percent of school board campaign contributions were from political parties, compared to 40 percent from donors with ties to the NJEA, the commission found in 2002.
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In Winnie-the-Pooh, there is a significant moment when the bear is asked whether he wants honey or condensed milk with his bread. He replies "both". You can get away with this sort of thing if you are a much loved character in children's literature. But it is more problematic when great nations start behaving in a childish fashion. When Americans are asked what they want - lower taxes, more lavish social spending or the world's best-funded military machine - their collective answer tends to be "all of the above".The result is that the US is piling up debt. A budget deficit of about 12 per cent of gross domestic product is understandable as a short-term reaction to a huge financial crisis. What should worry Americans is that, with entitlement spending set to surge, there is no credible plan to bring the budget deficit under control over the medium term.
The US has formidable strengths that will allow its government to be profligate for far longer than other nations could get away with. But if the US keeps running huge deficits, sooner or later the country will start flirting with bankruptcy. Oddly, it might be best if the crisis came sooner rather than later. For a surprising number of countries, running out of money has been the prelude to national renewal.
The two biggest and most beneficial geopolitical stories of the past 30 years - the spread of democracy and of globalisation - were driven by a succession of states finding their coffers empty.
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Read Educflack's Patrick Riccards, who has a new post up on why New Jersey should either 1) hold off on applying to Race To the Top til June, or 2)simply not apply at all. Riccards, a native New Jerseyan, explains the benefits of either proposition:1) While Davy's proposal is "a good plan," Christie's transition team was uninvolved in the details and, in fact, Christie won't even be able to sign it since the application is due the day he gets sworn in as Governor. The state would be better off waiting until Christie's new team can reshape it to conform with his vision of education reform.
2) Fuggedaboudit. N.J.'s too screwed up to take on another big initiative. Deciding not to compete in RTTT would be a bolder move: "he [Christie] could decree that his education improvement agenda is focused exclusively on the expansion and support of charter schools, and since charters are but a minor part of Race's intentions, he's going to go all-in on charters in his own way, and he'll find the state and private-sector support to make it happen without the federal oversight."
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Over the past several weeks, I have discussed the impact of attending a traditionally female college in the early 1970s. I wasn't there that long -- like most students of the time, I got on the train at 18 and disembarked at 22 with a diploma. But those four years were formative, shaping the rest of my personal and professional life in some important ways:--Valuing female friendships: Most women I know value their friendships with other women, of course. But I was raised in a time and culture that put men first. We were encouraged to break a date with a girl friend, for example, if a boy asked us out. My exposure to the brilliance, fierce loyalty, seriousness and silliness of my classmates put an end to that nonsense. My best friend from college remains one of my two best friends today. She is the person I call when I need to talk through a problem, cry without explaining myself, or share good (or bad) news. There is nothing I wouldn't do for her.
--Valuing women in the workplace: I have friends, both male and female, who complain about "women bosses": that they are petty, self-contradictory micromanagers, mostly. For a while I thought I had just been extraordinarily lucky to have a string of extremely competent, visionary, and decisive (not to mention empathetic and fun) female employers. Then I realized that we were sometimes talking about the same people. Women of my generation were trained not to raise our voices; to deliver definite pronouncements as though they were tentative questions; and to mask and deny irritation until it builds up into an explosion. This behavior is so ingrained in many of us that we don't realize we're sending out seemingly mixed signals. Working on tech crews, student committees, etc., at college, I got used to decoding "Maybe we should go with the yellow scrim; what do you think?" as "Please get started on the yellow scrim now," and this assumption that my female bosses a) knew what they wanted and b) were communicating this, if I listened hard enough, saved me many misunderstandings as a young flunky. I also, unlike many of my peers, took women's competence as a given, and thus avoided the irritating questioning and second-guessing that tends to lead to the aforementioned explosions.
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An Education Intelligence Agency analysis of NEA's financial disclosure report for the 2008-09 fiscal year reveals the national union contributed almost $26 million to a wide variety of advocacy groups and charities. The total more than doubles the amount disbursed in the previous year.The expenditures fall into broad categories of community outreach grants, charitable contributions, and payments for services rendered. In this list, EIA has deliberately omitted spending such as media buys, or payments to pollsters or consultants that have no obvious ideological component. The grants range from $3.6 million to Protect Colorado's Future, a coalition created to defeat three ballot initiatives in 2008, down to smaller grants to organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund, FairTest, MediaMatters, and People for the American Way.
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The Los Angeles Board of Education Tuesday will consider new policies aimed at both assisting charters and holding them more accountable for their performance. The regulations, about a year in the making, include key provisions on conflicts of interest and services for disabled students that are opposed by the association that represents charter schools.There are now more charter schools -- enrolling more students -- in Los Angeles than in any other city in the country. Their effect and performance were the subject of a Los Angeles Times special report on Sunday.
The number of charter schools is expected to increase sharply, partly as a result of a school board strategy that lets charter operators bid to take control of struggling traditional campuses as well as 50 new ones scheduled to open. Charter operators as well as groups of teachers are to submit final bids today for the first group of 30 campuses.
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Here is a report from my CNAS colleague Jennifer Bernal-Garcia, who is working with Bob Killebrew on the merger of drug gangs and terrorism, about a meeting they held recently with law enforcement experts on gang violence:By Jennifer BernalBest Defense Drugs & Crime Correspondent
Cops are the first line of defense against gangs, and they have a pretty good understanding of the issue. Talking with them yields a pretty grim assessment: There is a huge gang problem in the United States. Our cops in attendance estimated that the U.S. might have up to 1 million gang members, although the problem is often underreported both because it is difficult to detect and because of local politicians' incentives to downplay crime figures in their areas. The gang problem is inherently tied in to broader regional criminal trends. The extensiveness of drug trafficking south of the border and the degree to which cartels violently contest state authority is well acknowledged. There is nonetheless a common misperception that drug networks disintegrate when you cross the border into the U.S. They don't. Gangs -- mostly youth gangs -- step in to domestically distribute the drugs that cartels traffic in.
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The teacher sits in a large wooden rocking chair. One by one, she invites her third-graders to get up from their desks and take a place in front of her on the rug. "Thank you, Kiara," she says, complimenting a scrawny child with long black hair for sitting criss-cross-style. As the other students take their places on the rug, the teacher sits on the edge of her chair. Her eyes move from left to right, watchful for misbehavior."Look at that teacher scan," says Jim Lengel with an excited laugh. "It's like radar."
The students freeze as Lengel, a visiting professor at Hunter College School of Education, pauses the video he's been watching them on. Ten of the third-graders are looking directly at the teacher, while two look off toward the camera.
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Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal Monday announced that there would be a vast change in education policy making of the government in 2010.'You will see a paradigm shift in education policies. It will be an epochal year,' he said.
Describing the year 2010 as very important for his ministry, Sibal said that researchers and faculty would be given a stake in the system to boost higher education and research which are vital for a nation's development.
Releasing the book 'Engineering Education in India' authored by Prof. Rangan Banerjee and Vinayak P. Muley of IIT-Bombay at Observer Research Foundation, a public policy think tank headquartered in Delhi, the minister noted that while India and China were almost at the same level nearly 15 years back, China has now surged much ahead of India.
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A law adopting statewide high school exams for graduation took effect in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with the goal of ensuring that students leaving high school are prepared for college and the workplace. But critics say the requirement has been so watered down that it is unlikely to have major impact.The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation's public school students, say they often fall short of officials' ambitious goals.
"The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them," said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
