All posts by Jim Zellmer

California voters want public employees to help ease state’s financial troubles; York Citizens for Responsible Government

Shane Goldmacher:

California voters want government employees to give up some retirement benefits to help ease the state’s financial problems, favoring a cap on pensions and a later age for collecting them, according to a new poll.
Voter support for rolling back benefits available to few outside the public sector comes as Gov. Jerry Brown and Republicans in the Legislature haggle over changes to the pension system as part of state budget negotiations. Such benefits have been a flashpoint of national debate this year, and the poll shows that Californians are among those who perceive public retirement plans to be too costly.
Voters appear ready to embrace changes not just for future hires but also for current employees who have been promised the benefits under contract.
Seventy percent of respondents said they supported a cap on pensions for current and future public employees. Nearly as many, 68%, approved of raising the amount of money government workers should be required to contribute to their retirement. Increasing the age at which government employees may collect pensions was favored by 52%.

Jennfer Levitz: Tea Party Heads to School
Activists Fight Property-Tax Increases in Bid to Curb Education Spend
:


Trying to plug a $3.8 million budget gap, the York Suburban School District, in the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania, is seeking to raise property taxes by 1.4%.
No way, says Nick Pandelidis, founder of the York Suburban Citizens for Responsible Government, a tea-party offshoot, of the plan that would boost the tax on a median-priced home of $157,685 by $44 a year to $3,225.
“No more property-tax increases!” the 52-year-old orthopedic surgeon implored as the group met recently at a local hospital’s community room. “If you don’t starve the system, you won’t make it change.”
Fresh from victories on the national stage last year, many local tea-party activist groups took their passion for limited government and less spending back to their hometowns, and to showdowns with teacher unions over pay in some cases. Now, amid school-board elections and local budgeting, they are starting to see results–and resistance.

From the York Suburban Citizens for Responsible Government website:

Higher Spending and Lower Scores: From 2000 to 2009, spending per student (in constant dollars) increased from $11,413 to $15,291 – a 34% increase. Meanwhile 11th grade PSSA reading proficiency remained steady at 71% while math fell from 69% to 62%. This means 29% of students are below acceptable reading levels and 38% are not proficient in math! The York Suburban experience mirrors the national trend where increased spending in the public education system has not resulted in improved student outcomes.

Poor white UK pupils lag behind black peers

Chris Cook:

White schoolchildren in Britain’s poorest communities lag behind peers who are black or of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, a Financial Times analysis of more than 3m sets of exam results reveals.
Poor white children even achieve worse average results than deprived pupils for whom English is a second language.
The average black pupil from among the poorest fifth of children, identified by postcode analysis, gains the equivalent of one more GCSE pass at A*, the highest grade, than the average white child from a similar background.
The figures highlight the challenge facing the coalition, which has identified social mobility as one of its top concerns. Earlier this month, the government published a “social mobility strategy”, which stated that “tackling the opportunity deficit…is our guiding purpose”.
Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust and Britain’s leading educational philanthropist, said the FT results showed that “if the coalition is really serious about raising social mobility, it will need to find a way to crack the problems of the English white working class”.

State Life Insurance Examinations May Be Too Hard

Leslie Scism:

Primerica Inc., which has the country’s largest life-insurance sales force, had another strong recruiting year in 2010: About 230,000 people signed up to become agents.
Another number also stayed strong: the drop-out rate
About 80% of Primerica recruits don’t actually become insurance agents, often because they flunk state licensing exams, according to filings and interviews. That’s a problem for the company, which, more than any other insurer of its size, depends on agents to sell policies. As the number of Primerica agents has declined over the past four years, so, too, have sales of life insurance.
So Primerica recently came up with a novel solution: Make the tests easier. It asserted to state regulators that the exams aren’t only too hard in some places, but might also be racially biased, putting African-Americans and other minorities at a disadvantage.

Changes to the Excel Data Table for the NRC Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs

Board on Higher Education & Workforce:

A revised Excel Data Table for the NRC Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States is now available. A summary of changes for each program can be found here. Those who wish to compare the September 28, 2010 version of the Data Table to the revised rankings, may find the old rankings here.
The revisions are in response to communications and queries received by the NRC since the first Data Table was released on September 28, 2010. At that time, the NRC agreed to follow up on queries about the data and these were received from approximately 450 doctoral programs from 34 institutions. Ten of these institutions had queries for 10 or more of their programs.
The most common questions centered around faculty lists and related characteristics: publications per allocated faculty member, citations per publication, the allocation of faculty, and the measure of interdisciplinarity that used this measure. The NRC was not able to permit changes in faculty lists from what universities had originally submitted. That would have required enormous expense to completely redo the study with the 2005/6 data.

Rahm Emanuel: Not Yet Mayor and Already Got Chicago Schools in a Fine Mess

Michael Klonsky:

“I wanted an entire new board, an entire new corporate suite because what’s happening today both on the finances and the educational scores — needs to be shaken up. And what I know in my heart [is that] the people of the city do not think we’re doing what we need to do for our children.” — Rahm Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel isn’t even officially mayor yet and he’s already got the city and its schools in a fine mess. His appointment of the embattled J.C. Brizard as schools CEO (that’s what we call school superintendents here in Chicago) rivals only Bloomberg’s pick of Cathie Black in New York as most embarrassing of the year. Black lasted a mere three months before high-tailing it back to the sanctity of the corporate world, where failure is more often than not rewarded with super bonuses and not just a kick in the ass and a golden parachute a la urban school bosses.
Bloomberg’s choice of the eminently unqualified Black reset the I-don’t-give-a-damn-what-anybody-else-thinks standard previously set by former D.C. mayor, Adrian Fenty, whose pick of the also unqualified Michelle Rhee earned him the total disdain of D.C. voters who ultimately booted both Fenty and Rhee out of town.

Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts: Walker’s budget numbers for schools flawed

Sondy Pope-Roberts:

In the weeks ahead the biennial budget will be the dominant focus of the Legislature. Gov. Scott Walker has introduced his budget plan for Wisconsin, and while there are a number of troubling provisions, perhaps one of the most troubling is the drastic changes to public education that he proposes.
According to the Department of Public Instruction, school districts are expected to lose $1.68 billion in revenue authority and $835 million in state school aids over the next biennium. The governor has repeatedly touted the savings, tools and other reform measures that he says would soften the blow and even enhance education.
However, reducing the levy authority of school districts mandates a reduction in total spending, and changes to health insurance and pension contributions alone won’t suffice to cover the difference. That means layoffs, a decision made by Walker and not by local school districts.
The governor recently went to great lengths to highlight projected savings and other ways school districts would benefit under his budget. My office compiled a spreadsheet that outlines the inaccuracies in the governor’s projections. To outline the serious budgeting flaws, we relied on numbers from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau and the governor himself.

When Does a Parent Know His Child Is Gifted?

Carol Fertig:

So often I’m asked, “When does a parent know if his child is gifted?” I think they are surprised when I respond by saying, “I don’t know. What does it mean to be gifted?”
After all, I am supposed to be the expert. I am expected to have the answers. But I can’t provided any definitive reply.
First of all, what does it mean to be gifted? There are many definitions and many ways of assessing a child’s ability. Is one more correct than another? Who should make that determination? You may want to look at some of the previous posts on this blog about this subject, including
Conflicts in the Definition and Identification of Giftedness
What Does It Mean to Be Gifted?
Even if there is some consensus about the definition of giftedness, I think most people would agree that students fall somewhere on an extended continuum. There are children who have strong interests or abilities in just one area, which may or may not be a traditional academic subject. There are students who are more globally endowed and may finish high school before they are teenagers and receive graduate degrees by the time others finish high school. Some young people who are very bright have learning disabilities or physical disabilities or emotional problems. Some fit into a traditional school environment and some could care less about school.

Proposition 13: A case study in unintended consequences

The Economist:

DURING JERRY BROWN’S first term in the 1970s his hair was still full and dark. His voice was not yet gravelly. Unlike his back-slapping father, he still bore traces of the Jesuit seminary where he had once studied to become a priest. He meditated on Zen koans. He declined the governor’s mansion and slept on a mattress in a rented flat. He dreamed of large things whose time had not yet come, such as green energy. And yet, or perhaps because of all this, Jerry Brown failed to notice the anger boiling over in his state.
Californians were angry about property taxes. These local taxes were the main revenue source for school districts, cities, counties and California’s many specialised municipal jurisdictions. And they had been rising. A homeowner’s property tax was determined by two factors. One was the tax rate, the other the assessed value of the house to which the rate was applied. These assessments were soaring: between 1972 and 1977 home prices in southern California more than doubled, thus doubling homeowners’ tax bills. Mr Brown and the legislature fiddled with relief measures, but their bills were half-hearted and the taxpayers were angry.

Important voice missing in blue ribbon reading discussion

Susan Troller

While working on another story this morning, I kept checking Wisconsin Eye’s live coverage of the first meeting of Gov. Scott Walker’s blue ribbon task force on reading.
Sitting next to the Governor at the head of the table was State Superintendent Tony Evers, flanked by Sen. Luther Olsen, chair of the Education Committee and Rep. Steve Kestell. Also on hand were representatives from organizations like the Wisconsin State Reading Association (Kathy Champeau), teachers and various other reading experts, including a former Milwaukee area principal, Anthony Pedriana, who has written an influential book on reading and student achievement called “Leaving Johnny Behind.” Also on hand was Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition.
Dykstra, in particular, had a lot to say, but the discussion of how well Wisconsin kids are learning to read — a subject that gets heated among education experts as well as parents and teachers — struck me as quite engaging and generally cordial.
There seemed to be consensus surrounding the notion that it’s vitally important for students to become successful readers in the early grades, and that goal should be an urgent priority in Wisconsin.
But how the state is currently measuring up to its own past performance, and to other states, is subject to some debate. Furthermore, there isn’t a single answer or widespread agreement on precisely how to make kids into better readers.

Related:

In Kansas City, tackling education’s status quo “We’re not an Employment Agency, We’re a School District”

George Will:

John Covington hesitated before becoming this city’s 26th school superintendent in 40 years. A blunt-talking African American from Alabama, he attended the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles, which prepares leaders for urban school districts, and when he asked people there if he should come here, their response, he says, was: “Not ‘no,’ but ‘Hell, no!’ ” He says they suggested that when flying across the country he should take a flight that does not pass through this city’s airspace.
How did this pleasant place become so problematic? Remember the destination of the road paved with good intentions.
This city is just 65 miles down the road from Topeka, Kan., from whence came Brown v. Board of Education , the fuse that lit many ongoing struggles over schools and race. Kansas City has had its share of those struggles, one of which occurred last year when Covington took office with a big bang: He closed 26 of the district’s 61 schools. Kansas City had fewer students but twice as many schools as Pueblo, Colo., where Covington had been superintendent.
Thirty-five years ago, Kansas City’s district had 54,000 students. Today it has fewer than 17,000. Between then and now there was a spectacular confirmation of the axiom that education cannot be improved by simply throwing money at it.
In the 1980s, after a court held that the city was operating a segregated school system, judicial Caesarism appeared. A judge vowed to improve the district’s racial balance by luring white students to lavish “magnet schools” offering “suburban comparability” and “desegregative attractiveness.” And he ordered tax increases to pay the almost $2 billion bill for, among other things, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a planetarium, vivariums, greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, an animation and editing lab, movie editing and screening rooms, a temperature-controlled art gallery, a 25-acre farm, a 25-acre wildlife area, instruction in cosmetology and robotics, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and more.

Related: Money And School Performance:
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment
:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.

Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater served in Kansas City prior to taking a position with the local schools.

Preserving the bargain on Milwaukee School Choice

Patrick McIlheran:

State taxpayers are getting a fantastic bargain this year on the education of about one in six Milwaukee children. But how long will they go on getting it?
The bargain is what we spend when a family takes its school aid in the form of a voucher to a private school in Milwaukee’s choice program. Taxpayers shell out $6,442 per child, about 45% as much as the $14,183 per-child cost in the Milwaukee Public Schools, by the latest state figures.
The question is how much longer that can go on. Choice schools cannot charge poor families any more than the voucher, but researchers with the five-year study of school choice report that 82% of such schools have higher per-pupil costs. In the most recent figures, the average choice school spent $7,692 per child.
The voucher just isn’t enough to run a school, said the University of Arkansas’ Brian Kisida, one of the researchers: “How can you hire the best people on half the money?” He said that if he had Gov. Scott Walker’s ear, he’d tell him to keep the rule requiring state tests, flawed as they are, and to raise the grant.
That isn’t happening. Walker’s two-year budget through 2013 freezes the voucher at $6,442, since the state is $3.5 billion in the hole. Walker also cuts how much public schools have, reducing their per-child revenue limit, their most fundamental number, by 5.5% in the first year and freezing it in the second.

Hawaii Fires 10 Teachers for Misconduct in 2 Years

Katherine Poythress:

Only 10 teachers in the entire Hawaii Department of Education have been fired for misconduct in the last two years. That’s 10 out of about 12,000 teachers, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent. The Department also suspended 37 teachers for misconduct over the same period.
Teacher performance and accountability are central to most education reform discussions, and both play a key role in negotiations with the teachers union this year.
A Civil Beat investigation found that over the past two years the district disciplined teachers for misconduct in 42 of its 257 schools, or 16 percent. No teachers were fired on Kauai or the Big Island. Teachers were disciplined on all the islands, with 35 of the cases on Oahu, three on Maui, three on Kauai and six on the Big Island.

Big Cuts for Magnet Schools in Dallas Stir Conflict Over Spending on Education

Morgan Smith:

On a muggy afternoon in mid-April, Mary Ruiz, an animated 18-year-old, bounced through the air-conditioned corridors of her South Dallas high school.
“Excuse the mess,” she said, brushing away a small scrap of paper in an otherwise spotless stairwell, giggling as she added, “I’m acting like this is my house.”
Ms. Ruiz is a senior at the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center’s School of Health Professions, a magnet in the Dallas Independent School District. The Townview Center, named for the panorama of the downtown Dallas skyline visible from its north windows, houses six magnets, including programs for law, business and science.

In calculating Wisconsin school aid, count all the kids

Tom Barrett:

The Wisconsin Assembly recently held a hearing on Assembly Bill 92, which would eliminate the enrollment cap for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and extend the program to permit private schools located in Milwaukee County to participate.
Before any expansion of the program is considered, the funding mechanism for the choice program must be fixed. Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-07 school year and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.

Doctor warns of complacency in face of autism danger

Vanessa Ko:

Hong Kong has escaped the anti-MMR childhood vaccine movement – linking the jab to autism – which spread across many English-speaking countries in the past decade.
But despite the overseas movement’s dangers and the fraudulent study that inspired it, a prominent paediatrician has nevertheless warned that local parents are too complacent about potential environmental factors that could trigger the onslaught of autism among some young children.
“They just don’t know about it. They are just ignorant about it,” said Dr Wilson Fung Yee-leung, who is a council member of the Hong Kong Medical Association.
He said it was dangerous not to be concerned about autism and its potential environmental causes.

Inside the Chicago Public School Probation Maze

Meribah Knight:

Austin Polytechnical Academy, a school established in 2007 to help broaden the West Side community’s academic opportunities and retool perceptions of vocational education, is facing harsh realities as it prepares to graduate its first senior class: lagging test scores, diminishing attendance and dismal reading levels.
Last October, Polytech joined the ranks of the 67 percent of Chicago’s public neighborhood high schools when it was placed on academic probation. That same week, state-issued report cards showed that the school was not making sufficient yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Having both local and federal education officials label the school as failing is a bitter pill for parents, teachers and students. Yet people with a stake in Austin Polytech have always known they would need to struggle against long odds.
Administrators and teachers at Austin Polytech, which occupies two floors of a massive concrete building that once housed the failed Austin Community High School, have been working for four years to undo decades of neglect and failure.

Interactive Map: Where Chicago Schools are on Probation.

Milwaukee Public Schools: Open For Business?

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

With a proposed $74 million in cuts expected for Milwaukee Public Schools next school year, district officials are going to need help in filling some gaps. That’s where the business community should step up, both with money and other support.
Businesses generally have been strong supporters of MPS, but at this critical time, MPS needs more of that. If nothing else, naked self-interest should compel businesses to pitch in.
Gov. Scott Walker’s budget calls for $74 million in cuts for the district. This will have a huge impact, especially with no new federal educational dollars coming in next school year.
There are a number of ways businesses can help.
The GE Foundation stepped up in January when it announced that it would give MPS $20.4 million over five years to help the school system develop a rigorous math and science curriculum and provide professional development to teachers.
This is an investment in future MPS graduates, who GE hopes will be a part of Milwaukee’s workforce. GE says it will be very visible in MPS. This is important because children need to see business leaders involved in education. Children need good role models.

Three who are politically ‘all in’

Steven Walters:

In poker, there are gasps when players go “all in,” pushing all their chips forward to bet on the next card. By the end of that hand, they either bust and leave the table broke or sit there much richer.
This season, at least three Wisconsin leaders are “all in”: Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican Gov. Scott Walker and UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin.
Ryan: When he developed and got his fellow House Republicans to back his version of a federal budget, Ryan became Washington’s flavor of the month.
It’s the biggest risk of his career, however, because it would privatize and defund Medicare for anyone under 55; turn states’ Medicaid programs that help the elderly, poor and disabled into a block grant program; cut corporate tax rates; and continue tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans.
“It’s my obligation to offer an alternative” to the debt-and-spending cycle that threatens to choke America’s future, Ryan told constituents at a Wisconsin listening session last week.
But, with his plan, the seven-term Republican from southeastern Wisconsin became target practice for Democrats, starting with President Barack Obama, and pundits.

Teaching reforms get lost in Wisconsin budget tumult

Amy Hetzner:

Early in February, leaders of the state’s largest teachers union took what was for them a major step – endorsing a series of reforms they had previously resisted, including performance pay, dividing up Milwaukee Public Schools and tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Within a week, however, Gov. Scott Walker released a plan to sharply curb the collective bargaining rights of most public-sector workers, and little more was heard from the Wisconsin Education Association Council about its reform initiatives.
Amid the debate over public workers’ rights in Wisconsin, school reform has gotten lost in recent months, especially changes related to one of the most promising ways to improve academic achievement: focusing on teacher effectiveness.
Walker and his supporters have said that by prohibiting teachers unions from bargaining for anything other than inflation-tied wage increases, school boards are free to implement reforms that WEAC has been unwilling to embrace in the past.

Teacher colleges balk at being rated Wisconsin schools say quality survey from national nonprofit and magazine won’t be fair

Erin Richards:

A controversial review of America’s teacher colleges has met resistance in Wisconsin, where education school leaders in the public and private sector say they will not voluntarily participate.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit advocacy group, and U.S. News & World Report, known for its annual rankings of colleges, announced in January they would launch a first-ever review of the nation’s roughly 1,400 colleges of education. The recruitment and training of teachers have become a hot-button issue tied to education reform, but university system presidents in Wisconsin as well as New York, Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky have expressed misgivings about the process of assessing and ranking their education schools.
“While we welcome fair assessment and encourage public sharing of our strengths and weaknesses, we believe your survey will not accomplish these goals. We therefore wish to notify you that our entire membership has decided to stand united and not participate further in the survey process,” says an April 7 letter by Katy Heyning, president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and addressed to the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News. Heyning also is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The council, meanwhile, is filing open-records requests to get information about the public education schools in states that won’t provide it voluntarily. Arthur McKee, manager of teacher preparation programs at the NCTQ, said the council had not received the letter from Heyning. But it had received a letter from UW System President Kevin Reilly.
That letter from March 28 says that UW’s 13 teacher colleges declined to participate because of “serious concerns” about the survey’s methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Much more, here.

Advocating a “Classical Approach to Education”

Mollie:

A few months ago, we moved out of Washington, D.C., to be closer to where we’ll be sending our children to school. That decision wasn’t just made because it’s our parish school or because many DC public schools have serious problems. Prior to getting married, my husband and I separately served on the school board that oversaw the change in our parish school’s curriculum to a Classical approach. It was a large undertaking but we couldn’t be more pleased with the results.
From my experience, I know that the Classical movement is sizable and under-covered by major media. So I was completely delighted to read about a new Classical school in the area in a recent Washington Post. Written by Julia Duin, it begins with an anecdote that shows how Classical education works:

It’s 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton’s fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.
Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry’s immortal “Give me liberty or give me death” speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
“Beautifully done,” Clayton says at the conclusion. “We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation.” She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: “No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” Near that hangs a crucifix.

The Army should fix the geographical narrowness of its ROTC programs

Stephen Trynosky:

I don’t know your Year Group cohort, but I think you may not realize how narrow the ROTC’s geographic/outreach footprint has become since 1989 (e.g. closure of 4 of New Jersey’s 7 Army ROTC programs). Sadly, I have been taking on the “if they want it bad enough they will low crawl to ROTC” argument for almost two decades. I didn’t buy that argument as a first year ROTC cadet in 1994 and I buy it even less now.
The Army has allocated only a single Army ROTC instructor battalion to the entire state of Connecticut–which has one of the highest educational attainment levels in the United States and an enormous per capita student population. It is also noteworthy that Connecticut’s population is LARGER than Mississippi’s, over half the size of Alabama’s and FOUR TIMES LARGER than South Dakota’s. Despite its size and student population, Connecticut has just one Army ROTC battalion, while Mississippi has 5, Alabama has 10 and South Dakota has 3. It is misplaced to blame the Yale students for not seeking out Army ROTC — particularly when the program HQ and the Professor of Military Science (PMS) sit 70 miles away in Storrs. Sure, there is some instruction available in New Haven, but the core of the ROTC’s administrative, logistical and outreach capabilities in the state are 70 miles away from New Haven. This reality can not be discounted.
I challenge anyone to find a university comparable to Yale’s size south of the Mason-Dixon line that is 70 miles away from an Army ROTC host institution.

Great colleges, ignorant policies

Jay Matthews:

Our nation’s finest universities and colleges say they want our teenagers to be ready for college. They say they will do whatever they can to make that happen.
I would like to believe them, but in one small but revealing way, many of them — including the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University and Washington College — have been doing the opposite. They have failed to correct a discriminatory credit policy that is hurting the high school students trying hardest to prepare for their rich and rigorous programs.
Check the Web sites or rule books of most American universities, including the ones above, and you will discover that they offer college credit to students who get good grades on Advanced Placement exams in high school but that they refuse to give the same credit to students who do well on similar International Baccalaureate Standard Level exams. They offer credit to students who get good grades on exams taken after two-year Higher Level IB courses, but those are different. Tests for one-year IB courses don’t get credit; tests for similar one-year AP courses do.

Ace the School Reunion

Ray Smith:

School reunion time is here and it is all too easy to slip back into a high-school state of mind. The desire to impress mixed with feelings of insecurity can serve up a bad emotional cocktail.
Like it or not, clothing is a visual gauge of who has soared and who has stumbled. Pulling together an outfit that sends the message you desire–cool confidence or affluence or even Look-At-Me-Now Revenge on The One Who Dumped You or The Mean Girls Who Made School a Daily Nightmare–has become more daunting. Many high school and college reunions now stretch from an evening of dinner and dancing into rigorously scheduled all-weekend affairs.
“There’s usually a Friday evening cocktail event, then a Saturday daytime something where you may bring your children, maybe to a park, a baseball field or a pool, then a Saturday evening gala and then a Sunday farewell brunch,” says Mary Fanizzi Krystoff, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based events producer who has put together school reunions for more than 20 years.

Zhu Rongji resurfaces to criticise Chinese education reforms

Shi Jiangtao:

Former premier Zhu Rongji made a rare public appearance yesterday, delivering a scathing criticism of the mainland’s education system and other policies during a visit to his alma mater, Tsinghua University.
Zhu (pictured) lashed out at the much-criticised reform of tertiary education and urged mainland officials and scholars to speak the truth.
He said a newly published directive on trial reforms of the education system was “full of empty talk and nonsense”, according to excerpts of his remarks posted on the popular microblog platform Sina Weibo.

Virginia rolls out teacher merit-pay plan

Zinie Chen Sampson:

Gov. Bob McDonnell on Tuesday rolled out Virginia’s teacher merit-pay plan, inviting 57 districts that have struggling schools to apply for $3 million in total state funding for the 2011-12 school year.
At least 40 percent of a teacher’s performance evaluation will be tied to student academic performance — including improvements in standardized test scores. Schools that receive grants must adopt teacher-appraisal systems aligned with state-approved evaluation methods and performance metrics.
The General Assembly approved the pilot performance-pay initiative as part of McDonnell’s amendments to the state budget. A key component of the Republican governor’s education agenda, the initiative is aimed at attracting good teachers to so-called hard-to-staff schools. Such schools include those at risk of losing state accreditation and those that have a high percentage of English learners or special-needs students.

Customized Learning Fuels Rocketship

EdReformer:

Great post by John Danner, Rocketship CEO today on their efforts to customize learning. Rocketship is a network of high performing elementary schools in San Jose California. Students spend about a fifth of their day in a learning lab. Here’s the guts of John’s post:
We’ve put a ton of work into figuring out how to go from student assessments to individualized learning plans. When a learning plan accurately captures the next 6-8 objectives a student needs at a fine grain (i.e. this student needs to work on short a sounds), then you set yourself up to deliver the right lesson at the right time. This process of figuring out exactly what a student needs to learn is the key. From that, the potential upside for the right lesson to each child at the right developmental level probably has the potential to be 10x more effective for the student than a classroom lesson targeted at what a child that age should be learning, or some scope and sequence that has been defined. For students who are the farthest behind, classroom lessons are almost never relevant, they just aren’t there developmentally. So this 10x potential increase in learning is what our model plays on.

Looking At College Application Inflation

Robert Siegel:

It’s a time of high anxiety for high school seniors. Students across the country have been finding out where they got in to college and where they didn’t. For many applying to the most selective schools, the news is not good. While the number of applications has shot up, acceptance rates have hit historic lows. It’s been called, “application inflation.” Michele Norris talks with Bloomberg News’ higher education reporter Janet Lorin about college admissions and “application inflation.”

The PhD factory The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?

David Cyranoski , Natasha Gilbert , Heidi Ledford , Anjali Nayar & Mohammed Yahia:

Scientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud — they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see ‘The rise of doctorates’). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.
In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more — but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia. Here, Nature examines graduate-education systems in various states of health.

Steve Hsu has more.

Shutter Fraternities for Young Women’s Good

Caitlin Flanagan:

In the fall of 1984, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia named Liz Securro was invited to a fraternity party. While there, she was given a tour of the historic house and offered a cup of the dark green cocktail that was its specialty. Within minutes she was incapacitated. She was carried into a bedroom and raped. She woke up wrapped in a bloody sheet (she had been a virgin) and watched as the rapist coldly packed his backpack and told her, “You ought to get out of here before someone sees you.”
Alone, bruised and bleeding, she walked to the emergency room, waited for hours, was sent to Student Health and began a weeks-long ordeal. One school official suggested she take some time off or perhaps transfer. Many doubted her story. She realized she had no real hope for justice, and so she gave up trying to find it.
But 20 years later, something remarkable happened: Her rapist, who had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, sent her a letter of apology–or, as Liz came to see it, a handwritten confession. The story of his prosecution and ultimate imprisonment is detailed in her riveting new book, “Crash Into Me,” which includes a horrifying revelation. She learned during the discovery process of the trial that she had been gang raped.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public-sector pay Too modest or too much?

The Economist:

AMY GARDNER writes in the Washington Post of the emotional injury suffered by government employees when a goodly portion of the public begins to malign them as members of a parasite class who enjoy the ample fruits of less privileged and secure workers’ labour. Efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere to rein in the growth of public-sector salaries, pensions and health benefits have, Ms Gardner reports, “ripped apart how many public workers think of themselves and their role in society.” She considers the case of Judy and Jim Embree “an operating room nurse and paramedic and firefighter” from Ohio, who have been taken aback by increasingly negative attitudes toward public-sector workers. “The divide between those who back union workers and those who don’t comes down to a matter of perception over what qualifies as modest and what is too much,” Ms Gardner writes. Would you say this modest or too much?

Judy Embree earns $63,000. Under current rules, she is eligible to retire in five years, at age 54, after 30 years on the job. Upon retirement, she will be paid about 66 percent of her wages.Jim Embree earns $70,700. He is eligible to retire in two years, at age 50, after 25 years on the job. He will take home 60 percent of his retiring salary.Both Embrees could continue to work and improve their pensions; Judy Embree would qualify for 100 percent of her wages after 44 years of service (at age 68), and Jim would max out after 33 years (at age 58) with 72 percent of his final pay.

Not surprisingly, the Embrees think this just about right. The article concludes with this reflection from Mr Embree:

Students map the wild treasures of Warner Park

Susan Troller

Madison’s Warner Park may be best known as home of the Madison Mallards baseball team, but it’s also home to real mallards and at least 99 other species of wild birds.
Thanks to a group of outdoor-loving Sherman Middle School students working with University of Wisconsin-Madison student mentors, the list of wild birds that make the almost 200 acre urban park their home, or their temporary home as they migrate north and south, now stands at 100.
The first week in April the Sherman birding club, which includes sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students partnered with UW students, discovered the landmark 100th species in the park. It’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker, a type of woodpecker, sighted with the help of nationally renowned ornithologist and author John C. Robinson.
Robinson was visiting Madison to give a talk at the UW on conservation and outdoor recreation.

Teachers retiring at high rate, many because of collective bargaining changes

Matthew DeFour:

More than 130 Madison teachers — many of them worried that Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining law could lead to changes in post-retirement benefits — are retiring in June, a big increase over recent years.
As of the April 15 deadline, 138 Madison teachers have decided to retire, Superintendent Dan Nerad said. That’s a 62 percent increase over the average number of retirements over the previous five years.
The district plans to fill all of the positions, Nerad said, though the loss of so many more veteran teachers than usual could have a more noticeable effect on students and novice teachers.
“A lot of these people have been working with generations of students and influencing people for a long, long time,” Nerad said. “Our intention is to replace them with knowledgeable people, but as a rule they will be less experienced.”
More than 60 teachers indicated they were retiring earlier than anticipated because of concerns about the collective bargaining changes, said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.

Keep intact the mission of choice program

Howard Fuller:

It was not easy for me to stand before the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee and threaten to withdraw my support from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which I have supported for more than 20 years. But if lawmakers approve Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to lift the income requirement that has maintained the program for children from low-income families, that is exactly what I will do.
The governor’s plan would dramatically change the program’s social justice mission and destroy its trailblazing legacy as the first and still one of the few in the nation that uses public dollars to help equalize the academic options for children from low-income and working-class families. I did not join this movement to subsidize families like mine, which may not be rich but have resources and, thus, options.
When I got into this battle in 1989, standardized test scores showed Milwaukee was failing to educate poor black children. That’s when state Rep. Annette Polly Williams courageously stepped forth to make sure that poor families were afforded some opportunity to choose schools in the private sector for their children. She shepherded the pioneering voucher program through the Legislature.

Trading the corporate world for the classroom

Susan Troller:

Physicist, neuroscience entrepreneur and businessman, Jon Joseph traded the money and prestige of a flourishing career in corporate America for the opportunity to teach high level calculus, computer science and physics to high school kids. He’s doing his thing in the northern Green County community of New Glarus, teaching at a high school where there were exactly zero Advanced Placement courses less than 15 years ago.
A shortened version of his professional resume includes a Ph.D. in physics with a focus on neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While an assistant professor at UW, he founded the Biomagnetic Research Laboratory for brain research. He left academia for the corporate world in 1989, doing brain research for Nicolet Biomedical and later moving to the NeuroCare Division of VIASYS Healthcare, where he was chief technology officer and VP of engineering and new technology. Most recently, he was part of a startup company called Cyberkinetics, where he was vice president of research and development. He got his teaching certificate in 2006, and previously taught in Madison and Middleton. In New Glarus, he heads up the math and computer science department.
Capital Times: Describe the work you did before you became a teacher.
Jon Joseph: I spent a lot of time b

Somewhat related, from a financial and curricular perspective: The Khan Academy.

Madison Teachers’ Union Gets Death Threat

Matthew Rothschild:

Republican legislators in Wisconsin aren’t the only ones getting violent threats. On Thursday, Katherine Windels pleaded not guilty to making death threats to Republican state lawmakers. Her crazed threats have gotten a lot of media attention.
But what hasn’t gotten attention is the ugliness directed against labor.
“We’ve gotten a lot of threats,” says John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc (MTI).
MTI received a death threat on April 15.
“You’re all going to die. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you,” said a man’s voice calling from the (252) area code, which MTI saw on caller ID. That area code is in North Carolina.

Duncan Issues Far More NCLB Waivers Than Predecessors

Michele McNeil:

With Secretary Arne Duncan at the helm, the U.S. Department of Education is gradually–and sometimes quietly–chipping away at key parts of the No Child Left Behind Act as states and districts demand more relief from the elusive goal that all students be what the law terms “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.
The pressure on Mr. Duncan to waive substantial parts of the 9-year-old federal school-accountability law is only growing as Congress continues to drag its feet on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB is the latest version.
Although President Barack Obama and Mr. Duncan have called for revision of the law by the start of the next school year, draft legislation has yet to be introduced, and school leaders anxious about rapidly approaching deadlines are clamoring for leeway in the meantime.

Carolina’s Students Get Educated The School’s Elite Men’s Basketball Team Hits the Dormitory Courts to Play Classmates–Just for Fun

Ben Cohen:

College basketball doesn’t get any more glamorous than it does at North Carolina, a school that boasts one of the sport’s most prestigious programs. On this campus, the basketball players are lords of the manor.
But this spring, Carolina’s men’s team has started a new tradition, one that stands in sharp contrast to the booming prominence of the sport.
Since they bowed out of the NCAA’s Elite Eight last month, members of North Carolina’s Tar Heels have been showing up a campus dormitory courts to play five-on-five pickup basketball games with students. We caught up with some of the players at a recent session.
Since they bowed out in the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight last month, the players have been killing time before finals exams by showing up at outdoor courts at campus dormitories to play five-on-five pick-up games with students–just for fun. To make sure they draw a crowd, the players announce their plans beforehand on Twitter.
On a cloudless afternoon last week, five Carolina players showed up to the outdoor court at Granville Towers. As spectators in sunglasses and sundresses dangled their legs over the brick walls, a pack of would-be student challengers in sneakers and t-shirts made a beeline to the free-throw line, where the first five to sink shots would earn the right to play.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: As its power declines, the U.S. pays the price

Chrystia Freeland:

Economic policy isn’t just a domestic issue anymore. That is the conclusion we should draw from the market volatility this week, including the shift by Standard & Poor’s to a negative outlook for U.S. government debt, and the meeting last weekend of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
This is a familiar fact for smaller countries. The emerging market nations have long understood that judgments made on Wall Street or at the IMF headquarters in Washington often had more power to shape their economic policy than the proposals of their own ministers of finance and central bankers. More recently, that is a lesson that fiscally weak Western countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been learning, too.
Now, as the relative power of the United States in the global economy declines, it is a fact of life that Americans need to get used to, too. That is one of the important messages of the S&P decision at the beginning of this week to put the United States on a negative outlook – essentially a warning that the ratings agency is no longer certain the United States will maintain its AAA rating.
There are a lot of reasons the S&P call should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, the ratings agencies hardly covered themselves with glory in the run-up to the financial crisis, and surely no longer deserve oracular status – if they ever did.

Autism’s Causes: How Close Are We to Solving the Puzzle?

PBS NewsHour:

ROBERT MACNEIL: As we’ve reported, autism now affects one American child in a 110. Last month, a committee convened by public health officials in Washington called it a national health emergency. The dramatic rise in official figures over the last decade has generated a surge of scientific research to find what is causing autism.
Among the centers for such research is here, the University of California, Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento. Here and around the country, we’ve talked to leading researchers about where that effort now stands. Among them is the director of research at the MIND Institute, Dr. David Amaral.
DR. DAVID AMARAL, MIND Institute: Well, I think we’re close to finding several causes for autism. But there’s — I don’t think there’s going to be a single cause.
ROBERT MACNEIL: The science director of the Simons Foundation in New York, Dr. Gerald Fishbach; Dr. Martha Herbert, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; and Dr. Craig Newschaffer, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. First, I asked, how close are we to discovering the cause of autism?

Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years

Mary Grabar:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression.
Even noted composition scholar Peter Elbow, in his address, claimed that the grammar that we internalize at the age of four is “good enough.” The Internet, thankfully, has freed us from our previous duties as “grammar police,” and Elbow heralded the day when the white spoken English that has now become the acceptable standard, will be joined by other forms, like those of non-native and ghetto speakers.
Freed from standards of truth claims and grammatical construction, rhetoric is now redefined as “performance,” as in street protests, often by students demonstrating their “agency.” Expressions are made through “the body,” images, and song–sometimes a burst of spontaneous reflection on the Internet. Clothes are rhetorically important as “instruments of grander performance.”

Wis. teachers respond to challenges of budget repair bill

Taylor Nye:

The big news back in my small, rural southeast Wisconsin hometown is that the high school and middle school have a few new teachers. Every time I run into someone from back home, they have to tell me, “Did you hear about the new science/math/Spanish teacher?” Unfortunately, teachers in my hometown and around Wisconsin are not retiring because it’s their time. What we are seeing are effects from Gov. Scott Walker’s Budget Tyranny Bill, and small and large school districts alike will continue to face large turnover in the foreseeable future.
When Walker tried to slash union’s bargaining rights, he opened a legal can of worms. With all the actions that are being brought against his administration over the legality of his moves, it’s difficult to remember that Wisconsin’s teachers are left between a rock and a hard place as long as his measures stand. The educators who are now retiring likely didn’t consider leaving their school systems until it became clear that he was going to put his bill into effect. They have two choices: Take whatever they can get out of early retirement now, or stay on and wait to see what retirement benefits, if any, the unions will be able to bargain for in the future. In addition, there is another worry about continuing to teach — no one knows how expansive future layoffs will be.

New Study Confirms UFT Report’s Findings on ELLs in Charters

Christina Collins:

The Journal of School Choice recently published an article in which researchers Jack Buckley and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj confirmed the UFT’s findings in 2010 that charter schools in New York City enrolled a lower proportion of limited English proficient (LEP) students than the average district school in 2007-08. Overall, they find that among the city’s charters from 2006-2008, “in the case of the LEP proportions, there is a large group of schools with very few, a handful with a larger proportion, and perhaps 1-3 schools, depending on the year, with a large share of LEP students.”
This report provides a valuable complement to our findings in “Separate and Unequal,” both in its examination of two additional years of data and in its use of sophisticated statistical formulas to account for possible errors in the numbers of LEP students that charters report to the state each year. As this chart from the article shows, even when the researchers controlled for that possibility, the proportion of LEP students in most charters in the city fell well below the district average (represented by the solid line on the graph).

Teachers ‘bully other teachers’

BBC:

Bullying in school is a problem for many staff as well as pupils, according to a teachers’ union survey.
The bullies are often other teachers who pick on their staffroom colleagues – with heads and senior staff alleged to be among the worst culprits.
The survey, from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, says about a quarter of teachers have been bullied by another member of staff.
The union is calling for “robust” policies to tackle such instances.
Teachers report being “driven from their jobs” by bullying head teachers.

A lesson in mediocrity California’s schools show how direct democracy can destroy accountability

The Economist:

EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA’S school system is complicated, starting with the question of how bad its public schools are. Comparisons show that students in California fare worse than the national average in mathematics, reading, science and writing. But the numbers are unfair, says John Mockler, an expert in Californian education who has been following its fortunes since the 1960s. For instance, half of California’s pupils are Hispanic, and 40% of those hardly speak English. Most other states don’t face this problem.
Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that California’s public schools are not what they could be, nor what they used to be. California ranks 47th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in spending per pupil ($7,886, against an average of $11,397). It ranks last in the number of students per teacher: California’s legislative analyst estimates that most classes have 28-31 pupils. And it ranks 42nd in the proportion of pupils who graduate (63%, against a national average of 69%).

ACLU seeks federal probe of truants lockup

Lynn Arditi:

The American Civil Liberties Union and its Rhode Island affiliate are urging federal justice officials in Washington to investigate the lockup of truants at the state Training School.
The ACLU has asked officials in the U.S. Justice Department — who are scheduled to arrive in Rhode Island Tuesday — to investigate “documented evidence” published in a December 2010 Providence Journal article that showed, since 2005, at least 28 youths from the state Family Court’s truancy program had been detained overnight.
The Journal article described how juveniles who attended weekly truancy hearings in classrooms, cafeterias and school offices around the state were declared in criminal contempt of court and sent to the Training School. Their offenses included not answering a magistrate’s questions, swearing or otherwise acting disrespectful. In one case, a 12-year-old girl was ordered held for two nights for slamming a door on her way out of the room. At the time, the girl had no parent or lawyer present.

Full speed ahead for school reforms

Wisconsin State Journal:

If Wisconsin is to improve its public schools, it needs leaders willing to think and act boldly, kick sacred cows and innovate.
State and local officials should keep that in mind as they consider complaints that Gov. Scott Walker’s move to restrict collective bargaining for most public employees risks cutting an essential partner out of education reform plans.
As the State Journal’s six-part series “Labor’s Last Stand” reported in Tuesday’s installment, the complaints are based on the assumption that without teacher unions participating in the development and execution of reforms, those reforms will fizzle.
But framing the success or failure of school reform in terms of dependency on union bargaining is misguided. In the past, teacher unions have led some education reforms but have been roadblocks to others. In fact, it is insulting to individual teachers, school boards and superintendents to believe that nothing can be accomplished without going through a union.

Administrators Lobbying Against Wisconsin Open Enrollment Expansion

John Forester and a kind reader, via email

The SAA’s launching a last-ditch lobbying effort to try to limit the pending bill that will expand the open enrollment period. My transcription of the video alert:
Good afternoon SAA members, this is your lobbyist John Forester coming to you on Thursday afternoon, April the 21st, with a priority legislative alert on Senate Bill 2, having to do with the open enrollment application period. I need you to contact the members of the Assembly Education Committee in support of the SAA’s position on Senate Bill 2.
Senate Bill 2 was amended and passed in the Senate earlier this legislative session. The bill had a hearing in the Assembly Education Committee on April the 7th, and could be voted on by the committee as early as next Tuesday, April the 26th. The SAA is seeking to amend the bill. I have provided for you my testimony on the bill, as well as a Legislative Council memo explaining how the bill was amended in the Senate. You can find contact information for the Committee members on the left side of our website.
Now let me tell you this flat and straight. Some version of this bill is going to pass this legislative session. We are simply trying to get the bill amended to make it less objectionable. Now let me give you some information specifically regarding the bill. If adopted, Senate Bill 2 would expand the open enrollment application period from 3 weeks to the 3 full months of February, March and April. As amended, Senate Bill 2 would also create an alternate open enrollment application process that would allow a parent of a pupil wishing to attend a nonresident school district to apply to that school district if the pupil satisfies at least one of seven criteria established in the bill. Now under this alternate process, applications may be submitted outside the 3 month open enrollment window. The primary focus of our opposition to Senate Bill 2 is the last of the seven criteria in the alternate application process and it reads as follows: “The parent of the pupil and the nonresident school board agree that attending school in the nonresident district is in the best interests of the pupil.” Now because the nonresident school district, assuming it has room for more students, has a financial incentive to accept new open enrollment students, this provision of the bill essentially creates the potential for year-round open enrollment, and I know that I’ve received lots of phone calls from SAA members saying that that’s exactly what this would do. This provision would also provide difficult students and parents with one more weapon to manipulate school districts into making decisions favorable to the student and the parents.
Now we have requested that the committee solve this problem with that criteria number 7 either by deleting the 7th criteria listed in the alternate application process or by changing “nonresident school board” to “resident school board” in the bill language that was referenced earlier. Now I have been told by Assembly Education Committee members that the only way to get the bill changed to the way that we would like is for local school districts to contact the committee members and make the case. I’m doing all that I can on this bill, folks, I need your help and I need it now. So again I’m asking you, especially if the legislators that are members of the Assembly Education Committee are your legislators, please contact them and contact them as soon as possible and ask for this change in the bill. Again, some version of the bill is going to pass, what we want to do is to make the bill a little bit better for us. Again, what it really comes down to is: our response to this legislative alert is going to determine how successfully we can reshape the bill. Again thank you very much for everything you do on a daily basis for the kids here in this state. Thank you for your support and contact those legislators. This is your lobbyist John Forester signing off and Happy Easter.
[emphasis added]
It’s interesting to see the true motivations and conflicts of interest openly expressed. Now who represents the interests of children and their parents, again?

Much more on Wisconsin’s Open Enrollment program here.

Autism Now: Demand for Educational Resources for Children Outstrips Supply

PBS NewsHour:

ROBERT MACNEIL: In New York City schools, there are more than 7,000 students with autism. Seven hundred of them, from preschool age to 21, attend this public school for autism in the Bronx, PS 176.
WOMAN: Roll the dice. Oh, boy. What number?
STUDENT: Three.
WOMAN: Good. What are you going to do next?
ROBERT MACNEIL: These children see doctors periodically, but they go to school every day. It’s the public school system that bears most of the burden of treating children with autism, because treatment means teaching. And federal law mandates that all children with disabilities are entitled to a free, appropriate education.
RIMA RITHOLTZ: Autism can suck the fun out of life. Having a child with a disability can suck the fun out of life. And we work very hard here to put the fun back in.

How Genius Works

The Atlantic:

Great art begins with an idea. Sometimes a vague or even bad one. How does that spark of creativity find its way to the canvas, the page, the dinner plate, or the movie screen? How is inspiration refined into the forms that delight or provoke us? We enlisted some of America’s foremost artists to discuss the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always mysterious process of creating something new.

Teacher evaluations called unproductive

Dave Berns:

The assumption behind Gov. Brian Sandoval’s education reform package is that red tape has prevented schools from getting rid of bad teachers, who are increasingly viewed as the greatest impediment to improving public education.
Simply put, the governor wants to make it easier to fire teachers by ending tenure and removing those who fail annual evaluations.
Testifying Saturday on behalf of the reform measure, Assembly Bill 555, Sandoval’s senior adviser, Dale Erquiaga, noted that 0.3 percent of Nevada public school teachers annually lose their jobs because of poor performance. The national average, he said, is 1.5 percent.
The implication: The current process fails to weed out poor teachers.
Erquiaga argued the process is “too hard” and “too cumbersome,” citing research showing 5 to 10 percent of teachers could be replaced for poor performance.

Who Really Cares How Yuppies Raise Their Kids?

Motoko Rich:

First there was Amy Chua, the Yale law professor and author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” who sent legions of parents into a tizzy with her exacting standards for piano practice and prohibitions against sleepovers.
Now comes Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University whose book “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think” was published on Tuesday. In it, he argues that parenting hardly matters, and that we should just let our children watch more television and play video games. With parenting made so easy, he says, we should go ahead and have more children.
It’s the age-old nature-or-nurture debate. Ms. Chua clearly favors the nurture side of the equation (if her heavy-handed approach could be described as “nurturing”). Mr. Caplan, who has already been dubbed the “Un-Tiger Mom,” writes, “While healthy, smart, happy, successful, virtuous parents tend to have matching offspring, the reason is largely nature, not nurture.”

The Chicago Reset Button: Emanuel’s New Education Team

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

The almost complete overhaul of the Chicago Public Schools’ leadership team announced by Rahm Emanuel Monday sets a tone for the district and aligns with his education agenda to increase the number of charter schools, turn around failing schools, implement merit pay and lengthen the city’s school day.
“It’s a really comprehensive set of appointments,” said Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University. While his top choices, Jean-Claude Brizard and Noemi Donoso, have no previous ties to the city’s schools, the rest of Emanuel’s pics are strategic and, as he put it, share his “thirst for reform.”

The Unwise War Against Chocolate Milk

Jen Singer:

One by one, the children trooped to our table and put their apples in front of my son. By the fourth apple, I asked Christopher–my date for “Lunch with Your Second Grader” at the local elementary school in Kinnelon, N.J.–what was going on.
“Oh, they don’t like the apples that come with lunch, so they give them to me,” he reported, shrugging. “I can’t eat them all.”
I’m the mother of two boys, now middle-schoolers, one a good eater and one who would live on pizza and root beer if I let him. Christopher eats apples, and Nicholas leaves his on the lunch tray. He’s the one who needs his chocolate milk. Yes, chocolate.
And so it was disturbing to hear about the recent chocolate milk ban in the Fairfax County, Va., school system and elsewhere around the country. Ditching chocolate milk to cut down on our children’s sugar intake might be the right sentiment, but it’s the wrong solution.

iPad 2 in kindergarten classrooms: A good idea?

Samantha Murphy:

Move over, finger paint. A school district in Maine recently approved a $200,000 initiative that would give each of its 285 kindergarten students a new hands-on tool: Their very own iPad 2.
In what they are calling “a revolution in education,” the Auburn, Maine, school district will be bringing the $499 Apple tablet devices into kindergarten classrooms starting in the fall with the aim of increasing literacy rates from 62 percent to 90 percent.
This isn’t the first time Maine has become an early tech adopter in its educational systems. In 2002, it became the first state to give out laptop computers to its middle school students and later expanded the program to high schoolers as a part of a move to boost literacy.

College-Bound and Living With Autism

The New York Times:

Several readers of the Consults blog recently had questions about the long-term course of autism, including succeeding in college and beyond. Our experts Dr. Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center and Dr. Lisa Wiesner, co-authors of “A Practical Guide to Autism,” respond. For more on this and other topics, see their earlier responses in “Ask the Experts About Autism,” and The Times Health Guide: Autism. The authors also teach a free online course on autism at Yale University, which is also available at iTunesU and on YouTube.
Q.
Are you aware of any longitudinal studies of occupational outcomes and successful (independent) living for high-functioning autistic adults? Where would I find those? Are there particular strategies that should be pursued in high school or college to enhance the likelihood of success in these areas?

Problems in Wisconsin Reading NAEP Scores Task Force

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind reader’s email:

Wisconsin’s performance on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is simply unacceptable and unnecessary. Click here to view a summary of the results. Click here for more statistics.
4/25/2011 meeting agenda:
A general and detailed agenda for the April 25th meeting of the Governor’s Read to Lead task force have been released. We feel the important topics in reading reform can be addressed through this agenda.
General:
Introductions
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker on the mission of the Task Force.
A discussion of the current state of reading achievement in Wisconsin
A discussion of current practices as well as ways to improve reading instruction at the classroom level in Wisconsin
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment
Detailed:
I. Identifying the problem and its root causes.
A. An overview of the problem in Wisconsin
B. What are the some of the root causes of illiteracy?
1. Teaching methods and curriculum
2. Teacher training and professional development
3. Problematic interventions
4. Societal problems
5. Lack of accountability
6. Others?
C. Why are we doing so much worse than many other states and so much worse, relative to other states, than we did in the past?
II. Reading instruction
A. How are children typically taught to read in Wisconsin schools?
B. How do early childhood programs fit into the equation?
C. How might reading instruction be improved?
D. How do these methods and curricula differ with ELL & special needs students?
E. How quickly could improved reading instruction be implemented?
The attached fact sheet of NAEP scores (PDF), assembled with the assistance of task force and WRC member Steve Dykstra, was attached to the detailed agenda.
————
Governor Walker’s blue ribbon task force, Read to Lead, will have its first meeting on Monday, April 25, 2011, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM. The meeting will be held in the Governor’s conference room, 115 East, in the State Capitol. All meetings are open to the public. In addition, WRC will prepare reports on the progress of the task force to send as E-Alerts and post on our website, www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org. Questions on the task force can be addressed to Kimber Liedl or Michael Brickman in the Governor’s office at 608-267-9096.
In preparation for the meeting, the Governor’s office made this comment:
“As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s education columnist observed on Sunday, “[t]his is not your ordinary task force.” The creation of this task force is an opportunity to improve reading instruction and achievement in our state in an effort to open new opportunities for thousands of children. The MJS also noted that our task force “has diversity of opinion.” This is by design. Governor Walker is not looking for a rubber stamp, but for a robust, yet focused, conversation that will ultimately lead to concrete policy solutions.”

Related: Dave Baskerville: Wisconsin Needs Two Big Goals. (video)

Parents likely to embrace predictive genetic testing for their children if offered

Science News:

Parents offered genetic testing to predict their risks of common, adult-onset health conditions say they would also test their children. That is the finding of a new study published in the May issue of Pediatrics (published online April 18). The study authors note these and other findings should put pediatricians on alert that parents may chose predictive genetic tests for themselves and for their children, and seek guidance from doctors about what to do with the information. Personal genetic tests are available directly to consumers at drug stores and over the Internet. They are controversial, and generally marketed to adults for their own use. However, it might be only a matter of time before parents become the focus of advertising campaigns targeting their children for testing, says Kenneth P. Tercyak, PhD, associate professor of oncology and pediatrics at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center.
“The findings of our study should remind clinicians and policy-makers to consider children when regulating genetic tests,” says Tercyak, the study’s lead author. “These tests usually don’t offer a clean bill of health and can be hard to interpret even in the best scenario. They identify incremental risks for many common diseases. Most people carry some risk based on a combination of their family history, genetics, and lifestyle. A child’s unexpected test results could trigger negative reactions among parents and children, and lead to conversations at the pediatrician’s office that providers aren’t prepared to have.”

For AP Students, a New Classroom Is Online

Sue Shellenbarger:

When budget cuts wiped out honors French classes at her Uxbridge, Mass., high school, 18-year-old Katie Larrivee turned to the Internet.
These days, Ms. Larrivee, who plans to study abroad in college, practices her pronunciation alone in front of a computer.
“J’ai renforcé ma comprehension de la langue” by taking an advanced-placement French course online, Ms. Larrivee says.
Advanced-placement classes have been booming amid efforts by high-school students and parents to trim college tuition costs and gain an edge in the college-admissions race. A record 1.99 million high-school students are expected to take AP exams next month, up 159% from 2000, says Trevor Packer, vice president, advanced placement, for the College Board, New York, the nonprofit that oversees AP courses and testing. About 90% of U.S. colleges and universities award college credit to high-school students who pass the program’s rigorous subject-matter tests.

Seattle schools have forgotten to listen to parents: There’s always an open door for businesses and well-financed interest groups with an agenda. Parents? Well, that’s another story.

Melissa Westbrook:

It’s good that Seattle City Council members, our mayor, and the Seattle School Board are finally calling for needed reform and accountability within our district. While many in our community were stunned at the revelations about the depth of ineptitude, obliviousness, and near criminality within our school district, some parents felt a saddened sense of relief mixed with frustration. This is the part of the story that remains untold.
Parents in Seattle Public Schools have never been passive consumers but committed partners. Besides raising millions of dollars each year for our schools, they also get out the vote for our education levies and bonds. Some are watchdogs for our school district.
These “feet on the ground” parents know their schools and neighborhoods well.

Budget, Grades, Graduation, Change: Oh, the Chicago Public Schools Troubles Brizard Will See

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

Union relations
The current teachers’ contract is set to expire at the end of the next school year, and with education reform bills in Springfield pressuring teachers to make concessions, the negotiations may become heated. “He’s going to have to, in a very short period of time, figure out what he’s going to keep and what needs to be cut back, and at the same time get off on the right foot with the teachers union,” said Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois.
Budget deficit
With federal stimulus funding drying up, more than $350 million in late payments from the state, and a scheduled raise for teachers, CPS is staring at an $820 million deficit. But Brizard may have help.

Hudson school board will suspend dozens of teachers

Andy Rathburn:

The Hudson school board will suspend dozens of employees whose absences during public worker protests in Madison, Wis., caused district schools to close Feb. 18.
About 40 employees of the Hudson school district, mostly teachers, will be disciplined. Punishment ranges from one to 15 days of unpaid suspension, according to the district.
The length of suspension is based on “the district’s investigation into the actions believed to have been taken by each employee,” said district communications specialist Tracy Habisch-Ahlin in an email. The suspensions are to be served by the end of this school year.
“Having to close schools on Feb. 18 was a serious issue that impacted over 5,000 students along with their parents or caregivers,” said school board president Barb Van Loenen. “As a result, the board spent considerable time listening to our community members and … deliberating an appropriate response for individuals who were involved in the excessive absences.”

Success, Baggage Follow New Chicago Schools CEO

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel’s pick to guide the Chicago Public Schools is a New York superintendent who raised test scores and the union’s ire in Rochester, closed under-performing schools and opened new ones-and has quite a task ahead if he is to fulfill the education agenda outlined by his new boss.
“I’ve decided to have a fresh start and hit the reset button on education,” Emanuel said Monday in announcing Jean-Claude Brizard as his choice for chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, along with an entirely new school board and new CPS leadership team.
The appointment raised concerns among the Chicago Teachers Union about Brizard’s contentious relations with Rochester’s teachers. In Brizard, Emanuel has chosen a proponent of charter schools and merit pay who also now must deal with an $820 million budget deficit.
The Chicago Teachers Union, with whom Brizard must start negotiating a new contract, criticized the selection. “We’re disappointed both by the choice of Brizard and by the entire tone that the mayor-elect has adopted,” said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Detroit’s Mass Teacher Layoffs May Prove Bellwether For Education Reform Nationwide

Simone Landon:

When districtwide layoff notices hit every one of Detroit Public Schools’ 5,466 unionized employees late last week, an American Federation of Teachers spokeswoman called the move the largest “one fell swoop” firing of teachers in union memory.
More broadly troubling to teachers and education-reform observers, however, was DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb’s concurrent announcement that he plans to unilaterally modify the Detroit Federation of Teachers’ collective bargaining agreement, the first test of a sweeping new state law.
Public Act 4, signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in March, grants the emergency managers of troubled school districts the power to “reject, modify, or terminate one or more terms and conditions of an existing collective bargaining agreement.” Under the law, Bobb could choose to abrogate the Detroit teachers’ contract entirely.

Accountability and Those Children

Jocelyn Huber:

As the call for teacher evaluation and tenure reform intensifies across the country, the hypothetical arguments against holding teachers accountable become frustratingly similar. “How can we hold teachers accountable for students with difficult home lives? What about teachers who have homeless students in their classrooms? What about students whose parents are almost criminally uninvolved in their education? Certainly, it wouldn’t be fair to make teachers responsible for those students.” So, let’s settle this once and for all: making sure that those students get an education is the whole purpose of public education. And the existence of teachers who feel they should only have to worry about the children of involved, employed, and educated parents is part of what drives the fervor for education reform.
Public education should be a refuge for those children. It should be the one place where a child can be certain that his parents’ actions cannot hurt him, and where he can be sure all of the adults have only his best interests at heart. Public education should ensure that EVERY child graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college and in the 21st century job market. It should be the springboard out of generational poverty. Instead of family struggles or background being an excuse to give up on students, it should be the inspiration to work twice as hard to be sure students get the education that could change the course of their lives.

Talkin’ About an Education

Jake Silverstein:

The U.S. Constitution says nothing about public education, but all the state constitutions have clauses addressing it, and reading through them is a mildly inspiring way to spend half an hour. Arkansas: “Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools.” Florida: “The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida.” Idaho: “The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature . . .” Massachusetts: “It shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences.” Michigan: “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The Texas state constitution hits a similar note in Article 7, which states: “A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.” Compared with the other states’ fine print, this is pretty good. It isn’t quite as ardent as Michigan’s declaration, but it has considerably more enthusiasm than Wyoming’s (“The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition”). And the idea it articulates, in one long legal sentence, is beautifully straightforward and persuasive: We need a well-educated populace in order to have a functional democracy, so the state should ensure that everyone gets an education. Simple.

On the Madison School District’s 2011-2012 Budget

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

First, we need to adopt a preliminary budget so that we can get any necessary layoff notices issued before our deadline. This requires us to resolve the OT/COTA issue, since the superintendent has recommended issuing layoff notices to our COTAs. But no other layoff notices are in the works for the Board to consider. (There could be some layoffs attributable to shifting enrollment levels among our schools, but the Board tends not to get involved in these.) This lessens the urgency and reduces the scope of our budget deliberations.
Second, it seems likely that we will spend less time on individual Board member’s proposed budget amendments this year. In the past, Board members have generally had two primary motives for offering amendments. The first was to find alternatives for unappealing budget recommendations. We don’t have a slew of unappealing recommendations this year. The second motive has been to reduce what a Board member considered to be an unacceptably large increase in our property tax levy. That shouldn’t be an issue this year.
Individual Board members may come up with some sound and beneficial budget recommendations this year, of course. At this point, I don’t expect to offer much in the way of amendments myself, since I’m aware of no low-hanging fruit and I’m not much in favor of trying to effect policy changes through the budget amendment process.
Third, our budget deliberations (and our recent extension of our collective bargaining agreements) have been shaped primarily in response to the Governor’s budget recommendations. The budget bill is unlikely to pass before the end of June. Our budget choices are affected by the final form the budget bill takes. What happens with our underlevy authority is the most obvious example.
Under the circumstances, if we pass a preliminary budget before final action on the budget bill, our budget will be really, really preliminary. A lot of the heavy lifting budget-wise – like what to do with our underlevy authority, if it survives – can’t take place until after June.
There are some other reasons as well why it makes sense to defer substantive budget deliberations to later in the year. For example, it would be helpful to know how our fund balance will look at the end of the fiscal year on June 30 and how it’s changed from last year. We’d also be in a better position to make smart choices for next year if we have a clearer idea of how our 2012-2013 budget is looking and the more time passes, the clearer those numbers will come into focus.

Georgia, Wisconsin Education Schools Back Out of NCTQ Review

Stephen Sawchuk, via a kind reader’s email:

Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia–and possibly as many as five other states–will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia’s board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
The situation is murkier in New York, Maryland, Colorado, and California, where public university officials have sent letters to NCTQ and U.S. News requesting changes to the review process, but haven’t yet declined to take part willingly.
In Kentucky, the presidents, provosts, and ed. school deans of public universities wrote in a letter to the research and advocacy group and the newsmagazine that they won’t “endorse” the review. It’s not yet clear what that means for their participation.

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?:

Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town are “above average.” Well, in the School of Education they’re all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW’s schools. Scrolling through the Registrar’s online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C’s and only the really high performers score A’s.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody’s a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that’s the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A’s and a handful of A/B’s. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.

How I bluffed my way through college

Kate Harding:

Years after graduating with an English degree, I have a shameful secret: I’ve never actually read the classics.
Mr. White was that stern, older English teacher adored by the bookish nerds and despised by those students accustomed to getting by on entitlement and shouty parental phone calls. Naturally, I was crazy about him, and although I can’t say the feeling was entirely mutual, two lines from a college recommendation letter he wrote for me prove that he understood my fundamental nature better than most adults I knew, including my parents: “Kate will never be a cheerleader, but she has a genuine love of learning. She is never without a book; usually not the assigned text.”
I love that “assigned text” line all the more for its being sort of affectionately passive-aggressive. It’s true that in Mr. White’s A.P. Major British Writers, as in every English lit class I took between seventh grade and finishing my B.A., I only did about a third of the reading. Thanks to a finicky nature and what I now recognize as textbook ADHD, reading past Page 3 of a book that didn’t immediately hold my interest felt like going to the zoo and being forced to watch the naked mole rats for hours, never being permitted to look in on the giraffes.

ESEA Briefing Book

Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn, Jr.:

Political leaders hope to act this year to renew and fix the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind). In this important new paper, Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Executive Vice President Michael J. Petrilli identify 10 big issues that must be resolved in order to get a bill across the finish line, and explore the major options under consideration for each one. Should states be required to adopt academic standards tied to college and career readiness? Should the new law provide greater flexibility to states and districts? These are just a few of the areas discussed. Finn and Petrilli also present their own bold yet “reform realist” solutions for ESEA. Read on to learn more.

The adjunct economy: Universities rely on part-timers to do most of their teaching. So they should treat us better.

Nick Parker:

Early on Monday mornings, in my classroom at Babson College, I shepherd 30 undergraduates into the room with a smile and a “How are you?” or a “Good morning.” From my seat, I have a clear view down a corridor to another classroom, where I can sometimes glimpse a colleague from my department offering the same perfunctory greetings. While we have a lot in common – PhDs from respected institutions, years spent writing and publishing, a passion for teaching – there is something that divides us: He is a tenure-track professor and I am an adjunct lecturer.
In the world of academia, the distinction between these job titles is a huge one. Tenure-track professors are hired by universities to do a combination of teaching and research and to help their departments develop. Pending a major review of their performance after five or six years – when they try to win tenure, which pretty much guarantees a job for life – tenure-track professors are essentially full-time members of the faculty. Their positions usually come with a range of benefits like health insurance and periodic semester-long sabbaticals.
On the other side of this divide, adjunct faculty members (whose positions are sometimes described by other labels such as “lecturer,” “contingent faculty,” or “instructor”) are exclusively teachers. They generally work on a system of semester-to-semester contracts, rarely enjoy benefits, and often are considered part time, regardless of the amount of teaching they do.

Sick leave disciplinary records reveal Oshkosh teachers’ split opinions over union law fight

Adam Rodewald:

A split in teachers’ opinions over appropriate responses to an explosive state collective bargaining law resonates through disciplinary records released by the Oshkosh school district last week.
The records obtained by The Northwestern include forms signed by 86 employees who admitted they called in sick on Feb. 17 and 18 to join protests in Madison as well as a discipline settlement with teachers’ union president Len Herricks, who incorrectly told staff members that district administration would condone calling in sick to attend the protests.
Comments hand-written by educators on many of the records show a range of regret, defiance and confusion felt by rank-and-file employees caught in a whirlwind of political rhetoric and polarization.

Powerhouse Principal Dr. Steve Perry Shares His Thoughts

Earl Martin Phalen, via a kind reader’s email:

r. Steve Perry is the founder of the phenomenal Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut. Recognized by U.S. News and World Report, 100 percent of the graduating seniors are admitted to four-year colleges. An outspoken and highly successful national leader in education, Dr. Perry is also an Education Correspondent for CNN.
I was excited Dr. Perry could share his thoughts on school readiness, the role of community involvement in education, and keys to Capital Preparatory’s success.
1. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress study noted that two out of three children in the United States are not reading at grade level. School readiness is a major crisis in our country.

Is Facebook geared to dullards?

Nicholas Carr:

Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring? Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills? Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own? Buck up, my friend. The traits you consider signs of failure may actually be marks of intellectual vigor, according to a new study appearing in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
The study, by Bu Zhong and Marie Hardin at Penn State and Tao Sun at the University of Vermont, is one of the first to examine the personalities of social networkers. The researchers looked in particular at connections between social-network use and the personality trait that psychologists refer to as “need for cognition,” or NFC. NFC, as Professor Zhong explained in an email to me, “is a recognized indicator for deep or shallow thinking.” People who like to challenge their minds have high NFC, while those who avoid deep thinking have low NFC. Whereas, according to the authors, “high NFC individuals possess an intrinsic motivation to think, having a natural motivation to seek knowledge,” those with low NFC don’t like to grapple with complexity and tend to content themselves with superficial assessments, particularly when faced with difficult intellectual challenges.
The researchers surveyed 436 college students during 2010. Each participant completed a standard psychological assessment measuring NFC as well as a questionnaire measuring social network use. (Given what we know about college students’ social networking in 2010, it can be assumed that the bulk of the activity consisted of Facebook use.) The study revealed a significant negative correlation between social network site (SNS) activity and NFC scores. “The key finding,” the authors write, “is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people.” Moreover, “high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals.”
To put it in layman’s terms, the study suggests that if you want to be a big success on Facebook, it helps to be a dullard.

Jackson, NJ Board of Education candidates debate

Amanda Oglesby:

Antonoff said the proposed budget is inflated by purchases of technology “gimmicks” such digital whiteboards and audio equipment.
“We didn’t have those,” he said. “Computer is a distraction. . . . You learn the basics first.”
Disagreeing, Acevedo said schools need modern technology to stay globally competitive.
Technology is a tool to save money, said Hughes, who opposes the proposed budget. Systems that enable Internet-based communication between parents, teachers and students save money the district would spend on ink, paper and postage, she said.

Jackson School District.

Teachers union protests Washington Post

Keach Hagey:

The Washington Teachers Union staged a protest, complete with a giant inflatable rat, in front of the Washington Post building today for reasons that are, frankly, hard to understand.
According to the Post, which gamely reported on the event, the protesters claimed that the Post’s parent company’s reliance on Kaplan was affecting its editorial page coverage by making it skew anti-teacher.
From the Post:

Resistance to test-based school reform is growing

Valerie Strauss:

There are growing protests from teachers and parents across the country over high-stakes standardized testing and other school reform measures — many of which the Obama administration has encouraged states to undertake — as well as over huge cuts in public education.
The pushback has largely been local, though a national march on Washington is being organized for this summer as states move to enact reforms that call for more charter schools and vouchers and that make standardized testing more important than ever in evaluating schools, students and teachers.
In North Carolina, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools this spring field tested 52 (yes 52) new standardized tests, including four exams each for kindergartners and first-graders, and kids lost as much as a week of instruction. That won’t stop the district from adding even more tests next year, for art, music and physical education, and many teachers and parents fear that this is becoming the face of public education.

Transforming the School of Education?

Joe Carey:

In 2008, Molly Rozga went back to school just shy of her 27th birthday.
Rozga wanted to work in a field where she could give back to the community and have the added comfort of job security. So, she chose education, thinking teaching was one of the most stable careers out there.
But in the current political environment, Rozga, now a 29-year-old junior education major at Alverno College, sees teaching as something “a little scary to be going into.”
“It’s giving me a little bit of anxiety,” Rozga said.
With Gov. Scott Walker proposing to cut state aid to public schools and restrict collective bargaining for public school teachers as part of a plan to close a $3.5 billion state budget deficit, students like Rozga are stepping into a new world in their chosen field.

On School Buses, Ad Space for Rent

Catherine Rampell:

Cash-hungry states and municipalities, in pursuit of even the smallest amounts of revenue, have begun to exploit one market that they have exclusive control over: their own property.
With the help of a few eager marketing consultants, many governments are peddling the rights to place advertisements in public school cafeterias, on the sides of yellow school buses, in prison holding areas and in the waiting rooms of welfare offices and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The revenue generated by these ads is just a drop in the bucket for states and counties with deficits in the millions or billions of dollars. But supporters say every penny helps.
Still, critics question whether the modest sums are worth further exposing citizens — especially children — to even more commercial pitches.

Labor’s last stand? Education reform will come at a cost

Matthew DeFour:

The new state law, held up pending a legal challenge, forbids most public worker unions from negotiating salary schedules, benefits and workplace rules with employers. It still allows bargaining over inflationary increases in “total base wages,” but generally makes it harder for unions to operate.
It also means school administrators would be able to make major changes to pay scales, school calendars and work rules without consulting teachers.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, said that while teachers won’t necessarily obstruct changes, they are less likely to offer new ideas themselves if they are not covered by a union contract.
“Innovation takes risk,” Bell said. “Risk in an environment where your protection is gone is a much different proposition.”
Just days before Walker announced his changes to collective bargaining, WEAC had announced support for a statewide teacher evaluation system and performance-based pay. That overture, however, has been largely overshadowed by the union controversy.

John Kuhn: Why Shouldn’t Teachers Be Graded, Too?

Anthony Cody:

Three weeks ago I shared an interview with Superintendent John Kuhn of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in the great state of Texas. Today he offers us a reflection on a recent experience at the state Capitol.
Yesterday I testified before the Public Ed. Committee of the Texas House of Representatives on behalf of a bill that would initiate a two-year moratorium on standardized testing, known as STAAR in Texas. Here are the remarks I shared before the representatives began asking questions:

I have a dilemma: I personally believe state testing is morally compromised because TEA has overwrought test security to the point that it is a parody of big government interference and micromanagement, because testing has turned the adventure of education into something that feels more like an assembly line, because Austin has nudged our teachers from behind their podiums and has said Pearson can assess better than they can, because student creativity is being sacrificed in favor of standardization, because scores are used to unfairly punish schools and teachers that embrace the neediest students, and because test scores have been used during the past five years to drive a labeling process that has systematically concealed the fact that some schools are comparatively underfunded. Is a high target revenue “recognized” school really any better than a low target revenue “acceptable” school? Texas has published these labels with no mention of funding disadvantages, leaving the public to assume underperforming schools do so for no other reason than they are less competent institutions. I’m worried STAAR will continue this kind of railroading of our local schools.

Gripping saga in a bad school

Jay Matthews

I am probably the nation’s most devoted reader of real-life high school reform drama, an overlooked literary genre. If there were a Pulitzer Prize in this category, Alexander Russo’s new book on the remaking of Locke High in Los Angeles would win. It is a must-read, nerve-jangling thrill ride, at least for those of us who love tales of teachers and students.
Readers obsessed with fixing our failing urban schools will learn much from the personal clashes and political twists involved in the effort to save what some people called America’s worst school. I remember the many news stories about Locke, and enjoyed discovering the real story was different, and more interesting.
Locke was not really our toughest high school. Russo finds some nice students and kind teachers. But its inner-city blend of occasional mayhem and very low test scores made it famous when its teachers revolted and helped turn it over to a charter school organization that tried to fix it by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Cal Day activity can’t drown out budget questions

Justin Berton:

Michael Jedlicka, a board member of the Cal Parents committee, answered more financial questions than usual from his booth at Saturday’s Cal Day – UC Berkeley’s annual open house that attracted 40,000 prospective students and their parents.
While most of the high school seniors already have been accepted for admission to Berkeley, many also have acceptances from other colleges and must make a decision on where to enroll by May 1.
The university made its best effort to close the deal. On a sunny day, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau addressed 5,000 incoming students, lab doors swung open to the public – you could take a look at a stem cell or start your own earthquake in the seismology lab – and the Cal marching band trumpeted and drummed their way through campus.
Yet in the wake of steep budget cuts and Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent announcement that UC tuition could double to $20,000 in the 2012-13 academic year, Jedlicka said, many visiting parents wanted to know how it would impact their child’s college experience – and their own checkbook.

Big steps in education set Indiana on right path

The Indianapolis Star:

Indiana is on the verge of taking its most important strides forward on education in decades.
The final, and most important, piece fell into place Friday when Gov. Mitch Daniels announced that he would ask the General Assembly to expand full-day kindergarten to every school district in the state. That unexpected announcement, which dropped late in the legislative process, was made possible by a much better than expected revenue forecast.
Schools also will fare better than planned in the overall state budget. Districts absorbed 3 percent budget cuts last year, and the proposal before Friday was to write those reductions into the new two-year budget. Now, the governor and Republican legislators, who control the budget process, want to funnel an additional $150 million into public schools over the next two years.

Chicago Mayor Appoints New Schools Chief

Douglas Belkin & Staphanie Banchero:

Incoming Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel named a new schools chief Monday, choosing a leader known for his efforts to close low-performing schools, fire underperforming principals and link teacher pay to student test scores.
Jean-Claude Brizard, superintendent of schools in Rochester, N.Y., will succeed Terry Mazany, who has headed the nation’s third-largest school district since November 2010. Mr. Emanuel, who is scheduled to take office in May, made the announcement at Kelly High School on Chicago’s south side. The appointment must now be approved by the school board.
Mr. Brizard takes over a system that has seen three leaders in as many years. He will face a reported $750 million budget deficit, a looming contract negotiation with the Chicago Teachers’ Union, and a district that has lost its mantle as a national leader in education innovation.

The Newark Schools Governance Debate

Lisa Fleisher:

A visit to Newark by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Wednesday highlights the city’s emerging status as a focal point in struggle over how to improve public schools.
Duncan has high hopes for Newark, which is looking for a new superintendent at a time when both Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have made education their top issue. The Christie administration has approved a record number of public charter schools this year, many of them in Newark.
A $100 million education grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has meant, as Duncan put it, that “eyes of the country will be on Newark.”
“The goal in Newark is that in five years, not 10 years, it should be the best urban school system in the country,” Duncan said in an interview with the Star-Ledger.

Middleton Teachers, School Board Battle Over Contract

Channel3000:

The Middleton teachers’ union and school board continue to battle over the latest proposed contract.
The two sides met during a school board meeting on Monday and more than 50 people lined up to voice their concerns about the deal.
Many teachers said that they believe the contract takes away their collective bargaining rights by proposing non-negotiable changes, including the removal of “just cause for discipline.”
“Bullies are not welcome on school yards or on the school boards. It is time you step up to the plate and only deal with fiscal changes. Don’t play into politics going on throughout our state,” said Madison resident Cami Jo Sanner.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s AAA Bond Rating Under Threat

Gavyn Davies:

Standard & Poor’s surprised markets today with a warning that the AAA rating of US debt is now on “negative watch”, implying that there is a one-in-three chance that the US might lose its triple-A status in the next two years. Although there was nothing new in the underlying data cited by S&P, their judgment has clearly been impacted by the sharp political differences which have recently emerged in Washington about how to cut the deficit.
Both political parties agree that a large fiscal consolidation plan is needed, but they have widely different points of view on how the savings should be found. This has caused S&P to express scepticism about whether Washington can reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan and then stick to it over a series of difficult years.



via Wendy McElroy:

That’s how much the U.S. government spends, in inflation-adjusted dollars, per capita. Which means it’s adjusted for both inflation and population increase. And note that that graph has a logarithmic scale.
A hundred years ago, federal spending for each person was the equivalent of $200 in today’s dollars. After FDR, with all of his massive public spending, it was $1,000. This year, it’s over $12,000. How long can this continue?

James Cooper:

For the first time since the Great Depression, households are receiving more income from the government than they are paying the government in taxes. The combination of more cash from various programs, called transfer payments, and lower taxes has been a double-barreled boost to consumers’ buying power, while also blowing a hole in the deficit. The 1930s offer a cautionary tale: The only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936. That trend reversed in 1936, after a recovery was underway, and the economy fell back into a second leg of recession during 1937 and 1938.

Competitive disadvantage: High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like no

Jon Marcus:

Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she’s lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong’s younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn’t sound Asian.
“It’s a difficult time to be Chinese,” says Wong, a scientist who develops medical therapies. “There’s a lot of jealousy out there, because the Chinese do very well. And some people see that as a threat.”
Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet.
The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.

Detroit Moves Against Unions: Mayor and Schools Chief Leverage State Law to Force Change, Close Budget Gaps

Matthew Dolan:

A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.
Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district’s 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment.
Earlier last week, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing presented a $3.1 billion annual budget to City Council in which he proposed higher casino taxes and substantial cuts in city workers’ health care and pensions to close an estimated $200 million budget gap.
Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools.
……
Mr. Bobb, appointed in 2009 by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and retained by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, pledged last week to use those powers to deal decisively with the district’s $327 million shortfall and its educational deficiencies. Mr. Bobb raised the possibility of making unilateral changes to the collective-bargaining agreements signed with teachers less than two years ago.
He is also expected to target seniority rights that protect longtime teachers from layoffs and give them the ability to reject certain school placements.
The Detroit Federation of Teachers will likely fight him on these issues. The union couldn’t be reached for comment.

Houston’s best and worst schools

Houston Chronicle:

The local nonprofit Children at Risk has released to the Chronicle its 2011 ranking of public elementary, middle and high schools in the eight-county Houston area. Each year, the list of the area’s best and worst campuses generates a great deal of discussion and, in some cases, debate. Talking about schools is a good thing, we think.
There is, of course, no one perfect way to grade schools. The Children at Risk methodology is designed to evaluate schools on multiple academic measures and goes beyond the state’s accountability system, which is based largely on whether students pass (or are projected to pass) the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Children at Risk looks at the higher standard of “commended” on the TAKS. At the high school level, the most weight is given to a six-year graduation rate, calculated by Children at Risk. No matter what a school is doing, if students don’t graduate, then did it get the job done?
The formula also gives a boost to schools with larger concentrations of low-income children in an attempt to adjust for the impact of poverty. Children at Risk attempted to include as many schools as possible in the rankings, but those with insufficient data or atypical grade-level configurations were excluded. The rankings are based on public data from the Texas Education Agency from 2010 or 2009 (using the most recent year available).

The New Madison Teachers, Inc. Pact will be Devastating for Support Staff

Fran Zell:

Early on in the protests at the Capitol, I ran into a friend who predicted that the unions would agree to all of Walker’s benefit cuts if he agreed to allow collective bargaining.
“They would do that?” I asked innocently. “They wouldn’t tell the governor to rescind tax cuts on businesses before he attempts to balance the budget on the backs of workers?”
“Just wait,” she said.
Little did either of us imagine that the unions would soon concede to all of the benefit cuts BEFORE Walker agreed to talk. When you give up key issues before the other side is at the table, there isn’t much left to negotiate. It is certainly not the way we educators teach children to deal with a bully.
However things turn out with Walker’s damaging repair bill, Wisconsin unions have helped dig themselves into a hole. Some unions may fare better than others. I am distraught about Madison Teachers Inc., which I belong to as a substitute teacher. In its rush to negotiate with the district immediately after Walker signed the bill, MTI plunged headlong into the very waters it was trying to avoid. The union allowed the lowest paid to, in effect, sail away in a leaky lifeboat.

Proposed Missouri standards overhaul alarms educators

Claudette Riley:

Proposed overhaul of state accreditation rules but remain alarmed by its far-reaching implications.
They continue to raise serious questions about the proposal, which, among other things, would
– increase the number of already controversial state-mandated exams,
– require districts to be reviewed annually, instead of every five years, and
– force districts to track the progress of graduates and to report a variety of new details, including how many students complete federal financial aid forms.

The labor movement after Wisconsin

Lee Sustar:

Two days before the big Los Angeles labor demonstration, for example, a coalition of six unions representing more than 14,500 municipal workers reached a tentative agreement on a contract with an estimated $400 million in concessions, including cancellation of scheduled pay raises and a measure that would almost double workers’ contributions to retirement benefits from 6 to 11 percent. That’s close to the pension contribution of 12.8 percent mandated for Wisconsin public-sector workers in Walker’s anti-union bill.
The LA contract, if approved, will save the city government $1 billion over 30 years. “The structural impact will go on forever,” admitted Service Employees International Union Local 721 President Bob Schoonover.
Meanwhile, California Gov. Jerry Brown is using the Republican minority in the state legislature as a bogeyman to pressure state employees’ unions to take concessions beyond the $400 million they accepted last year. “I tell my union friends, you’re going to have to make some changes now, or much more drastic changes later,” Brown said.
Nevertheless, union leaders are giving Brown a pass, despite budget proposals that will devastate working people in California. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently gave a speech in which she denounced Walker and defended public-sector workers–but embraced Brown’s call for “shared responsibility, one that will hopefully lead to a better budgetary outcome in the short term, and a better economic output in the long term.”

Real horsepower comes to Boys & Girls Club

Susan Troller:

The six-horse rig Jason Goodman drove through south Madison late Wednesday stopped traffic, but few drivers seemed to mind, instead waving, grinning, giving thumbs up and taking pictures on cell phones.
Mammoth black Percheron draft horses, each weighing over a ton, provided the horsepower for a heavy-duty wagon that rumbled out of the Alliant Energy Center grounds, up West Badger Road, right on Park Street, right on Buick and then into Penn Park. For the next couple of hours, about 100 kids from the Boys and Girls Club got a chance to see the powerful horses — Bud, Barney, Hank, Titan, Shaq and Rock — up close and personal.
The horses, wagon, driver and handlers are part of the Texas Thunder traveling equine show, scheduled to perform several times a day at the Midwest Horse Fair, which began Friday and continues through Sunday at the Alliant Energy Center.

Rahm Says Chicago School Days Will Get Longer

Abdon Pallasch & Rosalind Ross:

Students in Chicago’s public schools will spend an extra hour or hour and a half in school each day once new legislation makes it out of Springfield, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
Emanuel said the issue of how much more teachers will get paid is open to negotiation — but not the question of whether the school day will be longer. It will be, Emanuel said.
“We’re not going to negotiate or discuss whether children get more instruction — we will work together so that gets done. I’m not deviating from that. I was clear about it,” Emanuel said after speaking at a South Side charter school.
More than any other mayoral candidate, Emanuel said he strongly backed curtailing teachers’ right to strike and a longer school day.
Chicago students are “cheated” by not getting as much school time as Houston’s students, Emanuel said.

Toddler Stella back to being a kid after life-changing brain operations

Lana Lam:

Clear Water Bay toddler Stella Sipma is back home after spending weeks in a New York hospital having three major brain operations that have changed her life dramatically.
The two-year-old, who suffers from a rare genetic disease that has caused major developmental delays, returned home to Sheung Sze Wan on Monday with mum Alison, dad Marcel and older sister Sophie.
Stella has tuberous sclerosis, which causes non-cancerous tumours to grow in vital organs, including the brain.
She was diagnosed at nine months and suffered daily violent seizures until last month when she had three operations to remove the tumours.
Before the operations, Stella was unsteady on her feet and had limited speech but since returning home, she has been full of energy, running around the house and playing with her older sister.
“The girls were really happy to be back and Stella was running around like a maniac,” Alison said.

The Default Major: Skating Through B-School

David Glenn:

PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. “Not many of them would pass,” he says.
Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.