All posts by Jim Zellmer

Ed Hughes, Beth Moss and Maya Cole: Cieslewicz forged good partnership with schools

Ed Hughes, Beth Moss and Maya Cole

As members of the Madison School Board, we appreciate that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s vision for the future recognizes that strong Madison public schools are vital to a growing and vibrant community.
Whether it’s been working together to establish the Meadowood Community Center, devoting city funds to improving safe routes for walking and biking to our schools or helping to plan for our new 4-year-old kindergarten program, the city under Cieslewicz’s leadership has forged a strong and productive partnership with the school district.
We look forward to continuing our work with Mayor Dave on smart and effective responses to the challenges that lie ahead for our schools and our city.
Ed Hughes, Beth Moss and Maya Cole, members, Madison School Board

IMPORTANT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep Planning Grant!

Kaleem Caire, via email:

March 28, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
In 30 minutes, our team and the public supporting us will stand before the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education to learn if they will support our efforts to secure a charter planning grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men.
For those who still do not believe that Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men is a cause worthy of investment, let’s look at some reasons why it is. The following data was provided by the Madison Metropolitan School District to the Urban League of Greater Madison in September 2010.
Lowest Graduation Rates:

  • In 2009, just 52% of Black males and 52% of Latino males graduated on-time from the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) compared to 81% of Asian males and 88% of White males.

Lowest Reading Proficiency:

  • In 2010, just 45% of Black, 49% of Hispanic, and 59% of Asian males in 10th grade in the MMSD were proficient in reading compared to 87% of White males.

Largest ACT Performance Gap:

  • Just 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors in the MMSD who completed the ACT college entrance exam were “college ready” according to the test maker. Put another way, a staggering 93% of Black and 82% of Latino seniors were identified as “not ready” for college. Wisconsin persistently has the largest gap in ACT performance between Black and White students in the nation every year.

Children Grossly Underprepared for College:

  • Of the 76 Black seniors enrolled in MMSD in 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam required by Wisconsin public universities for admission consideration, just 5 students (7%) were truly ready for college. Of the 71 Latino students who completed the ACT, just 13 students (18%) were ready for college compared to 403 White seniors who were ready.
  • Looking at it another way, in 2010, there were 378 Black 12th graders enrolled in MMSD high schools. Just 20% of Black seniors and completed the ACT and only 5 were determined to be college ready as state above. So overall, assuming completion of the ACT is a sign of students’ intention and readiness to attend college, only 1.3% of Black 12th graders were ready for college compared to 36% of White 12th graders.

Not Enrolled or Succeeding in College Preparatory Courses:

  • High percentages of Black high school students are completing algebra in the 9th grade but only half are succeeding with a grade of C or better. In 2009-10, 82% of Black 9th graders attending MMSD’s four comprehensive high schools took algebra; 42% of those taking the class received a C or better compared to 55% of Latino and 74% of White students.
  • Just 7% of Black and 17% of Latino 10th graders attending MMSD’s four comprehensive high schools who completed geometry in 10th grade earned a grade of C or better compared to 35% of Asian and 56% of White students.
  • Just 13% of Black and 20% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Literature courses with a grade of C or better compared to 40% of White and 43% of Asian students.
  • Just 18% of Black and 26% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Writing courses with a grade of C or better compared to 45% of White and 59% of Asian students.
  • Just 20% of Black 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed 2 or more credits of a Single Foreign Language with a grade of C or better compared to 34% of Latino, 69% of White and 59% of Asian students.
  • Just 33% of Black students took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses in 2009-10 compared to and 46% of Latino, 72% of White and 70% of Asian students.
  • Just 25% of Black students who took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses earned a C or better grade in 2009-10 compared to 38% of Latino, 68% of White and 64% of Asian students.

Extraordinarily High Special Education Placements:

  • Black students are grossly over-represented in special education in the MMSD. In 2009-10, Black students made up just 24% of the school system student enrollment but were referred to special education at twice that rate.
  • Among young men attending MMSD’s 11 middle schools in 2009-10, 39% of Black males were assigned to special education compared to 18% of Hispanic, 12% of Asian and 17% of White males. MMSD has been cited by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for disparities in assigning African American males to special education. The full chart is attached.
  • Of all students being treated for Autism in MMSD, 14% are Black and 70% are White. Of all Black students labeled autistic, 77% are males.
  • Of all students labeled cognitively disabled, 46% are Black and 35% are White. Of all Black students labeled CD, 53% are males.
  • Of all students labeled emotionally disabled, 55% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled ED, 70% are males.
  • Of all students labeled learning disabled, 49% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled LD, 57% are males.

Black students are Disproportionately Subjected to School Discipline:

  • Black students make up a disproportionate percentage of students who are suspended from school. Only Black students are over represented among suspension cases.
  • In 2009-10, MMSD levied 2,754 suspensions against Black students: 920 to Black girls and 1,834 to Black boys. While Black students made up 24% of the total student enrollment (n=5,370), they accounted for 72% of suspensions district-wide.
  • Suspension rates among Black children in MMSD have barely changed in nearly 20 years. In 1992-93, MMSD levied 1,959 suspensions against a total of 3,325 Black students. This equaled 58.9% of the total black enrollment in the district compared to 1,877 suspensions against a total of 18,346 (or 10.2%) white students [Dual Education in the Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, February 1994, Vol. 7, No. 2].
  • Black males were missed a total of 2,709 days of school during the 2009-10 school year due to suspension.
  • Additionally, 20 Black students were expelled from the MMSD in 2009-10 compared to 8 White students in the same year.

    The Urban League of Greater Madison his offering MMSD a viable solution to better prepare young men of color for college and beyond. We look forward to making this solution a reality in the next 18 months.
    Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men 2012!
    Onward!
    Kaleem Caire
    President & CEO
    Urban League of Greater Madison
    Main: 608-729-1200
    Assistant: 608-729-1249
    Fax: 608-729-1205
    Website: www.ulgm.org

  • Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy Charter school.

    Appeals court sides with Seattle schools over math text choice

    Katherine Long:

    The Washington State Court of Appeals has reversed an earlier decision in King County Superior Court that found Seattle’s choice of a new high-school math series was arbitrary and capricious.
    The appellate court found no basis for the Superior Court’s conclusion in February 2010 that the Seattle School board “was willful and unreasoning in coming to its decision” when it chose the Discovering Math series of textbooks for algebra and geometry in high school math.
    The school district has been using the series since the start of the 2009 school year.
    Some parents have criticized the Discovering Math series, saying it is inferior to other series and that its emphasis on verbal descriptions makes it difficult for some students to understand, especially those for whom English is a second language.

    Much more on the Seattle Discovery Math lawsuit, here.

    Corbett’s vision for Pennsylvania schools: His plan includes voter approval of budgets.

    Dan Hardy:

    When it comes to changing public education in Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett’s proposed billion-dollar funding cut to school districts this year could be just the beginning.
    The governor also is pushing a legislative agenda that could significantly affect the way children are taught, the teachers who instruct them, and how schools craft their budgets.
    One proposal that many suburban school boards fear and many taxpayers relish calls for voter approval of proposed district budgets when tax increases exceed inflation. If this were in effect now, more than 80 percent of the districts in Philadelphia’s suburbs probably would have to vote.
    Other Corbett initiatives would:
    Give school boards, for the first time, a free hand to lay off teachers to cut costs, with the decider in the furloughs being classroom performance, not seniority.
    Create vouchers providing state funding so low-income children in struggling schools could transfer to private ones. The role of charter schools would also be expanded.

    ‘Education was the main thing’

    Mark Lett:

    Richard Riley worked the levers of politics, government and education for more than a half-century by giving respect, taking advice, setting expectations, staying focused and never giving up.
    Most of all, he never gave up.
    As it turned out, Riley did it right. His career has been as successful as it has been tenacious. Now 79 and living and working in his hometown of Greenville, Riley:
    Mobilized support to overwhelm anti-tax sentiment and pass a tax increase for public education in 1984, producing what Southern historian Walter Edgar called “one of the most important pieces of education legislation ever passed in South Carolina.”

    Misplaced Priorities At a Session on Chicago Schools

    James Warren:

    Terry Mazany, interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, was like a baseball manager beckoning a star relief pitcher an inning early to hold a lead. Rather than Mariano Rivera, he waved in Kate Maehr to last week’s Board of Education meeting.
    He had opened an ultimately melancholy session dominated by budget woes by suddenly and without explanation defending the Breakfast in the Classroom program, quietly pushed through in January.
    The defense was due partly to an earlier mention in this column that generated lots of “Huh, are they serious?” responses among parents and others, according to board officials. The program mandates that the first instructional class open with pupils having breakfast at their desks, even at schools already offering pre-class breakfast.

    Discussion of Kansas ed spending ignites at public forum

    Michael Strand:

    Everybody knows education is expensive, but exactly how expensive depends on what you want to count.
    And a difference of opinion over that issue led to a few tense moments at Saturday mornings’s legislative forum in Salina.
    Ken Kennedy, director of operations for the Salina School District, asked local lawmakers the final question of the forum, asking whether lawmakers had suggestions for what spending districts should cut, and how soon they’ll know how much money they’re getting for the 2011-12 school year.
    Sen. Pete Brungardt, R-Salina, fielded the question first, saying it would likely be May before the Legislature passes a final budget — and that more cuts are likely.
    “It’s clear the trend has been down,” Brungardt said, adding that after accounting for inflation, school districts now have about the same funding as in 1990.

    Cost of borrowing to send child to a for-profit college may be too high

    Dear Liz: My son will be going to a for-profit technical school about 120 miles away from home. Unfortunately, we have not saved any money for his college education. What are our best options for borrowing to pay for his college education, which will cost about $92,000 for four years? He is not eligible for any financial aid other than federal student loans. Our daughter will graduate debt free with her bachelor’s degree in December. Since we concentrated on her education first, our son kind of got left behind.
    Answer: Please rethink this plan, because your family probably cannot afford this education.

    New L.A. schools chief to take lower pay: $275,000

    Jason Song:

    The incoming Los Angeles schools superintendent told the Board of Education on Saturday to withhold part of his $330,000 salary because of serious projected budget shortfalls.
    In an email to his bosses, John Deasy said he had been meeting with employees to explain potential budget-cutting scenarios. Last month, the board approved sending preliminary layoff notices to almost 7,000 teachers.
    “All of our work and plans for restoration are in serious peril,” Deasy wrote. “This is remarkably painful and emotional. As such, given our current circumstances, at this time I respectfully will not accept the salary offered in your contract.”
    Deasy will not forgo his entire salary but will instead keep receiving the pay — $275,000 — he has been getting as deputy superintendent. The $55,000 difference represents a nearly 17% reduction.

    It’s back to the basics in Milwaukee schools: evidence-based approach to improving literacy teaching and learning across all schools and classrooms

    Heidi Ramirez:

    The district has focused reading instruction and has launched an intensive effort aimed at boosting dismal outcomes. The MPS chief academic officer asks: Will we be given enough time?
    Walk in many Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms today, and here’s what you’re likely to see:
    There will be a teacher sitting at a table in a corner, guiding a handful of young readers or writers in targeted instruction. The other students, whether they be 4-year-olds or teenagers, will be actively engaged in small group work.
    What you’re not likely to see: a teacher holding court at the center of the room of mostly silent children, heads down on tables or blank stares on their faces.
    As the district’s new literacy effort takes hold, our students increasingly work in small groups at hands-on literacy stations set up around the room. Students, who otherwise would have had to wait for their teacher to pause and for their turn to speak, are instead guiding their own practice and that of their peers.

    Atlanta Public Schools underfunded its pension plan

    Russell Grantham:

    Beset by scandal over irregularities in test scores, Atlanta Public Schools has another, longer-running scandal on its hands: The district has underfunded its pension for custodians, bus drivers and cooks by more than a half-billion dollars.
    APS has the worst underfunding of any large public pension plan in the state, according to a recent state audit. While it is generally agreed that, at any given time, a pension plan should contain 80 percent to 90 percent of the money it is obligated to pay out, APS has assets to cover just 17.4 percent of its pension promises.
    The Jan. 1 report by the state Audits and Accounts Department found that pensions run by Georgia’s cities, counties and other local governments are under water by almost $4.5 billion. Three plans run by the city of Atlanta, plus the APS plan, accounted for nearly 40 percent of the deficit statewide.

    A Mentor’s Goal: Keeping At-Risk Chicago Teens Alive

    David Schaper:

    In Chicago last school year, 245 public school students were shot, 27 of them fatally.
    It’s a high toll. To try to find out who might be next, Chicago Public School officials developed a probability model by analyzing the traits of 500 shooting victims over a recent two-year period. They noted that the vast majority were poor, black and male, and had chronic absences, bad grades and serious misconduct.
    Using this probability model, they identified more than 200 teenagers who have a shockingly good chance of being shot — a better than 1 in 5 chance within the next two years.
    Project Director Jonathan Moy says the probability model isn’t perfect, but it’s working.

    Milwaukee could become first American city to use universal vouchers for education

    Alan Borsuk:

    Milwaukee’s private school voucher program has broken new and controversial ground often in its 21-year history. Now, it is headed toward what might well be another amazing national first.
    If Gov. Scott Walker and leading voucher advocates prevail, Milwaukee will become the first city in American history where any child, regardless of income, can go to a private school, including a religious school, using public money to pay the bill.
    Universal vouchers have been a concept favored by many free-market economists and libertarians since they were suggested by famed economist Milton Friedman more than half a century ago. Friedman’s theory was that if all parents could apply their fair share of public money for educating their children at whatever school they thought best, their choices would drive educational quality higher.
    Coming soon (fairly likely): Milwaukee as the biggest testing ground of Friedman’s idea.
    But not only is it hard to figure out what to say about the future of vouchers, it’s not easy to know what to say about the past of Milwaukee’s 21-year-old program of vouchers limited to low-income students except that it has been popular (more than 20,000 students using vouchers this year to attend more than 100 private schools) and there is not much of a case (except in some specific schools) that it has driven quality higher, both when it comes to many of the private schools specifically and when it comes to the educational waterfront of Milwaukee.

    Madison School District Proposes a 3.2% Property Tax Increase for the 2011-2012 Budget

    Matthew DeFour:

    Madison teachers wouldn’t pay anything toward their health insurance premiums next year and property taxes would decline $2 million under Superintendent Dan Nerad’s 2011-12 budget proposal.
    The $359 million proposal, a 0.01 percent increase over this year, required the closing of a $24.5 million gap between district’s estimated expenses from January and the expenditures allowed under Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed state budget, Nerad said.
    Nerad proposes collecting $243 million in property taxes, down from $245 million this year. Because of an estimated drop in property value, the budget would mean a $90 increase on an average Madison home, down from $170 this year. That amount may decrease once the city releases an updated average home estimate for next year.

    Related taxbase articles:

    Education ‘group think’ gets in the way of teaching kids to read

    Dick Lilly, via a kind reader’s email:

    School administrators should end their obsession with average test scores and focus instead on an absolute standard: Can each child actually read?
    For more than two decades now, the Seattle school district has been telling us that its most important goal is “closing the achievement gap.” Nevertheless, it is not unfair to say that only incremental progress has been made.
    Seattle, as everyone knows, is not alone. “Closing the achievement gap” has come to stand for the perennial problems of American K-12 education — though the inability of high schools to graduate more than two-thirds of their students has been running a close second.
    Among the results of this frustratingly persistent problem is a vast, energetic industry of school reform, headlined in recent years by the involvement of powerful private foundations and the policy directives of the federal government: “No Child Left Behind” in the “Race to the Top.”

    PLEASE JOIN US MONDAY! Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep; costs clarified



    March 25, 2011
    Dear Friends & Colleagues,
    On Monday evening, March 28, 2011 at 6pm, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) Board of Education will meet to vote on whether or not to support the Urban League’s submission of a $225,000 charter school planning grant to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. This grant is essential to the development of Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men, an all-male 6th – 12th grade public charter school.
    Given the promise of our proposal, the magnitude of longstanding achievement gaps in MMSD, and the need for adequate time to prepare our final proposal for Madison Prep, we have requested full support from the school board.
    Monday’s Board meeting will take place at the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton Street) next to the Kohl Center. We hope you will come out to support Madison Prep as this will be a critical vote to keep the Madison Prep proposal moving forward. Please let us know if you’ll be attending by clicking here. If you wish to speak, please arrive at 5:45pm to register.
    Prior to you attending, we want to clarify misconceptions about the costs of Madison Prep.
    The REAL Costs versus the Perceived Costs of Madison Prep
    Recent headlines in the Wisconsin State Journal (WSJ) reported that Madison Prep is “less likely” to be approved because of the size of the school’s projected budget. The article implied that Madison Prep will somehow cost the district more than it currently spends to educate children. This, in fact, is not accurate. We are requesting $14,476 per student for Madison Prep’s first year of operation, 2012-2013, which is less than the $14,802 per pupil that MMSD informed us it spends now. During its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep’s requested payment from MMSD drops to $13,395, which is $1,500 less per student than what the district says it spends now. Madison Prep will likely be even more of a savings to the school district by the fifth year of operation given that the district’s spending increases every year.
    A March 14, 2011 memo prepared by MMSD Superintendent Daniel Nerad and submitted to the Board reflects the Urban League’s funding requests noted above. This memo also shows that the administration would transfer just $5,541 per student – $664,925 in total for all 120 students – to Madison Prep in 2012-2013, despite the fact that the district is currently spending $14,802 per pupil. Even though it will not be educating the 120 young men Madison Prep will serve, MMSD is proposing that it needs to keep $8,935 per Madison Prep student.


    Therefore, the Urban League stands by its request for equitable and fair funding of $14,476 per student, which is less than the $14,802 MMSD’s administration have told us they spend on each student now. As Madison Prep achieves economies of scale, reaches its full enrollment of 420 sixth through twelfth graders, and graduates its first class of seniors in 2017-18, it will cost MMSD much less than what it spends now. A cost comparison between Madison Prep, which will enroll both middle and high school students at full enrollment, and MMSD’s Toki Middle School illustrates this point.




    We have also attached four one-page documents that we prepared for the Board of Education. These documents summarize key points on several issues about which they have expressed questions.
    We look forward to seeing you!
    Onward!
    Kaleem Caire
    President & CEO
    Urban League of Greater Madison
    Main: 608-729-1200
    Assistant: 608-729-1249
    Fax: 608-729-1205
    Website: www.ulgm.org



    Kaleem Caire, via email.
    Madison Preparatory Academy Brochure (PDF): English & Spanish.
    DPI Planning Grant Application: Key Points and Modifications.
    Update: Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes: What To Do About Madison Prep:

    In order to maintain Madison Prep, the school district would have to find these amounts somewhere in our budget or else raise property taxes to cover the expenditures. I am not willing to take money away from our other schools in order to fund Madison Prep. I have been willing to consider raising property taxes to come up with the requested amounts, if that seemed to be the will of the community. However, the draconian spending limits the governor seeks to impose on school districts through the budget bill may render that approach impossible. Even if we wanted to, we likely would be barred from increasing property taxes in order to raise an amount equal to the net cost to the school district of the Madison Prep proposal.
    This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that budgetary considerations prevent us from investing in promising approaches to increasing student achievement. For example, one component of the Madison Prep proposal is a longer school year. I’m in favor. One way the school district has pursued this concept has been by looking at our summer school model and considering improvements. A good, promising plan has been developed. Sadly, we likely will not be in a position to implement its recommendations because they cost money we don’t have and can’t raise under the Governor’s budget proposal.
    Similarly, Madison Prep proposes matching students with mentors from the community who will help the students dream bigger dreams. Effective use of mentors is also a key component of the AVID program, which is now in all our high schools. We would very much like to expand the program to our middle schools, but again we do not have the funds to do so.

    Mr. Hughes largely references redistributed state tax dollars for charter/virtual schools – a portion of total District per student spending – the total (including property taxes) that Madison Prep’s request mentions. I find Madison Prep’s fully loaded school based cost comparisons useful. Ideally, all public schools would publish their individual budgets along with total District spending.

    Great Teacher for Every Course

    Tom Vander Ark:

    here are some problems that are too hard to solve in traditional ways. Teacher effectiveness and school choice fit the bill–they are complicated and contentious. The good news is that digital learning allows us to solve these problems in new ways.
    It’s pretty easy to solve the teacher problem if we focus on providing a ‘great teacher for every course’ rather than a great teacher in every classroom.’
    If educational funding follows the student to the best course available (online or onsite) it provides a much more powerful and accountable model than partial funding for a private school down the street.
    Digital Learning Now recommends that all students should be able to “customize their education using digital content through an approved provider.” More specifically, DLN recommends that states:

    Building Teacher Evaluation Systems: Learning From Leading Efforts

    The Aspen Institute:

    Ambitious reforms across the country are reshaping teacher evaluation and performance management. Designing new systems for measuring teacher effectiveness and using that information to increase student achievement are at the heart of these efforts and at the center of important policy debates. Yet little information exists about how these systems work in practice and how to use evaluations in concert with other levers to improve teaching and learning.
    As policymakers and education leaders seek to accelerate reform in this area, it is essential to learn from efforts already underway. The Education & Society Program published three new reports: profiles of the performance management work in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and the Achievement First (AF) charter school network; and a synthesis of issues that emerge from the two profiles. Both DCPS and AF are at the forefront of efforts to re-design teacher evaluation, performance management, and compensation policies. The commonalities, distinctions, and early lessons learned in these initiatives represent an important learning laboratory for the field.

    Losing Our Way

    Bob Herbert:

    So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
    Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
    Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

    Japanese School A Blessing And A Curse For Students

    Jason Beaubien:

    In Japan, efforts to gain control of the crippled nuclear reactor continue at the same time that hundreds of thousands of people are living in shelters and millions of people are attempting to restart their normal lives.
    Officials in Japan now put the confirmed death toll at more than 10,000. Most of the deaths were due to the massive tsunami that pounded the Japanese coast.
    Some of the dead are parents and students swept out of a schoolyard in the coastal city of Ishinomaki.
    It was the last day of school and classes were letting out early. When the powerful 9.0 earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m., some parents had already picked up their children from the Kama Elementary School in Ishinomaki. Others were lingering in the parking lot that faces the sea. Still others were on their way to collect their kids from the school.

    The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, a Review

    Reviewed by Katharine Beals, via a kind reader’s email:

    The Death and Life of the Great American School System was wildly hailed as author and education critic Diane Ravitch’s dramatic about-face on No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and school choice. What’s missing from this sensational take is that Ravitch has changed her mind only about school reform tactics, and not about what constitutes good schools, or about her top priorities in fostering them.
    She still stresses curriculum–apparently still her topmost priority. She still supports a challenging, content-rich core curriculum of the sort promoted by E.D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Foundation. She still believes that the best teachers are those with who know their fields well and are enthusiastic about teaching. She still believes that attracting such teachers is nearly as essential, if not as essential, as curriculum reform.
    It’s in the question of why we’ve strayed so far from these ideals that Ravitch has shifted. While her earlier research (c.f. Left Back, published in 2000) critiqued, inter alia, a variety of prominent fad-peddling members of the education establishment, Ravitch now appears to blame just three factors: the high-stakes testing and accountability of No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the meddling in education by powerful outsiders like politicians and businessmen; and school choice ventures that skim off the best students and leave the rest to the most struggling of public schools.
    On NCLB testing and accountability, Ravitch is convincing. Tests can be effective, comprehensive measures of achievement, in which case teaching “to” them is equivalent to teaching students what they should learn anyway. But, as Ravitch explains, NCLB’s top-down, high-stakes, punitive approach deters states from devising tests that come anywhere near this ideal.

    Goodbye, flagship, and take elitism too

    Chris Rickert:

    My wife and I decided long ago that we have no intention of trying to bankroll the traditional college experience for our children.
    With tuition increases far outpacing inflation, I figure four years of college for each of my three kids would cost in the neighborhood of $300,000, and this journalist and his social worker wife would never be able to afford that.
    So when UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin says she wants her university to set sail from the constraints of the UW System, I say bon voyage!
    Respected public universities such as UW-Madison increasingly have sought status and brand-recognition as they prey on that bizarre middle-class American fetish for higher education that assumes a student’s choice of college is possibly the most important choice of his life.

    For that reason alone, he does not deserve Seattle School Board re-election

    Charlie Mas:

    In an earlier thread, skeptical wrote about Director Sundquist:

    Sundquist also opened the last, hardest, of this year’s budget sessions by making a sweeping statement that staff’s board recommendations should be baseline accepted as the starting point of discussion.

    For that reason alone, he does not deserve re-election. Which actions or statements by Board Directors make them un-deserving of re-election?
    I’ll provide the second one.

    GOP seeks to expand school voucher program

    Matthew DeFour:

    A Republican Assembly leader plans to add to the state budget bill an expansion of Milwaukee’s voucher program to other school districts, potentially giving more families in cities such as Madison access to private and religious schools.
    Voucher advocates say the time is ripe to expand the program to other cities, especially with Republicans in control of state government and a recent study suggesting students in the 20-year-old Milwaukee program are testing as well or better than their public school counterparts, with a lower cost per pupil.
    They also argue that vouchers would level the playing field for private schools, which have seen enrollment decline as public charter schools have gained popularity.
    But voucher opponents say expansion would further cripple public schools, which already face an $834 million cut in state funding over the next two years.
    And state test scores to be released Tuesday, which for the first time include 10,600 Milwaukee voucher students, could suggest they are testing no better than poor students in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
    “Given the proposed unprecedented cuts to public education as well as results from our statewide assessments, I question plans in the 2011-13 state budget for expanding the choice program in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said.

    Community College vs. Student Loan Debt

    Ron Lieber:

    One of the articles in our special section on Money Through the Ages (produced in partnership with the public radio program Marketplace Money) is about an 18-year-old high school senior with a choice to make. Should he go into at least $6,500 in debt each year to attend a private college or university like Juniata or Clark, or is he better off working part time and attending community college for two years before transferring to one of those colleges?

    Zac Bissonnette, the author of Debt-Free U and a senior in college himself, encourages students and families to take on as little debt as possible. He urged the subject of our profile, Mino Caulton of Shutesbury, Mass., to consider the University of Massachusetts, though Mr. Caulton was worried that he wouldn’t get enough individual attention there.

    Video, Notes & Links: Wisconsin Senate Bill 22 Hearing

    via a kind reader’s email:

    Clusty Search: Wisconsin Senate Bill 22.

    Seattle’s Strategic Plan Refresh

    Charlie Mas

    The District is preparing a “Strategic Plan Refresh“. They will review the Strategic Plan and decide which projects to continue, alter, defer, or remove. The refresh will have to include goals, timelines, status, and budgets for each of the projects.
    I spoke with Mark Teoh last night and asked if he could include two items in the Refresh program:
    1) A record of the various projects in the Strategic Plan, including those that were originally in it, those that were added, those that were completed, and those that were simply dropped without notice. Remember how there was supposed to be an APP Review in the plan? Remember how there was going to be an alternative education review? These projects just silently faded away. At the same time, Capacity Management and World Language curricular alignment, which were not part of the original plan, have been added.
    2) A review of the community engagement protocols and some table that shows which of the projects are meeting the requirements of the protocol (it’s easy – none of them).

    A Nation of Dropouts Shakes Europe

    Charles Forelle:

    Isabel Fernandes, a cheery 22-year-old with a constellation of stars tattooed around her right eye, isn’t sure how many times she repeated fifth grade. Two, she says with a laugh. Or maybe three. She redid seventh grade as well. She quit school with an eighth-grade education at age 20.
    Ms. Fernandes lives in a poor suburb near the airport. She doesn’t work. Employers, she says, “are asking for higher education.” Even cleaning jobs are hard to find.
    Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe. It is also the least educated, and that has emerged as a painful liability in its gathering economic crisis.
    Wednesday night, the economic crisis became a political crisis. Portugal’s parliament rejected Prime Minister José Sócrates’s plan for spending cuts and tax increases. Mr. Sócrates handed in his resignation. He will hang on as a caretaker until a new government is formed.

    Teachers protest IB program

    Mark McDermott:

    Fifty teachers from Redondo Union High School stormed the Board of Education Tuesday night to protest the implementation of the International Baccalaureate program.
    The group included a majority of the school’s department heads and some of the longest-tenured and most respected teachers at RUHS. Their concerns ranged from the cost of the program to what they argued was a lack of teacher input and a greater need to address the needs of less high-achieving students.
    Linda Dillard, the chair of the school’s science department, told the school board that teachers have not been allowed to engage in a “data-driven, fact-finding process” to help determine if the program is a good fit for RUHS.

    Race, Poverty and the Public Schools

    Letters to the New York Times:

    Re “Separate and Unequal,” by Bob Herbert (column, March 22):
    In spite of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, sadly the struggle goes on. The Department of Education reported in 2008 that 70 percent of white schoolchildren attend schools where at least 75 percent of the students are white, whereas more than half of all black children in industrial states attend schools where over 90 percent are members of minority groups. Go into any urban school and it is clear that 57 years after Brown, the schools have largely remained segregated.
    Years of social science research have cited the benefits of integrated schools. In our work with the West Metro Education desegregation initiative in Minneapolis public schools, the students in grades 3 to 7 who got on the bus to attend suburban schools made three times the progress in both reading and math when compared with similar students who did not participate.
    Teacher quality remains a consistent important factor. Ultimately, though, students in diverse classrooms benefit from collaboration and teamwork with those whose family circumstances are different from theirs. Eric J. Cooper
    President, National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
    Stamford, Conn., March 22, 2011

    On Public Education

    Jerry Pournelle:

    “How Not to Lay Off Teachers” in today’s Wall Street Journal (link) rather weakly repeats something that everyone who studies the education mess knows. It’s worth your time if you have any doubts that seniority is not the right way to determine who should be paid public money to teach in public schools. Of course just because everyone knows something doesn’t mean much.

    The steep deficits that states now face mean that teacher layoffs this year are unavoidable. Parents understandably want the best teachers spared. Yet in 14 states it is illegal for schools to consider anything other than a teacher’s length of service when making layoff decisions.
    It gets worse. “Many people don’t realize that teachers are not evenly distributed nationwide,” says Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project, which has released a new report on the nationwide impact on quality-blind layoffs. “Fourteen states have these rules but about 40% of all teachers work in those states, and they’re the states with the biggest budget deficits.” In addition to New York, the list includes California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.

    What do students miss with a virtual education?

    Christopher Dawson:

    I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
    Let me start with something that ZDNet’s digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet’s upcoming 20th anniversary:

    NEArmageddon: The State of States You Haven’t Read About

    Mike Antonucci:

    Kansas – A House committee passed a bill that would allow employee associations other than Kansas NEA access to teacher bulletin boards and orientation sessions.

    Florida – The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would “require unions to get written authorization from union members in order to use those dues for political purposes.”

    Alabama – The House Ways and Means Committee passed a bill that would provide taxpayer-funded liability insurance for education employees. In states where workers are not compelled to join unions or pay agency fees, liability insurance from the union is a powerful recruiting tool.

    Why One Innovator is Leaving the Public Sector

    Andrew Rotherham:

    Lately you can’t turn around in education without bumping into someone talking about innovation. The President is asking Congress for more federal support for educational innovation in this year’s budget, more and more school districts are naming “innovation officers,” and just last week a group of Silicon Valley start-up veterans launched a new incubator for innovative education companies. But while innovation is a catchy buzzword, on the ground conditions are often anything but innovative. This week, the resignation of a school administrator in New York City who most readers have probably never heard of vividly illustrates that disconnect.
    Joel Rose, 40, got his start teaching in Houston with Teach For America. After law school and a stint at Edison Schools, he landed at the New York City Department of Education leading a personnel strategy for that massive 1.1. million student system. Rose was struck, as many observers are, by how little technology had changed education relative to most other fields during the past few decades. So he started a program within the New York City Public Schools called “School of One” that uses technology to offer a completely customized schooling experience for each student.

    Why He Did It: For good reason, the Capitol exploded when Gov. Walker struck at collective bargaining: The Rise of Teacher Unions



    Christian Schneider, via a kind reader’s email

    By now, the political lore is familiar: A major political party, cast aside by Wisconsin voters due to a lengthy recession, comes roaring back, winning a number of major state offices.
    The 43-year-old new governor, carrying out a mandate he believes the voters have granted him, boldly begins restructuring the state’s tax system. His reform package contains a major change in the way state and local governments bargain with their employees, leading to charges that the governor is paying back his campaign contributors.
    Only the year wasn’t 2011 — it was 1959, and Gov. Gaylord Nelson had just resurrected the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Certain of his path, Nelson embarked on an ambitious agenda that included introduction of a withholding tax, which brought hundreds of protesters to the Capitol. Nelson also signed the nation’s first public-sector collective bargaining law — the same law that 52 years later Gov. Scott Walker targeted for fundamental revision.
    Two different governors, two different parties, and two different positions.
    Ironically, their assertive gubernatorial actions may produce the same disruptive outcome. By empowering the unions, Nelson’s legislation led to public-sector strikes and work stoppages. By disempowering the unions, Walker’s actions might lead to public-sector strikes and work stoppages.
    In Walker’s case, union members reluctantly agreed to his pension and health-care demands, but have fought desperately to preserve their leverage in negotiating contracts. That raises the basic question of the Madison showdown: Why is Scott Walker so afraid of collective bargaining?
    The answer can be found in the rise of the state’s teachers unions.

    Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

    Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

    Not-so-public education: A Colorado school voucher program seems likely to benefit mostly middle-class students and religious schools.

    Los Angeles Times

    Supporters of school vouchers like to say that their goal is to provide a higher-quality education for the children who need it most. The latest events in Colorado say otherwise. A voucher program there seems more likely to benefit middle-class children and religious schools than low-income public school students, and to worsen inequities in education.
    Last week, the board of the Douglas County School District voted for a pilot program that will give the parents of 500 of its 60,000-students about $4,500 each — 75% of what the district receives in per-pupil funding — to use toward tuition at participating private schools of their choice. Many of the private schools in the area are religiously based.
    Even in Colorado, where a dollar stretches a lot further than in Southern California, $4,500 falls significantly short of private school tuition. Most schools there range from about $7,000 up to $14,000. Clearly, the parents poised to benefit most from this taxpayer-sponsored perk are those with a few thousand to spare to fill in the price gap. There might be scholarships for some of the needier students — about 10% of the Douglas County students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches — but no one is promising anything.

    The College Derby Andrew: Ferguson’s delightful plea for sanity about college admissions.

    Timothy Noah:

    I have this problem. I can’t read self-help books. Like everybody else, I’ve experienced my share of life challenges–“life challenges” being the self-help euphemism for “problems”–and I would never pretend not to need any help in facing them, solving them, or at least getting through them. I accept the principles of, and am myself no stranger to, modern psychotherapy. But whenever I try to cope with one of life’s predictable stress points by reading a self-help book, I can’t manage it. My eyes glaze over. I think “This person is an idiot,” or “This person thinks I’m an idiot,” or “Maybe I am an idiot, because I can’t follow this.” Within minutes I toss the book aside and start digging around for a decent novel.
    hat I’ve come to believe is that psychological advice isn’t worth much if it isn’t rooted in personal experience. So instead of reading self-help books I read memoirs about the kinds of experience I’m trying to cope with. It doesn’t especially matter whether the author went about confronting his problem in a sensible way, nor even, necessarily, whether the author came out of the experience with a clear understanding of what he did right and what he did wrong. For instance, just about the last person I’d look to for personal advice about anything is Joan Didion. But when my wife died six years ago, I devoured Didion’s best-selling memoir about widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking, and then for good measure I read the script she wrote when she adapted it into a one-person show starring Vanessa Redgrave. (If asked to blurb either, I’d write, “Loopy but compelling.”) I read Donald Hall’s lovely book of poems about his wife’s death, Without, and Hall’s more tedious nonfiction reworking of the same material, The Best Day, The Worst Day. I read a mediocre book called Widow written three decades earlier by a publicist for Little, Brown named Lynn Caine, and a brilliant book–the gold standard on widowhood–called A Grief Observed, written four decades earlier by C.S. Lewis, an author I’d previously avoided like the plague. Some of these books were more helpful than others, but all provided some form of “self-help.” Meanwhile, a stack of self-help books pressed on me by well-meaning friends gathered dust.

    Chicago Public Schools deficit up to $720 million

    Rosalind Rossi:

    Interim Chicago Schools CEO Terry Mazany Wednesday delivered bad news — followed by more bad news.
    The estimated Chicago Public School deficit for next school year is $720 million, Mazany said. That’s up $20 million from just before his predecessor walked out the door in late November.
    Mazany called for “shared sacrifice,” including from teachers. Their pay raises will cost $80 million but, Mazany said, any successor to him appointed after Rahm Emanuel is seated as mayor May 16 will have to decide whether to try to re-negotiate the teachers’ contract to trim that tab.
    The interim CEO also proposed a series of what he called “urgently” needed actions that would impact 4,800 students at 17 schools, displace up to 100 teachers and up-end the jobs of, eventually, nine principals.

    How Miami students can get a free college education

    Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

    Miami Dade College announced Wednesday the American Dream Scholarship. The ‘free college’ offer could help boost college graduation rates – a goal of President Obama’s.
    College tuition is going up and financial aid is on the chopping block in many states, but in the Miami area, one college is offering successful high school graduates a price tag that’s hard to refuse: free.
    Miami Dade College – the largest institution of higher education in America, serving more than 170,000 students on eight campuses – announced its American Dream Scholarship on Wednesday. It will cover 60 credits at a value of about $6,500 – enough to earn a two-year degree or start in on one of the four-year programs offered by the community college.
    This spring’s high school graduates in Miami-Dade County will be the first to benefit from the “free college” offer. To qualify for the new scholarship, students must have a 3.0 grade-point average and score well enough on entry tests to show they don’t need remedial math or reading courses. Normally, about a third of the college’s entering students pass at that level.

    Hand-Crafted Digital Texts

    Scott McLemee:

    Despite an abiding preference for the traditional book, I started using an e-reader about seven months ago — and have found it insinuating itself into daily life, just as a key chain or wallet might. For there is a resemblance. A key chain or wallet (or purse) is, in a sense, simply a tool that is necessary, or at least useful, for certain purposes. But after a while, each becomes more than that to its owner. To be without them is more than an inconvenience. They are extensions of the owner’s identity, or rather part of its infrastructure.
    Something like that has happened with the e-reader. I have adapted to it, and vice versa. Going out into the world, I bring it along, in case there are delays on the subway system (there usually are) or my medical appointment runs behind schedule (likewise). While at home, it stays within reach in case our elderly cat falls asleep in my lap. (She does so as often as possible and has grown adept at manipulating my guilt at waking her.) Right now there are about 450 items on the device. They range from articles of a few thousand words to multivolume works that, in print, run to a few hundred pages each. For a while, my acquisition of them tended to be impulsive, or at least unplanned. Whether or not the collection reflected its owner’s personality, it certain documented his whims.

    In Preschool, What Matters More: Education or Play?

    Bonnie Rochman:

    It’s practically been relegated to superstar status in the annals of parenting lore: the Manhattan mom who sued her daughter’s $19,000-a-year preschool on grounds that the 4-year-old was not sufficiently prepared to tackle the entrance test for private kindergarten.
    Earlier this month, Nicole Imprescia filed her lawsuit against the York Avenue Preschool, claiming that her daughter, Lucia, was not primed to take the intelligence test and was instead relegated to a mixed-age classroom where talk revolved around — oh, the horror — shapes and colors. As a result, Imprescia withdrew her daughter from the preschool. (More on Time.com: Perspective on the Parenting Debate: Rich Parents Don’t Matter?)
    “The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom,” the suit stated.

    Questions Abound as the College-Rankings Race Goes Global

    Ellen Hazelkorn:

    It is amazing that more than two decades after U.S. News & World Report first published its special issue on “America’s Best Colleges,” and almost a decade since Shanghai Jiao Tong University first published the Academic Ranking of World Universities, rankings continue to dominate the attention of university leaders. Indeed, the range of people watching them now includes politicians, students, parents, businesses, and donors. Simply put, rankings have caught the imagination of the public and have insinuated their way into public discourse and almost every level of government. There are even iPhone applications to help individuals and colleges calculate their ranks.
    More than 50 country-specific rankings and 10 global rankings are available today, including the European Union’s new U-Multirank, due this year. What started as small-scale, nationally focused guides for students and parents has become a global business that heavily influences higher education and has repercussions well beyond academe.

    Parents want child with peanut allergy removed from school

    Amy Graff:

    As more kids are diagnosed with food allergies, more schools are faced with figuring out how to deal with students who require a special environment. Should schools be expected to inconvenience all students when only one of them has a severe peanut allergy? This debate is currently playing out at a school in Florida.
    A 6-year-old girl at a school in Florida has a peanut allergy so severe that she could have a reaction if she were to breath traces of nut dust in the air. Her elementary school in Edgewater, Fl., has taken extraordinary measures to accommodate her.
    All students are now required to wash their hands and rinse out their mouths before stepping inside the classroom. Desks must be regularly wiped down with Clorox wipes. School administrators have banned all peanut products and snacks are no longer allowed in the class. Earlier this month, a peanut-sniffing dog walked through the school to make sure everyone is following the rules.
    The school is legally obligated to take these safety precautions because of the Federal Disabilities Act, according to Nancy Wait, the the spokeswoman for Volusia County Schools.

    Madison teachers given until April 15 to rescind fake doctors’ notes

    Matthew DeFour:

    Madison teachers who missed school last month to attend protests and turned in fraudulent doctor’s notes have been given until April 15 to rescind those notes, officials said Thursday.
    The district received more than 1,000 notes from teachers, human resources director Bob Nadler said. A couple hundred of those were ruled fraudulent because they appeared to be written by doctors at the Capitol protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to limit collective bargaining.
    Teachers who don’t rescind fraudulent notes could receive a disciplinary letter of suspension, the most serious form of discipline aside from termination, Nadler said. The suspension would be considered already served — the time missed during the protests.
    “We didn’t want to give anybody more time off,” Nadler said. “They can’t afford it. We can’t afford to have them gone any more. I don’t think kids need their teacher gone another two days.”

    Hundreds attend, testify at legislative hearing on charter school changes

    Susan Troller:

    Testimony at the Capitol over a controversial bill that would strip control over charter schools from locally elected officials and place it in the hands of a politically appointed state-wide authorizing board drew hundreds on Wednesday to a standing-room-only Senate education committee hearing.
    Senate Bill 22, authored by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) would also fund independent charter schools ahead of traditional public schools. I wrote about the bill on Tuesday and it’s generated a robust conversation.
    Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad testified in opposition to the bill, and so did local school board member Marjorie Passman. Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and a strong proponent of the proposed boys-only Madison Preparatory Academy for minority students, testified in support of the bill. Madison Prep, if approved, will be a publicly funded charter school in Madison.

    Saving Young Black Men

    Sunny Schubert:

    Kaleem Caire is tired of waiting.
    He has watched in frustration as yet another generation of young black men fail to reach their potential, as the achievement gap continues to widen, as the economic disparity between blacks and whites continues to grow.
    “We have failed an entire generation of young men of color. We have not provided them with an education, and that is why so many of them end up in jail. It has to stop,” he says.
    And if that means taking on the educational establishment and the teachers union, Caire is ready.
    “In public schools, you are so strapped by rules and regulations. If teachers work outside the rules of the union, they get slapped,” he says.
    Caire believes he knows how to address the needs of minority children in school, because he himself was on the verge of failing and turned himself around to become a national leader in educational reform.

    Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, here.

    A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Vouchers

    Greg Forster, Ph.D.

    This report collects the results of all available empirical studies using the best available scientific methods to measure how school vouchers affect academic outcomes for participants, and all available studies on how vouchers affect outcomes in public schools. Contrary to the widespread claim that vouchers do not benefit participants and hurt public schools, the empirical evidence consistently shows that vouchers improve outcomes for both participants and public schools. In addition to helping the participants by giving them more options, there are a variety of explanations for why vouchers might improve public schools as well. The most important is that competition from vouchers introduces healthy incentives for public schools to improve.
    Key findings include:

    Suburban Parents Blocked In Try For Charter Schools

    Claudio Sanchez:

    Charter schools may be multiplying fast across the country, but they’re stalled in affluent, high-performing suburban school systems. Of the 5,300 charter schools in the U.S., only one-fifth are in suburbs.
    Suburban parents are frustrated by what they see as arbitrary policies to keep charter schools from spreading and are fighting back.
    That’s the case with some parents in Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington, D.C., where Ashley Del Sole lives. Her oldest daughter is about to start school, but she can’t go to her neighborhood school because it’s overcrowded.
    “My daughter is actually slated to go to a middle school next year for kindergarten because of the overcapacity problem,” Del Sole says.

    Can we achieve more with less?

    Dan Deming:

    With millions being cut from Kansas schools by legislative action or local boards reacting to reduced funding, it is easy to fall into a trap of believing that with less money our schools can’t possibly do as good of a job educating our kids. Probably, but not necessarily.
    Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire who is devoting much of his fortune to improving education and who co-chairs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote a provocative column this month in the Washington Post. Highlights from Gates’ conclusions are spotlighted in this week’s column to remind us that spending more money does not ensure better-educated kids and that some radical changes in how the dollars we now pour into education might significantly improve outcomes.

    Liberty School Board Candidate Profile

    Kim Marie-Graham:

    Fiscal Responsibility-The District has had the luxury of having sufficient resources to fund many non-essential expenditures. Our economy and funding levels have changed and will continue to do so going forward. The district must re-evaluate priorities. Significant cuts have been made to large ticket items but there is now work to do to improve the culture of fiscal responsibility. All decisions need to be made with an interest in doing what is best for the education of our children. If we can change the culture, we will be in a better position to afford the things we need to do, like pay our employees fairly.
    Educating Our Children-The Liberty Public Schools have a long and proud history of excellence in education. It is essential that we continue to focus on our primary mission, the education of our children. We must ensure our financial resources are spent on classrooms, proven curriculum, books and employees. We must continue our high academic achievement by maintaining and re-establishing, where possible, the essential programs we have lost. As popular culture continues to call for school reform, we must ensure we are making decisions that will always lead to the right end goal, an excellent education for all of our children.

    Judge Rules Chris Christie’s Education Cuts Violated State Constitution

    George Zornick:

    New Jersey has one of the most progressive education laws in the country — the Abbott v. Burke case produced several rulings requiring the state to equalize public education funding for all students, meaning that poor, urban districts must receive the same relative amount of funding as wealthy suburban districts. Abbott vs. Burke requirements have been characterized as “one of the most remarkable and successful efforts by any court in the nation to cut an educational break for kids from poor families and generally minority-dominated urban neighborhoods.”
    Today, a judge found that Gov. Chris Christie (R) violated Abbott v. Burke requirements when he slashed $820 million in state aid to schools last year, because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts:

    Clark Board of Education Approves 2011-2012 School Budget

    Jessica Remo:

    A proposed 2011-2012 school budget was approved unanimously by the Board of Education Tuesday night during a public hearing at the Clark Council Chambers. The spending plan would allocate just over $33.2 million, an increase of $225,000 over the previous year. The budget, if approved by voters, will mean a tax hike of three tax points, which translates into approximately $33 for the average taxpayer.
    Tax increases to fund schools is nothing new. In 2010, Clark residents saw a $36 rise in their tax bills following a loss of more than $671,000 in state aid. For the 2011-2012 school year, the budget includes $414,448 in funding from the state, an increase of $325,460 over last year’s spending plan. Overall, the budget yields a 0.83 percent increase over the 2010-2011 plan, well below the state-mandated 2 percent cap.
    Considering the economic climate and rising costs, Superintendent of Schools Kenneth Knops noted that the school board took on a daunting task — maintaining classroom quality while minimizing tax impact — and largely succeeded.

    Clark schools spends $14,896.85 per student. Madison’s most recent 2010-2011 citizen’s budget document indicates total planned spending of $358,791,418, which yields $14,661.90 per student (24,471 students).

    Justice Department sues on behalf of Muslim teacher, triggering debate

    Jerry Markon:

    Safoorah Khan had taught middle school math for only nine months in this tiny Chicago suburb when she made an unusual request. She wanted three weeks off for a pilgrimage to Mecca.
    The school district, faced with losing its only math lab instructor during the critical end-of-semester marking period, said no. Khan, a devout Muslim, resigned and made the trip anyway.
    Justice Department lawyers examined the same set of facts and reached a different conclusion: that the school district’s decision amounted to outright discrimination against Khan. They filed an unusual lawsuit, accusing the district of violating her civil rights by forcing her to choose between her job and her faith.

    Teacher bonus program fails to lure and retain top teachers in Washington’s high-poverty schools

    Jim Simpkins, via email:

    – A $99 million teacher bonus program that Washington legislators designed to lure good teachers into high-poverty schools has not worked as intended, according to a new analysis from the University of Washington Bothell’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.
    “Not only has the $10,000 annual bonus failed to move effective teachers to high-poverty schools, it has also failed to make those teachers any more likely to stay in high-poverty schools than other teachers,” said the report’s author, Jim Simpkins.
    Washington State provides $5,000 bonuses to those teachers who undergo and pass the rigorous national board certification process, a credentialing program that marks its graduates as among the best teachers. The evidence, however, on whether national board certified teachers (NBCTs) are actually more effective teachers is mixed.
    In 2007, state legislators added a second $5,000 bonus for NBCTs who teach in a high-poverty school, defined as one where a large portion of students are on free or reduced-price lunches. According to the Center’s report, ” . . . less than 1% of Washington’s NBCTs move from low-poverty to high-poverty schools each year.”

    Harvard Isn’t Worth It Beyond Mom’s Party Chatter: Amity Shlaes

    Amity Shlaes:

    Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness.
    Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson’s new book, “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College” (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter’s perfect SAT scores:
    “‘We were really surprised at how well she did,’ the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel.
    Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask.”

    Idaho Teachers union takes first step to repeal education bills

    KTVB.com

    The day after two education reform bills were signed into law, the state teachers union filed petitions to repeal them.
    The actions of the Idaho Education Association could prevent those laws from ever being implemented.
    The IEA filed two petitions – one for each reform bill.
    It’s likely a third petition will also be submitted if the third education reform bill, which is up for discussion for tomorrow, also becomes law.
    “We just took the first step in the process,” said Sherri Wood, president of the Idaho Education Association.

    Separate and Unequal

    Bob Herbert:

    One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.
    Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.

    Newark teachers protest charter schools’ use of public school buildings

    Daniel Ulloa:

    The Newark Teachers Union sent an email to its 4,800 members urging them to protest against the placement of charter school in underutilized public school buildings at an Advisory board meeting held tonight at Barringer High School.
    According to the Wall St. Journal, Union President Joseph Del Grosso strongly objects to the placement of charter schools in public school buildings, claiming that some of the private funding that the Charter schools will make obvious the stark differences between the two types of schools.
    The meeting will begin at 6 P.M. Tuesday, and staff, students, and parents are all being invited to voice their concerns.

    Unions Give Teachers a Voice and a Platform From Which to Help Students

    Marc Korashan:

    When I began teaching in New York City in 1975 I didn’t initially see the need for a union or get involved in union activities. I knew, from history and the stories my parents and grandparents told, about the struggle for unions, but like so many today, I took the existence of a union and a contract for granted. My chapter leader gave me some advice and made sure I had all the necessary forms when I got appointed, but that was the sum of my union involvement until I moved to a position as an Education Evaluator on School Based Support Teams.
    In that position, as a Special Education Teacher/Education Evaluator, I was much more exposed to the whims of management than I had been as a classroom teacher. Administrators didn’t often walk into my SIE VIII classroom as most of them were afraid of the volatile students I taught. I worked with my co-teacher and we succeeded in making a difference for most of our students.

    The Value of Education — and Teachers

    The Somewhat Daily RAG:

    A pharmacist friend in Jasper, Alberta said that she was appalled at the seemingly light sentences given to abusers who kill children while someone murdering a police officer gets a life sentence.
    Her take on this disparity was, “How do you know that if this child grew up he wouldn’t become a policeman?”
    An interesting and provocative take which I recalled when thinking of the value of education and our teachers who seem to be under attack these days as overpaid (whoever though a teacher could be accused of that?) and greedy.

    As Little Girls and Boys Grow, They Think Alike

    Avery Johnson:

    Boys’ and girls’ brains are different–but not always in the ways you might think.
    A common stereotype is that boys develop more slowly than girls, putting them at a disadvantage in school where pressure to perform is starting ever younger. Another notion is that puberty is a time when boys’ and girls’ brains grow more dissimilar, accounting for some of the perceived disparities between the sexes.
    Now, some scientists are debunking such thinking. Although boys’ and girls’ brains show differences around age 10, during puberty key parts of their brains become more similar, according to recent government research. And, rather than growing more slowly, boys’ brains instead are simply developing differently.

    Georgia charter school ruling to reverberate across nation

    A state Supreme Court opinion that will decide who has the power to fund and open public charter schools is expected by March 31, ending a constitutional challenge that threatens to derail the education of thousands of students.
    The two-year legal battle launched by seven local districts over power, money and the exclusive right to open neighborhood schools has threatened Georgia’s reputation as a national leader in education reform.
    The feud began in 2009 when the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, a state board, got into the business of approving and funding neighborhood schools such as Cherokee Charter Academy.
    The school, which plans to open in the fall as Cherokee County’s first charter campus, received more than 1,300 applications for about 700 spots. It was denied twice by the Cherokee Board of Education.

    Capitol Smackdown: Teacher Union vs. Teacher Union

    Rick Green:

    Don’t let anyone tell you that things aren’t changing. AFT Connecticut is supporting a reform package that would accelerate creation of better teacher evaluation standards. The Connecticut Education Association is opposing it.
    The idea is to speed-up efforts already underway so that school districts have clear measures over what makes a good teacher. Instead of, say, how many years a teacher has been on the job — which is the seniority standard that dominates in school districts.
    The rival Connecticut Education Association will have none of this. John Yrkchik, in testimony prepared for delivery at tomorrow’s public hearing by the education committee, says:

    Bill Gates Seeks Formula for Better Teachers

    Stephanie Banchero:

    Bill Gates shook up the battle against AIDS in Africa by applying results-oriented business metrics to the effort. Now, he is trying to do the same in the tricky world of evaluating and compensating teachers.
    The Microsoft Corp. co-founder has moved on from a $2 billion bet on high school reform–much of it spent on breaking up big, failing high schools and replacing them with smaller ones.
    Now, he is venturing that improving teacher effectiveness is the key to fixing broken schools. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $290 million to school districts in Memphis, Tenn.; Hillsborough, Fla.; and Pittsburgh, and a charter consortium in California to build new personnel systems Mr. Gates hopes will be models for the country.

    Republican bill calls for a board of political appointees to authorize charter schools

    Susan Troller:

    Under a Republican-sponsored bill, nine political appointees would get to authorize public charter schools while local school districts foot the bill. The creation of this state-wide charter school authorizing board — with members appointed by the governor and the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly — is a key provision of legislation authored by Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills that will get a hearing on Wednesday at 10 a.m. at the Capitol before the Senate Education Committee.
    Senate Bill 22 not only de-emphasizes local control, but also creates changes in how teachers are certified and removes caps from the numbers of students who may enroll in virtual schools. A companion bill is also pending in the state Assembly.
    Opponents say the proposed changes would not only eliminate local control in favor of a new, politically motivated bureaucracy but would also siphon general aid away from all of Wisconsin’s 424 public school districts in favor of charters. But backers say it will remove current barriers that prevent charter schools from realizing their full potential.
    “This bill would get rid of the charter school lite culture we currently have in Wisconsin and allow these schools’ full potential for autonomy, flexibility and innovation to be fully realized,” says John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association for Charter Schools.

    Related:
    School Choice Wisconsin: Milwaukee residents favor school choice expansion

    Seattle School Board Policy: Criticize Privately, Praise Publicly

    Charlie Mas:

    At the recent School Board Retreat, the Board discussed a Governance and Oversight Policy that would define the Board’s job.
    On page 18 of this 21 page document, is a section titled “Board-Superintendent Communications”. Under this section is this set of guidelines for communication between the Board and the superintendent:
    Communications between the Board and the Superintendent will be governed by the following practices:

    a. Exercise honesty in all written and interpersonal interaction, avoiding misleading information
    b. Demonstrate respect for the opinions and comments of each other
    c. Focus on issues rather than on personalities
    d. Maintain focus on common goals
    e. Communicate with each other in a timely manner to avoid surprises
    f. Criticize privately, praise publicly
    g. Maintain appropriate confidentiality
    h. Openly share personal concerns, information knowledge and agendas
    i. Make every reasonable effort to protect the integrity and promote the positive image of the district and each other
    j. Respond in a timely manner to request and inquired from each other.

    Parent organizing meeting set in Dane County

    TJ Mertz, via email:

    Parents in Dane County have scheduled an event to update the public on Governor Scott Walkers’ devastating cuts to their children’s educational opportunities and to plan what they can do, together, to form advocacy groups and work for a better way. The event follows closely on the heels of a similar meeting in Greenfield, March 5, that saw over 400 people come together to plan the next step.
    March 27, members of the Dane County School Board Consortium and WAES (http://www.excellentschools.org) will host a community meeting — “The Future of Public Education and A Call to Action” — at the Monona Grove High School Commons (http://www.mononagrove.org/mghs/), 4400 Monona Drive, Monona. The hoped-for outcomes of the event, which runs from 3 to 4:40 p.m., include an increased understanding of school funding in Wisconsin, alternatives to cuts in funding, and formation of community advocacy groups. For more information, call 608-217-5938 or go to http://www.excellentschools.org/events/2011/budget/dane_county_flier.pdf.

    Teacher Tenure Reform: Applying Lessons from the Civil Service and Higher Education

    Public Impact:

    Research continues to confirm what intuition has told many of us for years: Teacher quality has a bigger impact on student learning than any other factor in a school. Nationwide, this finding has increasingly motivated policymakers and the public to focus reforms on dramatically improving teacher quality. National, state, and local leaders have initiated reforms designed to better prepare teachers for the classroom, more accurately identify and reward top teachers, support teachers’ development, and equip education leaders to identify and remove the very least-effective teachers.
    Discussions of teacher quality often lead to questions about which teachers are retained and dismissed in K-12 public schools, and thus to questions about tenure. Teacher tenure was designed in the early 1900s as a set of procedural protections against unfair and arbitrary dismissals.1 But today, concerns about the effect on student outcomes — along with budgetary constraints — dominate education reform discussions.
    As a result, leaders in a handful of states and districts have begun making changes to align their tenure systems with their goal of increasing student learning. Common changes include streamlining tenure protections and increasing the rigor of the tenure-granting process.2 Parallel efforts to improve the quality, accuracy, and rigor of educator evaluations have strengthened the basis for personnel decisions based on performance, and have fueled increased interest in tenure reform

    The Search for a New Way to Test Schoolkids

    Bill Tucker:

    Excerpt from Greg Toppo’s article:
    “…In other places, educators are experimenting with different ways to test what kids learn. Bill Tucker, a managing director at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says states like Oregon have led the way with so-called adaptive tests, computerized assessments that actually change as students answer questions right or wrong. Such tests satisfy the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law. Students sit for these tests any time they’re ready, from October on, and the tests allow schools to find out more about how much kids have learned. And since each test is essentially different from the last, they’re “harder to game,” Tucker says.
    In a bid to look beyond bedrock skills such as reading and math, a few states are also looking at other measures, such as how many of their high school graduates had to take remedial classes in college, Tucker says. Federal Race to the Top funding, part of the Obama administration’s education stimulus plan, is pushing states to develop databases that would allow states to track graduates.
    The federal government has also invested in two separate efforts by the states to overhaul tests; 45 states are participating. One project is aimed at developing so-called “through testing,” which would sample every few months how much students learn, then combine those scores with the score on an end-of-year test. The other project focuses on computer-adaptive tests, like those used in Oregon, to be given at year’s end.

    Atlanta Mayor Reed wants to appoint some school board members

    Ernie Suggs and Kristina Torres:

    Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed for the first time Monday raised the possibility he might try to seek special power to appoint city school board members, as he seeks to speed reforms mandated by the city system’s accrediting agency.
    His comments, however, were met cautiously, and are fraught with political and legal implications.
    “Full reform may not be able to be passed during this legislative session, but I do believe something can be done,” Reed said, adding that he would ask Gov. Nathan Deal to address the issue during a special reapportionment session in late summer. “If we continue to see the kinds of failures we are seeing now, he should consider adding this as a priority agenda item.”
    Reed said that he would ask for the temporary ability to appoint members to the school board, to help “break the logjam that exists around governance and a search for a new superintendent that is transparent.”

    Charter school changes would hurt quality

    Martin Scanlan:

    On Wednesday morning at the state Capitol, the Senate Committee on Education will hold a public hearing on several bills: SB 20, SB 22 and SB 34. Senate Bill 22, which deals with public charter schools, is the bill with the most statewide effects. (The others focus solely on Milwaukee Public Schools.)
    Two dimensions of SB 22 should give pause to citizens across the political spectrum because as written, the bill would make it less likely for charter schools to serve the common good. The effect will be to reduce the professionalism of the faculty and the level of local accountability for charter schools.
    Clearly, the quality of education that occurs across sectors – public to private, preschool to postsecondary – is in the public interest. We all benefit when our schools educate children not only academically but in numerous other manners as well. Society is strengthened to the degree that children learn reflection, compassion, creativity and generosity. Schools can foster cross-cultural relationships and nurture respect amongst a populace that is growing increasingly pluralistic. While all schools serve the common good when they promote such learning, these characteristics define our expectations of public schools.

    Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?

    Jennifer Moses:

    In the pale-turquoise ladies’ room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is “skanky,” that one is “really cute,” and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they’ve got under the party lights.
    But for the most part, there isn’t all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.

    What the Department of Education’s “82 Percent of Schools Are Failing” Statistic Really Tells Us

    Rachel Sheffield:

    According to the Obama Administration, the majority of the nation’s schools could be failing.
    In a statement to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce just over a week ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that under the current No Child Left Behind law, 82 percent of the nation’s schools may not be sufficiently educating students. But this is debatable.
    It is true that far too many schools in the United States are not providing students with a good, or even remedial, education. Children in the U.S. continue to fall behind their peers internationally, and too few students are able to reach proficient levels in crucial areas like reading and math. This spells tragedy for the future of our nation.

    Levy doubling taxes for Seattle education advances

    Chris Grygiel:

    The City Council on Monday moved forward an expanded Families and Education Levy that Seattleites will likely see on the ballot this fall – one that would nearly double the amount of taxes people are paying.
    The measure is part of a city push to increase children’s school readiness and performance, but it also comes at a time when the school district is reeling from a money management scandal that led to the superintendent being dismissed. The Council’s Special Committee on Educational Achievement for Seattle Schoolchildren voted unanimously to send the levy to the full Council, which will consider it March 28.
    One issue Councilmembers were alerted to was the fact that there would be a “bow wave” effect for this seven-year levy in which, beginning in 2016, the proposed spending wouldn’t keep up with proposed revenues. By 2019 that gap would be about $8 million a year – a situation that future policy makers would have to deal with.

    NEA Plan of Attack

    Mike Antonucci:

    “We Are at War” – NEA’s Plan of Attack. With the situation in Wisconsin stabilized, if not settled, there is time to examine the National Education Association’s strategy for its short-term future. Though reasonable arguments can be made that the collective bargaining measures in Wisconsin, Ohio and Idaho aren’t significantly different from the status quo in other states, there should be no mistake about it – NEA sees them as a threat to its very existence.
    The reasons are not hard to understand. NEA has enjoyed substantial membership and revenue growth during the decades-long decline of the labor movement. It is now the largest union in America and by far the largest single political campaign spender in the 50 states.
    But after some 27 years of increases, NEA membership is down in 43 states. The union faces a $14 million budget shortfall, and the demand for funds from its Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund is certain to exceed its supply. Even the national UniServ grants, which help pay for NEA state affiliate employees, will be reduced this year.
    In the past, NEA has routinely faced challenges to its political agenda, mostly in the form of vouchers, charters and tax limitations. But the state legislative and gubernatorial results in the 2010 mid-term elections emboldened Republicans for the first time to systematically target the sources of NEA’s power, which have little to do with education and everything to do with the provisions of each state’s public sector collective bargaining laws.

    Teaching to the Text Message

    Andy Selsberg:

    I’VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.
    I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital.
    So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, “Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you’re wearing now on eBay.” The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, “A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it’s erased, there are traces of everything that’s been written on it.”

    It’s School Admissions Season in New York City: Does your 18-month-old have what it takes?

    Katie Roiphe:

    When T.S. Eliot wrote about the cruelest month “mixing memory and desire”, he might also have had in mind that this is the season of school admissions in New York City. So as the sooty piles of snow melt into gray puddles, parents obsess over the letters they will and won’t receive from the school that will or won’t confer on their radiant progeny the blessing of its approval. It seems to be a challenge in this season for even the more sensible parents among us, even those who really have better things to do, not to fall prey to the prevailing fantasy that if your child is rejected from one of these desirable and enlightened places, he or she will be destined for a life of drug addiction, grand theft auto, or general exile.
    My 18-month-old recently had his first school interview. Apparently he sailed through it, though how is somewhat mysterious to me. Especially since he calls all fruits “apples” and sentences such as “Mommy. Moon. Get it” are not necessarily indicative of a huge understanding of the workings of the universe. However, no one is too young for the system, and a small obstacle like language cannot be permitted to get in the way of the judging and selecting and general Darwinian sorting to which it is never too soon to accustom yourself in this city. I have been asked to write recommendations for other one-and-a-half-year-olds for this same lovely school, and have thought of, but did not actually write, “He knows a lot about trucks.”

    Private school funding draws ire

    James Salzer and Laura Diamond:

    Lawmakers are cutting state appropriations and HOPE scholarship money for public college students at the same time they are maintaining relatively stable funding for private colleges.
    For weeks, students at Georgia State, Kennesaw State and other public universities have been the face of protest as legislators reduced the benefits of the nationally lauded HOPE scholarship program.
    But inside the Statehouse, a strong lobbying effort led by politically active private college presidents has worked to persuade lawmakers to maintain about $110 million in state funding for their colleges.

    MPS schools $11.2 million in debt: Decentralized Budgeting Leads to Deficits

    Erin Richards:

    Years of overspending in a system that gives principals autonomy over their buildings’ budgets has put more than 80 Milwaukee schools into significant debt, to a district total of almost $11.2 million.
    The most recent budget documents show Bradley Tech High School with the highest accumulated deficit of more than $750,000, and the Marshall High School building with a deficit of more than $557,000. Even elementary schools that are cheaper to operate have run up debt, such as Brown Street Academy, which had a fiscal deficit of more than $350,000.
    The concept of giving Milwaukee Public Schools principals more autonomy over their individual budgets, initiated during Howard Fuller’s term as superintendent and moved into place around the 1996-’97 school year, was intended to free principals from the slow-moving bureaucracy at the central office and give them more discretion over how their money was spent.

    Education reforms must include parent responsibility

    The Jackson Sun:

    It appears Gov. Bill Haslam got an earful from Jackson-Madison County educators on his recent visit to talk to them about school reforms in Tennessee. The governor asked for candor, and he got it. We believe that is a step in the right direction. Any meaningful dialogue about public education must deal with reality, not just education theory. Education reforms that don’t take into consideration the realities of the classroom and in the home are just wishful thinking.
    We support the education reform ideas put forth by former Gov. Phil Bredesen and largely adopted by Haslam. Higher standards, more students going to college, more charter schools, teacher evaluations tied in-part to test results and changes to teacher tenure rules are education reforms whose times have come in Tennessee.

    Obama’s War on Schools

    Diane Ravitch:

    Over the past year, I have traveled the nation speaking to nearly 100,000 educators, parents, and school-board members. No matter the city, state, or region, those who know schools best are frightened for the future of public education. They see no one in a position of leadership who understands the damage being done to their schools by federal policies.
    They feel keenly betrayed by President Obama. Most voted for him, hoping he would reverse the ruinous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of George W. Bush. But Obama has not sought to turn back NCLB. His own approach, called Race to the Top, is even more punitive than NCLB. And though over the past week the president has repeatedly called on Congress to amend the law, his proposed reforms are largely cosmetic and would leave the worst aspects of NCLB intact.

    Better education takes team work

    Kathleen Monohan Romano:

    Suzanne Fields writes in her March 5 column that teachers should put pupils first. I am appalled that teachers are being blamed for the state of education and the economy.
    I have been a teacher in the Capital Region for 25 years and have had the privilege of working with highly qualified, dedicated, hardworking professionals. Yes, we consider ourselves professionals. The union has fought to improve salaries and working conditions, and protect workers from favoritism.
    U.S. schools lag behind those in other countries because of America’s culture. There has been a decline in discipline, self-discipline and structure in the home, as well as a host of other social problems. Teachers should be respected by their students and the families they serve; instead, they are unfairly under attack. Students in other countries work harder; their culture is one of respect for education and teachers.

    Minnesota House GOP releases sweeping K-12 finance bill

    Tom Scheck:

    Republicans in the Minnesota House offered a K-12 Finance bill that would dramatically alter the how the state’s schools are funded, change teacher seniority rules and would allow public money to be spent for low-income students to attend private schools.
    The bill, released Saturday afternoon, makes a slight reduction in expected growth for K12 schools, but increases the amount of money in the state’s per pupil formula.
    “The debate in education this year isn’t going to be about how much we spend,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington as he compared his bill to Gov. Mark Dayton’s budget plan. “The debate instead will be what we fund and what reforms we make to the system.”
    Garofalo finds the extra funding in the per pupil formula by cutting the state aid schools rely on for integration. It also caps state special education funding at current levels, leading many Democrats to allege that it would force local school districts to raise property taxes to meet federal requirements. Garofalo says he plans to offer a bill later this session that would free up state requirements on schools with special ed students. He says that would save schools money.

    Legislation may chart new course for Wisconsin charter schools

    Alan Borsuk:

    I wrote several weeks ago (not in the newspaper) that education in Wisconsin was entering “unchartered” waters.
    Oops. For one thing, I meant “uncharted” waters. A mental slip.
    More important, the waters are, in reality, about to become increasingly chartered. Charter schools are in for major boosts, both in Milwaukee and statewide, if Republican proposals in the Legislature become law. In fact, a big step in that direction may come Wednesday when the state Senate Education Committee takes up three education bills.
    But as more charter boats get launched, expectations rise for successful sailing. Will the resulting schools be piloted well? Will they set sail with enough skill and power to carry more kids to success?
    “If we’re going to maintain our credibility and maintain legislative support, we’ve got to show that we’re not simply producing large numbers, we’re producing quality schools,” said Dennis Conta, who heads a coalition known as the Milwaukee Charter School Advocates.
    Nationwide, the verdict is out on whether charter schools are a worthy innovation. The good ones offer important contributions to school improvement efforts. But, overall, those star schools are far outnumbered by charter schools where things aren’t more successful than nearby conventional schools. Sometimes they’re worse. There is no convincing case that charter schools overall have made things better.

    A Teachers Education

    Jerrianne Hayslett:

    I can’t get that electrician out of my mind. He was so incensed at last week’s School Board meeting.
    Shameful, he said, that South Milwaukee teachers, on average, make more than the average income of South Milwaukeeans. Shameful that the School Board had signed a new contract with teachers.
    I don’t remember all the stats he reeled off, backed up with proof, he said, as he waved a sheaf of papers of god knows what along with his assertions. But the upshot was that the School District was paying its teachers way too much in relation to other school districts in the the state. Nevermind that South Milwaukee students’ high achievement rates reflect the high quality of teachers the district hires. Or maybe the electrician puts no value on high-achieving students. Warehousing kids to keep them out of parents’ hair during the day is OK?
    Now, I really, really respect the work electricians do. They and plumbers and roofers do stuff I could and would never, never do or be able to do.
    Neither would I be able to do what a teacher does. Even a kindergarten teacher. Or make that, most especially a kindergarten teacher. I’ve spend time in a kindergarten classroom–as a visitor. Believe me, I would last about 10 minutes if I had to be in charge of just wrangling a classroom of those children–adorable as they are–let alone actually have to teach them something.

    Milton School District reaches labor deal

    Neil Johnson:

    Under the new contract, union members would have to pay 12.6 percent of the district’s costs for health insurance coverage and half of the district’s cost for pension benefits.
    That could save as much as $1.1 million in 2011-12, according to district estimates.
    The deal also eliminates contract language for class size, and makes job performance the first criteria in layoffs and non-renewals, putting seniority second.
    It also allows teachers union members who retire by April 30 to leave retaining the health insurance benefits they had prior to Friday’s contract extension.
    The contract was drawn up in a draft proposal this week by Superintendent Bernie Nikolay and teachers union President Michael Dorn.

    MEA letter asks teachers about striking over school funding cuts

    Chris Christoff:

    Michigan’s largest teachers union is stirring up possible teacher strikes — perhaps a statewide strike — to protest what the union calls attacks by Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-led Legislature on unions, school funding and middle-class taxpayers.
    A letter by MichiganEducation Association President Iris Salters to 1,100 locals asks them whether the union should authorize “job action,” up to and including illegal strikes, to “increase pressure on our legislators.”
    The union and other education advocates have criticized Snyder’s proposal to cut funding to schools by $470 per pupil as excessive.

    The College Board Honors 4 Districts with Advanced Placement District of the Year Awards:
    Districts in Chicago; Tampa, Fla.; Hudson County, N.J.; and San Bernadino, Calif. to Be Recognized at the AP® Annual Conference in July

    The College Board:

    AP Achievement List of 388 school districts that have had similar successes.
    “These districts are defying expectations by expanding access while improving scores,” said College Board President Gaston Caperton. “They are experimenting with initiatives and strategies that have driven increases in average exam scores when making AP available to a much broader and more diverse student population. Over the next two months we will work closely with each of the AP District of the Year winners to document what they are doing so we can share their best practices with all members of the AP community.”

    Wisconsin Districts that achieved recognition:
    Appleton Area School District
    Columbus School District
    D C Everest Area School District
    Diocese of Madison Education Office
    Germantown School District
    Green Bay Area Public Schools
    Kimberly Area School District
    Marshfield School District
    Menomonie Area School District
    Middleton-Cross Plains Schools
    Monroe School District
    Mt Horeb Area School District
    Mukwonago Area School District
    School District of Hudson
    School District of Rhinelander
    Stevens Point Area Public School District
    Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated School District
    Watertown Unified School District
    Wauwatosa School District
    West Bend School District

    As Thomas Jefferson High School adds help for poor English skills, some Va. parents fume

    Kevin Sieff:

    As Northern Virginia became home to more immigrant families in recent decades, Fairfax County officials say they started programs to teach English as a second language at every school – about 200 of them. Except one.
    The holdout was the region’s hallowed magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where many assumed that steep admissions standards rendered such a program for English language learners unnecessary.
    But next year, at the behest of the school’s teachers, Thomas Jefferson – often called TJ – plans to hire its first instructor to cater to a growing number of students who thrive in math and science classes but sometimes struggle with English.
    The decision to hire the half-time teacher has reinvigorated a debate about TJ’s mission – namely, how heavily the school’s admissions policy should favor math and science standouts over well-rounded applicants with superior reading and writing abilities.

    School administrative costs, public information practices draw backlash from Baltimore County lawmakers

    Erica Green:

    County hired deputy superintendent at salary of $214,000 even as it cuts teaching positions
    Members of the Baltimore County delegation are demanding an explanation for the school system’s spending on top-level administration and its policy of requiring written requests for salary information.
    In a letter dated Friday, Sen. Kathy Klausmeier and Del. John Olszewski Jr. criticized the school system’s recent hiring of a deputy superintendent at an annual salary of $214,000 even as the proposed budget calls for cutting 196 teaching positions at middle and high schools.
    “Leaving 200 teaching positions vacant will no doubt mean larger class sizes and it may also mean that many important and valuable educational programs will either be understaffed or non-existent,” they said in the letter to school Superintendent Joe A. Hairston.
    They also called the salary of Renee Foose, who will begin her job as the county’s deputy superintendent next month, “appalling to many Baltimore County residents.”

    If education is really a priority, fund it

    Kathy Hayes:

    Many of us are still trying to get over the shock of Gov. Rick Snyder’s recent budget proposal and the devastating impact it will have on school districts. We knew there would be sacrifices from all sectors of the state, but we didn’t expect such a disinvestment in public education. Snyder is proposing in his 2011-12 budget a $300 per pupil cut on top of the current $170 cut. Adding to the damage is an expected increase in retirement costs that could equate to an additional $230 per pupil. Add the numbers together and districts could be facing a $700 per pupil reduction.
    Michigan districts have been reducing their budgets for the past 10 years. They’ve been forced to think creatively to provide quality education despite years of shrinking resources and one-time budget fixes. At the same time, the expectations for school reform and increased student achievement are at an all-time high, negative attacks on education are unprecedented. The result has been a focus on short-term fixes that offer temporary relief to schools with no assurance of long-term funding stability. Districts have been forced to plan from year-to-year as opposed to long-term planning which we know is more conducive to spawning true reform.

    Kathy Hayes is executive director of the Michigan Association of School Boards.

    Wisconsin Kids caught in the middle of stalemate between Walker, teachers union

    Chris Rickert:

    Meanwhile, American kids, when compared with those in other countries, are in the middle of the pack or worse when it comes to reading, math and science proficiency, according to a study released last week. And locally, Madison schools struggle with rising numbers of low-income students and poor minority graduation rates.
    These are not problems that can be solved by killing teachers unions, nor with teachers unions unwilling to participate in real reform.
    But I suppose that as long as Walker and the unions remain in fight mode, solutions will have to wait.

    Are “charter universities” the future of state-funded higher ed?

    David Harrison:

    On the face of it, the budget proposal that Ohio Governor John Kasich released this week looks like terrible news for state universities. Not only would Kasich’s plan slash higher education spending by 10.5 percent but it also would cap tuition increases at 3.5 percent a year.
    So it might come as a surprise that some university presidents received the plan warmly. Within hours, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee released a statement praising the governor for “understanding that higher education and our state’s long-term strength are inextricably linked.”
    Gee’s optimism rests on another aspect of the governor’s budget. In exchange for the budget cuts, Kasich would give state universities more autonomy in running their day-to-day affairs. Long-term, that could save schools money. “We at Ohio State continue to move aggressively in both advocating for regulatory freedom and reconfiguring and reinventing our institution,” Gee said.

    Upstate N.Y. schools anguish over aid cuts

    Nick Reisman:

    Upstate school district leaders and education groups are concerned that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed budget sharply reduces their state aid while sparing their downstate counterparts.
    “I think it’s completely immoral,” said Bloomfield Central School District Superintendent Michael Midey in Ontario County. “Why is it that my students take a hit? I just don’t understand it.”
    Among school districts facing the largest cuts per pupil, 97 percent are in upstate communities while 75 percent of those facing the smallest cuts are in downstate suburban communities, according to the Alliance for a Quality Education, an Albany-based union-backed advocacy group.
    At issue is a proposed $1.5 billion cut to education aid in Cuomo’s 2011-12 state budget plan, dropping local funding from $20.9 billion to $19.4 billion.

    The search for a new way to test schoolkids

    Greg Toppo:

    By all accounts, George Washington Elementary School is the very model of a modern urban public school.
    Tucked into an up-and-coming neighborhood west of downtown, the school has produced impressive results on annual Maryland School Assessment (MSA) math and reading tests over the past several years. By 2007, scores had improved so steadily that the U.S. Department of Education made it a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. First lady Laura Bush came to town to hand out the award.
    But in October 2008, a parent came forward with a troubling complaint: Someone was tampering with answer bubble sheets at Washington Elementary.
    Soon, Baltimore Schools CEO Andres A. Alonso showed up at a PTA meeting at Washington and found “very poor” parent turnout and “an absence of student or staff enthusiasm,” according to city records.

    Newark School Board Talks Benefits or No Benefits for Board Members

    Nike Megino:

    NUSD board members have medical, dental and vision coverage for themselves and their families that is paid for by the district. Possible changes sparked disagreements at budget workshop.
    Debates surfaced among school board members on whether they should receive health benefits, a topic that was brought up during a budget workshop held on Tuesday night.
    Disagreements began when board member Nancy Thomas presented the idea that board members should no longer participate in health benefits provided by Newark Unified School District.

    Can Anyone Change No Child Left Behind?

    Andrew Rotherham:

    The Obama Administration is doubling down on its push to overhaul the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan testified before Congress and aggressively urged action to revise the landmark and contentious education law that was passed in 2001. The President began this week with a speech at a northern Virginia middle school urging Congress to act and then spent part of Tuesday cutting several radio interviews prodding Capitol Hill even more.
    This isn’t the first time the Administration has implored Congress to change this law: it’s been a constant drumbeat since 2009 (the law was due to be “reauthorized,” Washingtonspeak for tuned up, in 2007 but Congress couldn’t agree on how to do it) and even during the 2008 campaign. Now, frustrated with the lack of action, Obama and Duncan are trying a new approach: scaring Congress into acting. Both Obama and Duncan are highlighting Department of Education estimates that more than 80% of schools will not meet performance targets this year if the law isn’t changed. One wag dubbed the new strategy a “fail wail.”

    Evaluating teachers is a delicate conversation

    Stephanie McCrummen:

    They met on an icy afternoon, Clay Harris, an elementary math teacher at the end of a hectic day, and Eric Bethel, one of the city’s new master educators, there to render a verdict on Harris’s teaching that could determine whether he kept his job.
    In polite, awkward silence, they walked to Harris’s empty classroom at Beers Elementary School in Southeast Washington and settled in kid-size chairs at a low, yellow table.
    Bethel set up his laptop. Harris took out a piece of paper for notes and began tapping his pencil on it.
    “I didn’t do everything perfectly,” he said almost apologetically.
    Bethel smiled. “No one does,” he said.

    New York Democrat governor hits school districts, defends education cut

    Daniel Wiessner:

    Claiming local school districts are playing “political games,” New York’s governor on Thursday defended his $1.5 billion cut to education spending.
    Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed cut in state aid to schools — the largest in history — is aimed at closing a $10 billion budget gap for the next fiscal year.
    Cuomo told reporters on Thursday that his cuts average 2.7 percent per school district, and could be offset by rooting out inefficiencies, using reserve funds and lowering the salaries of superintendents.
    “I know there is waste and abuse in the school districts; 2.7 percent in waste and abuse,” Cuomo said after a private meeting with legislative leaders. “Districts say ‘we don’t have any.’ I don’t believe it.”
    Teachers’ unions and school officials have attacked Cuomo’s plan, saying that they’ve already made steep cuts in recent years, and that unfunded state mandates are driving up costs. Aid was cut by $1.4 billion in 2010 after being frozen in 2009. School districts have also assailed the governor’s proposal to cap property tax increases.