All posts by Jim Zellmer

Double-Dipping: More public-school superintendents in Ohio are collecting pensions and paychecks

Ben Fischer:

Nearly one out of every three public school superintendents in Greater Cincinnati collect taxpayer-subsidized pensions while continuing to work.
This legal practice of “retiring” – thereby triggering pension benefits – and then returning to work within days at a handsome salary has become widespread among top local schools executives in recent years.
Occasionally, the deals make news, as it did for Kevin Bright in Mason and Gary Gellert in North College Hill, two relatively recent “retire-rehires.”
But dozens of other superintendents across the state have simply agreed to a deal with a friendly school board with little fanfare. They’re members in an exclusive club of superintendents who retire and return to their same job or rotate to another school district after signing lucrative contracts.
An analysis by Ohio’s eight largest newspapers found:

Newark Teachers Face Tough Bargaining

Barbara Martinez:

When New Jersey agreed last year to give Newark teachers a 5% raise for working an extra four days, the union announced the news in a memo that included two dollar signs in large type and declared: “no health benefits give-back!!”
One year later, the Newark Teachers Union is back at the negotiating table–and this time things may not work out so favorably. Gov. Chris Christie earlier this year implored taxpayers to vote down local budgets that did not freeze teacher pay. Because the Newark schools are controlled by the state, it is one of the few teacher contracts over which Mr. Christie actually has veto power.
Newark Teachers Union Head Supports Merit Pay, Open to Abolishing Seniority
“Certainly, a 4.9% raise is out of the question,” said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the governor. He said the administration “has established clear guidelines” for the contract negotiations between the state-appointed Newark superintendent and the union of more than 5,000 teachers.

High School Engineers Build Revolutionary Assistive Writing Device

NewsHour:

What happens when a group of teenagers sets their minds on making something to help people with disabilities? In Boise, Idaho, a group of aspiring engineers teamed up with Bill Clark, a businessman in their community who suffers from hand tremors that keep him from being able to write legibly. They set about designing an easy-to-use, portable device that would steady Mr. Clark’s hand and, after many hours working with prototypes in their garage, came up with a design they call the PAWD – a Portable Assistive Writing Device.
When the team took their PAWD to the National Engineering Design Challenge in Washington, D.C. and won “Best Design,” they say it was just icing on the cake. Three of the student engineers behind the project spoke with NewsHour Extra about the design process, what it’s like to make something for a client and why they like engineering.

Investment guru Peter Lynch funds US education initiative

Ros Krasny & Svea Herbst-Bayliss:

Legendary investor Peter Lynch is donating $20 million to train school principals in Boston, making him the latest in a growing list of high net worth individuals to publicly champion philanthropy.
Last week, Microsoft (MSFT.O) founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N) (BRKb.N) the two wealthiest Americans, said they were asking hundreds of U.S. billionaires to give away at least 50 percent of their wealth.
Lynch’s fortune is considerably more modest — at an estimated $350 million — but he shares the belief that the wealthy should give back.
“The people who have been luckier than others should give away a lot of money,” Lynch said in an interview.
Lynch, 66, made his fortune running Fidelity Investments’ Magellan Fund. Between 1977 and 1990, when he resigned as a fund manager, the fund grew to Fidelity’s flagship, with more than $14 billion in assets, from a mere $20 million, and averaged a 29.2-percent annual return.
Lynch, now vice chairman of Fidelity Management and Research Co.,and his wife, Carolyn, have long funded educational initiatives through the Lynch Foundation, their philanthropic organization.
The new initiative, at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education, will be the first to give specific training to principals as a way to raise overall educational attainment.

Colorado education officials ignore law on teacher arrests

Trevor Hughes:

Colorado education officials have been ignoring a law intended to “flag” the arrests of teachers and then alert all school districts and charter schools across the state, a Coloradoan investigation has found.
The 2008 law requires the Colorado Department of Education to issue an alert every time a licensed educator is ar-rested. The arrest information is provided by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
But a Coloradoan investigation shows CDE officials have largely ignored the law since it was passed, arguing that they didn’t have enough money to implement it. Within days of the Coloradoan inquiring about the situation, CDE officials said they planned to start following the law. They couldn’t provide a specific timeline.

N.J. School Boards Association to spend millions on renovations despite cutbacks at schools

Elise Young:

The publicly financed lobby for New Jersey’s school boards is spending millions to renovate its headquarters, even as local districts face massive state aid cuts, defeated budgets and construction proposals, and pending teacher layoffs
The New Jersey School Boards Association collects more than $7 million a year from 588 member districts, which are legally required to join. It has socked away so much in dues and conference fees — $12.3 million, an amount greater than the group’s annual operating budget — that it is paying cash for the improvements.
It also paid $1.6 million in cash for 10 suburban acres where it had hoped to build an $18 million conference center. But the board abandoned that plan and put the land back on the market.
The most recent projected cost for the headquarter’s renovations was $6.3 million. But that figure could grow an additional $600,000 to $1 million, as the contractor decides whether to fix or replace the building’s walls of glass windows, officials said. In the meantime, its 70 employees — including five lobbyists paid to influence legislation — are working in leased office space.

In Praise of Tough Criticism

Jeffrey Di Leo:

Professor Jones is well known for her generosity. She encourages nonconfrontational exchanges of ideas and is always upbeat and positive about her colleagues and their work. She is patient with her graduate students, encouraging them to be patient with one another as well. When a student makes a comment in class that is weak or off base, unlike some other faculty members in her department, Jones will not make a fuss. When the appropriate opportunity presents itself, she will try to work with the student to improve his or her thinking. Jones’s critical credo is, “If you don’t have something positive to say, then it is best not to say anything at all–at least not in public.”
Her colleague Professor Smith is quite the opposite. He has built a successful career by telling people that they are wrong. The goal of criticism, he believes, is to persuade other people to see the world his way, and if they don’t, then he will do everything he can to prove to them–and anyone else who will listen–that they are wrong. Criticism is a competition of ideas, a nasty business in which it is acceptable and sometimes necessary to be a brute. Strong ideas survive, weak ones perish; there is no room for wishy-washy opinions and people. Smith’s assessments are harsh but well argued and persuasive. His critical credo is, “Public criticism is as valid as public praise.”

Teacher: ‘Worst year in the classroom’ in decades

Gary Groth:

As a classroom teacher with 30+ years experience, I just completed the absolute worst year in the classroom I have ever endured (and it was NOT the fault of my students–they were great).
“This year I was told what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, how long to teach, who to teach, who not to teach, and how often to test. My students were assessed with easily more than 120 tests of one shape or another within the first 6 months of the school year.
“My ability to make decisions about what is best for my students was taken away by an overzealous attempt to impose ‘consistency’ within my grade group. My school hired an outside consultant who threatened us with our jobs, demanded that everyone comply, and required us to submit data on test results on a weekly basis. If your class didn’t do well, you were certainly going to be in trouble.
“In addition, my class was visited at least twice a month by the consultant, two superintendents, principal, assistant principal, reading coach, math coach, and sometimes even more people. If I was not teaching exactly what they wanted to see, I was in trouble.

I asked Madison’s 3 Superintendent candidates in 2008 if they believed in either “hiring the best teachers” and essentially setting them free, or a “top down” approach to teaching. Madison continues to expand adult to adult spending (“coaches”, “professional development”).

Andrew Cuomo to New York State School Districts: Drop Dead

David Singer:

Governor-in-Waiting Andrew Cuomo loves how lame duck Governor David Paterson has grown a set of balls and has rammed through nearly half the state budget through the piecemeal passage of budget extenders — daring any legislator who votes no to be accused of voting to shut down state government.
The state fiscal year is nearly one-quarter over — and there’s still no adopted state budget. Governor Paterson has twice rammed through extenders to keep the state government operating — and incorporated components of his budget proposal each time. Next up, supposedly, is the diciest and arguably most important part of the budget; education. On Fred Dicker’s radio show on Friday, Andrew Cuomo suggested that the Governor embed a property tax cap in the next budget extender. What’s that about? A property tax cap has nothing to do with the state budget. A bit of advice to the wanna-be Governor: take the job of being governor seriously. I serve on a school board in Westchester County — and we’ve taken a look at the cost of state mandates on our budget (ergo our school tax burden) and in the aggregate they total over 15% of our entire school budget. Neither the Governor nor the legislature seems to be able to deal with rolling back state mandates (the unfunded costs for which get pushed down to local municipalities and school districts). That’s hard. Advocating for a property tax cap? That’s easy.

Detroit school board head quits after complaint alleging inappropriate behavior

Valerie Strauss:

In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category:
Otis Mathis, the president of the Detroit Board of Education, was accused of fondling himself for 20 minutes in a meeting with the system’s superintendent and quit right after the incident, but now is seeking to take back his resignation, the Detroit Free Press reports.
In this article, the newspaper says that board Vice President Anthony Adams plans to move ahead and post the vacancy.
Superintendent Teresa N. Gueyser filed a detailed complaint addressed to Adams about Mathis, saying he used a handkerchief while masturbating in front of her the entire time she was speaking.
Her complaint says that she has witnessed other unacceptable acts by Mathis and that she had informed him some time ago to have no physical contact with her, including handshaking.

A drastic teacher overhaul at St. Joan Antida High School

Alan Borsuk:

How about this for strong medicine to improve a school: Ask every teacher and administrator to turn in resignations. Tell them they can reapply for their jobs, but there’s going to be higher expectations from now on. Hire back less than half of the staff. Revamp the academic program extensively.
I’ve rarely heard of it actually happening around the country, and never around here. Until now:
“It’s a new day,” the message board outside St. Joan Antida High School, the 300-student, all-girls Catholic school at 1341 N. Cass St., says. It certainly is.
It’s been a difficult few years for the 56-year-old school. Enrollment declined from close to the building’s capacity of 400 to about 300. Competition increased from other private schools, charter schools and even suburban public schools.
The level of academic success at St. Joan Antida wasn’t much different than in Milwaukee Public Schools, which means it wasn’t very good.
Some students who enrolled were far behind grade level and the school wasn’t doing well in accelerating their achievement. The student body had become much less diverse – higher-income and white students had just about all departed, 90% of the students qualified for publicly funded school vouchers, and the student body was about evenly split between African-American and Hispanic.
People involved in the school say discussions about making major changes go back several years. Some teachers at the non-unionized school were not renewed, and there were some other efforts to improve. But the results didn’t amount to much.

Mistreated as a Student, an Alum Establishes Cash Prizes for Nice Professors at Israel’s Technion

Matthew Kalman:

What’s an alumnus to do when the university that was the gateway to his entrepreneurial millions was a place of “suffering” where professors “didn’t give a damn about the students”? Moshe Yanai’s answer: Give it millions of dollars to encourage faculty members to be more pleasant.
IBM minces few words when describing the work of Mr. Yanai, who holds one of the computer maker’s prestigious fellowships: “One of the most influential contributors in the history of the data-storage industry. His 30 years of technical expertise and design innovation are legendary.”
Mr. Yanai attributes his success in no small part to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, from which he graduated in 1975. Now a multimillionaire, he has given quietly to charities for many years, including to the Technion, the academic incubator of Israel’s high-tech revolution. But memories of his bitter experience there discouraged him from doing anything high profile.

A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California

Steven Camarota & Karen Jensen:

etween 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent.1 This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
Among the changes in California:

  • In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a)
  • Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b)
  • The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.
  • There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.
  • In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b)
  • California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b)
  • While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4)
  • The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.

Michael Gove has a precious chance to save our schools from the state

Matthew d’Ancona:

In the past few days, we have heard much sound sense from the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, about schools reform. But here is what the Prime Minister had to say, and it is worth quoting at length: “No one will be able to veto parents starting new schools or new providers coming in, simply on the basis that there are local surplus places. The role of the LEA [local education authority] will change fundamentally. There will be relentless focus on failing schools to turn them round. Ofsted will continue to measure performance, albeit with a lighter touch. But otherwise the schools will be accountable not to government at the centre or locally, but to parents, with the creativity and enterprise of the teachers and school leaders set free.”
The PM continued: “Where parents are dissatisfied, they need a range of good schools to choose from; or where there is no such choice, [to be] able to take the remedy into their own hands. Where business, the voluntary sector, philanthropy, which in every other field is an increasing part of our national life, want to play a key role in education, and schools want them to, they can. Where local employers feel local schools aren’t meeting local skill needs, they can get involved. The system is being empowered to make change. The centre will provide the resources and enable local change-makers to work the change. We will set the framework and make the rules necessary for fairness. Where there is chronic failure, we will intervene. But the state’s role will be strategic; as the system evolves, its hand will be lifted, except to help where help is needed.”

Michael Gove fast tracks UK parents’ schools

Jessica Shepherd:

Planning laws are being torn up so that hundreds of parents can set up their own schools in shops and houses, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced today. Gove said at least 750 groups of teachers, parents and charities had expressed an interest in establishing the schools that will be run as academies.
Applications to set up the schools opened today. The plan, a flagship Tory education policy, is modelled on Sweden’s free schools and charter schools in the US.
Teachers argue it would strip existing schools of much-needed cash and increase social segregation. They say only middle class parents would start their own schools. The man in charge of Sweden’s schools, Per Thulberg, has said free schools do not improve standards.
Gove said the amount spent per pupil would stay the same and the policy would reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils. Planning laws and regulations were being rewritten to make it far easier for the schools to be established, he said.

The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone

Wes Davis:

FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”
It was a message to mark the annual celebration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the epic novel built around events unfolding on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of the fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom. But the postcard also served as a kind of diploma for the men who received it.
Two years earlier a number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

Brookfield, CT School Board Plans to Adopt Strategic Plan

Scott Benjamin:

The Brookfield Board of Education plans to adopt an updated strategic plan this summer that, according to its chairman, Mike Fenton, will be, among other things, “paying closer attention to technology” and “changes in the world.”
Assistant Superintendent of Schools Genie Slone told the school board at its regular meeting Wednesday night that longtime school district consultant Jack Devine, an instructor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, has been coordinating discussions with a committee that is updating the strategic plan for the next five years.
The committee includes staff members, local residents, students, as well as two school board members, Jane Miller and Mr. Fenton.
Mr. Fenton said in an interview after the meeting that the plan is updated every five years and is a valuable document that provides direction in how the school board makes decisions.
“It is part of how we formulate the budget every year,” he said.

Brookfield, CT Strategic Plan 2 page pdf brochure.

Los Angeles teacher makes algebra cool with a hip-hop beat

Christina Hoag:

The class of eighth graders at a Los Angeles middle school tap their rulers and nod their heads to the rhythm of the rap video projected on a screen. It’s not Snoop Dogg or Jay-Z.
It’s their math teacher, LaMar Queen, using rhyme to help them memorize seemingly complicated algebra and in the process improve their grades.
“It gets stuck in your head,” says Cindy Martinez, a 14-year-old whose math grade went from a C-average to a B.
Queen, 26, is now known at Los Angeles Academy as the rap teacher, but his fame has spread far beyond the 2,200-student school in this gritty neighborhood. He’s won a national award and shows teachers and parents how to use rap to reach children.
“Math is a bad word in a lot of households,” he says. “But if we put it in a form that kids enjoy, they’ll learn.”
Queen is doing what many veteran educators have done — using students’ music to connect with them. Where teachers once played the rock n’ roll tunes of “Schoolhouse Rocks” to explain everything from government to grammar, they now turn to rap to renew Shakespeare or geometry.
“Rap is what the kids respond to,” Queen says. “They don’t have a problem memorizing the songs at all.”

Minnesota School District School district ponders whether to get rid of class rank

Tom Weber:

School officials in Mounds View will decide next week whether to get rid of class rank for graduating seniors. If they do, they’ll join a handful of other public school districts who have made the switch in recent years, and who say it might help some students get into college.
More than 400 seniors from Mounds View High School got their diplomas last week during commencement ceremonies. The school doesn’t list a valedictorian — but rather reconizes the top 10 ranking graduates during the ceremony.
That part of commencement might be gone next year, if the Mounds View School Board votes next Tuesday to ditch class rank. Class rank compares one student’s grade point average with that of his or her classmates.
Principal Julie Wikelius says the top of each class at Mounds View is compacted. Plenty of students earn good grades in honors and advanced classes, which creates a tight battle for the top-ranking GPA.

Strategy Roundtable: Online Education Startups

Sramana Mitra:

oday’s roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.
Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Newark Teachers Union Head Supports Merit Pay, Open to Abolishing Seniority

Barbara Martinez:

he New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ labor group, has been railing against Gov. Chris Christie’s ideas for revamping the state’s education system, particularly merit pay and tying teacher’s evaluations to student test scores. (See related stories from The Journal on teacher absences and contract negotiations.) But the president of the Newark Teachers Union thinks those ideas aren’t so bad. It could be because he is, like Gov. Christie, a Republican. Whatever the reason, Joseph Del Grosso shares his views on what are some contentious issues in education:
WSJ: What do you think of merit pay?
Del Grosso: I think it’s good. We would have to negotiate it.
WSJ: Would you tie merit pay to student test scores?
DG: Absolutely. It has to be part of it. It can’t be tied to a single test score, but it has to be part of it. It can’t live without it. If that’s not part of the equation we’d be fooling ourselves.
WSJ: What are some other elements that you would use to determine merit pay?

Missing in Newark: Its Teachers

Barbara Martinez:

Poor attendance has been plaguing the beleaguered Newark schools–but the teachers are the ones missing class.
Nearly half of all Newark teachers took at least two weeks of sick leave last year, and more than a quarter of them took three weeks or more off.
The district instituted an attendance-improvement program in October, but even so about 7% of the district’s teachers are absent on an average day, nearly twice the urban-district average of 4%, said Valerie Merritt, a spokeswoman for the system.
With more than 40,000 students, Newark represents one of the largest and most vexing school systems in the Northeast. The district was taken over by the state in 1995 and since then has seen three state-appointed superintendents and little change in student performance

Cyberschools approved: Georgia kids can have full K-12 experience

D. Aileen Dood:

Some Georgia students will be able to log on to a home computer and attend high school in their pajamas this fall.
The Georgia Charter Schools Commission on Friday approved the state’s first virtual charter high schools, opening the door for kids across the state to have a full k-12 experience online.
The two statewide virtual campuses, Kaplan Academy of Georgia, for students in grades 4-12, and the Provost Academy Georgia high school, will expand choice for families of gifted, struggling and special needs students who want the flexibility of learning at their own pace. Virtual schools provide the curriculum, the teachers and, for those who qualify, the computers , too, for free.
Kaplan and Provost follow the state’s first and largest virtual charter, Georgia Cyber Academy, a K-8 cyberschool of 5,000 , in serving public school students online.
“I think it is going to be a wonderful opportunity, especially for kids who have some very unique special needs,” said Ben Scafidi, state charter commission chairman. “These virtual schools are a lifeline to them.”

Houston School District’s Strategic Plan, an Update





Houston Board of Education:

HISD is working to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions and provide a road map for our future. The purpose of this strategic direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Supporting the Principal as the CEO, Developing Central Standards, Ensuring Accountability, and Cultivating Stakeholder Commitment. We believe these key, overarching strategies will help HISD achieve its goals and become the best school district in America.

To develop our long-term Strategic Direction, we are working with a in a six-month effort that started in February, 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of the final plan. The first step involved a diagnostic research effort to understand the current state of the district across a number of critical dimensions such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness. It also included analyzing other transformation efforts within HISD and across the country to ensure that the best ideas are being considered in our planning process. We have also started to gather input from members of Team HISD and we will continue to do so over the next several months. Click here to view the preliminary findings (.pdf)

True transformation does not happen overnight and cannot happen without the participation of every member of Team HISD. For this process to be authentic and meaningful, HISD needs all of you -parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and broader community members- to be fully engaged.

312K PDF
Ericka Mellon: Only 15 percent of HISD freshmen graduate college.
Related: Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process. More here.

Houston School District loses four more principals to KIPP

Ericka Mellon:

Pamela Farinas, the principal of Houston ISD’s Foerster Elementary, was honored Wednesday night as Principal of the Year for the district’s west region. It turns out that was her final hurrah in the state’s largest school district. Farinas is headed to the popular KIPP charter school chain. She will be a deputy head of schools and school leader (KIPP lingo for principal) at LIPP Liberation College Prep).
KIPP-co-founder Mike Feinberg, who began his career as a Teach for America teacher in HISD, also confirmed today that he has snagged a few other leaders from the school district:
-Daphane Carter, the principal of Bonham Elementary, is leaving to be a deputy head of schools and school leader at KIPP Spirit College Prep.
-Bill Sorrells, the principal of Thomas Middle School, is the new school leader at KIPP Polaris Academy for Boys.

Charter Schools are the Wrong Answer

Alan Singer:

As promised, I will respond directly to people who objected to my earlier posts critiquing the charter school movement.
On June 14, The New York Times ran a front-page article about kindergarten children at the Clara E. Coleman Elementary School from Glen Rock, New Jersey who are learning about the principles of engineering through hands-on activities before they even know how to read. Their task was to design housing that would protect the three little pigs from the big, bad, wolf.
This was a wonderful project, in a wonderful classroom, with an excellent teacher, in an affluent suburban school district. Pictures that accompanied the article showed that the children in this class and school are almost all white. According to real estate estimates and the 2000 census report, in the borough of Glen Rock, about twenty miles from New York City, the medium household income was over $100,000 a year, about 60% of adults are college graduates, houses sell for about $500,000, and the population was 90% White, 6% Asian, 3% Latino, and 2% African American. For the High School graduating classes of 2004 through 2006, over 95% of students indicated that they would move on to a two-year or four-year college.

Too narrow, too soon? America’s misplaced disdain for vocational education

The Economist in Waunakee, WI:

SARAH ZANDER and Ashley Jacobsen are like many teenage girls. Sarah likes soccer. Ashley was captain of her school’s team of cheerleaders this year. They are also earning good money as nursing assistants at a retirement home. Sarah plans to become a registered nurse. Ashley may become a pharmacologist. Their futures look sunny. Yet both are products of what is arguably America’s most sneered-at high-school programme: vocational training.
Vocational education has been so disparaged that its few advocates have resorted to giving it a new name: “career and technical education” (CTE). Academic courses that prepare students for getting into universities, by contrast, are seen as the key to higher wages and global prowess. Last month the National Governors Association proposed standards to make students “college and career ready”. But a few states, districts and think-tanks favour a radical notion. In America’s quest to raise wages and compete internationally, CTE may be not a hindrance but a help.

Churches Mix With Charters

Joy Resmovits:

Four of the 27 new charter schools opening in New York City this fall have ties with religious organizations, although leaders assert curriculum and instruction will be secular.
Supporters say the new schools are a welcome addition amid overcrowded classrooms and heightened demand for charters, especially in neighborhoods with low-performing schools. But the development blurs the line between church and state, and also calls into question the distinction between public education and private groups, an issue with which charter schools already contend.
Four pastors are involved in starting charter schools, which receive public funding but can be privately run.
The Rev. A.R. Bernard’s Brooklyn-based nondenominational Christian Cultural Center boasts a membership of 33,000, with 5,000 coming to services on any given Sunday. Now, 120 kindergarteners and first-graders will be attending Monday through Friday as it opens a charter school called the Culture Arts Academy Charter School at Spring Creek. The charter school will share the same building–but on a different floor–as the private school Mr. Bernard previously founded, Brooklyn Preparatory School.

That’s Debatable: Funding public education

Brian Fraley & Scot Ross:

Scot, looks like the Son of Stimulus, although stalled, is still on the agenda in Washington. You know, the plan to bail out local and state units of government with another boatload of “one time” money. Predictably, they are dressing this up as the salvation of “teachers” and will use the inflated figure of 300,000 teachers whose will be canned if this bloat doesn’t pass. But all it means is the federalization of local and state deficits, which will only accelerate our descent into Greece-like insolvency. At some point this ridiculous spending spree has to stop, because it has already exceeded our ability to pay. But, I know, “It’s for the kids!”
Ross Actually, I’d say “It’s for our future.” Thousands of Wisconsin teachers are facing layoffs, and students from all across the state could be forced into larger classes with less personal attention, fewer course choices and even cuts to instructional time. This responsible education funding plan would provide badly needed support in Wisconsin to save or create 6,100 jobs. Education has to be a top priority. After decades of underfunding at the hands of Republican administration and failed promises made through “No Child Left Behind,” we have a simple choice: Support education and our children, or give up on this country’s future greatness.

Recess

Melissa Westbrook:

Recess will be one of the topics on today’s The Conversation starting at noon. Call in if you have thoughts, 543-KUOW. Here’s their report on it. Interesting finding:
Another big difference between the schools is that at Thornton Creek, most of the students are white and middle-class. At Dunlap, nearly all of the students are black, Latino or Asian and from low-income families.
That corresponds to what KUOW found when we surveyed recess times across the Seattle school district. For instance, we looked at the 15 highest-poverty and lowest–poverty schools. Kids at the low-poverty schools average 16 minutes more recess than kids at the high-poverty schools. That amounts to about one whole recess more.
And amount of recess?
Dornfeld: “A lot of schools in the district give kids 45 minutes to an hour of recess every single day. Is that something that you see as realistic for this school?”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

The Economist:

THE state of Illinois has a rather crude way of coping with its ballooning budget deficit. It stops paying bills. Already, it has failed to pay more than $5 billion-worth. State legislators are paying their own office rent to avoid eviction. Schools and public universities are having their budgets cut.
Illinois owes Shore Community Services, a non-profit agency in suburban Chicago, some $1.6m for services to the mentally disabled. The agency has had to lay off a dozen staff. Jerry Gulley, the executive director, says his outfit’s line of credit could be exhausted soon. The bank will not accept the state’s IOUs as collateral. “That’s how sad it is,” shrugs Mr Gulley.

UW System Patronage? Officials say appointment was necessary to avoid lengthy search

Patrick Marley:

A state lawmaker accused University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly of engaging in political patronage for giving a high-paying state job to Gov. Jim Doyle’s top lieutenant without considering other candidates.
State Administration Secretary Michael Morgan’s new job as the system’s senior vice president for administration and fiscal affairs provides him with a 79% boost in pay.
Morgan, who makes $136,944 as administration secretary, will receive $245,000 a year when he takes the new job July 6. It is the same pay as that of the current person in the position, Tom Anderes, who has 30 years of experience in higher education and is leaving to head the University of Arizona system.
An aide to Reilly said Thursday that Morgan’s hiring was appropriate and the UW System was simply trying to avoid a protracted and costly search to fill the job at a time when the system is in the midst of major projects. Top-level system jobs are normally advertised so national searches can be conducted.

Madison School District Tax Climate:

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

It’s beginning to look a lot like another lump of coal will land on local property taxpayers just before the holidays in December.
That’s when tax bills go out to mailboxes. And so far, the tax burden is shaping up to soar at a rate far out of scale with ordinary people’s ability to pay.
The Madison School Board just agreed to a preliminary budget that will increase the district’s tax on a $250,000 home by about 9 percent to $2,770. The board was dealt a difficult hand by the state. But it didn’t do nearly enough to trim spending.
Madison Area Technical College is similarly poised to jack up its tax bite by 9 percent to $348. MATC is at least dealing with higher enrollment. But the 9 percent jump follows a nearly 8 percent increase last year. And MATC is now laying the groundwork for a big building referendum.
Then comes Dane County and the city of Madison.

Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Reality of America’s fiscal mess starting to bite & Greenspan Says U.S. May Soon Reach Borrowing Limit

Gillian Tett:

If you pop into a toilet on the Seattle waterfront this summer, you might see over-flowing bins. The reason? A polite notice explains that “because of 2010 budget reductions”, the Seattle government can no longer afford to “service this comfort station” each day. Hence the dirt.
Investors would do well to take note. In recent months, America’s fiscal mess has assumed a rather surreal air. On paper, the country’s federal-level deficit and debt numbers certainly look very scary. But in practical terms, the impact of those ever-swelling zeroes still seems distinctly abstract.

Jacob Greber:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. may soon face higher borrowing costs on its swelling debt and called for a “tectonic shift” in fiscal policy to contain borrowing.
“Perceptions of a large U.S. borrowing capacity are misleading,” and current long-term bond yields are masking America’s debt challenge, Greenspan wrote in an opinion piece posted on the Wall Street Journal’s website. “Long-term rate increases can emerge with unexpected suddenness,” such as the 4 percentage point surge over four months in 1979-80, he said.

Clearly, public and private organizations must endeavor to manage the funds available wisely.

A View From Both Ends of the Educational Spectrum

James Warren:

I attended my first Chicago Board of Education meeting in decades Tuesday and my first Chicago Public Schools kindergarten graduation the next morning. The inadequacies of the former were underscored by the inspiration of the latter.
The board reaffirmed the existing teachers contract, guaranteeing a generous 4 percent raise negotiated by the weak-kneed duo of Mayor Richard M. Daley and Arne Duncan, then the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools and now the United States secretary of education. The board thus eliminated the chance of a strike in the fall as it also gave Mr. Duncan’s successor, Ron Huberman the power to perhaps lay off teachers and raise the number of students in classrooms.
“Door Open to 35 in a Class,” declared a Chicago Sun-Times headline, reflecting the prime concern of what essentially is a superficial debate.
In fact, the meeting itself might as well have been choreographed by the Goodman Theatre, given all the role-playing.

Related: The 4% Solution.

Rhode Island’s new school aid formula: Some will win, some will lose

Jennifer Jordan:

After years of failed attempts, Rhode Island finally has a statewide school-financing formula, its first in two decades.
The complex formula, which was developed by the state Department of Education and researchers at Brown University, goes into effect for the 2011-12 school year and is intended to redistribute about $705 million a year in direct aid to school districts, charter and state-operated schools — without adding a lot of new money to the system.
Critics have been quick to point out that the formula creates a new system of winners and losers, giving more state aid to districts where student enrollments have increased or that serve high numbers of low-income students, while cutting districts that have lost students or serve fewer poor students.

On Seattle’s Superintendent

Melissa Westbrook:

I missed the report from KUOW reporter, Phyllis Fletcher, so I looked it up. Guess what? The Superintendent has this to say:

Goodloe-Johnson: “They don’t really get the opportunity to see the humane person that I am as it relates to children, and that I’ve committed my life to this work. And I don’t think they get to see that, which I’m gonna work on, because they don’t really know me. They know the Superintendent, the CEO of a business. And our business is about children. But they really don’t know me as a person and as a mom.”

So much can be said about these comments. I always get scared when I hear that education is a business but now Dr. G-J says children are her business. Great. And frankly, I don’t want to know her as a person or a mom. I don’t need to know the School Board that way to know if they are doing their jobs and I don’t need that from her.

California and the “Common Core”: Will There Be a New Debate About K-12 Standards?

EdSource:

A growing chorus of state and federal policymakers, large foundations, and business leaders across the country are calling for states to adopt a common, rigorous body of college- and career-ready skills and knowledge in English and mathematics that all K-12 students will be expected to master by the time they graduate.
This report looks at the history of efforts to create common education standards, in particular the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It also describes factors California may consider when deciding whether to adopt them.
Highlights:
The Common Core is the latest effort to create rigorous, common academic standards among states
California is supporting the concept of common standards, but state law calls for further review and leaves the adoption decision to the State Board of Education
Issues surrounding the adoption include the quality of the Common Core standards and their relationship to the state’s current standards as well as costs and other implementation concerns
Common Core or not, California might decide to review its current standards and expectations for students

Related: California State Academic Content Standards Commission:

On January 7, 2010, the Governor signed into law Senate Bill X5 1 (Steinberg). The bill calls for California’s academic content standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics to be examined against the Common Core Standards that were released in final form on June 2, 2010. The bill also calls for the establishment of the California Academic Content Standards Commission. The Governor and Legislature have made the required appointments to the commission.

Candidates call for Oklahoma education reform

Megan Rolland:

The five candidates for Oklahoma’s superintendent of schools were asked Wednesday how they would reform education in a state that ranks near the bottom of the nation for funding and also lags behind in the number of college graduates.
All agreed the state’s education system is in need of change, but differed in their vision of a successful system.
Democrat Jerry Combrink said after 30 years as the superintendent of two school districts in rural southeastern Oklahoma, he knows students need options, and not every student is going to college.
“I believe that we need to prepare students for the future they want. Develop a two-track system … so students who are not going to college are not diluting the teaching efforts of the students who are.”
His opponent in the July 26 primary, state Sen. Susan Paddack, D-Ada, said the state needs a strategic plan that will use test results to track improvements and failures.

Survey Finds Nearly Half of Graduating High School Seniors Lack Confidence in Ability to Manage Personal Finances

Capital One:

This high school graduation season, millions of young adults from around the country will celebrate their achievements and prepare to begin the next chapter in their lives. For many, setting out into the “real world” also means taking on new financial responsibilities. Capital One Financial Corporation (COF 42.16, -0.21, -0.49%) recently surveyed high school seniors to see how prepared they are to manage finances on their own. The survey shows that while many students are uncertain about their ability to manage their banking and personal finances, those who have had financial education — both in the classroom and through conversations at home — are significantly more confident about their personal finance skills and knowledge.
One troubling statistic shows that nearly half (45 percent) of all high school seniors polled say they are unsure or unprepared to manage their own banking and personal finances. However, of the students surveyed who have taken a personal finance class (30 percent of the sample), 75 percent said they feel prepared to manage their finances. In addition, two thirds (66 percent) of students who have taken a personal finance class rate themselves as “highly” or “very” knowledgeable about personal finance, compared to only 30 percent of students with no financial education course who show the same level of confidence in their skills.

Stanford program tries to improve education for China’s poor

John Boudreau:

Hu Yu Fan, a 12-year-old boy with doleful eyes, is the face of the other China — the one untouched by the nation’s economic miracle.
He is among tens of millions of young Chinese who have moved from rural provinces to major cities but are being denied the education needed to thrive in modern society. Instead, they end up in shabby migrant schools in places like Beijing and Shanghai, with few resources and few opportunities.
“I have never dreamed of anything for the future,” the boy said.
Hu and those like him are the focus of a program run jointly by Stanford University and Chinese research centers, called Rural Education Action Project, or REAP, which is researching ways to improve education for China’s rural and urban poor.
Financially supported by American companies such as San Jose’s Adobe Systems and Dell Inc., the researchers produce reports that are reviewed by the country’s top officials, including Premier Wen Jiabao. China’s leaders have grown increasingly concerned that the widening wealth and income gap between the country’s urban and rural citizens is a threat to social stability.

Memphis Gates Foundation Grant: Students learning that school is cool

Jane Roberts:

The idea that only a few people in a room are smart and the rest have a lot to prove is on trial this week in camp designed to change hearts and minds and eventually the culture of Memphis City Schools.
It all comes down to some simple brain theory, which 15 middle schoolers are soaking up at Douglass Elementary and five other city schools.
“Smart is not just something you are but something you get,” says Barbara Logan, director of School Services and Training at the Efficacy Institute in Waltham, Mass.
With $1.1 million this year from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to Memphis City Schools, Efficacy plans to train several hundred “student envoys” responsible for preaching the gospel of discipline and self-esteem, and delivering the message that smart isn’t by chance.

Related: Small Learning Communities.

More home education information needed, say inspectors

Katherine Sellgren:

It is “extremely challenging” for councils to ensure children taught at home in England receive a suitable education, inspectors have warned.
Ofsted said the absence of a home education register meant authorities did not have a full picture of how children in their area were taught.
There is no official figure for how many UK children are home schooled, but is estimated to be around 50,000.
Proposals for a register for home educators were shelved in April.
Home educators rejected the suggestion that a register for home-schooled children was necessary.

Business schools see big potential in Saudi Arabia

Beth Gardiner:

International business schools eager for new markets are looking to Saudi Arabia, where a still-strong economy and a big government push to boost management skills have created a pool of potential M.B.A.s.
As nearby economies like Dubai’s sag, B-schools have begun eyeing the small but growing new niche in the desert kingdom, particularly given Saudi students’ taste for foreign education. A handful of international schools have launched programs in the country, and more are recruiting Saudi students to their existing campuses.
A closed, conservative culture and reams of government red tape make Saudi Arabia a daunting place to set up shop. But its leaders are pouring money into education in an effort to tackle high unemployment and train Saudis to run the big businesses that now often depend on expat talent. Anxious to broaden an economy heavily dependent on oil, King Abdullah and his officials are also investing billions in new industries, and overseas business schools may help provide the trained executives they expect to need.

Why are we having this fight again?

Matthew Ladner:

Could the adoption of common core standards lead to substantial academic gains, even if somehow developed and kept at a high level in some imaginary Federal Reserve type fortress of political solitude and kept safe from the great national dummy down?

I ran NAEP numbers for all 50 states and the District of Columbia and calculated the total gains on the main NAEP exams (4th and 8th grade Reading and Math) for the period that all states have been taking NAEP (2003-2009). In order to minimize educational and socio-economic differences, I compared the scores of non-special program (ELL, IEP) children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch.

I then ranked those 50 states, and the table below presents the Top 10, along with the total grades by year for the strength of state proficiency standards as measured by Paul Peterson. Peterson judges state assessments by comparing scores on the state exam to those on NAEP.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Are State Public Pensions Sustainable? Why the Federal Government Should Worry About State Pension Liabilities

Joshua D. Rauh:

This paper analyzes the flow of state pension benefit payments relative to asset levels and contributions. Assuming future state contributions fund the full present value of new benefits, many state systems will run out of money in 10-20 years if some attempt is not made to improve the funding of liabilities that have already been accrued. The expected shortfalls raise the possibility that the federal government will be faced with a decision as to whether to bail out states driven to insolvency by their pension programs.

KINDERREADY GRADS CHEERED\ PROGRAM THAT GETS CHILDREN READY FOR KINDERGARTEN CELEBRATES ITS FIRST GRADUATES.

Andy Hall, via a kind reader:

Two dozen children donned homemade mortarboards Wednesday for a commencement ceremony marking their graduation from a program designed to help them be ready for kindergarten this fall.
As many of their parents snapped photos, the children received certificates and were cheered by a crowd that included the graduates’ siblings and officials from government and nonprofit agencies.
The ceremony and a picnic at Madison’s Vilas Park celebrated the end of the first year of the KinderReady program, which served 320 children ages 3 to 5, far exceeding its goal of 200.
The surge was largely credited to a weekly call-in program, “Families Together,” on La Movida, 1480-AM, a Spanish-language station, that includes learning activities for children, said Andy Benedetto, who is directing KinderReady for the nonprofit Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin.
Although data measuring KinderReady’s effects won’t be available until next year, interviews with parents and officials suggest the program is helping prepare children for kindergarten.

Chicago Teachers Increasingly Complaining About TIF

Adam Doster:

Facing an estimated $427 million FY 2011 deficit, the Chicago Board of Education gave CPS CEO Ron Huberman emergency power to raise class sizes and lay-off almost 3,000 public school teachers. The schools’ chief has not agreed to follow through with that plan quite yet. Instead, he’s offering a “menu of possible concessions” to the Chicago Teachers Union and its new president-elect, Karen Lewis. Neither side will disclose what’s on the list, although Lewis told the Reader’s Hunter Clauss that she’s hoping to survey her members this summer to find out exactly where they are willing to budge. “These official actions were partly procedural, and partly a way for Huberman and the board to publicly and skillfully back the teachers union into a corner,” adds Catalyst’s Sarah Karp.
In several print and television interviews yesterday morning, Lewis offered Huberman some alternative ways to trim costs. The new president set her sights on the city’s contracts with consultants, which she said cost $300 million per year. She also discussed trimming the central office payroll and eliminating a $60 million program that provides curriculum packages and coaching to high schools. But to get a clear sense of the Daley administration’s priorities, and find out where waste might exist, Lewis stressed that the budgeting process needs to be considerably more transparent to teachers and parents alike.
It took repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, for the city to post basic payroll information online. And they’ve ignored consistent appeals to provide serious internal data on the effect of the city’s tax increment financing system (TIF) on schools. From her acceptance speech this weekend (watch it here):

District Graduation Rate Map Tool

Education Week, via a kind reader:

EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable, readily accessible data on graduation rates and other indicators for every school district and high school in the country.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to present this powerful online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the nation’s graduation crisis. EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable data on graduation rates for every school district and high school in the country.
This Web-based application allows users to easily map out graduation rates by zooming in on any of the nation’s individual school districts. Users can then access detailed information for that district or any of its high schools.

Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors

Scott Carrell & James West:

In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standardized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow-on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.

Proposals for Increasing Student Achievement

Ilya Somin:

Stuart Buck has two interesting proposals for increasing educational achievement among minority students, based on his book Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation:

I do suggest one idea that I think has some promise: eliminate individual grades, and let students compete against other schools in academic competitions.
This idea is far from original. Rather, it comes from the eminent sociologist James Coleman. Coleman observed the striking fact that while students regularly cheer for their school’s football or basketball team, they will poke fun or jeer at other students who study too hard or who are too eager in class: “the boy who goes all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete who fails to go all-out is scorned and rebuked for not giving his all.”
But this is odd, is it not? Why are attitudes toward academics and athletics so different? Sports are more fun than classwork, of course, but that does not explain why success would actually be discouraged in class.
Coleman’s explanation was disarmingly simple: The students on the athletic teams are not competing against other students from their own school. Instead, they are competing against another school. And when they win a game, they bring glory to their fellow students, who get to feel like they too are victors, if only vicariously.
But the students in the same class are competing against each other for grades and for the teacher’s attention. Naturally, that competition gives rise to resentment against other children who are too successful (just as students will hate the football team from a cross-town rival)…..

Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams

Jessica Hamzelou:

AM I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.
If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream – a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart’s content.
Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain’s behaviour during the dream state (see “Dream mysteries“). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience.

Hysteria in Egypt’s streets over English exam failures

Matt Bradley:

On Monday, amidst the car horns and chatter, the sound of broken dreams echoed through Egypt’s streets.
Young girls fainted in the arms of their sobbing mothers. Fathers screamed with rage, their faces contorted into grotesque expressions of indignation. In some areas, ambulances were called in to treat victims of shock.
The source of all this madness: the English test in the thanawaya aama, Egypt’s annual nation-wide high school examination.
“They were suffering. The girls were crying, they were screaming. It was so difficult. All of them were suffering,” said Ahmed Ghoneim, a high school English teacher at Imbaba Secondary School outside Cairo, whose telling of the sorrowful scene inside the examination room might have recalled a motorway accident or a vicious murder.

Madison district got $23M from taxpayers for aging schools; where did it go?

Susan Troller:

A maintenance referendum may well be a tougher sell this time around than it was when back-to-back, five-year maintenance referendums were approved in 1999 and 2005. Not only do voters feel pinched by the ongoing recession, but taxpayers are facing a likely $225 hike in property taxes this year as part of the effort to balance the Madison schools budget, which took a heavy hit in reduced state aid.
Community support could also be compromised because a growing number of Madison School Board members have become frustrated by what they say is the district’s reluctance to adequately account for how maintenance dollars have been spent.
As chair of the School Board’s finance and operations committee, Lucy Mathiak has persistently asked for a complete accounting of maintenance jobs funded through the 2005 referendum. The minutes from a March 2009 committee meeting confirm that district administrators said they were working on such a report but Mathiak says the information she’s received so far has been less than clear.
“Trying to get this information through two administrations, and then trying to figure it out, is exhausting. The whole thing is a mess. I’m not, by any means, the first board member to ask these kind of questions regarding accountability,” Mathiak says. “You ask for straightforward documentation and you don’t get it, or when it comes it’s a data dump that’s almost impossible to understand.”
That lack of transparency might make it more difficult for other School Board members to get on board with another referendum.
“We have a responsibility to provide an accurate record of what happened with the funding,” says board member Arlene Silveira, who has supported all other school referendums. “I think people understand that other projects may come up and there may be changes from the original plan, but you do need to tell them what was done and what wasn’t done and why. It affects (the district’s) credibility in the community.”

Much more on the 2005 referendum and the District’s 2010-2011 budget (including what appears to be a 10% property tax increase here.
Related: “Accountability is important, now more than ever“.

Schools Face Test on Budget Math

Mark Whitehous & Amy Merrick:

For seventh-grader Kyle Scarpa, budget strains affecting schools across the country are hitting where it hurts.
In the wake of the worst recession in more than half a century, many communities find themselves with no choice but to cut funding for education. In Downe Township, N.J., the cuts are hitting where it hurts.
In addition to freezing wages and jettisoning its librarian, the school he attends here in southern New Jersey will cancel his after-school remedial math and literacy classes. His teacher believes the tutoring helped him build confidence and get his average grade up to a C from a D.
“He could fall through the cracks,” says teacher Rose Garrison, noting that Kyle is among four kids in her class having trouble keeping up. “When you’re teaching exponents and you have kids who don’t know the multiplication tables, how are you going to teach them?”
The struggles at Downe Township School illustrate the challenges public schools face across America as a convergence of factors–ravaged state and local finances, tapped-out taxpayers and a reform push by the Obama administration–force wrenching change. As the school year winds down, educators are grasping for new ways to do more with less, and to remedy an embarrassing reality: Despite spending more per student than the average developed country, U.S. schools perform below average in core subjects such as math and reading.

Digital Students, Industrial-Era Universities

Arthure Levine:

The American university, like the nation’s other major social institutions — government, banks, the media, health care — was created for an industrial society. Buffeted by dramatic changes in demography, the economy, technology, and globalization, all these institutions function less well than they once did. In today’s international information economy, they appear to be broken and must be refitted for a world transformed.
At the university, the clash between old and new is manifest in profound differences between institutions of higher education and the students they enroll. Today’s traditional undergraduates, aged 18 to 25, are digital natives. They grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking.

Students With Autism Learn How To Succeed At Work

Jon Hamilton:

People with autism often have a hard time finding and keeping jobs, so more schools are creating programs to help students with autism get prepared for the workplace. One of those programs helped change the life of Kevin Sargeant.
Just a few years ago, when Kevin was still in elementary school, things weren’t looking good for him. He was antisocial, desperately unhappy and doing poorly in school.
“He was pretty much a broken child, the way I would describe it,” says his mother, Jennifer Sargeant. “We really didn’t see that he would be able to go to college, even have a job. That just wasn’t in our future for him.”
Kevin, now 18, says his autism left him unable to handle the social interactions at school.

Race to Top Buy-In Level Examined

Michele McNeil:

States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers’ unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states’ education reform plans.
Those patterns emerged from an Education Week analysis of applications from 29 states and the District of Columbia, all of which entered both rounds of the $4 billion federal grant contest.
Although the changes made in applications from the first to the second round varied widely from state to state, union buy-in increased on average by 22 percentage points, with states such as Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin making big leaps.
At the same time, the overall level of district support and students affected in the 30 applications barely budged, mostly owing to California’s loss of support from about 500 districts representing nearly 2 million students. That negated progress other states made in improving buy-in.

The rise, and rise, of Seattle schools: The Seattle Public Schools are undergoing dramatic changes. However, the story is not one of doom and gloom but of steady progress.

Seattle Times Editorial:

THERE is much to be optimistic about as Seattle Public Schools transform into an urban model of education quality and accessibility.
Dramatic change doesn’t happen by tinkering around the edges. Nor is Seattle’s thrust occurring in isolation. It is part of a welcome push by urban school districts across the country to improve access to good teaching, strong curriculum and better school resources.
The work under way is most visible in Seattle’s shift from a costly open-choice system to a neighborhood assignment plan. Families got that they were exchanging choice — which worked for a lucky few — for a cheaper, simpler and fairer way to access schools and programs.
Making improvements in the middle of a deep recession required Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her team to aggressively leverage millions of dollars from credible organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and federal school-improvement grants.
Wholly appropriate, and much appreciated, is Seattle’s civic and business organizations’ willingness to fill a recession-driven vacuum in education funding. This kind of support has allowed the district to continue key improvements, including professional development for all principals and teachers and increasing popular programs such as foreign-language immersion and advanced classes.

Early Achievement Impacts of The Harlem Success Academy Charter School in New York City

Jonathan Supovitz & Sam Rikoon:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted two external analyses of the performance of Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) 2008-9 3rd graders on the New York State Test in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The first analysis was based on a comparison of the performance of 2006-7 first graders (who became the 2008-9 3rd graders) who were chosen through a random selection lottery process to attend HSA, and remained in HSA through the 3rd grade, relative to those who were not admitted by lottery to attend HSA and remained in New York City public schools. The second analysis compared the same HSA 3rd graders to 3rd graders in geographically proximate and demographically comparable New York City public schools. Student results were compared separately for ELA and mathematics using ordinary least squares regression and controlling for student gender, age, and special education status. The results indicated that HSA 3rd graders performed statistically significantly better than did either the randomized comparison group or the students in the demographically similar schools. More specifically, attendance at HSA was associated with 34-59 additional scale score points (depending on test subject) for non-special education students, after adjusting for differences in student demographic characteristics. Described another way, these results represent between 13-19 percent higher test performance associated with attending Harlem Success Academy.
The Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) opened its doors in August 2006. The school, located in Harlem Community School District 3 of New York City at 118th street and Lenox Avenue, is currently a K-4 school that intends to add a grade each year as students matriculate until it is a full K-8 school. HSA is one of four existing Harlem Success Academies founded by the Success Charter Network. Over the next ten years, the Success Charter Network plans to expand the network to 40 schools.
Students are admitted into HSA through an annual lottery which randomly selects students to attend the school from the pool of applicants. Any student who lives in New York City can apply to HSA and the school uses the lottery process to determine who will attend the school. Since the school has documented both the students who applied to HSA and were accepted through the lottery, as well as those who applied and were not selected, these conditions make for an experimental study of the impact of HSA on student learning outcomes.

Abolishing Department of Education isn’t extreme

Mona Charen:

Newly minted Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle is a kook. That’s what Sen. Harry Reid’s people are telling reporters. ABC, CNN, and other outlets seem to agree, noting that Mrs. Angle wants to shutter the federal Department of Education, get the U.S. out of the U.N., phase out Social Security, and eliminate the IRS.
We haven’t yet heard her explanations of these positions — many of which can be justified in the proper context. It’s certainly possible that she is a little eccentric (that prison massage program doesn’t pass the smell test). But this much is certain: It is not kooky to favor the elimination of the Department of Education. That this proposal is routinely labeled “extremist” is a reminder of the one-way ratchet that operates in government. Enshrine something in a federal agency and it becomes sacrosanct. Democrats cheerlead for federal programs because they are the party of government, and Republicans quietly go along because they’re afraid.
But if Republicans know how to argue for smaller government — as Gov. Chris Christie is demonstrating in New Jersey — they need not be intimidated. There are hundreds of federal programs that could be eliminated tomorrow with only the happiest consequences for the nation. And yes, the whole Department of Education could be scrapped. It vacuums up money and produces … what exactly?

I’m not an optimist with respect to our exploding Federalism and the related money printing approach to spending.

Blot on Schools

Times of India:

Even though the Supreme Court ordered a ban on the administration of corporal punishment to children almost a decade ago, it is shocking that schools across the country continue to adhere to the philosophy of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. The tragic case of Rouvanjit Rawla once again highlights this point. Rouvanjit, who was a student of Kolkata’s prestigious La Martiniere School for Boys, committed suicide after he was caned by his school principal and allegedly by four other teachers as well. What is truly despicable is that the school principal has no regrets about the incident and has admitted as much to the school’s board of governors and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights investigating the case. This reflects a perverse streak among certain educators who have no qualms about using their position of authority to inflict physical torture on children. The problem is symptomatic of a virulent mindset within the education system that sees corporal punishment as a legitimate means to discipline students and build character. In reality all it does is promote a culture of violence.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Pennsylvania‟s Taxpayer Relief Act: Big Gamble Pays Off for Some, But Most Lose Their Shirt

Jaime Bumbarger:


There is perhaps no greater debate in America than the one surrounding taxes, whether it is at the national, state, or local level. While taxes serve the important purpose of funding government programs, they also bear quite a burden on taxpayers. For example, property taxes account for the majority of revenue for local governments across the country.1 Pennsylvania is no different. In 2000, property taxes accounted for nearly $10 billion of revenue in Pennsylvania, which was 30 percent of total local government revenues and 70 percent of all local government tax revenues.2
Property taxes accounted for an even larger piece of the pie when it came to school districts: approximately 85 percent of the total tax revenues for Pennsylvania school districts in 2000.3 Nearly half of all school district revenue came from the collection of property taxes.4 Only counties relied more heavily on property taxes as a source of revenue.5
The state‟s heavy reliance on property taxes by school districts hit the wallets of Pennsylvania taxpayers and led to several attempts by legislators to harness the spending.6 The most recent attempt was Act 1 of 2006.7 Act 1 attempts to do what other legislation failed to do: provide property tax relief to all Pennsylvanians, but it, too, falls short of its mark.8
Although it was enacted more than three years ago, the Act still plays a prominent role today. Less than two years ago, homeowners started reaping the benefits of Act 1 when the first reduction in property tax bills occurred.9 Last fall, taxpayers could have faced another referendum on their ballots, asking whether they favor increasing the local income tax to offset a decrease in property tax.10 Officials faulted public confusion for the last referendum overwhelmingly failing across the Commonwealth.11 Also, last year‟s budget impasse resulted in new legislation that could significantly alter property tax relief in the future.12

First-year charter schools often face turmoil

Rosemary Winters:

The charter school’s popular director resigned abruptly at mid-year. One third of the faculty vowed not to return next year. E-mail allegations of poor management and failed communication clogged the in-boxes of parents, teachers and board members.
And that’s just in Excelsior Academy’s first year.
The K-8 charter school in Erda — Tooele County’s first charter — has had a rocky start.
So do many charter schools, which have to find or build a school house, navigate state laws and recruit a board and staff, typically with limited funds and expertise. The public schools receive money from the state for each pupil they enroll at the same rate as other public schools, but must raise funds for other expenses.
New schools often face opposition from parents and teachers when they don’t function as expected.

Autism and Education in France

Chantal Sicile-Kira:

Recently I was invited to Paris to present at a prestigious international colloquium on autism and education, which was organized by the INS HEA, the French Ministry of Education’s training institute for special education teachers. Seventeen years earlier, I had left France because in those days, children with autism did not have the right to an education, and my son, Jeremy, was severely impacted by autism.
It was an emotional moment for me, standing there, addressing 500 attendees in a lecture hall of the Universite Paris Descatres in Bolulogne – Billancourt, explaining my son’s educational experience in the United States, where all children have the right to a free and appropriate education under IDEA.
In 1993, my family left France, where we had been living since 1981. Both Jeremy and his sister, Rebecca (who is neurotypical), were born in Paris at the time when children with autism were considered mentally ill, not developmentally disabled. They had no right to an education. Instead, they were enrolled in day programs on hospital sites, where they were treated with psychoanalysis. Parents had no right to visit the day program, nor did they receive any communication about what went on during the hours their child spent there.

Women scientists on the debate over women in science

Maggie Koerth-Baker, via a kind reader:

Earlier this week, the New York Times published the first part of a two-part series by John Tierney looking at the current state of women in the sciences–in particular, whether the playing field can ever really be level, or whether innate neural differences mean there will always be more men getting ahead in science and math careers than women.

When Dr. Larry Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that “girls can’t do math.” But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced. Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits.

School Spotlight: Lodi teacher, an icon at the middle school, retires after 48 years

Pamela Cotant:

While Lodi Area Middle School teacher Jerry Hilliker stands out for the astonishing length of his career — he just retired after 48 years — just as remarkable is how he did it.
Seventh grader Sam Sagers said Hilliker told good jokes. He also gave them nicknames, said seventh grader Faith Hatch who became known as “Faith, Hope and Charity.”
Another Hilliker trademark was the coffee cup that was often in his hands. Seventh grader Tabitha Miller said she will always remember the way his classroom smelled like coffee in the morning.
“He teaches in a fun way,” Tabitha said.
His last day was June 9.

Looking back at a nine-year experiment to get kids to college

Minnesota Public Radio:

Almost a decade ago, third graders at seven high-poverty schools in the Twin Cities got an offer: Stay in school, and we’ll give you $10,000 for college. All the students had to do was stay in the Minneapolis or St. Paul public schools, graduate, and go to college. Midday looks at how the experiment turned out.

It’s the Public’s Data: Democratizing School Board Records

J. H. Snider, via a kind reader:

Consider just a few of the questions whose answers might help a community’s leaders and citizens make better decisions about how to improve their schools:

  • What has been said and written about school start times in districts with comparable demographics and financial resources, but better student test scores?
  • What is the relationship between student test scores and systems for electing school board members in comparable school districts?
  • How do superintendent contracts vary in comparable districts?

Parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers have legitimate reasons to ask questions like these. But it has been incredibly hard for them to do so. One reason is that much public information remains locked in the file cabinets of America’s more than 14,000 school districts. Another is that even if the information is posted to school websites, it may be posted in ways, such as a scanned document, that Internet search engines cannot read. Public information that should be available instantaneously and at no cost, like so much other information now available via search engines, instead takes hundreds of work-lifetimes and a fortune to gather–if it can be gathered at all.

Well worth reading.

Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It

Winnie Hu:

In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs’ house.
To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs — and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.
“Excellent engineering,” their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month.
All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.

Atlanta schools’ travel tab high

Rich McKay:

While school systems are cutting jobs or furloughing teachers to shore up withering budgets, Atlanta Public Schools has spent more than twice as much money per student on travel as most other metro districts.
Atlanta spent more than $1.4 million on travel in 2008-09, the latest year from which complete data was available. That works out to $28.77 per student, far higher than neighboring DeKalb County and more than double per pupil what Clayton, Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties spent on travel, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.
And Atlanta was slated to spend even more in 2009-2010 — about $1.8 million, a 28 percent jump.
Atlanta public school officials say travel is important so teachers can get the training they need and bring new skills and insights to the classroom. Much of the travel represents teachers going to education conferences, district officials said.

Commentary: Time to end teacher union stranglehold on education

Sara Longwell:

For young teachers looking to get their first gig after graduating from education school, times are tough.
In New York City, the Success Charter network advertised 135 openings; it received 8,453 resumes in response. In Westchester, a school announced seven openings. More than 3,000 candidates responded.
New York isn’t alone: School districts across the country, faced with budget shortfalls, have put a freeze on hiring any new educators. This is bad news for newly minted teachers entering the work force.
There is a silver lining, however: This glut of new educators gives administrators a golden opportunity to revamp rules protecting bad teachers.
Reformers can take advantage of this surplus of labor by pointing out that anyone who doesn’t like new rules that will improve the nation’s quality of education can quickly be replaced by those who will play ball.

Obama’s attack on education

Critical Reading:

Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush and a board member of various right-wing think tanks, who has now become a leading critic of the market-based school “reform” that has been embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. Ravitch is “still looking” for an elected official to take a stand against these changes, but opposition is more likely to come from below. One encouraging piece of news is the landslide victory this week of the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators in the election for the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. –PG

Our View: We need more innovation in education

Wausau Daily Herald:

As a part of the economic stimulus package of January 2009 — you may have heard of it — the federal government created a $100 billion education fund for states that were willing to take bold action to reform and improve their schools.
The fund, known as Race to the Top, is having the desired effect in many places. With state budgets in dire shape across the nation, it has provided a real incentive for states to look for ways to innovate in order to address real problems in the educational system — failing schools, bureaucratic deadlock, the achievement gap between rich and poor students.
In Wisconsin, though, what it has inspired is something more like a few pro-forma changes and half-hearted applications.
Wisconsin ranked in the bottom half of all the states that applied for Race to the Top funding in the first round in March. (The federal government placed our state’s application 26th out of 41 states and the District of Columbia that applied.)

New Wisconsin teacher rules hitting classrooms

Amy Hetzner:

Ten years after Wisconsin overhauled its licensure system for public school educators, the first big wave of teachers is set to advance under the rules – and reports are mixed on whether the change has made a difference.
Expectations for the new licensure regulations were high when they were first approved in 2000. In addition to requiring that teachers pass basic knowledge and skills tests and receive mentors for their first year in the profession, the rules also provided that teachers would have to demonstrate they had grown enough in their careers to attain a “professional” license.
For some beginning teachers, the new rules have been stressful additions to the start of an unfamiliar career with many bugs still left to be worked out. Others say they appreciate that they could set their own teaching goals and pursue related professional development activities while also reflecting on their experiences.
“I think teachers who really take the process seriously and do it with fidelity – they choose a goal that they really believe in and they want to achieve – that’s fine, that’s good, it serves its purpose,” said Judy Gundry, a citywide mentor for educators with initial teaching licenses in Milwaukee Public Schools.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate

Peter Scheer:

For public employee unions – those representing police, firefighters, teachers, prison guards and agency workers of all kinds at the state and local levels – these are the worst of times.
Despite record high membership and dues, and years of unparalleled clout in state capitols, public-sector unions find themselves on the defensive, desperately trying to hold onto past gains in the face of a skeptical press and angry voters. So far has the zeitgeist shifted against them that on one recent weekend, government employees were the butt of a “Saturday Night Live” skit, and the next day, a New York Times Magazine cover article proclaimed “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand.”
Public unions’ traditional strength – the ability to finance their members’ rising pay and benefits through tax increases – has become a liability. Although private-sector unions always have had to worry that consumers will resist rising prices for their goods, public sector unions have benefited from the fact that taxpayers can’t choose – they are, in effect, “captive consumers.”

Houston School District forces 162 teachers out of under-performing schools

Ericka Mellon:

More than 160 teachers in Houston ISD’s under-performing middle and high schools weren’t offered jobs at those campuses next year, the district announced Friday evening. The decision affects staffing at nine schools targeted in Superintendent Terry Grier’s “Apollo 20” reform plan.
Of the 600 teachers at those schools last year, 358 — or 60 percent — learned on Friday that the district wants them to return to help with the improvement efforts. But the district is forcing 162 teachers, or 27 percent of the staff, out of those schools. The administration made the decisions based on “an exhaustive data-driven evaluation” of the teachers, according to the news release, which didn’t specify what data were used.
An additional 80 teachers at the targeted schools previously had decided to retire, resign or transfer to other campuses, according to HISD. “In some cases, teachers opted not to stay due to a personal conflict with the longer school year and longer school day schedules of the Apollo schools,” the news release said.

America’s Best High Schools – 2010

Newsweek:

Each year, Newsweek picks the best high schools in the country based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with advanced placement college-level courses and tests. Just over 1600 schools–only six percent of all the public schools in the U.S.–made the list.
This year rankings have some fantastic new interactive features. We’ve teamed up with a data company called Factual to create individual profile pages for each school where students and faculty can comment and contribute. (For more information about how the rankings were calculated, see our FAQ.)

Mostly Milwaukee area high schools such as Rufus King (318) made the list. The only non-southeast Wisconsin high schools to make the list was Marshfield (370) and Eau Claire Memorial (1116). Marshfield High School offers 29 AP classes while Milwaukee Rufus King offers 0 and Eau Claire Memorial offers 14, via AP Course Ledger.
Related: Dane County High School AP course comparison.

In bold move, Colorado alters teacher tenure rules

Colleen Slevin:

Colorado is changing the rules for how teachers earn and keep the sweeping job protections known as tenure, long considered a political sacred cow around the country.
Many education reform advocates consider tenure to be one of the biggest obstacles to improving America’s schools because it makes removing mediocre or even incompetent teachers difficult. Teacher unions, meanwhile, have steadfastly defended tenure for decades.
Colorado’s legislature changed tenure rules despite opposition from the state’s largest teacher’s union, a longtime ally of majority Democrats. Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, signed the bill into law last month.
After the bill survived a filibuster attempt and passed a key House vote, Democratic Rep. Nancy Todd, a 25-year teacher who opposed the measure, broke into tears.
“I don’t question your motives,” an emotional Todd said to the bill’s proponents. “But I do want you to hear my heart because my heart is speaking for over 40,000 teachers in the state of Colorado who have been given the message that it is all up to them.”
While other states have tried to modify tenure, Colorado’s law was the boldest education reform in recent memory, according to Kate Walsh, the president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which promotes changing the way teachers are recruited and retained, including holding tenured teachers accountable with annual reviews.

Evaluating Curricular Programs in the Madison School District

Madison School District Administration 2.8MB PDF:

I. Introduction
A. Title or topic – District Evaluation Protocol – The presentation is in response to the need to provide timely and prioritized information to the Board of Education around programs and interventions used within the District. The report describes a recommended approach to formalizing the program evaluation process within the District.
B. Presenters
Kurt Kiefer – Chief Information Office/Director of Research and Evaluation
Lisa Wachtel– Executive Director of Teaching & Learning
Steve Hartley – Chief of Staff
C. Background information – As part of the strategic plan it was determined that priority must be given to systematically collect data around programs and services provided within the district. The purposes for such information vary from determining program and intervention effectiveness for specific student outcomes, to customer satisfaction, to cost effectiveness analyses. In addition, at the December 2009 Board meeting the issue of conducting program evaluation in specific curricular areas was discussed. This report provides specific recommendations on how to coordinate such investigations and studies.
D. Action requested – The administration is requesting that the Board approve this protocol such that it becomes the model by which priority is established for conducting curricular, program, and intervention evaluations into the future.
II. Summary of Current Information
A. Synthesis of the topic· School districts are expected to continuously improve student achievement and ensure the effective use of resources. Evaluation is the means by which school systems determine the degree to which schools, programs, departments, and staff meet their goals as defined by their roles and responsibilities. It involves the collection of data that is then transformed into useful results to inform decisions. In particular, program evaluation is commonly defined as the systematic assessment of the operation and/or outcomes of a program, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program.
Program evaluation is a process. The first step to evaluating a program is to have a clear understanding of why the evaluation is being conducted in the first place. Focusing the evaluation helps an evaluator identify the most crucial questions and how those questions can be realistically answered given the context of the program and resources available. With a firm understanding of programs and/or activities that might be evaluated, evaluators consider who is affected by the program (stakeholders) and who might receive and or use information resulting from the evaluation (audiences). It is critical that the administration work with the

Evaluating the effectiveness of Madison School District expenditures on curriculum (such as math and reading recovery) along with professional development (adult to adult programs) has long been discussed by some Board and community members.

Morning Bell: Prolonging Education’s Race to the Bottom

Israel Ortega:

In perhaps President Obama’s most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.

For close to four decades, the federal government has operated under the seemingly simple premise that increased spending on education will translate into academic achievement. This line of thinking has resulted in inflation-adjusted federal expenditures on education increasing 138 percent since 1985. Per-pupil expenditures have ballooned to over $11,000 per student, and are even higher in most urban areas including the District of Columbia where the government spends $14,500 on each child. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into our public school system because the federal government, backed by powerful teachers unions, is convinced that it is best suited to administer our country’s education system. Unfortunately, this approach has been a miserable failure.>

Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement

Stephanie McCrummen:

Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation’s public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.
Driving the boom is a surge in federal funding for such products, the industry’s aggressive marketing and an idea axiomatic in the world of education reform: that to prepare students kids for the 21st century, schools must embrace the technologies that are the media of modern life.
Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard — essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America — locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.

Excellent question.

Blended Learning Leverages Great Teachers

Tom Vander Ark:

Opportunity at the Top, a great report from Public Impact, points out that it’s great teachers that close achievement gaps but that all current efforts will fall well short of ensuring that all US students see the benefits.
The problem is that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem-there’s just no way to make the batch-print model work well for all kids. Batch processing age-cohorts in groups of 25 (or more) kids through print curriculum with one teacher has lots of limitations. The Public Agenda report shows it’s mathematically impossible to put a great teacher in every room and even if we did some kids would be behind while other kids were ahead.
Even the accompanying 3x For All report falls short of the answer because it is rooted in teacher-centric delivery. The solution is a blended learning environment with tiered staffing that leverages great teachers across hundreds of kids. If personalized digital learning made up 1/3 of the elementary day and 2/3 of the secondary day, school staffing patterns can be adjusted to include a variety of learning professionals-some on site and some remote.

A Privately Funded Communications & Engagement Plan for the Madison School District?

66K PDF:

Wood Communications has offered to work with the District to assist us in assessing the need for and the actual development of an engagement and communications plan.
Should funds for the development of this plan be needed, Wood Communications has agreed to raise these funds privately resulting in no District dollars being utilized.
During June’s Superintendent’s Announcements and Reports, I will communicate my intent to move forward to work with Wood Communications on an engagement and communications plan. This will also allow the Board to provide input on this work. Attached to this memorandum is a letter from James Wood detailing the first step this firm would take in determining the need for a plan of this nature.
Please let me know if you have any questions on this.

Kids need to be corrected: School

Times of India:

After remaining incommunicado for nearly a month, La Martiniere for Boys issued a press release on Friday, denying responsibility for Rouvanjit Rawla’s death.
“As a school, we deeply regret the loss of young life. Attempts being made to hold the school entirely responsible are certainly misplaced. There are times when children need to be corrected and helped. The idea has always been to inculcate a sense of values amongst them. It is also important for the school to ensure that there is an environment conducive to learning and often corrective measures have to be taken to ensure this environment is not vitiated in the interest of the larger student community of the school,” read the statement, signed by governing board secretary Supriyo Dhar.
“The constant attack against the school has damaged the confidence of teachers and students who are totally innocent and are being unnecessarily drawn into unseemly public scrutiny.”
Five teachers of La Marts for Boys, including principal Sunirmal Chakravarthy, are facing charges of abetment to suicide after Rouvanjit’s father Ajay Rawla filed an FIR.

Houston Superintendent Grier dishes on magnet schools, names new chief

Ericka Mellon:

Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier has eliminated the position of manager of magnet programs. That means Dottie Bonner, who held the job since March 2002, is out. She submitted her letter of resignation effective Aug. 31, according to the district.
Grier instead has created a higher-level position, an assistant superintendent over school choice. Lupita Hinojosa, the former executive principal over the Wheatley High School feeder pattern, has been named to the post.
We know that changing anything related to magnets puts parents on edge, especially after former HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra’s failed attempt to reduce busing to the specialty schools. A quick Internet search shows that magnet transportation also was a hot topic in Grier’s former district, San Diego Unified. The school board there voted in spring 2009 to eliminate busing to magnets to save money but reversed the decision after parent outcry, according to Voice of San Diego.
I talked to Grier this morning about what happened in San Diego, and he said the decision to end busing to magnet schools was the school board’s, not his. “(Deputy Superintendent) Chuck Morris and I counseled and advised and recommended that they not do this — that it would destroy the magnet program — but they did anyway.”

Study: highly-rated professors are. . . overrated

Daniel de Vise:

How does a university rate the quality of a professor? In K-12 education, you have standardized tests, and those scores have never been more widely used in evaluating the value added by a teacher.
But there’s no equivalent at the college level. College administrators tend to rely on student evaluations. If students say a professor is doing a good job, perhaps that’s enough.
Or maybe not. A new study reaches the opposite conclusion: professors who rate highly among students tend to teach students less. Professors who teach students more tend to get bad ratings from their students — who, presumably, would just as soon get high grades for minimal effort.
The study finds that professor rank, experience and stature are far more predictive of how much their students will learn. But those professors generally get bad ratings from students, who are effectively punishing their professors for attempting to push them toward deeper learning.
The study is called “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors.” It was written by Scott E. Carrell of the University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West of the U.S. Air Force Academy

New controversy at Rhode Island school

Valerie Strauss:

Just when it looked like things were quieting down at troubled Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, the place that became famous when all of the teachers were fired and then rehired, there’s a new controversy.
One of the two newly named co-principals was approved by the Central Falls Board of Trustees this week even though his resumé said that math scores at his former school were much higher than they really were, according to the Providence Journal.
Let’s review: In March, all of the teachers and other educators at the only high school in Central Falls, Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city, were fired so that the school could be restructured with a new staff.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo for firing all of the educators in the building, and President Obama said it showed “a sense of accountability.”

Madison School District Board of Education Progress Report–March through June 2010

Maya Cole, Board President & Beth Moss Board Vice-President, Via email:

The 2009-10 school year is over, and the Board is wrapping up a very busy spring 2010. After several months of hard work, the Board finalized the preliminary 2010-11 budget on June 1. For the second year in a row, the state legislature decreased the amount of per pupil state aid by 15%. This decrease in revenue, coupled with a decrease in property values in the Madison Metropolitan School District, created a much larger than usual budget shortfall. This year is different because unlike previous years when the Board of Education was not allowed to raise property taxes to cover the shortfall, this year the state gave the Board the authority to raise taxes by an extreme amount. The Board and administration have worked hard to mitigate the tax impact while preserving programs in our schools.
2010-11 Budget Details:
The Board approved a preliminary budget of $360,131,948 after creating savings of over $13 million across all departments in the district. This budget represents a decrease of over $10 million from 2009-10. The final tax impact on a home of average value ($250k) is $225. The Board made reductions that did not directly affect instruction in the classroom, avoiding mass teacher lay-offs as experienced by many districts around the country and state.
Other State action:
The School Age Guarantee for Education (SAGE) Act was changed from funding K-3 class sizes of 15:1 to 18:1. The Board is considering how to handle this change in state funding.
Race to the Top is a competitive grant program run through the federal government. The state of Wisconsin applied for Race to the Top funding in round 1 and was denied. The Board approved the application for the second round of funding. Federal money will be awarded to states that qualify and the MMSD could receive $8,239,396.
Board of Education Election:
Thank you for 6 years of service and good luck to Johnny Winston, Jr. Taking his seat is James Howard, an economist with the Forest Service and MMSD parent. New Board officers are Maya Cole, president, Beth Moss, vice president, Ed Hughes, clerk, and James Howard, treasurer.
Sarah Maslin, our student representative from West High School, will be off to Yale University in the fall. Thank you for your service and good luck, Sarah! Congratulations to Wyeth Jackson, also from West, who won the election for student representative to the Board of Education. Jessica Brooke from La Follette will return as Student Senate president and alternate to the BOE Student Representative.
Other news:
In April the board received the following reports:
The Facility Assessment Report, a compilation of district maintenance needs over the next 5 years.
The Board of Education/Superintendent Communication Plan, providing a template for reports to the Board.
The District Reorganization Plan, a plan to restructure the administration and professional development department of the district.
The Board held a public hearing on the proposed budget at UW Space Place. In addition, the School Food Initiative Committee and the 4-K Advisory Committee met.
In May the Strategic Planning Steering Committee met. Stakeholders reviewed accomplishments achieved thus far and discussed and reprioritized action steps for the next year. A second public hearing on the budget was also held in May.
In June the Board finalized the Preliminary Budget after a statutory public hearing. During committee meetings on June 7, the ReAL grant team presented action plans for each of the large high schools and gave the Board an update on the ReAL grant and the Wallace grant. The four high schools have collaborated for the past two years to improve engagement and achievement at our high schools. The Student Services and Code of Conduct/Expulsions Committee presented a proposal for a new code of conduct and abeyance, with an emphasis on restorative justice.
Congratulations and good luck to all graduates! Have a safe and restful summer break.

Google Apps (email, docs & calendar) for Madison School District Staff & Students Proposed by the Administration

550K PDF:

Technical Services has planned to replace our Eudora student email system since 2008 and identified this as Activity 50 in the June 2010 Technology Plan, approved by the Board of Education. Consideration has also been given to replacing our GroupWise staff email system since instability of the web version ofthis system became a problem beginning in October 2009. Demands on our staff email system have always been greater due to our need for highly secure, robust and reliable local and remote access, shared calendaring, and integration with an archival system allowing for a seven year retention. This has been a complicated system and is core to many critical business and legal functions ofthe District.
An request for proposals (RFP) for alternatives to replace our student email, with the caveat that our staff email might be considered as well, was released in fall 2009, generating responses from nine vendors, representing 11 products. Both Microsoft’s Live@edu and Google’s Gmail have been final contenders for student email and following product reviews in March by 13 teachers, six technical staffand four administrators, consensus built around migrating both student and staff email to Gmail. In addition to email, Google Apps for Education includes access to a wide variety ofGoogle tools including Docs (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, fonus) and Google calendar.
Financial considerations:

  • Moving to Gmail for both students and staff will enable free email account hosting and cost $67,320/yr for the use ofPostini for staff email archiving. We will continue to use Novell’s ZenWorks for desktop application maintenance, at a cost of $28,000/yr through the 2010-2011 fiscal year. This approach would cost $95,320/yr. Discussion around creating and maintaining Gmail accounts from Infinite Campus and Lawson, as well as migrating staff calendars and live email accounts has not concluded whether consulting help will be required, although discussions with other school districts suggest we may not need external assistance. Should technical assistance be required we would hire consulting support on a time and materials basis, for this help.
  • If instead, the District stayed with GroupWise bundled with ZenWorks, Novell’s annual maintenance would be $54,378/yr. Continuing use our current staff email archive product would cost $29,300/yr. This approach would cost $83,678/yr, an annual savings ofless than $12,000. However, this approach will continue to require growth in data storage and requires an estimated 0.5 FTE allocation to maintain.

Related: Yale delays switch to Gmail and Oregon educational system offers Google Apps.

Madison School District Student Code of Conduct Administration Update

727K PDF:

In response to the questions raised at the June 7 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, the following information is shared in hopes ofclarifying proposed changes to the Student Code of Conduct:
Will there be a more specific definition ofbullying than the one that currently exists in the Explanation of Conduct Rules and Terms?
The following definition comes from the draft Anti-Bullying & Anti-Harassment Protocol and it, or a similar definition, will be brought forward with the version of the revised Code for which Board approval will be sought in July:
Bullying is the intentional action by an individual or group of individuals to infiict physical, emotional or mental suffering on another individual or group of individuals when there is an imbalance of real or perceived power. Harassing and bullying behavior includes any electronic, written, verbal or physical act or conduct toward an individual which creates an objectively hostile or offensive environment that meets one or more of the following conditions:
Places the individual in reasonable fear of harm to one self or one’s property
Has a detrimental effect on the individual’s personal, physical or mental health
Has a detrimental effect on the individual’s academic performance
Has the effect of interfering with the individual’s ability to participate in or benefit from any curricular, extracurricular, recreational, or any other activity provided by the school
Has the intent to intimidate, annoy or alarm another individual in a manner likely to cause annoyance or harm without legitimate purpose
Has personal contact with another individual with the intent to threaten, intimidate or alarm that individual without legitimate purpose

Monona Grove School District Governance: Teacher Union Contract Bargaining

Sunny Schubert:

Monona Grove School Superintendent Craig Gerlach is not a happy camper these days, and the source of his displeasure is the ongoing job action by the Monona Grove Education Association.
As previously reported, the teachers are “working the contract,” meaning they refuse to take part in school-related activities that are not specifically required.
It is a tactic the union has employed successfully in the past when contract negotiations have stalled, as they are as of this writing.
“It’s extremely frustrating,” Gerlach said. “Also, it’s embarrassing.”
How so? Gerlach gave an example: At the Fine Arts Awards ceremony at the high school, teachers refused to come, so the kids wound up passing out the awards to each other.
“I’ve been getting a number of phone calls from parents,” he said, “and I don’t know what to say. This is all relatively new to me.”

Board member Peter Sobol responds.

Teachers Are Fair Game

David Brooks:

I started covering education reform in 1983, with the release of the “Nation at Risk” report. In those days everybody had some idea for how we should reorganize the schools or change the curriculum–cut school size, cut class size, create vouchers, create charters, get back to basics, do less basics, increase local control, increase the federal role.
Some of the reforms seemed promising, but the results were disappointing, and tangential to the core issue: the relationship between teacher and student. It is mushy to say so, but people learn from people they love.
Today, aided by the realization that teacher quality is what matters most, a new cadre of reformers have come on the scene, many of them bred within the ranks of Teach for America. These are stubborn, data-driven types with a low tolerance for bullshit. The reform environment they find themselves in is both softhearted and hardheaded. They put big emphasis on the teaching relationship, but are absolutely Patton-esque when it comes to dismantling anything that interferes with that relationship. This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help, and state and federal laws that either impede reform or dump money into the ancien régime.

Must-read new report on high school dropouts

Jay Matthews:

I have long considered high school drop-outs not only the least soluble of our education problems but the least clear. School districts have traditionally fudged the numbers, reporting their drop-out rates as only 5 or 6 percent, a grossly deceptive one-year rate.
The National Governors Association and other policymakers, ashamed of this charade, have put an end to it. Everyone is switching to a four-year drop-out rate, the percentage of ninth-graders (about 31 percent nationally) who do not receive diplomas four years later. The improved data has not only raised the level of the debate but also made possible a new report with some unnerving revelations about graduation rates.
My wife made the mistake of letting me go with her to her office last Sunday to catch up on work. While there I read the new Education Week report, “Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success,” and kept squealing at one statistical surprise after another. I insisted on reading each one to her, delaying her efforts to get back outside on a nice weekend day.

Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success.
Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!.

Announcing the SUMMER 2010 Online Issue of Gifted Education Press Quarterly

via a Maurice Fisher email:

Dear Subscriber —
Could you share the following message with your STAFF, TEACHERS OR PARENTS? We are offering a complimentary copy of Gifted Education Press Quarterly. They would need to email me directly to receive our SUMMER 2010 issue. My email address is:
gifted@giftededpress.com
Please encourage your colleagues and friends to email me for a complimentary online subscription to GEPQ.
I need your help in locating new subscribers, and would greatly appreciate your asking colleagues and friends to contact me. We are now in a major political battle with federal and state governments to maintain gifted education programs in the public schools. I need your support in making Gifted Education Press Quarterly a resource available to all educators and parents who want to maintain and expand programs for gifted students! Your colleagues and friends should email me at: gifted@giftededpress.com. Thank you.
We’re all on a mission to advance the well-being of gifted education, and we all share a vision of excellence in this field. At this time in our nation’s history, it is important to maintain our leadership in education, science and the humanities. Therefore, I am asking the readers of Gifted Education Press Quarterly for your support to insure that we can continue publishing this Quarterly. Please consider sending a few dollars to help defray the costs of producing this important periodical in the gifted education field or ordering some of our books. We have been publishing GEPQ for 23 years with the goal of including all viewpoints on educating the gifted. Our address is: Gifted Education Press; 10201 Yuma Court; P.O. Box 1586; Manassas, VA 20109. Thank you.
I would also like to give you a special treat. Joan Smutny, the editor of the Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal has given me permission to place the entire Spring 2010 Journal on the Gifted Education Press web site in PDF format. This is a very important journal issue in the gifted education field because it contains 27 excellent articles on Advocating for Gifted Education Programs. I invite you to read and/or print any or all of these articles from our web site. There is no charge for accessing this journal! Just go to my web site at www.GiftedEdPress.com and click the link for Gifted Advocacy – Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal. Happy reading!
Members of the National Advisory Panel for Gifted Education Press Quarterly are:
Dr. Hanna David — Ben Gurion University at Eilat, Israel; Dr. James Delisle — Kent State University; Dr. Jerry Flack — University of Colorado; Dr. Howard Gardner — Harvard University; Ms. Margaret Gosfield – Editor, Gifted Education Communicator, Published by the California Association for the Gifted; Ms. Dorothy Knopper — Publisher, Open Space Communications; Mr. James LoGiudice — Bucks County, Pennsylvania IU No. 22; Dr. Bruce Shore — McGill University, Montreal, Quebec; Ms. Joan Smutny — National-Louis University, Illinois; Dr. Colleen Willard-Holt — Dean, Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario; Ms. Susan Winebrenner — Consultant, San Marcos, California; Dr. Ellen Winner — Boston College.
Sincerely Yours in the Best Interests of the Gifted Children of America,
Maurice
Maurice Fisher, Ph.D.
Publisher
Gifted Education Press

Continue reading Announcing the SUMMER 2010 Online Issue of Gifted Education Press Quarterly

A School Prays for Help

Jennifer Levitz & Staphanie Simon:

When his budget for pencils, paper, and other essential supplies was cut by a third this school year, the principal of Combee Elementary School worried children would suffer.
Then, a local church stepped in and “adopted” the school. The First Baptist Church at the Mall stocked a resource room with $5,000 worth of supplies. It now caters spaghetti dinners at evening school events, buys sneakers for poor students, and sends in math and English tutors.
The principal is delighted. So are church pastors. “We have inroads into public schools that we had not had before,” says Pastor Dave McClamma. “By befriending the students, we have the opportunity to visit homes to talk to parents about Jesus Christ.”
Short on money for everything from math workbooks to microscope slides, public schools across the nation are seeking corporate and charitable sponsors, promising them marketing opportunities and access to students in exchange for desperately needed donations.

S Korea faces problem of ‘over-education’

Christian Oliver and Kang Buseong:

South Korea has some of the world’s most over-educated bakers. In one class in Seoul teaching muffin and scone-making, there are graduates in Russian, fine art and animation. For South Korean parents, the world’s highest spenders on their children’s education, something is going horribly wrong.
“I wanted to ease the burden on my parents by earning just a little something and finding a job that could give me something more dependable than temporary work,” said one 29-year-old trainee baker. Since graduating in art she could only find part-time work as a waitress. Like so many young people asked about finding work in a socially competitive society where unemployment is a stigma, she was too embarrassed to give her name.
South Koreans often attribute their economic success to a passion for education. But the country of 48m has overdone it, with 407 colleges and universities churning out an over-abundance of graduates.

Education minister sets deadline for balanced Vancouver School Budget

John Bermingham:

B.C. Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid is laying down the law to the Vancouver School Board — ordering trustees to send her a draft budget by June 18.
She also wants trustees to consider a number of cost-cutting options from last week’s comptroller-general’s report on the district’s finances.
The board currently faces a $17-million budget deficit, and has to submit a final and balanced budget to MacDiarmid by June 30.
Last week’s report recommended almost $12 million in other cost saving schemes.
They include closing schools, winning contract concessions from workers and charging higher rent to childcare centres.