Category Archives: Staff Support

Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Parenting, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

In Praise of Milwaukee’s High School Anti-Violence Program

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

An anti-violence program at six Milwaukee high schools continues to show progress, and that is good news for Milwaukee Public Schools and especially for students in those schools.
Suspensions and both violent and nonviolent incidents continue to decline since Violence-Free Zones were implemented at South Division, Marshall, Bay View, Custer, North Division and Washington high schools, according to organizers for the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a Washington, D.C.-based group that is working with MPS. If the program continues to show progress, MPS should consider expanding it beyond those schools.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Introduction to a standards-based system . . . assessment

Madison School District Department of Teaching & Learning:

The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Community leaders and staff in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum can be thought of as the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. Standards-based instruction focuses on teaching the knowledge and skills which support students’ continual progress toward meeting the standards.
This article focuses on assessment, the process of using multiple strategies to measure student learning.
The remainder of this article will use mathematics as an example of a content area to demonstrate the use of standards-based assessment. MMSD teachers assess the content standards (i.e., number and algebra) as well as the process standards (i.e., communication, problem solving, and reasoning).
Research indicates that in addition to quizzes and tests, a variety of daily assessment tools (i.e., questioning, observations, discussions, and presentations) are needed to create a more thorough picture of what a student understands.

Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison School Board Discusses Discipline, Safety, Cell Phones and Code of Conduct

Watch the discussion via this video

Channel3000:

The Madison School Board met on Monday night to discuss a new positive behavior support plan as well as a new code of conduct for students who attend Madison public schools.
The code of conduct has been under review for months by a committee who made recommendations to the board in a special meeting on Monday.
The meeting is especially timely after the highly publicized recordings of students fighting at Toki Middle School came to light last week.
Committee members will recommend making a few major revisions or additions to the code, including specifically banning voice or image recording.
Board members discussed safety, discipline and cell phones, which were all topics of importance that applied to the Toki situation, reported WISC-TV.
Madison’s new student code of conduct targets cell phones. Secret or hidden recordings are a serious offense that could get a student suspended or expelled.
“Cell phones and video cameras are being used in very wrong ways, to take pictures of tests, to film fighting, to record kids in the locker room, that’s just not acceptable,” said school board president Arlene Silviera. “I think we have to be very specific in the use of these types of devices — what can and what cannot be done.”

Tamira Madsen:

In an effort to give principals and administrators a chance to exercise discretion to expel a student who brings a weapon besides a gun to school, Madison school district officials are considering alterations to the language in the student codes of conduct.
Recommended revisions were discussed at Monday night’s School Board meeting.
The current rule for a first offense states that a student who has a weapon on school grounds besides a firearm, pellet gun or BB gun and isn’t carrying the weapon with an “intent to cause harm to another” will receive a five-day suspension. After a second offense, a student could face an expulsion recommendation.
The rule revision would give principals and administrators the option to expel the student for a first-time offense.
Dan Mallin, who works in legal services with the Madison Metropolitan School District and is a member of the committee drafting changes to the codes of conduct, said the rule change is meant to take into account a variety of circumstances.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Fairfax County Schools to Review Grading Practices

Michael Alison Chandler:

Fairfax County school officials have agreed to review their grading policies in response to parents’ concerns that relatively stringent standards mean their children are losing out on scholarships and college admissions.
More than 2,800 parents and students signed an online petition urging the school system to adopt a 10-point grading scale and give extra weight for honors, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes. The current system requires a score of 94 or higher for an A, and gives no extra credit to honors courses. AP courses are given half a point.
Many competing school systems, including Montgomery County, give A’s for lower scores and graduate students with similar backgrounds but higher GPA’s, the parents contend. Their concerns come as competition for admission to big-name colleges is at a high and tuition more expensive than ever.
Louise Epstein, president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted, said the current policies are unfair. “They cost families money and reduce good opportunities for students just because they go to Fairfax schools,” she said.

School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

California Considers New Free Speech Protections in Schools

Daniel Wood:

Eleven-year teaching veteran Teri Hu was adviser to The Voice, the student newspaper of Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., when school administrators told her not to let it publish a story critical of school policies on teaching assistants. Two months after she refused, Ms. Hu became “former” adviser to The Voice.
Janet Ewell, a tenured teacher in Garden Grove, was enjoying the praise in her 2002 school evaluation until she came to the part about her performance as advisor to journalism students. “[The principal] let me know he didn’t like three student editorials, one about school bathrooms, one about the cafeteria and one about teachers who are not available to help students,” recalls Ms. Ewell. “Then he told me I wouldn’t be advising them the next fall.”
Scenarios like those above occurring in schools across California have prompted the state to take the national lead again in protecting free speech rights on campuses. Two years ago, the state was the first to pass a bill preventing college administrators from censoring student newspapers.
Now, legislation is moving forward to protect both high school and college faculty advisers from being punished by administrators for students’ articles or editorials.

Budget/Financing, Discipline / Violence, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison’s Sennett Middle School Discipline Climate & Security Cameras

Channel3000:

But her enthusiasm for the cameras pales in comparison to a new district-wide middle school program started this year called Positive Behavior Intervention Support, or PBIS.
“This is very good for kids — very, very good,” Lodholz said.
The PBIS program uses positive behavior support coaches like Sennett’s Jennifer Tomlinson. She works with students, teachers and staff to teach positive behavior skills to students.
Often the behavior is rewarded and promoted by the students themselves, through handmade posters or activities aimed at showcasing such behaviors, WISC-TV reported.
Officials said the key is to actually instruct kids how to behave correctly, be it through mediation sessions, classroom instruction or other innovative approaches.
“We need to teach kids how to be accountable for their actions and that’s what we’re doing through this system,” Tomlinson said.
Lodholz said the program helps offer instruction to students on how they should be behave. She said the PBIS program builds upon other Sennett school strategies and that it all seems to be working.
Last year incidents of misconduct at Sennett totaled 1,706, and 1,169 suspensions were handed out.
But in the 2007-08 school year to date, with the cameras and new program, Sennett’s seen more than 730 fewer misconduct incidents — at 973 — and only 94 suspensions.

College Preparation, Community Partners, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Curriculum - Math, Curriculum - Science, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

“The Schools Aren’t Teaching Our Kids What They Need to Know”

Bob Herbert:

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.
“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”
Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.
When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.
Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades:

Common Core of Data.

Discipline / Violence, Events, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Student Fights At Toki Middle School Posted Online

5 Comments

Channel3000.com:

Disturbing video showing girls engaged in vicious fights on the Toki Middle School grounds popped up on the popular Web site YouTube.
The video, which was posted on April 19, featured a fight between girls outside the school and one from inside the building.
Madison police confirmed that they responded to fights at Toki on Thursday, April 17 and one on Friday, April 18, but can’t say whether the fights were the same ones posted online.
“School staff are very aware not only of the videos, but of the things that happened,” said Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater. “The students have been identified and are being dealt with through the discipline system in the ways that are appropriate for what the incident was.”
That discipline could include suspension. Rainwater said the incidents are so new the discipline process is still ongoing.
The incidents come one month after extra security was added to the school in the form of an additional security guard and a dean of students to deal specifically with problematic students.
The additional safety measure came at the request of Toki parents who felt the school was unsafe with escalating violence all year.

More from Kathleen Masterson.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Adult Workers Have a Lot to Learn Online

Michael Schrage:

Children are fantastic little learning machines. They are hardwired to play with ideas and absorb knowledge. Adults, alas, are not. That is why the challenge of adult education and lifelong learning is more difficult – and ultimately more important – than childhood education. Societies that are serious about raising their standard of living should focus on enhancing the productivity of parents rather than boosting teenage test scores.
The economic rationale is clear. Ageing populations of Europe, China and North America increasingly enjoy long and healthy lives. Yet as they grow older, wealth creation depends on the ability to acquire and convert information, skills and technologies into new value. In this environment, hard-won expertise, rather like expensive capital equipment, often depreciates with astonishing speed. The cruel “human capital” jibe, that many workers do not have 20 years’ experience but one year’s experience 20 times over, has assumed new poignancy.
The premise that quality education during life’s first two decades matters more than for decades four and five has become literally counterproductive. Demographic realities and dynamic economies have made “ageing adults” today’s most underappreciated – and underappreciating – capital asset class.
Improving returns on that asset requires neither great sums of money nor greater flights of imagination. The key is to rethink and reorganise how busy but anxious adults can benefit from education and training opportunities. Technology makes meeting that challenge far more affordable, entrepreneurial and compelling. Adult education is a market ripe for rapid global transformation.

Continuing our technology & education discussions. Related posts: on technology spending in Milwaukee and Lauren Rosen Yaezel on Technology in the Madison Schools.
Brittanica on Adult Education.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Columbus, Stoughton Granted Startup Funds for 4-Year-Old Kindergarten; Background on Madison’s inaction

Quinn Craugh:


School districts in Stoughton, Columbus, Deerfield, Sauk Prairie and Janesville were among 32 statewide named Monday to receive Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction grants to start kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds.
But it may not be enough for at least one area district.
Getting 4-year-olds enrolled in kindergarten is a key step to raising student achievement levels and graduation rates, particularly among children from low-income families, national research has shown, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said.
School districts’ efforts to launch 4K programs have been hampered because it takes three years to get full funding for the program under the state’s school-finance system, according to DPI.
That’s what these grants are supposed to address with $3 million announced for 4K programs to start this fall.
Columbus, one of the school districts that qualified for the grant, would get an estimated $62,814 to enroll 87 children this fall.

Related: Marc Eisen on Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign.

The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district’s proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they’re still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That’s why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin’s 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children “to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers.”

Madison Teachers Inc.’s John Matthews on 4 Year Old Kindergarten:

For many years, recognizing the value to both children and the community, Madison Teachers Inc. has endorsed 4-year-old kindergarten being universally accessible to all.
This forward-thinking educational opportunity will provide all children with an opportunity to develop the skills they need to be better prepared to proceed with their education, with the benefit of 4- year-old kindergarten. They will be more successful, not only in school, but in life.
Four-year-old kindergarten is just one more way in which Madison schools will be on the cutting edge, offering the best educational opportunities to children. In a city that values education as we do, there is no question that people understand the value it provides.
Because of the increasing financial pressures placed upon the Madison School District, resulting from state- imposed revenue limits, many educational services and programs have been cut to the bone.
During the 2001-02 budget cycle, the axe unfortunately fell on the district’s 4-year-old kindergarten program. The School Board was forced to eliminate the remaining $380,000 funding then available to those families opting to enroll their children in the program.

Jason Shephard on John Matthews:

This includes its opposition to collaborative 4-year-old kindergarten, virtual classes and charter schools, all of which might improve the chances of low achievers and help retain a crucial cadre of students from higher-income families. Virtual classes would allow the district to expand its offerings beyond its traditional curriculum, helping everyone from teen parents to those seeking high-level math and science courses. But the union has fought the district’s attempts to offer classes that are not led by MTI teachers.
As for charter schools, MTI has long opposed them and lobbied behind the scenes last year to kill the Studio School, an arts and technology charter that the school board rejected by a 4-3 vote. (Many have also speculated that Winston’s last minute flip-flop was partly to appease the union.)
“There have become these huge blind spots in a system where the superintendent doesn’t raise certain issues because it will upset the union,” Robarts says. “Everyone ends up being subject to the one big political player in the system, and that’s the teachers union.”
MTI’s opposition was a major factor in Rainwater’s decision to kill a 4-year-old kindergarten proposal in 2003, a city official told Isthmus last year (See “How can we help poor students achieve more?” 3/22/07).
Matthews’ major problem with a collaborative proposal is that district money would support daycare workers who are not MTI members. “The basic union concept gets shot,” he says. “And if you shoot it there, where else are you going to shoot it?”
At times, Matthews can appear downright callous. He says he has no problem with the district opening up its own 4K program, which would cost more and require significant physical space that the district doesn’t have. It would also devastate the city’s accredited non-profit daycare providers by siphoning off older kids whose enrollment offsets costs associated with infants and toddlers.
“Not my problem,” Matthews retorts.

It will be interesting to see where incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad takes this issue.
Kindergarten.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Seminar tries to clear up confusion about inclusion

Paul Sloth:

Julie Maurer hopes to see a day when parents of children with special needs, parents like her, don’t have to advocate for their children in public school
Maurer hopes the system changes and schools accept children, like her daughter, Jenny, as easily as children who will never carry a label like “learning disabled” or “emotionally disabled.”
Maurer’s daughter, now 20, attends the University of Wisconsin-Parkside after graduating from Racine Unified.
A small group of parents, educators and disability advocates spent a few hours Saturday at the United Way of Racine County, 2000 Domanik Drive, with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor Elise Frattura, clearing up the confusion of including special education students in regular education classrooms.
Those years, from elementary school through high school, were marked by Maurer’s struggles to get her daughter into regular classrooms instead of being isolated from the rest of the children her age.
A preschool teacher encouraged Maurer to read the federal special education law, so as to understand what she should expect her daughter to receive in school.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

More on Technology Education

Brian Back:

“If we don’t teach this to them,” Joan Fecteau, an MPS instructional technology leader, told me, “then we are doing as much of a disservice as not teaching them to read or write.”
But you can’t teach driving by sitting at a desk. You have to get behind the wheel. Let’s give kids hands-on experience under teacher supervision.
Fecteau not only teaches students but teachers as well. “Some teachers don’t know enough about the Internet to understand how to avoid viruses and tracking devices. For example, clicking on a pop-up window can lead to malicious spyware or unintended Web pages being displayed.”
It is apparent to parents that most kids are far beyond their teachers’ and parents’ understanding. The one institution that has the mission to teach is not keeping up. We need to give schools the nod and the resources to do it – which is code for funding. Oh, no, did I say that?

Lauren Rosen Yeazel’s recent words generated some interesting discussion on technology and schools.
In my view, technology, per se, is not the core issue. Critical thinking and knowledge come first, then tools. Tools we purchase today will be long obsolete by the time our children graduate (maybe this argues for some technology presence in high school). Ideally, our schools should have fast fiber and wireless (open) networks, and as Momanonymous noted, perhaps teacher compensation might include a laptop/mobile device allowance.
I am generally against teaching kids powerpoint, particularly before they’ve mastered the art of writing a paper.

Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Suburban DC Schools Reject Metal Detectors

Daniel de Vise:

In spring 1991, after a teenage girl stabbed a classmate in the cafeteria of an Anacostia school, the D.C. Board of Education voted to install metal detectors at the front entrances of 10 middle and high schools.
No other school system in the region has embraced the technology, even as metal detectors have multiplied in courthouses, museums and other public buildings across the region over the past two decades.
Many school officials view metal detectors as costly, impractical and fallible. To suburban parents, they conjure up images of armed camps. Even at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, where three loaded guns were found in a locker last week, consensus is building against them.
“I don’t want my son to come to school through metal detectors. That’s prison,” said Alex Colina, speaking to several hundred other parents at a community meeting Monday night.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Sadly, kids’ struggle with writing goes on

In light of West High School Principal Ed Holmes’s budgetary decision to shut down the Writing Lab after almost 40 years in existence, I share this recent column from Barbara Wallraff, who writes the column Word Court.
America’s eighth-graders and high school seniors got their writing “report cards” the other day — the results for the writing part of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress were announced. Just a third of eighth-grade students and a quarter of high school seniors are “proficient” in writing. Oh, dear! And yet federal authorities consider this encouraging news — that’s how bad the situation is.
Granted, the average scores are a few points higher than they were when the test was given in 2002. And the improvement is almost across the board, at least among the eighth-graders. Students in every ethnic group except American Indians are doing better, and the gap white and black eighth-graders is narrowing. Also granted, better is better — and mountains of behavior modification research demonstrate that praising successes is a more effective way to bring about change than criticizing failures.
But still, isn’t cheering because a third of the kids are doing well like congratulating ourselves that we made it a third of the way to the finish line in a race? Or that we managed to pay a third of our bills? Speaking of thirds, a 2003 survey by the College Board concluded that a third of employees at America’s blue-chip corporations are pretty bad at writing and need remedial training. And speaking of writing, can everybody see the handwriting on the wall? The message is terribly disheartening. Writing isn’t just a skill that people tend to need to earn a good living — it’s one of our basic means of communication.
The question is what to do about the two-thirds or three-quarters of our young people who are less than proficient. Keeping on doing whatever we’ve been doing isn’t suddenly going to start yielding different results. Admittedly, the sorry state of America’s writing skills is a vast, long-term problem to which experts have devoted whole careers. So who am I to propose a solution?
Writing is different from other skills. In math, you either get the concept or you don’t. In history, you either know who did what when or you don’t. But writing isn’t right or wrong, just better or worse. Learning to write is something each of us does individually, in our own way — which makes me suspect that sweeping initiatives, no matter how brilliant and well-funded (hah!), aren’t what’s needed.
May I suggest, instead, that anybody who has the time , energy and interest in young people encourage them, one at a time, to write — and read? (Reading skills and writing skills go hand in hand.) Ask kids to write you emails. Lend them a favorite book , and tell them what the book has meant to you. Ask them about what they’ve been reading.
If you’re a parent, you’re probably doing this for your own kids, and you probably know the statistics about what a huge advantage it gives kids if their parents take an interest in their education. If you’re only, or also, a concerned citizen — well, there are plenty of kids who aren’t lucky enough to be growing up in your family. Wouldn’t it make you proud to help a few of them?
For more:

College Preparation, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Curriculum - Math, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Unready in MA

Many Mass. graduates unprepared in college
Thousands need remedial classes, are dropout risks
By Peter Schworm
Boston Globe Staff / April 16, 2008
Thousands of Massachusetts public high school graduates arrive at college unprepared for even the most basic math and English classes, forcing them to take remedial courses that discourage many from staying in school, according to a statewide study released yesterday.
The problem is particularly acute in urban districts and vocational schools, according to the first-of-its kind study. At three high schools in Boston and two in Worcester, at least 70 percent of students were forced to take at least one remedial class because they scored poorly on a college placement test.
The study raises concern that the state’s public schools are not doing enough to prepare all of their students for college, despite years of overhauls and large infusions of money.
The findings are also worrisome because students who take remedial courses, which do not count toward a degree, are far more likely to drop out of college, often without the skills needed to land a good job. That has broad implications for the state’s workforce, economy, and social mobility.
The report, conducted jointly by the state Departments of Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education, found that the problem crossed socioeconomic lines. One third of high school graduates in suburban Hanover took remedial classes, as did 27 percent of graduates in Lynnfield and Needham.

Continue reading Unready in MA →

Community Partners, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Lacking Credits, Some Students Learn a Shortcut

Elissa Gootman:

Dennis Bunyan showed up for his first-semester senior English class at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem so rarely that, as he put it, “I basically didn’t attend.”
But despite his sustained absence, Mr. Bunyan got the credit he needed to graduate last June by completing just three essay assignments, which he said took about 10 hours.
“I’m grateful for it, but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous,” Mr. Bunyan said. “There’s no way three essays can possibly cover a semester of work.”
Mr. Bunyan was able to graduate through what is known as credit recovery — letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school. Although his principal said the makeup assignments were as rigorous as regular course work, Mr. Bunyan’s English teacher, Charan Morris, was so troubled that she boycotted the graduation ceremony, writing in an e-mail message to students that she believed some were “being pushed through the system regardless of whether they have done the work to earn their diploma.”

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Technology in the Madison Schools

16 Comments

I am the parent of 2 children, one in first grade and the other soon to enter Kindergarten. I recently registered my child for Kindergarten where I was handed a very helpful folder with lots of great information in it. It had pictures of children learning in various contexts and text touting the wonderful education Madison children receive. The curious thing is that in the center of the folder is a picture of children using computers that are most likely more than 10 years old. Across the picture in large print it says “Welcome to Madison’s Award Winning Schools!” Opposite the picture is a paragraph stating that there is a 4 to 1 computer ratio and that computers are integral to the K-12 instructional program. While I don’t doubt all this to be true, just how old is that computer that is “integral” to my child’s instructional program? Is my child getting the experiences that meet today’s standards for knowledge in this area? While this is just a picture, it caused me to look around my daughter’s school and to talk to a few teachers. What I learned was appalling.
Many teachers do their grades at home, not because of time, but because their classroom computer is so old and slow that it freezes on them or times out during an upload and they lose all of their data. I was stunned and confused. We as parents have been hearing about this new system that will allow us better access to seeing how our kids are doing in school and yet the teachers can’t even enter data from their classrooms. Should we not be embarrassed as a district? Can we really claim truth in the text filled folds of the aforementioned folder?

Continue reading Technology in the Madison Schools →

Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Schools ignored abuse warnings for 2 decades

John Iwasaki:

Seattle Public Schools will pay $3 million for failing to act on dozens of warnings that a popular teacher was molesting some of his fifth-grade students, a pattern that lasted two decades.
The most abused girl will receive $2.5 million, which her attorney said will be the largest reported settlement paid by a school district in Washington to a single victim in a sex-abuse case.
Under the settlement, approved Monday in King County Superior Court, the district acknowledged negligence in failing to protect two girls from Laurence “Shayne” Hill, 58, who has admitted to molesting at least seven girls while teaching at Broadview-Thomson Elementary in North Seattle.
The girls’ lawyers said the district protected Hill even though at least 15 teachers and staff members made at least 30 reports to administrators that he was grabbing girls’ buttocks and having them sit on his lap, sometimes in darkened classrooms, since the mid-1980s.

Related by Doug Erickson & Andy Hall: Former Waunakee educational assistant wasn’t reported by the Madison Schools.

Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

If You Text in Class, This Prof Will Leave

Scott Jaschik:

Some professors threaten to confiscate students’ cell phones if they go off during class. Laurence Thomas has his own approach to classroom distractions. If the philosopher at Syracuse University catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn’t matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave.
Last week, when a student in a large lecture — in the front row no less — sent a text message, Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen” disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.
While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. “One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas followed up with a second e-mail, noting that at least one parent of a student had complained about two classes being called off. “Everyone has to understand that respect is a two-way street. I respect you, as I endeavor to do and you respect me. My experience has been that confronting students directly and asking them to stop has virtually no effect. I walk out to underscore the importance of what this means to me,” he wrote.

Community Partners, Events, Parenting, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

How to Disagree: An Attempt at a “Disagreement Hierarchy”

Paul Graham:

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.
The result is there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it’s not anger that’s driving the increase in disagreement, there’s a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it’s easy to say things you’d never say face to face.
If we’re all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here’s an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Jobs, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

John Matthews has run Madison’s teachers union for 40 years. Is it time for a change?

1 Comment

Jason Shephard:

But while Matthews laments the failures of government to improve teaching and learning, he glosses over his own pivotal role in local educational leadership. That role includes standing in the way of programs like 4-year-old kindergarten that could help the district meet its educational objectives.
Beginning in the next few weeks, a school board made up mostly of rookies will begin to address the challenges ahead. A new superintendent starting July 1 — Daniel Nerad, formerly top dog in Green Bay — inspires hope of new solutions to nagging problems. But the third pillar of power is John Matthews. He’s been around the longest and arguably knows the most.
Already, Matthews has cemented his legacy from building a strong, tough union. But now, some are wondering if Matthews will also leave behind a legacy of obstructing key educational change.

Clusty Search: John Matthews.

Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Coverage of the Madison School Board Elections: 2008

Marc Eisen @ Isthmus:

Just because they’re uncontested, you shouldn’t overlook the two races for the Madison school board on the April 1 ballot.
There isn’t a tougher job or a more important one in local politics than maintaining the high quality of the Madison schools and dealing with the serious problems that confront them.
Over the past five weeks, we’ve queried retired teacher Marj Passman, the lone candidate for Seat 6, and attorney Ed Hughes, the lone candidate for Seat 7, on the important issues.
Here’s the week-by-week breakdown of our questions:

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Numbers Don’t Tell Whole Story at Madison’s Glendale Elementary

Susan Troller:

Glendale Elementary may be failing by test-based standards, but it’s succeeding by human ones.
The question of how we recognize good schools and bad ones has become a pressing issue.
In Washington, Congress is debating the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind legislation. Locally, Madison and Sun Prairie parents have recently been upset over boundary changes that some see as sending their children to less desirable schools.
At the same time, the movement toward inclusivity in special education, a growing minority population and increasing poverty rates throughout Dane County, particularly in Madison, have put a sharp point on some important questions:

  • Do advanced students suffer when they share a classroom with struggling students?
  • How should schools address the stresses of poverty?
  • Are test scores a reliable measure of a school’s effectiveness?

This story doesn’t attempt to answer those questions; educational researchers have been struggling with them for decades. Instead, it puts one Madison elementary school under the microscope where all those currents come together — a school that by No Child Left Behind’s test-based standards is clearing failing. Yet, by the assessment of a number of parents, volunteers and other fans, the school is succeeding beyond all expectations.
A closer look at Glendale Elementary, a 50-year-old Madison school within the noisy shadow of U.S. 51, shows a school where success is occurring in ways that test scores can’t measure and poverty rates don’t reveal.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

There’s a Hole in State Standards And New Teachers Like Me Are Falling Through

A Second Year Teacher:

All states should have clear, specific, grade-by-grade, content-rich standards. When they don’t, it’s the students who miss out on a top-notch education and the teachers—especially the new teachers—who find more frustration than fulfillment. Below, we hear from a new teacher who laments the lack of direction she received in her first year on the job. We have withheld her name and school district to allow her to speak frankly and to emphasize that new teachers across the country are facing similar challenges.
–Editors

First days are always nerve-racking—first days attending a new school, first days in a new neighborhood, and especially first days at a new job. My first day as a high school English teacher in a large, urban public school was no exception. It was my first “real” job after graduating college just three months earlier, and to add to my anxiety, I was hired just one day, precisely 24 hours, before my students would arrive. But my family and friends, mentors, and former professors all assured me that, like all other first days I had conquered, this day would be a successful start to a successful career. Unfortunately, this time they were wrong.
My first day on the job, I entered the building expecting to be greeted by the principal or chairperson, guided to my classrooms, and provided with what I considered to be the essentials: a schedule, a curriculum, rosters, and keys. Instead, the only things I received were a piece of paper on which two numerical codes were written, and a warning not to use the women’s bathroom on the second floor. After some frantic inquiring, I learned that the codes signified that I would be teaching ninthand tenth-grade regular English. As various colleagues pulled at my paper to get a glance, some nodded approvingly, while others sighed sympathetically. Eager to make a judgment of my own, I asked a question that, two years later, has yet to be answered: “What is taught in ninth- and tenth-grade regular English?” In response, I was given book lists containing over 20 books per grade, ranging from Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender to William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew on the freshman list alone, and even greater disparities on the other three lists. I was told to select six books from the appropriate list for each grade I taught, and “teach a book for every six weeks of the school year.” Unsatisfied with this answer, yet slowly beginning to feel foolish for asking (Should I know the answers to these questions? Am I unqualified to be a teacher if I don’t know what ninth- and tenth-grade English means?), I gathered the courage to inquire further. “What concepts are we supposed to teach the students through these books?” Now growing visibly agitated, several colleagues responded, “Teach literary elements and techniques. They need to re-learn those every year, and prepare them for the state test, and teach them some grammar and vocabulary as well as whatever concepts each book calls for.”

Much more on Wisconsin’s standards here.

Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Parenting, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, TAG

School Cell Phone Policy

Samara Kalk Derby:

As it stands, Madison school district policy strictly forbids students from having cell phones in school. The Student Senate will recommend to the School Board next month that phones be allowed to be used before and after school and during lunch.
“I don’t know many teenagers who would like to be separated from their cell phone,” said Laura Checovich, 17, president of the Student Senate and a student at West High School.
“Right now, the current policy is that you could be expelled just for having one in your backpack or in your pocket. We thought that was pretty drastic and thought it needed to be looked at again,” she said.
Some students leave their cell phones in their lockers, but Checovich estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of students keep their phones in their pockets or backpacks, which is prohibited under current school policy.
The School Board directed the Student Senate in December to research and recommend potential changes to district policy on cell phone use in schools. The Senate’s recommendations will be confined to policy in the high schools. The Senate will present its findings to the board at a 5 p.m. meeting April 14 at La Follette High School.

College Preparation, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Why Bother Having a Resume?

Seth Godin:

This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.
Not just for my little internship, but in general. Great people shouldn’t have a resume.
Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.
Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?
If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?

Community Partners, Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

How to Fix K-12 Education

David Bessoud:

This month, I want to use this forum to publicize a report that came out last fall with solid advice for how to improve our schools. As we think about K-12 mathematics education, as we engage in the debate of what should succeed No Child Left Behind, I believe that this report provides a useful, research-based framework in which to situate that debate. And I believe that this report has implications for how we think about mathematics teaching in our colleges and universities, a topic to which I shall return in later columns.
The report in question was issued by McKinsey & Company in September, 2007, How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top [1]. Their procedure was straight-forward. They took the ten top-performing countries according to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea, and asked what practices are common among them. They tested their conclusions by comparing these practices with those in the US school systems that have seen the most dramatic increase in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or TIMSS scores or have been consistent finalists for the Broad Prize for Urban Education. These school systems are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Ohio.
None of their conclusions should be surprising. The three practices that they identified are on most people’s lists of what they would like to see. What is eye-opening is how effective these practices can be and how important it is to focus on them. In my own paraphrase, they are

  1. Recruit teachers from among the most highly literate and numerate college students.
  2. Support teachers with continual coaching, peer-mentoring, and professional development.
  3. Have clear standards for system performance, intervene quickly and effectively when problems arise, and allocate resources so that those with the greatest need get the most support.

Budget/Financing, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Maryland District Plans Teacher Incentive Pay Pilot Program

Nelson Hernandez:

Prince George’s County education and labor leaders unveiled a much-anticipated pilot program yesterday that will offer teachers and administrators at 12 schools incentive pay for good performance.
The voluntary program, called Financial Incentive Rewards for Supervisors and Teachers, or FIRST, will allow teachers to make as much as $10,000 above base salary for improving the performance of their students, teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subjects, and participating in evaluations and professional development. Principals and assistant principals will be able to make up to $12,500 and $11,000, respectively.
County education leaders hope the offer of extra pay will help Prince George’s recruit talented teachers and attract the best teachers and administrators to academically struggling schools. The extra pay would represent a sizable bump for a starting teacher salary of about $41,000.
Although labor organizations across the country have often opposed pay-for-performance programs, saying they can be imposed unfairly by management, union leaders at yesterday’s news conference said that they like the voluntary nature of the county’s program and that they had been invited to help design it from the beginning.

Community Partners, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Freedom Means Responsibility

George McGovern:

Nearly 16 years ago in these very pages, I wrote that “‘one-size-fits all’ rules for business ignore the reality of the market place.” Today I’m watching some broad rules evolve on individual decisions that are even worse.
Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics, including calls to regulate subprime mortgages.
With liberalized credit rules, many people with limited income could access a mortgage and choose, for the first time, if they wanted to own a home. And most of those who chose to do so are hanging on to their mortgages. According to the national delinquency survey released yesterday, the vast majority of subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages are in good condition,their holders neither delinquent nor in default.
There’s no question, however, that delinquency and default rates are far too high. But some of this is due to bad investment decisions by real-estate speculators. These losses are not unlike the risks taken every day in the stock market.

About George McGovern.

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

SMALLER CLASSES NOT ENOUGH TO REDUCE ACHIEVEMENT GAP

Northwestern News:

A Northwestern University study investigating the effects of class size on the achievement gap between high and low academic achievers suggests that high achievers benefit more from small classes than low achievers, especially at the kindergarten and first grade levels.
“While decreasing class size may increase achievement on average for all types of students, it does not appear to reduce the achievement gap within a class,” said Spyros Konstantopoulos, assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy.
Konstantopoulos’ study, which appears in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, questions commonly held assumptions about class size and the academic achievement gap — one of the most debated and perplexing issues in education today.
The Northwestern professor worked with data from Project STAR, a landmark longitudinal study launched in 1985 by the State of Tennessee to determine whether small classes positively impacted the academic achievement of students.
Considered one of the most important investigations in education, STAR made it abundantly clear that on average small classes had a positive impact on the academic performance of all students.

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Cheating Scandals Rock Three Top-Tier High Schools

Susan Donaldson James:

Sam is a top student in a high-pressure high school just outside New York City who openly admits he “cheats along the way” to academic success.
The 16-year-old sees nothing wrong with looking at another student’s paper during a quiz or borrowing a classmate’s ideas.
He insists “90 percent or higher” of the students at his school engage in cheating — from tucking vocabulary crib sheets under their hats to stealing math exams.
But Sam insists he has a moral conscience — he won’t use his last name for this article — and he swears he will never cheat in college. But he justifies his cheating.
“My parents would consider this cheating, but I don’t have any major problems with it,” Sam told ABCNEWS.com. “It’s school, and you’re cheating your way through the system.”
Sam is typical of most American students. An estimated two-thirds of all high school students admit to “serious” academic cheating, according to a national survey by Rutgers’ Management Education Center in New Jersey.

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison School Board Detailed Agenda Posted Online – Including a Proposed Wisconsin Center for Education Research Contract

A reader’s email mentioned that the Madison School Board has begun posting more detailed agenda items on their meeting web page. Monday, March 3’s full agenda includes Superintedent Art Rainwater’s discussion of the proposed Middle School report card changes along with a recommendation to approve an agreement with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (1.5MB PDF):

The focus of this project is to develop a value-added system for the Madison Metropolitan School District and produce value-added reports using assessment data from November 2005 to November 2007. Since the data from the November 2007 assessment will not be available until March 2008, WCER will first develop a value-added system based on two years of state assessment data (November 2005 and November 2006). After the 2007 data becomes available (about Ma r c h 1 2008), WCER will extend the value-added system so that it incorporates all three years of data. Below, we list the tasks for this project and a project timeline.
Task 1. Specify features o f MMSD value-added model
Task 2. Develop value-added model using 2005 and 2006 assessment dat a
Task 3. Produce value-added reports using 2005 and 2006 assessment data
Task 4. Develop value-added model using 2005, 2006, and 2007 assessment
Task 5. Produce value-added reports using 2005-2007 assessment data

August, 2007 presentation to the Madison School Board’s Performance & Achievement Committee on “Value Added Assessment”.

College Preparation, Community Partners, Curriculum, Curriculum - Science, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

Immersion Presents: Monterey Bay Live Broadcasts

Location: Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary
Dates: Sunday, March 2 – Friday, March 7
Times (EST): 11 am, 12 am, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm
Program Length: 30 minutes
Immersion Presents:

How do you get kids to say “I want to be a scientist when I grow up?” Dr. Robert Ballard, known for discovering the Titanic among other scientific breakthroughs, may have the answer. The renowned oceanographer’s latest quest is not to discover underwater secrets, but to inspire the next generation of ocean explorers by introducing kids to the thrill of discovery and encouraging them to pursue the science and environmental careers so critical for the health of the planet.
From March 2–7, 2008, Immersion Presents Monterey Bay, a cutting-edge, interactive educational program led by Dr. Ballard and a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other institutions, will use telepresence technology – a combination of satellite and Internet connections – to transport young people live to a scientific expedition in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Students will explore in real-time one of the planet’s most spectacular and most important biodiversity hotspots where they will experience majestic 100-foot-tall kelp forests, take a day trip out to the deep sea in NOAA’s research vessel R/V Fulmar, and study endangered marine mammals like the grey or blue whale and the threatened California sea otter.
“When kids see scientists in action, whether diving a kelp forest, exploring with an ROV, or getting up close to a whale, they immediately discover that being a scientist means much more than wearing a white coat in a lab,” said Dr. Ballard, founder of Immersion Presents. “With everyone talking about ‘going green,’ now more than ever we need kids to get excited about the environmentally focused careers that will help protect the planet. Immersion expeditions show kids that science is not only far from boring or nerdy, it is absolutely essential to preserve one of our most threatened resources, the oceans.”
“Many of our kids only know what a jellyfish is from watching Sponge Bob on television,” said Hector Perez, club director of the Chicago’s Union League Boys & Girls Club, which participates in the program. “It’s hard for kids to imagine being part of something that they’ve never seen before. Immersion Presents’ virtual science expeditions open their minds, transporting them to a whole new world of ocean discoveries, new technology, and exciting career opportunities.”

Budget/Financing, History - Madison Schools, PTO Priorities, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Wellness, What Can I Do?

LVM Dreams Big

Susan Troller:

First it was the doors to the classroom that swung open for kids in wheelchairs. Now it’s access to the playground, especially at Elvehjem Elementary School, where there’s boundless enthusiasm for the Boundless Playground project.
The project aims to get students with disabilities playing side by side with the rest of the kids, Shelly Trowbridge, one of the parent organizers of LVM Dreams Big said in a recent interview.
On Friday, local supporters of the project held a chili dinner at the school. It included ceramic bowls made by students and a silent auction with artwork by students and community members. It was the latest in an ambitious series of family-oriented fundraisers that are aimed at building a community as well as a playground.
The nonprofit group (www.playgroundsupport.com) has raised over $81,000 in cash and in-kind contributions toward a goal of $200,000 to build the state’s first barrier-free Boundless Playground next summer on the Elvehjem School grounds. There are about 100 such play structures nationwide, but none in Wisconsin.

www.playgroundsupport.com

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Thinking about the Next Few Decades: “Let Us Light A Candle While We Walk, Lest We Fear What Lies Ahead”

Fabius Maximus:

Many people look to the future with fear. We see this fear throughout the web. Right-wing sites describe the imminent end of America: overrun by foreigners, victim of cultural and financial collapse. Left-wing sites describe “die-off” scenarios due to Peak Oil, climate change, and ecological collapse – as the American dream dies from takeover by theocrats and fascists.
Most of this is nonsense, but not the prospect of massive changes in our world. But need we fear the future?
The past should give us confidence when we look ahead. Consider Dodge City in 1877. Bat Masterson is sheriff, maintaining some semblance of law in the Wild West. Life in Dodge is materially only slightly better from that in an English village of a century before. But social and technological evolution has accelerated to a dizzying pace, and Bat cannot imagine what lies ahead.

Well worth reading as Madison prepares for a new Superintendent and two new school board members.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

AP Trends: Tests Soar, Scores Slip

Scott Cech:

While more American public school students are taking Advanced Placement tests, the proportion of tests receiving what is deemed a passing score has dipped, and the mean score is down for the fourth year in a row, an Education Week analysis of newly released data from the College Board shows.
Data released here this week by the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand shows that a greater-than-ever proportion of students overall—more than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007—scored at least one 3 on an AP test. The tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, the highest score.
Yet, as the number of AP exams taken in U.S. public schools has ballooned by almost 25 percent over the four years that the College Board has released its “AP Report to the Nation,” the percentage of exams that received at least a 3—the minimum score that the College Board considers predictive of success in college—has slipped from about 60 percent to 57 percent.
The mean score on the nearly 2 million AP exams taken by students in last year’s U.S. public graduating class was 2.83, down from 2.9 in 2004.
“That happens,” said Jennifer Topiel, a spokeswoman for the College Board. “Any psychometrician can tell you that as participation grows, scores go down.”
Still, Ms. Topiel said the score declines are a major concern for the organization, as are widening score gaps between some racial and ethnic groups, “particularly those among underrepresented students who are not being prepared and not having the same resources.”

Links:

School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Teachers reveal bag of tricks to keep students focused on learning

Jacqueline Reis:

Sixteen-year-old Joel Santos recalls a shouting match between a fellow student and a teacher that started with “Shut up!” and escalated. Other students swear at their teachers. And Kim L. Veth, 16, remembers one fourth-grade classmate who got so bored that he started dancing on a table.
When it comes to being heckled, stand-up comedians have nothing on teachers. Comedians know they were hired to entertain, but teachers have to be part motivator, part counselor and part disciplinarian, all as a means to educate.
So how do they deal with the sass? For Chad Malone, an English teacher at Claremont Academy in Worcester, a public school that partners with Clark University, the keys are keeping rules to a minimum and not blowing his top.
“Crazy behavior problems come from being bored in the classroom,” he said. “The kids have to be engaged in what they’re doing, and that, I think, comes from being planned out and ready to go with the day.”
Joel, who is one of his students, agrees. “Students get bored … because teachers just stand up there and talk in a boring way,” he said.

Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Parenting, Staff Support, Student Support, What Can I Do?

School Programs Hope Babies in the Classroom Will Reduce Bullying

Nick Wingfield:

It’s just Nolan Winecka’s second time teaching a class of fifth graders at Emerald Park Elementary School in this Seattle suburb, and it shows as he stares nervously at the two dozen kids surrounding him.
He burps. And the class erupts in giggles.
Nolan is 6 months old and hasn’t had any formal pedagogical training. But to the group that put him in the classroom, he has everything he needs to help teach children an unconventional subject. A Canadian nonprofit group, Roots of Empathy, is now bringing to the U.S. a decade-old program designed to reduce bullying by exposing classrooms to “empathy babies” for a whole school year.
Nolan is one of 10 babies in a test of this latest education craze in Seattle-area schools. In all, more than 2,000 empathy babies are cooing, crawling and crying in classrooms in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. The idea is that children — typically from kindergarten to eighth grade — can learn by observing the emotional connection between the babies and their parents, who volunteer for the program and who are with them in the classroom. It’s part of a wave of programs aimed at boosting the “emotional literacy” of youngsters in schools by getting them to recognize and talk about their feelings rather than act out aggressively.

Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

On Madison Boundary Changes

4 Comments

Dear Board,
As the opening of a new school is coming close, I was surprised to some extent that the plans were changed with such a short amount of time left before the new year.
So………..I dug up my West Side Long Term Planning Binder and reviewed all the data presented to us, as a member of that committee, and remembered the HOURS we spent debating and reviewing the pros and cons of each plan. I believe this is a very hard process and I am sad it is being altered at this late date.
I think one thing many of us felt on the Long Range Planning Committee was even with the new school and addition to Leopold we did not devise a Long Term Plan. My #1 suggestion to the board would be to revisit the plan of “making the map look better” and balancing the income levels but TO MAKE IT A LONG TERM plan and say in 6 years this is what we are going to do. (and stick to it) I think when you spring it on families that in a few months Johnny has to switch schools, we parents are too invested and comfortable with the school and protest the change. But if a 6 Year Plan was in place with some options to start at the new school, grandfather for a couple of years the protest would be great but families would have lots of time to accept the change and deal with it. It would also be a LONG TERM PLAN.

Continue reading On Madison Boundary Changes →

Discipline / Violence, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

Suspending Students is Exactly the Wrong Idea

Joel McNally:

We talk so much about the value of education and the need to do something to reduce dropouts that it may surprise some people that nearly half of all the freshmen in the Milwaukee Public Schools have been ordered not to come to school.
In fact, beginning in the sixth grade, more than a third of every grade level until senior year is suspended and told to stay away from school for up to three days at a time. Many are repeatedly told not to attend school.
The good news is that Milwaukee Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, after more than five years on the job, has finally noticed the destructive practice he has been presiding over and decided to do something about it.
Andrekopoulos says Milwaukee may have the highest suspension rates in the country. He has asked outside educational experts, the Council on Great City Schools, to examine Milwaukee’s suspension policies and recommend ways to keep more kids in school.
The highest in the country. Hmmm. That sounds familiar. What else have we read recently about Milwaukee Public Schools leading the country? Oh, we remember now. MPS also had the lowest reading scores in the country.

Community Partners, Curriculum, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Why the Public Schools?

Laurent Lafforgue:

Since my forced resignation from the High Council of Education, I have received hundreds of testimonials from teachers, parents, students and plain citizens of all social groups. Among these messages I have been particularly struck by those parents who have written me, in substance, “We have been so deceived, and we are so appalled, by what has become of the schools that we have decided to remove our children from there, and to teach them ourselves.” Or, “We have joined with other parents and are pooling our talents to form our own classes for our children”. Or, again, “Despite the financial sacrifice it represents, we have placed our children into private schools.” And finally, those most numerous messages which say: “Our children go to school, yes, but every evening we put them to work using old textbooks, and do what we can to give them the kind of rigorous instruction that is no longer given in their classes. But what a labor for them, and what a responsibility for us!”
That parents should go so far as to remove their children from school, to teach them themselves, at home, or to form parallel classes for them in which they, themselves, are the teachers, to prefer a school to which they must pay the fee to the free public school, or to impose on their children and themselves the burden of a night school added to the day school they consider to be nothing but a holding pen, all this became and remains for me a theme of profound dismay. And I notice as well that these are surely the parents who enjoy a high level of education and – for those who can pay the fees of a private school – of income. And then I think of the other children, who do not have the benefits of having been born into families similarly favored.
Students, all the students, are the primary victims of the destruction of the school. This destruction has resulted from educational policies of all the governments of the last few decades. It is not the teachers who are responsible for it, for they are victims themselves: firstly in that they have been prevented from teaching correctly, by the publication of national curricula which are increasingly disorganized, incoherent and emptied of content; then because the knowledge gaps accumulated by their students over the course of years have made the conditions of teaching ever more difficult, and have exposed them to incidents of increasing incivility and violence on the part of adolescents who have never been taught either the elementary understandings, the habits of work, or the self-control which are indispensable to the progress of their studies; and finally because the younger generation of teachers has suffered from an already degraded educational program, so that their own understanding is less certain than that of their elders, and, with the exception of some well tempered characters, has been disoriented by the absurd training so prodigally distributed by the teachers colleges.

Clusty Search: Laurent Lafforgue.

Discipline / Violence, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

16 Year Old Mugged Near West High Thursday Evening

2 Comments

Madison Police Department:

Around 6:26 p.m. on December 20th Madison police responded to the 2300 block of Eton Ridge to meet with a robbery victim. A 16-year-old told police he had just finished basketball practice and was crossing Regent Street when he observed a group of approximately seven individuals. The victim walked from Regent Street to Virginia Terrace [MAP]
to where his car was parked on Eton Ridge. As he neared his vehicle he says three from the group he had noted moments earlier came up quickly behind him. He says perpetrator #1 grabbed him and demanded money. He did not have any money. The victim says #1 next rummaged through his pockets and stole his iPhone.
No weapon was seen, and it is not known whether this robbery and another (case #152841) that happened on N. Mills Street two hours later are connected.

Curriculum, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Top 10 Education Concerns

1 Comment

Michael Shaughnessy interviews the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews:

7) What do you see as the top ten concerns in education? What are the biggest concerns in the Washington Circle?

My concerns or Washington’s? I will go with mine:

  1. Low standards and expectations in low-income schools.
  2. Very inadequate teacher training in our education schools.
  3. Failure to challenge average students in nearly all high schools with AP and IB courses.
  4. Corrupt and change-adverse bureaucracies in big city districts.
  5. A tendency to judge schools by how many low income kids they have, the more there are the worse the school in the public mind.
  6. A widespread feeling on the part of teachers, because of their
    inherent humanity, that it is wrong to put a child in a challenging situation where they may fail, when that risk of failure is just what they need to learn and grow.

  7. The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won’t be as successful in life.
  8. A failure to realize that inner city and rural schools need to give students more time to learn, and should have longer school days and school years.
  9. A failure to realize that the best schools–like the KIPP charter schools in the inner cities—are small and run by well-recruited and trained principals who have the power to hire all their teachers, and quickly fire the ones that do not work out.
  10. The resistance to the expansion of charter schools in most school district offices.

Matthews list is comprehensive and on target.

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

2007 High School Challenge Index

Washington Post:

The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.

Local schools on the list include: Madison Memorial and Verona

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Madison Schools Consider an Increase in School Safety/Security Spending

Susan Troller:

We are at a point in our high schools and middle schools where we need to take some action to assure the public that our schools remain safe and secure,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said. He noted that public safety had become a significant issue in neighborhoods throughout the city.
But long time board member Carol Carstensen asked to table the proposal, and other board members agreed to put the decision off a week for more study.
“I’m probably going to vote for it,” she said. “But I would like a little more time and more details in the next week.”

Related:

Budget/Financing, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison Teachers Protest Larger Class Size

Channel3000:

Many of Madison’s elementary school teachers spoke out to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education on Monday night.
Carrying brightly colored signs, the group protested the increased class size for gym, arts and computer classes. The larger related arts classes are known by some as “one and one-half classes,” WISC-TV reported.
District officials started the policy at the elementary level this year to save money.
Some teachers said their students, many of whom come from low-income backgrounds, are getting short-changed.
“I teach in a school with 46 percent or more kids on free or reduced lunch,” said Rhonda Schilling, a music teacher for Thoreau and Hamilton elementary schools. “Many of the kids come from really rough backgrounds, and those are the kids in particular that shine often in the arts. They need that contact time with their teacher.”

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Casting for Knowledge

Mark Coddington:

Jesus Reyes, a fifth-grader at Dodge Elementary School, stands in front of a green piece of fabric in the school’s library, reading a script he wrote about last week’s Grand Island sewer emergency.
As the camera on a MacBook laptop records him, an image on its screen replaces the fabric with photos Jesus took on a trip to the city’s wastewater plant this week.
Later, a classmate, Dayne Jaros, records an introduction to Jesus’ piece, handing his Internet viewers off to “our on-the-spot reporter, Jesus.”
The end result, an audio and video broadcast accessed over the Internet, is miles beyond kids fiddling around with their parents’ video camera for a school project.
In fact, increasingly elaborate podcasts like Jesus and Dayne’s are giving several area schools a medium for largely self-directed projects that provide a whole new realm to bring writing, reading and listening skills to life.
With podcasts, “learning becomes more than just a grade in the gradebook,” said Jamey Boelhower, who teaches English at Centura public school near Cairo. “It matches the culture and the world they’re growing up in.”
At Lincoln Elementary School, about a dozen students are working on a range of podcasting projects, most of them with only basic staff instruction, said Maura Hendrickson, the school’s integration specialist.

Anne Eisenberg:

These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.
At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.
When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.
“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”
Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate. “The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Teachers draft reform plan

Howard Blume:

In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone — neither teachers nor students — what to wear.
These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.
If Brewer passes on the delegation’s proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.
At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District’s effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these “high priority schools” scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year’s California Standards Tests.
Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Unemployment Training (The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools)

1 Comment

Via a kind reader email: Martin Haberman:

For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology “works” for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students’ street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.
The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.
The dropout problem among urban youth–as catastrophic as it is–is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for “successful” youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as “successful” but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.

Clusty Search on Martin Haberman. Haberman is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Curriculum, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

3 Comments

Carol Dweck:

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.
Growing Pains

  • Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
  • Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
  • Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

Community Partners, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

New York Grades Set Off Debate on Judging Schools



Elissa Gootman & Jennifer Medina:

Not long after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced plans last year to give grades of A through F to schools, principals at some of New York City’s coveted specialized high schools grew concerned. With the city looking to reward gains among the lowest-achieving students, how would the elite schools be judged?
The principals peppered the administration with ideas for extra credits for their schools: perhaps counting how many Advanced Placement tests students pass or the college credits they accumulate. In the end, the city decided to tie bonus points for these schools to high scores on state Regents exams.
That served the gold-standard Stuyvesant High School well, propelling it from a high B to a comfortable A. But the principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Randy J. Asher, called the decision “ridiculous,” saying it contradicted a core principle of the report cards: the need to gauge how far students have come, rather than simply how they perform.
“I think we all really came to the table saying, let’s find something fair for schools like ours,” Mr. Asher, whose school earned a B, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think we succeeded.”

Community Partners, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

How to Fix Struggling High Schools

Jay Matthews:

I think the people running our high schools, as well we parents, need to stop making compromises that sustain the cycle of failure. Kind and thoughtful educators and parents, such as the ones in Parker’s articles, are trying to get through each day without hurting too many feelings or forcing too many confrontations. When the choice is between letting standards continue to slip or making a scene, few people want to be drama queens, which is too bad.
The best inner-city educators begin each day knowing they are going to have to confront apathy again and again. They shove it away as if it were a kidnapper trying to steal their children. To succeed, a high school like Coolidge needs a unified team of such people, who follow the same standards of regular attendance, daily preparation for school, high achievement and attention and decorum in the classroom.
It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are inner-city schools right now, including some charter, religious and private schools that operate that way. It takes strength and intelligence and humor and love for young people, and an abhorrence for the limp compromises that have created such sickly schools as Coolidge.
I asked several expert educators how they would fix schools like that. Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, said: “These problems did not occur overnight and will not be resolved easily or in a short time.” Michael Riley, superintendent of the Bellevue, Wash., schools, said: “Anyone who thinks there is a quick fix, that taking a couple of dramatic steps will make this situation better overnight, is kidding himself.”

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison School District Administration Presentation on High School Redesign

2 Comments

The Madison School viewed a presentation from the Administration Monday evening on their proposed High School redesign. Listen via this mp3 audio file (or watch the MMSDTV Video Archive).
Susan Troller:

“Sometimes institutional history can be a weight around your neck,” Rainwater noted. “This can be an opportunity to bring in new ideas, and new blood,” he added.
Rainwater has said change is necessary because high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations but that students will live and work in a world that has changed dramatically, and which demands new skills and abilities.
He acknowledged that the path was likely to be bumpy, and noted that the plan — which has been developed thus far without public input — recognizes that there are major concerns in the community regarding changes to Madison’s school system.
Some of those concerns include worries about trying to balance resources among students of widely varying abilities, about “dumbing down” the curriculum with inclusive classrooms, the potential for the high schools to lose their unique personalities and concerns that addressing the broad ranges of culture in the district will not serve students well.

Background:

Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

‘No Child’ Data on Violence Skewed: Each State Defines “Dangerous School”

Nelson Hernandez:

A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify “persistently dangerous schools” is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year.
Maryland had six, all in Baltimore; the District and Virginia had none.
At Anacostia Senior High School last school year, private security guards working under D.C. police recorded 61 violent offenses, including three sexual assaults and one assault with a deadly weapon. There were 21 other nonviolent cases in which students were caught bringing knives and guns to school. Anacostia is not considered a persistently dangerous school.
One high school in Los Angeles had 289 cases of battery, two assaults with a deadly weapon, a robbery and two sex offenses in one school year, according to an audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general. It did not meet the state’s definition of a persistently dangerous school, or PDS. None of California’s roughly 9,000 schools has.
The reason, according to an audit issued by the Department of Education in August: “States fear the political, social, and economic consequences of having schools designated as PDS, and school administrators view the label as detrimental to their careers. Consequently, states set unreasonable definitions for PDS and schools have underreported violent incidents.”
Critics of the law, including lawmakers who hope the policy can be changed as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, say the low number is a sign the legislation is not working.

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Montgomery School’s New Take On Ability Grouping Yields Results

Via a reader email – Daniel de Vise:

In a notebook on her desk at Rock View Elementary School, Principal Patsy Roberson keeps tabs on every student: red for those who have failed to attain proficiency on Maryland’s statewide exam, an asterisk for students learning English and squares for black or Hispanic children whose scores place them “in the gap.”
Roberson and the Rock View faculty are having remarkable success lifting children out of that gap, the achievement gap that separates poor and minority children from other students and represents one of public education’s most intractable problems.
They have done it with an unusual approach. The Kensington school’s 497 students are grouped into classrooms according to reading and math ability for more than half of the instructional day.
The technique, called performance-based grouping, is uncommon in the region. Some educators believe it too closely resembles tracking, the outmoded practice of assigning students to inflexible academic tracks by ability.
Educators say Rock View, however, is using the same basic concept to opposite effect, and the results have been positive. While some other Montgomery County schools serving low-income populations have posted higher test scores, few have shown such improvement or consistency across socioeconomic and racial lines.

Joanne has more.

Community Partners, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

On American School Reform: the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well

The Economist (Los Angeles & New Orleans):

OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg’s accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven’t had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we’re seeing change from the bottom up.”
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity [Ask Google Live Yahoo] in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Rethinking How to Teach the New Teachers

Denise Caruso:

SCHOOL enrollments are increasing year by year, but qualified teachers are leaving the classroom in droves. More than a million veteran teachers are nearing retirement, and more will follow.
More than two million new teachers will be needed in the next decade alone, according to the National Education Association, and we should hope that they start lining up soon.
Economic research shows that an educated work force is the foundation of a stable economy. A good education does more than just increase a person’s earning potential. Studies find that regions that produce well-educated high school graduates have a higher rate of business start-ups and more economic activity. Graduates also provide communities with a continuing pool of taxpaying labor.
As teacher rosters shrink, the question is this: How long will such regions be able to hold onto those benefits?

Community Partners, Curriculum, Staff Support, Student Support

A new International Baccalaureate program is raising the game in middle school

Jay Matthews:

The letter published in the Reston Connection four years ago said the program at Langston Hughes Middle School promoted “socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.”
The Middle Years Program, part of the International Baccalaureate system, was just getting started at Langston Hughes, and it wasn’t the first time an IB program had been slapped around in Fairfax County. W.T. Woodson High School had thrown out its IB courses in 1999, in part because some parents and teachers thought they were too global and played down American history. Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell reported in 2004 that Fairfax parents were in revolt against IB. It was an exaggeration, but there was enough of a fight to raise concern about the program’s future in the Washington area’s biggest school district.
Some parents and teachers at Langston Hughes, and next door at South Lakes High School, where the MYP continued for ninth- and 10th-graders, distrusted a program invented in Switzerland and alien to what they remembered of their own more traditional middle school days. Other parents and teachers thought the MYP was wonderfully rigorous, with its commitment to global awareness, foreign languages and writing. The differences of opinion appeared to reflect tension between Americans who thought the country was too soft and those who thought the country was too dumb.
Who won? A visit to Langston Hughes this fall reveals that the people favoring smarter students have beaten those fearing foreign influence to an apparently invisible pulp. It is hard to find anyone who even remembers when the school’s unusual curriculum was considered a threat to American values. Instead, past and present Langston Hughes parents are greeting an unexpected jump in SAT scores at South Lakes — the biggest this year in Fairfax County — as proof that they were right to go with the MYP, perhaps the most challenging middle school program in America for non-magnet schools.

Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

If You Want Good High School Grades, Move to Texas

Jay Matthews:

Ten years ago, I had the good fortune to win the confidence of two energetic teachers, Cliff Gill and Don Phillips at Mamaroneck High School in Westchester County, N.Y. They told me exactly how they assessed their students.
Gill, a math teacher, was tough. If a student missed two homework assignments, five points were subtracted from the student’s 100-point report card grade. A third missed assignment meant another five points off. Everyone at that school knew how hard it was to get an A in Mr. Gill’s class.
Phillips, a social studies teacher, was easy. He called himself the Great Grade Inflator. If a student with poor writing skills did his best on a paper, Phillips was inclined to give the student just as high a grade as a top student who turned in college-quality work. About 90 percent of the grades in Phillips’s history courses were 90 or above on that 100-point scale.
No one asked Phillips to raise his standards. No one asked Gill to ease up. Grading at Mamaroneck High, as at most of the public high schools I have visited, is considered the teacher’s prerogative, a matter of academic freedom. A teacher who gives many F’s may be pressured to raise some of those grades to keep parents happy, but that is about as far as principals will go in interfering with teachers’ assessment decisions.
Robert M. Hartranft, a retired nuclear engineer in Simsbury, Conn., does not like this at all. He cannot understand why public school administrators, who so often declare their commitment to equal treatment of every student, put up with such outrageous and inexplicable variation in what remains the most important assessments their students get–grades on report cards.

Curriculum, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects

Charles T. Clotfeler, Helen F. Ladd and Jacob L. Vigdor [488K PDF]:

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students among classrooms within schools. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. As a result, the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socio-economic status of high school students – a pattern we also document – contributes to achievement gaps in high school.

http://www.caldercenter.org/.

Discipline / Violence, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness, What Can I Do?

Madison High School Police Calls & Discipline Rates:
Comparing 2001/2002 and 2005/2006

Madison Parent’s School Safety Site:

When there’s violence at school, parents want answers to their questions about school safety. If parents are told “our school is safer than other schools”, where’s the data that supports that vague reassurance? Police call-for-service data (as posted on this site from time to time) is one indicator of school crime, but it’s only part of the picture, and may not be a reliable basis of comparing school to school – or even comparing whether the safety situation in one particular school is improving or deteriorating.
We looked at police call data for East, LaFollette, Memorial and West High Schools in 2001-02, and in 2005-06. (Data notes: This data was obtained by public records request to the Madison Police Department. Due to the format in which the data was provided, the call totals for each school are for calls made to the block in which each school is located, rather than the specific street address of the school. Calls for each year were tallied over a July 1 through June 30 period in order to track the corresponding school years used for comparison below. Variations in school enrollment between the comparison years aren’t reported here since they don’t appear to affect the analysis or conclusions, but that information is readily accessible on the DPI web site. The DPI web site is also the source of the discipline data presented below.)

Discipline / Violence, Events, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

West High / Regent Neighborhood Crime Discussion

3 Comments

Parents, staff and community officials met Wednesday night to discuss a number of recent violent incidents at and near Madison West High School [map]
I took a few notes during the first 60 minutes:
Madison Alders Robbie Webber and Brian Solomon along with James Wheeler (Captain of Police – South District), Luis Yudice (Madison School District The Coordinator of Safety And Security), Randy Boyd (Madison Metro Security) and West Principal Ed Holmes started the meeting with a brief summary of the recent incidents along with a brief school climate discussion:
James Wheeler:

Police beat officer and Educational Resource Office (ERO) patrol during West’s lunch period.
“There have been complaints from the houses around the school” so MPD increased patrols to “make a statement last week”.
Still a relatively safe neighborhood.
3 arrests at Homecoming.
Made a drug dealing arrest recently.
People do see drug dealing going on and have reported it.
There have been additional violent incidents, especially at the Madison Metro transfer points

Ed Holmes

Behavior is atypical of what we have seen on the past . Perpetrators are new to West.
Emphasized the importance of a safe learning environment.
Make sure there are police and school consequences and that they are severe. These crimes are unacceptable and should not be tolerated.

Randy Boyd (Madison Metro)


60+ bus runs daily for the school system.
There have been some serious fights at the transfer points. Cameras are in place there.
Main problem is confidentiality due to the students age. Can track them via bus passes.
Adding DSL so that the police precinct can monitor the transfer points. Incidents are about the same as last year but the numbers are going up.
Baptist church elders have helped patrol the South Transfer Point. We are looking for more community help.

Luis Yudice

Big picture perspective:
Our community really has changed a lot within the past five years. I sense a great deal of stress within the police department.
Citywide issues
Increasing violence involving girls. He has looked at a lot of data with the District Attorney’s office. Girls are extremely angry.
Angry parents are coming into the schools.
Increasing issues in the neighborhood that end up in the schools. Mentioned South Transfer Point beating and that Principal Ed Holmes mediated the situation at an early stage.
Growing gang violence issue particularly in the east side schools. We do have gang activity at Memorial and West but most of the issues are at Lafollete and East. Dealing with this via training and building relationships
What the school are experiencing is a reflection of what is going on in the community.

Parents:

Parent asked about weapons in school, metal detectors and k9 units.
Response:


Do we have weapons in school? Yes we find knives in all the schools. No guns. Unfortunate fact is that if a kid wants to get their hand on a gun, they can. They are available.

Ed Holmes:

“We took away a gun once in my 18 years”.
I want to get across to the students – if they see something they have to report it. We have 2100 students and 250 staff members.

Parents:

Kids are afraid of the bathrooms
Another lunch assault that has not been reported.
Incidents are much higher than we know because many incidents are not reported.

A parent asked why the District/Police did not use school ID photos to help victims find the perpetrators? Ed Holmes mentioned that District has had problems with their photo ID vendor.

Madison School Board member (and West area parent) Maya Cole also attended this event.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support

Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison’s Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application

I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:

I’m writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd’s high school “reform” initiative, particularly in light of two things:

  1. The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
  2. The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?

In other words, how do you feel about accountability? 🙂

They replied:
Marj Passman:

I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students — especially the college bound – but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I’m all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about “accountability” and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I’d like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
Thanks for this opportunity
Marjorie Passman
http://marjpassmanforschoolboard.com

Ed Hughes:

From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I’m all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction – bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked – so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I’m sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette’s four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole’s post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.

Related Links:

Thanks to Ed and Marj for taking the time to share their thoughts on this important matter.

Community Partners, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Five Ways to Boost Charter Schools

Jay Matthews:

Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham, two of my favorite educational researchers, have inspired me to save the charter school movement with five brilliant if perhaps too far-sighted suggestions for reform.
The Washington-based think tank Education Sector www.educationsector.org has just published their paper, “A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling.” They may be horrified by what I have done with their facts and insights, but I think my ideas will push charters in the right direction — more good ones and fewer bad ones.
In theory, charter schools are a great idea. There are now more than 4,000 of them with more than 1 million students in 40 states and the District. These independent public schools give smart educators with fresh ideas a chance to show what they can do without the deadening hand of the local school system bureaucracy around their necks. They also give public school parents more choice. The problem is, as one former state charter school official told me, there are a lot of loons out there starting charter schools. We don’t seem to be able to get rid of their loony schools as easily as the original advocates of charter schools promised. That is one reason why charter schools, despite including some of the best public schools I have ever seen, do no better on average than regular public schools in raising student achievement.
Here are my suggestions for fixing that situation, based largely on what I learned from Mead and Rotherham:
1. Stop letting local school boards authorize charters. Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, and Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, used a grant from the Annie E.Casey Foundation to analyze reports they oversaw on charter schools in California, Minnesota, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, Florida and Michigan and four cities: New York, Indianapolis, Chicago and the District. They conclude that “perhaps the most significant lesson of the charter school movement to date” is that the number and quality of charter schools depend on who does the authorizing and how well they do it. State school boards, universities and independent bodies like the D.C. Public Charter School Board appear to do a better job of authorizing charters than local school boards, which see charters as competition for students, funds and prestige. California, Colorado and Florida have built strong charter systems with local school boards as the prime authorizers, but only by creating alternative authorizers for charter proposals that get turned down by local school boards.

The complete report is available here: Education Sector Reports: Charter School Series
A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling, by Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham.

Budget/Financing, School Climate, Staff Support

Shabaz Allows Trial For Whistle-blower

Kevin Murphy:

A jury will get to decide if a Madison Metropolitan School District employee speaking out about alleged bid-rigging cost her a promotion, a federal judge ruled.
Linda Martin had worked in the district’s transportation office since 1989, but was passed over in November 2002 for the newly created position of transportation coordinator. A month later, Martin was transferred to the accounting department as her transportation clerk’s job was eliminated.
Although the school district contends Martin wasn’t qualified for the coordinator’s job, that argument is contradicted by the district’s interviewing her for the position, according to U.S. District Judge John Shabaz’s decision issued Thursday. It also is under dispute whether the district’s choice, Jeff Fedler, was more qualified than Martin.
Fedler had worked for a school bus vendor, First Student, formerly Verona Bus, before being recommended in May 2002 by Martin’s supervisor, Rene Bremer, for the job Martin was seeking.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

Schools by Age, Not Address

Amy Hetzner:

Theory” and “experiment” were two ways Waukesha School Board members last week described the district’s move to create two schools focused solely on the lower or upper elementary grade levels.
But staff in schools already organized around such grade levels describe the model another way: child-focused.
“Really, the whole building kind of revolves around those early learners,” said Deb Ristow, principal of Pewaukee Lake Elementary School, which has housed students in kindergarten through third grade since 2002.
Although not as common in southeastern Wisconsin, “grade centers” that serve students for a fraction of their elementary years make up one of every five elementary schools nationwide, according to an analysis by the Educational Research Service. The facilities can be kindergarten-only centers, pre-kindergarten through second- or third-grade buildings or third- through fifth- or sixth-grade schools.

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’

Samuel G. Freedman:

Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.
Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.
That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.
Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. Lampros’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.

College Preparation, Curriculum, School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, TAG

How Schools Get It Right

Experienced teachers, supplemental programs are two key elements to helping students thrive
Liz Bowie
Baltimore Sun
July 22, 2007
Tucked amid a block of rowhouses around the corner from Camden Yards is an elementary school with a statistical profile that often spells academic trouble: 76 percent of the students are poor, and 95 percent are minorities.
But George Washington Elementary has more academic whizzes than most of the schools in Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll and Baltimore counties.
These students don’t just pass the Maryland School Assessment – they ace it. About 46.2 percent of George Washington students are scoring at the advanced level, representing nearly half of the school’s 94 percent pass rate.
An analysis by The Sun of 2007 MSA scores shows that most schools with a large percentage of high achievers on the test are in the suburban counties, often neighborhoods of middle- and upper-middle-class families. But a few schools in poorer neighborhoods, such as George Washington, have beaten the odds.
Statewide, Howard County had the highest percentage of students with advanced scores, and Montgomery and Worcester counties weren’t far behind.
Of the top five elementary schools, two are in Montgomery County, two in Anne Arundel and one in Baltimore County.
Whether they are in wealthy or poor neighborhoods, schools with lots of high-scoring students share certain characteristics. They have experienced teachers who stay for years, and they offer extracurricular activities after school. Sometimes, they have many students in gifted-and-talented classes working with advanced material.

School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

When Discipline Starts a Fight: Pressured to Handle Disabled Children, A School Tries Restraints


Robert Tomsho:

When Eva Loeffler walked into her daughter Isabel’s classroom at Waukee Elementary School on Dec. 15, 2004, she says a male guidance counselor was trying to contain the shrieking 8-year-old by wrapping his arms around hers in a restraint hold.
Isabel, suffering from autism and other disabilities, had a history of aggressive behavior, but Mrs. Loeffler had never seen her so agitated. Her eyes were glazed and her face was red. “She was like a wild animal,” says Mrs. Loeffler, who, at the time, felt sorry for the counselor who had to deal with her daughter in such a state.
That sympathy waned as Mrs. Loeffler and her husband learned all the measures the school district used on Isabel. These included restraint holds by three adults at once and hours in a seclusion room that teachers called “Isabel’s office.” There the girl sometimes wet herself and pulled out her hair, according to documents filed in a 2006 administrative-law case the Loefflers brought against the school district.
In March, the presiding administrative-law judge ruled that the district had violated federal law by educating Isabel in overly restrictive settings and failing to adequately monitor its methods. The district has appealed. Its lawyer, Ronald Peeler, says it used “established educational principles” in addressing Isabel’s problems, and made adjustments when its discipline wasn’t working. “We are not dealing with an exact science here,” says Mr. Peeler.

School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Mainstreaming” Trend Tests Classroom Goals

3 Comments

John Hechinger:

The strategy backfired. One morning, Andrea swept an arm along the teacher’s desk, scattering framed photos of Ms. McDermott’s family across the classroom. A glass frame shattered, and another hit a student in the arm. Though no one was hurt, Ms. McDermott says she lost hours of instruction time getting the children to settle down after the disruption.
From the first weeks of school, Ms. McDermott found Andrea’s plight heartbreaking. “No! No! No!” she remembers her student screaming at times. “Want Mommy! Want Mommy!”
“She looked at me, like she was saying, ‘Help me,’ and I couldn’t. How could I possibly give Andrea what she needs?”
Years ago, students like Andrea would have been taught in separate classrooms. Today, a national movement to “mainstream” special-education students has integrated many of them into the general student body. As a result, regular teachers are instructing more children with severe disabilities — often without extra training or support.
This year, Ms. McDermott counted 19 students in her class at Whittier Elementary School. Five had disabilities, including attention deficit disorder and delays in reading and math. The teacher worried that she was failing all her students — especially Andrea. “It used to be a joy to go to work,” she says. “Now all I want to do is run away.”
In Scranton and elsewhere, the rush to mainstream disabled students is alienating teachers and driving some of the best from the profession. It has become a little-noticed but key factor behind teacher turnover, which experts say largely accounts for a shortage of qualified teachers in the U.S.

More on mainstreaming.
Background: Special Education Legal history and a few charts/graphs.

Discipline / Violence, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

MMSD student/teacher assaults/injuries 2006-2007

2 Comments

Madison Parent:

Details of the data behind the “School assaults, by the numbers” item (thank you, Bill Lueders) in this week’s Isthmus are posted here (sorted by school name), and here (subtotals of incidents by school type). The reports included incidents through June 4, 2007, so any incidents that occurred during the final fortnight of the school year aren’t included. There are a couple of entries whose dates predate the school year and may be typos, but they are replicated as is.

Student-on-student assault/injury information is not included in these reports, nor do these reports include incidents of verbal threats of violence against staff (even those serious enough to result in the issuance of a restraining order). Police were called in only 13 of the 224 incidents. We don’t know whether there is a district-wide policy that requires that all such incidents be reported, and, if there is, whether the policy is followed consistently from school to school. I concur with the commenters at School Information System that this is only a part of the picture, that we need to know more, and that we need to do more.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Cut Costs for Teacher Health Insurance (Or Not)

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

The district proposed to add two more HMO options for teachers. If a teacher chose any of the three HMO options, the district would pay the full premium. But if a teacher chose the high-cost WPS option, the district would pay only up to the cost of the highest-priced HMO plan. The teacher would be responsible for the remainder.
The change would have saved the district enough money to permit salaries to increase 2.8 percent, rather than 1 percent.
Madison Teachers Inc., however, resisted. Although bargaining units for food service workers, custodians and other district employees had accepted similar changes to their health insurance plans, the teachers union preferred to sacrifice higher pay to maintain the WPS health insurance option.
The School Board’s mistake was to cave in to the union’s position. While the cost to taxpayers was the same whether money was devoted to health insurance or salaries, it was in the district’s long-term interest to control health insurance costs and shift more money to salaries.

Audio / Video and links of the Madison School Board’s discussion and vote on this matter.
Lawrie Kobza’s statement.
MTI’s John Matthews offers a different perspective:

he union is obligated to represent its members interests. The union surveyed its members prior to entering bargaining and the members spoke loudly and clearly: Retain our health insurance options.
MTI members value Wisconsin Physicians Service because it enables freedom of choice in medical providers. And MTI members value the services of Group Health Cooperative. However, both GHC and WPS coverage would be in jeopardy under the district’s proposal.
GHC has the option of increasing its premium by 2 percent for each additional HMO offered by the district. Adding other HMOs would undercut the financial base of employees necessary to maintain the foundation of the WPS option.
Insurance is supposed to assure economic stability. Revenue controls undercut this basic principal of employment benefits, as it causes even the best intentioned individuals to think about reducing the quality of insurance to provide wages. MTI members have not been willing to take that risk.

Discipline / Violence, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

School assaults, by the numbers

5 Comments

Bill Lueders:

In the 2006-07 school year, there were 224 instances in which staff members in Madison schools were assaulted or injured by students, according to records provided to Isthmus. (This represents a significant increase from 2005-06, when the district tallied 173 such incidents.)
Most occurred in elementary schools, and eight out of nine involved special education students. The incidents are mostly minor — kicks, bites, scratches and such — although 43 required some medical attention. Police were called on nine occasions.
Luis Yudice, the district’s safety coordinator, says the most serious incidents were the two reported recently in Isthmus (Watchdog, 6/8/07), both involving injuries to staff members trying to break up fights.
The most startling revelation is the extent to which a handful of students drive these numbers upward. A single fourth-grader at Chavez Elementary accounted for 41 of this year’s incidents. At the middle school level, a seventh-grader at Sennett and eighth-grader at Cherokee had 19 and 12, respectively. And a ninth-grader at East had 10.
Together, these four students generated 37% of the total assaults for the 24,576-student district. (In 2005-06, a single student at Lowell logged 36 incidents; no one else had more than seven.)

Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Will Marquette & Lapham students be safe?

1 Comment

This is a report from the Madison police department on calls to the alternative programs that will be relocated to Lapham and Marquette. [The report had individuals’ names in a few instances, but I deleted them.]
06/07/07 14:48:28 M A D I S O N P O L I C E D E P A R T M E N T
M.M.S.D. CALLS FOR SERVICE / SEPTEMBER 1, 2006 THRU JUNE 7 2007
* * * * * * ALTERNATIVE LEARNING ACADEMY 15 S BREARLY ST * * * * * * * *
CALL DATE TIME CALL TYPE CASE # REPORT OFFIC
DISPATCH NOTES: Y/N?
09/12/2006 11:54 VIOLCRTORD 06-110419 2 STUDENTS PHYSICAL AND VERBAL WERE OUTSIDE 1154,002 Y FAVOU
09/27/2006 12:32 SXASLTCHIL 06-117349 3 STUDENTS REPORTING THEY HAVE BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED, DIDNT Y FAVOU
10/03/2006 14:22 THREATS 06-119989 THREATS REPORT, VICT IN #207, SUSPECT IS IN THE PRINC OFFICE, N WALKE
10/05/2006 09:49 JUV COMPLT 06-120707 CK STUDENT – [Name deleted] 9/27/89 LISTED AS A Y FAVOU
10/20/2006 11:03 WPNS OFFNS 06-127224 SEE 17 IN THE CLUSTER PROGRAMS ROOM TOOK A KNIFE OFF A Y HENNE
10/23/2006 12:45 BATTERY 06-128387 15YOA FEMALE, OUT OF CONTROL. THE FEMALE IS ALSO PREGNANT AND Y COVER
11/06/2006 12:28 AGGR BATT 06-134539 FIGHT OCCURRED BETWEEN 2 STUDENTS ONE HAD A KNIFE 1228,002 Y ZIEGL
11/10/2006 12:47 JUV COMPLT 06-136265 KIDS RETURNING TO SCHOOL FROM A TRIP DOWNTOWN ARE REPORTING AN Y RAMIR
11/20/2006 08:44 JUV COMPLT 06-140009 NO DATA Y FAVOU
11/21/2006 10:36 DRUG INCID 06-140448 NO DATA Y FAVOU
12/12/2006 14:54 DAM PROPTY 06-148289 REPORT DAMAGE TO AUTO. HAVE SUSPECT INFO. IN THE PARKING LOT. N GOEHR
01/19/2007 08:56 THREATS 07-006335 SEE [Name deleted] HERE, NEEDS TO REPORT A THREAT, ANOTHER 0856,002 Y VALEN
01/30/2007 12:42 THREATS 07-010608 THREATS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A STUDENT-VICTIM OF THE THREAT IS Y MCCON
02/07/2007 09:45 911 DISCNT 07-013478 MISDIAL 0946,004 N HENNE
03/12/2007 12:35 JUV COMPLT 07-026047 2 STUDENTS HAD AN ALTERCATION NO EMS NEEDED GO TO Y COUTT
03/22/2007 13:34 JUV COMPLT 07-030197 JUVENILE DISTURBING. THEY ARE IN THE STAIRWELL RIGHT NOW. N HENNE
03/29/2007 11:36 SUSPCS PRS 07-033232 2 PEOPLE CAME IN,AND TRIED TO GET TO A STUDENT;THEY RAN OUT Y MCCON
04/12/2007 14:41 CHK PERSON 07-038233 17 SAYS A MALE WHO HAS BEEN ABUSING A FEMALE HERE WAS JUST AT N GOEHR
04/16/2007 09:07 JUV COMPLT 07-039735 [Name deleted] IS HERE. THINK THAT SHE MAY BE A RUNAWAY. Y MCCON
04/17/2007 08:39 ASST CITZN 07-040174 THEY HAVE A STUDENT AT SCHOOL TODAY WHO WAS REPORTED BY HIS N MCCON
04/17/2007 09:53 THREATS 07-040202 SEE 17 IN THE OFFICE ABOUT A FEMALE STUDENT WAS THREATENED ON Y MCCON
04/25/2007 12:07 JUV COMPLT 07-043723 SCHOOL REQUEST STUDENT ISSUED FOR HIBITUAL TRUENCY. SHE IS Y MCCON
04/27/2007 08:42 DISTURBANC 07-044457 PLS SEE 17 IN THE OFFICE, REF TO A DISTURBANCE THAT OCCURRED Y FAVOU
05/02/2007 08:49 DISTURBANC 07-046747 COME TO SAPAR FEMALE STUDENT HERE THEY WANT OUT OF THE Y HARLE
05/10/2007 15:12 DISTURBANC 07-050650 HAPPENED ON E WASH/INGERSOLL BY BUS STOP – ONE OF GIRLS IN Y GOEHR
05/16/2007 11:36 DISTURBANC 07-053258 STUDENT OUT OF CONTROL IN THE OFFICE VERY AGITATED 1136,007 Y HENNE
05/18/2007 09:09 ASST FR/PO 07-054161 SMOKE IN THE BUILDING 0909,001 N SLAWE
05/31/2007 11:00 DISTURBANC 07-060205 14YO CAUSING PROBLEMS, VERBAL ONLY AT THIS TIME COME IN MAIN N PAYNE
06/06/2007 08:33 WPNS OFFNS 07-062961 ONE OF THE KIDS SUPPOSEDLY HAS A KNIFE IN SCHOOL HAS NOT N MCCON
06/06/2007 12:26 DRUG INCID 07-063049 HAVE 3 STUDENTS SELLING MARAJUANA WOULD LIKE TO INTERVIEW N HENNE
TOTAL CALLS FOR THIS SCHOOL
COUNT 30
* * * E N D O F R E P O R T * * *

School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Season of Gratitude

2 Comments

As we begin the last week of the school year, I’d like to encourage everyone to make a point of saying “thank you” to at least one teacher, administrator or other school staff person in the coming few days. Teaching is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. We have some really fine ones in our schools. Take a moment to write a note or an email, make a phone call, or stop by a classroom.

Budget/Financing, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Van Pao will be green school

1 Comment

The Van Pao Elementary School will be certified for Leadership in Energy and Envrionmental Design (LEED), according to a story from Channel3000:

In spite of the controversy over its name, Vang Pao Elementary is officially under construction.
Ground was broken at the new school site on Wednesday. School board members along with Superintendent Art Rainwater and the building designers all turned the first soil where the school will stand.
The new school will cost $12,923,000. The 86,396-square foot school will have 36 classrooms and house 690 students and 90 teachers. It’s expected to be completed by September 2008.
The green building will be LEED Silver Certified, and will include geothermal day lighting and solar electric panels. The school will be located on Madison’s far West Side off of Valley View Road west of County Highway M on Ancient Oak Lane.

Continue reading Van Pao will be green school →

Governance/Board Decision Making, Health Care, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Wellness

Reports On School Crimes Are Rare

Daniel de Vise:

The recent announcement that Montgomery County school officials were starting work on an annual report of crimes committed by students and other disciplinary incidents underscored a surprising fact: In this era of heightened concern about school safety, few Washington area school systems regularly report such offenses to the public.
The annual School Safety Report, slated for publication in Montgomery starting in the 2008-09 academic year, will place the county almost alone among Maryland and Northern Virginia school systems in reporting detailed school crime statistics to the public, according to education leaders and lawmakers. In much of this region, as in much of the nation, comprehensive reports on weapons, drugs and sex in individual public schools simply don’t exist.
Among the area’s largest school systems, only Fairfax County reports school crime data online, as part of its searchable database of school report cards. One other county, Anne Arundel, publishes a hard-copy student discipline report with annual crime data for individual schools. School systems in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard, Loudoun and Prince William counties publish no such document.
“It’s all theoretically available to the public but rather difficult to obtain,” said Montgomery County Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), who has pushed for annual school crime reporting.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Budget Cuts: The Dog that Didn’t Bark

3 Comments

Can anyone explain why the discussion of ways to meet the gap in next year?s school budget has not included any mention of the cost of teachers? salaries and benefits and how much they are expected to go up next year?
The district has projected a budget deficit for next year of $7.9 million. To arrive at this figure, the district has to make some assumption about the costs of salaries and benefits for next year, which necessarily implies an assumption about how much those costs will increase. There seems to be no information available from the district that explains that assumption.
In last week’s Isthmus, Jason Shepard wrote that salaries and benefits are slated to rise 4.7% next year. That figure comes from a five-year budget projection that is available on the district’s web site. However, I have been told that that figure is not accurate. The district’s contract with MTI for next year has not yet been negotiated (bargaining commences on April 25). I have been told that the district wants to keep its budget assumptions about salaries and benefits confidential for now, in order to avoid adversely affecting its bargaining position. The idea is to preserve the possibility that the district could do better in its bargaining than it is now assuming.
This explanation does not seem compelling to me, for a couple of reasons. First, call me a cynic, but I can’t imagine that the very competent folks at MTI cannot figure out what assumptions the district is utilizing, and so those the district is leaving in the dark include everyone except MTI. Second, once the district has gone through the agony of the current round of budget cuts, it will have very little incentive to try to do better in bargaining than the result that it has already planned for.
It seems to me that the cost of salaries and benefits is the dog that didn’t bark in the current discussion of budget cuts. The amount by which those costs will go up next year has a significant impact on the amount of cuts that will be required.

Continue reading Budget Cuts: The Dog that Didn’t Bark →

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

More deck-chair shuffling

11 Comments

From the MMSD:

For immediate release
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Six elementary schools to have different principals
Six elementary schools will have different principals next year in a series of transfers and changes within the Madison School District. The principals who are transferring have been at their current schools from four to ten years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Deborah Hoffman to Lincoln from Franklin (10 yrs.)
Beth Lehman to Hawthorne from Lincoln (6 yrs.)
Catherine McMillan to Franklin from Hawthorne (10 yrs.)
Michael Hertting to Lapham from a leave of absence
Kristi Kloos to Lake View from Lapham (4 yrs.)
Joy Larson to Allis from Marquette (4 yrs.)
Allis Principal Chris Hodge and Gompers Principal Sherrill Wagner will retire this summer, and Lake View Principal Linda Sweeney will take a leave of absence for career exploration. Hertting will come off a similar leave; previously he led Orchard Ridge for five years. Vacancies will be filled within the next few months.
“We believe these assignment changes are good for the students, the staff, the principals and the district,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater. “Last year, we shifted six other elementary principals after stays of similar length.”
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 4 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.

Constant shuffling of principals damages the effectivenss of the MMSD. All the rhetoric about building relationships amounts to nothing but words, when these actions speak louder.
The superintendent named no principal at Marquette. Apparently, he plans to “consolidate” Lapham and Marquette regardless of whether the board votes for it or not.
With the uncertainty and stress about staff cuts and school closings, the changes could not come at a worse time.
Is the superintendent hell-bent on destroying the MMSD?

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools

1 Comment

Dear Mr. Rainwater:
I just found out from the principal at my school that you cut the allocations for SAGE teachers and Strings teachers, but the budget hasn’t even been approved. Will you please stop playing politics with our children education? It?s time to think about your legacy.
As you step up to the chopping block for your last whack at the budget, please think carefully about how your tenure as our superintendent will be viewed a little more than a year from now when your position is filled by a forward-thinking problem-solver. (Our district will settle for no less.)
Do you want to be remembered as the Superintendent who increased class size as a first step when the budget got tight? Small class size repeatedly rises to the top as the best way to enhance student achievement at the elementary level. Why would you take away one of best protections against federal funding cuts mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act? Rather than increase pupil to teacher ratios, have you checked to see if the pupil to administrative staff ratio has been brought closer to the state-wide average? (In 2002, Madison Metropolitan schools were at 195 children per administrator; the rest of the state averaged 242 children per administrator.) Have the few administrative openings you?ve left unfilled over the past few years actually brought us into line with the rest of the state?

Continue reading An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools →

Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

I have a few comments on separate courses for students of different abilities

I think that it is important to have opportunities for advanced students to obtain seperate instruction is subjects they excel in. It is my belief that by doing this we don’t sacrifice diversity, we actually increase it.
My logic is as follows. If gifted students are not given the challenge they need in school, they will not achieve as much as they can. If the public schools are not able to provide for these childern, then parents of gifted kids will pull them out of school. Unfortunately, only involved parents with money will have the ability to give their kids the alternative education like private school. Thus, the public schools will be left with few children at the top end of the education spectrum since it can’t provide for them.
My belief that this is true comes from my home town in California. We have one elementary school in a wealthy area that is known to have much better educational opportunities for students. Parents in other districts constantly try to move their children to this school. Due to declining enrollment, other school districts have stopped letting students switch schools. To still provide for the children, the school in the wealthy area became a charter school. Now, parents can move their children there without incident. But, the other public schools are left without their brightest students. If the other public schools could provide for their brightest, the public schools would include all of the students.

Continue reading I have a few comments on separate courses for students of different abilities →

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Hard MMSD Budget Still Has Wiggle Room

3 Comments

Scott Milfred:

It’s a contentious fact that has run through so many Madison School Board races and referendums in recent years:
Madison schools spend a lot — $12,111 per student during the 2005-06 school year.
If the district is spending that much, how can it be in crisis?
The answer is complex and a bit murky. Yet a few things are clear.
Liberal Madison has long spent more than most K-12 districts in Wisconsin. This was true before the state adopted school revenue limits in the 1990s, and the caps only reinforced this today.
“When revenue caps went in, everyone was basically frozen in place,” Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater said Friday. “We do spend more than the state average. But that has been the expectation of our community.”
So why does Madison spend more? Berry points to Madison’s higher number of staff who aren’t teachers. Madison hires a lot of social workers, psychologists, nurses and administrators.
Madison spends more per pupil than Racine, Green Bay and Kenosha — as well as the state average — on student and staff services, administration and building and grounds. And Madison’s non- instructional costs are rising as a percentage of its spending.
“Madison is actually de- emphasizing instruction,” Berry contends.
In addition, Berry suspects Madison is over-identifying students for learning disabilities.

Links: Madison spending, student and staffing history. 2006/2007 MMSD Citizen’s Budget. Carol Carstensen’s thoughts on a 2007 Referendum.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board

18 Comments

It will be interesting to see how voters on February 20 and April 3 view this decision by a majority of the Madison School Board: Should the Board and Administration continue to give away their ability to negotiate health care benefits ($43.5M of the 2006/2007 budge) before MTI union bargaining begins? Read the 2005 MMSD/MTI Voluntary Impasse Agreement [1.1MB PDF; see paragraph’s 2, 10 and 11]. The 2007 version, alluded to in Andy Hall’s article below, will be posted when it sees the light of day.
This is an important issue for all of us, given the MMSD’s challenge of balancing their growing $331M+ budget, while expenses – mostly salaries and benefits – continue to increase at a faster rate. Mix in the recent public disclosure of the district’s $5.9M 7 year structural deficit and I doubt that this is the best approach for our children.
Recently, the Sun Prairie School District and its teachers’ union successfully bargained with DeanCare to bring down future costs for employee health insurance.

Andy Hall, writing in the Wisconsin State Journal asks some useful questions:

But with the Madison School Board facing a $10.5 million budget shortfall, is the board giving away too much with its promises to retain teachers’ increasingly pricey health insurance and to discard its legal mechanism for limiting teachers’ total compensation increase to 3.8 percent?

Yes, School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said Saturday, “I feel very strongly that this was a mistake,” said Kobza, who acknowledged that most board members endorse the agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.

State law allows districts to avoid arbitration by making a so-called qualified economic offer, or QEO, by boosting salaries and benefits a combined 3.8 percenter a year.

“To agree before a negotiation starts that we’re not going to impose the QEO and negotiate health care weakens the district’s position,” Kobza said. She contended the district’s rising health-care costs are harming its ability to raise starting teachers’ salaries enough to remain competitive.

The “voluntary impasse resolution” agreements, which are public records, are used in only a handful of Wisconsin’s 425 school districts, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

Four of the 7 current Madison School Board Members were backed by MTI during their campaigns (Arlene Silveira, Carol Carstensen, Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr.). Those four votes can continue this practice. Independent School Board members Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts have spoken publicly against the concessions made in advance of negotiations. If you support or oppose this approach, let the board know via email (comments@madison.k12.wi.us), or phone.

Related links, media and transcripts:

  • What’s the MTI Political Endorsement about?:

    In 2006-07 the Madison School district will spend $43.5M on health insurance for its employees, the majority of the money paying for insurance for teachers represented by Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) That is 17% of the operating budget under the revenue limits.
    In June of 2007, the two-year contract between the district and MTI ends. The parties are now beginning negotiations for the 2007-09 contract.
    The Sun Prairie School district and its teachers union recently saved substantial dollars on health insurance. They used the savings to improve teacher wages. The parties joined together openly and publicly to produce a statement of the employees health needs. Then they negotiated a health insurance package with a local HMO that met their needs.

  • The MMSD Custodians recently agreed to a new health care plan where 85% of the cost savings went to salaries and 15% to the MMSD.
  • Ruth Robarts discussed concessions in advance of negotiations, health care costs and the upcoming elections with Vicki McKenna recently. [6.5MB MP3 Audio | Transcript]
  • What a Sham(e) by Jason Shephard:

    Last week, Madison Teachers Inc. announced it would not reopen contract negotiations following a hollow attempt to study health insurance alternatives.
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone who suggests the Joint Committee on Health Insurance Issues conducted a fair or comprehensive review needs to get checked out by a doctor.
    The task force’s inaction is a victory for John Matthews, MTI’s executive director and board member Wisconsin Physicians Service.
    Losers include open government, school officials, taxpayers and young teachers in need of a raise.
    From its start, the task force, comprised of three members each from MTI and the district, seemed to dodge not only its mission but scrutiny.

Continue reading Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board →

Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

My Life and Times With the Madison Public Schools

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Up close, the author finds that politics obscure key educational issues
Marc Eisen:

Where’s the challenge?
I’m no different. I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired, and challenged in school. Too often—in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness—that isn’t happening in the Madison schools.
Advanced classes are being choked off, while one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous groupings”) are created for more and more students. The TAG staff has been slashed nearly in half (one staffer is now assigned to six elementary schools), and even outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility (this is the fate of the most excellent Wisconsin Center For Academically Talented Youth [WCATY]). And arts programs are demeaned and orphaned.
This is not Tom Friedman’s recipe for student success in the 21st century. Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed and structured in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district’s own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. For example, 46% of Madison’s black students score below grade level on the state’s 3rd grade reading test compared to 9% of white students.
At East, the state’s 10th grade knowledge-and-concepts test show widely disparate results by race. With reading, 81% of white kids are proficient or advanced versus 43% for black students. The achievement gap is even larger in math, science, social studies, and language arts. No wonder TAG classes are disproportionately white.
Reality is that the push for heterogeneous class grouping becomes, among other things, a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that are too white and unrepresentative of the district’s minority demographics.

Board Meeting Archives, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Madison Schools’ “Restorative Justice”

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“Madison Parent”:

The superintendent, school board president and other school board candidates are already talking as if this were a done deal. But what is “restorative justice,” and what will it mean to have student misconduct addressed with a “restorative justice” approach? A layperson’s online search leads to academic papers in the criminal and juvenile justice area from fields ranging from sociology, social work, philosophy and theology, but not much specific research or data on whether or how “restorative justice” has been found to work as an approach to addressing misconduct in schools. The decision to move away from a discipline-based approach to a “restorative justice” approach will have an immediate, on-the-ground, daily impact on the school climate and educational experience encountered by the students and teachers in our schools, and parents of children in the public schools here may very well have the following questions:

College Preparation, Curriculum - Math, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, What Can I Do?

Madison School Board Discusses an Independent Math Curriculum Review

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The Madison School Board’s 2006/2007 Goals for Superintendent Art Rainwater included the “Initiatiation and completion of a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum”. Watch the discussion [Video] and read a memo [240K PDF] from the Superintendent regarding his plans for this goal. Much more here and here.
Barbara Lehman kindly emailed the Board’s conclusion Monday evening:

It was moved by Lawrie Kobza and seconded by Ruth Robarts to approve the revised plan for implementation of the Superintendent’s 2006-07 goal to initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent, and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum as presented at this meeting, including extension for completion of the evaluation to the 2007-08 school year. The Board of Education shall receive a report in 2006-07 with analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-test scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools in addition to reports in subsequent years. Student representative advisory vote * aye. Motion carried 6-1 with Lucy Mathiak voting no.

Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

1989-2006 Math Comparison: Are Students Better Now?

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math8906.jpg
W. Stephen Wilson [75K PDF]:

Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. This paper answers that question for one group of students.
For my fall 2006 Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences course I administered the same final exam used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical and the classes were approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshmen. The 2006 class had significantly lower exam scores.
This is not a traditional research study in mathematics education. The value of this study is probably in the rarity of the data, which compares one generation to another.
….
Nineteen eighty-nine is, in mathematics education, indelibly tied to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ publication, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989), which downplayed pencil and paper computations and strongly suggested that calculators play an important role in K-12 mathematics education. My 2006 students would have been about two years old at the time of this very influential publication, and it could easily have affected the mathematical education many of them received. Certainly, one possibility is that mathematics preparation is down across the country, thus limiting the pool of well prepared college applicants.

Wilson is a Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.

Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness, What Can I Do?

Madison Parents’ School Safety Site

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Within moments of reading Chris Anderson’s “The Vanishing Point Theory of News“, a link to the Madison Parents’ School Safety Site arrived in my inbox. The site includes a useful set of questions that all parents should use to evaluate their children’s school.
RSS Feed.

Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Milwaukee Schools to Ban Cell Phones

Alan Borsuk:

Principals throughout Milwaukee Public Schools were ordered Tuesday to crack down on students carrying cell phones and similar electronic devices inside schools.
Seeking to improve safety after a first semester marred by numerous violent incidents, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos told principals to come up with effective policies banning cell phones, with some exceptions, by Jan. 29, when the second semester starts.
He also announced that students who use cell phones to summon outsiders to a school for reasons that threaten safety will be expelled from school.
In addition, he said that Milwaukee County’s new district attorney, John Chisholm, has agreed to consider charging people involved in violence at schools with felonies. Generally, people involved in fighting have been given municipal disorderly conduct tickets, which Andrekopoulos said was too weak a punishment to be effective.

Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

“Do you want innovative public school options in Madison?

If you do, then your support of The Studio School charter school proposal is critical. Please let the school board know. Write letters. Email them [comments@madison.k12.wi.us]. Call them. Attend the meeting on January 22nd! I have heard from a board member that if the “pressure” to vote for opening this school in the fall isn’t strong enough, board members will not vote in favor of this proposal January 29th.
The opportunity to offer this innovative educational option with the possibility of up to $450,000.00 of federal funding over the next two years will not be available to MMSD again.
For more information to find out how to help, community members are invited to join us for our planning group’s general meeting on January 17th (this Wednesday) at 6:30 PM at the Sequoya Branch of the Public Library [Map]. You can also go to our website for more information.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, PTO Priorities, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992

Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater’s recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.
The Madison School District’s two most recent Superintendent hires were Cheryl Wilhoyte [Clusty] and Art Rainwater [Clusty]. Art came to Madison from Kansas City, a district which, under court order, dramatically increased spending by “throwing money at their schools”, according to Paul Ciotti:

In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
It didn’t work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students’ achievement hadn’t improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.(1)
The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district’s desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, “No one’s ever tried.”

Cheryl Wilhoyte was hired, with the support of the two local dailies (Wisconsin State Journal, 9/30/1992: Search No Further & Cap Times Editorial, 9/21/1992: Wilhoyte Fits Madison) by a school board 4-3 vote. The District’s budget in 1992-1993 was $180,400,000 with local property taxes generating $151,200,00 of that amount. 14 years later, despite the 1993 imposition of state imposed annual school spending increase limits (“Revenue Caps“), the 2006 budget is $331,000,000. Dehli’s article mentions that the 1992-1993 School Board approved a 12.9% school property tax increase for that budget. An August, 1996 Capital Times editorial expressed puzzlement over terms of Cheryl Wilhoyte’s contract extension.
Art, the only applicant, was promoted from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent in January, 1999. Chris Murphy’s January, 1999 article includes this:

Since Wilhoyte’s departure, Rainwater has emerged as a popular interim successor. Late last year, School Board members received a set of surveys revealing broad support for a local superintendent as opposed to one hired from outside the district. More than 100 of the 661 respondents recommended hiring Rainwater.

Art was hired on a 7-0 vote but his contract was not as popular – approved on a 5-2 vote (Carol Carstensen, Calvin Williams, Deb Lawson, Joanne Elder and Juan Jose Lopez voted for it while Ray Allen and Ruth Robarts voted no). The contract was and is controversial, as Ruth Robarts wrote in September, 2004.
A February, 2004 Doug Erickson summary of Madison School Board member views of Art Rainwater’s tenure to date.
Quickly reading through a few of these articles, I found that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Fascinating. Perhaps someone will conduct a much more detailed review of the record, which would be rather useful over the next year or two.

Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

West High School Small Learning Community Presentation 1/8/2007 @ 7:00p.m.

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Madison West Small Learning Community Coordinator Heather Lott is giving a presentation at Monday evening’s PTSO meeting: “SLC Post-Grant Update and Discussion”. Location: Madison West High School LMC [Map] West’s implementation of Small Learning Communities has been controversial due to the move toward a one size fits all curriculum (English 9 and English 10).
Background Links:

Loading Clusty Cloud …

Parents with children potentially on their way to West High School should check out this Monday evening event.

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

More Notes on Milwaukee’s Plans to Re-Centralize School Governance

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Looking for the path to effective education, leaders of the Milwaukee Public Schools have long slogged through the wilderness of school reform only to end up where they started. All used to be centralized at MPS. Then decentralization became the watchword. Now centralization is again in.
This lunging between two opposite approaches is in a way understandable. Getting big-city school systems to work is no easy task, to judge from the rarity of the accomplishment. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is right in being dissatisfied with the slow pace of improvement and in searching for ways to step it up. And recentralization does carry the force of logic for decentralized schools that have failed to improve.
Still, as onetime MPS chief Howard Fuller reminded us when we reached him in New Orleans, where he is consulting, neither centralization nor decentralization is a magic bullet. The key ingredient for great schools are “people committed to do whatever it takes to educate our children.”
n doing so, MPS must minimize the red tape, which has clogged school operations. Another trick the system must manage is to refrain from hurting the schools that have thrived under decentralization, an example of which is Hamlin Garland Elementary School on Milwaukee’s south side. Borsuk highlighted the school in another article this week.

Madison appears to be rather centralized, with a push for standardized curriculum, generally lead by downtown Teaching and Learning staff. I often wonder how practical this actually is, given 24,000+ students and thousands of teachers and staff. Perhaps, in 2007 and going forward, the best solution is to support easy to access internet based knowledge tools for teachers where they can quickly review a variety of curriculum (including those not blessed by the central administration) with notes and links from others. This could likely be done inexpensively, given the wide variety of knowledge management tools available today.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Teacher Rules, Roles & Rights National Collective Bargaining Searchable Database

National Council on Teacher Quality:

the portal is the first of its kind-empowering anyone to analyze and compare the day-to-day operations of teachers and schools in a single district or all fifty. You can choose to download the full text of a teacher contract, just the salary schedule, and even the school calendar. Or perhaps you just have a single question and don’t want to wade through lengthy documents. Most likely the answer in our database, easily retrieved in three quick steps using our report generator. The database provides answers to over 300 questions, ranging from salary and benefits to how a teacher gets evaluated–with more getting added all the time.
The more this site gets used, the more powerful it will become. We invite users to contribute knowledge and ideas to our data collection, helping us keep the site current, accurate and fair. Consider this site the central depository for teacher policies. To ensure the accuracy of this database, we will be vetting all user feedback before posting any changes.

The 158 page collective bargaining agreement (7/1/2005 to 6/30/2007) between Madison Teachers, Inc. and the Madison Metropolitan School District is available here [540K pdf]. Additional links and documents can be found here.
Mike Antonuccia has more.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support

Milwaukee Evaluates Online Textbooks & Free Wireless Internet for Students

Erin Richards:

Milwaukee Public Schools may go digital with some learning resources as the district selects about $7.7 million worth of new language arts, foreign language, technology education and social studies textbooks.
With a new wireless network expected to bring free broadband Internet access into the homes of MPS students by next semester, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said the district could start to “expand its textbook options” and look at more paperless models. But questions remain about if and how the district would make the most necessary resource – computers – available to a largely low-income population of students.
“This is the first time we’ve started looking at online options, especially with language arts material,” Andrekopoulos said last month, after a School Board committee voted to move forward with the textbook adoption process. The committee’s recommendation was approved by the full board on Nov. 30.
Aquine Jackson, chief academic officer for MPS, said electronic options could improve some of the literacy curricula that need supplemental resources. At a district-estimated $6.7 million worth of materials, language arts texts for grades K-8 and spelling for grades K-5 constitute the bulk of material that’s up for adoption.

Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, What Can I Do?

Do Math Topics Lead to Better Instruction?

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Daniel de Vise:

It says the typical state math curriculum runs a mile wide and an inch deep, resulting in students being introduced to too many concepts but mastering too few, and urges educators to slim down those lessons.
Some scholars say the American approach to math instruction has allowed students to fall behind those in Singapore, Japan and a dozen other nations. In most states, they say, the math curriculum has swelled into a thick catalogue of skills that students are supposed to master to attain “proficiency” under the federal No Child Left Behind mandate.

Math Forum audio / video

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, What Can I Do?

Madison School Board: Superintendent’s High School Redesign Presentation & Public Comments [Audio / Video]

Four citizens spoke at Monday evening’s school board meeting regarding the proposed “high school redesign”. Watch or download this video clip.
Superintendent Art Rainwater’s powerpoint presentation and followup board discussion. Watch or download the video.

Links: