Category Archives: Teacher Support

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

The Effect of Charter Schools on Student Achievement

Julian R. Betts and Y. Emily Tang via a kind Deb Britt email:

Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?
Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth- based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.
Focusing on math and reading scores, the authors find compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects. However, important exceptions include elementary school reading and middle school math and reading, where evidence suggests no negative effects of charter schools and, in some cases, evidence of positive effects. Meta-analytic methods are used to obtain overall estimates on the effect of charter schools on reading and math achievement. The authors find an overall effect size for elementary school reading and math of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively, and for middle school math of 0.055. Effects are not statistically meaningful for middle school reading and for high school math and reading. Studies that focus on urban areas tend to find larger effects than do studies that examine wider areas. Studies of KIPP charter middle schools suggest positive effects of 0.096 and 0.223 for reading and math respectively. New York City and Boston charter schools also appeared to deliver achievement gains larger than charter schools in most other locations. A lack of rigorous studies in many parts of the nation limits the ability to extrapolate.

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

Wisconsin Assembly should ice teacher discipline bill

Mary Bell:

If you want to tell if someone is a good driver, you watch them drive. If you want to tell if someone is a good teacher, watch them teach. When it comes to evaluating teachers, the further from the classroom you get, the weaker the measure is.
There’s no doubt about it – high-quality evaluation systems for teachers and principals help students and schools. Our union of educators has called for consistent evaluations for years – and even advanced our own proposal back in January. We have been one of many voices on the State Superintendent’s Educator Effectiveness Design Team, which is near to releasing a comprehensive evaluation framework.
The education community knows what works: professional development, consistent and thorough classroom observation and using results to help good educators become great.
It was troubling, then, when last week the state Senate voted to advance a bill to tie teacher discipline – even firing – to students’ Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) test scores.

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

WEAC assesses future of annual convention as school districts consider alternatives

Matthew DeFour:

Most area schools will be closed Thursday and Friday, but with the annual teachers union convention canceled districts are considering whether to do away with the mid-semester break in the future.
Many school districts had already set their calendars for this year by the time the Wisconsin Education Association Council announced in May it would cancel its fall convention.
But Sun Prairie and McFarland have decided to hold classes next year on the days previously set aside for the WEAC convention. Others, including Cambridge, Belleville and DeForest, are thinking about doing the same.
“Early indications are people would favor having regular classes on those days to reduce breaks in instruction for students,” DeForest Superintendent Jon Bales said. “It also allows for the addition of makeup snow days at the end of the year without going too far into the month of June.”

Budget/Financing, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Waste

Wisconsin school districts adjust to canceled teacher convention

Matthew Bin Han Ong:

The annual state teachers union convention that has traditionally meant a two-day school holiday at the end of October is off this year, leaving public school districts with decisions about how to schedule students and teachers.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council canceled the convention, which would have been Thursday and Friday this week, after changes in state law weakened the union and its local affiliates.
Without the certainty of having input into school calendars through the negotiations process, members could not guarantee that they could all get the days off from school, said WEAC President Mary Bell, who added that the convention was “the flagship piece of professional development that we provided for members.”
Some school districts, with their calendars already set before the convention was called off, are keeping the school holiday for students but bringing teachers in for training or other activities. Others, such as Waukesha, are keeping the holiday and treating it as two unpaid days for teachers.
The Brown Deer School District scheduled classes.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Navigating Public School Admissions, With a Consultant’s Help

Rebecca Vevea:

Armed with tote bags for the handouts awaiting them, thousands of Chicago parents shuffled through display tables adorned with brightly colored posters as they faced the daunting task of selecting schools for their children.
For many parents, the school fair, put on by the Neighborhood Parents Network, is their first encounter with the public school system. It is timed to coincide with the opening of the district’s admissions process, which ends in December. Many parents hope to place their children in the growing number of charter, magnet and selective-enrollment elementary schools.”If you hang out with parents of 4-year-olds, the conversation never stops,” said Christine Whitley, a Chicago Public Schools parent. “That’s all they talk about: ‘Where are you sending your child to school?’ ”
As choosing a school becomes increasingly complicated, some entrepreneurial parents, including Ms. Whitley, have started small consulting businesses aimed at helping parents navigate the admission process. But some observers have raised concerns about the potential for parents to game the system.
The district has 482 elementary schools, multiple application forms and five specialty school options in addition to the neighborhood elementary schools: gifted, classical, magnet, magnet cluster and charter. Magnet, magnet cluster and charter schools select students largely through a computerized lottery, but gifted and classical require admission tests for children at age 4 because the schools offer an accelerated curriculum.

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

The DOJ intervenes on behalf of a Muslim school teacher who claimed that the board of her Illinois school district was guilty of religious bias.

Dorothy Rabinowitz:

In the end it couldn’t have come as any great shock when the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of a Muslim school teacher who claimed that the board of her Illinois school district was guilty of religious bias. Nor could it have come as any surprise that the Board of Education, Berkeley School District 87 Cook Country Illinois, was finally forced to settle the case brought against it by the DOJ. Still, even Americans accustomed to the relentless — more precisely the relentlessly selective — political correctness of the Obama Justice Department had to have been startled at the facts of this case and the deranged notions of equity that had impelled Eric Holder’s DOJ to go rushing into battle against the school district.
The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Matt Richtel:

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

We Petition the Obama Administration to promote legislation to prevent public schools from starting earlier than 8 a.m.

Terra Snider, via a kind JH Snider email:

Considerable research confirms the relationship between school start times, sleep deprivation, and student performance, truancy, and absenteeism, as well as depression, mood swings, impulse control, tobacco and alcohol use, impaired cognitive function and decision-making, obesity, stimulant abuse, automobile accidents, and suicide. Mounting evidence about the biology of adolescent sleep, and about the impact of later start times, shows that starting school before 8 a.m. not only undermines academic achievement but endangers health and safety. Because logistical and financial issues prevent local school systems from establishing safe and educationally defensible hours, however, federal legislation mandating start times consistent with student health and educational well-being is essential.

Terra Snider:

As the parent of two former and one current Severna Park High School student, I’ve been living with the issue of early high school start times for years. Although the consensus of scientific opinion is that teenagers (and young adults) would be better off if school hours were better aligned with their biological clocks, the possibility of changing school hours inevitably sparks raging controversy, both here and across the country.
Changing school hours costs money, and we all know school systems don’t have a lot of that on hand. It also means changing the way we do things, and most of us don’t like doing that much either. On the other hand, Moses didn’t come down from Mount Sinai with commandments that schools must start at 7:17 a.m. and end at 2:05 p.m.
Surely if we know students learn better, and are healthier and safer, with different hours, we should make that our number one priority. Shouldn’t we?
The Severna Park High School CAC (and the now defunct countywide CAC) have been working on the issue of high school start time for years, decades even – to no avail. Many of us have become convinced that the only solution to the problem is a national mandate. That’s why I created a petition on We the People on WhiteHouse.gov, a new platform that allows anyone to create and sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues.

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

Charters and Minority Progress

Wall Street Journal:

A tragedy of American politics is that civil rights groups like the NAACP oppose education reform, even as reform’s main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans. The latest evidence comes in a study showing that black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools.
The California Charter Schools Association looked at the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that the average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data.
In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.

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

Senate Panel Approves Bill That Rewrites Education Law

Sam Dillon:

Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration’s offering states waivers to the law’s key provisions.
“Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on,” Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. “It gave us a sense of urgency.”
Mr. Harkin’s committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington’s role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee’s ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it “a good compromise bill” that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Elections, Fund Raising, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support, Teacher Support

2011-2012 $369,394,753 Madison Schools Budget update

2011-2012 Revised Budget 1.3MB PDF (Budget amendments document). District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753, yet “Fund Equity“, or the District’s reserves, has increased to $48,324,862 from $22,769,831 in 2007 (page 24). The District’s property tax “underlevy” (increases allowed under Wisconsin school revenue limits which are based on student population changes, successful referendums along with carve-outs such as Fund 80, among others) will be $13,084,310. It also appears that property taxes will be flat (page 19) after a significant 9% increase last year. Interestingly, MSCR spending is up 7.97% (page 28).
2011-2012 enrollment is 24,861. $369,394,753 planned expenditures results in per student spending of $14,858.40.
I welcome clarifications and updates to these numbers, which are interesting. We’ve seen a doubling of District reserves over the past few years while spending has remained relatively flat as has enrollment.
Finally, this is worth reading in light of the District’s 2011-2012 numbers: Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Advocates Additional Federal Tax Dollar Spending & Borrowing via President Obama’s Proposed Jobs Bill.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison Prep is so much more than same-sex classes

Scott Milfred

Let’s see:

  • A longer school day and year, with July classes.
  • Higher standards, expectations and school uniforms.
  • Mandated extracurricular activities.
  • Grades for parents based on their involvement at the school.
  • More minority teachers as role models.
  • More connections and internships with local employers.
  • Millions in private fundraising.

If the Madison Preparatory Academy can pull off all of that, how could it not improve the academic success of its largely black and Latino students?
That’s the big picture view Madison should adopt as it considers the Urban League of Greater Madison’s intriguing charter school request. Instead, a disproportionate amount of time and concern has been spent on a final part of the proposal:
Same-sex classrooms.

Related: Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Acdemy IB Charter school.

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

African American Student Performance in Charters

California Charter Schools Association, via a kind reader’s email:

Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform
One of the greatest public education challenges in California–and the nation–is the achievement and opportunity gaps between African American students and their White and Asian peers.
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has an interest in understanding how the state’s charter public schools can accelerate closing achievement gaps for African American students, while at the same time advancing educational innovation that improves teaching and learning for all public school students.
The Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform report, released by CCSA in October 2011, details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that California charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American students, and that African American students are enrolled at higher percentage in the state’s charters, among other findings.
Since the inception of the Charter Schools Act in California in 1992, charter schools have become an important part of the public education system, opening their doors in both urban and rural areas, in order to provide quality educational options for families. Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform demonstrates that as laboratories of innovation, California’s highly effective charter public schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated nationally.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

NYU Exiting National Merit Scholarship Citing Test Process

Janet Lorin:

New York University pulled out of the National Merit scholarships, becoming at least the ninth school to stop funding one of the largest U.S. merit-based aid programs, because it doesn’t want to reward students based on a standardized test.
The National Merit Scholarship Corp. distributed more than $50 million to students in the 2009-2010 year based on the PSAT college entry practice exam. Most of the money comes from almost 200 colleges, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago, to fund awards of as much as $8,000 over four years. Companies such as Boeing Co. and Pfizer Inc. also sponsor the program, primarily to benefit their employees’ children.
NYU’s withdrawal is another blow to National Merit, already ignored by many elite colleges and a subject of a critical report by a Harvard College-chaired commission. Schools are debating how to allocate scarce financial-aid dollars as tuition costs rise and the economy remains sluggish. While high schools trumpet National Merit winners, relying heavily on a standardized test is a flawed way to evaluate students, said Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president of admissions at NYU.
……….
National Merit hasn’t collected any fees from the PSAT for the past 14 years, though it is entitled to a “nominal percent” of revenue under their contract, Kauffmann said. Instead, it has reinvested the funds into the program to keep test fees low and expand access to fee waivers, he said.
The College Board gains a marketing benefit from its association with National Merit when school districts or states consider using public funds to pay for the PSAT in 11th grade or ACT Inc.’s 10th-grade test known as PLAN, according to Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, a nonprofit group in Boston that works to end the misuses of standardized testing. Almost 1.3 million 10th-graders nationally took the PLAN test in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the nonprofit ACT.

Related: 2011 National Merit Cut Scores

Illinois 214
Minnesota 213
Iowa 209
Massachusetts 223
Michigan 209
Texas 215
Wisconsin 209

College Preparation, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support, Teacher Support

Please Don’t Study So Much!

High School Students–please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America’s workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
——————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

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

Test scores could be factor in teacher discipline under bill

Jason Stein:

School officials could use standardized tests to help decide whether to discipline or fire a teacher, under a bill passed by the state Senate Thursday.
The bill passed 17-16 on a party-line vote, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats in opposition.
Current law allows school administrators to use standardized tests as one of multiple criteria to evaluate teachers’ performance but prohibits school districts from using the test results to fire or suspend a teacher. The bill would allow such actions as long as the test results weren’t the sole reason for removing, suspending or disciplining a teacher.
Democrats urged senators to hold off on the bill and wait for an effort by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers to finish its work developing a system to better evaluate student learning.
“This is a very unfair position that we’re putting teachers in,” Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said.

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Curriculum - Math, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Bidding Adieu to the Madison School Board; “Facts are an Obstacle to the Reform of America”

1 Comment

Lucy Mathiak, via a kind email:

Dear Friends,
I am writing to thank you for your encouragement and support in my decision to seek election to the MMSD Board of Education in late fall 2005. Your help in getting elected, your support during tough times, and your help in finding solutions to problems, have made a great difference to my service on the board.
I am writing to let you know that I will not seek re-election in 2012. I continue to believe that the Board of Education is one of the most important elected positions for our community and its schools, and encourage others to step forward to serve in this capacity. MMSD is facing significant challenges, and it is more important than ever that thoughtful citizens engage in the work that will be needed to preserve the traditional strengths of our public schools while helping those schools to change in keeping with the times and the families that they serve.
At the same time, I do not view school board service as a career, and believe that turnover in membership is healthy for the organization and for the district. I have been fortunate to have had an opportunity to serve on this board, and to work with many fine community organizations in that capacity. For that I am grateful.
Again, thank you for your interest, support, and collegiality.
Lucy J. Mathiak
716 Orton Ct.
Madison, WI 53703
Madison School Board
Seat #2

I am appreciative of Lucy’s tireless and often thankless work on behalf of our students.
Every organization – public or private, deteriorates. It is often easier to spend more (raise taxes), raise fees on consumers – or a “rate base”, reduce curricular quality and in general go along and get along than to seek substantive improvements. Change is hard.
Citizens who seek facts, ask difficult and uncomfortable questions are essential for strong institutions – public or private. Progress requires conflict.
Yet, very few of us are willing to step into the theatre, spend time, dig deep and raise such questions. I am thankful for those, like Lucy, who do.
Her years of activism and governance have touched numerous issues, from the lack of Superintendent oversight (related: Ruth Robarts) (that’s what a board does), the District’s $372M+ budget priorities and transparency to substantive questions about Math, reading and the endless battle for increased rigor in the Madison Schools.
In closing, I had an opportunity to hear Peter Schneider speak during a recent Madison visit. Schneider discussed cultural differences and similarities between America and Germany. He specifically discussed the recent financial crisis. I paraphrase: “If I do not understand a financial vehicle, I buy it”. “I create a financial product that no one, including me, understands, I sell it”. This is “collective ignorance”.
Schneider’s talk reminded me of a wonderful Madison teacher’s comments some years ago: “if we are doing such a great job, why do so few people vote and/or understand civic and business issues”?
What, then, is the payoff of increased rigor and the pursuit of high standards throughout an organization? Opportunity.
I recently met a technical professional who works throughout the United States from a suburban Madison home. This person is the product of a very poor single parent household. Yet, high parental standards and rigorous academic opportunities at a somewhat rural Wisconsin high school and UW-Madison led to an advanced degree and professional opportunities.
It also led to a successful citizen and taxpayer. The alternative, as discussed in my recent conversation with Madison Mayor Paul Soglin is growth in those who don’t contribute, but rather increase costs on society.
Lucy will be missed.

Community Partners, Curriculum - Math, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison Math Circle for Middle & High School Students

Gheorghe Craciun, via a kind email:

We have started the “Madison Math Circle” for interested middle and high school students (please see more details below, or at https://www.math.wisc.edu/wiki/index.php/Madison_Math_Circle ), but we are having some trouble advertising it.
Prof. Steffen Lempp told me that you might be able to help us.
Thank you very much!
Best,
George

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

Rocketship Education’s plan for school in Milwaukee advances

Erin Richards, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

A young and tech-savvy charter school network that’s gotten attention for reducing the achievement gap in San Jose, Calif., got the green light from a Common Council committee Tuesday to bring the model to Milwaukee.
Rocketship Education, a nonprofit management company, has applied for a charter from the City of Milwaukee that would allow it to open a publicly funded school in the fall of 2013, with the eventual intent to serve up to 4,000 children in eight K-5 schools by 2017. Each school would have to show measurable progress before subsequent schools could open.
The organization, started in 2006, currently serves about 2,500 students in five San Jose area elementary schools.
A majority of members on the Steering and Rules Committee on Tuesday approved sending Rocketship’s application to the full council for consideration.
Rocketship CEO and co-founder John Danner explained the organization’s three areas of emphasis: engaging parents through teacher-led home visits and training them to advocate for their children; developing talent by growing a pipeline of teachers who can become school leaders; and giving all students individualized learning plans that blend six hours a day of face-to-face instruction with two hours of lab time spent working with online computer programs and low-cost tutors.

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

Los Angeles Charities and Minority Groups Tell United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD: ‘Don’t Hold Us Back’

Hillel Aron:

Today, full page ads appear in the L.A. Times, Daily News and La Opinion taken out by Don’t Hold Us Back — respected organizations calling out United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD for letting kids fail. The new supergroup includes The United Way, The Urban League, Community Coalition, Alliance for a Better Community, Families in Schools, Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Communities for Teaching Excellence.
The ad’s bland wording at first seems a bit “so what?” but it’s actually written in code to UTLA leaders, who have helped the local teachers union gain a reputation as one of the most anti-reform big-city education unions in the U.S. Here’s a translation:
In one line, the ad says teachers should “be rewarded for academic excellence.”
That sounds normal, right?
But in fact, that idea has for years been vehemently opposed by UTLA. UTLA has fiercely fought efforts to reward the most effective teachers, or the teachers who take on the toughest assignments, by giving them financial sweeteners — merit pay.

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

Study of philosophy makes gains despite economy

Jeff Gammage:

Shannon Maloney had already earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but she returned to Lehigh University for a fifth year to complete a second major she knows will make her more employable:
Philosophy.
Yep, philosophy.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged – as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science – more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.

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

Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?

Peter Gray:

From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives, viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn’t work very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn’t work very well either.

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

Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Advocates Additional Federal Tax Dollar Spending & Borrowing via President Obama’s Proposed Jobs Bill

Matthew DeFour:

Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad publicly touted President Barack Obama’s stalled jobs proposal Monday, saying it would help the School District pay for millions of dollars in needed maintenance projects.
“We either pay now, or we pay more at a much later date,” Nerad said at a press conference at West High School, which is due for about $17.4 million in maintenance projects over the next five years.
A School Board committee is reviewing maintenance projects identified in a 2010 study by Durrant Engineers that said the district may need to spend as much as $83.7 million over five years on projects not already included in the budget.
The committee is expected to make recommendations early next year. Nerad said the committee hasn’t decided yet whether to recommend another maintenance referendum. A 2004 referendum authorizing $20 million over five years ran out last year.

Federal tax receipts, spending and deficits, fiscal years 2007-2011, billions of dollars:

Receipts

$2,568

$2,524

$2,104

$2,162

$2,303

Outlays Deficit Deficit as a % of GDP
2007 $2,729 $161 1.2%
2008 $2,983 $459 3.2%
2009 $3,520 $1,416 10%
2010 $3,456 $1,294 8.9%
2011 $3,600 $1,298 8.6%

Source: Congressional Budget Office.
The most recent Madison School District maintenance referendum spending has come under scrutiny – though I’ve not seen any further discussion on this topic over the past year.
Related: Wisconsin state budget is bad for kids by Thomas Beebe:

“It’ll be OK,” Gov. Scott Walker said last winter when he announced a budget that snatched away more than $800 million in opportunities to learn from Wisconsin public school kids. “I’m giving you the tools to make it work.”
Well, the tools the governor gave local school districts are the right to force teachers to pay more toward their retirement, and the option to unilaterally require educators to kick in more for their health care. The problem is that the tools, along with any money some of them might have left over from federal jobs funds, are one-time solutions. These tools can’t be used again unless school districts ask teachers to give up even more of their take-home pay.
By law, all school districts have to balance their budgets. They always have, and always will. That’s not the point. The point is that the governor has hijacked the language. Educational accountability isn’t about balancing the budget, it’s about giving kids opportunities to grow up into good, contributing adults. That’s not what Gov. Walker wants to talk about.

Reuters:

The red line, here, is median real household income, as gleaned from the CPS, indexed to January 2000=100. It’s now at 89.4, which means that real incomes are more than 10% lower today than they were over a decade ago.
More striking still is the huge erosion in incomes over the course of the supposed “recovery” — the most recent two years, since the Great Recession ended. From January 2000 through the end of the recession, household incomes fluctuated, but basically stayed in a band within 2 percentage points either side of the 98 level. Once it had fallen to 96 when the recession ended, it would have been reasonable to assume some mean reversion at that point — that with the recovery it would fight its way back up towards 98 or even 100.
Instead, it fell off a cliff, and is now below 90.

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

Notes From a Dragon Mom

Emily Rapp:

MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.
I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.
How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?
Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.

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

New education reform could impact ISU teachers

David Bartholomew:

In a move that has startled many on the left and the right, Iowa Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made public his new 18-page education reform bill titled “One Unshakable Vision: World-Class Schools for Iowa.” The plan, officially released Oct. 3, makes sweeping changes to the Iowa public education system, as well as to the process for becoming a teacher in Iowa, which could substantially affect aspiring teachers at Iowa State and other colleges and universities in Iowa.
Under this new education bill, students in K-12 public school will be subjected to a more intense Iowa core curriculum, third graders will be required to take a reading test in order to move on to the fourth grade, ninth graders will be asked to take a standardized test that would compare them to other students on an international basis, and 11th graders will be required to take a college entrance exam.
As for teachers, the required grade point average for admission into teaching programs at Iowa universities will be raised from a 2.5 to 3.0, core content coursework may be increased, new teachers will enter into an apprentice program in which they will be mentored and trained by distinguished veteran teachers, and a new pay ladder will be implemented from which pay will be tied to both performance and experience. Many believe that these new ambitious approaches are needed to make Iowa a leader in education again, but many still remain wary of some of the ideas proposed in the bill, especially the new standards for prospective teachers at Iowa universities.

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

Fran, Henderson & Pingry, and Me: A Tale of Problems vs Exercises

Barry Garelick, via email:

Fran, by Way of Introduction
My high school algebra 2 class which I had in the fall of 1964, was notable for a number of things. One was learning how to solve word problems. Another was a theory that most problems we encountered in algebra class could be solved with arithmetic. Yet another was a girl named Fran who I had a crush on.
Fran professed to not like algebra or the class we were in, and found word problems difficult. On a day I had occasion to talk to her, I tried to explain my theory that algebra was like arithmetic but easier. Admittedly, my theory had a bit more to go. She appeared to show some interest, but she wasn’t interested. On another occasion I asked her to a football game, but she said she was washing her hair that day. Although Fran had long and beautiful black hair, and I wanted to believe that she had a careful and unrelenting schedule for washing it, I resigned myself to the fact that she would remain uninterested in me, algebra, and any theories about the subject.
My theory of arithmetic vs. algebra grew from a realization I had during that the problems that were difficult for me years ago when I was in elementary school were now incredibly easy using algebra. For example: $24 is 30% of what amount? In arithmetic this involved setting up a proportion while in algebra, it translated directly to 24 = 0.3x, thus skipping the set up of the ratio 24/30 = x/100. Similarly, it was now much easier to understand that an increase in cost by 25% of some amount could be represented as 1.25x. What had been problems before were now exercises; being able to express quantities algebraically made it obvious what was going on. It seemed I was on to something, but I wasn’t quite sure what.

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

Tiny Adirondack school grows with foreign recruits

Associated Press:

Newcomb Central School had two big problems when Skip Hults took over as superintendent five years ago: There were only 55 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, and the cultural diversity was zero.
Hults took a novel approach solving both problems: He recruited students from abroad.
“We realized that if we wanted to keep our school, we needed to expose our kids to the world,” Hults said.
The innovation has worked as Hults intended. This fall, the school has nearly twice as many students, 96, including nine from such nations as Brazil, Russia, Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Lured by Newcomb’s innovative programs, other students have come from neighboring districts, one from 50 miles away. And parents and teachers mention signs that show students are becoming more engaged in the world, too.

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

Another initiative to fix Milwaukee education, but let’s give it a shot

Alan Borsuk:

If Milwaukee needs a big, well-crafted, we’re-all-in-this-together effort by a wide-range of power players working on meeting the educational needs of so many thousands of our children, why do I sense so much reluctance to be enthusiastic about an effort that aims to be all of those things?
Two simple answers:
Because we’ve been down roads like this before and nothing much came from them.
Because a lot of people, including some of those power players, are skeptical about our collective ability to make real progress.
I’m sympathetic with both of those points.
For years, I’ve seen community leaders of all kinds say good things (and often mean them) and come up with no consequential results.
I, too, suffer from oh-no-not-another-big-initiative syndrome. And we all know how deeply entrenched our problems are.
But overall, I say: It’s time to get moving, folks.

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

Now’s your chance to help revitalize public education

1 Comment

Chris Rickert:

But it’s clear that teachers are doing their part to keep one small, if important, piece of the public education reform movement alive: making sure they have an organized voice.
Now we should do ours.
Say what you want about his approach, Walker basically gave reform-minded school districts their chance by ramming through a collective bargaining law that drastically limits what’s subject to negotiation.
So, if you think the school year should be longer, if you’d like to see your district have an easier time keeping that awesome first-year teacher and ditching the underwhelming 20-year vet, if you want more money put into recruiting minority teachers and less into teachers’ generous health care and pension benefits — now’s your chance.
For despite what you might have heard from union backers, teachers union priorities and students’ needs are not always the same thing.
Unions exist, appropriately, to protect their members. You can quibble about whether Walker went too far in lessening their power. But a grudge against a transitory public figure shouldn’t take precedence over trying something new to improve public education.
Besides, it’s not as if teachers won’t have a seat at the reform table.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

50 percent of all high school courses will be taken online by 2019

Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn:

As a disruptive innovation–an innovation that transforms a sector from one that was previously complicated and expensive into one that is far simpler and more affordable–the rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize her fullest potential.
Whether it does this in the coming years will depend on several variables.
Entrepreneurs and investors–both for-profit and non-profit–are doing their part, as they seek to fashion the future by solving the problems they see students and teachers struggling with today.
Some, like those at Los Altos School District and Rocketship Education, are creating new learning and schooling models and liberating students and teachers.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Jobs, Legal Rights, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

The Teachers’ Guild – A Short Story From a Parallel Universe

David Xanatos:

Imagine a world, in which when you teach something to someone the knowledge is considered your “intellectual property”. Your students are not permitted to teach the things they have learned from you to anyone else, neither for money, nor even for free.
To become a teacher, one must buy into the guild for a lot of money, inherit rights from someone who was a teacher, or teach something that hasn’t been learned from anyone, i.e. something newly invented.
Being a teacher was a very powerful position. Having a monopoly to teach and usually even your own districts to educate exclusively, a teacher could charge any price. Furthermore, teachers even had the right to dictate the purpose and conditions on which the knowledge they taught was allowed to be used.

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

How to Improve Vocabulary: 101 ways

DictionUP:

1. Read: Any thing and Everything.
2. Write: Use new words that your learn in your writings.
3. Listen: When someone uses a word you don’t understand, ask them what it means or look it up later.
4. Carry a Dictionary.
5. Watch Frasier: Get your hands on Frasier Dvds. An entertaining way to Improve Your Vocabulary.
6. Make sticky notes of new words and post them in strategic places.
7. Download a words and definitions screensaver.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

John Coons

We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good–for the child, the parent, the family, and society.
We begin with the delicate subject of authority–that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.
Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.

Clusty Search: John Coons.

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

College of Education can learn about itself

5 Comments

Deborah Van Eendenburg:

No factor is more important to the quality of education than the quality of the teacher. With so much at stake, it would be good to know just how well teacher preparation programs are equipping tomorrow’s teachers — and their students — up for success.
To answer this question, the National Council on Teacher Quality has partnered with U.S. News & World Report to launch a review of the more than 1,400 teacher preparation programs around the country. NCTQ will look at whether the programs select academically capable students, ensure they know the subjects they will teach and equip them with the techniques they need to help their students achieve. The review will let aspiring teachers know where they can get the best preparation, and encourage other programs to emulate the models of their field.
In the 2008-09 academic year, the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development produced more than 300 of the 4,500 new teachers who graduated in Minnesota. Yet despite its key role in filling the state’s ranks of educators and despite being sent a formal request to participate in July, as of this week, CEHD has not indicated that they will cooperate with the review.

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

Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Special Education, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Improve your vision with an app

Peter Aldhous

A system that trains your brain to overcome degrading vision as you age will soon be available as an iPhone app
WE HAVE gotten used to the idea that smartphone apps can substitute for devices like GPS navigation systems or portable music players. But the latest item on the list may come as a surprise: reading glasses.
Early next year, a company called Ucansi will launch GlassesOff, an iPhone app that could help older people shed their reading glasses for at least part of the time – and may allow others to carry on reading without optical aids for years longer than would otherwise be possible.
The app helps people compensate for deterioration in their eyes’ ability to focus on nearby objects by training the brain to process the resulting blurred images. “We’re using the brain as glasses,” says Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and co-founder of Ucansi.

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

‘Unions’ empower parents to push for reform

Christina Hoag:

Choehorned into a small living room in a South Los Angeles apartment, a dozen parents discuss why their kids’ school ranks as one of the worst in the nation’s second-largest school district.
The answers come quickly: Teachers are jaded; gifted pupils aren’t challenged; disabled students are isolated; the building is dirty and office staff treat parents disrespectfully.
“We know what the problem is — we’re about fixing it,” said Cassandra Perry, the Woodcrest Elementary School parent hosting the meeting. “We’re not against the administrators or the teachers union. We’re honestly about the kids.”
School parent groups are no longer just about holding the next bake-sale fundraiser. They’re about education reform.

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

Accountability, transparency desperately needed for education expenditures

Laurie Rogers, via email

The British are coming! The British are coming!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Public education needs more money! Public education needs more money!
One of these statements (had Paul Revere actually said it) was true. One of these statements is obviously false. And the third, well, skies don’t fall, silly.
Taxpayers keep hearing how the funding for public education has been cut. We’re constantly barraged with: “Money is tight.” “We’ve cut the budget to the bone.” “We’re running out of options.” “We’ve done all we can; now we have to cut programs and teachers.” These claims defy explanation. They aren’t true in Spokane. They aren’t true in Washington State. They aren’t true in most other states, and they aren’t true at the federal level. Unfortunately, many people believe them.
A city council candidate insisted recently: “We can’t gut education!” Last week, a Spokane reporter wrote: “Since 2002, Spokane Public Schools has cut $45 million from its budget…” In its budget forums last spring, district administrators and board directors told the public that since 2002, the district has cut $54 million from its budget. Spokane school board candidate Deana Brower has repeatedly said that the district needs more money.
Let’s look at some numbers. Follow the links to the budget documents. See how the budget has grown, and see the district’s tendency to budget for greater expenditures than it has in revenues.

College Preparation, Curriculum, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Over-Education and the Skills of UK Graduates

Arnaud Chevalier, Joanne Lindley:

During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated; to compare pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates. We find the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. This suggests that the labour market accommodated most of the large expansion of university graduates. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills such as management and leadership. Additionally, genuine over-education increases unemployment by three months but has no impact of the number of jobs held. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it, does not alter these conclusions.

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

Building character traits benefits students and staff

Alan Borsuk:

Consider three anecdotes from Mary Diez, dean of education at Alverno College:
Several years ago, she was walking up to the door of a Milwaukee high school. A student told her, “Lady, you don’t want to go in there. It’s not a nice place.” Unfortunately, she said, he was right. Too many staff members didn’t really care about the kids, and you had the feeling the place could go out of control at any time. Is that the formula for a successful school?
While Diez was involved in an effort to help 11 specific schools in the city, a principal showed her a six-page document, listing rules and the consequences for violating them. Her response: “You think, if you had more engaging classes, you would need all that?”
Students at one school were telling her about their favorite teacher. “She respects us and we respect her back,” one said. The teacher had found something you don’t learn from a course or a manual: the right mix of caring for kids and demanding educational progress from them that brings good outcomes, even with high-needs youths.
Diez is one of the leading figures in the Milwaukee area in what I believe (and this may be hopeful thinking) is a growing commitment by schools and educators to strengthen their work on improving the character traits of their students – and of staff members.

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

The Big Easy’s School Revolution John White, superintendent of New Orleans’ public schools: ‘In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system.’

Matthew Kaminski:

At John McDonough High School in this city’s Esplanade Ridge district, the new superintendent points to a broken window boarded up with plastic. Nobody thought to fix it properly. “Why? Because these are the poor kids,” says John White, who arrived in New Orleans this spring. “The message is: ‘We don’t care.'”
John Mac is one of the worst schools in New Orleans, which makes it one of the worst in America. It scored 30 out of 200 on a statewide performance scale when 75 counts as “failing.” In a school built for 800 students, 340 are enrolled. Virtually all are African-American. A couple years ago, an armed gang burst into the cafeteria and assassinated a student.
Mr. White looks in on classrooms. In one, groups of seniors chat loudly and puzzle over a basic algebra problem. In another the teacher struggles to start a conversation about a USA Today article that few students had read. A girl in the corner sits with a jacket over her head, headphones in both ears.

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

Madison Prep gets closer but big questions remain

Susan Troller:

Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison School Board members appear to have ironed out some of the major wrinkles in the plans for the controversial new charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of minority students.
But the devil remains in the details, board members say. Bringing several issues into clearer focus and then getting agreement will be essential to move the project forward. A final vote by the School Board will take place before the end of the year.
Details to be examined include the fine print on a broad agreement announced last week between the Madison teachers union and organizers of the Urban League-sponsored charter school.
“There are still some tremendously big questions that haven’t been answered about how this agreement would actually work,” says Marj Passman, School Board vice president. “It’s not clear to me that all the parties are on the same page on all the issues, large and small.”

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

What’s so bad about school choice? Opponents are waging a misinformation campaign

Larry Kaufmann:

Monopolists hate competition, and they’ll say almost anything to prevent it. When natural gas competition was introduced in the mid-1980s, pipeline executives told regulators it would lead to gas explosions throughout Manhattan. As implausible as that tale was, it pales in comparison to the misinformation campaign waged by the public school monopoly against school choice.
The school choice movement is gathering steam because of one simple fact: Public education is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America. Since 1970, spending on public schools (per student, in inflation-adjusted terms) has more than doubled. Over the same period, students’ combined math and reading scores have been flat, and the U.S. has fallen behind most other industrial nations on standardized tests.
Educational productivity can be measured as the “output” of educational achievement for each inflation-adjusted dollar spent per student, and by this measure, the productivity of American public schools has fallen by 50% since 1970. A dollar invested in public schools in the U.K., Ireland and New Zealand now yields nearly twice the educational achievement as the same dollar spent in U.S. public schools.
These results cannot be explained by the efforts made to educate the disadvantaged, or by “exit exams” that reduce the pool of high school graduates in some countries. America’s public schools clearly need to be improved but, in spite of receiving a massive increase in resources, have consistently failed to do so. Given this dismal performance, the current calls for fundamental educational reform are natural, healthy and long overdue.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

The Other Crisis in American Education

Daniel Singal:

A college professor looks at the forgotten victims of our mediocre educational system–the potentially high achievers whose SAT scores have fallen, and who read less, understand less of what they read, and know less than the top students of a generation ago.
Two crises are stalking American education. Each poses a major threat to the nation’s future. The two are very different in character and will require separate strategies if we wish to solve them; yet to date, almost without exception, those concerned with restoring excellence to our schools have lumped them together.
The first crisis, which centers on disadvantaged minority children attending inner-city schools, has received considerable attention, as well it should. Put simply, it involves students whose habitat makes it very difficult for them to learn. The key issues are more social than educational. These children clearly need dedicated teachers and a sound curriculum, the two staples of a quality school, but the fact remains that most of them will not make significant progress until they also have decent housing, a better diet, and a safer environment in which to live.

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

Dress code for teachers?

Rose Locander:

It appears that the one thing holding down student achievement was the jeans the teacher wore to class. Oh, if only we had realized that unless the teacher was wearing a tie while dodging spitballs from his class of 60 kids, that would make all the difference as to whether or not Johnny could read.
No one cares to lower class sizes, and heaven forbid we should give teachers the opportunity to have any say in their workplace. So let’s enact dress codes for teachers. No one is saying where the teachers are going to get the money for all these clothes, but I guess Goodwill might be high on the list.
What an interesting paradox to read the Oct. 2 article on dress codes for teachers in the same newspaper that carried the lament that we need more people with manufacturing skills such as machinists and CNC operators. Does anyone remember that some people who work with their hands are the ones who are actually helping the economy along? I mean, are we so blinded by the thought that we all want everyone to be a doctor, lawyer or MBA that we have forgotten that some people are amazing at doing jobs that don’t require wearing a suit?

Nancy Ettenheim:

In this era of tumult and freefall for teachers in public schools, the imposition of a teacher dress code seems almost over the top. At first glance, it appears heavily dredged in the flour of unbounded management power.
A number of public school districts in the metro area have imposed dress codes on their teaching staff. While the codes vary in detail, they seem to center around a neat, casual appearance for the teachers.
Politics aside, when one steps back and examines the strengths of the policy, it is a good idea. Teachers quoted in an Oct. 2 Journal Sentinel article, for the most part, appear to be supportive. In my experience, most teachers already dress this way, what I call “respectfully comfortable.”
The key issue to me is that teachers not be mistaken for students because of lax appearance. Clothing is a powerful symbol in all areas of life; it makes announcements as to how a person wishes to be perceived. Teachers do and should occupy an arena of esteem and authority. This can be diminished if a teacher shows up in class wearing clothes so informal as to send a message to students that, hey, we’re all buddies and I want to be your friend.

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

New Path for Teacher Ed Reform

Allie Grasgreen:

“Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report’s release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven’t pointed to a single one. “That would be laughable if the results weren’t so tragic for our nation’s children,” Duncan said.
The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
Measuring teacher performance has been a focus for Duncan, who last year upset many programs by suggesting that master’s degrees in education should not automatically merit higher paychecks, saying that money should be redirected to teachers who either prove their ability to perform or work in high-needs areas such as low-income districts. The new federal proposal, which Duncan announced here on Friday, was widely praised for its goal of improving student outcomes. But it also prompted some skepticism from teacher education groups questioning its feasibility.

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

Reforming NCLB: How the GOP and Democrats Compare

Kevin Carey:

Everybody hates the No Child Left Behind Act. In the last few weeks, both conservative Republicans and President Obama have announced plans to overhaul George W. Bush’s signature education law by sending power over K-12 schooling back to the states. On the surface, this might seem like a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. Don’t believe it. The two plans actually represent radically different views of the federal government’s responsibility for helping children learn.
To see why, it helps to understand some common misconceptions about NCLB. The law requires schools to administer annual reading and math tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and it holds schools accountable for the percentage of students who pass the tests. That target percentage increases steadily over time, to 100 percent in 2014. Since universal proficiency is obviously impossible, the law has been cast as a malevolent force designed to tar public schools with “failing” labels as a prelude to corporate takeover and/or conversion to the free-market voucher nirvana of Milton Friedman’s dreams.
There are, however, three aspects of NCLB that render this scenario very unlikely. First, states were given total discretion to set their own academic standards, pick their own tests, and decide what scores on the tests count as passing. Last year, for example, Alabama reported that 87 percent of its fourth graders had passed the state’s reading test. Yet Alabama is, by all available measures, one of the most academically low-performing states in the nation. According to the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, only 34 percent of Alabama fourth graders are proficient in reading. The lesson: Give state education officials the ability to decide how their performance will be judged, and they’ll respond in predictable fashion.

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

What if the NFL Played by Teachers’ Rules? Imagine a league where players who make it through three seasons could never be cut from the roster.

1 Comment

Fran Tarkenton:

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.

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

Arne Duncan Meetings With Rahm Emanuel, Scott Walker Don’t Address Teachers Union Controversy

Joy Resmovits:

Stopping in areas notorious for volatile labor relations this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrapped up his Great Lakes bus tour in Milwaukee and Chicago on Friday with little talk of teachers union battles.
In Milwaukee, Duncan was joined by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who outraged educators by signing a budget in June that severely limited their collective bargaining rights, at a town hall event focused on connecting learning to career skills.
“All of us feel your presence today but appreciate your interest in Milwaukee and particularly the Milwaukee Public School system,” Walker said in the library of Milwaukee’s School of Career and Technical Education.
“You’ve done some things we agree with, and you’ve done some things that we don’t agree with,” Duncan said, addressing Walker. “Limiting collective bargaining rights is not the right way to go,” he added, garnering applause.

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

Wise words, well delivered: What is it that gives mentoring its particular force and makes it different from teaching or training?

Harry Eyres:

I suppose this is, officially speaking, the end of the tennis season. Djokovic and Nadal – a raging bull tamed by a matador of superhuman reflexes and speed – fought out their thunderous final in New York a month ago and our end-of-season party at the club took place not long afterwards. As far as I’m concerned, though, there is no end to the season; I was brought up to play in light snow and some of our most exhilarating battles have been joined on crisp winter evenings with the temperature close to zero.
Perhaps the best moments of my tennis year, so far, came just as the autumn leaves started to strew the courts, just before the nets and posts of the grass courts were taken up for the last time. There were some good late-season games – but even better than the games were flashes of insight, not just into technical aspects of the game but more particularly into the true nature of mentoring.
Our club is a place where people of different generations come regularly and naturally together, from the senior members, a little creaky in the limbs, to very young children just beginning to swing racquets (you hope not in the direction of their brothers and sisters), and that in itself is unusual in a world that is more and more stratified in terms of age – and not just age.

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

Teachers Union Courts Aldermen

Hunter Clauss:

The Chicago Teachers Union’s closed-door “policy briefings” for aldermen Monday were as much about public relations as they were about school policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s unofficial City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O’Connor (40th Ward) said after attending one of the three sessions.
For weeks, the union and Emanuel have been locked in a war of words over the mayor’s push to immediately extend the school day by 90 minutes. On Monday, the union’s leaders made their case instead to 25 of the council’s 50 members, with eight other aldermen sending aides to the meetings.
“They’re trying to win a little more sympathy from the public and the City Council, and this was their effort to do that,” O’Connor said. “I think today was an attempt by the Chicago Teachers Union to basically say, ‘We don’t like to be vilified. We don’t want to be in a position when people are upset with us as being an obstruction to a longer school day.'”

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Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing Statement

1 Comment

Don Severson, via email:

DATE: October 3, 2011
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Don Severson, President, 577-0851, donleader@aol.com RE: Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing
Notes: For public appearance
The actions of the past few days are stunning, but not necessarily surprising ULGM (Madison Prep) and MTI have made working ‘arrangements’ regarding employment of teachers and staff and working conditions, the details of which have yet to be made public.
Major issue: ‘negotiations/arrangements’ have been made between MP & MTI without MMSD BOE nor administration at the table–both observed and verified by parties not involved.
In other words, MTI is the de facto negotiator for the Board and NOT the elected BOE, nor specified as its representative
ACE has publicly stated its support of MP. We must now withhold affirmation of that support until and unless major, systemic changes occur in how the proposal process and plans (both academic and business) play out.
By design, default, benign neglect or/and collusion the BOE has abdicated the authority vested in it by law and the electorate of the District with regards to its fiduciary irresponsibility and lack of control for policy-making.
Lest you are OK with your past and current operating methods; have forgotten how you are demonstrating your operating methods; or don’t care, you have been elected to be the leader and be in charge of this District, not MTI.
By whatever BOE action or in-action has thus far been demonstrated, the proposed operational direction of MP has been reduced to appearing and acting in the mirror image of the District. This is inappropriate to say the least. The entire purpose of a charter school is to be different and to get different results.
How is forcing MP to operate in essentially the same fashion as the District and at a cost of more money….any different from….operating the District’s nearly 30 current alternative/innovative programs and services for 800 students, at millions of dollars, taking away from other students in the District? And, you can’t even produce data to show what differences, if any, are being made with these students.
This current Board, and past Boards of Education have proven over and over again that spending more money and doing essentially the same things, don’t get different results (speaking here essentially about the ‘achievement gap’ issue)
Continuing to speak bluntly, the Board’s financial and academic philosophies, policies and actions are inconsistent, phony and discriminatory.
Let us be clear…
The process for consideration of the Madison Prep charter school proposal must

  • be open and public
  • be under the leadership of the BOE
  • be accountable to the BOE and the public
  • have ALL stakeholders at the same table at ALL times

Thank you.

PDF Version.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

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Public Comments on The Proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School

Matthew DeFour:

Late last week the proposal cleared a major hurdle with the announcement that the Urban League had struck a deal with MTI to employ unionized teachers, nurses and clerical staff.
AFSMCE Local 60 President Tom Coiyer asked the district to use its own unionized custodial staff rather than allow them to be contracted. And Don Severson, president of a conservative district watchdog group, withdrew his previous support because of the deal struck between the Urban League and MTI, which didn’t involve the School Board.
MTI executive director John Matthews, who attended but did not speak at the hearing, said the union would no longer oppose the proposal. However, he remains skeptical that Madison Prep would be more successful than the district’s high schools at closing the achievement gap.

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The price of a free school: Of course the idea sounds grand – but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what?

Harry Eyres:

At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being “shaken up” by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of “free schools” has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.
Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand – but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes – the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word “free” meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish “Glorious Revolution” of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.

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

Incentives for Advanced Work Let Pupils and Teachers Cash In

Sam Dillon:

Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students — the “smart kids” — were capable of advanced coursework.
But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom’s school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.
South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.

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

City native, Teach for America see better days

Alan Borsuk:

It would have been easy to predict an unpromising future for Maurice Thomas when he was born. His mother was single, 17 years old, and the product of a low-income, troubled Milwaukee home.
But Thomas had some big things going for him: His mother’s dedication to education. Teachers who pushed him forward with care and skill. And his own commitment to making a difference.
“Trajectory” is a word used often by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, the organization that over two decades has trained more than 20,000 high performing college graduates to be teachers and placed them in high-needs classrooms across the country for their first two years out of school.
Kopp is convinced that the trajectory of the lives of children – in fact, of entire communities – can be turned for the better, especially by education.
When Kopp published her book, “A Chance to Make History,” last winter, Maurice Thomas, who was with Teach for America in Atlanta, was one of the people she wrote about in detail. She described his impact as a teacher and how he had become deeply involved in getting his students to succeed.

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Should kids’ test scores be used to evaluate teachers’ colleges?

Todd Finkelmeyer:

The ongoing debate over whether using student test results on standardized exams is a good way to evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness just took a new twist.
The U.S. Department of Education on Friday released a report calling for new regulations designed to link federal funding for teacher-education programs to the test scores of students.
“While there are many beacons of excellence, unfortunately some of our existing teacher preparation programs are not up to the job,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says in the forward to the report. “They operate partially blindfolded, without access to data that tells them how effective their graduates are in elementary and secondary school classrooms after they leave their teacher preparation programs. Too many are not attracting top students, and too many states are not setting a high bar for entry into the profession.”
The report, which outlines the Obama administration’s proposals for teacher education reform, also calls for additional funds for teaching scholarships and expanding efforts to create more minority teachers. It’s mainly catching the eyes of higher education officials nationally, however, for proposing ways to hold colleges, universities and programs that produce teachers accountable for those they send into the classroom.

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

The Case for Early Parenthood Education

Thomas Sticht:

One hundred fifty-three thousand words per week. That’s the difference between the 215,000 words per week that the average child in a privileged home hears and the 62,000 words per week that the average child in a family on welfare hears. I’ll explain the research behind these numbers later; for now, just consider how staggering the differ- ence is. And consider the implications. Hearing language is the first step in learning to read and write and make sense of the world.
The language gap that results in the achievement gap begins at home. Schools can and should do their part to close this gap, but parents, by reading to their children and interacting with them in positive and encouraging ways, need to do their part, too.
The idea that families need to provide enriching educational activities is not new. In 1908, Edmund Burke Huey, regarded as “one of the foremost leaders” in educating children with learning disabilities,1 wrote, “The school of the future will have as one of its important duties the instruction of parents in the means of assist- ing the child’s natural learning in the home.”2 This insight was just one of many in his classic work The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, a 500-page book so highly regarded that it was reprinted by the MIT Press in 1968 and again by the International Reading Association in 2009.

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Why Madison Prep deserves consideration

The Capital Times:

We have historically been uncomfortable with so-called “charter” schools, which too frequently sacrifice the principle of providing all students with a well-rounded education in favor of narrower experiments.
And we have never had any taste for separate-but-equal — or more usually separate-and-unequal — schemes that divide students along lines of race, class and gender.
As such, we approached the Madison Preparatory Academy project with trepidation.
The proposal to create a charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students has been sincerely and generally well presented by Urban League President Kaleem Caire. We respect that Caire is attempting to address serious issues, including a lingering frustration with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s responses to the achievement gap that has plagued the district for many years.

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

Frustrations mount as racial achievement gap persists in Madison schools

Matthew DeFour:

Tim Comer says when his son moved from a mostly black magnet school in Chicago to the Madison School District in 2006, “he went from sharp to dull.”
Comer, 45, a black father and unemployed electronic engineer, said the difference was that Madison was “laid back” while the Chicago school pushed students to work extra hard to succeed.
“In Chicago he was always a frontrunner,” Comer said. “But here, he’s always on the back burner.”
Comer’s dissatisfaction is shared by many black parents in Madison where, despite decades of efforts, a significant gap persists between white and black students’ academic performance and graduation rates.
Although the gap is closing among students completing algebra by the 10th grade, it has widened on 4th grade reading tests and in high school graduation rates since 2003. Those changes have come as the number of black students in the district has increased and the number of whites has declined.
“We know that we’re not pushing the needle significantly,” Superintendent Dan Nerad said about what he considers “the most significant social justice issue in America.”

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

Madison Prep and Teacher’s Union Collaborate: What’s it all about?

Kaleem Caire, via email:

October 3, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times newspapers reported over the weekend, the Urban League of Greater Madison, the new Board of Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison Teachers, Inc., the local teachers’ union, achieved a major milestone last Friday in agreeing to collaborate on our proposed charter schools for young men and women.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work “aggressively and proactively” with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD’s Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a “non-instrumentality” charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI’s collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD’s administration. MMSD’s 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD’s Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep’s teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep’s longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th – 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD’s administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members’ concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We’ve since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep’s first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher’s union and community stakeholders, we’ve been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches – including new schools – to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce; tomorrow’s leaders; tomorrow’s innovators; and tomorrow’s peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children’s teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org

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Math Curriculum: School District’s Activities Should be an Open Book

Laurie Rogers:

Since January 2007, I’ve attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools‘ leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It’s an effort you’d think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.
In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district’s activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I’ve had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn’t available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:

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U.S. Education Secretary calls Massachusetts ‘great example’ for nation

Matt Murphy:

Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Massachusetts’s successful pitch for $250 million from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, Gov. Deval Patrick, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state Education Secretary Paul Reville on Wednesday touted the efforts the state has made to improve innovation and student performance in public schools.
The anniversary comes as state education officials indicate they plan to seek a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that require 100 percent of students to be proficient in English and math by 2014. Obama announced the opportunity for states to apply to opt out of portions of NCLB last Friday.
Duncan credited Massachusetts with setting “a great example for the country,” despite Reville acknowledging that under No Child Left Behind over 90 percent of Massachusetts schools have been categorized in some way as “underperforming” based on the most recent MCAS scores.

How does Wisconsin compare to Massachusetts? Find out, here.

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

Cassidy: Education on the brink of an online revolution

Mike Cassidy:

I’ve been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.
But I’m coming around. I’m coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive — and positive — changes are coming; and they’re coming faster than many might think. I’ve concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they’ll do it in a matter of years, not decades.

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

The Obama Administration’s Plan for Teacher Education Reform and Improvement

US Department of Education:

Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in our elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year.1 Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching positions, be retained in them, and lead their students to strong learning gains. Weak programs set minimal standards for entry and graduation. They produce inadequately trained teachers whose students do not make sufficient academic progress.
Unfortunately, while there are shining examples of strong programs throughout the country, too many of our teacher preparation programs fall short. As a whole, America is not following the lead of high-performing countries and recruiting the nation’s best and brightest into teaching. Instead, only 23% of all teachers, and
only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.2 Our differences with other nations are not due to teacher preparation alone. We must do more to support and reward excellent teaching at various stages in the education system. However, we can do more in the area of preparation. After admission, too many programs do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work. Only 50 percent of current teacher candidates receive supervised clinical training. More than three in five education school alumni report that their education school did not prepare them for “classroom realities.” 3

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A federal takeover of education

George Will:

Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president “gives” states a “voice” in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:
Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was “Mr. Republican,” revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP’s 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In “The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party,” Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania’s Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.

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Hillsborough school officials take new evaluation system to parents

Marlene Sokol:

It started with a partnership between the school district and the teachers’ union.
Next came $100 million in grant funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, then the arduous job of explaining the Empowering Effective Teachers plan to more than 11,000 teachers.
On Monday night, a small group of parents braved heavy rains for its chance.
Turnout at Chamberlain High School to hear Hillsborough County school officials explain and answer questions about the program was sparse. But Melissa Erickson, president of the county PTA council, didn’t mind.
“It’s the beginning of a conversation,” she said.

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Crunch Time for Madison Prep Charter School

2 Comments




Ruth Conniff:

Ed Hughes has a problem.
Like most of his fellow school board members and practically everyone else in Madison, he was bowled over by Urban League president Kaleem Caire’s vision for Madison Prep, a charter school that would aggressively tackle the school district’s entrenched minority achievement gap.
“The longer day, the instructional focus, and the ‘no excuses’ approach appealed to me,” Hughes says.
But as he looked into the details, Hughes became more and more concerned about the cost of the school and “whether there is a good match between the problem we are trying to address and the solution that’s being proposed.”
Expressing those doubts in his blog has turned the soft-spoken Hughes into a heretic.
Caire is a superstar who has galvanized the community to get behind his charter school. At school board hearings, only a handful of speakers express any reservations about the idea, while an overwhelming number speak passionately about the need to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and about Madison’s moral obligation to do something for the kids who are not being served.
Hughes listens respectfully. But, he says, “for Madison Prep to be the answer, we’d need to know that the students it was serving would otherwise fall through the cracks.”
…..
But Hughes’ big problem with the Urban League’s draft proposal, submitted to the district last February, is cost. The total cost to the school district of $27 million over five years is just too much, he says.

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

I don’t know if the Urban League’s plans for Madison Prep will come to fruition. If they do, I predict here and now that the school will have a higher graduation rate than the Madison school district as a whole for African-American students and probably for other groups of students as well. I also predict that all or nearly all of its graduates will apply to and be admitted to college. What is impossible to predict is what difference, if any, this will make in overall educational outcomes for Madison students.
Of course charter schools like Madison Prep will have higher graduation rates than their home school districts as a whole. Students enrolled in charter schools are privileged in one clear way over students not enrolled. Each student has a parent or other caregiver sufficiently involved in the child’s education to successfully navigate the process to get the student into the charter school. Not all students in our traditional neighborhood schools have that advantage. Other things equal, students with more involved parents/caregivers will be more likely to graduate from high school. So, one would expect that charter schools will have higher graduation rates.

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

Proposed Madison Prep IB Charter School and Madison Teachers, Inc will work together on new charter school; to be staffed largely with Union Teachers

Susan Troller:

Several major impediments facing the proposed Madison Prep charter school appear closer to resolution after a series of meetings and communications Friday between Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire, district Superintendent Daniel Nerad and John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.
The changes are just in time for a public hearing on the Urban League-backed school on Monday, Oct. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
In a major shift, the proposed charter school will now be what’s called an “instrumentality” of the Madison Metropolitan School District. That means a significant portion of the school’s staff will be covered by the contract the district has with the local teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc. The contract runs through the end of June 2013

Matthew DeFour and Gayle Worland:

On the eve of a public hearing for Madison Preparatory Academy — a proposed charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students — backers of the school agreed to employ union staff, eliminating a potential hurdle to approval of the school.
A budget plan for Madison Prep, proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, also was released late Friday. It estimates the Madison School District would spend $19.8 million over five years on the school, or about $2,000 less per student than it spends on other secondary-school students.
In lengthy meetings Friday, Urban League officials hammered out an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents Madison school teachers. MTI executive director John Matthews said the union, which previously opposed creation of Madison Prep, will remain neutral on whether the school should be approved.

Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the substance of the arrangement, particularly its implications for the current MMSD schools and Madison Prep’s curriculum and operating plans. 
A friend notes that the change is “stunning” and that it will likely “cost more” and perhaps “gut” some of Madison Prep’s essential components.

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K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Bread & Circuses, or a Look at California’s Union, Pension, Budget and Political Challenges

Michael Lewis:

David Crane, the former economic adviser–at that moment rapidly receding into the distance–could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they had when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. “This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years,” says Crane later. “Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs.” Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education–that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state’s share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.
This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. “You have to realize the thing was so much fun!” he says. “We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama.” As we roll to a stop very near the place on the beach where he began his American bodybuilding career, he says, “You have to step back and say, ‘I was elected under odd circumstances. And I’m going out in odd circumstances.’ You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a spoiled brat.”

wikipedia on bread and circuses.

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Bipartisan bill would block automatic voucher school expansion in Wisconsin

Susan Troller:

Ten Wisconsin senators, from both parties, have joined forces to propose legislation that would require any further expansion of voucher schools to receive a full public debate.
The state’s voucher program provides taxpayer funds for families to send their children to private schools. It has served low-income students in Milwaukee for about 20 years, but was expanded by Gov. Scott Walker in the state budget passed in June without public debate or other legislative action.
Also included was language allowing automatic expansion of the voucher program in the future to any school district in Wisconsin that meets certain financial and demographic criteria.
That mechanism isn’t sitting well with some senators, including Senate President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah. He introduced SB 174, which ensures that any further expansion of the voucher program would include full public debate and legislative action.
“Sen. Ellis is not an enthusiastic advocate nor is he an opponent of voucher programs. But he’s long argued that policy issues should not be added into the budget process and this legislation addresses concerns about automatic expansion without proper debate,” says Michael Boerger, an aide to Ellis.

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Test Scores, Multiple Measures, and Circular Reasoning

Christinia Collins:

Anthony Cody’s recent reflection on this year’s Education Nation program on MSNBC offers an important caution to those trying to develop “multiple measures” for student learning and effective teaching. If the decision to use a given measure is determined solely by whether or not it’s linked to higher standardized test scores (as with the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching study), then you don’t really have “multiple measures.”

Tracking test scores can be an important tool in helping students make progress, and it is useful to know which elements of classroom practice have a significant impact on students’ performance on end-of-the-year tests. For example, teachers in Chicago who had high ratings on Charlotte Danielson’s framework for evaluating effective teaching have also been shown to have higher value-added scores. However, when test scores are used as the sole measure of effective teaching and learning — or when valuable aspects of effective teaching and important types of student learning are discarded or ignored because they don’t align with standardized test results — our students are the ones who ultimately pay the price.

Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score — or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students “learned the material at the end of the year.”

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To Hover Over Schoolwork, Parents Go Online

Molly Baker:

When Debbie Sumner Mahle, an Atlanta mother, wants to know what her sons, ages 6, 7 and 10, are working on in school, she turns on her computer and logs into NetClassroom. The portal lets her see not just their school assignments but also their attendance and grades.
More public and private school systems are wiring up data-management systems, and school work is just the tip of the iceberg. Parent-accessible websites and “learning community management systems”–or LCMSs, in the age of no jargon left behind–are increasingly handling schools’ scheduling, emergency contacts, immunizations, academic assessments and even meals, with some offering a daily nutritional breakdown of lunch.
Ms. Sumner Mahle receives email reminders to place her sons’ requests at orderlunches.com, which manages the meal program at their school, the Davis Academy. If she wants to work a shift as a cafeteria monitor, or bring cupcakes to a Halloween party, she signs up at volunteerspot.com.

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Further Commentary on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School: Gender discrimination likely a red herring in charter school discussion

Chris Rickert:

The Madison School District now has another justification for killing a charter school aimed at doing what the district hasn’t: consistently educate minority students.
Last week, the state Department of Public Instruction said the first half of a planning grant for Madison Preparatory Academy would be released. Madison Prep would focus on low-income minority students and was originally just for boys but has since been revamped to include girls in separate classrooms.
But DPI had a catch: In order to get the rest of the grant, the school must provide scientific research that single-gender education is effective. If you’re going to discriminate by gender, DPI is saying, at least have a good reason for it.
I can’t help but wonder: Is this the best DPI can do?
I don’t know much more than what I’ve read in this newspaper about how Madison Prep would organize itself, what kinds of educational approaches it would use or how capable its sponsor, the Urban League of Greater Madison, would be.

TJ Mertz:

ewsletter (as of this writing PD has not taken a position on the Madison Prep proposal). I’ve only changed minimally for posting here; one thing I have added is some hyperlinks (but I did not link as thoroughly as I usually do), another is a small “For Further Reading” set of links at the end,” and of course the song. This is intended to be a broad overview and introduction to what I think are some of the most important issues concerning the decision on the Madison Preparatory Academy presented in the context of related national issues. Issues raised in this post have been and will be treated in more depth — and with hyperlinks — in other posts]

For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it – Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison – have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.

A Public Hearing on the Madison Prep proposal has been scheduled for Monday October 3, at 6:00 PM in the Doyle Building Auditorium; The Madison Prep proposal is on the agenda of the PD General Membership Meeting (Wed , 9/28 , 6:00 p.m, Hawthorne Branch Library, guests welcome).

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.

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Educating the Gifted

Norman Augustine, via a kind reader’s email:

The very subject of giftedness is fraught with contradiction and controversy. On the one hand, we often encounter misunderstanding, envy, and perceived elitism–and on the other, admiration, dependency, and respect. Little wonder that our K-12 education system has not yet determined how best to nurture extraordinary individuals so that they can become extraordinary contributors to society–and feel rewarded in doing so. Unfortunately, it is not simply the gifted who are underserved by most of our nation’s 14,000 public school systems; that group is just more acutely neglected, along with the economically less fortunate, than the nation’s student population as a whole.

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Madison School Board OKs use of police dogs for drug searches

Devin Rose:

In the coming weeks, Madison police dogs will be able to sniff through the halls, bathrooms and parking lots of the city’s middle and high schools if school principals suspect there may be illegal drugs there.
The School Board voted 5-1 Monday to allow the sweeps, which school officials say will help eliminate drug use and trafficking in schools and decrease violence. Annual evaluations will be conducted to assess the program’s effectiveness.
Supporters, including Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, said it could be an effective and color-blind tool as part of a strategy to keep schools safe. The dogs would search for marijuana, heroin and cocaine.
Luis Yudice, coordinator of safety and security for the school district, said one statistic that led officials to consider these searches was the 60 percent increase in student code-of-conduct violations since 2007 occurring because of drugs.

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The Global Report: Compare US School Districts to the World

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The Global Report Card, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

The Global Report Card was developed by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee as part of the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative. The Bush Institute works to increase dramatically the number of American students who graduate high school ready for college or prepared for a good career by:

  • cultivating a new generation of principals
  • implementing cutting edge research
  • advancing accountability

Driven by accountability and data, these initiatives challenge the status quo and lead a wide range of partners to share goals and use clear metrics tied to student achievement.
Summary of Methodology
The calculations begin by evaluating the distributions of student achievement at the state, national, and international level. To allow for direct comparisons across state and national borders, and thus testing instruments, we map all testing data to the standard normal curve using the appropriate student level mean and standard deviation. We then calculate at the lowest level of aggregation by estimating average district quality within each state. Each state’s average quality is evaluated then using national testing data. And finally, the average national quality is determined using international testing data. Essentially, this re-centers our distribution of district quality based upon the relative performance of the individual state when compared to the nation as a whole as well as the relative performance of the nation when compared to our economic competitors.
For example, the average student in Scarsdale School District in Westchester County, New York scored nearly one standard deviation above the mean for New York on the state’s math exam. The average student in New York scored six hundredths of a standard deviation above the national average of the NAEP exam given in the same year, and the average student in the United States scored about as far in the negative direction (-.055) from the international average on PISA. Our final index score for Scarsdale in 2007 is equal to the sum of the district, state, and national estimates (1+.06+ -.055 = 1.055). Since the final index score is expired in standard deviation units, it can easily be converted to a percentile for easy interpretation. In our example, Scarsdale would rank at the seventy seventh percentile internationally in math.

The Best United States School Districts (2007 Math data) [PDF].
Related: www.wisconsin2.org and 1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison.

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What Do Test Scores Tell Us?

Gary Gutting:

Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change — more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.
So what exactly do test scores tell us?
Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform. At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action. This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking. Last week’s report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.

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Martin Institute Looks at Inclusion Teaching

Bill Dries:

Public and private school teachers will explore the shifting line between “mainstream” students and special education students during a two-day special education summit at The Martin Institute that begins Tuesday, Sept. 27.
The session is for special education teachers. The Wednesday session is for teachers outside the specific special education area. Both are on the Presbyterian Day School campus in East Memphis.
The summit and an 18-month focus on special education that follows arose from a series of luncheons and discussions Institute director Clif Mims had last spring with special education teachers.
The teachers and school system administrators cited “inclusion teaching” as both a trend and a challenge for all teachers.

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School district tackles its changing demographics

Mila Koumpilova:

WORTHINGTON, Minn. (AP) — Perla Banegas arrived in Worthington a decade ago, on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles. Her single mom had heard about a safe, quiet town in the upper Midwest and steady jobs at its meatpacking plant.
In sixth grade that year, Banegas quickly got a reputation as a painfully shy kid — and a talking-to for taking too many bathroom breaks. She wasn’t shy: She just didn’t understand a word of English in class. In bathroom stalls, she’d have a good cry and then give herself a pep talk: “You have to go back and try.”
She did. And she graduated.

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StoryCorps Launches National Teacher Initiative

W J Levay:

StoryCorps — a national oral history project whose interviews you’ve probably heard on public radio — kicked off its National Teacher Initiative earlier this week with AFT president Randi Weingarten participating at the White House event.
The project, which launched Sept. 19, celebrates and honors the courageous work of public school educators nationwide. “This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from teachers — the people who are closest to the kids,” said Weingarten. “Their stories will be a window to the world on today’s public education — what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do better to prepare our children for the 21st-century knowledge economy.”
StoryCorps is looking to partner with schools, districts, teachers unions, community groups, and others to conduct an on-site recording day, and will send their staff and equipment to schools or events if the local or state federation can guarantee that at least eight interview pairs that include at least one teacher are available to participate. Each interview takes 40 minutes, and the participants will receive a CD of their interview.

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Milwaukee Public Schools: Educator & Social Agency

James Causey:

Imagine what would happen to Milwaukee’s most vulnerable children if it weren’t for the services provided by their school district: Milwaukee Public Schools.
I know what some of you are thinking: Their parents should be providing for them. Or: MPS might get better results if the district focused more on education and less on being a social service agency.
I agree. Parents are responsible for their kids, and the district is responsible for education. I’m not here to defend the district against justifiable criticism.
But understand: Many of the kids who attend MPS come from homes so impoverished that even the most basic things – breakfast or a place to sleep – are missing. How can the district educate kids living in such circumstances?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that nearly half of Milwaukee’s kids live in poverty. More than 80% of MPS students receive free or reduced-price lunch.

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Let’s Not Focus on the Achievement Gap

The Milwaukee Talkie:

A thought-provoking essay in the current issue of National Affairs by the prolific and sardonic Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute calls for a retreat from education reform’s long-held focus on closing the achievement gap. Hess feels the federal No Child Left Behind Act has, ironically, become “education policy that has shortchanged many children.” His thesis is that by focusing on improving achievement scores of the lowest performing subgroups of students, opportunities for reform that would also benefit the other students have been passed up. The result is that many parents, educators, principals, and elected officials see school reform as inapplicable to the average- or highly-performing students who make up the majority of children in most classrooms across the country.
Which begs the question–if most children in the country are, in fact, being served pretty well by their public schools (and there can be strong arguments made that children who are white, or female, or upper class, or suburban are served well enough by public schools), then why should the adults who care for and educate them want to reform their schools? Should education reform affect change throughout the system or should it focus more narrowly on those students poorly served by public schooling?

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Parental participation in Milwaukee Public Schools appears weak

Alan Borsuk:

Twenty-three percent?
Does it surprise you to hear that is the percentage of Milwaukee Public Schools children who had adults in their lives attend parent-teacher conferences last spring?
Or that the figure for a year earlier was 47%, meaning the percentage dropped by half in one year?
I’ve often heard anecdotes from teachers or principals about how low involvement is in parent-teacher conferences. Five parents show up for conferences involving a class of 27 kids. Numbers like that. There are individual MPS schools where participation is high, but that underscores how low the figure is at many other schools.
Parent-teacher conference attendance is sometimes overemphasized. There are other things parents can and should do that are much more important. But conferences can be seen as a measure of parent involvement. I had never seen specific numbers for MPS as a whole until now. The School Board was given a report on parent involvement this month, including numbers produced by stepped-up efforts in MPS to monitor this.

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Great Recession yields a lost generation of workers

Hope Yen:

Call it the recession’s lost generation.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others — nearly 1 in 5.
New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.

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Our Achievement-Gap Mania

Frederick Hess:

A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: “Achievement gaps” became reformers’ catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.
Today, the notion of “closing achievement gaps” has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.
The No Child Left Behind Act’s signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps — a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that — you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that’s unacceptable for America.” Margaret Spellings, Bush’s secretary of education, said last year, “The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers.”

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Wisconsin School chief Evers says state will seek No Child Left Behind waivers

Scott Bauer:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the “first possible moment.”
Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
“This is absolutely outstanding news,” said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.

Kevin Helliker:

Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.
In characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn’t be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
“It’s problematic,” Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, “we would need legislation passed.”

Much more on No Child Left Behind, here
I spoke with a local mother recently who mentioned that her child was doing great, based on the WKCE math report.

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Texas Students of all backgrounds outperform Wisconsin Students

Allison Sherry, via a kind reader’s email

While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.
Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools. On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.
“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”

National Center for Education Statistics State Education Data Profiles.
much more at www.wisconsin2.org

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1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison, by State



Download a 55K PDF version.
Conor Dougherty & Rob Barry

Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation’s most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California’s Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.
The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
“In a knowledge economy, success breeds success,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor’s degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.

Data Source: American Community Survey.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org

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Declining Local School District “Control”

Lyndsey Layton:

Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are scheduled Friday to detail plans to waive some of the law’s toughest requirements, including the goal that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014 or else their schools could face escalating sanctions.
In exchange for relief, the administration will require a quid pro quo: States must adopt changes that could include the expansion of charter schools, linking teacher evaluation to student performance and upgrading academic standards. As many as 45 states are expected to seek waivers.
For many students, the most tangible impact could be what won’t happen. They won’t see half their teachers fired, their principal removed or school shut down because some students failed to test at grade level — all potential consequences under the current law.

A Capital Times Editorial:

Wisconsin has moved to take authority away from local elected school boards and parents and to rest it with political appointees who respond to Gov. Scott Walker and out-of-state groups that are spending millions of dollars to undermine public education.
Wisconsin’s best and brightest teachers — the Teacher of the Year award winners — have joined mass demonstrations to decry the assault by politicians and their cronies on public education.
What’s Walker’s response? He wants to tell the nation how to do the same.

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Proposed Madison Prep Academy needs to show proof of effectiveness of single-gender education to get grant

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Matthew DeFour:

The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding.
The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform “is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence,” according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
The Urban League of Greater Madison originally proposed Madison Prep as an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities. But after a state planning grant was held up because of legal questions related to single-gender education, the Urban League announced it would open the school next year with single-gender classrooms in the same building.

I find this ironic, given the many other programs attempted within our public schools, such as English 10, small learning communities, connected math and a number of reading programs.
Related: Co-Ed Schooling Group Study Assails Merits of Single-Sex Education and from Susan Troller:

A newly published article by child development experts and neuroscientists blasting the trend toward single-sex education as “pseudoscience” won’t help the cause of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy.
Neither will the continued opposition of the South Central Federation of Labor, which reiterated its opposition to the Urban League-sponsored proposal this week because teachers at the school would not be represented by a union. The Madison Metropolitan School District has a collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. that runs through June of 2013, and Madison Prep’s plan envisions working conditions for its staff — a longer school day and a longer school year, for example — that differ substantially from the contract the district has with its employees.
With a public hearing on the charter school scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, the debate surrounding Madison Prep is heating up on many fronts. The Madison School Board must take a final vote giving the charter school a go or no-go decision in November.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League and a passionate proponent for the separate boys and girls academies aimed at helping boost minority youth academic performance, says he is unimpressed by an article published in the prestigious journal, Science, on Sept. 23, that says there is “no empirical evidence” supporting academic improvement through single-sex education.

Are other DPI funded initiatives held to the same “standard”?
The timing of these events is certainly interesting.
14mb mp3 audio. WORT-FM conducted an interview this evening with Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the authors. Unrelated, but interesting, Hyde’s interview further debunked the “learning styles” rhetoric we hear from time to time.
UPDATE: The Paper in Question: The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling:

In attempting to improve schools, it is critical to remember that not all reforms lead to meaningful gains for students. We argue that one change in particular–sex-segregated education–is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.

Curriculum, Curriculum - Fine Arts, Curriculum - Languages, Curriculum - Math, Curriculum - Physical Education, Curriculum - Science, School Climate, Staff Support, TAG, Teacher Support

Rick Hess’s Critique of Achievement-Gap Mania

By Reihan Salam
I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the latest issue of National Affairs, which includes Rick Hess’s fascinating and at times provocative discussion, or perhaps I say “devastating takedown,” of “achievement-gap mania.” The following paragraph gives you a hint as to Hess’s conclusion:

In essence, NCLB was an effort to link “conservative” nostrums of accountability to Great Society notions of “social justice.” The result was a noble exercise hailed for its compassion. The sad truth, however, is that the whole achievement-gap enterprise has been bad for schooling, bad for most children, and bad for the nation.


I found his discussion of the neglect of advanced and gifted education particularly convincing, as well as his recounting of how the “delusion of rigor” has undermined quality control across many domains. Hess ends his essay with an accounting of where “achievement-gap mania” has left the politics of K-12.
(1) Reforming education has become someone else’s problem:

First, achievement-gap mania has signaled to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn’t about their kids. They are now expected to support efforts to close the achievement gap simply because it’s “the right thing to do,” regardless of the implications for their own children’s education. In fact, given that only about one household in five even contains school-age children — and given that two-thirds of families with children do not live in underserved urban neighborhoods, or do not send their kids to public schools, or otherwise do not stand to benefit from the gap-closing agenda — the result is a tiny potential constituency for achievement-gap reform, made up of perhaps 6% or 7% of American households.
Because middle-class parents and suburbanites have no personal stake in the gap-closing enterprise, reforms are tolerated rather than embraced. The most recent annual Gallup poll on attitudes toward schooling reported that just 20% of respondents said “improving the nation’s lowest-performing schools” was the most important of the nation’s education challenges. Indeed, while just 18% of the public gave American schools overall an A or a B, a sizable majority thought their own elementary and middle schools deserved those high grades. The implication is that most Americans, even those with school-age children, currently see education reform as time and money spent on other people’s children.


(2) Reforming education for the majority of students who come non-poor families is seen as somehow unnecessary:

Second, achievement-gap mania has created a dangerous complacency, giving suburban and middle-class Americans the false sense that things are just fine in their own schools. Thus it’s no surprise that professionals and suburbanites tend to regard “reforms” — from merit pay to charter schooling — as measures that they’ll tolerate as long as they’re reserved for urban schools, but that they won’t stand for in their own communities. …
Gap-closing strategies can be downright unhelpful or counterproductive when it comes to serving most students and families, and so can turn them off to education reform altogether. Longer school years and longer school days can be terrific for disadvantaged students or low achievers, but may be a recipe for backlash if imposed on families who already offer their kids many summer opportunities and extracurricular activities. Policies that seek to shift the “best” teachers to schools and classrooms serving low-achieving children represent a frontal assault on middle-class and affluent families. And responding to such concerns by belittling them is a sure-fire strategy for ensuring that school reform never amounts to more than a self-righteous crusade at odds with the interests of most middle-class families.


This is one reason why Hess rightly bristled at the crusader mentality that informs films like the recent Waiting for ‘Superman.’

Continue reading Rick Hess’s Critique of Achievement-Gap Mania →

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Health Care, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Wellness

Recess Making Comeback in Chicago Schools

Rebecca Vevea:

As more Chicago public schools cash in on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s longer-day financial incentives by adding 90 minutes to their school day, the previous votes by a dozen schools to add about a half hour to the day by bringing back recess are going unnoticed.
Restoring recess is part of a broader health push by parents, advocacy groups and some city officials to bring more exercise and better nutrition to both schoolchildren and preschoolers.
Beginning in November, the city’s Department of Public Health will require children who attend preschool or day care centers in Chicago to spend less time in front of television or computer screens — 60 minutes or less — and more time, at least an hour a day, participating in physical activity. At snack or meal time, milk cannot have a fat content higher than 1 percent, unless a child has written consent from a doctor. Only 100 percent juice can be served.
In Chicago, 22 percent of children are overweight before they enter school, more than twice the national average, according to research compiled by the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, a group of organizations and health advocates.

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

Universities Seeking Out Students of Means

Tamar Lewin, via a kind reader’s email:

Money is talking a bit louder in college admissions these days, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by Inside Higher Ed, an online publication for higher education professionals.
More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September.
Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.

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

Selling out public schools: Millions of dollars are changing face of education

Bill Lueders:

“School choice” is a broad term that refers to a wide range of alternatives, including themed charter schools that are entirely under the control of their home school districts. Forty states and the District of Columbia have those in place, according to the American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group.
But it is the voucher programs, in which public funds are used to send children to private schools, that are the focus of much of the energy around the choice movement. Seven states and the District of Columbia have those, and Milwaukee’s voucher program is the first and largest of its kind in the country. That makes Wisconsin a key national battleground.
“Wisconsin has a high level of value to the movement as a whole,” says Robert Enlow, president of the Indianapolis-based Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a nonprofit group that advocates for school choice. The state, he says, is notable for “the high level of scholarship amounts that families can get.”
Milwaukee’s voucher program had 20,300 full-time equivalent voucher students at 102 private schools in 2010-11, compared to about 80,000 students at Milwaukee’s public K-12 schools. The total cost, at $6,442 per voucher student, was $130.8 million, of which about $90 million came from the state and the rest from the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Critics see the school choice program as part of a larger strategy — driven into high gear in Wisconsin by the fall election of Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans — to eviscerate, for ideological and religious reasons, public schools and the unions that represent teachers.

It would be interesting to compare special interest spending in support of the status quo, vs groups advocating change, as outlined in Bill Lueders’ article. A few links:

  • WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

    How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state’s largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
    That’s how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected – enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
    Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an “all in” bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
    In an Oct. 25 report to the Government Accountability Board, the 98,000-member union reported that it will independently:

  • Wisconsin teachers union tops list of biggest lobbying groups for 2009-10, report shows

    The statewide teachers union led in spending on lobbying state lawmakers even before this year’s fight over collective bargaining rights.
    The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent $2.5 million on lobbying in 2009 and 2010, years when Democrats were in control of all of state government, a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Board showed.
    WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker’s plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
    Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn’t helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.

  • Spending in summer recall elections reaches nearly $44 million

    Spending in the summer’s recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
    Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
    The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.

  • Kansas City School District Loses its Accreditation
Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, Waste

Kansas City, Mo., School District Loses Its Accreditation

A.G. Sulzberger:

The struggling Kansas City, Missouri School District was stripped of its accreditation on Tuesday, raising the possibility of student departures and a state takeover. The action follows weeks of tumult that included another round of turnover of top leadership.
Though not entirely unexpected, the move was a painful return to reality for the city after a period of optimism that difficult choices were finally being made to confront longstanding problems in the school district, most notably the closing of nearly half the schools in response to a huge budget deficit.
The Missouri Board of Education cited the continued failure to improve academic performance and the continued instability in district leadership as driving its decision. The district has been provisionally accredited for nearly a decade after a two-year period during which it was unaccredited.
“We’ve given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems,” said Chris L. Nicastro, the state education commissioner, who had recommended the move. “Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards.”

Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater formerly worked for the Kansas City School District.
The great schools revolution Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned.
Money & School Performance is well worth a read.
It is a rare organization that can reinvent itself, rather than continuing to atrophy.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Time for a Tuition Revolt: By The Way, We Teach A Little Too

Investors Business Daily:

It’s time for a tuition revolt, and higher taxes aren’t the answer. Students and the rest of the public are now paying for decades of mission creep and bureaucratic bloat.
The regents of the University of California met this past week to revisit an old issue they’ve never really dealt with well — how to cope with erratic (and usually dwindling) state aid.
Sooner or later, they’ll probably raise tuition again, as they have in the past. But for now they are quailing at a plan, offered by UC’s president, to raise students’ costs by at least 8%, and up to 16%, annually for the next four years. “It scares the bejesus out of folks,” said one of the regents, California’s Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
If the past is any guide, that horror will give way to realism. The regents will take a shot at raising more private money from corporations, foundations, rich alumni and the like. They’ll come up short, if only because every other academic institution is trying to do the same thing and there’s only so much money to go around.

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

How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores

E D Hirsch:

THE latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered.
This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to hold down a job. It also predicts future income.
The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.