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Book: Amy’s Game: The Concealed Structure of Education



Amy’s Game: The Concealed Structure of Education :

Amy’s Game is a field manual for parents, teachers, and leaders who want to give our children the education they deserve. The author draws on over 30 years experience and hundreds of studies to expose education’s hidden structure responsible for our schools’ decline. Tactics for reversing that slide are given along with inexpensive, well-researched instructional methods that anyone-parent to professor-can use to improve our children’s education.

Amazon Link. Thanks to Larry Winkler for the link.




Excuses are not an option



Alan Borsuk:

There are casual days at Milwaukee College Preparatory School when it comes to what students can wear. Polo shirts (red for almost all the students and yellow for standouts who have earned privileges) are the uniform for those days. Other days, students have to wear blazers and ties.
But there are no casual days at the school when it comes to academics, even down to the kindergartners.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” eighth-grade math teacher Edward Richerson exhorts his students as a half dozen head toward the blackboard to solve some equations. They’re not moving fast enough for him.
A couple of them falter in their explanations. “What I’ve told you not to do is get lazy on these equations, which is what you’ve done,” Richerson says. If you’re not getting them, it’s not because you’re not smart enough, he says. “Since we are overachievers,” he begins as he tells them why they have to be as picky about the details of the answers as he is.
In a 5-year-old kindergarten class, children do an exercise in counting and understanding sequences of shapes. Four-year-olds are expected to be on the verge of reading by Christmas.
In national education circles, phrases such as “no excuses” and names such as “KIPP” have come to stand for a hard-driving approach to educating low-income urban children, and that includes longer days, strict codes of conduct, an emphasis on mastering basics and a dedication among staff members approaching zeal. The Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, operates 57 schools in cities around the country and has a record that is not perfect but is noteworthy for its success.
Milwaukee College Prep, 2449 N. 36th St., is the prime example in Milwaukee of a no-excuses school. The charter school, which is publicly funded and was chartered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is not formally a KIPP school, although it is affiliated with the KIPP movement.

Milwaukee College Preparatory School’s website.




The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act: Wisconsin Tied for #1



Kevin Carey:

This report includes an updated Pangloss Index, based on a new round of state reports submitted in 2007. As Table 1 shows, many states look about the same Wisconsin and Iowa are tied for first, distinguishing themselves by insisting that their states house a pair of educational utopias along the upper Mississippi River. In contrast, Massachusetts—which is the highest-performing state in the country according to the NAEP—continues to hold itself to far tougher standards than most, showing up at 46th, near the bottom of the list.

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin – especially the state Department of Public Instruction – continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.
For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author’s assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
“Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect,” said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. “As a result, the most vulnerable students aren’t getting the attention they need.”
DPI officials declined to comment on the new report because they had not seen it yet. In 2006, Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, objected strongly to a nearly identical ranking from Education Sector and said state officials and schools were focused on improving student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students on the short end of achievement gaps in education.
The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector’s founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.
Several of the reports have contrasted Wisconsin and Massachusetts as states with similar histories of offering high-quality education but different approaches toward setting statewide standards now. Massachusetts has drawn praise for action it has taken in areas such as testing the proficiency of teachers, setting the bar high on standardized tests and developing rigorous education standards.
The Education Sector report and Carey did the same. The report rated Massachusetts as 46th in the nation, meaning it is one of the most demanding states when it comes to giving schools high ratings.
Carey said that in 1992, Wisconsin outscored Massachusetts in the nationwide testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Wisconsin is now behind that state in every area of NAEP testing, he said.
“Unlike Wisconsin, Massachusetts has really challenged its schools,” Carey said.

Additional commentary from TJ Mertz and Joanne Jacobs. All about Pangloss.




School Integration Efforts Face Renewed Opposition



Joseph Pereira:

Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets — and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton’s lowest test scores.
Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I “just don’t feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school,” he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn’t have “much of a standing.”
Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts declared.
Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that’s been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.
In Georgia, the Bibb County School District, which encompasses Macon, has decided to abandon a balancing plan between whites and minorities at one of its top magnet schools next year. A broader school-board redistricting plan aimed at promoting integration is facing a host of opposition, including a threat of legal action by a lawyer citing the Supreme Court decision.




Board Talks Will Focus on a New Blueprint



Susan Troller
The Capital Times
September 25, 2007

Football coach Barry Switzer’s famous quote, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple,” could easily apply to schools and school districts that take credit for students who enter school with every advantage and continue as high achievers all along.
But how do you fairly judge the job that teachers, schools and districts with many children who have significant obstacles — obstacles like poverty, low parental expectations, illness and disability or lack of English proficiency — are doing? Likewise, how do you make certain that your top students are adding growth every year as they go through school, rather than just coasting toward some average or proficient standard?

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The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of U.S. Public Schools



Rick Fry:

The 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville has focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation’s 93,845 public schools. A new analysis of public school enrollment data by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that in the dozen years from 1993-94 to 2005-06, white students became less isolated from minority students while, at the same time, black and Hispanic students became slightly more isolated from white students.
These two seemingly contradictory trends stem mainly from the same powerful demographic shift that took place during this period: an increase of more than 55% in the Hispanic slice of the public school population. Latinos in 2005-06 accounted for 19.8% of all public school students, up from 12.7% in 1993-94.
In part because whites now comprise a smaller share of students in the public schools, white students are now more likely to be exposed to minority students. In 1993-94, fully one-third (34%) of all white students attended a nearly all-white school (this report defines a school as “nearly all-white” if fewer than 5% of the students are non-white). By 2005-06, just one in five white students (21%) was attending a nearly all-white school.

Alan Borsuk:

Mix two parts population growth (among Latino and African-American students) and one part population decline (white students). Fold in a continuing pattern in which whites, blacks and Latinos generally live separately from each other. Let the mixture steep in a much cooler climate – legal, political and social – toward integrating schools.
This recipe for re-segregation is the subject of two new national studies.
Both say the tide of desegregation that roiled America from the 1950s through the 1970s has turned, and the reduction in racial separation that often came via court order and school bus is being reversed.
But there is a twist: Largely because there are so many more minority students than in the past, fewer whites are going to schools that are all-white or close to it.
At the same time, the numbers of all-minority schools are increasing.
Within several years, for the first time, fewer than half of the nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade students will be white.

The Civil Rights Project [192K PDF Report]:

This new report released by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that for the first time in three decades, the South is in danger of losing its leadership as the nation’s most integrated schools. The report examines the effects of the dual processes of racial transformation and resegregation on the educational opportunity of students, as well as the relationship between race and poverty and its implications in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions. The report concludes with recommendations for school districts.

Bruce Murphy has more.




The Achievement Trap: How American is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families



Groundbreaking report just released by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Here is the September 10, 2007, press release:
MAJOR TALENT DRAIN IN OUR NATION’S SCHOOLS, SQUANDERING THE POTENTIAL OF MILLIONS OF HIGH-ACHIEVING, LOWER-INCOME STUDENTS, NEW REPORT UNCOVERS
Current education policy focused on “proficiency” misses opportunity to raise achievement levels among the brightest, lower-income students
WASHINGTON, DC – A disturbing talent drain in our nation’s schools, squandering the potential of millions of lower-income, high-achieving students each year was exposed today before the U.S. House of Representative’s Education Committee. New research cited at the hearing shows that students who demonstrate strong academic potential despite obstacles that come with low incomes, are currently ignored under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
Alternative NCLB legislation being debated in the Education Committee hearing today includes provisions that could, for the first time, hold schools accountable for the academic growth of students performing at advanced levels. The report cited in the testimony -Achievement Trap: How America is Failing 3.4 Million High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families – is a first-of-its-kind look at a population below the median income level that starts school performing at high levels, but loses ground at virtually every level of schooling and suffers a steep plummet in college.

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French & British Education Climate Update



The Economist:

  • Bac to School:

    LADEN with hefty backpacks, French children filed back to school this week amid fresh agonising about the education system. Given its reputation for rigour and secular egalitarianism, and its well-regarded baccalauréat exam, this is surprising. What do the French think is wrong?
    Quite a lot, to judge from a 30-page “letter to teachers [Lettre aux éducateurs 326K PDF Google Summary Ministry of Education]” just sent by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Too many school drop-outs; not enough respect or authority in the classroom (pupils, he says, should stand up when the teacher enters); too little value placed on the teaching profession; too little art and sport in the curriculum; too much passive rote-learning; and too much “theory and abstraction”. France, the president concludes, needs “to rebuild the foundations” of its education system.
    The criticisms touch all levels. A government-commissioned report reveals that two in five pupils leave primary school with “serious learning gaps” in basic reading, writing and arithmetic. One in five finish secondary school with no qualification at all. Even the baccalauréat is under attack. This year’s pass rate of 83% is up from just over 60% in the early 1960s. “The bac is worth absolutely nothing,” asserts Jean-Robert Pitte, president of the Sorbonne-University of Paris IV.

  • Parent-Led Schools: B

    Going beyond the call of duty to get good teaching
    THE transition to secondary school is hard for children at the best of times. Imagine, then, that your precious baby must make a 90-minute journey across London twice a day, just to attend a school that has space only because locals have turned up their noses and gone elsewhere. Until this autumn, that was the prospect faced by many parents in West Norwood, South London. Not any more—and they can take the credit for improving their children’s lot.
    On September 10th 180 of the neighbourhood’s 11-year-olds will start their secondary education in the school their parents built. Not quite with their bare hands—the local council, Lambeth, renovated a disused Victorian school to house them until their permanent home is finished in 2009. But certainly with their sweat, and even the occasional tear. For The Elmgreen School is Britain’s first state school to have been set up with parents—not a church, or business, or charity, or council—in the driving seat.

  • Latest Thinking on Education:

    THE Conservative Party knows all too well that education is an emotive issue in British politics—indeed, perhaps the most emotive. In May a restatement of its line on selective grammar schools—that new ones would not be created by a future Tory government, just as they had not been by the last one—provoked a fortnight of internal strife.
    The report of the party’s public-services policy group on September 4th is forcing the Tories to talk about education again. They will be grateful for its many sensible ideas. Setting (selecting classes by students’ ability in specific subjects) is a neat compromise between the inclusive aims of comprehensive secondary schools and grammar schools’ commitment to high-flying performance. There are measures to improve discipline, too.

  • Schools Unchained:

    SOMETHING extraordinary is happening in London this week: in Lambeth, one of the city’s poorest boroughs, 180 children are starting their secondary education in a brand new school. The state-funded school was set up, without a fancy business sponsor, by parents who were fed up with the quality of local education. In countries with more enlightened education systems, this would be unremarkable. In Britain, it is an amazing achievement by a bunch of desperate and determined people after years of struggle (see article).
    Britain’s schools are in a mess. Although British schoolchildren perform reasonably well compared with those in other countries, average standards are not improving despite billions in extra spending, and a stubbornly long tail of underachievers straggles behind. A couple of years ago, a consensus emerged among reformers that councils had too much control and parents too little. There was radical talk in both main parties of encouraging parental choice as the best way to drive up standards: if schoolchildren were free to vote with their feet, taking public funding with them, new schools would open and existing ones would improve in order to compete.




Goal is to get students walking, bicycling



Tom Held:

As children make their way back to classrooms, schools and municipalities in Wisconsin will start spending $4 million in federal transportation grants to encourage and help more of them make that trek by foot or bicycle.
Milwaukee Public Schools will spend the largest planning grant, $242,000, to teach 6,000 grade school and middle school students how to walk or bike to school safely.
That such an educational program is deemed necessary suggests how much society has changed from a time in the late 1960s when more than half of the students in the country walked or biked to school. That percentage has dropped to 15%, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The decline in walking or biking to school has been cited as a cause behind a different trend: the growing number of children who are overweight or obese. A national study found that 18.8% of children ages 6 to 11 were obese in 2003′-04, roughly triple the percentage found two decades earlier.
Looking to reverse the trends, Congress allocated $612 million for the national Safe Routes to Schools program, spread across the 2005-’09 fiscal years.




Make science easier, examiners are told



Adam Kula & Alexandra Frean:

Examiners will have to set easier questions in some GCSE science papers, under new rules seen by The Times. A document prepared by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents awarding bodies across Britain, says that, from next year, exam papers should consist of 70 per cent “low-demand questions”, requiring simpler or multiple-choice answers. These currently make up just 55 per cent of the paper.
The move follows growing concern about the “dumbing down” of science teaching at GCSE and grade inflation of exam results, which critics claim is the result of a government drive to reverse the long-term decline in the number of pupils studying science.
In the past five years, the proportion of students gaining a grade D or better in one of the combined science papers has leapt from 39.6 to 46.7 per cent.
The latest move has been condemned by an education expert. Last night Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Education and Employment Research Centre at the University of Buckingham, said: “Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”




Hours of teaching differ for schools



Amy Hetzner & Alan Borsuk:

Where a student attends public school in the five-county metropolitan Milwaukee area can make a difference of as much as four weeks’ time in the classroom per year, according to data reported to the state.
For the last two school years, the school districts of Burlington, Cudahy, Kettle Moraine, Mukwonago, Slinger, South Milwaukee and Wauwatosa reported that most – if not all – of their schools held classes at least 65 hours longer than the minimum hours set by state law.
Meanwhile, the Oak Creek-Franklin and Waukesha school districts met for the minimum amount of hours, and a large number of schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system fell below the standard in 2006-’07.
“There’s nothing more important than time with the classroom teacher,” said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction. “And, if that’s continually taken away, the state of Wisconsin would have an obligation that doesn’t happen.”
By and large, most public schools in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties reported similar annual total instructional hours for their students for the past two years, the only years for which data was available from the DPI.




How Schools Get It Right



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




California’s students get into college, but not always out



Justin Pope:

For most of history, higher education has been reserved for a tiny elite.
For a glimpse of a future where college is open to all, visit California — the place that now comes closest to that ideal.
California’s community college system is the country’s largest, with 109 campuses, 4,600 buildings and a staggering 2.5 million students. It’s also cheap. While it’s no longer free, anyone can take a class, and at about $500 per term full-time, the price is a fraction of any other state’s.
There is no such thing as a typical student. There are high achievers and low ones, taking courses from accounting to welding. There are young and old, degree-seekers and hobbyists — all commingled on some of the most diverse campuses in the country, if not the world.
Many students, for one reason or another, simply missed the onramp to college the first time around — people like 31-year-old Bobbie Burns, juggling work and childcare and gradually collecting credits at San Diego City College in hopes of transferring to a media program at a nearby university.




Helping students become ‘responsible citizens’?



Vin Suprynowicz:

John Taylor Gatto, honored on several occasions as New York City and New York state teacher of the year, has made it the second part of his life’s work to determine why our government schools are so ineffective — why he always had to fight the bureaucracy above him in order to empower his young charges (many of them minority kids, given to him as “punishment” because the administrators thought them “hopeless”) to spread their wings and learn.
What Gatto discovered is enough to cause a massive paradigm shift for anyone who reads his books, whether you start with the slim “Dumbing Us Down” or his weightier master work, “The Underground History of American Education.”
America’s schools aren’t failing, Gatto discovered. They’re doing precisely what they were re-designed to do between the 1850s and the early 1900s, when America embarked on our current imperial/mercantilist adventure — that is, to churn out little soldiers and factory workers with mindless obedience drilled in and with the higher critical faculties burned out of them through the process of feeding them learning in small unrelated bits like pre-digested gruel, till they neither know how nor feel any inclination to discern higher patterns, which might lead them to challenge the “party line.”
Who dreamed up such a system?
Thus, if we want to see what our “reverse-engineered” copy of the German school system has in mind for us, it might pay to simply take a look at what’s happening with government-run schooling … in Germany.




Too Many California Students Not Ready for College



Pamela Burdman and Marshall S. Smith

California’s vibrant economy is in jeopardy because we aren’t producing enough educated workers to meet the state’s future needs, according to a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California. The authors see only one solution: improving college attendance and graduation rates of Californians.
High-profile attempts by top universities to serve more low-income and minority students are important, but they won’t solve this problem. Only a limited number of students can attend these schools. Substantially increasing graduation rates will require lifting achievement levels for students who are not admitted to public universities.
If approved by lawmakers, a $33 million investment tucked inside the state budget represents a rare attempt to work toward that goal. The funds would ensure continuation of an audacious initiative that is shining a spotlight on a problem that has historically seemed intractable: the large number of students who don’t succeed in college because they don’t complete remedial English or math.
This effort represents the best chance in years to reverse that trend. It is being coordinated by instructors at the state’s community colleges, and no one is better positioned to tackle the problem. But the plan will not work without the serious engagement of colleges and sustained state support.




Wisconsin “Languishing” on Policies Affecting Teachers



National Council on Teacher Quality: [864K PDF Report]

Area 1 – Meeting NCLB Teacher Quality Objectives: Grade C

Wisconsin has better data policies than many states, which can help it ameliorate inequities in teacher assignments. The state’s subject matter preparation policies for future elementary teachers need improvement. Its requirements for future high school teachers are adequate, but its expectations for middle school teachers are insufficient. The state also needs to define a subject matter major. Wisconsin is phasing out the use of its HOUSSE route.

Area 2 – Teacher Licensure Grade F

Wisconsin’s teaching standards do not clearly refer to the knowledge and skills that new teachers must have before entering the classroom. State policies do not ensure that teachers are prepared in the science of reading instruction. New teachers are allowed to teach for up to two years before passing state licensure tests. The state needs to reduce its obstacles to licensure for out of state teachers. Wisconsin does not recognize distinct levels of academic caliber at the time of initial certification for new teachers.

Area 3 – Teacher Evaluation and Compensation Grade D

While Wisconsin’s minimal teacher evaluation guidelines require subjective observations, they do not ensure that evaluations are based primarily on a preponderance of evidence of classroom effectiveness that includes objective measures. Teacher accountability is further undermined by only requiring evaluations once every three years, by a lack of value-added data, and by not ensuring districts wait five years prior to granting teachers tenure. The state does not burden districts with a minimum salary schedule.

Area 4 – State Approval of Teacher Preparation Programs Grade D

Wisconsin does not do enough to hold its programs accountable for the quality of their preparation. It has failed to address their tendency to require excessive amounts of professional coursework. Wisconsin does require applicants to pass a basic skills test and has a sensible accreditation policy.

Area 5 – Alternate Routes to Certification Grade F

Wisconsin does not currently provide a genuine alternate route into the teaching profession. The alternate routes the state offers have serious structural flaws combined with low and inflexible admissions standards. Wisconsin does not ensure that programs do not require excessive coursework, and it does not ensure adequate support is provided to new teachers. In addition, the state collects little objective performance data from alternate route programs and does not use the data to hold programs accountable for the quality of their teachers. Wisconsin has a restrictive policy regarding licensure reciprocity for teachers from out of state who were prepared in an alternate route program, making it difficult for some teachers to transfer their licenses.

Area 6 – Preparation of Special Education Teachers Grade D

Wisconsin’s standards for special education teachers do not ensure that teachers will be well prepared to teach students with disabilities. The state places no limit on the amount of professional education coursework that its teacher preparation programs can require of special education candidates, resulting in program excesses. While elementary special education teachers are required to pass a subject matter test, this policy does not sufficiently ensure that candidates will have the knowledge relevant to all of the topics they will have to teach. The state’s secondary special education candidates are likely to finish their preparation program highly qualified in at least one subject area, but the state has not developed a streamlined HOUSSE route to help them meet additional subject matter requirements once they are in the classroom.

Wisconsin DPI’s Tony Evers comments via Channel3000.com:

Deputy state superintendent Tony Evers attributes the state’s low marks to a difference in philosophy over teacher education. The state believes in a mixture of subject matter, such as English and science, and courses on how to teach, while the council wants more of an emphasis on content.
Evers also said that the report represented only a superficial view and he took particular issue with a D grade for Wisconsin’s preparation of special education teachers.
He said that teachers in that area are so well-trained that there is a problem with other states recruiting them away.




No Child Left Behind setting below-average goals



Mary Wolf-Francis
When Margaret Spellings visited the Southeast Valley this spring, she was asked to respond to the question about the effects of No Child Left Behind on the average and above-average students.
Her response was frightening.
Spellings declared that No Child Left Behind is about the “vast, vast number of young Americans who lack the ability to be successful in our country. That is our prime directive, our highest priority.”
The highest public education official in our country essentially stated that public schools should be dedicated to below-average students. This may be seen as a call for all parents of average to above-average students to run, don’t walk, to their nearest private school.
Spellings takes it a step further by defining the problem as related to race, saying, “We’re only graduating half of our Hispanic and half our African-American students on time.”
Did I hear you say public education is dedicated to underachieving students of color? Political correctness aside, these are not the only students who lack the ability to be successful. Would you be surprised if we told you that many of our best and brightest students fit this category?
As many as 40 percent of all gifted students are underachievers, according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, and between 10 and 20 percent of all high school dropouts test in the gifted range.
Consider, then, that many other populations of students are being left behind, especially as funds are diverted into meeting the mandates of this narrow legislation.




Madison Schools MTI Teacher Contract Roundup



Conversation regarding the recent MMSD / MTI collective bargaining agreement continues:

  • Andy Hall wrote a useful summary, along with some budget numbers (this agreementi s56% of the MMSD’s $339.6M budget):

    District negotiators headed by Superintendent Art Rainwater had sought to free up money for starting teachers’ salaries by persuading the union to drop Wisconsin Physicians Service, a health-care provider that offers open access to medical treatment with no need for referrals.
    The district wanted MTI members to choose from among three health-maintenance organizations that limit coverage to specific providers in return for lower costs.
    But the union kept the current mix — WPS plus one HMO, Group Health Cooperative — after members in a survey indicated support for maintaining those options.
    Matthews is a paid member of the Wisconsin Physicians Service board of directors — an arrangement he defends as a means of advocating for members and the district. Critics contend it represents a conflict of interest.
    “Our plan is cheaper than almost any in town,” said Matthews, referring to a union comparison of Wisconsin Physicians Service coverage, used by half of the members, to coverage offered to employees of state and local governments.
    “The teachers were willing to pay more, they were willing to move money from wages to health insurance, in order to preserve those kinds of rights.”
    Among the new costs facing teachers: A $75 co-pay for emergency room visits and a $10 co-pay for office visits.
    Premiums for WPS, which is favored by many members with a serious illness in the family, will cost 10.4 percent more beginning July 1. But the premiums will decrease slightly beginning Jan. 1 as the co-pays take effect. For example, the WPS family premium will cost the district $1,711 per month while the employee’s share will be $190, falling to $187 on Jan. 1.
    The GHC premium will increase by 5.7 percent — to $974 monthly for family coverage, paid entirely by the district — beginning July 1. That amount will decrease to $955 on Jan. 1.

  • Don Severson & Brian Schimming discuss the agreement and the school board: 5MB mp3 audio file.
  • 2005 / 2007 Agreement 528K PDF.
  • The Madison School Board will vote on the Agreement Monday evening, June 18, 2007.
  • Additional links and notes.
  • Don Severson: 3 Simple Things.
  • MMSD / MTI contract negotations beginCarol Carstensen: An alt view on Concessions Before Negotiations.
  • Going to the Mat for WPS
  • What’s the MTI Political Endorsement About?
  • Some MMSD unions have addressed health care costs.



What is the price of a good education?



hongkongzmetro2007.jpg
The Economist:

AMONG the most commercial of cities, Hong Kong follows many markets; but none more intently than the trade in debentures tied to admissions to the city’s international primary and secondary schools. These non-interest-bearing bonds are typically issued to pay for construction or other costs. Bought by parents anxious to do the best by their children, or by employers anxious to attract the best staff, they are then traded at prices set by the city’s volatile economic fluctuations.
Recently, slots in international schools have become precious. The economy is booming in China’s tailwind, attracting well-paid expatriates. Prosperous local residents, meanwhile, are deserting local schools because of what is seen as deterioration in English-language teaching since the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It is not just the very rich who are worried: early this month a small group of not very well-off South Asian residents marched through central Hong Kong, demanding more schooling in English, arguing their children were suffering from having to attend classes conducted in Chinese.




Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still



I have a friend who is fond of saying “never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence.” These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS — and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town — have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.

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SCHOOL BOARD WATCHDOG GROUP TO HOLD NEWS CONFERENCE TUESDAY at 12:15 pm



In reference to current talk about a referenda proposal by the Madison Metropolitan School Board (MMSD), Active Citizens for Education (ACE) will hold a news conference this coming Tuesday, June 5th at 12:15 p.m. at The Coliseum Bar, 232 East Olin Ave, Madison [map].
The group will advance three proposals that the School Board should adopt and initiate in the process of deciding whether or not to place any additional requests before the voters for taxpayer funds or exemptions from the state-imposed revenue caps. The proposal topics are:

  • GOOD HEALTH CARE AT AN AFFORDABLE PRICE
  • PUT THE LID ON THE COOKIE JAR
  • ELIMINATE THE CHAOS OF BOARD DECISIONS

Speakers will include Don Severson, president of ACE, and former Madison Alder Dorothy Borchardt, an activist in school and community issues.
In addition to comments by Severson and Borchardt, there will be five display boards briefly outlining the proposals as well as duplicated handouts. The presentation part of the news conference will last 15 minutes, followed by questions.




An elite education should be open to all who can benefit, not just those who can pay



The Economist:

NO exam question is as perplexing as how to organise schools to suit the huge variety of pupils they serve: rich and poor, clever and dim, early developers and late starters. Every country does it differently. Some try to spot talent early. Others winnow out the academic-minded only at 18. Some believe in parent-power. Others trust the state. Finland has state-run uniform comprehensives; Sweden, another good performer, has vouchers and lots of private schools.
The British system produces some world-class high-flyers, mainly in its private schools and the 164 selective state “grammar” schools that survived the cull in the 1960s and 1970s when the country moved to a non-selective system. But it serves neither its poor children nor its most troublesome ones well. The best state schools, especially the grammar schools, are colonised by the middle classes, and the whole system is disfigured by a long straggling tail of non-achievers.

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Wisconsin DPI: Cracking Down on SAGE Class Size Waivers



Amy Hetzner:

The state Department of Public Instruction gave wide leeway last year to a school district seeking to avoid the strictures of Wisconsin’s class-size reduction program, even as the DPI rolled out its plan to clamp down on such exceptions.
The Chippewa Falls School District was allowed to hold classes with one-third more students than the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program demanded and still receive $100,000.
But such permissiveness is coming to an end, promised state schools Deputy Superintendent Tony Evers.
Already this year, several school systems that previously received funding while exceeding SAGE’s 15-to-1 class-size requirements have had their requests denied.
Others have quietly dropped their programs after determining that they would not be able to meet the class-size standards and that DPI staff would become more involved in monitoring their programs, Evers said.




Saving Our Schools



Andy Moore:

The sun came up over the near east side Tuesday morning. It wasn’t supposed to. Forecasters said to expect thunderstorms. But for an hour or so, sunshine painted the upper branches of the sugar maples that line the streets within the heart of the isthmus.
For those of us in the Lapham and Marquette neighborhoods, it was hard to avoid the symbolism. Clear skies rode in on the fair winds of change at the previous night’s school board meeting. The board’s earlier decision to consolidate Lapham and Marquette schools at Lapham — and close Marquette — was reversed.
The original decision was a harsh product of the inexorable pressure of state revenue caps on the school budget. The reversal was a product of many things. Among them, a courageous, open-minded school board willing to, as board member Johnny Winston Jr. put it, “think outside the box.”




Madison School Board Should “Learn from Fiasco”



Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

After the Greek King Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in 279 B.C., he cut his celebration short.
Pyrrhus realized that the battle had been more costly to his army than it had been to the Romans. His response went something like this:
“One more such victory, and we are undone.”
Those words should be haunting the Madison School Board today.
One more fiasco like last week’s flip-flop on consolidating two elementary schools, and this board may be undone.
School Board member Johnny Winston Jr. said the board’s reversal could be a win-win.
He was wrong-wrong.




In Low-Income Schools, Parents Want Teachers Who Teach: In affluent schools, other things matter



Brian Jacob & Lars Lefgren:

Recent government education policies seem to assume that academic achievement as measured by test scores is the primary objective of public education. A prime example is the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools to bring all of their students to “proficient” levels on math and reading tests by 2014. Many state accountability plans judge schools on the basis of these tests alone, and some states and school districts are considering tying teachers’ compensation to student test results. Yet education historically has served a variety of functions (e.g., socialization, civic training), and public support for music and art in school suggests that parents value things beyond high test scores.
Are test scores the educational outcomes that parents value most? We tackle this question by examining the types of teachers that parents request for their elementary school children. We find that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as best able to promote student satisfaction, though parents also value teacher ability to improve student academics. These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across schools. Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher’s ability to keep students happy.

More here and here.




Madison School Board “Kowtows to Complainers”



Susan Lampert Smith:

So kids, what did we learn from the Madison School Board’s decision Monday to reverse itself and not consolidate the half-empty Marquette and Lapham elementary schools?
We learned that no doesn’t really mean no.
We learned that, oops, maybe there is money after all.
And most importantly, we learned that whoever yells the loudest gets it.
The most telling moment at Monday’s board meeting was when the rowdy crowd of Marquette supporters was admonished to “respect the board” after hissing at Lawrie Kobza, who said she was “saddened” by arguments that the schools must stay open to appease residents with “political clout.”
“Respect us,” one man hollered back.
Respect you?
Honey, with the exception of Kobza and Arlene Silveira, who held their ground, the board rolled over for you like a puppy. Tony Soprano doesn’t get this kind of respect.

A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:

Kindergartner Corey Jacob showed up at this week’s Madison School Board meeting with a homemade “Keep Schools Open” sign.
And he got a terrific lesson.
The board, which had voted to close Marquette Elementary School on the city’s near east side, reversed its wrongheaded decision in the face of overwhelming opposition from parents, teachers and kids like Corey.
The lesson Corey learned is perhaps the most important one that can be taught in public life: No decision is set in stone. When an official body makes the wrong decision, people can and should organize to oppose that decision. And when that happens, the members of the targeted body are duty-bound to reconsider their mistaken move.

More from Bessie Cherry:

er column was ludicrous. Comparing a school board who actually listened to its constituents’ warranted concerns to a parent who gives in to a whiny child?! Lapham Elementary, where my daughter attends kindergarten, is hardly “half empty.” In fact, the students there eat lunch in 18 minute shifts, and the school board’s own projections predict that it will become overcrowded within the next five years.
Smith failed to mention that the velocity behind the vocal backlash against the original decision to consolidate was fueled by the fact that two of the board members won their seats by proclaiming before their election that they would never vote in favor of consolidation. Instead of accusing the board of “rolling over like a puppy” and proving that “whoever yells the loudest gets it”, she should be applauding those parents for exemplifying democracy in action for their children. They organized, yes, the old-fashioned way (a way I much prefer to the prevailing point-and-click passivity of “activism” today), and involved their children by having them sign petitions, hand out flyers– they even staged an elementary school walkout.




Madison School Board to Reconsider Marquette / Lapham Consolidation



Deborah Ziff:


The Madison School Board may reverse its decision to consolidate Lapham and Marquette elementary schools after a neighborhood group mobilized in opposition to the budget cut.
The board is nearing the five votes needed to overturn its decision.
Four of the seven board members — Carol Carstensen, Beth Moss, Johnny Winston Jr. and Maya Cole — asked board President Arlene Silveira to reopen a discussion on the consolidation for a meeting on Monday. Four votes are needed to reopen discussion.




Critics pack meeting on unpopular school decisions



Susan Troller:

Although the Madison School Board so far has held its ground on a host of unpopular decisions, it may be approaching a tipping point, at least on the issue of school consolidation.
The School Board’s meeting was a multi-ring circus Monday night as a capacity crowd presented a collective howl of anguish about many budget cuts and about the controversial decision to name the community’s newest elementary school for a Hmong military leader revered by his adherents.
It will be up to board members in coming days to decide whether to revisit any of the decisions they have made in recent weeks that are stirring passionate, and often angry, public commentary on topics ranging from the elimination of yellow school buses for parochial school students to a school closing on the near east side to the new school’s name.
Arlene Silveira, elected unanimously Monday night as the board’s new president, said she would return items to the agenda for possible reconsideration if four board members requested them. A supermajority, or five votes, would be necessary to reverse any budget-related decisions. So far, it appears that several board members are willing to revisit the budget item to consolidate Marquette and Lapham elementary schools.




Letter to School Board Members & a Meeting with Enis Ragland



Sue Arneson, Jason Delborne, Katie Griffiths, Anita Krasno, Dea Larsen Converse, Diane Milligan, Sich Slone, Grant Sovern, Lara Sutherlin:

Dear School Board Members:
A group of neighbors from the Marquette and Tenney-Lapham communities met this morning with Enis Ragland, Assistant to the Mayor. While we didn’t claim to represent any organizations, many of us have been tapped into various discussions and email threads over the last few days. We put forth the following points:

  • The city’s vision for downtown development is sorely compromised by the consolidation plan. It goes against all the investments in business development, affordable housing, central park, improved transportation, and the building of a strong community that spans the isthmus.
  • The school board’s own projections predict that Lapham (as the sole elementary campus) will become overcrowded in 5 years – perhaps sooner if we reinstate reduced class sizes. Where will the city find a ‘new’ school to open in the downtown area?
  • The Alternatives programs DO need a permanent home, but their own director stated last year that the worst possible site is next to a junior high. Other options are available, including the possibility of the Atwood Community Center once it is completed.
  • The Lapham/Marquette consolidation passed purely for financial reasons – there is no convincing or consensed-upon programmatic advantages.

    (more…)




    Board members explain votes to close schools



    Susan Troller:

    When newly elected Madison School Board members Maya Cole and Beth Moss went into Monday night’s crucial budget meeting, both intended to vote against closing schools, consistent with their campaign promises.
    But by the time the seven-member board patched together the various cuts, additions and compromises necessary to restore some programs and services while keeping the budget in the black, both Moss and Cole found themselves making a reversal and voting with Lawrie Kobza and Arlene Silveira to consolidate the paired elementary schools Marquette and Lapham at the Lapham site on East Dayton Street.
    Now Moss, along with board members Carol Carstensen and Lucy Mathiak, would not mind reopening the discussion with the possibility of reconsidering that vote.
    But Cole — who during the campaign was firmer than Moss in her opposition to school closings — says her decision to consolidate Marquette and Lapham is final.

    (more…)




    Gates Foundation Hires Portland Superintendent Vicki Phillips



    Gates Foundation:

    Today, more than one million students fail to finish high school, including half of African American and Hispanic students. Of those who do graduate, only half have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. Over the last seven years, the foundation has made significant investments to reverse these startling statistics.
    In her new position, (Vicki) Phillips will join the U.S. Program team and direct the foundation’s education portfolio. The portfolio also includes scholarship programs to remove the financial barriers to college for promising students and an initiative to improve early learning in Washington state. Dr. Phillips will complete the school year in Portland and begin work at the foundation August 1, overseeing and expanding upon more than $3.4 billion in strategic education investments and partnerships.

    Related Links:




    Referendum Budget and School Closings



    From: Thomas Mertz
    Subject: Referendum Budget and School Closings
    A group of parents and community members are working to convince the Board not to close schools or make other nearly irreversible cuts before offering the voters a chance to pass an operating referendum. You can help. More details here.
    Please follow the link, read and sign on.

    (more…)




    Some interesting insight into another district’s budgeting process, knowledge, and challenges.



    Shane Samuels:

    There are those who like to work with numbers, and then there are those who figure school budgets. They’re not necessarily the same person.
    School finance consists of a labyrinth of property values, student enrollment totals, federal aid, and state aid. Only two people in Chetek claim to understand the funding formula from top to bottom: Superintendent Al Brown and business manager Tammy Lenbom.
    A couple times of year their budgetary work catches the public’s eye – once in September when it comes time to pass the budget at the annual meeting, and once about this time of year when Brown and Lenbom propose that budget for next fall.
    The budget proposal period is more visible, because that is when we find out how those financial decisions will affect people’s lives – teachers who may be forced to look for new jobs, or students who might have their favorite class offering taken away from them.
    While it takes a professional to explain a school budget line item by line item, this article is an attempt to at least summarize how school administrators and the school board reach their budgetary decisions, as well as detailing some of the struggles they face.
    The timetable

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    Knowledge is Power Only if You Know How To Use It



    Denise Caruso:

    In the 17th century, they note that reading know-how was such a known quantity that the colony of Massachusetts had a law requiring it to be taught in the home. But a century later, when Cotton Mather championed a new and effective smallpox inoculation in Boston, most of the physicians in town rejected the treatment because it was not supported by the accepted know-how of the time.
    Today the situation is reversed. “While almost every child vaccinated against measles is safe from the disease,” the professors write, “an alarming number of children who are ‘taught’ to read in school never really learn to read at a level necessary to perform well in today’s society.”




    Closing the Math Gap



    Milwakee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

    Too many grads of the Milwaukee Public Schools wind up in remedial classes in math when they pursue college. Key educational leaders in the city have come up with a proven plan to reverse this alarming trend – a plan Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed to finance with $15 million in state money as part of his $80 million financial package to help Milwaukee over two years.
    Raising math achievement in the state’s sole big city is all the more reason to support that package. Math proficiency among workers can attract good jobs to Milwaukee. And the better the city does economically, the better the state does.

    The “Math Coach” model mentioned by the J-S is also under discussion in Madison.




    A K-12 View from 35,000 Feet



    I happened to sit next to the Curriculum Coordinator (20+ years in that District) for a large, growing US School District recently ( north of 100,000 students). I found some of the comments interesting:

    • They cycle through superintendents every 2 to 3 years. The Supers are paid $300K+ with “lots of benefits”.
    • The new super is decentralizing all over the place, pushing control down.
    • They use trailers as enrollment moves around the community.
    • The new super wants to require any children in grades K-3 not reading at grade level to have only one task per day (beyond lunch, recess and PE) – read. This involves tracking.
    • I asked what sort of curriculum they used for reading: Whole language with “lots of phonics”. I asked if they used Reading Recovery. The person said that they evaluated RR but felt it was “far too expensive”.
    • Offer a great deal of IB and AP courses. They also have magnet schools, though the person said that they are less popular now that the district has gone back to neighborhood schools (evidently there was a successful reverse discrimination lawsuit). They have evidently received “a great deal of federal funds” to support IB and AP.
    • 8th graders who cannot read at grade level will go to a different set of curriculum or school than those who are at or above.

    This district spends about $7,900 per student annually (Madison is in the $12,500 range).
    Interestingly, this is the 2nd time during the past 12 months that I’ve sat next to an educator on their way to a conference sponsored by curriculum publishers.




    Gifted student feels Left Behind



    Dave Toplikar
    January 30, 2007
    Lawrence ninth grader to speak up for high achievers during Capitol visit.
    As No Child Left Behind policy is reviewed this year, there is one group of students some think may have been left behind — those who are high achievers.
    “Most of the time I’m stuck in regular classes,” said Dravid Joseph, a ninth-grader at West Junior High. “Sometimes I’m bored with what I’m doing there.”
    Partially for that reason, Dravid will join a contingent of some of Kansas’ most gifted students who will travel Wednesday to Topeka to advocate for specialized classes for more than 15,000 of their peers across the state.
    Similar stories from Wisconsin and beyond:

    Taking Middle Schoolers Out of the Middle



    Elissa Gootman:

    The two schools, in disparate corners of the nation’s largest school system, are part of a national effort to rethink middle school, driven by increasingly well-documented slumps in learning among early adolescents as well as middle school crime rates and stubborn high school dropout rates.
    The schools share the premise that the way to reverse years of abysmal middle school performance is to get rid of middle schools entirely. But they represent opposite poles in the sharp debate over whether 11- through 13-year-olds are better off pushed toward adulthood or coddled a little longer.
    Should the nurturing cocoon of elementary school be extended for another three years, shielding 11-year-olds from the abrupt transition to a new school, with new students and teachers, at one of the most volatile times in their lives?




    NYC Mayor Moves to Give Principals More Autonomy



    Diane Cardwell:

    Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg laid out ambitious new plans yesterday to overhaul the school system by giving principals more power and autonomy, requiring teachers to undergo rigorous review in order to gain tenure and revising the school financing system that has allowed more-experienced teachers to cluster in affluent areas.
    The plan, which would also increase the role of private groups, represents the most dramatic changes to the system since the mayor reorganized it after gaining control of the schools in 2002. Although the mayor has chosen to spend some of the city’s current surplus on tax cuts, he said he could invest more in schools with money promised by Gov. Eliot Spitzer to equalize state education aid across New York.
    The administration can undertake most of the education reforms unilaterally, without City Council or union acquiescence.

    While New York City appears to de-centralize, Milwaukee is evidently moving in the opposite direction. WNYC has more.
    David Herszenhorn has more:

    Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg yesterday effectively doubled his bet that the nation’s largest school system is capable of unprecedented improvement, wagering the education of the city’s nearly 1.1 million students and his own legacy on a far-reaching decentralization plan that puts enormous pressure on principals to raise student achievement.
    The mayor’s announcement, in his State of the City address, made clear that by the end of his second term he hopes to leave behind a school system irreversibly changed and virtually unrecognizable from the bureaucracy that existed before he took office.
    It will have new rating systems for schools, principals and teachers, a new finance system designed to break the lock that many schools in middle-class neighborhoods have had on highly paid veteran teachers, and a sharply increased role for private groups in helping to run schools. It will also make it harder for teachers to get tenure.
    But Mr. Bloomberg’s plan, while cementing his place at the forefront of urban education reform in America, also carries huge risks, raising questions about whether yet another reorganization will bring such swift and noticeable improvement in test scores and graduation rates that it can mute critics who say the administration is using constant change to mask mediocre results.




    2007 – 2008 Madison School District Budget Discussions Underway



    Watch Monday evening’s school board discussion [Video | Download] of the upcoming larger than usual reductions in revenue cap limited increases in the District’s 2007 – 2008 budget (they are larger than normal due to the recently disclosed 7 year structural budget deficit). The 2006 / 2007 budget is $333M+ (it was $245M in 98/99 while enrollment has remained flat, though the student composition continues to change).

    Related Links:




    On Wisconsin’s Learning Gap



    Alan Borsuk:

    The education achievement gaps between African-American and white children in Wisconsin remain among the worst in the United States, according to an analysis released Wednesday by an influential education group.
    To a degree that’s good news. That’s better than in 2004, when a similar analysis by the Journal Sentinel showed the proficiency gaps in several key measures between African-American and white children were larger in Wisconsin than in any other state.
    Using more recent results of the same series of tests – the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the Education Trust found that in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math, Wisconsin was near the bottom of the list, which included the states and the District of Columbia. In eighth-grade math, Nebraska had a bigger gap. In fourth-grade reading, Wisconsin was sixth from worst in gap size and eighth from the bottom when it came to the average score of black students.
    The results, said Daria Hall, a senior policy analyst for the organization and the main author of the report, “show just how far Wisconsin has to go in order to ensure that all kids, particularly poor kids and kids of color, are getting equal opportunities to meet high standards.”
    Hall – herself a graduate of Milwaukee Public Schools – said Wisconsin should look to states with much smaller gaps and with gaps that have been narrowed in recent years to see what it should do. She named Massachusetts and Delaware as examples.
    Massachusetts has eliminated funding gaps between school districts serving high-income and low-income students, she said. But it’s not only about money, she added. The state has created rigorous education standards and accountability systems.
    Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, said the analysis showed that the scores of African-American and Latino students in Wisconsin had risen in recent years while the scores of white students stayed flat – which he called “slightly good news.”

    Edtrust Wisconsin Report 500K PDF. Edtrust.org.




    Free tuition for vow to stay?



    Scott Williams:

    Considering recommending free tuition for all students who agree to remain in the Dairy State after getting their degrees, reversing an exodus of college graduates and potentially transforming the state’s economy.
    The commission will gather in Madison on Tuesday to discuss including the idea in a package of recommended reforms geared primarily toward improving the two-year campuses.




    Wisconsin Math, reading proficiency are much higher on state exams than on federal



    Amy Hetzner:

    Wisconsin students continue to fare far better on the state’s standardized tests than they do on those given by the federal government, according to a new analysis that raises questions about what it means to be “proficient.”
    About 70% to 85% of Wisconsin students were considered proficient or better on the state’s reading and math tests for the 2005-’06 school year. Yet only 33% to 40% of the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders scored at least proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in those subjects, according to the study by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
    The state was one of 16 in the country that had a proficiency gap of 45 to 55 percentage points, the Taxpayers Alliance found. Several states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, had even larger differences between the percentage of students considered proficient by their states as opposed to the federal government.
    “It just creates confusion,” said Dale Knapp, research director for the Taxpayers Alliance. “We want a sense of what our students know, where they sort of stand. And we’re really getting two different answers that are very different answers.”
    The blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction, which administers the tests annually.
    “Math is the same in Madison as it is in Missouri as it is in Mumbai.” – Michael Petrilli,
    Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a group that has raised the idea of national standards
    “What that ought to be is a big signal to the folks in Wisconsin that they really need to evaluate the rigor of their standards and their assessment.” – Daria Hall, Education Trust

    More on the Fordham Foundation’s report and EdTrust. Finally, WISTAX offers a free report on testing.




    More on the Kalamazoo Promise: College for Free



    The Kalamazoo Promise program has drawn 985 students to their K-12 system. Jamaal Abdul-Alim recently visited the city to learn more:

    The program is as much a social experiment aimed at leveling the playing field of access to higher learning as it is an economic development initiative meant to generate school revenue, boost the economy and reverse the effects of a middle-class flight – some say “white flight” – that began in the 1960s and continued after the 1973 court-ordered desegregation of the city’s public schools.
    Students and parents in Kalamazoo believe the program has made children’s educational futures so secure that some have scrapped their college-savings plans to buy household items, such as TVs.
    Teachers say students and parents are showing more concern about their children’s performance in school.
    Home sales are up, and enrollment in the public school system – roughly 11,000, down 40% from four decades ago – is on the upswing. The 985 new students this school year brought an additional $7.5 million in state aid, and the district hired 50 new teachers. No new taxes were levied because of the promise.




    A Few More 11/7/2006 Referendum Links



    • Support Smart Management: Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Board:

      Taxpayers in the Madison School District should demand that the School Board be smarter about managing the district’s money and resources.
      On Tuesday’s ballot is a school referendum containing three smart proposals.
      That’s why the referendum deserves voters’ support.
      More important than the referendum, however, is what happens next. The School Board is confronting difficult choices, including how to respond to rapid growth in areas where there are no schools while in other parts of the city, schools have excess space.
      A pivotal question in upcoming months will be: Does the board have the courage to close a school? While the rapidly growing Far West Side merits a new school, other parts of Madison are experiencing declining student populations.
      Taxpayers can’t afford to build schools where the children are while maintaining schools where the children aren’t.
      At least one school should eventually be closed and sold, with boundary changes to distribute children to other schools.

    • Another Referendum: WKOW-TV:

      This referendum is different from the last – it has one question, with three parts. In 2005, just one issue of a three-part question passed. Voters passed a plan for building renovations, but they said voted down a second school on the Leopold Elementary site, and to exceeding the revenue cap
      Monday night, spokesperson Ken Syke pointed out that since at 1993 no MMSD referendum has fully failed-at least one issue has always passed.

    • Don Severson & Vicki McKenna discuss the referendum question and a District email to MSCR users [mp3 audio]

    Many more links here.




    Poor Management Compels “No” Vote



    After being decisively defeated in two spending referendums last year, the administration and a majority of the Madison School Board haven’t learned that the voters are sick and tired of runaway spending and poor management.
    In a demonstration of true arrogance, after being told in May 2005 that flat enrollment did not justify a new school in the Leopold School area of Arbor Hills, in June this year, the administration began construction of a major addition to Leopold School.
    In so doing they put forth no plan to pay for the addition while gambiling on voters reversing themselves in a new referendum.
    Madison spends significantly more per student than other Wisconsin districts. Over the past 10 years, while student enrollment has declined, full-time equivalent staff has increased by more than 600. At the same time, operating budgets have increased 58 percent, the cost per pupil is up 59, and there are 325 more non-teaching staff and administrators.
    Clearly, the administration does not seem to be able to prudently manage district finances.

    (more…)




    If Chartering is the Answer, What was the Question?



    Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, charter school leaders at Education/Evolving urge legislators to expand Wisconsin’s charter school law:

    “The Importance of Innovation in Chartering”
    Remarks to the Legislative Study Committee on Charter Schools
    By Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, Education/Evolving
    October 17, 2006
    TED KOLDERIE
    Let me try to set the context for the Legislature’s use of the chartering strategy. The ‘Why?’ of anything is important to legislators. It is fair to ask: “If ‘chartering’ is the answer, what was the question?”
    The question is: How do we make schooling different enough to motivate the kids who have never learned well in conventional school?
    Paul Houston, the head of AASA, has been pointing out how dramatically the signals have been switched for public education. Forever, their charge was access and equity: take everybody; give everybody the opportunity to participate and to learn. Now suddenly the charge is proficiency: The districts are required to see that all children learn.
    This is a huge change. The current model of schooling was not built for this. The districts were not built for this. Success with this very different assignment requires major readjustment in the institution.

    (more…)




    Does Television Cause Autism?



    Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson and Nodir Adilov [Full 728K PDF Report]:

    One of the major health care crises currently facing the United States is the exploding incidence of autism diagnoses. Thirty years ago it was estimated that roughly one in 2500 children had autism while today it is estimated that approximately one in 166 is diagnosed with the condition – more than a ten-fold increase.1 In turn, due to the high costs of treating and caring for a typical autistic individual over his or her lifetime, it is estimated that the annual cost to society of autism is thirty-five billion dollars (Ganz 2006). Clearly, the highest priority needs to be given to better understanding what is causing the dramatic increase in diagnoses and, if possible, using that improved knowledge to reverse the trend.
    Despite the recent rapid increase in diagnoses and the resulting increased attention the condition has received both in the media and in the medical community, very little is known about what causes the condition. Starting with the work of Rimland (1964), it is well understood that genetics or biology plays an important role, but many in the medical community argue that the increased incidence must be due to an environmental trigger that is becoming more common over time (a few argue that the cause is a widening of the criteria used to diagnose the condition and that the increased incidence is thus illusory). However, there seems to be little consensus and little evidence concerning what the trigger or triggers might be. In this paper we empirically investigate a possibility that has received almost no attention in the medical literature, i.e., that early childhood television watching is an important trigger for the onset of autism.

    Via Slate.

    Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.




    A New School on Madison’s Far West Side: A Long Term Perspective



    On November 7, Madison area residents will be asked to vote on a referendum concerning our local schools. While the referendum has three parts, this paper will focus on the first part – the construction of a new school on the far west side, representing over 75% of the total cost of the referendum.

    This report will argue that the most important determinant of whether or not a new school should be built on the far west side (or anywhere else in the district), is whether the long-term outlook clearly indicates it is appropriate. Otherwise, the problem should be considered temporary, with temporary measures pursued to address it. However, the situation here suggests strongly that the problem is a more permanent one, requiring a “permanent solution”, the building of a new school.

    This report will not attempt to forecast specific enrollment figures for the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) – such an effort would take several months to do properly. Instead, it will focus on the TRENDS that support the conclusion a new school is warranted.

    (more…)




    Teaching Math, Singapore Style



    The countries that outperform the United States in math and science education have some things in common. They set national priorities for what public school children should learn and when. They also spend a lot of energy ensuring that every school has a high-quality curriculum that is harnessed to clearly articulated national goals. This country, by contrast, has a wildly uneven system of standards and tests that varies from place to place. We are also notoriously susceptible to educational fads.
    Editorial, New York Times, September 18, 2006

    (more…)




    The Education Issue



    Michael Grunwald:

    To some extent, the controversy over Reading First reflects an older controversy over reading, pitting “phonics” advocates such as Doherty against “whole language” practitioners such as Johnson.
    The administration believes in phonics, which emphasizes repetitive drills that teach children to sound out words. Johnson and other phonics skeptics try to teach the meaning and context of words as well. Reading First money has been steered toward states and local districts that go the phonics route, largely because the Reading First panels that oversaw state applications were stacked with department officials and other phonics fans. “Stack the panel?” Doherty joked in one e-mail. “I have never *heard* of such a thing . . . .” When Reid Lyon, who designed Reading First, complained that a whole-language proponent had received an invitation to participate on an evaluation panel, a top department official replied: “We can’t un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.”
    Doherty bragged to Lyon about pressuring Maine, Mississippi and New Jersey to reverse decisions to allow whole-language programs in their schools: “This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens.” Massachusetts and North Dakota were also told to drop whole-language programs such as Rigby Literacy, and districts that didn’t do so lost funding. “Ha, ha–Rigby as a CORE program?” Doherty wrote in one internal e-mail. “When pigs fly!”
    Said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators: “It’s been obvious all along that the administration knew exactly what it wanted.”
    But it wasn’t just about phonics.
    Success for All is the phonics program with the strongest record of scientifically proved results, backed by 31 studies rated “conclusive” by the American Institutes for Research. And it has been shut out of Reading First. The nonprofit Success for All Foundation has shed 60 percent of its staff since Reading First began; the program had been growing rapidly, but now 300 schools have dropped it. Betsy Ammons, a principal in North Carolina, watched Success for All improve reading scores at her school, but state officials made her switch to traditional textbooks to qualify for the new grants.

    No Child Left Behind Votes: Congress 381 Ayes, 41 Noes 12 NV (Tammy Baldwin voted Aye) | Senate 87 Yea, 10 Nay, 3 Not voting (Feingold Nay, Kohl Yea)




    Dissecting the Dollars: MMSD Referendum Nears



    WKOW-TV:

    The five-minute video, available on MMSD’s Web site, explains why there is a referendum, and how a yes-vote impacts taxpayers’ wallets. Board member Carol Carstensen said it’s intended to be shown at various meetings. “In parent groups, neighborhood groups, service organizations, anyone who wants to find out the facts about the referendum question,” she said.
    Since tax dollars produced it, Carstensen said the video is simply factual, not promotional. In places, she said the numbers are quite exact. For instance, Carstensen said when it shows the impact on the average home, the dollar amounts include an extra 60-percent the district has pay to help fund poor school districts in the state. “That includes the negative aid, the way in which the state finances work,” she said.
    Watching the district’s finances, and the video closely, will be Don Severson. He heads the group Active Citizens for Education, which doesn’t take a position on the referendum, but seeks to clarify information for voters. Severson will questions other dollar amounts, like the lump sum $23 million being advertised on the district’s Web site. “What they aren’t saying is the other extra 60-percent which amounts then to $37 million,” he said.
    Severson said he’ll spend the next six weeks dissecting similar numbers in this video. “Trying to make sure it’s as complete as possible and as accurate as possible.” He said voters should still watch out for the district’s official enrollement numbers for the year, which were taken last Friday. Severson said voters will need that information, since two of the three parts of the question concern overcrowding.

    Much more here.




    Research: School diversity may ease racial prejudice



    A small study and I confess I haven’t looked at the study itself, but a reminder that some important aspects of education aren’t measured by standardized tests.
    TJM
    Research: School diversity may ease racial prejudice
    More bias seen in kids in mostly white setting
    By Shankar Vedantam
    The Washington Post
    Published September 19, 2006
    White children in 1st and 4th grades who live in areas and attend schools with little ethnic diversity are more likely to blame a black child than a white child when presented with ambiguous information involving potential misbehavior, according to a study released last week that explores the origins of bias.
    Researchers showed 138 white children attending a rural Middle Atlantic school a number of pictures and then asked them what they thought was happening.
    One set of pictures, for example, showed a child sitting on the ground with a pained expression, while another child stood behind a swing–suggesting that the child on the ground might have been pushed. Another interpretation would be that the child on the ground had fallen off.
    In every case, the pictures showed children of different races. In some, a white child stood behind the swing and a black child was on the ground. In other pictures, a black child was the potential perpetrator, and the white child the potential victim.
    While 71 percent of the 7- and 10-year-old children said the pictures showed evidence of wrongdoing when the child behind the swing was black, only 60 percent guessed that the white child had pushed the black child when the roles were reversed, University of Maryland researchers Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen reported last week in the journal Child Development.
    The paper noted that white children at a more diverse school had not shown such a bias in a previous experiment, suggesting that greater social contact among children of different ethnicities may prevent or reduce bias among youngsters.
    Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune




    Fordham Foundation: Wisconsin DPI Academic Standards = D-



    Alan Borsuk:

    It’s the fourth time in three months that a national study has accused state officials of shirking their responsibilities, particularly to minority students and those from low-income homes. Two national education reformers said Monday that Department of Public Instruction officials have misled citizens about their work to improve the quality of education in Wisconsin.
    The report being released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington uses harsh terms in critiquing the standards that are intended to guide instruction in Wisconsin schools. “Depth is nowhere to be found,” it said of the science standards. “This document has no structure or method,” it said of the world history standards. “Skimpy content and vague wording,” it said in describing the math standards.
    In June, a different group ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in the country in frustrating the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Also in June, a third organization focused on Milwaukee and Wisconsin as examples of places where more inexperienced – and therefore, less proficient – teachers are disproportionately assigned to high-needs schools. And two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education rejected as inadequate Wisconsin’s plans for dealing with federal requirements that every student have a “highly qualified” teacher.
    Is there a drumbeat in the bad grades for Wisconsin’s efforts to raise the bar in education?
    Not surprisingly, DPI officials disagreed on almost every point. Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, said the DPI was moving forward in addressing the concerns in all of the reports, was meeting all the requirements of federal law, and had made closing the achievement gaps in Wisconsin a high priority.
    He said that, separate from the Fordham report, the DPI was getting started on redoing the state’s academic standards, which have not changed in a decade or so.
    Evers said if there is a theme common to the four reports, it is that all are premised on creating more of a national system of standards and testing for students, something Wisconsin educators do not favor.

    Bill Chrisofferson has moreas does former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.




    Improving School Food



    Lisa Belkin:

    By any health measure, today’s children are in crisis. Seventeen percent of American children are overweight, and increasing numbers of children are developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes, which, until a few years ago, was a condition seen almost only in adults. The obesity rate of adolescents has tripled since 1980 and shows no sign of slowing down. Today’s children have the dubious honor of belonging to the first cohort in history that may have a lower life expectancy than their parents. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted that 30 to 40 percent of today’s children will have diabetes in their lifetimes if current trends continue.
    The only good news is that as these stark statistics have piled up, so have the resources being spent to improve school food. Throw a dart at a map and you will find a school district scrambling to fill its students with things that are low fat and high fiber.
    But there is one big shadow over all this healthy enthusiasm: no one can prove that it works. For all the menus being defatted, salad bars made organic and vending machines being banned, no one can prove that changes in school lunches will make our children lose weight. True, studies show that students who exercise more and have healthier diets learn better and fidget less, and that alone would be a worthwhile goal. But if the main reason for overhauling the cafeteria is to reverse the epidemic of obesity and the lifelong health problems that result, then shouldn’t we be able to prove we are doing what we set out to do?




    CAST Gearing Up For $23.5 Million Referendum



    From Channel 3000:

    Fall is right around the corner. That means classes back in session and another school referendum for Madison voters.
    A group calling itself CAST is gearing up to get voters to say yes to a $23.5 million referendum on Nov. 7.
    CAST stands for Communities And Schools Together.
    Rich Rubasch is heading up the group. He’s a parent looking out for the best interest of his children. He believes a referendum is the answer.

    (more…)




    Curious Social Development



    My daughter is the “Mothering Type”. You know the kind. She still loves dolls beyond her friends, and loves pets, and she took the babysitting class as soon as possible so she could be around small children. She is always the person in the class the helps and socializes with the high needs kids in her classroom too. One day while I was volunteering at her school, a very nice mom of a high need autistic child was in her class, to discuss what she needed the students in this class to know. She discussed her child’s sensitivity to sound, high stimulation, and the need for calmness. During this discussion the students in the class discovered that this student had a sibling. A student inquired about this sibling and who’s class (teacher) he/she was in….

    (more…)




    High School Rigor: Iowa AP Index and a Michigan School Board Member



    The University of Iowa:

    Every May a large number of high school students across America take AP exams. In May 2005 over 1.2 million high school students took over 2.1 million AP exams. AP allows students to pursue college-level studies while still in high school. Over 3000 colleges accept AP exam scores for either college credit or placement in higher level courses. AP was developed by The College Board and is one of the most successful and respected academic programs in the nation.
    There have been numerous studies and articles proclaiming the advantages of AP. AP test scores have been found to be very good predictors of college grades and college graduation. A National Center for Educational Accountability study (2005) indicated that passing AP exams shows a strong and consistent relationship to college graduation rates. Recently, there has been considerable reporting on the benefits of AP courses and exams for minority students and students from poverty backgrounds. Such students exceed their educators’ expectations on AP (when given the opportunity). AP tests and minority students were made famous with the movie “Stand and Deliver” portraying the high success of inner-city Latino students on the AP Calculus exam.
    While there is some controversy over AP (e.g., too much material covered in a short time; more breadth than depth) there is strong agreement (backed by research) by educators that AP courses and exams are a rigorous and meaningful indicator of academic preparation for college. Also, AP exams provide a uniform standard of academic accomplishment across geography, economic status, ethnicity and school size. AP exams cover 34 subject areas and exams are scored on a scale of 1-5, with 5 considered top level work (a grade equivalent of an “A”) in a corresponding college course. A score of 3 or better is often accepted for either college credit or placement.

    (more…)




    Education Spending and Changing Revenue Sources



    Sonya Hoo, Sheila Murray, Kim Rueben:

    Real per capita school spending increased by about 50 percent between 1972 and 2002. Spending levels fell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflecting declines in student populations and funding that grew more slowly than inflation. However, those real declines were reversed by the mid-1980s.
    Although school districts are the primary supplier of education services, they do not always have independent authority to set spending levels or raise revenues. The ability to set expenditure levels depends in part on the taxing authority of school districts. School districts in 36 states are designated independent, meaning they may generate their own revenues, usually by setting property tax rates. In the other states, some school districts are dependent on a city, town, or county to raise revenues. For example, most school districts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are city- or towndependent, while districts in Maryland and North Carolina are primarily dependent on counties. Other states have a mix of both dependent and independent school districts, with dependent school districts generally found in larger cities. Most dependent school districts are on the East Coast.




    Milwaukee Schools Increase Low Performing School Curriculum Oversight



    Alan Borsuk:

    Andrekopoulos said in his speech that from about 1988 through 2000, the leadership of MPS made it a priority to decentralize control of the district, allowing many schools to operate more independently and choose approaches to education. Some schools flourished as a result, but many did not, he said, and the focus was not on student achievement.
    Now, he said, the focus must be on student achievement, and the central office must make sure that good teaching is going on in schools.
    “We need to move away from a system of schools to a school system,” he said, reversing one of the catch phrases that was used by advocates of decentralization – including Andrekopoulos himself, when he was principal of Fritsche Middle School.




    Making the Grade: Madison High Schools & No Child Left Behind Requirements



    Susan Troller:

    Don’t assume that a school is bad just because it’s not making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That comment came today from Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak, whose children attend or have attended East High School.
    East and three other Madison public high schools were cited for not making the necessary progress outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. In addition to being cited for not making adequate yearly progress, East was also rapped for not having made sufficient progress for two straight years.
    La Follette High School, which was on the list last year for not making progress two years in a row, was removed from that list this year. However, there were other areas this year where La Follette did not meet the required proficiency levels for some groups of students.
    “I’m not saying I’m thrilled to see the results,” Mathiak said. “But it’s not as if all schools have equal populations of students facing huge challenges in their lives, chief among them issues of poverty.”

    Sandy Cullen:

    Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, said the preliminary list of schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress, which the Department of Public Instruction released Tuesday, “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know.”
    “Sooner or later, between now and 2013, every school in America is going to be on the list,” Rainwater said.
    Rainwater said there are students at all schools who aren’t learning at the level they should be, and that the district has been working hard to address the needs of those students.

    WKOW-TV:

    It’s a list no school wants to land on. In Wisconsin, the number of schools not meeting federal guidelines more than doubled, from 45 last year to 92 in 2005-06. The lists can be seen here. One list contains schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for one year. Schools in need of improvement are schools who have failed to meet AYP for two or more years in a row.
    Of the 92 schools were the four main Madison high schools, though Superintendent Art Rainwater cautioned against reading too much into it.
    At many local schools this past school year, only one or two segments of students failed to score high enough on state tests.
    In Madison, East, La Follette, West, and Memorial high schools all did not make enough yearly progress. The state department of public instruction cited low reading scores at three of those four.
    Superintendent Art Rainwater said those lower scores came from special needs and low-income students. “Certainly this in a very public way points out issues, but the fact that they didn’t do well on this test is secondary to the fact that we have children who are in the district who aren’t successful,” said Rainwater.
    Staff at Memorial and LaFollette were already working on changes to those schools’ Read 180 programs, including adding special education teachers.

    DPI’s press release.
    DPI Schools Identified for Improvement website.
    Much more from Sarah Carr:

    The list has “broken some barriers relative to different parts of the state,” Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers said. Still, the majority of schools on the list are from urban districts such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine.




    English 11 Planned for 2009?



    Reprinted from the newest West High School publication, The Scallion.
    In response to the popularity of the recently proposed English 10 curriculum, school administrators have begun to plan English 11, a standardized syllabus they believe will promote “equality in the school and confidence in the student.” The course is to be implemented in the 2009-2010 school year so that West High School can end the decade “with a bang!”
    However, many teachers and officials disagree on which books to feature. One faction desires a challenging curriculum that would include Othello, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and the short stories of William Faulkner. Noting that this list may expose intellectual differences between students and will thus lessen the net confidence gain of the school, an opposing faction has titled their proposal “The Life Works of Dr. Seuss: from The Cat in the Hat to Green Eggs and Ham.”
    The growing rift between the two factions has increasingly been manifested through harsh words. One teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, referred to the more classical curriculum as “pandering to the bourgeois interests of the University Heights junta.” In response, the classical teachers noted that while “Dr. Seuss is a widely respected author and his rhymes are humorous and entertaining, his works are inappropriate for the High School setting.”
    Augmenting the current debate, the feminist movement has made clear their opposition to the Dr. Seuss curriculum. Says junior Anna James, “we don’t need to place another dead white man up on a pedestal. The Dr. Seuss proposal is representative of the sexist academia placing the unqualified man over the more qualified woman.” James has proposed her own curriculum of Virginia Wolff and Maya Angelou in a gesture the MENS club referred to as “reverse sexism.”
    In the end, it seems likely that Dr. Seuss will feature prominently in the English 11 curriculum. As Art Rainwater says, “why have intellectual standards when you can have artificially contrived equality that engenders undeserved confidence and intellectual apathy in the students?”
    Many thanks to the Scallion staff responsible for this humorous and insightful piece.




    More on “How States (WI is #1) Inflate Their Progress Under No Child Left Behind”



    Alan Borsuk takes a look at and speaks with DPI’s Tony Evers on Kevin Carey’s report, emailed to this site on 5/20/2006 by a reader involved in these issues:

    In an interview, Carey said he agrees that Wisconsin generally is a high-performing state in educating students, “but I do not believe its performance is as good as it says it is.” He said the way school officials have dealt with the federal law shows “a clear pattern where Wisconsin consistently refuses to challenge itself.”
    He compared Wisconsin with Massachusetts, which he said also has high performing students. That state was ranked 39th in the “Pangloss Index,” because it has taken a much tougher line on such things as defining “highly qualified” teachers to require demonstrated knowledge in the subject area being taught. Wisconsin has generally defined such teachers by whether they have state licenses.
    In a separate analysis, two researchers connected to an education magazine called Education Next analyzed the differences between the percentage of students in each state listed as proficient or better in reading and math on the state’s own tests and the percentage in the same categories in the nationwide testing program called the National Assessment of Education Progress. In many states, there is a wide disparity between the two, leading some to argue that states are setting proficiency standards too low.
    The two researchers, Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess, both generally described as conservatives, then gave each state a grade based on how big a difference there was between the state scores and the national scores. The two gave Wisconsin a grade of C-, based on 2005 results. That was better than the D they gave the state for results in 2003.

    Sandy Cullen wrote recently ” new statewide assessment used to test the knowledge of Wisconsin students forced a lowering of the curve, a Madison school official said.
    The results showed little change in the percentages of students scoring at proficient and advanced levels”




    State Tightening SAGE class size compliance



    State tightening class-size initiative
    Schools receiving funding must get formal waiver to exceed 15-1 ratio
    By AMY HETZNER, Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel
    ahetzner@journalsentinel.com
    Posted: May 31, 2006
    In an effort to get a better handle on state money schools use to reduce class sizes, the state Department of Public Instruction plans to tighten its control over schools that seek to escape from standards set by a state class-size reduction program.
    Advertisement
    The state agency has imposed a new requirement that schools seek formal waivers before exceeding a 15-to-1 student-teacher ratio guideline set by the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program.
    DPI Deputy Superintendent Tony Evers acknowledged that requiring schools to get a waiver could end some practices the DPI had not known were in effect. Yet the requirement isn’t designed to limit flexibility schools have had, he said.

    (more…)




    Numbers Don’t Lie



    Martha Stark:

    I believe in the power of numbers. I don’t know when my belief in numbers began. Perhaps when I was a child. My high school dropout, bookkeeper dad came home each week to tell us that he had played the numbers — my neighborhood’s equivalent of lotto but lots more complex.
    Dad would convert every thought and dream to a number with help from his trusty dream book. You had a dream about mice? Consult the book. “That’s a 12, 17 or 21. What was the mouse doing — climbing out of a garbage can? Well climbing is a 21, 34, or 42 and garbage is a 17, 39, or 32. So, let’s play 12 and 21 (the reverse of each other), 17 (it appeared twice), and 34, the year your mom was born.”




    Work on education gap lauded



    From the Wisconsin State Journal, May 2, 2006
    ANDY HALL ahall@madison.com
    Madison made more progress than any urban area in the country in shrinking the racial achievement gap and managed to raise the performance levels of all racial groups over the past decade, two UW- Madison education experts said Monday in urging local leaders to continue current strategies despite tight budgets.
    “I’ve seen districts around the United States, and it really is remarkable that the Madison School District is raising the achievement levels for all students, and at the same time they’re closing the gaps,” Julie Underwood, dean of the UW- Madison School of Education, said in an interview.
    Underwood said she’s heard of no other urban district that reduced the gap so significantly without letting the test scores of white students stagnate or slide closer to the levels of lower-achieving black, Hispanic or Southeast Asian students.
    “The way that it’s happened in Madison,” she said, “is truly the best scenario. . . . We haven’t done it at the expense of white students.”
    Among the most striking trends:
    Disparities between the portions of white and minority students attaining the lowest ranking on the state Third Grade Reading Test have essentially been eliminated.
    Increasing shares of students of all racial groups are scoring at the top levels – proficient and advanced – on the Third Grade Reading Test.
    Graduation rates have improved significantly for students in every racial group.
    Underwood commented after one of her colleagues, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, presented a review of efforts to attack the racial achievement gap to the Schools of Hope Leadership Team meeting at United Way of Dane County.
    Gamoran told the 25- member team, comprised of community leaders from the school system, higher education, nonprofit agencies, business and government, that Madison’s strategy parallels national research documenting the most effective approaches – one-to-one tutoring, particularly from certified teachers; smaller class sizes; and improved training of teachers.
    “My conclusion is that the strategies the Madison school system has put in place to reduce the racial achievement gap have paid off very well and my hope is that the strategies will continue,” said Gamoran, who as director of the education-research center oversees 60 research projects, most of which are federally funded. A sociologist who’s worked at UW-Madison since 1984, Gamoran’s research focuses on inequality in education and school reform.
    In an interview, Gamoran said that Madison “bucked the national trend” by beginning to shrink the racial achievement during the late 1990s, while it was growing in most of America’s urban school districts.
    But he warned that those gains are in jeopardy as Wisconsin school districts, including Madison, increasingly resort to cuts and referendums to balance their budgets.
    Art Rainwater, Madison schools superintendent, said Gamoran’s analysis affirmed that the district and Schools of Hope, a civic journalism project of the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) that grew into a community campaign to combat the racial achievement gap, are using the best known tactics – approaches that need to be preserved as the district makes future cuts.
    “The things that we’ve done, which were the right things to do, positively affect not just our educationally neediest students,” Rainwater said. “They help everybody.”
    John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, and Rainwater agree that the progress is fragile.
    “The future of it is threatened if we don’t have it adequately funded,” Matthews said.
    Leslie Ann Howard, United Way president, whose agency coordinates Schools of Hope, said Gamoran’s analysis will help focus the community’s efforts, which include about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors a year working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in grades kindergarten through eight.
    The project’s leaders have vowed to continue working until at least 2011 to fight gaps that persist at other grade levels despite the gains among third- graders.
    “I think it’s critical for the community to know that all kids benefited from the strategies that have been put in place the last 10 years – the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and everybody in between,” Howard said.
    “To be able to say it’s helping everyone, I think is really astonishing.”




    Budget Forum Audio / Video



    Rafael Gomez held a “Parent and Taxpayer Perspective on School Budgets” last evening. Participants included: Carol Carstensen, Peter Gascoyne, Don Severson, Jeff Henriques, Shari Entenmann, Jerry Eykholt and Larry Winkler. This 70 minute event is well worth watching (or listening via the audio file).

    • Carol discussed the “three legs” of school finance and passed around an article she wrote recently “State Finance of Public Education and the MMSD Budget” [112K pdf version];
    • Peter Gascoyne suggested that we embrace long term financial forecasts as a means to guide our planning. Peter also expressed doubts about any material change to state school financing of public education over the next five years (I agree with this assessment).
    • Don Severson mentioned Madison’s historic strong financial support for public education and the need to be as efficient as possible with the District’s $321M+ budget.

    Audio [mp3] and video




    INCLUSIVE EDUCATION AS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE



    A letter to the editor
    Dear Editor: We are dismayed that two of the candidates running for the Madison School Board, Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole, would work toward reversing access for students by promoting ability-grouping and tracking. In fact, Cole called the district’s efforts to provide more heterogeneous classes that all students could access “worrisome.”
    Consider these points:
    • The research has clearly shown that ability-grouping and tracking lead to unequal educational opportunities for students, particularly students of color, poor students and students with disabilities.
    • Madison schools are regularly studied and visited by other urban districts looking for successful ways to increase inclusion.
    • Only nine-tenths of 1 percent of MMSD’s African-American students are taking advanced placement classes, while more than 30 percent receive special education support.
    • The achievement gap between white, middle-income students and all other students in the district is just starting to show improvement.
    This is an issue of civil rights and full access for traditionally marginalized groups. Mathiak, Cole and their supporters can point to no hard data showing that including all students in classes with appropriate supports, services and differentiated curriculum harms the highest echelon. At most, they claim that some high-achieving students may be “bored.” Hardly a concern when the dropout rates, AP course access, and postgraduate outcomes for traditionally marginalized students continue to be both a nationwide and an MMSD problem.
    Using words like “cookie cutter” approach and “one size fits all,” they portray the issue of access as one of “dumbing down” to low achievers. Nothing could be further from the truth in successful differentiated classes, where all students access curriculum at the learning levels that are appropriate for their individual needs and goals.
    In fact, teaching in a fully inclusive model requires the best-trained, most creative and hardest-working school staff available. While Mathiak and Cole say it sounds good in theory, we have seen effective inclusive education in classrooms all over the district.
    That’s why Madison Partners supports strong leadership, high-level training and total team teaching as strategies to improve Madison schools and outcomes for all students. Just because inclusive strategies are challenging doesn’t mean these research-proven methods aren’t worth doing.
    We encourage the community to step forward on this critical civil rights issue.
    Kelli Betzinger, Kristina Grebener, Helen Hartman, Barb Katz, Jane and Randy Lambert, Lisa and Mike Pugh, Tom Purnell, Beth Swedeen and Terry Tuschen on behalf of Madison Partners for Inclusive Schools
    Published: March 28, 2006
    Copyright 2006 The Capital Times




    When Ability Grouping Makes Good Sense



    By James J. Gallagher
    I am posting this article from 1992 given the recent debate on one size fits all classrooms. Professor Gallagher makes the point that the argument that homogeneous grouping hurts no one is clearly false: research consistently shows that high ability students do better when they are in classes with similarly able peers.
    The recent educational literature has been filled with discussions of the effects of ability grouping, tracking, etc., and new virtues have been found in the concept of heterogeneous grouping of students. The homogeneous grouping of slow-learning children does not appear to be profitable, but the homogeneous grouping of bright students is a very different matter, and often ignored in these discussions. (See “Tracking Found To Hurt Prospects of Low Achievers,” Education Week, Sept. 16, 1992.)
    The goal of heterogeneous grouping appears to be a social one, not an academic one.(emphasis added) The desirability of that goal needs to be argued on its own merits, which I believe to be considerable. The argument is clouded, however, by the insistence of the proponents that nothing is lost in academic performance by such grouping. This position is clearly false, in my judgment, as it applies to bright students. Apart from the meta-analyses which indicate substantial gains for gifted students grouped for ability, there is a small matter of common sense.

    (more…)




    April 2004 West High School Math Teacher Letter



    Susan Lochen, Madison West High School (co-signed by other West math teachers: Janice Cis, Keith Knowles, Carol Michalski, Jackie Hubbard, Daniel Boyland, Artie L. Orlik, Stephen Lang, Stephen Land, Tim Goldsworthy):

    Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
    It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?

    I’d forgotten (unfortunately) about this letter. School Board Seat 1 candidate Maya’s post below included a link to these words. The current school board majority has not addressed these critical questions….




    Standards, Accountability, and School Reform



    This is very long, and the link may require a password so I’ve posted the entire article on the continued page.
    TJM
    http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=11566
    Standards, Accountability, and School Reform
    by Linda Darling-Hammond — 2004
    The standards-based reform movement has led to increased emphasis on tests, coupled with rewards and sanctions, as the basis for “accountability” systems. These strategies have often had unintended consequences that undermine access to education for low-achieving students rather than enhancing it. This article argues that testing is information for an accountability system; it is not the system itself. More successful outcomes have been secured in states and districts, described here, that have focused on broader notions of accountability, including investments in teacher knowledge and skill, organization of schools to support teacher and student learning, and systems of assessment that drive curriculum reform and teaching improvements.

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    Math Forum Audio / Video and Links



    Video and audio from Wednesday’s Math Forum are now available [watch the 80 minute video] [mp3 audio file 1, file 2]. This rare event included the following participants:

    The conversation, including audience questions was lively.

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    A Formula for Failure in L.A. Schools



    This is from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times. I was alerted to it by the Daily Howler blog http://www.dailyhowler.com/. I mention this because that site has had some great education coverage lately and will soon be launching an all-education companion blog.
    http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-dropout30jan30,0,3211437.story?coll=la-news-learning
    THE VANISHING CLASS
    A Formula for Failure in L.A. Schools
    Because they can’t pass algebra, thousands of students are denied diplomas. Many try again and again — but still get Fs.
    By Duke Helfand
    Times Staff Writer
    January 30, 2006
    Each morning, when Gabriela Ocampo looked up at the chalkboard in her ninth-grade algebra class, her spirits sank.
    There she saw a mysterious language of polynomials and slope intercepts that looked about as familiar as hieroglyphics.
    She knew she would face another day of confusion, another day of pretending to follow along. She could hardly do long division, let alone solve for x.
    “I felt like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I going to do?’ ” she recalled.
    Gabriela failed that first semester of freshman algebra. She failed again and again — six times in six semesters. And because students in Los Angeles Unified schools must pass algebra to graduate, her hopes for a diploma grew dimmer with each F.
    Midway through 12th grade, Gabriela gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School.
    Her story might be just a footnote to the Class of 2005 except that hundreds of her classmates, along with thousands of others across the district, also failed algebra.
    Of all the obstacles to graduation, algebra was the most daunting.
    The course that traditionally distinguished the college-bound from others has denied vast numbers of students a high school diploma.
    “It triggers dropouts more than any single subject,” said Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer. “I think it is a cumulative failure of our ability to teach math adequately in the public school system.”

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    Teachers bar shift in health coverage



    Madison’s teachers union said Friday it will not agree to reopen its contract with the School District to renegotiate health-care benefits, dashing hopes the district could find cheaper coverage.
    A joint committee of district and union representatives has been studying rising health- care costs, but both sides had to agree to reopen the 2005-07 contract to take any action. Either way, officials say taxpayers would not have seen savings, at least not in the short term.
    John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., said a strong majority of union members like the coverage they have and don’t want to jeopardize it, even though any savings would have gone to higher salaries.
    “Members of MTI have elected to have a higher quality insurance rather than higher wages, and that’s their choice,” he said.
    By Doug Erickson, Wisconsin State Journal, February 18, 2006
    derickson@madison.com

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    Noted Educator Donna Ford is Coming to Wisconsin



    Dr. Donna Ford, Vanderbilt University Professor and nationally known speaker on gifted education and multi cultural and urban education issues, will be visiting Wisconsin this March.
    In conjunction with the MMSD Parent Community Relations Department, Dr. Ford will be presenting a workshop for parents entitled “Promoting Achievement, Identity, and Pride in your Children” on March 8, 2006 from 6:00—8:00 p.m. at the Double Tree Hotel, 545 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI. For more information and to register, contact Diane Crear at 663-1692 or dcrear@madison.k12.wi.us Space is limited. Please make your reservation no later than February 20, 2006
    Then on March 10 and 11, the Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted (WATG) is proud to have Dr. Ford as the featured speaker for their spring event for educators and parents:
    On Friday afternoon, March 10, Dr. Ford will speak on “In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms that Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds” in Janesville.
    Friday evening, March 10, Dr. Ford will address parents and educators on the topic of “Parenting for Achievement and Identity” in Milwaukee.
    Saturday, March 11, Dr. Ford will present an all day workshop in Milwaukee on “In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms that Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds.” This is a learning and application experience designed specifically for use in the urban/suburban classroom!
    For more information and to register go to www.watg.org .

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    Gutknecht on “Swan Creek residents ask to join Oregon schools”



    Kurt Gutknecht:

    Frustrated by continued uncertainty over where their children will attend school, residents of Swan Creek are asking to be transferred to the Oregon School District.
    The decision would reverse a 2003 decision that transferred Swan Creek to the Madison Metropolitan School District.
    Residents obtained signatures from 188 households on a petition asking the respective school boards to consider the request. Three real estate developers also endorsed the move.
    If the school boards refuse the request, residents can ask that an appeals board consider the transfer.
    “We know it’s an uphill battle,” said resident Renee Hammond, referring to the previous unsuccessful attempt to reverse the decision of the two school boards.
    Several residents said they had been misled about schools when they purchased their homes. Some had been told that they could choose which school district they wanted to attend or that the Madison district planned to construct a school in Swan Creek or elsewhere in Fitchburg.
    More upsetting to residents, however, is the uncertainty over whether their children can continue to attend Leopold Elementary School. The Madison school board is weighing plans to alleviate overcrowding at Leopold that could send children from Swan Creek to several different schools.
    Organizers of the petition drive said they could easily have obtained more signatures.
    Romney Ludgate said there’s no assurance that making space for additional students at Leopold would be more than a short-term solution to overcrowding and that residents might have to continually address the issue.
    “Until a school is built in Fitchburg, residents of the southern part of the district in Fitchburg will continue to face extreme instability” in where Swan Creek students would attend school, Hammond said.

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    MMSD’s Enrollment & Capacity Picture: A Perspective



    The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) is facing a significant challenge – growth. As a result of that growth – which is not evenly distributed across the district’s region – some schools are facing, or will soon be facing, overcrowding. Other schools still continue to see languishing enrollment which calls into question the appropriate future use of their facilities. Two task forces were created to examine these issues, and to recommend up to three options to address them. The task forces were also asked to develop options so as to reduce concentrations of low-income students. This report endeavors to examine how the enrollment picture plays out over the next five years, particularly under the various options proposed by the task forces. Special attention is given here to the West Side task force options due to this author’s greater familiarity with them, and his continued maintenance of a model tracking their proposals.
    This report [121K PDF] first looks at the proposed options for the West & Memorial areas, and examines how projected enrollment and capacity compare over each of the next five school years. The report will then consider population projections over the next 25 years to try to get some sense of what one may expect as regards future demand for school facilities.
    Disclosure, or why am I doing this?

    • I recently moved to Madison and saw this issue as a way to get involved in the community and to understand “how things work” here.
    • This particular issue is a complex problem, and therefore a rather interesting one to look at.
    • I have two children attending MMSD schools, and therefore am especially interested in the well-being of this district, and community.
    • Once I got started, it’s been hard to stop (though my work and family demands have certainly constrained my efforts).

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    Urban League Honors Outstanding Students



    Nine local high school students were inducted into the National Achievers Society at Sunday’s 22nd annual Youth Recognition Breakfast. The society was started by the National Urban League and other civic groups to promote positive attitudes about academic achievement, school participation, and a committment to exceeding expectations. The inducted students include Tyrone Cratic of East, Ricquelle Badger of Edgewood, Chukwuma Offor of La Follette, Heena Ahmed of McFarland, Latoya Allen of Memorial, April Greene of Sun Prairie, Tessia Brown of Verona, Rob Hetzel of Waunakee, and Diana Savage of West. In addition, Halil Ahmed and Shamika Kroger from Memorial and La’Basha McKinney of East were named Mann Scholars, a program that honors the legacy of Bernard and Kathlyn Mann, African-American parents whose five children graduated from Madison schools and went on to receive college degrees. Outstanding Young Person Awards were also presented to over 170 middle and high school students from around Dane county. Congratulations to these exemplary students.




    Swan Creek Residents Organize to Stay at Leopold



    Kurt Gutknecht, writing in the Fitchburg Star:

    Residents of Swan Creek have launched a spirited campaign against plans to bus students from the area to Midvale/Lincoln elementary schools.
    A few days after Christmas, 185 households signed a letter [500K PDF] opposing the plan, which a task force had proposed to address overcrowding at several schools in the western part of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
    Students from Swan Creek now attend Leopold Elementary School.
    The letter was presented at the Jan. 5 meeting of the task force. Another task force is preparing plans for the east side of the district where under enrollment is a greater concern.
    According to the letter, said the plan being considered meant the “subdivision is used selfishly by the Madison school district” to “plug holes in a plan that has very little merit” and contradicts an agreement the district made when it exchanged land with the Oregon School District. During the negotiations prior to the land swap, the Madison district said children from Swan Creek would attend Leopold.
    The letter cited behavioral and safety issues associated with long bus rides, the negative effects on parent involvement and neighborhood cohesion, and criticized the attempt to use children from the subdivision to achieve balanced income at the schools.
    Prasanna Raman, a member of the task force who presented the letter, said busing students from Swan Creek could be a case of reverse discrimination.

    UPDATE: Midvale parent Jerry Eykholt sent this letter [pdf] to the Task Force and Swan Creek residents.

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    Speaking up about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & King Events in Madison



    The Madison Times (now owned by former school board member, Ray Allen) recently asked various members of the Madison community to comment on the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was honored to do so. These comments can be seen in this weeks issue. I’m also including dates and times of Dr. King events in the City. I hope you and your family are able to attend some of these events.

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    “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!



    Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.
    When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:
    Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
    This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
    Characteristics of this group:

    • Grade 5 math scores – 84.2 percentile
    • Male – 55%
    • Low income – 53%
    • Minority – 42%
    • African American – 31%
    • Hispanic – 6%
    • Asian – 5%

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    The Two Faces of Advance Placement Courses



    Tamar Lewin writes in the New York Times January 8, 2006, about Advance Placement Classes – students and parents believe AP classes are important preparation for college, colleges have mixed feelings about students who take AP classes.
    “We’ve been put off for quite a while about the idea of teaching to the test, which is what a lot of A.P.’s are,” says Lynn Krahling, guidance director of the Queen Anne’s School in Upper Marlboro, Md. “We’re convinced, as an educational institution, that they’re not as valuable as what we could be offering on our own.
    “But,” she says, “I think we’re going to stick with A.P.’s – purely out of fear. Parents are so terrified that if we drop our A.P.’s it would really affect college admissions that I think some of them would jump ship.”

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    West HS English 9 and 10: Show us the data!



    Here is a synopsis of the English 10 situation at West HS.
    Currently — having failed to receive any reply from BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang to our request that he investigate this matter and provide an opportunity for public discussion — we are trying to get BOE President Carol Carstensen to put a discussion of the English 10 proposal (and the apparent lack of data supporting its implementation) on the agenda for a BOE meeting.  Aside from the fact that there is serious doubt that the course, as proposed, will meet the educational needs of the high and low end students, it is clear we are witnessing yet another example of school officials making radical curricular changes without empirical evidence that they will work and without open, honest and respectful dialogue with the community.
    As the bumper sticker says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!”

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    Letter to Performance and Achievement Committee



    The following letter was hand delivered to Shwaw Vang a week ago, and email copies were sent to the Board, Superintendent Rainwater, and Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. There so far has been no response. A follow up email was sent yesterday to the Performance and Achievement Committee again asking that they look into why the English 9 curriculum has not worked in raising student achievement before allowing West High School to implement changes in the 10th grade English curriculum.
    Dear Shwaw,
    We are writing to you in your capacity as Chair of the BOE Performance and Achievement Committee to ask that you address a critical situation currently unfolding at West High School.

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    Evaluation of the SLC Project at West High School



    Here is the full text of SLC Evaluator Bruce King’s recent report on the plan to implement a common English 10 course at West HS.
    Evaluation of the SLC Project at West High School
    The 10th Grade English Course
    M.Bruce King, Project Evaluator
    608-263-4769, mbking1@wisc.edu
    2 November 2005
    The development and implementation of the common 10th grade English course is a significant initiative for two related reasons. First, the course is central to providing instruction in the core content areas within each of the four small learning communities in grade 10, as outlined in the SLC grant proposal. And second, the course represents a major change from the elective course system for 10th graders that has been in existence at West for many years. Given the importance of this effort, we want to understand what members of the English Department thought of the work to date.

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    Run for School Board



    It’s not too early to think about running, even though school board elections are “spring elections,” because it takes time to learn the issues and organize a campaign.
    A lively debate during school board elections will help shape better policies and improve programs for Madison’s children. A lively debate, of course, requires more than one candidate in a race. You can be one of those candidates!
    You won’t be alone. A strong network of experienced activists from all across the city will help with research, organizing, fundraising, and all the other necessities of running a campaign.
    As a candidate, you would run city-wide for one of two numbered seats currently held by Bill Keys and Juan Lopez, both of whom I have encouraged to run again.
    Learn more by visiting this web page.
    If you’d like to know more about how to run, feel free to contact Jim Zellmer, Webmaster of schoolinfosystem.org, (608) 213-0434, zellmer at mac dot com; Don Severson, Active Citizens for Education, (608) 238-8300, don at activecitizensforeducation dot org; Ed Blume, (608) 225-6591, edblume at mailbag dot com.




    State’s learning gap still vast



    Wisconsin students stayed above national averages in test results released Wednesday, but a Journal Sentinel analysis of the data shows that the gap between black and white students was among the largest in the nation. In eighth-grade reading and in fourth-grade math, the gaps were larger than in any other state in the country.
    By SARAH CARR
    scarr@journalsentinel.com
    Oct. 19, 2005

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    Get Involved at West NOW



    I said it in the comments section attached to Marcia’s original post. Now is the time for pre-high school families to get involved at West. Don’t wait.
    This will be like turning around the Titanic, however–there is a great deal of momentum to disassemble much of what was strong about West for high achievers. And what the district seems to be ignoring is that many of these families make up the backbone of support for the school, from PTO, to athletic and drama boosters, etc, both in terms of hands-on involvement and financial contributions.
    The safety valve of attending UW classes is also being shut off, too. If a course is offered ANYWHERE in the district, MMSD won’t pay for a West student to take it at UW. In addition, there is a “residency” requirement, i.e., to be considered a full-time student, a certain number of credit hours have to be taken at West or be approved to be taken elsewhere. So even if your family can afford to pay for UW courses and can get approval from UW for your student to take more than one class per semester, your student might still run afoul of the residency requirement.
    Of course, home schooling is an option. Some families have quilted together classes at West, UW and home or on-line. One of the “West” national merit scholars this year has done just that.




    Harlem School Uses Regionally Grown Food




    Reader Barb Williams forwarded this article by Kim Severson:

    But perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took control of the students’ diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home.
    Experts see the program as a Petri dish in which the effects of good food and exercise on students’ health and school performance can be measured and, perhaps, eventually replicated.




    Authors Challenge Schools to Challenge Students



    Tuesday, September 20, 2005 – Washington Post
    Two new books on how to teach students of divergent abilities seem at first to have been written on different planets.
    But Deborah L. Ruf’s “Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind” and a new edition of Jeannie Oakes’s “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality” eventually reveal a similar frustration. Both want children to be given more individual attention and more of an academic challenge than they are getting in most schools.

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    No Names Yet of Task Force Members



    For more than a week, I’ve been trying to get the names of the people appointed to the East and West/Memorial task forces on attendance and facilities.
    I have the following partial list of the names of people who were nominated by board members and the board member who nominated each.

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    Soda Marketers To Reduce School Sales



    American Beverage Association:

    Under the new policy, the beverage industry will provide:

    • Elementary Schools with only water and 100 percent juice.
    • Middle Schools with only nutritious and/or lower calorie beverages, such as water, 100 percent juice, sports drinks, no-calorie soft drinks, and low-calorie juice drinks. No full-calorie soft drinks or full-calorie juice drinks with five percent or less juice until after school; and
    • High Schools with a variety of beverage choices, such as bottled water, 100 percent juice, sports drinks, and juice drinks. No more than 50 percent of the vending selections will be soft drinks.

    The American Beverage Association is asking beverage producers and school districts to implement the new policy as soon as possible. Where school beverage contracts already exist, the policy would be implemented when the contract expires or earlier if both parties agree. The success of the policy is dependent on voluntary implementation of it by individual beverage companies and by school officials. The policy will not supercede federal, state and local regulations already in place. ABA’s Board of Directors, which unanimously approved the policy, represents 20 companies that comprise approximately 85 percent of school vending beverage sales by bottlers.

    Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the U.S., and the responsibility for finding common-sense solutions is shared by everyone, including our industry. We intend to be part of the solution by increasing the availability of lower-calorie and/or nutritious beverages in schools,” said Susan K. Neely, ABA president and chief executive officer.

    Pepsi Statement | Coke Statement (not yet online). Betsy McKay has more (click the link below).

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    PEOPLE Program: The Debate continues



    (With apologies to readers – it is not possible to respond using the comments feature on the blog.)
    Response to Lucy’s Post on PEOPLE program
    JOAN: Tempting though it is to rebut your arguments tit for tat I am not sure it will necessarily be productive.
    RESPONSE: I would be interested in a “tit for tat” response to my comments on the reasons why the PEOPLE program is needed.
    JOAN: Let’s back up and look at the assumptions underlying this program. The first is that minority students are not getting adequate preparation in their home schools. You assert that this is true in the well-staffed, well-funded Madison school district because of institutional racism. You believe your visual review of a school proves your point. That’s not particularily strong evidence.
    RESPONSE: I think you need to go back and read what I wrote. I said,

    “All of the above examples are conditions that I have witnessed first hand or, in one or two cases, have heard of from other parents – including parents of white students. When the above conditions disappear and/or white students experience these same conditions, we can talk about equity.”

    Nowhere did I say or imply that my comments were “based on a visual review of a school.” It is true that there is no systematic, methodologically defensible, study of how students of color and their parents fare in Madison’s schools. I would welcome a well-crafted study of this nature.

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    Task Forces Need Community Expertise & Open Debate



    I delivered the following statement to the MMSD Long Range Planning Committee on July 11:

    Back on October 18, 2004, I spoke to the Long Range Planning Committee at a meeting at Leopold School. I suggested that “the Long Range Planning Committee take the time to think beyond an April referendum on a new school” at Leopold. I see the West side task force as just that, and I compliment the board for forming the group.
    I also made the statement that “citizens of the broad Madison school community include people with a tremendous amount of expertise in education, management, finance, urban planning, real life, and more. You should use every possible opportunity to tap their knowledge.”
    I’m here again tonight to restate my plea that the Long Range Planning Committee draw on the vast knowledge and experience of people in the community, because as I said in October, “I have this perhaps naive democratic belief that the more ideas you get the better the final outcome.”

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    Planning for MMSD Legislative Committee for 2005-06



    As chair of the MMSD School Board’s Legislative Committee for 2005-06, I post information about state and federal laws and legislative issues related to the Madison Schools on this blog under Hot Topics , Madison School Board Legislative Committee blog.
    In June I asked MMSD staff for the committee, Joe Quick, for his ideas on future directions for the committee. My questions and his answers are available under as well as news reports and background materials.

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