According to a new study which will be presented August 4 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, technology has made it possible to identify and gain the personal information of strangers by using facial recognition and social media profiles like Facebook.
The study, led by Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University, combined the use of three different technologies – cloud computing, facial recognition and public information that can be found on various social networking sites.
They used these technologies in three different experiments. In the first experiment, Acquisti and his team were able to identify members of an online dating site where members do not use their real names for identification. The second experiment allowed the research team to identify college students in real life walking on campus based solely on their face and information gathered online.
LAUSD fired 56 tenured teachers in 2010-11 school year
Los Angeles Unified fired 56 tenured teachers in the 2010-11 school year – more than four times the number terminated the previous year.
The information was learned by the Daily News, a sister newspaper of the Daily Breeze.
The increase over the 13 teachers fired in 2009-10 represents a policy shift for the district as it tries to improve the quality of teaching, despite state rules that can make the dismissal process lengthy and difficult.
A total of 758 teachers – those with tenure and without – as well as substitutes and administrators were fired last year and 105 more resigned to avoid dismissal, according to a district memo.
Among those fired for poor performance were 136 nonpermanent educators – those with less than two years’ experience – and 312 substitute teachers.
The total represents less than 3 percent of the district’s workforce of 30,000 teachers, but it’s a significant increase from the number of terminations made in previous years.
The myth of the extraordinary teacher
Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.
The kid in the back wants me to define “logic.” The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn’t done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I’ll never know. I’m trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote “clarify your thinking” on his essay, but he’s still confused.
It’s 8:15 a.m. and already I’m behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.
More Business Schools To Accept GRE Scores
Momentum for business schools to accept the GRE test, mainly used by graduate-school applicants in the social sciences and humanities, is building as those schools aim to attract less traditional applicants.
Since April, more than 100 business schools have said they will accept applications with GRE–Graduate Record Examination–scores. In the past, business schools have only accepted the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, which looks more at reading comprehension and reasoning. The GRE has a stronger focus on vocabulary and straightforward quantitative skills.
Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting
Excellence in Education’s PowerPoint presentation: 1MB PDF, via a kind Julie Gocey email.
Related links: Video: Governor’s “Read to Lead” Task Force Meeting.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Read To Lead Task Force, here.
How does Wisconsin compare? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org
The AFT’s Real Feelings About Parent Power
When the AFT offers a road map on how to shut down Parent Power efforts, it offers a nice PDF document to do it. Apparently in a fit of celebration during last month’s TEACH 2011 conference, the nation’s second-largest teachers union offered up a presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate managed to make the state’s Parent Trigger law a little less harder for parents to use. (Dropout Nation is doing everyone a courtesy by making it available for public consumption; the orginal is still available at the AFT’s Web site. At least, for now.)
Can Johnny Read? CA bill would eliminate standardized tests for 2nd grade students
Remember a long time ago when educators were asking why Johnny couldn’t read? Well now in California, it appears that there is a major push to delay learning how well Johnny can read in the first place.
Early assessments are essential to get kids like Johnny on track to succeed in school. These assessments provide critical data that help schools identify which kids need extra help and use best practices to help them get to grade level proficiency.
SB 740, a bill pushed by the California Teachers Association, is quickly moving through the California Legislature, which would eliminate standardized second grade testing. SB 740 eliminates a valuable early assessment mechanism for teachers and parents. Without the data from the second grade assessment, we will be less likely to know exactly which students need extra help. And we will likely have more schools that fail to close achievement gaps and allow students–especially low income and minority students–to fall further behind.
Chicago Public Schools Pushing for Property Tax Hike
For the first time since 2007, Chicago Public Schools will seek to increase the amount of money it collects from property taxes to raise an estimated $150 million over the next fiscal year-and likely add to Chicago residents’ property tax bills.
School district officials said the tax increase-to the maximum allowed by state law-is needed to help reduce a $712 million deficit. The tax increase is part of the district’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2012 that was released Friday.
Asked if Mayor Rahm Emanuel had signed off on the politically sensitive decision, school district officials said the Board of Education, not Emanuel, decides whether to raise property taxes. But while the school system does develop its budget and has taxing authority, it has been intertwined with the mayor’s office since Mayor Richard M. Daley took control of public schools in 1995. The current CPS leadership and school board were hand-picked by Emanuel.
The Kapors’ SMASH Academy is filling an education gap
Give a kid a chance and you’ll be amazed at what happens next.
That thought kept rolling through my mind as I surveyed the controlled chaos that was lunch for 80 teenagers who’d moved onto Stanford’s campus to take five summer weeks of intensive math and science courses.
I know. What’s so different about a passel of brilliant kids studying hard stuff at Stanford?
Well, for one thing, a pessimist might look at these particular kids working their way through hamburgers, chicken and mashed potatoes, and conclude that they are not college material. In fact, the vast majority of them would be the first in their families to go to college. Nearly all of them attend high schools where most students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Some live in tough neighborhoods. Some dodge gangs on the way to and from school — and maybe even at school.
But that’s not what defines them. Not at all. The kids at Stanford, members of the inaugural class of the Silicon Valley version of the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy (SMASH), are energetic, optimistic, determined, resourceful and approaching brilliant.
New Wisconsin School of Business Dean to Confront State Budget Woes
François Ortalo-Magné takes the helm of the Wisconsin School of Business next month following Wisconsin’s contentious battle over collective bargaining rights for public-employee unions, which has presented challenges for the state university system.
Mr. Ortalo-Magné, however, sees those challenges as opportunities. The business school suffered some loss of funding–a small fraction of the nearly $100 million cut made to parent school University of Wisconsin-Madison. In exchange, the university system wrested some control over hiring and budgets from the state.
Nice pr in the Wall Street Journal…
Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth
Teenagers ‘addicted’ to using smartphones
Just under half of British children aged 12 to 15 own a smartphone, with many claiming to be “addicted” to the devices, which they use while eating, at the cinema and in bed.
Research published by Ofcom, the communications market regulator, on Thursday found that smartphone ownership was highest among younger teenagers, with 47 per cent owning a device, compared with 27 per cent of British adults.
About 60 per cent of teenagers who owned smartphones described themselves as “addicted” to their handsets and around 71 per cent of smartphone owning teens have their device switched on all the time.
Union to defend teachers in cheating scandals
The head of the USA’s second-largest teachers union on Monday said local affiliates will defend the rights of teachers caught up in cheating scandals, including the one now unfolding in Atlanta. But she said cheating “under any circumstances is unacceptable.”
Speaking to reporters during the American Federation of Teachers’ biannual training conference, Randi Weingarten said the union would “obviously” represent teachers accused of cheating “to make sure that people have some kind of fairness — and that it’s not some kind of witch hunt.”
A long-awaited report released last week by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, found teacher- or principal-led cheating in 44 of 56 Atlanta schools investigated. Investigators determined that 178 educators cheated. Of those, 82 confessed.
Madison School District Talented & Gifted Program Update
During the 2011-2012 school year, as MMSD implements Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI2) and the new district School Support Teams, the plan for delivery of Talented and Gifted Services will continue to be integrated and refined so that it accomplishes the following: 1) is both systemic and systematic in nature; 2) is collaborative; 3) is financially sustainable; 4) is fluid and responsive to student needs; S) offers appropriate opportunities for student growth and talent development; 6) addresses the comprehensive needs (academic, social and personal growth) of students; 7) is aligned with State regulations, professional standards, current research, and effective practice; and 8) provides goals and evaluation procedures to evaluate growth and suggest areas in which change is needed. This Plan for TAG Services describes the following:
Much more on the recent complaint regarding the Madison School District’s Talent & Gifted Update, here.
Douglas County, CO School District Ups the Ante in Voucher War
In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools.
The move is being challenged in state court and a judge has held hearings this week to determine if the program can go forward.
The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado.
The program is also unique in that the district explicitly promotes the move as a way for it to save money. The district is, in effect, outsourcing some students’ education to the private sector for less than it would spend to teach them in public schools.
School choice is risk-free, Pennsylvania education secretary says
Tax dollars soon could go to schools where teachers aren’t required to be certified and where students aren’t required to take the same standardized tests as their public school counterparts.
That concerns Democrats, who expressed concerns about Republican school-choice measures that were the subject of a House Education Committee public hearing today.
Rep. Jim Christiana, sponsor of one bill in the education reform package, said school choice isn’t about turning public schools into private ones; it’s about letting parents choose where their children will be best educated.
“We’re not saying students shouldn’t have to take standardized tests. We’re just saying the tests should be based on the curriculum you’re offering,” said Mr. Christiana, R-Beaver.
SIGnificant Concerns
If the U.S. Department of Education fancies itself a school reform organization, then the School Improvement Grant is one of its most important programs — if not the most important.
— Check out the cross-post with our good (and cynical, insightful) friends at Title I-derland. —
The purpose of SIG is to transform “persistently lowest achieving schools” into good ones and, in so doing, demonstrate that the federal government can invest our money wisely. Of course, that is no small task. If this flops, then maybe ED should reconsider its role as a reform organization. The stakes are that high.
Most readers probably know how the program works. Basically, the state identifies the bottom 5 percent of its persistently lowest achieving schools, including Title I and Title I-eligible high schools with a graduation rate of 60 percent or less. Once those schools are identified, districts can apply for SIG funds on behalf of those schools, but only if they implement one of four prescriptive school intervention models.
Smallest med school in U.S. to open with 8 students
A Kansas college hopes young doctors will be more willing to practice in small towns if they go to a medical school in a rural area.
The University of Kansas will have what it says is the smallest four-year medical education site in the country when eight students begin taking classes on Monday on a satellite campus in Salina, Kansas. The move is in response to a shortage of rural doctors in the United States.
“By training physicians in a nonmetropolitan area, we are showing young medical students that life can be good, and practice can be stimulating, outside of the big city,” said Dr. William Cathcart-Rake, the physician who directs the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Salina.
The Jobless Recovery and the Education Gap
The charts above show the differences in: a) monthly employment levels and b) monthly unemployment rates between 1992 and 2011 for: a) college graduates and b) workers with less than a high school degree. The differences are quite striking and interesting, and might help explain some of the labor market dynamics in the current “jobless recovery.”
Note that the employment level for college graduates flattened during the 2008-2009 recession, but is now at a record high level. In contrast, the employment level for workers without a high school degree is about 2.5 million below the pre-recession peak. Likewise the jobless rate for college graduates has increased by a few percentage points because of the recession (and is now at 4.4%), but the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree has increased by more than six percentage points (now at 14.3%), and was recently almost ten percentage points above its pre-recession level.
Debt-Limit Deal Cuts College Kids a Break
One federal program emerged with more money in the deficit-reduction deal signed into law this week: Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.
The White House and its allies cited the increase when they urged Democrats to vote for the broader legislation, which was almost all about cutting government spending.
The final deal “protects Pell grants from deep near-term cuts,” Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) said Monday on the Senate floor. “I think most of us understand how important Pell grants are to providing opportunities to young, talented people all across America to improve themselves through higher education.”
Education policy-making as farce
I like writing about classrooms. I think state and national education politics, by comparison, are irrelevant and trivial. Steven Brill, in his new book “Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools,” wants to prove me wrong. He may have done so.
The book is about the U.S. Education Department and school superintendents and teacher union leaders in New York, Denver, Florida, New Orleans and the District wallowing in regulations and legislation and memoranda of understanding. What a bore, I thought. I put it in the bathroom, my spot for stuff my job forces me to read. Within the first few pages, I was taking the book everywhere — the supermarket checkout line, the dinner table, the movies.
It is funny, exciting, surprising and deep. Brill is a remarkable person, a reporter who became a mogul, creating American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, Brill’s Content magazine and Press+, a new business model for journalism online. But he still likes reporting.
AAA ACE Teen Pilot Program warning
I was recently contacted by AAA California inviting us to participate in their ACE Teen Program.
This voluntary program provides a GPS tracking device with cellphone uplink that can be placed in your teenager’s car. The device is provided by a third party, who also supports a website for convenient access to tracking information.
The alleged goal of the program is to allow parents to provide feedback on their teen’s driving habits, esp. when the parents are not in the car. An additional “feature” is an On-Star-like capability that, in the event your teen’s car needs AAA assistance, the parent can allow AAA to determine the vehicle’s exact location.
I’ll ignore the issue of parent/child privacy, since the program doesn’t focus on whether the device is in the car with or without the teen’s knowledge. Let’s assume the latter.
I had a long discussion with AAA about how this program was badly conceived. The risks include:
We Want to Hear from Teachers About Teacher Prep
National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report, via a kind reader’s email:
Since we launched our national review of teacher preparation programs last January, we’ve heard a lot from schools of education about what they think about our effort.
We’ve also heard what state and district superintendents along with ed
reform organizations around the country think: the public needs to know
which preparation programs are doing a good job and which are not.
But now it’s time to _[4]hear_ from those most directly affected by teacher preparation programs: teachers themselves.
We want to know how ready teachers felt on their first day of class. What do teachers value about their teacher preparation programs? What do they think aspiring teachers need to know about the programs they are considering?
Links: 4. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/teacherprepsurvey
Airy Labs Founder On ‘Higher Education Bubble’ Vs. Real World
On the surface, Andrew Hsu is a curious fit among the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows.
Andrew Hsu says there are some things you can’t learn in college. “In the real world it’s crazy,” he says.
PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s “20 Under 20” fellowship program awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years of age who drop out of college to pursue science and technological innovation. The program officially launched in May and is the first assault in Thiel’s war against the “higher-education bubble” – a system he says stymies innovation and burdens youngsters with debt.
Hsu, now 20, graduated with honors and degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry and a minor in mathematics from the University of Washington at 16. He was a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s neuroscience program when he left it earlier this year to launch Airy Labs Inc.
Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success
The American higher education system is plagued by two chronic problems: dropouts and debt. Barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. At the same time, student loan debt is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.1 Loan default rates have risen sharply in recent years, consigning a growing number of students to years of financial misery. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation’s ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.
The federal government has traditionally tracked these issues by calculating, for each college, the total number of degrees awarded, the percentage of students who graduate on time, and the percentage of students who default on their loans. Each of these statistics provides valuable information, but none shows a complete picture. A college could achieve a stellar graduation rate by passing students
along and handing out degrees that have little value in the job market, making it difficult for graduates to earn enough money to pay off their debt. Alternatively, a college could keep tuition and loan default rates low while also providing a terrible education and helping few students earn degrees. Students choosing colleges and policymakers governing higher education need an overall measure of value, one that combines debt and graduation.
Education Sector has created such a measure, the “borrowing to credential ratio.” For each college, we have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing:
Teachers Union Honesty
Never put on the Internet anything you wouldn’t want to see in the newspaper, right? Tell that to the American Federation of Teachers, which recently posted online an internal document bragging about how it successfully undermines parental power in education.
This document concerns “parent trigger,” an ambitious reform idea we’ve reported on several times. Invented and passed into law in California in early 2010, parent trigger empowers parents to use petition drives to force reform at failing public schools. Under California law, a 51% majority of parents can shake up a failing school’s administration or invite a charter operator to take it over.
California’s innovation caught on quickly–and that’s where the AFT’s PowerPoint presentation comes in. Prepared (off the record) for AFT activists at the union’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. last month, it explains how AFT lobbying undermined an effort to bring parent trigger to Connecticut last year. Called “How Connecticut Diffused [sic] The Parent Trigger,” it’s an illuminating look into union cynicism and power.
Our Irrelevant Debates – Are Teachers Overpaid?
This “everyone is saying teachers are overpaid” meme has quickly gained traction among the credulous. You can apparently attract celebrities like John Stewart and Matt Damon to rallies by playing the mom card and telling them that people are saying teachers are overpaid and it’s important to push back on that notion. Great, except for the most part it’s another in a long list of strawmen in the education debate. In fact, to the extent anyone in the mainstream of the education conversation is saying anything even approaching “teachers are overpaid” the conversation centers on the sustainability of current public sector benefit schemes for retirement (pdf) and health care. And while some of the “crisis” rhetoric is overblown there is a real problem with teacher pensions in some states. In the public debate that’s a different issue though than cash compensation, which is what people usually discuss when they want to argue about this. So, it is worth pointing out that while teachers are not overpaid, the wages are competitive in many places. Like the pension issue, and given the structure of our education “system” like most issues, there is a a great deal of variance.
Less than 77 percent of Kentucky’s high school students get diplomas
Kentucky’s overall high school graduation rate for the 2009-10 school year was 76.68 percent as computed under a new formula, the state Department of Education said Tuesday.
While 2009-10 is the most recent year for which graduation figures are available, the state also released recalculated rates for 2007-08 and 2008-09 Tuesday using the new “averaged freshman graduation” formula.
Under that formula, Kentucky’s overall graduation rate for 2007-08 was 74.99 percent, and it climbed to 75.11 percent in 2008-09, state education officials said.
Kentucky is switching to the averaged freshman formula as it transitions toward a new, federally mandated uniform national formula designed to put all states on the same page in computing graduation rates.
Imaginative Transcripts
It’s not often the words imagination and innovation are used in the context of transcripts, or anything related to most registrar offices. I was lucky this past month to attend the Registrar Forum at the AACRAO Technology Conference, and in the closing session, Tom Black, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and University Registrar at Stanford made me remember how powerful thinking outside the box can be, especially for something I take for granted: a student’s transcript.
Like many Registrars, I came to this profession through a work-study gig. I worked simultaneously in my college IT Help Desk and Registrar’s Office, two offices with different orientations to student computing, but also a lot of overlap. When I was a freshman in the late 1990s, online services under one administrative umbrella were rare, and Wesleyan pioneered electronic portfolios as a wrap-around to most student computing services on campus. While I still think of the e-portfolio as a portal with another name, Tom Black’s presentation made me realize the synergy between the two concepts, and how portfolios can enhance the academic transcript.
Court hears testimony in case to stop Douglas County Colorado’s voucher program
A business owner and father of three told a packed courtroom today that he joined a lawsuit to stop Douglas County School District’s voucher program because it will harm his daughters’ schools.
“This is taking money from public schools and funding religious and private schools. This is going to cost our school district precious resources that we do not have,” Kevin Leung said. “I taught my children to do what’s right. It might cost me business in Douglas County and things like that, but it doesn’t matter. You have to do what’s right.”
Leung testified during the first of what is expected to be three days of hearings on a request to temporarily stop Douglas County from implementing the voucher program until a lawsuit challenging the legality of the program is resolved.
More leave UK primary with good ‘three Rs’ grasp
The number of children leaving primary school in England with a good grasp of reading, writing and maths has increased again, government data shows.
Some 67% of 11-year-olds gained the expected level, Level 4, in all of these subjects in national curriculum tests, known as Sats.
Last year 64% of primary pupils left school having reached this level.
But one in three youngsters still failed to achieve the level expected of them in all three subjects.
This means that nearly 183,000 pupils left school without a good grasp of reading, writing and maths this summer.
Prejudice lurks even in 3-year-olds
The seeds of prejudice are being planted in the minds of Hong Kong children as young as three, a study has revealed.
Face-to-face questioning of 152 youngsters aged between three and six discovered many hold more negative attitudes towards people with darker skin.
The results of the survey, commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the first of its kind to be carried out in the city, have prompted calls for better pre-school education and parenting.
The children were asked to describe their attitudes towards different skin colours by rating eight positive and negative qualities, including friendliness, beauty, honesty, courtesy, selfishness and rudeness.
Student Lending’s Failing Grade
The student lending industry managed to avoid many of the pitfalls that affected mortgages, auto loans and credit cards during the Great Recession. In fact, volume growth has been steady, if not accelerating, as more individuals sought additional education and training in response to the weak labor market, and as lenders did not tightened standards to anywhere near the degree of other segments. The performance of student loans in recent years has barely changed; delinquency and loss rates on outstanding student loan balances remained steady throughout the recession. While this may sound positive, it is concerning in light of the strong balance and account growth, which would typically push delinquency rates down. In addition, performance of other consumer loan segments has significantly improved as the economy has recovered; performance of student loans has not. In this study, we examine the rapid growth of the student loan industry over the past few years, the weakening per- formance of loan portfolios, and what these trends suggest for future performance and lending volumes.
School Voucher Programs and the Effects of a Little Healthy Competition
Do voucher programs force public schools into a zero-sum game by redirecting public funds and promising students to private schools? Or do school-choice options spur healthy competition by pressuring public schools to improve? Using data from Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program, David Figlio of Northwestern University argues that public schools improve their performance when faced with the prospect of losing students to nearby private schools through voucher programs, and that greater competition results in greater gains in public school students’ test scores. In other words, the competitive effects of school choice could create a system where everybody wins.
UK pupils ‘among least likely to overcome tough start’
Sean Coughlan, via a kind reader’s email:
The UK performs poorly in an international league table showing how many disadvantaged pupils succeed “against the odds” at school.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has studied how pupils from poor backgrounds can succeed academically.
It says that “self-confidence” is a key factor in whether such pupils succeed.
The UK comes behind Mexico and Tunisia in the table – with the top places taken by Asian countries.
Michigan toughens school standards
At least 200 public schools in Michigan would be at risk of losing their state accreditation — and being closed — under new standards being pushed by the state Department of Education.
Under the changes, accreditation would be based on standardized test scores, a move state education officials say would help them identify failing schools that need support and intervention.
Currently, accreditation is awarded based on a school’s compliance in six areas related mostly to administration and school organization. Schools can self-report data to the state, including staff certification, state curriculum compliance and school improvement plans.
The system misleads the public about how Michigan’s 4,000 schools are doing, said Jan Ellis, Department of Education spokeswoman. She added that a revised accreditation system would make schools more accountable to parents and the public.
Face-ID Tools Pose New Risk
As Internet giants Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. race to expand their facial-recognition abilities, new research shows how powerful, and potentially detrimental to privacy, these tools have become.
Armed with nothing but a snapshot, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh successfully identified about one-third of the people they tested, using a powerful facial-recognition technology recently acquired by Google.
New Mexico commission considers charter school proposals
The state Public Education Commission plans hearings across the state on proposals to establish 21 charter schools.
The commission will start with hearings on Aug. 8 in Las Cruces and Deming. Meetings will be held during the rest of the week in Albuquerque, Moriarty, Taos, Penasco, Espanola, Santa Fe and Gallup.
Minidoka To Launch Online School Program
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County’s school district will launch this fall.
“He wants more friends and he’s interested in playing baseball,” his mother said.
The district’s full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district’s extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
Ivy Preparatory Academy to open DeKalb, GA schools for boys and girls
The Georgia Board of Education on Monday unanimously approved Ivy Preparatory Academy’s plan to open k-12 boys and girls schools in DeKalb County.
The schools, Ivy Preparatory Academy at Kirkwood, will be housed on the former campus of Peachtree Hope Charter School. Each campus will have 265 students and a staff of 10. A parent information session will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday on the DeKalb campus.
State charter school officials said the plan will help keep more educational options available for DeKalb students.
Include teachers in developing new evaluations
The state is pursuing its broad mission to improve Hawaii’s public school system along several fronts, but sharpening the accountability of all parties surely is one top goal. And teachers are perhaps the most important of the parties being called to account, with plans to develop a more effective way to evaluate their work.
Proposing to overhaul teacher evaluations and make them more “performance-based” was a key element in the state’s successful bid for a federal Race to the Top competitive grant — specifically, to make student academic growth a factor in the teacher’s score. To their credit, the Hawaii State Teachers Association leaders have said they favor it in concept.
The ongoing dispute between the union and the state administration, unfortunately, has further complicated what already was to be a complex process. However, the HSTA, which wants to reopen talks, has an opportunity to use evaluation reform as an olive branch to help restart negotiations for contract amendments.
An olive branch is clearly needed. The state imposed its “last, best and final offer,” sparking an HSTA complaint that is now before the Hawaii Labor Relations Board.
Predictive power of early childhood IQ
In the comments of this earlier post a father wondered to what extent one can predict adult IQ from measurements at age 5. The answer is that predictive power is fairly weak — the correlation between a score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age 5, 6 and 7 correlates about .85 with adult score. This suggests that while it is difficult to measure a child’s IQ in any single sitting, the IQ itself is relatively fixed already by age 7 or so! Of course there are the usual caveats concerning range of environments, etc. I would like to see results from larger sample sizes.
School, district ratings drop; Austin ISD has 8 underperforming schools, Round Rock has 2
The Round Rock school district, which earned the state’s second-highest academic rating in 2010, this year has two schools that failed to meet state standards, securing “academically unacceptable” labels that will stick for two years.
The news comes as schools and districts across Texas see their ratings slide this year despite making academic gains. Figures released by the Texas Education Agency on Friday show that more than half of all Texas schools that had the highest rating in 2010, exemplary, fell in their ratings, and five times as many schools were deemed academically unacceptable, the lowest rating.
Locally, eight of the Austin school district’s 112 rated schools missed state academic targets; last year, only one Austin school was rated academically unacceptable. Pflugerville this year has two schools rated unacceptable. Both traditional high schools in Bastrop failed to meet state standards and received the lowest rating. Hutto has two elementary schools that are rated unacceptable.
New school district keeps DPS in debt
Appointed Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts and Gov. Rick Snyder announced on June 20 the formation of a statewide school district of “low performing” schools.
Critics of the new statewide school distrct, the Education Acievement System (EAS), say it unfairly targets Detroit students while continuing to drain DPS resources.
Beginning in 2012, according to the plan, DPS students from an undetermined number of schools would become part of the EAS for five years.
State school aid and federal grants would leave DPS and follow students to EAS, according to Lamar Lemmons, finance chair for the Detroit Board of Education.
The growing budget deficit, which now stands at $327 million, would remain. Lemmons says that scenario benefits the state apparatus, which has kept control over DPS finances by keeping the district in debt.
Can’t blame WEAC for not trusting Walker on school accountability
I feel you, Wisconsin Education Association Council; I don’t trust Gov. Scott Walker, either.
But so far as I know, he’s not trying to kill me.
This might be the key distinction in judging WEAC’s decision to skip out on a Walker-associated effort to devise an accountability system for Wisconsin schools; one would think the state’s largest teachers union would want to be a part of that.
Last week, WEAC president Mary Bell seemed to indicate it all came down to trust.
“How can we trust the governor to be a credible partner on education issues when they just passed laws to make massive cuts to school funding and silence our voices in schools?” she asked.
Detroit Public School union leaders creating response to contract break
Detroit Public School union leaders said today they will use the weekend to strategize a response to the district breaking eight union contracts Friday to impose a 10 percent wage cut and increase employees’ health insurance contributions.
“We’re meeting with attorneys over the weekend and on Monday to outline what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it,” said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. The response could include a court challenge, Johnson said.
Emergency Manager Roy Roberts’ order affects nearly 10,000 union and nonunion employees. The district, with a $327 million deficit, would save $81.8 million, officials said.
Teachers will have to contribute 20 percent toward their health care. Teachers will see a 10 percent cut in pay starting with their Sept. 20 paycheck, Johnson said.
Researchers warn of school ‘accountability shock’
Math teacher Antoine Joseph already had been thinking of leaving Miami Norland Senior High School, so when its annual grade from the state dropped from a D to an F nine years ago that just solidified his decision.
Joseph said it wasn’t just a matter of being stigmatized as a failure – he was just tired of the circumstances behind the failing grade.
“There is a propensity to go to another school where the parents are more involved, the students are more eager to learn and they are more thirsty for knowledge,” he said.
Joseph apparently was not alone. A recent study by a trio of economists showed a disproportionate number of Florida teachers left schools that got lower grades in 2002 after the state changed the way it evaluated them.
The researchers call it “accountability shock.” That’s their term for unexpected results from shake-ups in the way students, teachers, administrators or schools are evaluated, graded, rewarded or punished. The study is timely advice because accountability changes are in the works across the nation due to President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” school initiative. The program is providing $4.35 billion in federal stimulus money to Florida, 10 other states and the District of Columbia for innovative changes aimed at improving student achievement.
The Hidden Costs of Medical Student Debt
He was a senior surgeon many of us in training wanted to emulate — smart, busy and beloved by patients and staff. But we loved him most because he could have been any one of us. He had slogged through the same training program some 15 years earlier, and he had survived.
I caught up with him one afternoon during my internship, hoping to glean some wisdom, but all he could talk about was how he was going to be seeing patients less and focusing on his dream of improving hospital quality and efficiency. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I love caring for patients.” But the stress of keeping a practice afloat was wearing him down.
“Plus the monkey is finally off my back now,” he said with an enormous grin. “I paid off my last student loan.”
Latest counterfeit IDs are so good they’re dangerous
When the fleeing motorcycle hit the curb, scraped past a utility pole and hurled 20-year-old Craig Eney to his death, a bogus South Carolina driver’s license was in the hip pocket of his jeans.
He spent the final hours of his life trading on that phony license to buy shots for his buddies at two downtown Annapolis bars, places so popular among underage drinkers that bouncers are stationed outside to check everyone’s ID.
Yet scores of young people flash fake driver’s licenses and waltz on by to the bar.
The days when faking driver’s licenses was a cottage industry — often practiced in college dorm rooms by a computer geek with a laminating machine — have given way to far more sophisticated and prolific practitioners who operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
In an era when terrorism and illegal immigration have transformed driver’s licenses into sophisticated mini-documents festooned with holograms and bar codes, beating the system has never been easier.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Other People’s Money
The problem with many school districts, including Sun Prairie, is that the district administration (no matter how vehemently they argue to the contrary) find it too easy to spend other people’s money. Instead of Tim Culver spending time with the high salaried muckety mucks, we’d love to see him visit a few seniors who are dangerously close to losing their homes.
We ALL want a good, solid, quality education for the kids of Sun Prairie. And we might all enjoy eating sea bass dinners. But the simple reality is that most of us don’t have the means. It is also the seniors who struggle with property tax payments that built this district from the ground up.
n Tough Times, How Will NEA Handle Collective Bargaining as an Employer?
The teachers’ unions believe that dealing with tight budgets in a faltering economy requires close coordination and collaboration with employees through the collective bargaining process. That belief will be put to the test over the next couple of months as more than half of NEA’s state affiliates will bargain new contracts with their own employees.
Several affiliates have already instituted wage and hiring freezes as well as reductions in force in order to balance budgets short on revenue due to membership losses. But as EIA has reported in the past, the union’s employees, represented by staff unions, are no more likely to meekly accept layoffs and benefit cuts than are NEA affiliates when school districts try the same measures.
The professional staff of the Ohio Education Association went on strike for 10 days last September. Such jobs actions are embarrassing for the union, but two or more such strikes at the same time in different states would be sure to garner national attention and cause NEA significant public relations harm.
Chinese teachers are on a U.S. mission
The large ballroom in UCLA’s Covel Commons resembled a bustling day-care center one recent day, as laughter rang out across the room.
A boisterous game of Twister was being played in one corner, charades were set up near the refreshments and the occasional shout of “Uno!” sounded from the front.
But the participants, speaking in rapid-fire Mandarin, were not children. They were dozens of Chinese teachers in Los Angeles for a nine-day crash course to prepare them for what they consider the opportunity of a lifetime: to teach Mandarin in American schools.
In a few weeks, 176 Chinese teachers will head to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms across the country, from rural Kentucky towns to the tidy suburbs of Salt Lake City. Only two will remain in California, assigned to schools in Redding and Ojai.
July 29 Wisconsin Read to Lead task force meeting
The fourth meeting of the Governor’s Read to Lead task force took place in Milwaukee on Friday, July 29. The meeting was filmed by Wisconsin Eye, but we have not seen it offered yet through their website. We will send out a notice when that occurs. As always, we encourage you to watch and draw your own conclusions.
Following is a synopsis of the meeting, which centered on reading improvement success in Florida and previously-discussed task force topics (teacher preparation, licensing, professional development, screening/intervention, early childhood). In addition, Superintendent Evers gave an update on activity within DPI. The discussion of the impact of societal factors on reading achievement was held over to the next meeting, as was further revisiting of early childhood issues.
In addition to this summary, you can access Chan Stroman’s Eduphilia tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/eduphilia
Opening: Governor Walker welcomed everyone and stressed the importance of this conversation on reading. Using WKCE data, which has been criticized nationally and locally for years as being derived from low standards, the Governor stated that 80% of Wisconsin students are proficient or advanced in reading, and he is seeking to serve the other 20%. The NAEP data, which figured prominently in the presentation of the guest speakers, tell a very different story. Superintendent Evers thanked the task force members and indicated that this is all about “connecting the dots” and putting all of the “puzzle pieces” together. The work of this task force will impact the work going on in other education-focused committees.
The Florida Story: Guest speakers were Patricia Levesque, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, and Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida’s statewide reading initiative, Just Read, Florida! from 2001 to 2006.
In a series of slides, Levesque compared Wisconsin, Florida, and national performance on the NAEP reading test over the past decade. Despite challenges in terms of English language learners, a huge percentage of students on free/reduced lunch, and a minority-majority demographic, Florida has moved from the scraping the bottom on the NAEP to the top group of states. Over the same time period, Wisconsin has plummeted in national ranking, and our students now score below the national average in all subgroups for which NAEP data is disaggregated. 10 points on the NAEP scale is roughly equivalent to one grade level in performance, and Florida has moved from two grade levels below Wisconsin to 1/2 grade level above. For a full discussion of Wisconsin’s NAEP performance, see our website, http://www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org.
Levesque and Bragg also described the components of the reading initiative in Florida, which included grading all schools from A to F, an objective test-based promotion policy from third to fourth grade, required state-approved reading plans in each district, trained reading coaches in schools, research assistance from the Florida Center for Reading Research, required individual student intervention plans for struggling students, universal K-2 screening for reading problems, improved licensure testing for teachers and principals, the creation of a reading endorsement for teaching licenses, and on-line professional development available to all teachers. As noted above, achievement has gone up dramatically, the gap between demographic groups has narrowed, early intervention is much more common, and third grade retention percentages continue to fall. The middle school performance is now rising as those children who received early intervention in elementary school reach that level. Those students have not yet reached high school, and there is still work to be done there. To accomplish all this, Florida leveraged federal funds for Title 1 and 2 and IDEA, requiring that they be spent for state-approved reading purposes. The Governor also worked actively with business to create private/public partnerships supporting reading. Just Read, Florida! was able to engineer a statewide conference for principals that was funded from vendor fees. While Florida is a strong local control state, reading is controlled from the state level, eliminating the need for local curriculum directors to research and design reading plans without the resources or manpower to do so. Florida also cut off funding to university professors who refused to go along with science-based reading instruction and assessment.
Florida is now sharing its story with other states, and offering assistance in reading plan development, as well as their screening program (FAIR assessment system) and their online professional development, which cost millions to develop. Levesque invited Wisconsin to join Indiana and other states at a conference in Florida this fall.
Questions for, or challenges to, the presenters came from three task force members.
- Rachel Lander asked about the reading coaches, and Bragg responded that they were extensively trained by the state office, beginning with Reading First money. They are in the classroom modeling for teachers and also work with principals on understanding data and becoming building reading leaders. The coaches now have an association that has acquired a presence in the state.
- Linda Pils stated her belief that Wisconsin outperforms Florida at the middle school level, and that we have higher graduation rates than Florida. She cited opinions that third grade retention has some immediate effect, but the results are the same or better for non-retained students later, and that most retained students will not graduate from high school. She also pointed out Florida’s class size reduction requirement, and suggested that the NAEP gains came from that. Levesque explained that the retention studies to which Pils was referring were from other states, where retention decisions were made subjectively by teachers, and there was no requirement for science-based individual intervention plans. The gains for retained students in Florida are greater than for matched students who are not retained, and the gains persist over time. Further, retention did not adversely affect graduation rates. In fact, graduation rates have increased, and dropout rates have declined. The University of Arkansas is planning to do a study of Florida retention. The class size reduction policy did not take effect in Florida until last year, and a Harvard study concluded that it had no effect on student reading achievement. Task force member Steve Dykstra pointed out that you cannot compare the NAEP scores from two states without considering the difference in student demographics. Wisconsin’s middle school scores benefit from the fact that we have a relative abundance of white students who are not on free/reduced lunch. Our overall average student score in middle school may be higher than Florida, but when we compare similar cohorts from both states, Florida is far ahead.
- Tony Pedriana asked what kinds of incentives have been put in place for higher education, principals, etc. to move to a science-based system of instruction. The guests noted that when schools are graded, reading performance receives double weight in the formula. They also withheld funding for university programs that were not science-based.
DPI Update: Superintendent Evers indicated that DPI is looking at action in fours areas: teacher licensure, the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, the use of a screener to detect reading problems, and implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
- The committee looking at licensing is trying to decide whether they should recommend an existing, off-the-shelf competency exam, or revise the exam they are currently requiring (Praxis 2). He did not indicate who is on the committee or what existing tests they were looking at. In the past, several members of the task force have recommended that Wisconsin use the Foundations of Reading test given in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
- DPI is revising the WMELS to correct definitions and descriptions of phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics. The changes will align the WMELS with both the Report of the National Reading Panel and the Common Core State Standards. Per the suggestion of Eboni Howard, a guest speaker at the last meeting, they will get an outside opinion on the WMELS when they are finished. Evers did not indicate who is doing this work.
- DPI is looking at the possibility of using PALS screening or some other tool recommended by the National RTI Center to screen students in grades K-2 or K-3. Evers previously mentioned that this committee had been meeting for 6-7 months, but he did not indicate who is on it.
- Evers made reference to communication that was circulated this week (by Dr. Dan Gustafson and John Humphries) that expressed concern over the method in which DPI is implementing the Common Core. He stated that districts have been asking DPI for help in implementing the CC, and they want to provide districts with a number of resources. One of those is the model curriculum being developed by CESA 7. DPI is looking at it to see how it could help the state move forward, but no final decision has yet been made.
Task force member Pam Heyde, substituting for Marcia Henry, suggested that it would be better to look at what Florida is doing rather than start from ground zero looking at guidelines. Patricia Levesque confirmed that Florida was willing to assist other states, and invited Wisconsin to join a meeting of state reading commissioners in October.
Teacher Preparation: The discussion centered around what needs to change in teacher preparation programs, and how to fit this into a four-year degree.
Steve Dykstra said that Texas has looked at this issue extensively. Most schools need three courses to cover reading adequately, but it is also important to look at the texts that are used in the courses. He referenced a study by Joshi that showed most of the college texts to be inadequate.
Dawnene Hassett, UW-Madison literacy professor in charge of elementary teacher reading preparation, was invited to participate in this part of the discussion. She indicated we should talk in terms of content knowledge, not number of credits. In a couple of years, teachers will have to pass a Teacher Performance Assessment in order to graduate. This was described as a metacognitive exercise using student data. In 2012-13, UW-Madison will change its coursework, combining courses in some of the arts, and dropping some of the pedagogical, psychological offerings.
Tony Pedriana said he felt schools of education had fallen down on teaching content derived from empirical studies.
Hassett said schools teach all five “pillars” of reading, but they may not be doing it well enough. She said you cannot replicate classroom research, so you need research “plus.”
Pils was impressed with the assistance the FCRR gives to classroom teachers regarding interventions that work. She also said spending levels were important.
Dykstra asked Mary Laura Bragg if she had worked with professors who thought they were in alignment with the research, but really weren’t.
Bragg responded that “there’s research, and then there’s research.” They had to educate people on the difference between “research” from vendors and empirical research, which involves issues of fidelity and validation with different groups of students.
Levesque stated that Florida increased reading requirements for elementary candidates from 3 to 6 credits, and added a 3 credit requirement for secondary candidates. Colleges were required to fit this in by eliminating non-content area pedagogy courses.
Kathy Champeau repeated a concern from earlier meetings that teacher candidates need the opportunity to practice their new knowledge in a classroom setting, or they will forget it.
Hassett hoped the Teacher Performance Assessment would help this. The TPA would probably require certain things to be included in the teacher candidate’s portfolio.
Governor Walker said that the key to the effectiveness of Florida’s retention policy was the intervention provided to the students. He asked what they did to make sure intervention was successful.
Levesque replied that one key was reading coaches in the classroom. Also, district reading plans, individual intervention plans, student academies, etc. all need to be approved by the state.
There was consensus that there should be a difference in reading requirements for elementary vs. secondary teachers. There was no discussion of preparation for reading teachers, reading specialists, or special education teachers.
Licensing: The discussion centered around what teacher standards need to be tested.
Dykstra suggested that the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading, written by Louisa Moats, et al, and published by the International Dyslexia Association in 2010, would be good teacher standards, and the basis for a teacher competency exam. There was no need for DPI to spend the next year discussing and inventing new teacher standards.
Champeau said that the International Reading Association also has standards.
Pedriana asked if those standards are based on research.
Dykstra suggested that the task force look at the two sets of standards side-by-side and compare them.
Professional Development: The facilitators looked for input on how professional development for practicing teachers should be targeted. Should the state target struggling teachers, schools, or districts for professional development?
Rep. Jason Fields felt all three needed to be targeted.
Heyde asked Levesque for more details on how Wisconsin could do professional development, when we often hear there is no money.
Levesque provided more detail on the state making reading a priority, building public/private partnerships, and being more creative with federal grant money (e.g., the 20% of each grant that is normally carved out by the state for administration). There should be a clear reading plan (Florida started with just two people running their initiative, and after a decade only has eight people), and all the spending should align with the plan to be effective. You cannot keep sending money down the hole. Additional manpower was provided by the provision that all state employees would get one paid hour per week to volunteer on approved reading projects in schools, and also by community service requirements for high school students.
Bragg suggested using the online Florida training modules, and perhaps combining them with modules from Louisiana.
Dykstra also suggested taking advantage of existing training, including LETRS, which was made widely available in Massachusetts. He also stressed the importance of professional development for principals, coaches, and specialists.
Bragg pointed out that many online training modules are free, or provided for a nominal charge that does not come close to what it would cost Wisconsin to develop its own professional development.
Lander said there were many Wisconsin teachers who don’t need the training, and it should not be punitive.
Champeau suggested that Florida spends way more money on education that Wisconsin, based on information provided by the NAEP.
Levesque clarified that Florida actually is below the national average in cost per student. The only reason they spend more than Wisconsin is that they have more students.
Rep. Steve Kestell stated that teachers around the entire state have a need for professional development, and it is dangerous to give it only to the districts that are performing the worst.
Sarah Archibald (sitting in for Sen. Luther Olsen) said it would be good to look at the value added in districts across the state when trying to identify the greatest needs for professional development. The new statewide information system should provide us with some of this value added information, but not at a classroom teacher level.
Evers commented that the state could require new teacher Professional Development Plans to include or be focused on reading.
Pils commented that districts can have low and high performing schools, so it is not enough to look at district data.
Champeau said that administrators also need this professional development. They cannot evaluate teachers if they do not have the knowledge themselves.
Dykstra mentioned a Florida guidebook for principals with a checklist to help them. He is concerned about teachers who develop PDP’s with no guidance, and spend a lot of time and money on poor training and learning. There is a need for a clearinghouse for professional development programs.
Screening/Intervention: One of the main questions here was whether the screening should be universal using the same tools across the state.
Champeau repeated a belief that there are districts who are doing well with the screening they are doing, and they should not be required to change or add something new.
Dykstra responded that we need comparable data from every school to use value added analysis, so a universal tool makes sense. He also said there was going to be a lot of opposition to this, given the statements against screening that were issued when Rep. Keith Ripp introduced legislation on this topic in the last biennium. He felt the task force has not seen any screener in enough detail to recommend a particular one at this time.
Heyde said we need a screener that screens for the right things.
Pils agreed with Dykstra and Heyde. She mentioned that DIBELS is free and doesn’t take much time.
Michele Erickson asked if a task force recommendation would turn into a mandate. She asked if Florida used a universal screener.
Levesque replied that Florida initially used DIBELS statewide, and then the FCRR developed the FAIR assessments for them. The legislature in Florida mandated the policy of universal kindergarten screening that also traces students back to their pre-K programs to see which ones are doing a better job. Wisconsin could purchase the FAIR assessments from Florida.
Archilbald suggested phasing in screening if we could not afford to do it all at once.
Evers supports local control, but said there are reasons to have a universal screener for data systems, to inform college programs, and to implement professional development.
Lander asked what screening information we could get from the WKCE.
Evers responded that the WKCE doesn’t start unitl third grade.
Dykstra said we need a rubric about screening, and who needs what type and how often.
Pedriana said student mobility is another reason for a universal screener.
There was consensus that early screening is important. Certainly by 4K or 5K, but even at age three if a system could be established. Possibilities mentioned were district-run screenings or pediatrician screenings.
Walker reminded the task force that it only makes sense to screen if you have the ability to intervene with something.
Mara Brown wasn’t sure that a universal screener would tell her anything more about her students than she already knows.
Levesque said she could provide a screening roadmap rubric for the task force.
No one on the task force had suggestions for specific interventions. The feeling was that it is more important to have a well-trained teacher. Both Florida and Oregon started evaluating and rating interventions, but stopped because they got bogged down. Wisconsin must also be careful about evaluations by What Works Clearinghouse, which has some problems.
Pedriana asked if the task force is prepared to endorse a model of instruction based on science, where failure is not an option.
The facilitator said this discussion would have to wait for later.
Early Childhood: The task force agreed that YoungStar should include more specific literacy targets.
Rep. Kestell felt that some district are opening 4K programs primarily for added revenue, and that there is wide variability in quality. There is a need to spend more time on this and decide what 4K should look like.
Evers said we should use the Common Core and work backward to determine what needs to be done in 4K.
Wrap-Up: Further discussion of early childhood will be put over to the next meeting, as will the societal issues and accountability. A meeting site has not yet been set, but Governor Walker indicted he liked moving around the state. The Governor’s aides will follow up as to locations and specific agenda. The next meeting will be Thursday, August 25. All meetings are open to the public.
Related: An Open Letter to the Wisconsin Read To Lead Task Force on Implementing Common Core Academic Standards; DPI: “Leading Us Backwards” and how does Wisconsin Compare? www.wisconsin2.org.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Read to Lead Task Force, here.
7.28.2011 Wisconsin School Accountability Conference, with Video
An effort to develop a statewide school accountability system marks a turning point in Wisconsin, education experts said last week as a public effort to design the system got under way.
When the modern school accountability movement began in the 1990s, several states such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Florida developed their own systems for measuring how well schools helped students learn. Wisconsin created a statewide test in 1993, but deferred to local districts on what it meant for schools.
“Some states have embraced (school accountability) more than others,” said UW-Madison education professor Doug Harris. “Wisconsin hasn’t.”
Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers, who otherwise have clashed on education issues, have agreed to change that. A task force they formed began collecting information at a symposium last week organized by Walker, Evers and the La Follette School of Public Affairs and will soon meet to begin designing the system.
When it comes to developing a system for accountability for Wisconsin’s schools, including ways to measure whether students are meeting the ultimate goal of being ready for a career or college, Betebenner says, “My advice to you is to go slow … and be deliberate.”
John Johnson, director of education information for DPI, was encouraged by the standing-room-only crowd and the attendance by a number of policymakers, including key legislators, at Thursday’s meeting.
“Maybe by wading into school reform rather than diving into the deep end of the pool with Race to the Top, we’ll actually be able to swim, instead of drowning,” he says.
Watch the “Building a New School Accountability System for Wisconsin” conference, here.
Wisconsin’s academic standards have long been criticized for their lack of rigor.
Schools of education thriving despite the market
When Jodi Bell enrolled in Miami Dade College’s bachelor in education program, she thought she had chosen a recession-proof career and expected to land a job in special education upon graduation.
But while she’s been in school, the job market has shrunk.
Broward County laid off 1,400 teachers this spring; Dade was able to balance its budget without slashing teacher jobs, but a few hundred non-instructional positions were cut.
But Bell, who is expected to graduate in May 2012, is still optimistic she’ll land a job in her chosen career.
“I’m willing to move for a job, I’m not tied down to this area,” Bell said. “I’m optimistic, I’m doing well in my program and my program is good.”
PBIS in the Sun Prairie Schools
PBIS is all the rage in school districts across the country. No…Sun Prairie didn’t just dream this up all by themselves. What, exactly, is PBIS? PBIS stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. It’s an offshoot of the IDEA program (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). You may see/hear it as SWPBS (School-wide Positive Behavior Supports). In a nutshell, PBIS is a system of behavior modification, with three stages of intervention.
Primary intervention is targeted to all students and is s system designed to clearly identify which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Exhibiting positive behavior is rewarded in some fashion. In theory, about 80-85% of students respond to this primary level of intervention. The overall target is to develop a system in which positive reinforcements (for “acceptable/desired” behaviors) outnumber negative reinforcements (for unacceptable behaviors) by about 4:1. In this way, kids overwhelmingly see that “being good” is the place to be. You get rewards.
PBIS extends further to the 2nd tier, kids that do not respond well to these primary tactics. These kids represent about 10-15% of the population and are those that potentially are at risk for “failure”, or at the very least not realizing their academic potential. This group, however is not in need of individualized attention, but rather is targeted in small groups (a modernized form of “group” therapy). The third tier, which includes about 5-10% of students, covers those students who require individualized attention to develop positive behaviors and squelch those behaviors which are not acceptable.
Leadership begins with School Board
Leadership in any organization comes from the top. No, the superintendent is not “the top” of a school district organization. The top spot is held by the School Board, seven elected individuals who work together to implement policies and practices to meet the changing needs of students and families, all within the limited resources, financial and otherwise, that are available.
I have been fortunate during my first two years as superintendent to work with a dedicated and hard-working School Board. Being a board member requires the commitment of endless hours of time and effort, and is frequently somewhat thankless as there are very few decisions made in a large school district that will be welcomed by all. The service and support of our current board is appreciated.
Recently the School Board met in a retreat to review the best practices of high-performing boards and evaluate what changes they can implement to improve not only the functioning of the School Board, but ultimately the effectiveness and efficiency of the school district. I commend our board for this undertaking as it is a great modeling and example of the culture we are seeking to develop in the South Washington County Schools of continuous improvement and performance excellence. While the School Board generally functions very well, there is always room for improvement and this board is committed to such evaluation, assessment and improvement of their performance.
Groups Rally To ‘Save Our Schools’
Several Madison groups gathered on the Capitol square Saturday afternoon to be part of the national movement to “Save Our Schools.”
Rallies across the nation, including a march in Washington, D.C., were planned for the weekend to highlight what organizers feel is a crisis in public education.
Those who attended the rally said they want the political games to end in the nation’s capital when it comes to the debt ceiling impasse.
“I think the debt ceiling has something to do with public education,” said Todd Allan Price, an assistant professor at National-Louis University. “It’s showing where our misplaced priorities are. The debt ceiling has actually been raised many, many times before and the president could do that, but the problem is, is there’s a lot of gamesmanship going on.”
Is laying off teachers by seniority a mistake?
With the economy forcing closer scrutiny of budgeting at all levels of government and politicians zeroing in on government workers’ pay, perhaps the most visible target is education.
For the most part, elementary and secondary education in the United States is funded with local tax dollars, with assists from state and federal coffers. And the biggest line-item expense? Teacher salaries. When it comes time to cut the budget, layoffs are announced, and because of union contracts teachers with seniority are favored. Usually those most recently hired are the ones who go.
But is this the smartest way to fix the budget? Dan Goldhaver, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington Bothell, and Roddy Theobald, a researcher at the center and a doctoral student in statistics, write in the fall issue of Education Next this subservience to union seniority rules is wreaking havoc on the education system, often axing the most energetic and creative educators in the system. Worse yet because they are the most recent hires, their salaries are at the low end of the pay scale so it takes more layoffs to meet the dollar figure necessary to reduce the budget, pushing up class size and sometimes forcing districts to eliminate subject areas and programs entirely
Public School Comes Home
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County’s school district will launch this fall.
“He wants more friends and he’s interested in playing baseball,” his mother said.
The district’s full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district’s extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
Seize the moment for education reform in Iowa
Add your voice to the discussion. Click here to submit a letter or mini editorial to the Journal staff.
Whatever the endeavor – be it business, athletics … or education -nobody stays number one by staying the same.
Historically, we Iowans have prided ourselves on the quality of our schools. We have considered ourselves at or near the top in the nation.
The state’s education system still gets good, passing grades, don’t get us wrong, but we can and should do better in our classrooms to prepare our children for the realities and dynamics of a changing, more-global workforce. “We must,” in the words of Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass, “have a world-class education system …”
School administrator pay varies across Washington state
School administrator pay is not capped or regulated in Washington and it’s not consistent by student population or region, according to an analysis of statewide compensation records obtained by The Spokesman-Review.
Last year, for example, West Valley School District Superintendent Polly Crowley – who oversees a district with about 3,600 students – made about $12,000 more than Superintendent Nancy Stowell of Spokane Public Schools, the state’s third-largest district with about 28,100 students. Compensation for 21 Washington public school administrators exceeded that of the governor – $199,038 – in 2010, while 41 top school officials made more than the state’s K-12 superintendent, Randy Dorn. His total compensation was $146,751.
Superintendents overseeing similar-size districts in the same county can have salaries that vary by thousands of dollars. And the superintendent of the second-largest school district is not necessarily the second-highest paid in the state.
The 10 Commandments of Bad Parenting
Ever have a moment when you realize the thing you always thought you were the best at, is suddenly the thing you’re least skilled at doing?
I’m there with parenting, and that’s why my friend Margit Crane’s “10 Commandments of Bad Parenting” strikes me:
I. Be sarcastic
Don’t let it bother you at all that the word means “to tear flesh.” Kids are plenty sophisticated enough to understand that when you say, “Yes, of course I think you’re stupid,” you don’t in any way mean it. Plus! You’ll love it when they reach their teens and start dishing it back to you. Nothing is more lovable than a sarcastic teen!
II. Lecture, yell, nag, and be smug
Dude. Who doesn’t love to cuddle up for a good lecture? And yelling just makes it that much easier to be heard. Of course, if you’re one of those who (cough) doesn’t believe in yelling, acting smug works great too. Saying to your kids “I’m sorry I ever birthed a sinner like you” in a calm voice is totally different than saying it in a loud voice. Besides, listening is so last century.
Should School Superintendents’ Salaries be Capped?
An Indiana Education Committee met for the fist time in Indianapolis Thursday to evaluate whether the state should cap school superintendent salaries and benefits.
Indiana’s 2011 Interim Study Committee on Education Issues is being co-chaired by State Senator Dennis Kruse. Kruse says the committee decided superintendent compensation was an issue for local school boards, not legislators.
“School board members need the flexibility to be able to choose the best person, and they need that negotiation to be able to offer a package deal that’s better than what they might be getting in another state as well as another community. Each individual school corporation has different needs and they have different budgets.”
The disparities in pay from district to district are significant. There are 291 school districts in Indiana, and according the Indiana Department of Education, superintendents earn a collective $33 million each year. That’s an average of more than $113,000.
Bill Gates Urges Focus On Teachers To Fight Achievement Gap
Among the many prominent thinkers attending the Urban League’s annual conference Thursday, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates made his case for focusing on teachers.
One of the nation’s oldest civil rights groups, the Urban League, is holding its annual conference in Boston this week.
Much of the conference focused on education Thursday — specifically, the persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts.
Gates has been in the education reform game for a while, pouring billions of dollars into scholarships, research and trying to improve public schools. Gates said there have been advances on most other civil rights issues, but not much progress on education.
Autism Risks: Genes May Not Play Biggest Role
Up to now, genetics were thought to account for 90 percent of a child’s risk for autism, but a new Stanford University School of Medicine study suggests environmental factors could play a much larger role than previously thought.
The largest study of its kind, the research focused on autism in 192 pairs of twins — 54 identical, 138 fraternal. The surprise came when Stanford researchers found a greater number of fraternal twins shared autism than identical twins. Fraternal twins share only half their genes with each other, thus, when both fraternal twins are autistic, it suggests factors other than genetics are at work.
In fact, “About half of what we see is due to environmental factors, and half of what we see is due to genetic factors,” Dr. Joachim Hallmayer tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. Hallmayer is the lead author of the study.
Schools, financiers in talks for failed investments
Five Wisconsin school districts that invested in $200 million worth of risky financial instruments that deflated in the economic collapse are engaged this month in settlement talks with the financial institutions they claim led them astray, according to court documents.
The legal counsel for the school districts – Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee, Whitefish Bay, Kenosha and Kimberly – and for Stifel Financial Corp. and the Royal Bank of Canada met in New York this month and asked a Milwaukee County circuit judge for time to continue those talks.
“The schools are actively engaged in the mediation process, which we are hoping will produce a settlement,” said Stephen Kravit, one of the attorneys representing the districts.
Kravit and other attorneys for the school districts and financial institutions met in court Thursday for a status hearing. The next major hearing, which is likely to discuss amendments to a cross-claim that Stifel filed against the Royal Bank of Canada last month, is scheduled for Aug. 30.
Block Scheduling in Milwaukee Schools
The seasons, they go ’round and ’round, and the painted ponies go up and down.
No, I’m not just having a Joni Mitchell musical flashback. The painted ponies on my mind are block scheduling and the way school systems – Milwaukee Public Schools particularly – make and unmake decisions, over and over.
Block scheduling of high schools and middle schools is an idea that seems to come around, pass by, then come around again. In fact, at the moment, it is both coming and going in the Milwaukee area.
Under a block plan, the traditional daily schedule of seven classes of 45 or 50 minutes is replaced with four classes of 80 to 90 minutes. Commonly, courses are completed in a quarter, rather than a semester, and then new classes start. Some argue that longer class periods allow different learning styles and more depth. Others argue block schedules mean more wasted time. I’ve seen evidence of both in classes I’ve observed. Research nationally doesn’t reach a strong overall verdict.
Brookfield East and Brookfield Central high schools in the Elmbrook district will switch to blocks for the coming school year. And Homestead High School in Mequon is going to a relatively rare trimester program, in which the school year will be broken into three sections. As part of that, there will be fewer, but longer, classes each day.
What is the Point of a School Board?
- Is the role of a board director accountability and responsiveness to the district — or to voters?
- Should directors work to support the superintendent and staff? Or, should they work to hold the district accountable for fiscal responsibility and academic outcomes?
- If the district and the voters disagree on what should happen with taxpayer money and our children, to whom should the board listen?
Your views on this will guide you as you vote. As the only elected officials in our school district, board directors should be accountable and transparent to the people. They approve expenditures of taxpayer dollars, and they oversee the education of our children. There should be very little about their work that’s closed to public view. When the district pushes something the community doesn’t want, the board should pay attention and be inclined to support the electorate.
That’s why, on July 27, I asked Spokane board directors to allow the people to vote on whether the district should spend several million tax dollars on a proposed new data system, and on the new federal vision for public education. As directors contemplate these multi-million-dollar expenditures on (unproved) products – they’re also contemplating cutting people and programs that parents actually want. So, at the July 27 board meeting, I asked the directors to put the proposed expenditures on a ballot. They were silent. They looked at each other. Then, they went on with their meeting.
Exploring Arizona School District Consolidations
State-mandated unification and consolidation of school districts in the past has not fared well with wary Arizona voters.
School districts have been concerned about losing local control, teachers and their identities if merged with each other.
A committee of school officials, board members and politicians are tackling the issue again, this time with the goal of offering Arizona’s 227 school districts options to explore.
Lessons from the Iowa Education summit
This is an important moment in the history of education in the state of Iowa.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and an array of educational experts offered a set of challenges to educators at the two-day Education Summit in Des Moines.
The message was simple: Things need to change if Iowa is to regain its status as one of the strongest educational systems in the nation.
Although the statistics about Iowa students’ performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress can be used to support diverse narratives about how students are performing compared with their peers across the nation, international comparisons tell an unambiguous story: American schools will need to do better if the United States is going to produce a globally competitive work force for the 21st century.
Failing New Jersey Schools Told to Stop Teacher Swaps
When Newark’s public school system accepted $5 million from the federal government last year to turn around the poorly performing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School, it agreed to replace at least half of the school’s teachers, under the belief that principals could then hire better ones.
Instead, Shabazz swapped teachers with two other failing schools.
Some 68 teachers were shuffled among Shabazz, Central High School and Barringer High School, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Shabazz, which had 90 teachers, sent 21 of them to Barringer. And Barringer sent 21 of its teachers to Shabazz, according to teacher transfer records obtained through an open records request.
“Federal money may have unintentionally funded the infamous ‘dance of the lemons’ that has been a harmful practice in districts for decades,” said Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps school districts recruit teachers.
So Newark officials elected to use the “replace 50% of the staff” form of intervention for Shabazz High School. But, remember, teacher tenure is inviolable. Therefore, what happened to the 45 teachers who were removed to improve student achievement? According to the Journal, 21 of them went to Barringer High School, which is also a chronically failing school. And what happened to the 21 Barringer teachers who were supplanted by the exodus from Shabazz? Simple. They went to Shabazz. Actually, 68 teachers were rearranged among three of Newark’s high schools.
Detroit school teachers to take 10 percent wage cut
Detroit public school teachers will take a 10 percent wage cut and pay more for health care in what the school system’s manager on Friday said were “extreme measures” needed to address a financial emergency.
The measures are designed to save nearly $82 million as part of the Detroit Public Schools’ effort to address a $327 million deficit.
“These wage concessions and health care cost-sharing plans are being implemented because we are in an extremely difficult financial period for Detroit Public Schools,” Roy Roberts, the emergency manager for the school system, said in a statement.
The New Chinese Exclusion Act
With Washington focused on a last-minute debt deal, one California congresswoman wants her colleagues to turn their attention to an anti-immigration law that’s been off the books for 70 years. Democrat Judy Chu of the 32nd District in Los Angeles County has called on fellow members to join her in a “Resolution of Regret” over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882–a bill that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed on Wednesday.
Setting aside Ms. Chu’s sense of priorities, there’s a deep irony in her resolution. Even as she calls public attention to sins committed while Chester A. Arthur was president, Ms. Chu staunchly supports the most harmful form of anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S. today: racial preferences in hiring and university admissions.
Ms. Chu’s resolution rightly notes that the Chinese Exclusion Act was “incompatible with the basic founding principles of equality recognized in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.” It goes on to call on Congress to “reaffirm its commitment to preserving the same civil rights and constitutional protections for people of Chinese or other Asian descent in the United States accorded to all others.” Yet “the same” rights aren’t what Ms. Chu wants for Asians today.
Is Going Back to School Over 50 Worth It?
With unemployment high and retirement savings low, hundreds of thousands of people over 50 are turning to college programs to boost their job skills. But given the rising costs of tuition, is it worth the money?
Drawn by a growing number of college programs targeted at boomers and spurred by the lousy job market, the number of students ages 50 to 64 increased 17% between fall 2007 and fall 2009, according to the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. And colleges have welcomed them with programs specifically designed for older students: In 2008, the American Association of Community Colleges launched its “Plus 50 Initiative” on 15 campuses and has since expanded to 21. And individual schools, including University of California schools in Los Angeles and Riverside, have recently launched boomer-specific programs.
Keeping Informed about School Vouchers
Center on Education Policy 555K PDF:
With Republicans controlling a majority of state houses and the U.S. House of Representatives, interest in school vouchers has spiked during the past year at the federal, state, and local levels. Vouchers are payments that parents use to finance private school tuition for their children. Although vouchers can be privately funded, the programs that attract the most attention and controversy provide vouchers paid for with public tax dollars.
In the deal that ended the stalemate over the federal fiscal year 2011 budget, Congress restored funding for the District of Columbia voucher program, which had been discontinued in 2009 by the Obama Administration and the previous Democratic- controlled Congress. Vouchers are also likely to be a hot-button issue during the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2012 national elections. Indiana recently enacted a statewide voucher program, and other states are actively considering voucher proposals with strong support from key legislators and governors. The school board in Douglas County, Colorado, adopted a local private school voucher program this spring.
In 2000, the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an independent nonprofit organization, reviewed and summarized the major research on school vouchers in the report School Vouchers: What We Know and Don’t Know and How We Could Learn More, available at www.cep-dc.org. Since 2000, much has changed in the voucher landscape. On the legislative front, new voucher programs have been established during the past decade in D.C., Ohio, and New Orleans, in addition to the recently adopted programs in Douglas County and Indiana. Citizens’ referenda on vouchers in California, Michigan, and Utah were defeated by sizeable margins. On the judicial front, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the longstanding Cleveland voucher program was constitutional, but state Supreme Courts struck down an established voucher program in Florida and a new statewide program in Colorado. On the research front, numerous studies have added to the knowledge base about vouchers, including comprehensive studies examining the longer-term effects of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and D.C.
This CEP report provides updated information for policymakers and others about the status of publicly funded voucher programs and the findings of major voucher studies published since 2000. Other types of programs also subsidize private school tuition including tuition tax credits, specialized vouchers for students with disabilities, town tuition programs for remote rural students, and privately funded vouchers but in order to produce a succinct report focusing on the most controversial form of subsidy, we limited our review to publicly funded voucher programs for general education students.
More, here.
As incumbent state Senate Republicans and their Democratic challengers flood TV airwaves and stuff mailboxes in the run up to the Aug. 9 recall elections, they are largely sidestepping the issue that spurred tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to sign reca
As incumbent state Senate Republicans and their Democratic challengers flood TV airwaves and stuff mailboxes in the run up to the Aug. 9 recall elections, they are largely sidestepping the issue that spurred tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to sign recall petitions this spring — the elimination of many collective bargaining powers for most public-sector workers.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a single ad that’s directly about union representation issues,” said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This Is Your Brain on Summer
THE American ideal of lazy summers filled with fun has an unintended consequence: If students are not engaged in learning over the summer, they lose skills in math and reading. Summers off are one of the most important, yet least acknowledged, causes of underachievement in our schools.
Decades of research confirm that summer learning loss is real. According to a report released last month by the RAND Corporation, the average summer learning loss in math and reading for American students amounts to one month per year. More troubling is that it disproportionately affects low-income students: they lose two months of reading skills, while their higher-income peers — whose parents can send them to enriching camps, take them on educational vacations and surround them with books during the summer — make slight gains. A study from Johns Hopkins University of students in Baltimore found that about two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income ninth graders could be explained by summer learning loss during the elementary school years.
Will de-funding unravel the academic integrity of universities?
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2007, Deutsche Bank entered into an agreement with two German universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, to fund a mathematical laboratory. The problematic parts were the ‘secret’ terms: according to the article, the Deutsche Bank could not only influence the hiring process, but bank employees could serve as adjunct professors. Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of the agreement were that the bank had veto power over the laboratory’s research agenda and, more importantly, “was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years.”
In close vote, Milwaukee Teachers Union declines additional concessions
In a letter emailed to teachers today (which you can read here), MTEA president Bob Peterson gave the results of the survey:
The survey showed that 52.4% of the membership opposed additional concessions and 47.5% favored them. Based on the results and the many thoughtful comments, the Executive Board decided to not pursue any additional concessions.
Considering that last fall’s vote, which involved far larger concessions than those considered this time around, was overwhelming in favor, I think it’s clear that Milwaukee teachers feel first, that we’re not opposed to giving back, but we also recognize that we have given quite a lot.
But the closeness of this week’s vote suggests that there is still room for compromise in the future, if we ever get the right to bargain collectively back. Currently, you might recall, it’s against the law for the union and the district to meet and mutually discuss the employment conditions of Milwaukee’s teachers.
Erin Richards has more.
Can unions reboot for the 21st century?
One can only marvel at how masterfully Gov. Scott Walker gutted Wisconsin’s public employee unions. This was deft work, surgically precise in its neutering of 50 years of collective bargaining rights.
Walker tightly limited bargainable items, made union dues voluntary, ended the lifeblood of payroll deductions for dues collection and mandated yearly certification votes for unions trying to represent public workers.
The last item is particularly devilish. To be certified, the union must receive not just a simple majority of the votes, but 51% of the entire workforce, including those who don’t bother to vote at all.
Reality check: Walker himself wouldn’t be governor today if he had to meet that threshold. Candidate Walker won 52.3% of the vote last November, but that was just 25.8% of the voting-age electorate. David Ahrens, a labor activist, studied the legislative numbers and found that only two of 132 lawmakers reached the 51% threshold and just one in a contested election.
For a lot of people, the Republican crackdown reeked of unfairness. This is a major reason Walker and the GOP legislative majority are nervously playing defense today: They seemed downright thuggish, to use a favorite conservative pejorative, in beating down the unions.
Iowa’s Pre-K Program Continues for 2 More Years
Gov. Terry Branstad will not seek changes to the state’s universal preschool program for at least the next two years as the state moves forward with its education reform package.
The commitment is a change from Tuesday when Branstad sidestepped several questions about the future of the state’s preschool program during a news conference immediately following the Iowa Education Summit.
Pre-K education found wide support among the summit’s speakers and audience members, who frequently applauded when a panelist or presenter indicated their support for such programs.
Earlier this year, Branstad pushed a proposal that would have every parent pay something – based on a sliding income scale – for their child to attend a preschool program. The plan didn’t make it through the Legislature, and the governor ultimately backed off, although he indicated he issue wasn’t settled.
Best thing to happen to Wisconsin schools? Repealing of collective bargaining
Wisconsin Senator Glenn Grothman:
The repeal of much of Wisconsin’s collective-bargaining law with regard to many of Wisconsin’s public employees has not been adequately explained. This repeal will do more to improve the quality and lower the cost of Wisconsin government than anything else we’ve done. There are approximately 275,000 government employees in the state of Wisconsin. About 72,000 work for the state, 38,000 for cities and villages, 48,000 for counties, 10,500 (full time equivalent) for technical colleges, and 105,229 for schools. Only half of state employees are unionized, but almost all school employees are.
As you can see, the biggest impact will be on Wisconsin’s schools. Since my office has received the most complaints from school teachers, let’s look at how collective bargaining affects both the cost and quality of our schools.
Under current law, virtually all conditions of employment have to be spelled out in a collectively bargained agreement. Consequently, it is very difficult to remove underperforming school teachers. It may take years of documentation and thousands of dollars in attorney fees to fire a bad teacher. Is it right that two or three classes of second-graders must endure a bad teacher while waiting for documentation to be collected? Just as damaging is the inability to motivate or change the mediocre teacher who isn’t bad enough to fire. Good superintendents are stymied when they try to improve a teacher who is doing just enough to get by.
Controversy @ The Madison School Board over Discipline Policy: “Featuring the Administration as Sisyphus” (Now with Video!)
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
As is becoming increasingly common these days however, mine turned out to be a minority view. Other Board members took turns identifying parts of the revision that they did not like, raising some concerns that they had previously expressed and some that were new. The general tenor of the comments was that the current format of the Code was fine but that Code should be stricter and that more violations should lead to mandatory recommendations for expulsion.
About an hour into the meeting, I expressed some frustration with the proceedings (since I’m just figuring this stuff out, this video starts with eight seconds of black) :
Eventually Board members settled on deep-sixing the Work Group’s proposal but adopting some (but not all) of the substantive changes reflected in the revision. For example, the aggravated theft offense was added. The change to the unintentional use of force against a staff member violation was adopted (a very good move, btw), but the change to the possession and distribution of drugs or alcohol violation was not (I think). Another change boosted the potential consequences imposed for non-physical acts of bullying or harassment.
Also on our agenda Monday night was the creation of a new Board Ad Hoc Committee on Student Discipline, Conduct and Intervention, to be chaired by Lucy Mathiak. Some Board members suggested that the revisions recommended by the Work Group and rejected by the Board might be re-considered by the members of this committee in some fashion.
I found the Board’s rejection of the proposed revisions and ad hoc amending of the existing Code an unfortunate turn of events and criticized what I described as our legislating on the fly right before the vote:
Will the new teacher evaluation system Improve Instruction
In Monday’s post, I went through the DC teacher evaluation system, IMPACT, which weights value-added improvements in student scores at 50 percent of the teacher’s evaluation, with the remaining half of the evaluation covering 22 areas (fit into 9 categories). Five classroom observations are held,
three times by a building administrator and twice by an outside “master evaluator” who is a subject-matter expert and does not report to the building administrator.
Teachers in tested subjects are evaluated by standards different from those used for paraprofessionals, counselors, special education teachers and others in the system, with teachers in non-tested subjects having only 10 percent of their evaluation based on student scores.
Some truths about teachers
In many a twilight have I sat with government schoolteachers, discussing education. Discussion over, they gather their bags and lunch boxes, having come straight from school, and head home. Some ride back on two-wheelers, some take the bus. Their homes are often 10-20km away, not an easy commute in rural and small-town India. Next morning they will open their schools, often another 10-20km from their homes, and get back to work: teaching with passion, managing with care and dealing with the vagaries of life, with determination.
These are teachers doing a good job, within every constraint that our government school system has. We have found these good teachers in every block (a typical district has three-six “blocks”) that we have worked in, across 17 states. Many of them are not just good, they are exceptional.
Sen. Shelby questions education grant competition
The “Race to the Top” program extends the reach of the federal government too far into states’ public schools operations, a leading Republican senator said on Wednesday.
The Obama administration also risks neglecting poorer states by moving toward competitive education funding, Sen. Richard Shelby, the most powerful Republican on the Banking Committee, said at a hearing on education spending.
Monitor Kids on Facebook Without Being Their ‘Friend’
Parents fret all the time about protecting their kids on Facebook, but many of the products and services I’ve seen that aim to help are intrusive, and inject the parents into the child’s normal, healthy online social life in a way that’s awkward for both.
You could co-manage your child’s account, or “friend” them on the service, which technically has a minimum age of 13. But those are time-consuming and embarrassing practices, especially when the offspring are teenagers, who generally crave some degree of privacy, even if they don’t merit full treatment as adults.
So I’ve been testing a service called ZoneAlarm SocialGuard that I think strikes a good balance between safety and privacy, between a parent’s peace of mind and a teen’s sense of freedom. Every five minutes, it monitors kids’ Facebook accounts for approaches by potential predators and strangers, cyber-bullying, age fraud, account hacking, and links to inappropriate or malicious websites. It uses algorithms that look for certain types of language, profile data, or other clues that unwanted activity may be under way.
Education is Roy Roberts’ secret to success
Roy S. Roberts’ path to the top job at Detroit Public Schools began long before he made headlines as General Motors Corp.’s highest-ranking African-American executive.
It began before he stepped into the White House Rose Garden to receive the American Success Award from President George H.W. Bush in 1989.
That path began near a cotton farm in rural Texas in the late 1930s, before Roberts was even born.
“The big white guy in town had a cotton farm. He came down and talked to my father and said: ‘You have seven kids that are old enough to pick cotton. I want them down there Monday morning,'” Roberts, 72, said in his office in Detroit’s Fisher Building, where he serves as emergency manager for DPS.
Open Source E-Reader
Akademos, Inc., a leading provider of integrated online bookstores and marketplaces to educational institutions, announced today that it has launched a digital reader that will allow its member institutions to access electronic content from traditional publishers and from open resources, such as the Connexions Consortium, World Public Library, the Guttenberg Project, and many others.
The company also announced its first major Open Educational Resources (OER) partnership with publisher Flat World Knowledge, which is providing the company with its full catalog of over 40 high-quality textbooks covering major subject areas for introductory general education colleges courses.
Charters Are Not Taking Over Public Education
If you monitor education topics on Twitter you will quickly get the impression that huge numbers of American public schools are being replaced with charter schools. And you will also pick up lot of antipathy toward the schools from some of the most visible promoters of this week’s SOS Marches.
But the numbers show that, in most places, charter schools are insignificant.
Charters are not allowed in nine states (Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) and they make up fewer than 3 percent of all schools in 12 other states. More than 10 percent of schools are charters in only three states–Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Charters in Washington, D.C. get a lot of attention, as they should, because they constitute 45 percent of the schools. New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charters, is another hot spot. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a handy map that profiles the charter school situation in each state, going back to 1999.
Palm Beach County School Board tentatively passes $2.3B 2011-12 budget
The new Palm Beach County public schools budget comes with a slight property tax increase, a $500 raise for all teachers, less than 100 employee layoffs, compliance with state class-size limits, and no major school construction projects.
Following a 20-minute hearing, the School Board on Wednesday voted 5-1 to tentatively approve a $2.3 billion spending plan for the 2011-12 school year. Major changes are not anticipated before the board’s final hearing and vote on Sept. 14.
“I’m not going to support it because we are giving some people raises while laying off others,” said board Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson. Board member Monroe Benaim was absent, and no one from the public commented before the vote.
The Palm Beach County School District supports 172,664 students and spends $13,320 each, based on a $2,300,000,000 budget. Locally, Madison budget plans to spend about $362,000,000 for 25,000 students; $14,480 per student..
If students fail history, does it matter?
If there’s a student anywhere who would be able to answer a trivia question about President Abraham Lincoln, it would be on the marble steps of his memorial in the nation’s capital.
But a summertime visit there backed up recent test results that showed the majority of U.S. students don’t know the most basic facts about the country’s history — Lincoln and all.
Test results released in June showed that fewer than one quarter of all students are “proficient” in American history.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Popping the Public-Pension Bubble
With the day of reckoning approaching for California’s lavish but disastrously underfunded public-employee pensions, union partisans have tried to persuade the public that reformers are engaged in “pension busting.” But to believe that reformers are waging a partisan vendetta against state workers’ pensions would require ignoring a mountain of data. The fact is, only by skewing the averages can the unions maintain that they’re victims of a campaign against their “modest” pensions.
The union arguments are deceptively straightforward, rehearsed constantly by their talking heads and, unfortunately, repeated by a sympathetic and innumerate media. A master practitioner is Art Pulaski, chief officer of the AFL-CIO’s California Labor Federation. In an online debate at the Sacramento Bee in March (which also included City Journal associate editor Ben Boychuk and frequent City Journal contributor Steven Greenhut), Pulaski claimed that the average pension that California’s retired state workers collect is not much more than what they would receive under Social Security. “The average state worker gets a pension of $24,000 and often without Social Security,” Pulaski said. “Not lavish by any means.” More recently, the Bee published a column by Martha Penry headlined PENSION ‘REFORMERS’ DISTORT FACTS ON BENEFITS. The paper identified Penry as “a special education teacher’s assistant in the Twin Rivers school district,” but it didn’t disclose that she’s also a high-ranking union official who serves on the board of directors of the California School Employees Association. Penry accused “pension busters” of overstating the cost of pensions and the amount of the average pension. “Three quarters of CalPERS retirees collect yearly pensions of $36,000 or less,” she claimed.
Educators Worry Teachers Are Not Getting Adequate Training, Evaluation
Education leaders told a House committee Wednesday to focus on crafting comprehensive blueprint for teacher evaluations as Congress moves ahead in overhauling No Child Left Behind.
The four witnesses called before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce agreed educators have not come up with an ideal framework to evaluate teachers. They also expressed concern over whether teachers are being prepared for the classroom, and said the right people might not be going into education in the first place.
Witnesses questioned whether the higher education institutions were actively recruiting people who had a true interest or in being educators.
Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said half the people that graduate from an education program don’t wind up getting teaching jobs.
Technology and Teaching
Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?
In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject “Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology”) on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: “Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren’t teaching the tools, you aren’t teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn’t necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn’t necessarily the same thing.”
Teen Fights To Succeed In Rural S.C. Community
A fifth of the nation’s public school students attend rural schools, but nearly a third of those kids don’t graduate. In fact, many schools that researchers have labeled “dropout factories” are in rural communities. No state has more than South Carolina, which has 50. In this state, lots of teenagers just don’t think they need a high school diploma.
Oconee County, S.C., sits on the far west fringes of the state, just a few miles from the Georgia border. This is where Nick Dunn was born, and where his father died in a car accident a day before Christmas. Nick was 11.
KUOW Interviews with Position 6 Seattle School Board Candidates
Not a complete bust but not a great interview with these candidates on The Conversation this afternoon.
First, KUOW should make up its mind on the format. For District 2, the candidates were interviewed individually and for a longer period of time. (There were three of them.) For District 6, they had them all in the studio and interviewed each for a much shorter period of time but did allow them to interact. I think it would be better to have the interaction among candidates AFTER the primary and allow people more time to get to know these candidates now.
Searching For Consistency in the Charter School Wars
Both NJ Spotlight and PolitickerNJ are reporting on Gov. Christie’s speech at the Iowa Education Summit hosted by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. According to Spotlight,
[Christie] promoted the idea of charter schools, but added they may not be the answer in all school districts, a clear response to the suburban backlash that has been felt in New Jersey.”They are not needed in every district in New Jersey and wouldn’t add much to the education offered there,” he said.
The “suburban backlash” alluded to is spearheaded by the group Save Our Schools-NJ, which is lobbying for a set of charter school bills that would subject any new charter to a community vote, require every child in surrounding districts to be entered into a lottery, regardless of interest, and severely curtail the growth of new charters. SOS-NJ makes a number of fair points: some charter schools tend to accept fewer kids with disabilities and fewer kids who are English Language Learners. They “cream off” high-achieving students and are a money suck for local districts who pay tuition and must educate anyone who walks in the door.
From Drug Dealing To Diploma, A Teen’s Struggle
No statistic in education is more damning than the nation’s dropout rate. Almost 4 million students start ninth grade every year. One in four won’t graduate.
About half of those who drop out every year are black. Most will end up unemployed, and by their mid-30s, six out of 10 will have spent time in prison. In Chicago, one young man dropped out, spent time in jail and is now getting a second chance.
For a kid who’s been hustling and gang-banging on the streets of South Chicago for much of his life, 19-year-old Patrick Lundvick doesn’t look menacing at all.