A case of poor timing landed state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek in hot water with the House Appropriations Committee as he was testifying Wednesday about his agency’s budget.
Pastorek, whose cocksure manner and $377,000 annual pay package has rankled legislators in years past, told Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, early in the meeting that he planned to select a new superintendent for the Recovery School District “soon, very soon.” But Pastorek didn’t divulge to the committee members that he had tapped John White, deputy chancellor for New York City public schools, to take over the job held by Paul Vallas.
As Pastorek continued his testimony, lawmakers on the committee learned the truth, as the news of White’s selection was reported on NOLA.com. And that brought a rebuke from the courtly committee chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, who reminded the superintendent that he was under oath when he was being questioned. “So you weren’t willing to share that? That you had made the selection?” Fannin asked.
Teaching the Civil War, 150 years later
“Guess who won this battle?” teacher Cindy Agner asks.
“No one,” the kids chorus.
“This is what they call a draw.”
And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation’s deadliest armed conflict began. Agner’s reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads — a tactile lesson the vet eran teacher dreamed up this year — drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate.
Reinventing the Way We Teach Engineers
Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham. When Miller started, there were no buildings, no faculty, no curriculum, no students.
The foundation’s mandate: design a boldly original model for a 21st century school whose graduates would be not just accomplished engineers but world-beater entrepreneurs and leaders.
Now the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a wind-swept cluster of six earth-toned buildings, 347 brainy students who pay a maximum of $38,000 tuition, an untenured faculty totaling 25 men and 13 women and a curriculum oriented toward what Miller calls “design based” learning. Miller, who has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, has honed his leadership skills as Olin’s chief creator and builder. The following is an edited version of an interview with Miller conducted by Inc. contributor Joseph Rosenbloom.
A City School’s Uphill Fight Over Sharing Space With a Charter
In a city where so many public schools are segregated by race and wealth, Public School 9 in Brooklyn is an exception.
It has a substantial number of poor children, with about 75 percent receiving subsidized lunches. And because it is in a gentrifying neighborhood, Prospect Heights, the school also has a sizable number of yuppie children.
The co-presidents of the parent-teacher organization are Nelly Heredia, a single mother with two children who is out of work, and Penelope Mahot, a married mother with two children who owns a product design company and a gift store. The mothers like the same things about P.S. 9: the principal, Sandra D’Avilar, makes herself available to parents; the school is full of experienced teachers; the parents’ groups are thriving; the children are learning; there are classes in art, music, theater and dance.
A three-year college degree in Ohio?
Ohio Governor John Kasich wants the state’s universities to offer a three-year degree program to make college more affordable, The Plain-Dealer reports. Students would have to squeeze in more courses during their time at school in order to satisfy degree requirements, much as they do today without an established three-year program. Ball State University in Indiana already offers three-year degrees for 30 of its 180 degree programs and Rhode Island lawmakers approved a measure in 2009 to offer three-year degrees at both of the state’s public universities. Meanwhile, Kasich’s budget anticipates a 10.5 percent cut in higher education funding in the 2012 fiscal year, less than had been feared, followed by a 3.7 percent increase in 2013, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
SESSION ENDS: Idaho lawmakers gaveled their session to a close Thursday having approved three major education overhaul bills that had been a priority for Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and state superintendent Tom Luna, according to The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review. The bills would weaken teachers’ tenure and collective bargaining provisions, expand online courses, reduce the number of teachers and institute a merit pay system. The state Senate also approved legislation to implement the changes immediately rather than on July 1 in an effort to dampen an attempt to put the controversial changes up to a referendum next year.
The human brain: turning our minds to the law
A human brain is three pounds of the most complex material in the universe. It is the mission control centre that drives the operation of your life, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armoured bunker of the skull. This pink, alien computational material, which has the consistency of jelly and is composed of miniaturised, self-configuring parts, vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building.
Using those brains, humans have done something unique. As far as we know, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us.
2011 Adoption of Madison’s Orchard Ridge Elementary School: 2/3 of Students of Color (56%) & Low Income (55%) Cannot Read
African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC), via a kind reader’s email:
As a logical stage of development, the African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC) has established a number of community projects for 2011. The AACCC will focus the wisdom and energy of its corresponding constituent groups toward areas in need of positive outcomes. The projects are designed to serve as a demonstration of what can be accomplished when the “talent” of the community is focused on solutions rather than symptoms.
Education
The AACCC’s first educational pilot project is the “adoption” of Orchard Ridge Elementary (ORE) School for the first six months of 2011 (second semester of 2010/2011 school year).
After assessing the primary issues and unmet needs concerning student achievement, the AACCC, the ORE School Principal and Central Office MMSD administration (including the Superintendent) have determined a number of vital activities in which the AACCC could play a vital role.
Too much is at stake for the AACCC adoption of Orchard Ridge Elementary to be viewed as a “feel good” project. The student population of ORE involves 56% students of color, and fifty five percent (55%) of its student enrollment is from low-income homes. As dramatically depicted below, approximately two thirds of that population cannot read.
Please note the following:
Much more on Orchard Ridge, here.
Implementing Luna’s Idaho Education plan
There are still a few things that have to happen before many of Idaho’s newly minted education reforms can be fully executed in the state’s kindergarten- through 12th-grade public schools.
Some of the responsibility for the success or failure of Idaho public schools chief Tom Luna’s “Students Come First” education reform plan now rests with members of the Idaho State Board of Education. Other reform package measures require that school boards throughout the state create their own local policies and procedures to put the reforms, now Idaho law, into action.
“Implementation will determine how effective the reforms are and if the promised efficiencies will be realized,” state education board spokesman Mark Browning said.
The sweeping changes to K-12 education were announced by Luna, with support from Gov. Butch Otter, in Janurary at the start of the legislative session.
Broken down into three bills, the reforms were passed by lawmakers during weeks of contentious House and Senate committee hearings, and protests by students and teachers throughout the state. The final bill was signed into law Friday by the governor, a day after the session adjourned.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A debt disaster behind a comic book budget squabble
The world had better start paying attention to the US government’s inability to govern. The prevailing mood over this has been strangely complacent. Six months of the fiscal year gone and only now a ramshackle budget? Government brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements? Absurd, one thinks, but this is Washington. Do as most Americans do, and regard the pantomime with blithe contempt. In the end, out of sheer exhaustion, the actors do their deals and it is business as usual.
So it proved with the shutdown farce. Capitol Hill and its followers tracked the quarrel avidly. TV news showed clocks counting down the hours and minutes before “inessential services” would be suspended. Talks between Congress and the White House were covered as though a nuclear strike was imminent. With an hour to go, a deal that no one understood was done.
The president stood before the cameras: “Americans of different beliefs came together again,” he said, as if expecting applause. Some laughed; most yawned.
The shutdown punch-up was a nuisance and proof of Washington’s recklessness, but little apart from political advantage was at stake. Mostly, it was theatre. But a real fiscal crisis is coming. The debt-ceiling fight, next on the playbill, raises the theoretical possibility of a government default. Beyond that, public debt keeps rising. The current dysfunction shows how hard it will be to stop.
What is the Academic Mission of the Seattle School District’s Central Office?
e know the District’s mission – to educate Seattle’s students. That work is done primarily in the schools. The mission of the schools – to educate students – no different from the District mission. The Central Office has two sides: Operations and Academics. The mission of the Operations side is also clear – to take on all of the non-academic work to free the schools to focus on academics. But what is the mission of the academic side of the Central Office?
What academic tasks are the proper work of the Central Office?
The lack of a clearly defined mission for the Academic side of the Central Office has led to two unacceptable consequences: tasks that the central office should do have been left undone and the central office has squandered resources and irritated colleagues by taking on work they should not be doing.
I suggest that the Central Office has three academic duties:
1. Quality Assurance. Someone needs to follow up on the schools and make sure that they are doing a good job. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate interventions for students working below grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate challenge for students working beyond grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are delivering – at a minimum – the core content in each subject at each grade level. Someone needs to make sure that the teachers understand that the Standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Someone needs to make sure that they are following the IEPs, that they are providing appropriate services to ELL students, that their Advanced Learning program meets the expectations for such programs, and so on. Someone needs to make sure that the schools offer all of the classes and opportunities that they are supposed to offer (music, AP classes, etc.). This work, Academic Assurances, is the District’s work. Much of it has not been done. Much of it still is not done.
Along these lines, Dr. Enfield wanted to clarify her “Spectrum is Spectrum is Spectrum” remark, but she didn’t really manage it. I will follow up with her.
Reading instruction focus of task force
Again and again, I clicked on Wisconsin on an interactive map of reading scores from across the nation. Wisconsin fourth-graders compared with other states. Eighth-graders compared with other states. White kids. Black kids. Hispanic kids. Low-income kids.
The color-coded results told a striking story: In each case, there were few states colored to show they had significantly lower scores than Wisconsin. For fourth-grade black kids, there were none. For fourth-grade low-income kids, there were four.
Here’s one that will probably surprise you: For fourth-grade white kids, there were only four (Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia) that were significantly below Wisconsin. Wisconsin white kids score slightly below the national average, putting us in a pack of states with kind-of-OK results, significantly below more than a dozen that are doing better.
Wisconsin is not the reading star it was a couple of decades ago. You’ll get little argument that this isn’t good.
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But how reading is taught may be exactly what it heads for. In interviews, Dykstra and Pedriana said they hope there will be a comprehensive review of how reading is taught in Wisconsin – and how teachers are trained by universities to teach reading.
“We need to pay more attention to what works best,” Dykstra said. “We have known for 40 years a basic model for how to teach kids to read that is more effective than the predominant model in the state of Wisconsin.”
Pedriana said Wisconsin was a particularly “grievous example” of a state that had not done what it could to improve reading achievement. “Teacher training has to be addressed,” he said.
Related: Wisconsin Executive Order #22: Read to Lead Task Force and Dave Baskerville: Wisconsin Needs Two Big Goals.
Fulfilling the charter school promise
Something unprecedented is happening with charter schools in San Diego and across California. This year, San Diego County saw a 14 percent increase in the number of charter schools operating, jumping from 81 to 92. Throughout California, 115 new charters opened – the largest number to ever open in a single year in any state in the nation. This brings California to 912 charter schools serving 365,000 students. Even though the state’s funding crisis is disproportionately affecting charter schools, the pipeline for expansion is more robust than it has ever been.
What is causing this growth?
Plain and simple, it is coming in response to demand from parents. Parents are seeing the successes that charter schools are generating. In addition to offering highly innovative programs that cater to individual student needs, charter schools are becoming known for generating high levels of learning.
School for sober kids gets funding boost from Madison school district
For students who have been treated for addiction, going back to a conventional high school is like sending an alcoholic into a bar, experts say. But, they add, it’s extremely hard to find a safe, nurturing educational option for teens who are struggling to stay drug or alcohol-free.
Horizon High School is a tiny, non-profit, Madison-based recovery school where students learn and help keep each other on track and sober, day in and day out. It’s one of only three recovery schools in Wisconsin.
Horizon High School serves about a dozen mostly local kids each year, employs a handful of teachers and counselors and operates out of rented space at Neighborhood House on Mills Street in Madison. For the students, it means close relationships with their teachers and each other, and routine, random drug tests as a fact of life.
Customized Learning: Will Washington Advance or Retreat?
For several months, I had been listening to my friend agonize over the challenges she had been facing with her 16 year old daughter, “Tammy” , who was attending a suburban public high school in Washington state.
It started with a few phone calls from the school about some relationship issues between Tammy and some other girls at school. Within a month, Mom was getting two or three calls a week informing her Tammy had skipped several classes that day. Over the next several months the skipping continued, Tammy’s grades took a nose dive, and she became recluse and defiant at home. Meetings were held with the school administration, school counselor and the family. The parents did what they could administering consequences on their end. Yet nothing seemed to help.
My friend felt like she was loosing her daughter. Tammy could care less about graduating anymore – even though she used to love school as a child. That’s when I mentioned to her the idea of enrolling Tammy into one of Washington State’s online learning programs. At first, Mom was resistant. Like myself, my friend grew up in your “typical brick and mortar” school…..grouped by age, all taught the same thing at the same time no matter what level your were at, promoted regardless of mastery, huge masses of students moving through a system based on the industrial revolution. Tammy’s high school had close to 2000 students in it. Her teachers had about 180 students a day. Would anyone even notice Tammy’s plight?
Duncan: ‘We have to do things in a very, very different way’
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lauded the city and state for its post-Hurricane Katrina education reform during a wide-sweeping conversation about education on Friday.
Duncan spoke to a room of education journalists during the Education Writers Association National Seminar and touched on national issues relevant to Acadiana school systems.
He touted drastic reform in education, an issue that he said touches so many other problems. For example, only 25 percent of America’s youth qualify for the
The Trials of Kaplan — and the education of The Washington Post Co.
Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang:
As damaging as the new rules could be, Kaplan is also reeling from a storm of criticism of the industry’s practices and of The Post Co., an institution more accustomed to publishing news of others’ foibles.
The company was snared in a government sting that found Kaplan employees pushing students to take on loans without regard to whether they could afford them. It has been hammered by congressional critics, sideswiped by hedge fund investors and investigated by journalists. In the end, The Post Co. reluctantly conceded it would have to revamp Kaplan’s business model and turn away many prospective low-income students it once wooed.
The challenges have never jeopardized The Post Co.’s survival, but they cast a spotlight on management decisions and raise a question: How did The Post Co. end up here?
Post Co. executives blame outside forces, including a drop in political support for private-sector education companies and “financial and corporate agendas.” They also acknowledge missteps. Current and past officers say The Post Co. did not keep close-enough tabs on its fast-sprawling education unit, even as it focused heavily on customers who were poorer and thus at the riskier end of the business. But they say serving that disadvantaged population is important.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Absurd US Budget Debate
Updated: Does Kiplinger’s claim of “weak” Madison schools compared to “suburban” schools hold up?
The College Decision From The Professors’ Perspective
As the next class of college freshmen weigh their choices, I asked Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman, authors of The Secrets of College Success, to compile some tips for readers of The Choice. What follows are excerpts. – Jacques Steinberg
Focus on the academics. Since the main reason you’re going to college is to get a good education, the quality of the courses should be a critical factor in your choice-procedure. If you’re able to visit — or revisit — your top two or three choices, you’ll be able to assess how good the teaching is by attending a few first-year classes. Pay particular attention to who the instructor is (regular faculty, T.A., or adjunct professor — ask if you’re not sure), how well and interestingly the material is presented, and whether skills of analysis and interpretation are being emphasized.
A tool to measure ‘well-being’ is being tested on British children, with the aim of identifying problems and acting on them. But how do you put a number on a feeling?
Do you agree that your life has a sense of purpose? Would you say that, overall, you have a lot to be proud of? Do you wish you lived somewhere else? Coming out of the blue, these are tricky questions to answer. Yet they aren’t aimed at adults. They come from a questionnaire for children aged 11 to 16.
The charity think-tank New Philanthropy Capital has devised the questions as part of its “well-being measure”, a 15-minute survey that asks about relationships with family, school and community, as well as self-esteem and life satisfaction. The tool, being tested now, is designed to be used by charities, schools and youth groups to work out how happy (or not) children are. John Copps, who runs the project at NPC, believes the survey is capturing something that has been elusive: it is, he says, “putting a number on a feeling”.
The desire to match numbers to feelings is popular at the moment. In November last year, prime minister David Cameron put happiness at the centre of government policy when he announced that the Office for National Statistics would produce a national “well-being index” alongside its usual tables measuring income, health, births and deaths. And from this month, as part of the data-gathering, about 200,000 people a year will be asked new questions about their life satisfaction as part of the Integrated Household Survey.
Tantalising evidence is emerging of a serious gap in biologists’ understanding of the diversity of life on Earth
The data from which this conclusion was drawn were collected between 2003 and 2007 on one of the most scientifically productive holidays in history. This was a round-the-world cruise taken by Craig Venter on his yacht, Sorcerer II, which studied the diversity of micro-organisms in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.
Dr Venter was working out his frustrations after having been fired in 2002 from Celera Genomics, a company he helped set up in 1998 with the specific aim of sequencing the human genome faster and better than the public Human Genome Project was managing at the time. In that, it succeeded. In the wider aim of turning such knowledge into hard cash, however, it was nowhere near as successful as its financial backers had hoped. Dr Venter therefore found himself with more time on his hands than he had been planning.
His killer app in Celera’s assembly of the human genome was a technique called shotgun sequencing. This first shreds a genome into pieces small enough for sequencing machines to handle, then stitches the sequenced pieces back together by matching the overlaps using a computer. In principle, he realised, that trick could be used on mixed DNA from more than one organism. A good enough program would stitch together only fragments from the same type of creature. This would allow you to see what was living in a sample without having to culture anything. And since a huge majority of micro-organisms (by some estimates, 97%) cannot be cultured, that sounded like a great idea.
Metagenomics [Wolfram Alpha], as the new technique is known, has vastly extended knowledge of what bugs live in the sea–and in many other places, from hot springs to animals’ guts. It is not perfect. In practice a lot of what emerges are fragments of genomes, rather than complete assemblies. But it has been enormously successful at identifying previously unknown individual genes.
Mainland babies in a class of their own when it comes to parental expectations
On a cold, wet Friday morning, only a third of the children turn up for the 45-minute class in Shanghai’s Putuo district.
It’s not as if the children can get there themselves. Junjun, the eldest, is just 21 months old. Nini, the youngest, is 19 months old.
Their young teacher begins the class by leading the children and various accompanying grandparents on a walk around the sides of a square painted on the ground.
The early education centre, which says its tuition is based on the theories of famed Italian educator Maria Montessori [Blekko], says the exercise helps calm the children and concentrate their minds for learning.
Wozniak says innovative projects, not tests, should determine a student’s grade; the popular DVR follows your every move
Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking – which is key to “the artistic side” of technology.
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.
Wisconsin School Choice & Student Testing
Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-’07 school year, and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.
But we have a lot more work to do to ensure this program is fair to all taxpayers.
For decades, our state has recognized that some communities have more wealth than others. That means that the amount spent on a child’s education could change dramatically depending on which “side of the tracks” a student lives on.
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program’s performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program’s achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee’s long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
That discussion is a relevant one given that higher educational attainment certainly is the overall goal for all Milwaukee students. Nevertheless, there are several reasons recent comparative test score results should not be dismissed.
Much more on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, here.
Pilot program could swap ACT for Nebraska statewide test in 11th grade
Remember the statewide tests for public school students signed into law in 2008?
A Lincoln senator would like the state to consider deviating from that just a smidgen.
Lincoln Sen. Bill Avery would like to persuade the Legislature to go along with a pilot program that could change the statewide NeSA test for 11th-graders to the ACT college entrance exam.
The idea is to conduct the pilot in Lincoln and seven other districts in the state for three years. The program would evaluate whether the ACT would be an appropriate measure of content knowledge in reading, math and science, and of college and career readiness.
Avery believes having students take the ACT statewide could improve Nebraska’s college-going rate. The current rate is 67 percent for graduating high school students, he said.
Siblings play key role in child development
PhD candidate in the School of Psychology, Karen O’Brien, said children with autism could have difficulties in social interactions and that their siblings played an important role in their development, particularly when it came to social skills.
“Children acquire the ability to identify mental states, also known as ‘theory of the mind’ (ToM), at around four years of age,” she said.
“Research has shown that children with autism typically struggle on ToM tests and their everyday ToM skills are impaired, making it rare for even the highest-functioning autistic child to pass these tests before the age of 13 years.”
Mental states identified in ToM include intentions, beliefs, desires and emotions, in oneself and other people, and understanding that everyone has their own plans, thoughts, and points of view.
According to Ms O’Brien, typically developing children show a significant advance in ToM understanding between the ages of three to five years.
How to Get a Real Education
I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes–a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?
I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.
There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.
Japan Struggles to Reopen Schools
DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI And MIHO INADA:
The gymnasium of fifth-grader Ryodai Kinno’s school in Rikuzentakata, Japan, is packed with evacuees and its parking lot is full of aid vehicles. But authorities are determined to reopen his school and others across northeast Japan that have been closed since March 11, to help the youngest victims get over the trauma of the disaster.
Ryodai says he still gets frightened by the aftershocks and sometimes finds his legs shaking uncontrollably. “I’m not really sure the reason why,” he says.
On the day of the tsunami, Ryodai watched as his home was swallowed up by the rushing waters after fleeing to higher ground.
Broken Business Model in Liberal Arts
Maybe what the liberal arts needed was a full-blown depression.
“A couple of years ago I had great hope, because of the externality of the economic situation,” Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed College, told a room full of fellow audience members at a summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) on Thursday.
“I was really hoping, contrary to all of my better judgment, that things would really go into the toilet,” Ringle continued. “Because if we didn’t stop at recession — if we went all the way down to depression — maybe that would be enough for the economic forces to require us to change.”
The school voucher scam
The vicious scam behind Milwaukee’s school voucher program now is becoming public for all to see. The program is about to take another ugly turn transferring money from our neediest students to the most privileged.
It was always suspicious that right-wing Republicans were enthusiastically supporting a tax-funded government program they claimed would help poor children of color receive a quality education.
Historically, the right has consistently fought tax funds going to people in need, especially those of other races. The only government programs they support are huge tax cuts and corporate welfare benefiting the wealthy.
Much more on the Milwaukee School Choice Program, here.
A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2
What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.
In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama’s call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college–at an ever greater cost–when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” after four years of education?
This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking?
Poisoned milk kills 3 children, dozens ill
Three children in Pingliang, Gansu, have died and 36 others have fallen ill from nitrite poisoning after drinking milk bought direct from farmers.
Pingliang’s No2 People’s Hospital recorded the first food-poisoning death around 9am on Thursday and another hospital recorded two similar deaths shortly afterwards.
“The three dead children were all under three years old. The rest of the patients were mostly children under 14 years old,” a Pingliang government spokesman said.
Wright Middle School inspires
Just when you think the world is going to hell in a hand basket, a bunch of hand-written letters arrive from Wright Middle School students.
For the past several years, I’ve participated in the “School Makes a Difference” program where adults talk to kids about their career and give them a pep talk about learning. It’s not a big commitment — and the thank you notes from the kids make it well worth the time.
For example, Hope Blackmon wrote that my 15-minute presentation “really inspired a lot of us to start writing more and to try to get better at writing.”
Charter Schools & Unions
There were no charter school unions in 2008, when the Chicago Teachers Union formed its Charter Outreach Committee to knock on doors and help charter teachers organize.
Nationally, 604 charter schools, roughly 12 percent, have collective-bargaining agreements. But 388 of those schools are in states where the law dictates that charters be included in existing collective-bargaining agreements with local districts, according to data collected by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Illinois law does not require charter schools to be part of local collective-bargaining units.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Bankrupt Nation Wakes Up; David Stockman on the Debt
The high point in The Gallery of Antiquities, Balzac’s great novel of debt, comes when gendarmes are arresting the young Count d’Esgrignons for a forgery committed to cover his borrowing. The loyal notary Chesnel, attached to the d’Esgrignons family by generations of service, has already spent his own modest fortune to get the young count out of such scrapes, but he is at the end of his resources. “If I don’t manage to smother this story,” he tells the count matter-of-factly, “you’ll have to kill yourself before the indictment is read out.” The count realises in a flash that people have lent him money not because they have more than they know what to do with, or because he’s a nice guy, or because his privileges are the natural order of things. They have lent him money because they have made certain assumptions about his honour – misplaced assumptions, as it turns out.
Americans came face-to-face with their government debt this week and discovered that they are in the position of d’Esgrignons. There are several ways to measure how apocalyptic the situation is. The recent announcement by Pimco bond analyst Bill Gross that he was selling his long-term Treasury holdings has shaken people, and not just those who watch the business channels. In a memo laced with words like “staggering” and “incredible”, Mr Gross described himself as “confident” the US would default on its debt if did not reform its entitlement programmes (pensions and government healthcare). Mr Gross cited an estimate by Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist, that government unfunded liabilities stand at $75,000bn. To spend time with the federal budget is to suspect that the US is the sick man of the global economy.
Stockman described the impending showdown as a “wakeup call”–the political equivalent of getting whacked in the head by a two-by-four containing a rusty nail.
“And then,” Stockman added in a tone of lethal glee, “they’re going to be calling their own bluff. Because at that point the problem will remain 98 percent as large as it was the morning before.”
The 64-year-old Stockman, who made millions as an investment banker after serving as a Michigan congressman and then Reagan’s fiscal guru in the early 1980s, makes Debbie Downer sound like a cockeyed optimist. During a conversation punctuated by mirthless laughter, he characterized America’s elected officials as “the fools inside the Beltway,” dismissed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, generally celebrated as the GOP’s brightest policy star, as “an earnest young man” who offers discredited ideology over practical solutions, and predicted a long and agonizing epoch in which incomes will fall, the economy will stall and reality’s bite will leave painful tooth marks.
Related: Videographic on Pensions.
NY schools innovating, cooperating to ease cuts
From labor concessions by teachers and administrators to changing bus routes, many school districts in New York are finding ways to handle Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s historic cut in state aid without massive layoffs or drastic increases in property taxes.
Some schools that have already presented budget proposals are also tapping deeper into reserves to avoid layoffs and cuts to programs and sports. The result in many of the first batch of districts to formally propose budgets to voters is savings that cover much of the cut while protecting academic programs, yet resulting in tax levy increases near or below inflation.
“A lot of that is happening right now,” said David Albert of the state School Boards Association. He said the Legislature’s restoration of $230 million in operating aid in the state budget adopted March 31 has helped, along with labor concessions.
One Virginia Law Student’s Monument to Rejection
We have all felt the sting of rejection.
Law students have been particularly stung of late, as law firms continue to be rather parsimonious with job offers.
But a third year law student at the University of Virginia has turned rejection into an art form: the attached model of UVA Law built entirely out of law-firm rejection letters!!
Here’s the Above the Law post that broke the news of this deranged act of brilliance. The sculptor was not identified by ATL.
Louisiana education board agrees to hire new RSD leader
A new superintendent for the Recovery School District, which oversees schools taken over by the state for poor performance, will begin his job May 1, after the state’s top education board approved the hiring Friday.
John White, a deputy chancellor for New York City schools, was backed in a 7-1 vote by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Three BESE members abstained from the vote amid complaints about how Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek conducted the search.
“John is probably one of the most respected reformers in the country,” Pastorek said. He added, “I picked, I believe, the highest quality person, the person most capable to do this job.”
Who Speaks English?
EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists’s threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord. They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.
Kansas City Don Bosco Charter to close
A second Kansas City charter school today announced it will close at the end of this school year.
Don Bosco Charter High School is shuttering its doors for good after operating more than a decade as a school for students at risk of dropping out.
School officials said this morning that because of poor student attendance they were unable to generate the revenue needed to continue operating the high school. State funding for public schools is based on a formula heavily weighted by the average student daily attendance.
But school leaders were quick to defend their students.
“It would be very easy to blame students, but I don’t want to do that,” said Al Dimmitt, chairman of the Don Bosco Charter High School Board of Directors. “We are dealing with a student population faced with a lot of challenges in life and attendance in school does not always arise to their top priority,”
Spreading the word Hong Kong is well placed to promote Asian literature within the region and to the wider world
Two Chinese novelists, Su Tong and Wang Anyi, have just been named finalists for the biennial Man Booker International Prize, the first Chinese writers to receive this honour. This is, therefore, something of a milestone. Yet, even while savouring the reflected glow of this accolade, those familiar with contemporary Chinese literature might wonder why it has taken so long. One explanation might be that this prize, like many international prizes, is based on works in English, and the English-language publishing world has been slow to produce Chinese novels or, indeed, much of anything in translation (a situation that, fortunately, seems to be improving somewhat).
This particular prize, furthermore, is awarded not for a single book, but for a writer’s entire corpus. China’s recent history has been such that it has not been possible for a long time to publish novels; these two authors are, by the standards of such lifetime prizes, relatively young, Su Tong particularly so.
2011: The Year of Education Reform
School districts across the nation are grappling with the question of how to improve student performance in a time of fiscal austerity. Some reformers are challenging the idea of automatic tenure, arguing that teachers should be paid based on performance rather than seniority. Moreover, recent legislative battles involving teacher compensation in Wisconsin and Ohio have put the issue squarely in the public spotlight.
The Education School Master’s Degree Factory
One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master’s degree. Simply by giving up the extra payment for the master’s degree, school districts in Florida could save better than 3 percent of their teaching personnel costs without losing any of their classroom effectiveness. In a paper just published in the Economics of Education Review, Matthew Chingos and I look at the characteristics of effective 4th through 8th grade teachers in Florida over the period 2002 to 2010.
We found that teachers with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. Further, we found out that it did not make any difference from which public university in Florida a teacher had earned the degree. None of them had an educational program that correlated with a teacher’s classroom effectiveness.
Yet a teacher who has taught for 10 years will earn 6.5 percent more (or about $2500), if he or she has collected that extra diploma. Since about half the teachers have pursued that advanced degree–given the extra dollars, why not?–the state could save better than 3 percent of its teaching personnel costs by eliminating this useless feature of the teacher compensation scheme.
Parent teacher confences: appreciating the love
So we had our own parent teacher conferences, and, like with everything in life, therer was the rough and the smooth. It took a while, but I finally reminded myself that there was a whole lot more smooth than rough.
First, the smooth: how many parents popped by just to tell me that they appreciated my hard work or that their kid tells them stories I told them in class or that their kid has never actually spent so much time studying for a class and yet enjoying themselves. Four of last year’s kids’ parents came by to tell me that they had gotten into the college they wanted, and to thank me for the recommendation letters, and one mom hugged me tight enough to crack a rib not once but twice. That was really nice.
Now, at the end was the parent who lies about what I do and say about once a week. He demanded that I do all sorts of things to appease him, and I politely but firmly refused even while he lied to my face four times in fifteen minutes. He huffed off after that, and I did regret the fact that this was how it went down. He then told my principal that I had “bullied” him (look up the definition of bullying, and you will see that that was what he has been attempting to do to me all year, but okay, whatever. I guess I won’t be on the Christmas card list.
Student Financial Aid Programs Work! But do they work for students or for colleges?
Suppose that parents want their college-graduate son or daughter who has found a good job to be able to afford a house that would otherwise be too costly. So they give him or her $25,000 to be used toward the down payment. There is no doubt that they have made home ownership more affordable.
That is the idea behind federal financial aid programs for students, which give (or lend at attractive terms) money that offsets some of the cost of going to college. Obviously those programs work. If students have more money, their college education won’t cost them (and their families) as much.
But like many government programs, financial aid for college has unintended consequences that may partially or completely negate their intended consequences. In a recent paper, “How College Pricing Undermines Financial Aid” economists Robert Martin and Andrew Gillen make a strong case that instead of working to help students afford college, the government’s financial aid programs actually work for the schools.
NJ Gov. Christie calls for peer teacher evaluation
Beth Fouhy & Angela Dellis Santi:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday called for public school teachers to be evaluated based equally on their classroom performance and student achievement and accused the state’s largest teachers union of being a group of “bullies and thugs.”
Christie laid out his proposal in a speech in New York sponsored by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank. A teachers union spokesman called the governor’s plan an “educational disaster.”
Since taking office last year, the Republican Christie has emerged as a popular figure among conservatives nationally for his willingness to confront public employee unions, including teachers, over their salaries and pensions. Several other governors have since followed suit, saying such benefits for public employees are unsustainable over time.
If Wisconsin is so careless with some schools’ reputations . . .
The state, if you recall, released a snapshot of student performance in Milwaukee’s school choice program last week. Tony Evers, head of the Department of Public Instruction, used the numbers to make a political statement against school choice, which he opposes.
But the figures had issues, and now still more are emerging. One of the surprises in the figures were how poorly one particular choice school, Tamarack Waldorf, did.
It’s surprising because Tamarack is by reputation a good school, unusually deliberate in its curriculum and rigorous in the peculiar way of schools in the Waldorf movement – where, for instance, children do not just have a chapter on photosynthesis but, instead, spend a couple of weeks learning the chemistry behind it and studying the geometry of branches and doing a project on forest ecology and reading literature about trees and taking a field trip to the park, the better to appreciate art involving trees and to make some of their own. Rather than taking tests, the children produce books to demonstrate their learning.
The kind of people who send their kids to such a school are generally engaged and intellectual parents – and, generally, not favorably disposed to standardized testing.
So an unusual number of Tamarack parents opted their children out of the state’s tests, as is the right of any parent in the state. You can see the figures here: In math and reading, about 55% of choice students at Tamarack didn’t take the state tests.
The state’s figures say that 42% of Tamarack students did well – scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading, and 24% did in math. Those aren’t good scores. But they aren’t real, either.
As Tamarack administrator Jean Kacanek wrote to parents, “The data published is not complete because the Department of Public Instruction averaged scores of ‘0’ for each MPCP student in grades 4-8 at Tamarack who did not take the test. As one might expect for a Waldorf school, with a philosophy averse to standardized testing, many parents chose to opt out of the test.”
How the Best School Systems Invest in Teachers
When the rankings of the best school systems in the world were released earlier this year, Americans were shocked: our former number one standing slipped again, this time to number 26.
The rankings showed a new trend: the highest-performing school systems in the world are mostly in Asia.
What are the Asian school systems doing right? And what can the United States learn? Asia Society invited top education ministers from China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan and Singapore, to sound off on these questions.
There was no lively debate. The answer was clear: invest in teachers.
Weathering Education Cuts
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett proposed cuts last month that would slash the state’s higher-education budget to $567 million from $1.2 billion, affecting more than a dozen state-run and state-supported universities.
For the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, tuition would have to be increased by 40% to break even, although the school doesn’t plan to implement such a dramatic increase.
John Delaney, who has been the school’s dean since August 2006, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the budget cuts and how far the school is prepared to go to keep itself afloat. “I think we’ll have to really change the way we do things,” Mr. Delaney says.
Literacy Services boosts self-esteem, job prospects for adults
Dorothy Snead now knows her ABCs – in order.
Before coming to Literacy Services of Wisconsin, the 28-year-old knew only random letters and their sounds, which made reading difficult, if not impossible.
“If you get mail at home and do not know how to read, you’re in trouble,” said Snead, who often enlisted the help of others to read her own mail. “Going through life not knowing how to read can be hard on a person.”
So, over the past two years, Snead has set out to change her path and is getting good results. “My reading levels are moving up.”
Snead, who dropped out of high school, is among an increasing number of adult learners seeking literacy services, in large part to earn their GED, said India McCanse, the executive director of the agency, which served more than 800 people last year.
Do You Get an ‘A’ in Personality?
In the never-ending quest to help people co-exist peacefully with their spouses, children, siblings and in-laws, therapists are turning to tools used to assess the psychological stability of pilots, police officers and nuclear-power plant operators: personality tests.
I’m not talking about the pop quizzes in magazines that claim to help you determine the color of your aura or what breed you’d be if you were a dog. I am referring to tests that are scientifically designed and heavily researched, consisting of dozens if not hundreds of questions that identify specific aspects of your personality. Are you a thinker or a feeler? Intuitive or fact-oriented? Organized or spontaneous?
Answering questions like these helped Mardi and Richard Sayer get through a difficult period a few years ago when their adult daughter, Maggie Sayer, moved back into their Middletown, R.I. home.
Watertown (MA) School Committee rejects teachers contract
The Watertown School Committee Monday night voted down the long-negotiated teachers’ union contract in front of a standing-room only audience, citing the dire financial situation the schools face next year.
The 5-3 vote means negotiators will have to go back to the bargaining table after teachers thought they had an agreement with the School Committee that came only after 18 months of negotiations and the involvement of a mediator.
“We recommended in good faith that our members ratify the agreement…Our members trusted us and voted to ratify the agreement,” said Watertown Educators Association president Debra King at Monday’s meeting. “We expected the School Committee team would also act in good faith and ratify the agreement. But then came the disturbing turn of events that have led us to tonight.”
Admissions Figures on Elon, Harvey Mudd, Brandeis and Nearly 100 Other Colleges
In the few days since my colleague Eric Platt and I began publishing our running tally on how many students applied to — and were accepted by — various colleges and universities this year, the ledger has more than doubled, to 100.
Those of you who’ve been following this exercise know that our table is to be read with several caveats in mind. One is that it is far too early in the endgame of this year’s decision process to draw meaningful conclusions from these figures, especially considering that they represent a fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and universities. Moreover, as a number of commenters have noted, colleges and universities sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mass-mailing campaigns to drive up the number of applications they receive — and, in effect, drive down their admission rates — so that what might appear to be instant popularity could well be manufactured.
10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly
Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren’t as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.
In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn’t, or didn’t, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.
How to Ensure School Failure
I got my start as a journalist freelancing stories for the old Milwaukee Sentinel about problems with achievement test results at Milwaukee Public Schools. Throughout the 1980s, the media’s increasing focus on problems at MPS helped to lay the groundwork for a radically different alternative – a voucher system where low-income families could choose to send their children to private schools. The case for school choice could not have been made without years of achievement test data showing the below-average performance of MPS schools.
So it is highly ironic – and quite alarming – that Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to end the requirement that choice schools participate in the state system of standardized testing. I can’t think of a better way to guarantee these schools are failures.
Last week the media reported the results of state tests for MPS and choice schools. The average scores were astoundingly bad for some choice schools. The proportion of students who were proficient in reading and math was just 12 percent and 14 percent at Texas Bufkin Christian Academy; 17 percent and 6 percent at Travis Technology High School; 20 percent and 7 percent at Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy; 23 percent and 9 percent at Right Step, Inc.; 18 percent and 0 percent (Did no one take the math test?) at Dr Brenda Noach Choice School; 16 percent and 9 percent at Destiny High School. You get the feeling some of these schools worked harder on creating their name than educating the students.
Much more on the Milwaukee school choice program, here.
Massachusetts School district petitions legislature to opt out of common education standards
A Massachusetts school committee has petitioned their legislature to opt out of Federal education standards which most states have adopted in attempt to get federal funding during lean budget times.
The Tantasqua Regional School Committee, the equivalent of our local Board of Education, is working with their state legislature to allow them to opt out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
School Committee Chairman Kathleen Neal told the Gazette committee members are concerned with the cost of implementing the program as well as the way the standards were adopted with little public input last year.
The Massachusetts Core initiative was adopted during the summer and Neal said the committee had no idea it was being discussed until after the vote was passed with almost no notice to the general public. “If you are going to change the way you do assessments you should bring the people who are invested in it to the table.” She expressed frustration at state officials lack of asking the local districts for solutions.
Autism Treatments Scrutinized in Study
Three new studies conclude that many widely used behavioral and medication treatments for autism have some benefit, one popular alternative therapy doesn’t help at all, and there isn’t yet enough evidence to discern the best overall treatment.
Parents of children with autism-spectrum disorder often try myriad treatments, from drugs to therapy to nutritional supplements. The studies being published Monday and funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, were part of the effort to examine the comparative effectiveness of treatments in 14 priority disease areas, including autism-spectrum disorders.
Autism and related disorders, conditions marked by social and communication deficits and often other developmental delays, have become more common over the years and now affect 1 in 110 U.S. children, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Public-College Presidents Score Raises
Presidents of public universities collected a small raise in pay last year amid budget squeezes at most schools across the U.S.
The median pay of presidents at 185 large public universities rose 1% to $444,487 during the 2009-2010 school year, according to an annual survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That’s less than half the 2.3% bump the Chronicle found for the previous year, and it pales beside the 7.6% jump reported the year before that.
As many state legislatures debate double-digit percentage cuts in higher-education funding, presidential pay could become a sensitive subject. In Austin, for instance, University of Texas Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa is asking lawmakers to limit proposed reductions in the state’s funding of higher education, even as his compensation was third highest, by total cost of employment, among public-university leaders in America.
It’s class warfare in battle to cut Hong Kong schools down to size
All schools are equal under a government plan to reduce classes, but some are more equal than others. These are the elite schools.
Their alumni are often wealthy donors and powerful people, so it is much more difficult for the government to encourage them to join the class-reduction plan. Officials want about 200 secondary schools to volunteer to cut a secondary-one class as part of government efforts to cut costs because of falling birth rates.
But alumni of Wah Yan College in Kowloon and King’s College in Sai Ying Pun are leading the rebellion, and many parents who want to enrol their children in such elite schools do not want them to cut classes.
Alumni of King’s College are considering launching a judicial review of the school’s decision to join the scheme.
MATC full-time faculty earn more on average than faculty at most UW campuses
Full-time faculty members at Madison Area Technical College earned an average base pay of $79,030 last year, more than the average professor earned at all University of Wisconsin System campuses except UW-Madison.
Average take-home pay increased to $87,822 when sources such as summer school and overtime were factored in, according to a State Journal analysis of 2009-10 salary data, obtained through Wisconsin’s open records law.
Officials say one reason MATC faculty are paid more than those in the UW System is because the technical college must compete with high-paying private-sector jobs to hire faculty to teach subjects such as plumbing, electrical fields and information technology.
But another reason for the gap may be the way salaries are set. Raises for UW System faculty must be included in the state budget along with other state workers, while MATC faculty negotiate their salaries with the district board through union representation.
When It Comes to Teaching, Who Needs Experience?
As I think back over a dozen years in the classroom, I cannot recall the exact moment that I changed from an idealistic beginning teacher at the peak of my game to the space-wasting NEA member who is keeping some good young teacher on the unemployment line.
When did experience turn from an asset to the biggest roadblock to saving American public schools?
In Missouri, a bill has been proposed by Republican Rep. Scott Dieckhaus which would eliminate tenure and the due process it guarantees and allow administrators and school boards to fire teachers with or without reason.
Dieckhaus’ bill also calls for a four-tier merit pay system, based almost entirely on the scores on standardized tests. The bill specifically forbids basing teacher pay on years of experience or advanced schooling.
Why straight-A’s may not get you into the University of Washington this year
A series of worsening revenue forecasts and a $5 billion state budget shortfall have made it even more likely that the Legislature will again slash higher-education funding this year. So in February, top academic leaders at the UW made a painful decision to cut the number of Washington students the school will admit this fall to its main Seattle campus and increase the number of nonresident students, who pay nearly three times as much in tuition and fees.
“When the decision was made, it was not a happy one,” said Philip Ballinger, the UW’s admissions director. “There were real debates, and internal reluctance to the last minute.”
School Cuts Spur Michigan K-12, Higher Education Spending Conflict
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said earlier this year he wouldn’t “pick fights” with public-employee unions, but he’s now headed for a showdown with teachers over his proposed education cuts.
The Michigan Education Association, which represents 155,000 teachers statewide, began polling members late last month to gauge support for a range of “crisis activities,” including a strike, to protest the governor’s proposed 4% cut in school funding.
In response, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would add stiff new penalties for teacher strikes–which are barred by state law–including revoking a teacher’s certification. The teachers also plan a rally next week in the state capital of Lansing.
“The battle lines have already been drawn,” said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a political newsletter in Lansing. “There is the gathering prospect that we could end up with another Wisconsin.”
Democrat Oregon Governor Kitzhaber pushes for 1 board to oversee education, pre-kindergarten through grad school
Gov. John Kitzhaber leads a full-court press today for what he considers to be the centerpiece of his education reform plan — a single board that would help set the budgets for pre-kindergarten programs to universities and everything in between.
At a news conference, he surrounded himself with every top education official in the state to tout his bill that would establish the Oregon Education Investment Board. The board would replace the state boards of education and higher education, and would oversee spending on all facets of learning.
“The state needs to move from a funder to an investor,” Kitzhaber said. And the money each program gets “needs to be based on outcomes rather than seat time.”
Later today, Kitzhaber is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee on Senate Bill 909, which takes the first steps toward establishing the new uber-board.
Kitzhaber acknowledged that even under that system interest groups would still compete. But not as fiercely as they do under the current system.
John Kitzhaber: “If you’re developing a single joint budget based on some clear criteria going in, it creates a rationale for that debate. Right now it’s simply how do I get as much money as I can in my pot.”
The unified education budget would still have to be approved by lawmakers. Kitzhaber made his pitch to members of the Oregon Senate Education Committee.
Rallying Back
The fact that the American Federation of Teachers’ annual meeting on higher education took place in a hotel here alongside the American Professional Wound Care Association was, to be sure, a quirk of scheduling. But the irony was not lost on several of those attending.
Organized labor has suffered punishing blows in recent days and weeks, in Wisconsin and Ohio, with the promise of further attacks on collective bargaining to come in other states, such as Indiana, Michigan and Florida.
“This has been about the worst year that I could have ever imagined happening,” Ed Muir, AFT’s deputy director of research and information services, said at the opening plenary session Friday. “Our enemies were given more political power than ever before.”
Broadband Availability for US Schools
The U.S. Department of Education developed this broadband availability map and search engine as part of a collaborative effort with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This education-focused broadband map and database builds upon the NTIA State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) Program that surveys bi-annually broadband availability and connectivity for the 50 United States, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia.
Requiring Algebra II in high school gains momentum nationwide
Peter Whoriskey, via a Mike Allen email
With its intricate mysteries of quadratics, logarithms and imaginary numbers, Algebra II often provokes a lament from high-schoolers.
What exactly does this have to do with real life?
The answer: maybe more than anyone could have guessed.
Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates.
In recent years, 20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students.
The effort has been led by Achieve, a group organized by governors and business leaders and funded by corporations and their foundations, to improve the skills of the workforce. Although U.S. economic strength has been attributed in part to high levels of education, the workforce is lagging in the percentage of younger workers with college degrees, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Sample questions are available here.
India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire
Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
How the System Ensures Teacher Quality
As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.
In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers — she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master’s degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.
Gov. Christie creates task force to review N.J. education rules
Gov. Chris Christie created a committee today that will be tasked with reviewing all of the state’s education regulations.
The task force will return recommendations to eliminate regulations which take decision-making power away from the local districts, Christie said.
“What I want to have happen here is to return more of the power back to school districts and less from the central office in Trenton, so that we can encourage people to innovate,” Christie said. “We’ve gotten into a pattern over the course of time with increasing money coming from Trenton over the last 20 to 25 years years with increasing regulation coming from Trenton. I don’t think that’s the best way for us to go at transforming education.
Don’t use Michigan’s K-12 fund for higher education
Michigan’s education funding system has been broken for a long time.
Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to shift college and university funding into the School Aid Fund that pays for K-12 education is not a good long-term solution.
Snyder is trying to use the financial pressure to accelerate efforts to curb the overpromising of salaries, pensions and benefits – especially health care benefits – to teachers. Likewise, many in the Republican Party believe the state’s colleges and universities have spent too much on salaries and benefits.
Fun with the California Federation of Teachers
It’s a serious time in the world of education labor. Some even call it war. And while the California Federation of Teachers is stockpiling arms in the Fight for California’s Future, the union still has a wide range of priorities, as evidenced by its list of approved resolutions from last month’s convention at the Marriott Manhattan Beach.
Resolution 1 calls on the state to research the effects of methyl iodide and asks CalSTRS to divest any investment in the company that manufactures it for agricultural use.
Resolution 2 institutes compensation for additional statewide CFT officers, the amount to be determined by the CFT Executive Council.
Resolution 4 directs the union to lobby for compulsory kindergarten.
New York’s Claremont Prep Is Sold To a For-Profit Network
Claremont Preparatory School, a six-year-old institution in Lower Manhattan that has had difficulty fulfilling its ambitions, is being sold to a private-equity-backed firm, in a sign of growing investor interest in private schools in New York City.
The sale to the firm, Meritas, which is owned by Sterling Partners, illustrates the growing force of profit-seeking companies in private education, a development loaded with potential and risks. Private equity firms are as well known for their top-notch management teams as for their cost-cutting mandates, which have been widely tested in the world of business but are relatively new to the field of elementary and secondary education.
Kids Do More With Arts Education: Closing the Achievement Gap By Increasing Social Assets
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners… but having the same manner for all human souls. In short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
Professor Henry Higgins says this to Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion. He has wagered that he can pass Eliza, a “lowly” flower girl, for a society lady by teaching her how to speak and behave properly. Higgins is successful, Eliza does pass, but her acceptance into the social elite came as much from her newly found self-esteem, as her style and manner.
The idea that “social assets” can help kids get ahead and do more in the world isn’t a new one. Social assets aren’t about money, but the stuff that comes with money. Things like knowing about fine art, current events, fashion, design, even food and wine. These are the social markers that give away what part of town you live in, where you go to school, and what your parents do for a living. In the last forty years the concept of social assets has been widely recognized in educational research as a major factor in where, or if, kids go to college, and how much they’ll earn over their lifetimes.
In World of Education Apps, Tech Owes Teachers Some Media Literacy
As a former high school English teacher, I used to have a pretty constricted view when attending continuing education workshops. Like most teachers, I thought: How can this help my school and students? Now, as a HuffPost Education editor reporting at the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference in Los Angeles, I got to think big in terms of the newest education ideas and who they affect. And there was lots to take note of.
The conference was a mix of educators, reformers and software developers who spent three days bouncing around theories, policies and practices on the best ways to use technology in the classroom. Diligent teachers tuned in by taking notes on their iPads and updated grades on their smartphones — all while discussing how best to use these platforms in their curriculum.
Tax credits for religious schools? Supreme Court says taxpayers have no say.
The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools.
In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona’s religious school tax credit program.
Pioneer of ballet wants girls to have more choices
Being born female set sometime actress Christine Liao on the road to a career in ballet, but it could all have been so different.
Growing up in a traditional, male-dominated environment, the founder of the Christine Liao School of Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet Company may never have had such an impact on the art form had she not seen other career paths blocked.
And that’s precisely why she is backing a new campaign called “Because I am a Girl”, which will promote the rights of girls.
Liao began dancing when she was eight and, at the age of 19, she became a film actress using the stage name Mao Mei, and starred in eight films from 1955 to 1962. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in languages and literature, she turned her back on the silver screen and considered becoming a lawyer or working in an office.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Google’s Low tax Strategy, Relations with President Obama and Anti-Intellectualism
Take Google, for example – like WPP it has sited its European headquarters in Dublin although it most of its European revenues are generated outside Ireland – from the UK and other large EMEA economies such as Germany.
The internet giant doesn’t pay 12.5% corporate tax in Ireland, it pays 20%. But that figure is not the interesting one. The interesting figure is the gargantuan “administrative expense” that reduces its gross profit from €5.5bn to just €45m.
Grant Thornton tax accountant Peter Vale, who works with multinationals in Dublin says the corporate tax rate of 12.5% may not be a critical factor for companies like Google.
The search engine is using Ireland as a conduit for revenues that end up being costed to another country where its intellectual property (the brand and technology such as Google’s algorithms) is registered. In Google’s case this country is Bermuda, according to an investigation by Bloomberg last year.
Vale points out that Bermuda is likely to be happy to receive tax revenues from such a huge company, saying: “To them, the 12.5% probably doesn’t matter.”
The 2009 Google Ireland Limited accounts show the company turned over a phenomenal €7.9bn in Europe for the year ending 2009 – up from €6.7bn the previous year.
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy:
“Google was Obama territory [during the campaign], and vice versa. With its focus on speed, scale, and above all data, Google had identified and exploited the key ingredients for thinking and thriving in the Internet era. Barack Obama seemed to have integrated those concepts in his own approach to problem solving. Naturally, Googlers were excited to see what would happen when their successful methods were applied to Washington, D.C. They were optimistic that the Google worldview could prevail outside the Mountain View bubble. … [A]nyone visiting the Google campus during the election year could not miss a fervid swell of Obama-love. While some commentators wrung hands over the Spock-like nature of the senator’s personality, Googlers swooned over the dispassionate, reason-based approach he took to problem solving. … ‘It’s a selection bias,’ says Eric Schmidt of the unofficial choice of most of his employees. ‘The people here all have been selected very carefully, so obviously there’s going to be some prejudice in favor of a set of characteristics – highly educated, analytic, thoughtful, communicates well.’ …
“[O]ne of the company’s brightest young product managers, Dan Siroker [the Chrome browser], … got permission to take a few weeks off. … At [Obama] campaign headquarters in Chicago, Siroker began looking at the web efforts to recruit volunteers and solicit donations. … [H]e returned to Google to help launch Chrome. But over the July 4 weekend, he went back to Chicago to visit the friends he’d met on the campaign. Barack Obama walked through headquarters, and Siroker was introduced to him. He told the senator he was visiting from Google. Obama smiled. ‘I’ve been saying around here that we need a little more Google integration.’ That exchange with the candidate was enough to change Siroker’s course once more. Back in Mountain View, he told his bosses he was leaving for good. He became the chief analytics officer of the Obama campaign. …
“Just as Google ran endless experiments to find happy users, Siroker and his team used Google’s Website Optimizer [tool for testing site content] to run experiments to find happy contributors. The conventional wisdom had been to cadge donations by artful or emotional pitches, to engage people’s idealism or politics. Siroker ran a lot of A/B tests and found that by far the success came when you offered some sort of swag; a T-shirt or a coffee mug. Some of his more surprising tests came in figuring out what to put on the splash page, the one that greeted visitors when they went to Obama2008.com. Of four alternatives tested, the picture of Obama’s family drew the most clicks.
“Even the text on the buttons where people could click to get to the next page was subject to test. Should they say, SIGN UP, LEARN MORE, JOIN US NOW, or SIGN UP NOW? (Answer: LEARN MORE, by a significant margin.) Siroker refined things further by sending messages to people who had already donated. If they’d never signed up before, he’d offer them swag to donate. If they had gone through the process, there was no need for swag – it was more effective to have a button that said PLEASE DONATE. … There were a lot of reasons why Barack Obama raised $500 million online to McCain’s $210 million, but analytics undoubtedly played a part.”
Via Mike Allen.
The FTC on Google’s “deceptive tactics” and violation of its own privacy rules.
Google Inc. has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the practices violate the FTC Act. The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers’ information. In addition, this is the first time the FTC has alleged violations of the substantive privacy requirements of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, which provides a method for U.S. companies to transfer personal data lawfully from the European Union to the United States.
“When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honor them,” said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. “This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations.”
According to the FTC complaint, Google launched its Buzz social network through its Gmail web-based email product. Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective. For users who joined the Buzz network, the controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.
Finally: Massive Offshore Tax Giveaway supported by Senators Kohl & Feingold:
As mentioned here, I, too, would like the 5.25% tax rate that our good Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported (to repatriate foreign profits via a one year tax break). Timothy Aeppel looks at the results:
But it’s far from clear whether the spending has spurred the job growth that backers of the break touted.
A law signed by President Bush shortly before the 2004 election allows companies to transfer profit from overseas operations back to the U.S. this year at a special low tax rate of 5.25%. Businesses often keep such funds outside the country in part to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., where the effective rate on repatriated profit for many companies is normally closer to 25%. Backers said the measure would provide an incentive to companies to invest those funds in U.S. operations.
Most companies using the break have offered only broad outlines for how they intend to use their windfall. For the most part, they say they are using the bulk of the money for tasks such as paying down debt and meeting payrolls. Direct job creation rarely appears on the list.Why do countries and cities and states try to attract tech companies such as Google when they don’t want to support the local community tax base?
Twitter, for example is trying to get out of paying San Francisco payroll taxes.
Yet the Obama administration believes that innovation from companies like Google and Twitter will help build jobs and provide the wealth to eliminate US deficits. Other governments have similar hopes.
That’s a highly optimistic view and one that’s not supported by the actions of those companies who seek the best deals they can get, and use every loophole to get out of paying a share of their profits to the communities where they live and work.Well worth Reading: John Mauldin: The Plight of the Working Class and Ed Wallace: What’s that Whining Sound?
This influence peddling at the highest levels is not unique to Google, or to the private sector for that matter. MG & E’s lobbying is another example where funds, generated from a large rate base (the general public), are spread to a few politicians. Facebook’s privacy problems and cellular user tracking are also worth following.
A new school in Sai Kung will be a model for sustainable design and education in Hong Kong
No longer the preserve of tree-huggers, the trend for sustainable design is gaining momentum as more people opt for homes and buildings created using renewable resources that don’t cost the earth, literally. No wonder – these buildings use less energy, cost less to operate, use fewer natural resources and have less of an impact on the environment than their conventional counterparts.
Hong Kong Academy’s green school, which opens in Sai Kung in 2013, is part of a new era in sustainable architecture in our city, says Josh Arnold, who teaches middle school science, maths and design technology at HKA.
Guaranteeing my future employment
Three distinguished scholars at the Brookings Institution have been spending much time worrying about what we education writers are going to do with ourselves in the uncertain future. This week, they released their third consecutive report on this subject, and filled me with hope that I had not had before.
The three — governance studies director Darrell M. West, Brown Center on Education Policy Director Grover J. Whitehurst and governance studies senior fellow and Post political columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. — have discovered among our fellow Americans a stubborn faith in education reporting in newspapers. That’s right: The byproduct of dead trees sitting in front of your house getting soaked in the spring rain is still a useful tool.
They surveyed 1,211 adults in the continental United States and found that daily newspapers were the second-most common source for current education news among this diverse group, with 60 percent saying newspapers were a source of education news for them.
Blagojevich speaks to high school students at convention
Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, speaking with high school students from around the Midwest, gave an inside look into his time in office and his recent trial for allegedly attempting to sell President Barack Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat.
Blagojevich was the keynote speaker Saturday at the Junior State of America’s Spring State Convention at the DoubleTree Hotel in Oak Brook.
Students from Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota attended, asked questions of the impeached former governor and played a game of “Jeopardy!” with him to raise money for Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims.
“Some may say (I’ve) taken a hard fall and those who say that are true,” Blagojevich said. “This is the nature of the political system today in America. It’s all taken away because you are accused falsely of things you didn’t do.” The former governor, expected back in federal court April 20, spoke harshly about Gov. Pat Quinn, Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan and state Senate President John Cullerton. Blagojevich criticized Quinn’s tax hike, and Madigan and Cullerton for not calling a bill to make property taxes more affordable.
Racine schools want $118 million from voters, promise improvement
In a city hit hard by the recent economic downturn, school officials have set an ambitious agenda for turning around a struggling school system.
Within five years, Racine Unified School District officials say, their goal is to have 90% of third-graders reading at grade level or higher – a dramatic improvement over the 65% proficiency rate posted on the recent state test.
What they’re asking for in return in a Tuesday referendum is an additional $118.5 million. If approved, it would be the largest successful referendum in Wisconsin, not even counting another question on the ballot that seeks an additional $10 million for district reserves.
“What this referendum is about is us, as a district, making a commitment, but also having the community make a commitment, to make us demonstrably better,” Racine Unified Deputy Superintendent Alan Harris said.
Harris was formerly Principal of Madison’s East High School.
SEC recommends action against bank over $200 million school investments
School officials in Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay claim they were misled about the nature of the investments
Securities and Exchange Commission staff have recommended taking enforcement action against an investment bank involved in five Wisconsin school districts’ $200 million investment in risky financial instruments, the bank disclosed Friday.
The parent corporation for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. disclosed in an SEC filling that Stifel Nicolaus had received a “Wells Notice” from the federal agency on Friday, indicating that “the staff intends to recommend the filing of a civil or administrative enforcement action against Stifel Nicolaus for possible violations of securities laws related to its role” in the school districts’ investments.
“Stifel Nicolaus plans to respond and explain why it believes enforcement action is not warranted,” the company wrote in the filing.
Bankers with Stifel Nicolaus helped sell $200 million worth of complex financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations in 2006 to five school districts – Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay – as a way to help fund non-pension post-employment benefits for the districts’ employees.
Choice Schools Do Pay Off
The striking bit of news out of that ongoing study comparing private and public schools in Milwaukee is this: Researchers aren’t yet sure how, but the private schools are better at getting kids across the finish line.
This is one bright spot in a report otherwise showing that children using Milwaukee’s school choice program were doing only about as well as Milwaukee Public Schools kids on state tests. The study, by independent university researchers, is following two sets of children, matched for background and poverty, to see which system does a better job of improving their scores on math and reading tests. So far, say researchers, there’s no statistically significant difference.
But the study’s oldest students have reached graduation age. There, say researchers, there is a difference. Children in choice schools were notably more likely to graduate from high school. Just among those who spent ninth grade taking their state aid to a private school in the form of a voucher, 77% graduated in four years; 69% of MPS kids did.
Among students who spent all four years in a choice school, 94% graduated on time; 75% of kids who stayed in MPS all four years did.
Much more on the Milwaukee Parental Choice program, here.
MISSED ADJUSTMENTS and OPPORTUNITIES RATIFICATION OF Madison School District/Madison Teachers Collective Bargaining Agreement 2011-2013
The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO ‘urgent’ need (nor ANY need at all) to ‘negotiate’ a new contract. The current contract doesn’t expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in ‘locking in’ the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.
- Keeping the ‘step and advancement’ salary schedule locks in automatic salary increases; thereby establishing a new basis annually for salary adjustments. The schedule awards increases solely on tenure and educational attainment. This also significantly inhibits movement for development and implementation of ‘pay for performance’ and merit.
- Continues the MOU agreement requiring 50% of teachers in 4-K programs (public and private sites combined) to be state certified and union members
- Continues required union membership. There are 2700 total or 2400 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, numbers rounded. Full-time teachers pay $1100.00 (pro-rated for part-time) per year in automatic union dues deducted from paychecks and processed by the District. With 2400 FTE multiplied by $1100 equals $2,640,000 per year multiplied by two years of the collective bargaining unit equals $5,280,000 to be paid by teachers to their union (Madison Teachers Inc., for its union activities). These figures do not include staff members in the clerical and teacher assistant bargaining units who also pay union dues, but at a lower rate.
- Continues to limit and delay processes for eliminating non-performing teachers Inhibits abilities of the District to determine the length and configuration of the school day, length and configuration of the school year calendar including professional development, breaks and summer school
- Inhibits movement and placement of teachers where needed and best suited
- Restricts adjustments to class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios
- Continues very costly grievance options and procedures and litigation
- Inhibits the District from developing attendance area level teacher/administrator councils for collaboration in problem-solving, built on trust and relationships in a non-confrontational environment
- Continues costly extra-duties and extra-curricular agreements and processes
- Restricts flexibility for teacher input and participation in professional development, curriculum selection and development and performance evaluation at the building level
- Continues Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), costing upwards to $3M per year
- Does not require teacher sharing in costs of health insurance premiums
- Did not immediately eliminate extremely expensive Preferred Provider (WPS) health insurance plan
- Did not significantly address health insurance reforms
- Does not allow for reviews and possible reforms of Sick Leave and Disability Leave policies
- Continues to be the basis for establishing “me too” contract agreements with administrators for salaries and benefits. This has impacts on CBAs with other employee units, i.e., support staff, custodians, food service employees, etc.
- Continues inflexibilities for moving staff and resources based on changes and interpretations of state and federal program supported mandates
- Inhibits educational reforms related to reading and math and other core courses, as well as reforms in the high schools and alternative programs
Each and every one of the above items has a financial cost associated with it. These are the so-called ‘hidden costs’ of the collective bargaining process that contribute to the over-all costs of the District and to restrictions for undertaking reforms in the educational system and the District. These costs could have been eliminated, reduced, minimized and/ or re-allocated in order to support reforms and higher priorities with more direct impact on academic achievement and staff performance.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
100k PDF version
It’s time for schools to focus on quality, not politics or structure
I’m tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we’ve proved anything in Milwaukee, we’ve proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.
Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation’s foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee’s publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and – for the first time – school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We’ve got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We’re not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee – MPS, voucher schools and charter schools – had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us – especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders – focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
I appreciate and approve of Borsuk’s sentiment.
Bennet introduces bill to close loophole in how feds fund high-poverty schools
In an attempt to close funding disparities between high- and low-poverty schools, a bill introduced in Washington, D.C., on Thursday would force districts to be more detailed in reporting school-by-school funding, closing a longtime loophole.
The bill, introduced by Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Thad Cochran, R-Miss., targets districts that collect federal Title I funding for high-poverty schools.
“All too often, well-intentioned policies hatched in Washington do not work the way they were intended,” Bennet said in a release. “We are one of only three developed countries to pump more money into affluent schools than low-income schools. That needs to change.”
When federal Title I funding was started, it was meant to be an additional resource on top of other funds to help students in need get on an equal academic playing field.
Autism sufferer Lo Yip-nang found a way to express himself through art – and his work is dazzling thousands
A joyful kaleidoscope in clay, Lo Yip-nang’s display of intricate patterns in jewel tones entranced thousands of people who visited his exhibition at the Jockey Club Creative Art Centre in Shek Kip Mei. Although many were eager to talk to the artist, he kept working with his slivers of coloured clay, giving monosyllabic replies to queries.
“You’ve been working all day; are you tired?” asks one woman. “No,” he says after a long pause. “People like your work, does that make you happy?” asks another. “Yes.”
Lo wasn’t playing the temperamental artist, though. The 30-year-old is autistic and his two-week exhibition last month is a personal triumph – and a sign of hope that people with the disability can live independently.
Autism stems from glitches in neurological development that cause sufferers to be socially impaired. Unable to interpret what people are expressing or to communicate how they feel, they typically become engrossed with specific objects instead or find comfort in repetitive behaviour and routine. But Lo, or Nang as he is affectionately known, is a rare autistic person who found a way to express himself.
An Anti-College Backlash?
Americans are finally starting to ask: “Is all this higher education really necessary?”
Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower” (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I’ve discovered that rather than a lone crank, I’m a voice in a growing movement.
Also see:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
The Truth About Harvard: It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it’s easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate’s report. By Ross Douthat
What Does College Teach? It’s time to put an end to “faith-based” acceptance of higher education’s quality. By Richard H. Hersh
I hadn’t expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic’s web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.
In the months and years since then – and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article – I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I’m seeing it everywhere? I don’t think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college.
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers’ Budget Testimony
JFC co-chair Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said in the last budget, cuts to K-12 education were offset by millions of stimulus dollars from the federal government.
“It was a luxury that was great at the time,” he said. “Now we don’t have that one-time money.”
While he admitted that the “tools” Gov. Walker provides may not offset funding cuts dollar-for-dollar, he said asking teachers to pay more for health insurance coverage and pension will help. Vos then asked Evers if he supports the mandate relief initiatives Walker proposed in his budget.
Evers said the mandates, which include repealing the requirement that schools schedule 180 days instruction but retains the required number of hours per school year, won’t generate much savings for school districts. He said the challenge schools face from reduced funding is much greater.
“It’s nibbling around the edges,” Evers said of the mandates. “I think we’re beyond that.”
Excerpts from Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers prepared remarks to the Joint Finance Committee:
“We know that resources are scarce. School districts around the state have demonstrated that they are willing to do their part, both in recent weeks in response to this state budget crisis and throughout the past 18 years under the constraints of revenue caps. While this difficult budget demands shared sacrifice, we need a budget that is fair, equitable, and does not undercut the quality of our children’s education,” Evers said.
“As you know, the Governor’s budget proposal, which increases state spending by 1.7 percent over the next two years, would cut $840 million in state school aids over the biennium – the largest cut to education in state history. While these cuts present unprecedented challenges, an even larger concern is the proposed 5.5 percent reduction to school district revenue limits, which dictate exactly how much money schools have available to spend. Depending on the school district, schools would have to reduce their spending between $480 and $1,100 per pupil. Statewide, the proposed revenue limit cuts will result in a $1.7 billion cut over the biennium, as compared to current law. These dramatic and unprecedented revenue limit cuts will be a crushing challenge to our public schools, especially by the second year of the budget.”
Higher Education Governance Agreement in Oregon, For Now
In contrast to some other states (yes, that means you, Wisconsin), Oregon’s politicians and the leaders of its public colleges and universities are on the same page about changes the state should make in how it manages higher education. But don’t blink, or you might miss the moment.
Governor John Kitzhaber and the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, agreed Tuesday that the university would postpone for a year its push for legislation that would give it a new financing stream and an independent governing board separate and apart from the existing State Board of Higher Education.
Under the agreement, which was memorialized in an exchange of letters, Lariviere said the university would throw its support behind the governor’s plan to create a single statewide board to oversee pre-K to postsecondary education. While Kitzhaber did not openly state in return that he would fully back the university’s autonomy plan, Lariviere said in an interview Thursday that he was heartened by what university officials had heard in their discussions with the governor and his staff. “What we have received is as strong and as clear an endorsement of our ideas as we could reasonably expect at this stage,” he said.
Time for a change: Susan Schmidt is a newcomer who is well-informed about what makes for successful schools. She appears ready to make the tough decisions needed to get the Milwaukee School district on track.
The Milwaukee School Board needs fresh ideas, which is why we favor newcomer Susan Schmidt over Terry Falk for the at-large seat on Tuesday’s ballot.
Schmidt, 49, a single parent of two, is well-informed about what makes for successful schools, having visited and worked with a number of Milwaukee Public Schools and charter and choice schools.
Through her work with the nonprofit Scooter Foundation, established after her brother was shot and killed in Milwaukee in 2005, Schmidt opposes expanding choice beyond poor students. She believes the district needs to be more fiscally responsible. She said the board has a history of putting the needs of adults ahead of students.
The board’s reluctance to allow Superintendent Gregory Thornton to explore the idea of outsourcing food service to save the district money is a prime example of the board’s lack of leadership.
Janesville Schools Take Steps To Balance Budget
At Thursday night’s school board meeting, the school board approved cuts and fee increases totaling nearly $1 million.
“(Superintendent Karen Schulte) made an extensive presentation that covered $12 million in cuts covering a good portion of our $13 million budget shortfall.” said Keith Pennington chief financial officer of the Janesville School District.
The approved cuts include reducing district travel expenses and increasing fees for student athletic events.
“We are going to be increasing ticket prices for sporting events from $3 for adults and $2 for students to $5 for adults and $3 for students, which is aligned with the other schools in our conference,” Pennington said. “Participation fee increases, student parking fees will increase from $50 a year to $100 a year and other miscellaneous costs surrounding athletic events.”
Education commissioner calls for compromise in Minnesota K-12 bills
Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius said Friday that the Dayton administration and the Republican-controlled Legislature have some work ahead of them to reach some compromise on the education funding bills that passed at the Capitol this week.
The proposals would boost the basic per-pupil funding. But it freezes spending for special education and other funding that goes primarily to the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth districts.
One example is aid that’s distribute based on how concentrated poverty is in a school building. Cassellius says cutting that funding would hurt the most vulnerable students.
“It’s really a realization of not understanding the difficult nature of concentrations of poverty, and the difficulty to meet the needs of all children and all the challenges that are there,” she said.
Another brand of Bush school reform: Jeb’s
The president who turned No Child Left Behind from slogan into statute is gone from Washington, and the influence of his signature education law is fading. But another brand of Bush school reform is on the rise.
The salesman is not the 43rd president, George W. Bush, but the 43rd governor of Florida, his brother Jeb.
At the core of the Jeb Bush agenda are ideas drawn from his Florida playbook: Give every public school a grade from A to F. Offer students vouchers to help pay for private school. Don’t let them move into fourth grade unless they know how to read.
Through two foundations he leads in Florida and his vast political connections, Jeb Bush is advancing such policies in states where Republicans have sought his advice on improving schools. His stature in the party and widening role in state-level legislation make him one of the foremost GOP voices on education.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Government Employment Growth Compared to the Private Sector
If you want to understand better why so many states–from New York to Wisconsin to California–are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two–Indiana and Wisconsin–has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees–twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.
Economic growth and the resulting tax base expansion is, of course critical to public and private sector employment.
Seven Stumbling Blocks for Madison Prep
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
The Madison School Board’s recent consideration of the Urban League’s application for a planning grant from DPI for the Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men prompted me to dig deeper into the issues the charter school proposal raises. I have several concerns – some old and some new – that are described below.
I apologize for the length of this post. It kind of turned into a data dump of all things Madison Prep.
Here are the seven areas of concern I have today about the Madison school district agreeing to sponsor Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school.
1. The Expense.
As I have written, it looks like the roughly $14,500 per student that Madison Prep is seeking from the school district for its first year of operations is per nearly twice the per-student funding that other independent and non-instrumentality charter schools in the state now receive.
Independent charter schools, for example, receive $7,750 per-student annually in state funding and nothing from the local school district. As far as I can tell, non-instrumentality charter schools tend to receive less than $7,750 from their sponsoring school districts.
It seems that the Madison Prep proposal seeks to pioneer a whole new approach to charter schools in this state. The Urban League is requesting a much higher than typical per-student payment from the school district in the service of an ambitious undertaking that could develop into what amounts to a shadow Madison school district that operates at least a couple of schools, one for boys and one for girls. (If the Urban League eventually operates a girl’s school of the same size as projected for Madison Prep, it would be responsible for a total of 840 students, which is a larger total enrollment than about 180 school districts in Wisconsin can claim.)
What about the argument that Madison Prep does not propose to spend any more on a per-student basis than the Madison school district already spends? There are a couple of responses. First, MMSD does not spend $14,500 per student on in-school operations – i.e., teachers, classroom support, instructional materials. The figure is more like $11,000. But this is not the appropriate comparison.
Much more on the proposed IB Charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy, here.
UW Ed School Dean and WPRI President on the Recent School Choice Results
The release of the results of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the standardized test that every state public school is required to give, is a rite of spring for Wisconsin schools.
Distributed every year, the WKCEs provide educators, parents and community members with information about how well schools and districts are performing, broken down by subject and grade level.
The WKCEs are used alongside other measures to determine where schools are falling short and what is working well. For parents with many different types of educational options from which to choose, the WKCEs allow them to make informed choices about their child’s school. For taxpayers, the tests provide a level of transparency and demonstrate a return on investment.
But while state law requires all public schools to give the WKCEs, not all publicly funded schools are required do to so. Since its inception 20 years ago, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has been virtually without any kind of meaningful accountability measures in place. Choice schools have not been required to have students take the WKCEs. That is, until this school year.
We have all done it at one time or another — opened our mouth before engaging our brain.
State Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, just had one of those moments. In reacting to the news that, on average, students attending schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice program performed about the same or slightly below students in Milwaukee Public Schools, she said taxpayers are being “bamboozled” and the program is “a disservice to Milwaukee students.”
Whoa! Had she taken a moment to think before she spoke, here are a few things that should have occurred to her:
• Those private schools are performing about as well at educating Milwaukee children as the public schools — at half the cost. Public funding for each child in the choice program costs taxpayers $6,442 while each child in Milwaukee Public Schools receives taxpayer support of over $15,000. If all of the 21,000 choice students moved back into Milwaukee Public Schools, that would require a $74 million increase in local property taxes across the state, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Don’t hide ‘step and lane’ raises in the Madison School District
The salary schedule for Madison teachers is frozen for the next school year.
But teachers will still get raises.
That’s because, outside of the general salary schedule, Madison teachers are financially rewarded for their years of experience and for the higher education coursework they complete toward advanced degrees.
These “step and lane” raises, as they are called, will average 2.3 percent next school year for Madison teachers.
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad and two School Board members didn’t know what this figure was when they met with the State Journal editorial board three weeks ago.
One School Board member even suggested the average teacher raise for years of experience and higher education credits would be so small it was hardly worth considering.
But a 2.3 percent raise sounds pretty good to private sector workers who have endured real pay freezes, furloughs and layoffs for years now because of the recession and slow economic recovery. The school district calculated the 2.3 percent figure last week at the State Journal’s request.
Updated with a new link (and a Google Cache archive pdf) sent by a kind reader’s email. Here is the original, non working link.
Milwaukee Public Schools agree to close, merge, move schools
The Milwaukee School Board on Thursday night closed, merged or relocated about seven schools for next year to address space and facility issues in a district facing an upcoming $74 million budget shortfall.
At the same time, board members considered plans to open a handful of public charter schools next year. By late Thursday, they had approved an education management company to restart North Division High School as a charter school, and they had approved a voucher-school operator to open a public K-12 charter school with a residential element for high schoolers.
The board approved a proposal from Milwaukee College Prep, one of the city’s highest-performing charter schools, to lease with an option to buy the vacant Thirty-Eighth Street School building. The deed restriction on the school, which keeps it from being used as a school that would compete with MPS, would be lifted after five years.
Robert Rauh, leader of Milwaukee College Prep, said College Prep proposed expanding into the Thirty-Eighth Street building as an MPS non-unionized charter school for kindergarten through fourth grade. Middle schoolers in grades five through eight would make up the population at Milwaukee College Prep’s main campus in Metcalfe Park.