Hyman’s Anecdotal Healings: Now The Autism

Kim Wombles:

Mark Hyman loves the case study; when one of his posts at Huffington Post deals with an almost magical healing he’s engendered, well, chances are, there’s gonna be a kid involved. This time up, it’s Hyman curing autism cuz he’s teh man.
Let’s look at his first paragraph: “Imagine being the parent of a young child who is not acting normally and being told by your doctor that your child has autism, that there is no known cause, and there is no known treatment except, perhaps, some behavioral therapy.”
Fortunately, I don’t have to imagine this scenario; I can and do speak from experience. The whole assessment thing for Bobby was hell on wheels from 1994 when we first began the process through 1998 when we got a thorough assessment. We were never told there were no known causes. Even in the mid 90s there were known causes and tests to run, like Fragile X, so that right there is BS on Hyman’s part. We were also, despite the crap we were told, never told there was no known treatment. Speech, OT, PT and therapy were begun in 1994, even as we went through a string of inaccurate diagnoses.

Raising school achievement isn’t enough – D.C. principals must also keep order

Jay Matthews

Dunbar High School Principal Stephen Jackson was fired at the end of the last school year by the private management group in charge of the school but put back in the job last week by interim D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson at the urging of parents, community leaders and teachers. Jackson seemed an unusually lively and energetic educator when I met him at the long-troubled Northwest Washington school a year ago. He may be the person who can finally straighten Dunbar out.
But the odds are against him because of the ingrown nature of the school’s problems and the dispiriting message Henderson’s decision sends to him and any other school leader she assigns to a low-performing school after this.

The Achievement Recession

Tom Vander Ark

Given middle of the pack reading levels on PISA results, the National Journal asked the rediculous question, “what’s so awful about being average?” They seem to ignore that US math and science results are much worse and lag most of the developed world. As dumb as the prompt was, it got a few of us to write a response. Here’s mine.

Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.

Money Matters

Andy Rotherham:

Last week’s TIME column about the prospects for school spending occasioned some interesting responses. A common one, though, was the idea that the public is just clamoring to spend more on schools. You hear this a lot. Unfortunately, there are three problems with this argument:

Structural: The money just isn’t there (and annual increases are largely spoken for). The current trajectory of spending is simply not sustainable unless we’re prepared to made radical changes in policies, for example, affecting health care, senior citizens, or prisons. Whether or not we should make those changes is debatable. In many states all senior citizens get a break on property taxes, which are a key revenue source for schools. As the population ages this will ripple through public education budgets. Should these measures be means-tested for ability to pay? Perhaps. Given how politics works are they likely to be? Doubtful. Likewise, our correctional policies are a mess but most politicians are not lining up to fix them. So sure, today’s fiscal choices are just that, choices, but the implications of those decisions and prospects for change must be considered with an eye toward political and other realities realities. A second, related, structural constraint is how little discretionary money there is annually because of how much is tacked down for ongoing obligations. In practice this means that there are annual increases (excepting the last few years where in some places you’ve seen genuine reductions), which consume new money.

Shanghai PISA scores

Steve Hsu:

The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann’s work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)

Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.

As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn’t as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.

Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the “low scores” achieved in the most recent PISA 🙂

To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.

NYTimes: … PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.

Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.

Education fills big space on Brown’s chalkboard

Seema Mehta:

As the governor-elect prepares to take office, California’s schools are confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
As Gov.-elect Jerry Brown prepares to take office, major headwinds are buffeting the biggest component of his upcoming budget: California’s schools. They are being confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
Most immediate and pressing is the state’s fiscal crisis — a $28-billion gap is forecast for the next 18 months. How that will affect school districts already reeling from years of multibillion-dollar cuts will be the subject of Brown’s second budget forum, which is scheduled for Tuesday in Los Angeles.
“Jerry Brown is entering office at a moment when the capacity of the system is weaker than any time in recent memory,” said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA. “I worry we may be reaching a breaking point.”

Confronting the Myths About Tenure and Teachers’ Unions

Ellen Dannin

Current American education policy is built on these assumptions: The quality of American education has plummeted because our schools are filled with teachers who can’t teach. Teachers’ unions and contracts tie the hands of school administrators. And teachers’ unions protect bad teachers. Here are a few reasons why these conclusions are leading our educational system in a bad direction.
First, these policies ignore the effects of poverty on educational outcomes. Given the increasing number of children growing up in poverty, we ignore its effects at our peril.
I know something about poverty and its effects because I grew up in an impoverished, single-parent home and attended a low-quality school through eighth grade. Despite those beginnings, I graduated from one of the top US law schools and am now a law professor. If I could make it, then poverty must not matter, right?

St. Andrew’s School Blazing iPad Tablet Trail in the U.S.

Eric Lai:

I only know of two K-12 schools that have come close to doing full 1-1 rollouts of iPads to their students. One is the Cedars School of Excellence outside of Glasgow, Scotland, whose 105-student deployment has captured most of the publicity due to the eloquence of its head of IT, Fraser Speirs. The one that gets less publicity is actually much more ambitious in many ways.
Saint Andrews School is a private school in Savannah, Georgia. It has deployed a total of 480 iPads to students, including one to all 440 students in the grades 1-12, and classroom sets for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (so technically not 1:1, but pretty close).

Everett School District ‘Outside review’ was hardly independent

Jessica Olson:

The Everett School District recently invited a “Management and Operations Review” by an outside organization. The entity that performed the assessment, WASA, is the Washington Association of School Administrators. It is an organization of, by and for school administrators; an organization to which all higher level administrators in Everett (including Everett Superintendent Gary Cohn) belong and pay dues.
Having this organization assess the source of their income and calling it objective is akin to hiring the teachers’ union to review the effectiveness of teachers for the district, or hiring a textbook publishing company to rate the effectiveness of the district’s curricula. While this arrangement struck one board member as preposterous, four members of the board felt it made perfect sense.

NEA’s Independent Teaching Commission Not So Independent

Mike Antonucci

At the union’s convention last July in New Orleans, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel announced the creation of a Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, which would study teacher effectiveness and report its findings to the delegates of the 2011 convention.
“Let’s demand to be the ones in charge,” Van Roekel said, adding, “Imagine going beyond ‘being at the table’ to running the meeting.”
He asked, rhetorically, “What would the profession look like if we – the union of practitioners – actually controlled teacher training, induction and licensure, evaluation and professional development?”
Today, NEA announced the 21 members of that commission, and while the press release described them as “diverse” and “independent,” they seem committed to Van Roekel’s goals – union control of teacher training, induction, licensure, evaluation and professional development.

Rash of upcoming superintendent retirements raises questions on Gov. Christie’s pay cap

Jessica Calefati:

Leonia School District Superintendent Bernard Josefsberg determines spending plans and decides when schools are closed for snow. He translates complex education jargon for parents and visits classrooms to read with elementary students, many of whom he knows by name in a district of about 1,800 students.
In June, Josefsberg is retiring, in part because of a pay cap imposed by Gov. Chris Christie that is set to take effect in February after the current required period of public comment ends.
The cap links a superintendent’s salary to the size of a district, limiting pay for the largest school systems to a maximum $175,000, the governor’s salary.

Hero Teacher Kept Kids Calm During School Siege in France

Mara Gay:

A French nursery school teacher who kept kids calm while a sword-wielding teenager took their classroom hostage is being hailed as a hero today.
French authorities say Nathalie Roffet kept the 17-year-old hostage-taker talking for hours so he didn’t threaten the children and reasoned with him to secure their release from the school in Besancon, a small city near the Swiss border.
Roffet, who has been teaching at the Charles-Fourier school for five years, showed “remarkable sangfroid,” Besancon Mayor Jean-Louis Fousseret told reporters today, according to The Telegraph. The four-hour standoff ended this morning when the teen released the final six children and the teacher. Then, GIGN, an elite French police force, stormed the building, shot him with a stun gun and arrested him.

Rahm Emanuel Announces Education Plans, Gery Chico Responds

Fox Chicago News

In the race to replace Mayor Daley, Rahm Emanuel would like voters to be thinking about something other than those challenges to his residency, and he’s talking about schools.
Sunday, he unveiled his plans for improving education in Chicago, includind giving principals more power over their individual schools, doubling the number of teacher training academies and getting parents more involved.
Emanuel wants parents to sign a contract with their child’s teacher pledging to encourage learning at home.
“Our teachers simply cannot succeed without parents as partners. While government must do its part, it’s no substitute for a committed parent,” Emanuel said.
Monday, it’s back to the residency challenge, when Emanuel and other witnesses will be called to testify at a Board of Elections hearing.

Proposed Single sex charter school (Madison Prep) funding doesn’t add up

Susan Troller:

There’s been plenty of buzz — much of it positive — surrounding a proposed single sex charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of Madison minority students. Yet a closer look at the financing projections for the Madison Preparatory Academy, starting with the $300,000 the proposal notes is coming from the Madison Community Foundation, raises some questions,
“I have no idea where they got that figure,” says Kathleen Woit, president of the foundation, when asked about the funding. “No, we have not committed to that. We’ll have to get this straightened out.”
The preliminary proposal, presented to the Madison School Board’s Planning and Development Committee Dec. 6, also notes that $1.35 million would be available in six grants of $225,000 through the state Department of Public Instruction’s charter school federal start-up fund. That’s more than twice what is allowable for a school of Madison Prep’s size, and suggests the school would be receiving both implementation and planning grants in two of the four years the school is eligible for start-up money.
“It looks like they are double counting,” says Robert Soldner, director of School Management Services for the Department of Public Instruction. Soldner says that DPI typically helps charters get up and running with several years of funding, starting with a planning grant the first year, an implementation grant the second year and extensions of the implementation grants possible in the next couple of years of operation. Charter schools are not eligible for planning and implementation grants at the same time.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, here.

Oakland’s middle school “brain drain”

Katy Murphy:

The Chronicle had an interesting story in yesterday’s paper (print-only until Tuesday) about the brain drain in the Oakland school district after the fifth grade.
According to this analysis by the Oakland school district, 28 percent of all fifth-graders — and 40 percent of those who scored “advanced” on this year’s reading test — dispersed to non-OUSD middle schools this year.
At Lincoln Elementary School in Chinatown, the city’s first public, non-charter school to win a National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education, a staggering 77 percent of last year’s fifth-graders left the district, up from 57 percent a few years ago.
Superintendent Tony Smith told Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker, whose son goes to Peralta Elementary in Rockridge (a school with the fifth-highest “leaving rate” in OUSD – 44 percent), that the loss of top students was one explanation for the drop-off in district test scores at the middle and high school level.

Private school finds answers in Singapore method

Jason Wermers:

Educators at a small private Christian school in Olde Town Augusta are seeing results with a math curriculum imported from halfway around the world.
For the past three years, Heritage Academy has used Singapore Math as its basal math curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade.
In the first year the school adopted Singapore Math, all of its kindergarten and first-grade pupils met or exceeded proficiency standards on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, as did 80 percent of second-graders.
Why use math from Singapore?

Related: Math Forum Audio/Video.

Middleton Cross Plains Professional Development Plan

Middleton Cross Plains School District 60K PDF, via a kind reader:

In a more concerted effort to enhance the manner in which our students are taught to become contributing members of a global society, we would like our schools to emphasize:

  • The interconnectedness of the world’s cultures, politics, and economics.
  • Recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating trends in global relationships.
  • Creative problem solving, critical thinking, and innovative thought processes.
  • Understanding issues from cultural perspectives other than our own.
  • Encouraging study and travel abroad.
  • Technical competence and the critical impact that technology has had in our world.
  • Technological innovation that can expand curriculum, opportunity, and our students’ world view.
  • Outreach to the community for resources and expertise to further global awareness.
  • The role of world languages in preparing students for an international environment. Consideration of Chinese as a new curricular offering.

It is our hope that all students are touched by this initiative, in all courses and at all levels of our curriculum. We appreciate any innovation that can be brought to our students to achieve this goal.

Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa takes on teachers union

Patrick J. McDonnell and David Zahniser

In a speech to state leaders, the mayor brands United Teachers Los Angeles as an obstacle to reform as the city stands at ‘a critical crossroads.’
With a hard-hitting speech that branded the city’s teachers union as an unyielding obstruction to education reforms, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set the stage this week for a new battle over control of the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest.
In a Sacramento address to state leaders, Villaraigosa — himself a longtime teachers union employee before launching a career in public office — declared that education in Los Angeles stands at “a critical crossroads,” and he assailed United Teachers Los Angeles for resisting change.
During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as “one unwavering roadblock to reform.” He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority — all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.

Related: Marc Eisen:

Public employee unions look increasingly out of touch and may be forced to swallow wage and benefit cuts.
Too bad a ball-peen hammer wasn’t handy. If so, leaders of the embattled Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association might have walloped themselves over the head. Instead, they did something even more self-destructive, suing Milwaukee Public Schools for Viagra coverage of its members.
Union president Mike Langyel gamely defends the suit, saying Viagra is used to treat a bona fide medical problem. But even liberal supporters winced at the timing.
Here was a financially strapped school system struggling with an anticipated layoff of almost 500 teachers, and the clueless union was demanding insurance coverage of a sexual aid that could cost taxpayers more than $700,000 a year.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Schools facing storm Money no longer there for education

San Bernardino County Sun:

California’s massive 2011-12 budget shortfall won’t be closed without big cuts to public education.
The likely result doesn’t look pretty.
“Schools will become more and more like prisons and less and less like schools,” said David Plank, a professor of education at Stanford University. “You’ll have huge classes, restive young people and overworked teachers.”
Sound drastic? So is the budget crisis.
Soon after Gov.-elect Jerry Brown is sworn in next month, he will have to present a budget for 2011-12, a year that likely will be worse than any that California schools have endured in modern history.
On Wednesday, Brown noted the budget deficit over the next 18 months is likely worse than previously reported. He released figures showing California stands to lose another $2.7 billion from potential changes to the federal estate tax, swelling the shortfall through June 2012 to $28.1 billion.

Educator Is Said to Have Rejected Chancellor Job

Javier Hernandez:

In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, “exactly the right person for the job” and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.

Madison School Board Approves Badger Rock Charter Middle School: “Could Cost More Than Expected”

Channel3000:

new one-of-a-kind charter school in the city of Madison could soon become a reality, but an error in crunching numbers may mean more of a burden for city taxpayers.
The error was found just a few weeks ago, and it could put taxpayers on the hook for an additional $380,000 over the next five years.
But proponents of the proposed Badger Rock charter school have been scrambling to find ways to trim costs. And despite the bigger budget numbers, they said they hope the Madison School Board sees the bigger picture and not just dollar signs.
The year-round, agriculture- and green-based school on Madison’s southwest side would start with 50 students in sixth grade. The school would add grades seven and eight in the following two years, for a total of 150 students.
Support for the school has been great until what’s being called a “hiccup” two weeks ago.

As part of the conditions that passed, the board must execute a contract with the school no later than April 1 to operate it for a five-year period. Board member Lucy Mathiak added a sentence saying the contract shall define the district’s financial obligations for each of the five years and shall contain language limiting the district’s financial liability. Mathiak’s amendment passed 6-1.

Much more on Badger Rock here.
It would be interesting to see how the funding/review/political model compares with the ill-fated Studio School proposal and, how current public schools might fare as a “startup” today.

McDonald’s chief attacks children’s meal ‘food police’

Greg Farrell and Hal Weitzman

The chief executive of McDonald’s has described critics of the company who have tried to curtail the sale of Happy Meals aimed at children as “food police” and accused them of undermining parents in making decisions for their families.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jim Skinner responded to last month’s vote by the San Francisco board of supervisors to forbid restaurants from offering toys with meals unless the food complied with limits on calories, sodium, sugar and fat.
“We’ll continue to sell Happy Meals,” said Mr Skinner, in the face of a ban that does not become effective until December 2011. The new rule “really takes personal choice away from families who are more than capable of making their own decisions”.

Pulling the parent trigger Parents want reform at Compton’s McKinley Elementary. That’s fine, but the process has flaws

If anyone has reason to overthrow the public school establishment, it’s parents in the Compton Unified School District. Five of the district’s 35 schools are listed among the worst 5% statewide. In July, an auditor reported that the schools were run to benefit adults more than students and that the district appeared incapable of fixing the problem. And the school board recently fired its superintendent for charging thousands of dollars of personal expenses to her district credit card.
So it’s no great surprise that Compton Unified became the first school district targeted for the so-called parent trigger, which allows parents to force radical change at a particular school if 51% of them sign a petition. Among their options are replacing the school’s management or most of its staff, or turning it into a charter school. Parents organized by the group Parent Revolution, the leading force behind the parent trigger movement, delivered their petition to district headquarters last week, demanding that McKinley Elementary School become part of the Celerity Education Group charter organization.

China’s Army of Graduates Is Struggling

Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.
Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.

Candidates dwindling for Madison School Board races

Matthew DeFour:

One suggestion Severson offered that hasn’t gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.
Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive — hers cost $20,000 — and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has “almost overwhelming influence” on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates’ qualifications and get members out to vote.
“However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial,” she added, referring to district-based elections. “If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?”

Teachers unions often resist school reforms

Amy Hetzner:

The Obama administration could not have set the stage for a better demonstration of the power and priorities of Wisconsin’s teachers unions.
With its Race to the Top competition, the federal government dangled the prospect of a share of $4.35 billion for those states ready to enact reforms, especially related to improving teacher and principal performance.
Eyes on that prize, states launched plans tying teacher pay and promotions to student achievement, giving state officials more control over local schools and overhauling data tracking and assessment systems.
Then the game got tricky: Teachers unions had to be on board.
In the end, only 11 states and the District of Columbia ended up with money from the program this year. Wisconsin got nothing.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council had helped kill or watered down critical parts of the state’s proposal, with the president of the teachers union attaching a letter to the application that one participant described as “grudging.” In the end, only 12% of the union’s local leaders endorsed a plan that might have brought in more than $250 million in school funding to Wisconsin.

Related: WEAC tops lobbyist spending list

The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent nearly twice as much as any other organization to lobby lawmakers in 2009, according to the Government Accountability Board.
The state’s largest teachers union reported spending more than $1.5 million and 7,239 hours lobbying, almost twice as much as the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, which spent the second-highest amount on lobbying in the state.
One aspect of the union’s lobbying effort was largely successful, with the state Legislature repealing the 16-year-old qualified economic offer law that restricted teachers’ pay and benefits.

Adults Blame Parents For Education Problems

Associated Press:

Blaming teachers for low test scores, poor graduation rates and the other ills of American schools has been popular lately, but a new survey wags a finger closer to home.
An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what’s wrong with the U.S. education system — more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.
Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame. Moms were more likely than dads — 72 percent versus 61 percent — to say parents are at fault. Conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to blame parents.
Those who said parents are to blame were more likely to cite a lack of student discipline and low expectations for students as serious problems in schools. They were also more likely to see fighting and low test scores as big problems.

Parent Trigger Pulled at Compton’s McKinley Elementary

Leiloni De Gruy

Not all parents want to see the Parent Trigger Law pulled at McKinley Elementary School, according to Principal Fleming Robinson.
In a statement released Thursday, Robinson said despite recent outcry there are still a lot of parents who support the school and its administration, and a host of others have been misguided.
“Some have said they signed the petition but were harassed or signed under false pretenses, which included beautifying the school,” Robinson said. “A lot of parents weren’t given clear information on what the petition was for.”
However, on Tuesday during a press conference where more than 50 parents, students, guardians and residents spoke before heading to Compton Unified School District headquarters to hand over a stack of parent-signed petitions, Elizabeth Hidalgo, the mother of a child attending McKinley, acknowledged that several parents were up in arms over their attempts and “have been spreading lies” about not receiving all the details.

Bathroom Ban Leads To Riot At NYC High School

CBS

Hundreds of students at Murry Bergtraum High School took a stand this week after being told they couldn’t use the bathrooms at school.
Fed up with what some say are strict policies, crowds of angry teens rushed the Manhattan school’s halls, creating chaos, reports CBS 2’s Derrick Dennis.
It was literally a riot — students crowded the hallways, screaming at the top of their lungs and protesting what they said was the principal’s decision to close all the bathrooms to students.
“What happened was two students started fighting, and the principal got mad, and closed all the bathrooms, and then all the kids went crazy and just started a riot,” one student said.

Study backs ‘value-added’ analysis of teacher effectiveness

Classroom effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging students’ progress on standardized tests, Gates foundation study shows. Results come amid a national effort to reform teacher evaluations.
Teachers’ effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students’ progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of “value-added” analysis, whose accuracy has been hotly contested by teachers unions and some education experts who question the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
The approach estimates a teacher’s effectiveness by comparing his or her students’ performance on standardized tests to their performance in previous years. It has been adopted around the country in cities including New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and soon, if local officials have their way, Los Angeles.
The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study is a groundbreaking effort to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. Ultimately, it will examine multiple approaches, including using sophisticated observation tools and teachers’ assessments of their own performance

Much more on value added assessment, here.

US Education Secretary Duncan Re-thinks Goals

Sam Dillon

For two years, backed by a friendly Congress and flush with federal stimulus money, President Obama’s administration enjoyed a relatively obstacle-free path for its education agenda, the focus of which is the $4 billion Race to the Top grant program.
But with Republican deficit hawks taking control of the House next month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will no longer have billions of dollars to use at his discretion.
The administration is also having to recalibrate its goals for working with Congress to overhaul the main federal law on public schools. Fortunately for the administration, its ambitions for the law, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind effort, are shared by Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who will be the chairman of the House education committee.

Building A Better Teacher: Some unions, management collaborating

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared in Tampa, Fla. alongside the presidents of the two major teachers unions: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association.
Praising teacher evaluation, tenure, and pay reforms pursued through a partnership among the local school district, union and the Gates Foundation, Duncan lobbed a message of conciliation into an often-overheated debate over the role of unions in school improvement efforts.
“I don’t think any of us like it when something is imposed on us,” Duncan said. “I think there is so much the country can learn from what’s happening here. You have elevated the profession.”
The news conference – held in Hillsborough County, where it now takes up to four years to earn tenure and teachers are paid, in part, according to how well their students perform on standardized tests – was intended to extend an olive branch to the teachers unions in recognition of an important, though increasingly embattled, Democratic Party constituency.

No High School Scholars Need Apply

Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12×22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students…No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn’t mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don’t care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don’t think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
—————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Ask Students

Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee’s new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our High School students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.
Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.
When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.
Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their “hands-on” experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.
What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.
This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000- to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.
Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let’s, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let’s give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.
This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.
I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Is the Golden Age of Education Spending Over?

Andrew Rotherham:

As America starts to grapple with its out-of-control spending habits, we as a nation really should reckon with our education costs. Few federal education programs were targeted by President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, but that’s because most school funding comes from the state and local levels. And that’s where the big-time money problem is. According to a report issued jointly last week by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers, when federal stimulus funds run out in 2011, states — and, by extension, schools — will tumble off a fiscal cliff, and even an economic upturn won’t bring state funding back up to where it was a few years ago.
The problem, however, is not just the struggling economy. In 1970 America spent about $228 billion in today’s dollars on public schools. In 2007 that figure was $583 billion. True, some of the increase can be traced back to growing enrollments, better programs, and improved services for special-education and other students, but much of the increase is just a lot of spending without a lot to show for it. And given all the various pressures on state budgets (including our aging population, health care costs and the substantial obligations states and school districts owe for pensions and benefits), the golden age of school spending is likely coming to an end.

Related: Wisconsin K-12 spending growth far exceeds University pace.

Houston School board OKs creation of a school just for boys

No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.
Neither will bad attitudes.
And neither will girls.
This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.
The boys at this new school in Houston’s Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation — go on to earn a college degree.
This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD’s umbrella to become a state charter school.

Related: The Proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy.

Lessons for America

Asia Society via Kris Olds:

What education practices can high-performing nations learn from one another?
Learning With the World is an Asia Society initiative that focuses on common educational concerns worldwide, as well as international best-practice solutions. We work with education leaders from nations with the best and quickly improving education systems to discuss the key drivers of educational improvement and the lessons learned.

PDF Report.

Madison School Board to reconsider ag charter school: Badger Rock

Matthew DeFour:

As the Madison School Board prepares to take a second shot Monday at approving an agriculture-themed charter school on Madison’s South Side, board members remain divided on what was once thought to be a slam-dunk proposal.
“I’m sold on the concept; I’m not sold on the budget,” board member Lucy Mathiak said Friday. “I don’t see anyone being jolly about spending $700,000 a year for 50 kids.”
Badger Rock Middle School, expected to open next fall with 50 sixth-graders mostly from the Sennett Middle School attendance area, has a projected budget shortfall of $43,000 for 2011-12, with a projected budget of $668,600. The gap is projected to grow to $134,000 in the charter school’s third year, when it has 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders and is expected to cost $1.37 million to run.

Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad 1.3MB PDF::

On February 16,2010, MMSD received BRMS’s Planning
Grant and Executive Summary of its proposed charter school. On August 16, 2010, the DPI approved the Planning Grant and provided BRMS with an award of $200,000.
(Please see communication from DPI attached as Appendix A).
The proposed charter school will be located on 4 acres of property on the grounds of the
Badger Resilience Center in South Madison. The designated site is adjacent to a 7 acre
Madison park that will also be used to foster BRMS’ philosophy of cultural and
environmental sustainability. The site also currently has a working farm, a community
center, a cafe and a gardening and sustainability operation run by Growing Power.
In addition to the previously referenced planning grant, funding for BRMS, including a
school endowment, is being spearheaded by the Center for Resilient Cities. BRMS
reports that “close to a million dollars” has been committed to the project and these, and
future, funds are being provided by private contributors.
BRMS notes that the research-based instructional strategies upon which their pedagogy
will be established are Environmental-Based Education (EBE) and Place -Based
Education (PBE). As noted in BRMS Executive Summary, both EBE and PBE have
been subject to numerous research efforts and have demonstrated positive results for
involved students, and in particular, students at the middle school level. EBE in
particular is also consistent with PI 8.01 which mandates that “environmental education
objectives and activities shall be integrated into the kindergarten through grade 12
sequential curriculum plans.” BRMS also proposes a “year-round” school which would
not increase the number of instructional days, but would lessen the traditional threemonth
summer break.
BRMS has established numerous partnerships with community agencies. These
agencies are detailed in the Executive Summary and Detailed Proposal (See
Appendices B and D)

Much more on the proposed Badger Rock Middle School Charter initiative here.

Do we the courage to address flaws in our education system?

Alan Borsuk:

President Barack Obama said Monday in a speech about education that this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
My first question is: How many high school students around here know what Sputnik is?
My second question is: Do you think there are things to be learned from the educational success in countries that are doing better overall than the United States?
The release last week of results from testing of 15-year-olds around the world, including in most of the world’s industrial nations, was one of the main factors underlying Obama’s statement. American students showed a bit of improvement, but overall were in the middle of the pack. That means, among the 34 countries at the center of the study, the U.S. was 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. The U.S. standings were in line with other results in recent years.
While the rankings from the Program for International Student Assessment got a lot of attention, a set of accompanying reports got little. Among those was one focused on lessons for the United States.

Educator Is Said to Have Rejected Chancellor Job

Javier Hernandez

In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, “exactly the right person for the job” and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Survey says 55% of Wisconsin residents live paycheck-to-paycheck

Paul Gores:

More than half of Wisconsin residents are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no “rainy day” fund that would cover thee months of unanticipated financial emergencies, a survey released this week says.
The Financial Capability Survey conducted by FINRA, the self-regulating agency of the investing industry, said 55% of Wisconsinites report spending all or a little more than their household income, which is similar to the rate nationwide. About 57% of Wisconsin resident don’t have emergency money stashed away, slightly better than the national average of 60%.

Colorado tenure law considered at N.J. hearing

Leslie Brody

A Colorado state senator told New Jersey lawmakers considering ways to fix tenure Thursday about a new law he pushed to make such job protection a “badge of honor.”
Mike Johnston gave the Senate education committee details of a law passed in spring that requires teachers to get three consecutive years of effective evaluations before they earn tenure, called non-probationary status there. If they have two consecutive years of poor evaluations, they go back on probation. Those teachers can get help to improve and might eventually earn back tenure. If they don’t, a district can dismiss them.

Dropout rate for blacks doesn’t tell full story

Chip Johnson

The recent figures released by the state Department of Education, which show a statewide public high school dropout rate of 37 percent among African American students, is a symptom of a broader social malaise and not an accurate measure of one group’s performance.
Because when you hear some of the stories of children living in big city, high-crime neighborhoods, you come to understand that steering clear of troubled streets is in itself a full-time job.
I spoke with four young African American men on Thursday, all of them dropouts who returned to school. They attend Dewey Academy, the continuation high school in Oakland, where the high school dropout rate hovers around 40 percent.

Milwaukee Schools’ budget planners anticipate losing 300 jobs

Erin Richards

Preliminary Milwaukee Public Schools budget predictions for fiscal 2012 include a slight dip in student enrollment and the loss of more than 300 full-time jobs, primarily because of a drop in federal stimulus and education jobs money, according to an analysis by the district’s budget office.
But the head of the School Board’s budget committee said Wednesday that it’s too early in the budgeting process for any financial predictions to carry much weight, mostly because nobody knows how much money will be available for schools in the next state budget under the new governor.
Terry Falk, chair of the board’s Committee on Strategic Planning and Budget, said at a committee meeting Tuesday that even the district’s budget forecast for next year is less predictable than it’s been at this point in the past several budget cycles.
“Any prediction at this point is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” Falk said, noting that the administration can only make projections based on what it knows right now, and that all that could change quickly.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin State agencies request 6.2% hike in spending

Jason Stein:

State agencies are requesting an additional $3.94 billion in state and federal money – a 6.2% increase – over the next two years to fund priorities such as health care and education.
But with the state already facing a massive deficit in the 2011-’13 budget, Governor-elect Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature are unlikely to fill many of those requests. The report on the $67.43 billion in requests over two years – most by agencies in Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration -was released Thursday by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The biggest share of the proposed increases would go to the state Department of Health Services for programs such as Medicaid health care for the poor – spending that Walker and other Republicans have pledged to rein in.

Cathie Black’s Best Credential

Michele Somerville

Probably the best teacher I ever had is a man I fondly call “Stein the Medievalist.” He’s a smart guy. He follows the news closely. He’s an opera maven. He’s multilingual. He’s a full professor of language and literature at a fine university. He was my Latin teacher in college.
In our 30 years of friendship, we’ve generally found ourselves on the same side of any given civic or educational controversy. He still teaches me, and sometimes I even teach Stein, but when he, whom I have never known to forward such missives, forwarded to me a petition asking State of New York Education Commissioner David Steiner to deny Cathie Black the request for the waiver she would need to work as the head of the school system, I couldn’t sign it.
I am the mother of three adolescent children. Each has attended NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) schools. Two do so at present. Our family is deeply committed to public education, and two of my children have been, and are currently being well educated in DOE schools.

Monona Grove School Board Update

Peter Sobol:

In the public appearances section of the meeting MGEA representative Kevin Mikelbank noted that in consideration of the status of the ongoing negotiations the teacher’s union has suspended their “work to the contract” job action, and that teachers would now participate in activities such as writing student letters of recommendation.
After the remaining preliminaries, the board heard first from PMA financial consultants who perform a 5 year budget forcast for the district each year. This year’s preliminary model assumes zero enrollment growth and $200/year increase in the revenue cap – in all likelyhood we will see a smaller increase. Even so, the preliminary projections show a deficit that increases $700K to $1M each of the next five years, and unless a miracle occurs in the state budget process it will quite probably be worse. Ugh.

2 percent University of Wisconsin pay increase warranted?

Todd Finkelmeyer:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The University of Wisconsin System argues its faculty and staff are in desperate need of pay raises in each of the next two years just so these in-demand folks can keep from falling further behind those at peer institutions.
Fiscal conservatives reflexively howl that those within the UW System simply don’t understand the magnitude of the budgetary crisis facing Wisconsin and are out of touch for wanting more when everyone else is trying to make do with less.
The latest round of this perpetual battle took place Thursday afternoon at the Memorial Union when a Board of Regents committee voted unanimously to recommend most faculty and academic staff working across the UW System receive a 2 percent pay increase in each of the next two years. The decision by the regents’ business, finance and audit committee to back the proposal from UW System President Kevin Reilly will almost certainly be approved by the full board Friday morning.

Interested Observers

In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch “jaundiced,” and “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including “student feedback,” which Alter observes parenthetically, is “(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)…”
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn’t a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that “below” the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: “Can we not–using W.C. Field’s paraphrase–see the handwriting on the floor?”
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don’t you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don’t think to ask them. We don’t benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don’t we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?

We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn’t we? And brought the astronauts safely home…surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn’t we?

Next generation workforce: Outperformed in math and science

Scott Olster

f you want to get a sense of what’s in store for the American workforce, just take a look at how our students match up against the rest of the world in math and science. After all, most of the professions within the U.S. economy that are growing — healthcare, information technology, and biomedicine — require extensive training in both subjects.
So how are we doing? Not well, at all.
American 15-year old students scored below average in math and were outperformed by 23 other countries and education systems, according to test results released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment.
And they didn’t do much better in science, ranking 19 among the lot of 65 participating countries and education systems (N.B. “educational systems” are individual cities within a country, like Shanghai).

More schools join Minnesota teacher reform program, Begin Sharing K-12 Lessons via iTunes

Chris Williams

Seven school districts and 23 charter schools are joining Minnesota’s alternative system for evaluating and paying teachers — the signature education initiative under Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who leaves office next month.
Pawlenty on Wednesday announced the largest one-year expansion of the Q Comp program since it began in 2006. With the addition of the new schools next year, nearly a third of Minnesota students will be taught by a teacher in the program.
Also, the Minnesota Department of Education has begun uploading state-approved lessons for teachers and preschool through high school students to the iTunes web site in collaboration with Apple Inc., Pawlenty said.

iPods, iPads, cell phones welcome in Green Bay area schools

Patti Zarling

Green Bay-area school districts are beginning to change long-standing bans on handheld technology, such as cell phones and iPods, after realizing they are increasingly part of students’ everyday lives.
The Pulaski School District, for example, now encourages middle and high school students to bring their cell phones to class. They’re also welcome to carry other electronic gadgets such as netbooks, which are a bit smaller than laptop computers; iPads, handheld tablet computers; or electronic-book readers.
Pulaski school leaders said they decided to drop a ban on cell phone use because it wasn’t practical. Students own the gadgets, administrators say, so why not use them as classroom tools?

GAO revises its report critical of practices at for-profit schools

Nick Anderson

The Government Accountability Office has revised portions of a report it released last summer on recruiting practices in for-profit higher education, softening several examples from an undercover investigation but standing by its central finding that colleges had encouraged fraud and misled potential applicants.
The revisions have come as the Obama administration and senior Democratic lawmakers are pushing for tougher regulation of the industry. A Republican senator said the revisions called into question some of the conclusions in the report.
The original report, issued Aug. 4 in testimony to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, examined recruiting practices at 15 for-profit colleges, including campuses operated by the Apollo Group, Corinthian Colleges and The Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan unit.

My healthy school lunch idea: turkey brats and low-fat cheese curds

Chris Rickert

Mom’s admonishment still rings true today, with only minor adjustment: “Starving children in North Korea would be happy to have that beef and bean burrito.”
Or, as it’s known in the Madison School District, the least popular lunch among students this past October and a poster child for the dilemma faced by lunch ladies across this land of plenty: How to get children to eat things that are good for their bodies, not just pleasing to their tongues.
The irony in trying to solve this problem — also known as a “blessing” in food-deprived parts of the world — is so old as to be left unmentioned. I mention it here only as a reminder that in our free-flowing-capital-and-consumer-products global economy, we still can’t manage to keep kids from starving to death.
In any case, my first reaction to the healthy choices conundrum was simple: Let them go hungry.

Evers says he’d accept lifting Wisconsin Voucher & Virtual School enrollment cap

Becky Vevea

Governor-elect Scott Walker’s campaign promise to lift the enrollment cap on Wisconsin’s voucher and virtual schools could come to fruition soon, despite opposition from unions.
In an interview this week on the public affairs program “WisconsinEye,” State Superintendent Tony Evers said that he is open to lifting the enrollment limits, something Republicans have pushed for in the face of resistance from unions and public school advocates who see the voucher program as draining resources from Milwaukee schools by diverting public funding to private voucher schools.
“I’m steeped in reality. I’m not sure if what I think makes a lot of difference,” Evers said, alluding to the impending Republican control of the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature. “People have made clear what their positions are.”
Removing the caps on virtual schools or the choice program would not “fundamentally change the way those programs operate, nor will it dramatically increase the enrollments,” Evers said.

Texas Study suggests education cost savings

Candace Carlisle

Texas Comptroller Susan Combs released a study Wednesday to help school districts and campuses identify cost-saving strategies schools can make without compromising academics.
The newly released study was required by House Bill 3 from the 2009 legislative session. It was conducted by researchers from the state’s top institutions, including the University of Texas at Dallas, among industry experts.
The costs of Texas public education have increased significantly to nearly $55 billion, with per-pupil spending rising by 63 percent, Combs said, in a written letter. With cuts to state-funded budgets expected in the upcoming legislative session, school districts will need to operate more efficiently.

School District Financial Efficiency: Houston School District gets average score

Ericka Mellon:

The Houston Independent School District is making above-average gains in student performance but isn’t spending its money as efficiently as other districts, according to a new study released today by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
The first-of-its-kind analysis, ordered by the Texas Legislature, rates the financial efficiency compared with students’ academic progress for every district and school. Those boasting gains in student test scores and spending little money per pupil get the highest marks (5 stars in the rating system).
Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, earned three stars. Dallas ISD, the second-largest district and the most comparable to Houston’s, received two stars.
Statewide, 43 districts and charter school operators earned five stars. The list included Angleton, Clear Creek, Conroe, Cypress-Fairbanks, Friendswood, Katy and Pearland.

Financial Allocation Study for Texas

The Comptroller’s office is leading the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) to examine how our school districts and campuses spend their money – and how this spending translates into student achievement. Our study is intended to identify cost-effective practices that promote academic progress.
In addition to presenting the FAST study findings, this website also allows you to run your own custom reports on school district finances and results. We hope that policymakers and the public alike will use this resource to see how our education dollars are working to prepare the next generation.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin State budget preview leaves unanswered questions

WisTax

Much of the state’s recurring deficit problems are due to short-term budget decisions made over the past 15 years. But revenue volatility has also played a role. During 1990-2000, annual growth in general purpose tax revenues (GPR) averaged 6.8%, and the average was still higher (7.0%) during 1995-2000. Even after the 2001 recession, state tax collections grew an average of 5.0% per year during 2003-2008. But that was followed by collections dropping 7.1% in 2008-09 and remaining stagnant the following year, despite tax increases.
How the 2011-13 budget ultimately fares depends in part on the revenue outlook. And the new forecast for 2010-13 shows tax revenues growing at annual (bars in graph above) and average (line) rates generally below the recent past. The table below provides forecast detail. Tax revenues are projected to grow 4.2% or less over the next biennium.

More on Madison’s Response to DPI Complaint

Great Madison Schools.org

In its response to the Department of Public Instruction’s request for information on its talented and gifted services, the Madison School District points out that the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has recently updated its standards for TAG programming. Now, the District argues, the NAGC standards “actually serve as validation of the District’s current practices,” including West High School’s claim that it meets the needs of talented and gifted students through differentiation within regular classrooms. We disagree.
The NAGC issued its revised standards in September, around the same time West High School area parents filed a complaint against the Madison School District for allowing West High to deny appropriate programming to academically gifted students. West has refused for years to provide alternatives to its regular core curriculum for 9th and 10th graders who demonstrate high performance capabilities in language arts and social studies.
The District writes:

Lots of related links:

Houston School District magnet audit finds inconsistency in programs

Ericka Mellon

If there’s one theme that emerges from the ongoing audit of Houston ISD’s magnet schools, it’s inconsistency. An interim report [pdf] from Magnet Schools of America, released today, finds that the funding, quality, entrance criteria and student diversity vary from school to school. This is not ground-breaking news for those who have followed the magnet school discussions and media coverage over the last several years. An HISD committee that evaluated the magnet schools in 2006 drew similar conclusions.

The interim report doesn’t name schools or cite specific data, but here are a few of the general points — which shouldn’t necessarily be taken as gospel because three of the auditors noted that “it appeared as though they were observing a specially designed day rather than feeling this is the way we do things at the school every day.” [Editor’s translation: The schools were putting on a dog and pony show for the auditors.]

New York Chancellor From Different World Visits Classrooms

Susan Dominus

Cathleen P. Black, the schools chancellor designee, is not a gusher. She is not an over-talker. She is a firm shaker of hands, a professional-grade eye-contact-maker and active listener. During an hourlong visit to Public School 33 in Chelsea on Monday morning, Ms. Black missed no opportunity to smile and say hello to school employees, from the office assistants to the person she later called the safety adviser (safety officer, but O.K., she is still new). Making the classroom rounds, she chatted with the children about pyramids and pets and greeted, but did not exactly bowl over, the teachers.
“Teachers need good knees,” she observed about midway through the visit, rising from the crouch she had been in while listening to some students talk about why they liked “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”
It is all new to Cathie Black: the knees, the numbers, the needs of the nation’s largest school system, where two-thirds of the students are poor enough to qualify for free meals. The current chancellor, Joel I. Klein, grew up in a housing project; Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, acknowledged Monday that she had never set foot in one. She and her children attended private schools.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: 2010 Madison Property Tax Bills Online

City of Madison 2010 property tax bills can be viewed at the City Assessor’s office website and via Access Dane.. Taxes are up, significantly.
The increases depend, to some extent on property assessments (if the assessed value declines, tax rates generally increase more to compensate for the reduced tax base and support spending growth), but a quick look reveals City of Madison and Dane County taxes are up in the 6% range, MATC over 10% and the Madison School District in the 9% range. Much more on the Madison School District’s 2010-2011 budget, here.
Two Madison School Board seats will be on the April, 2011 spring election ballot. They are currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman. I presume they are both seeking re-election, but I’ve not seen an announcement to that effect.

Gov. Doyle: Announces 71,400 students have signed the Wisconsin Covenant

Laura Smith

Governor Jim Doyle today announced that 18,264 students signed the Wisconsin Covenant Pledge in the fourth year of the program, bringing the total number of students who have signed the pledge and indicated that they plan to go on to college to more than 71,400 students across the state. The first class of students to sign the pledge are currently seniors in high school and preparing to make the transition to college next fall.
“I am encouraged that so many students have signed the Wisconsin Covenant and chosen the path to higher education that will help train them for the high-paying, technical jobs we need to compete in the global economy,” Governor Doyle said. “Regardless of their family’s economic background, their past academic behavior, and whether anyone in their family has a college degree, all students need to know that higher education is an option for them.”
Students who participate in the Wisconsin Covenant sign a pledge affirming that they will earn a high school diploma, participate in their community, take a high school curriculum that prepares them for higher education, maintain at least a B average in high school, and apply for state and federal financial aid.

The honeymoon’s over: After two years at helm, Madison school chief Nerad struggling

Susan Troller

For months, there was nothing but enthusiastic buzz surrounding the proposal to start a green charter school in Madison. The organizers of Badger Rock Middle School have broad support throughout the community and have meticulously done their homework. The school district administration was enthusiastic about the school’s focus on urban agriculture, and School Board members, who have the ultimate vote, were too.
Then, just days before the board was expected to give its final approval, the school district released new figures showing it would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to staff and operate the new school. This was a reversal from earlier projections that showed Badger Rock would bring no extra costs to the district.
In the current era of pinched budgets and dreary financial prospects, this revelation threw a monkey wrench into the process and caused the board to delay final consideration of the project until later this month.
“I had planned to come in here tonight to vote for this most innovative project,” board member Marj Passman said during the Nov. 29 meeting. “But at the last minute the Badger Rock people and the board were both hit broadside with new information that raises a lot of last-minute questions.”

Much more on Dan Nerad, here. Watch a recent video interview.

New Player in D.C. Schools Teachers’ Union Elects Tough-Talking Chief; Performance Evaluations Targeted

Stephanie Banchero & Neil King, Jr.

The election of a tough-talking new teachers’ union head here could complicate efforts to turn around the capital’s struggling school system, just as the fragile national effort to overhaul public schools faces a change in educational leaders in this and two other big cities.
Officials who took over in the wake of Michelle Rhee’s departure as chancellor of Washington’s school system said Friday they might refine her signature policies, but promised not to backtrack on closing low-performing schools and evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
But they face a new player in Nathan Saunders, who ousted Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker in an election last week. Mr. Saunders said he wanted to overhaul the teacher evaluation system Ms. Rhee put into place, and would fight to retain many of the 737 teachers termed low-performing by the school district who could lose their jobs at the end of the school year.

School officials weigh benefits with costs of healthy meal options

Gena Kittner & Matthew DeFour:

Healthier lunches are coming with a heftier price tag as school districts struggle to get students to buy meals rich in green produce and whole grains yet short on sugar, fat and salt.
The dilemma has added urgency as Madison and Dane County parents become increasingly vocal in urging better food in the lunch line. Districts are getting creative, making pizzas with wheat crusts and low-fat cheese, for example. But that only goes so far, officials said.
“Try as we might, there are some kids who are not going to eat raw broccoli,” said Robyn Wood, food services director for the Oregon School District, which ran a $50,000 deficit last school year in its $1.5 million lunch program. “They’re not going to buy an apple over a cookie. We serve apples at the high school and kids leave campus and buy cookies.”
The Madison School District has experienced a 35 percent reduction in revenue for its a la carte menu in the past five years after healthier options were introduced as part of a new wellness policy, said Food Services Director Frank Kelly.

Youth Sports May Not Offer Enough Exercise

Jennifer Corbett Dooren

The majority of children participating in organized team-sports don’t meet the federal recommendation of one hour a day of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, according to a study released Monday.
Federal-government guidelines recommend children and teens get at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity each day. It is estimated that fewer than half of children and only about 10% of teenagers meet that goal.
Many parents might believe if their children participate in team sports, then they must be getting enough exercise. Researchers at San Diego State and the University of California, San Diego, showed that isn’t necessarily the case.
The researchers looked at sports practices involving 200 children ranging in age from 7 to 14 years old, who were participants on a soccer, baseball or softball team in San Diego County. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published online Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Talent Management in Portfolio Districts

Christine Campbell, Michael DeArmond:

One of the most important things a school district can do to improve student achievement is ensure that students have effective teachers. Recognizing that human resource management systems are often not up to the task, some urban school districts are reforming how they recruit, hire, develop, and retain teachers by streamlining processes and procedures and aligning them with the district’s broader reform strategy.
This paper looks at how such reforms are playing out in two portfolio school districts: New York City and Washington, D.C. Though the districts’ reform efforts differ, together they highlight four courses of action that portfolio–and perhaps traditional–districts can take to transform talent management from a bureaucratic staffing system into a core leadership function:
1. Assign talent strategy to a senior reform executive
2. Distinguish strategy from routine transactions
3. Redesign policies and practices to support flexibility and performance
4. Change the culture to focus on performance

Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators

Sam Dillon

With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.
The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.

If I Ran the Schools

Hermene Hartman

There is a new trend in education and frankly, I don’t like it.
Unfortunately, you don’t have to be an educator to be at the helm of an educational system.
Years ago, it was impossible for an educator to rise to the top of the system without having established degrees and qualifications such as a PhD, classroom experience, administrative experience and academic hours in educational management.
The new sense in big city governments is to treat education less as a profession and more as bean counting. The thinking is to manage the process while the children, teachers and parents become peons.

Related: America’s Outmoded Approach to Education Credentials

Time to discuss state employee benefits

Joe Nation

Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research has issued two recent reports on the condition of public employee pension funds in California. The first identified a $425 billion funding shortfall for three state pension systems: the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and the University of California Retirement System. The second report found a nearly $200 billion shortfall for local government pension systems.
Both reports focused on the overall financial health of pension systems in California but did not touch on retiree benefit levels. It’s time to begin that conversation.
Discussing public employee retirement benefits is dangerous politically. So let’s start with the legal status of benefits owed to public employees.

CEO or school chief? Meet today’s superintendent

Jaime Sarrio

They manage budgets that stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars. They run organizations that rank among Home Depot and Kroger in terms of the number of people they employ locally. Perhaps most importantly, they are responsible for developing precious products, with the outcome impacting the future of the state and region.
Meet the metro school superintendent, a high-profile, well-compensated figurehead who’s part of an elite — but some say shrinking — class of educators more often compared to corporate CEOs or celebrities than classroom teachers.
The role of these leaders is taking on a renewed relevance in metro Atlanta as three of the state’s largest districts look to hire replacements in 2011. Those decisions will directly affect the lives of 250,000 students, 35,500 employees and countless others in the region, said Brad Bryant, state school chief.

Will a boys only, non-union prep school fly in Madison?

Susan Troller

Local attorney and former Wisconsin State Bar Association president Michelle Behnke spoke in favor of Madison Prep, saying both she and her now grown children attended Edgewood High School in preference over Madison public schools. “I am not a gambler,” Behnke, who is black, said during her three minute appearance before the board. She noted that the statistics regarding academic success for minority students in Madison were so bleak that neither she nor her parents felt they could risk a public school education.
Steve Goldberg, representing CUNA Mutual, also testified in favor of the school, saying his organization was looking forward to being involved and supportive of Madison Prep.
According to Caire, extreme measures are needed to deal with the extreme problems facing area black and latino youth in public school settings, claiming that conventional efforts have not yielded significant results. Both the achievement gap and the incarceration rate for black males in Dane County are at the bottom of national statistics.
Caire believes Madison Prep could be an experimental laboratory for change, and that if successful it could be replicated across the Madison district and elsewhere.
“We’ve been trying various approaches for 30 or 40 years and it’s still not working,” he says.

Much more on the proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.

American Teens Trail Global Peers in Math Scores; But U.S. Students Show Progress in Science

OECD

American teenagers made modest progress on an international exam, but still performed below average in mathematics compared with their peers in other industrialized countries, according to results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The test, called the Program for International Student Assessment, has been given every three years since 2000 to 15-year-old students. Last year, when the test was administered, 60 countries participated. It’s coordinated worldwide by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
The results for American students drew a lukewarm response from U.S. education officials as they seek to boost test scores among high-school and college students. “We’re in the middle of the pack; that’s not where we want to be,” said Stuart Kerachsky, deputy commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Department of Education that administers the PISA test in the U.S.

Korea and Finland top OECD’s latest PISA survey of education performance:

Korea and Finland top the OECD’s latest PISA survey of reading literacy among 15-year olds, which for the first time tested students’ ability to manage digital information.
The survey, based on two-hour tests of a half million students in more than 70 economies, also tested mathematics and science. The results for 65 economies are being released today.
The next strongest performances were from Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Full results here.
The province of Shanghai, China, took part for the first time and scored higher in reading than any country. It also topped the table in maths and science. More than one-quarter of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%.

Give all-male charter school a chance

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial

The Urban League of Greater Madison’s dramatic proposal for an all-male public charter school deserves open minds and fair consideration from the Madison School Board.
Don’t dismiss this intriguing initiative just because the teachers union is automatically opposed. A new approach to helping more young black men get to college is justified, given the district’s stark numbers:

  • Only 7 percent of black students who took the latest ACT college preparation test were ready for college.
  • Barely half of black students in Madison schools graduated in 2009.
  • Almost three-quarters of the 3,828 suspensions last school year were black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body

Much more on the proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.

Madison School District Leaders Learn More About Boys-Only Charter School

Madison Metropolitan School District leaders on Monday night learned more about a proposed boys-only charter school and heard from the public.
The school, which would have uniforms and be targeted toward minority students, would be the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
The idea is called Madison Prep, and it would be part of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school’s goal is for 100 percent higher education acceptance for its students, and to meet that goal it will have a longer school day and school year.
And while it’s never been done here before, the person behind it said that’s the idea. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said it’s time to think out of the box to help children be more successful in school — specifically black middle-school children.

Friends, Romans, schoolchildren

Harry Eyres

The only remotely classical thing about Pegasus Primary School on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford is the name and the school logo of a blue winged horse. The logo looks cuddlier than the Pegasus of Greek mythology, sprung from the blood of the gorgon Medusa when the hero Perseus cut off her head.
This is not the Oxford of the dreaming spires; the school is in one of the largest council estates in Europe, close to the former Morris car works at Cowley, where Minis are now made. My taxi driver points out the Blackbird pub, noted for fights, and a supermarket which he claims has been raided five times in the past year.
This well-run primary school in a tough area is doing something culturally counter-cyclical: it is teaching Latin and Greek under the auspices of the Iris Project, a volunteer-run scheme which brings classics to inner-city state schools. As someone who loved classics at public school in the 1970s, when the subject seemed out of date and doomed to oblivion, I find this both incredible and thoroughly heartening.

In Jane Austen 2.0, the Heroines And Heroes Friend Each Other

Arden Dale & Mary Pilon

Ben Kemper, 19, plans to wear a frock coat with cuffs to the annual Jane Austen birthday tea in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
The outfit will be “the whole shebang,” says Mr. Kemper, who hopes to scare up some yard work so he can pay for the new threads. He says his costume may include riding boots, a cane, gloves and a buttoned vest.
Mr. Kemper is among an unlikely set of fans of the long-dead Ms. Austen–young people. The English novelist best known for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility” has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as “Janeites” who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis

Michael Cooper & Mary Williams Walsh

The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.
While next year could be even worse, there are bigger, longer-term risks, financial analysts say. Their fear is that even when the economy recovers, the shortfalls will not disappear, because many state and local governments have so much debt — several trillion dollars’ worth, with much of it off the books and largely hidden from view — that it could overwhelm them in the next few years.
“It seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point,” said Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.

Teachers can make their case about reform to policymakers

In the Nov. 28 Star, Matthew Tully contributed an insightful piece highlighting a significant disconnect between education reformers and those who will perhaps be most affected by reforms — teachers (“Teachers hear something else in reform debate”). The article begs us to contemplate the forces underlying educators’ distrust of state-directed education reforms. Teachers will be instrumental in implementation of these reforms. As such, the fracture between policymakers and practitioners demands our attention.
Tully captured the gestalt of the problem when noting that many good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools’ failures. We’re not. We’re actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools’ successes.

Honolulu Charter school stands accused of nepotism

Susan Essoyan

Principal Diana Oshiro of Myron B. Thompson Academy Public Charter School says she values “blind loyalty” and has hired several relatives — including her sister and three nephews — because she can count on them to do what she says.
Three out of four administrators at Thompson, one of the state’s largest charter schools, are part of Oshiro’s family. Her sister oversees the elementary school as vice principal and also works as a flight attendant.
Oshiro’s nephew is the athletic director, although the school had no sports teams last year or this year, and he doesn’t teach PE. He and his brother, the film teacher, were hired with just high school degrees, although public school teachers are supposed to have bachelor’s degrees and teaching licenses.
A veteran educator, Oshiro was blunt when asked about her hiring practices at the online school, which has 517 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

“Education for Innovation,” a live digital town hall

The Innovation Economy

Please join us to watch:
An announcement from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Angel GurrĂ­a, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the standing of U.S. students in reading, math and science literacy compared to other countries around the world;
A two-way conversation with Secretary Duncan and students, teachers and administrators from Olin College of Engineering (Needham, Mass.) and the School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Dallas, TX);
Robert D. Atkinson, President of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discuss the results from a new report on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education released that morning; and
An interview with Thomas L. Friedman on U.S. competitiveness, innovation and economic growth.

Live Webcast on Tuesday, December 7, 8:45 a.m. EST

The Merits of Training Mentors

Christine Pfund, Christine Maidl Pribbenow, Janet Branchaw, Sarah Miller Lauffer, Jo Handelsman

Good mentoring can be learned.
In research universities and colleges, mentoring is one of the most important skills for faculty because it affects both research productivity and the quality of training for under- graduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. Moreover, the diversity of science is dependent on the quality of mentored research, because this experience is a key to attracting underrepresented groups to science (1-5). In the past, many faculty learned skills such as mentoring on the job. In recent years, various organizations have developed training programs to help prospective and new faculty learn skills such as grant writing, laboratory management, and classroom teaching, but mentoring has been largely absent. In response to this need, we developed and evaluated a mentor-training seminar. The seminar is intended to improve mentors’ skills and to enhance the research experiences of undergraduate students.

Comments on Dane County (WI) High School Graduation Rates

Dave Zweifel

The countywide graduation rate for African-American students also showed a dramatic improvement, going from 64 to 90 percent in the past five years, although individual district graduation rates still lag, including Madison’s.
What’s happened to cause this? United Way began focusing on school dropout and graduation rates in recent years, after an intensive study on what factors cause kids to drop out and fail to graduate. The charitable agency has directed more funding to groups that attack school problems with the goal to get more kids to stay in and finish school.
The superintendents at the meeting also cited other factors, including better tracking of students and creating opportunities for problem students to get another chance to earn their diplomas.
It’s good to know that efforts to solve some of those nagging problems facing our schools are being addressed — and getting results, besides.

Michelle Rhee Picks Florida?

Susan Sawyers

The “what will she do next” guessing game came to an end this week when Florida’s Republican Governor-elect Rick Scott named Michelle Rhee,” the former chancellor of the District of Columbia school system, to an 18-member transition team on education.
Scott said the transition team would help him “find innovative ways to create a new education system for a new economy.”
What Michelle brings to public education in Florida, according to Julie Young, President and Chief Executive Officer of Orlando-based Florida Virtual School (FLVS), “is a new perspective and drive for change.”
“Michelle was controversial, but she has a clear passion for what is best for kids and making sure kids have the highest quality education and the highest quality teacher,” said Young.

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan: December, 2010

Madison School District Administration

The last Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Plan was adopted by the MMSD Board of Education in 1991. With state statute and policy reform, alignment with current District strategic planning, and a desire to utilize research in exemplary practice, approval of a comprehensive Talented and Gifted Plan has become a District priority.
This document is meant to be a guide as the Division aims to achieve its mission in alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, the State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules for gifted and talented education, and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
There will be a review of the Plan, with status reports issued to the Board of Education, in January and June 2010. Adjustments to the Plan will be documented at that time.
Wisconsin State Statute 121.02(1) (t), and Administrative Rule PI 8.01(2)(t).2 require school districts to identify those students who give evidence of high performance capability as talented and gifted and provide those students with access to appropriate systematic and continuous instruction. The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) standards complements the Wisconsin framework and provides a guide for quality educational programming.
The Plan below identifies the following categories as areas in need of improvement in MMSD Talented and Gifted Programming. The primary focus in developing this Plan has been in the areas of identification, programming, and professional development.

Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?

Laura Rowley

Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?
by Laura Rowley
Friday, December 3, 2010
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Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor’s in sociology — and a whopping $200,000 in student loan debt. Space, who lives with her parents and works full-time, put up a Web site called TwoHundredThou.com soliciting donations to help meet her debt obligation, which is $891 a month. That number jumps to $1,600 next November.
In creating the site, Space, of course is hoping to ease her financial burden, but it’s “mainly to inform others on the dangers of how quickly student loans add up,” she said. So far she’s raised $6,671.56, according to her site.
Space is just one example — albeit an extreme one — of a student loan bubble that may be about to burst. Over the last decade, private lenders, abetted by college financial aid offices, eagerly handed young people hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn bachelor’s degrees. As a result of easy credit, declining grants and soaring tuitions, more than two-thirds of students graduated with debt in 2008 — up from 45 percent in 1993. The average debt load is $24,000, according to the Project on Student Debt.

Levi Gets a Cellphone, and a Lot of Rules

Stephen Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder

STEVE: “Cellphone,” came the one-word email the other day. “Cellphone,” said the handwritten sticky note on my desk when I got home.
They were subtle messages from Levi, and he had a point: After years of resisting, Karen and I in June told him he could have a cellphone when school began. School had begun.
There are good reasons not to give a teen a cellphone. It’s an addictive time sponge. The teen will text all night long and will mess with the phone at the dining table. The phone will magically be juiceless or out of range when Dad’s calling on a Friday night.

The Madison School District’s “Phoenix Program”: An “Alternative to Expulsion”

The Madison School District Administration

On June 14, 2010, the Board was presented with a Document entitled Disciplinary Alternatives: Phoenix Program.
That Document outlined the foundation for the current Phoenix Program, an alternative to expulsion that allows a student’s expulsion recommendation to be held in abeyance while the student participates in a half-day program tailored to the student’s academic, emotional and behavioral needs. At the time of presentation, the Board voted to implement the Phoenix Program.
The June 14, 2010 document did not provide all the details related to the Phoenix Program and contemplated that further details would be provided to the Board as the Program was implemented. This memo is intended to advise the Board of the current state of the Phoenix Program, provide further details of its operation and advise the Board of changes to prior practices that have been made in the process of implementing the Phoenix Program.
For ease of reference, this Update will follow the structure of the June 14, 2010 Document. Also for !he Board’s reference the following documents are attached to this Update: Phoenix Program Participation Agreement, the “Knowledge” analysis form, and a chart that compares and contrasts the old practices versus the new practices.
Introduction
As the Board will recall, the Phoenix Program was recommended and adopted in order to provide an alternative toexpulsionforstudentswhocommittedcertainexpellableoffenses. Theintentoftheprogramistoprovide academic, social and emotional interventions to students who engage in certain behavior in order for students to remain connected to the school environment and improve their prosocial skills and not repeat the same or similar behavior.

Talking Points for the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, an IB Charter School

Kaleem Caire, via email

What are Charter Schools?

  • Charter schools are public schools that have more freedom to innovate because they are exempt from many (but not all) policies that govern traditional public schools. There are more than 200 public charter schools in Wisconsin and two in Madison.
  • Charter schools employ fully qualified teachers and participate in statewide testing programs just like traditional public schools do.
  • Wisconsin has two kinds of charter schools: instrumentality (staff employed by a school district) and non-instrumentality (staff not employed by a school district, but by a nonprofit organization).

Read the initial proposal, here.

Hold the brownies! Bill could limit bake sales

Mary Clare Jalonick

A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama — and championed by the first lady — gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.
Republicans, notably Sarah Palin, and public school organizations decry the bill as an unnecessary intrusion on a common practice often used to raise money.
“This could be a real train wreck for school districts,” Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association said Friday, a day after the House cleared the bill. “The federal government should not be in the business of regulating this kind of activity at the local level.”

The College Debt Bubble: Is It Ready to Explode?

Hans Bader

Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?,” asks Laura Rowley at Yahoo! Finance. College tuition has skyrocketed much more than housing did during the housing bubble, in percentage terms. One hundred colleges charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition. College financial-aid policies punish thrifty families, so that “parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.”
“University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers,” notes Facebook investor Peter Thiel, “selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties,” he says, an assessment shared by prominent law professor Glenn Reynolds.
My wife is French. She spent twice as much time in class at her second-tier French university as I did in my flagship American university (the University of Virginia), and more time studying, too (even though I was studious by American standards, and as a result, later went on to attend Harvard Law School). France spends less per student on higher education than we do, to produce a more literate and knowledgeable citizenry.

The Faculty Sabbatical on the Chopping Block

Christine Hurt

A blurb in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that the Iowa legislature, in the face of shrinking budgets, is rattling swords at faculty sabbaticals, stating that it is unfair that academics would get paid semester or year leaves while other employees feel the budget pain. This statement caught my eye and get my mind swirling:
1. It’s almost impossible to explain a sabbatical to nonacademics and have it seem necessary. Sabbaticals are fairly unknown in most professions. I’ve heard of ministers getting sabbaticals and a million years ago a few law firms mentioned having sabbaticals, but they definitely aren’t part of the average American worker’s salary and benefits package.
2. The name “sabbatical” sounds like a rest. Making the argument that folks that do no physical labor need periodic rest is tough.
3. If a university expects faculty to apply for a sabbatical by proposing doing research or scholarly project during the sabbatical, then it is not a paid rest. In that case, a sabbatical is merely a research leave. If faculty are required to produce scholarship, and this is explicit in tenure, promotion and raise standards, then a sabbatical is merely time given to meet the requirements of the job. Perhaps re-branding is necessary: a “research intensive”? If sabbaticals are used for mere relaxation, travel or outside work, then they seem more “cut-worthy” in an era of shrinking budgets.

The Great Divide

Susan O’Doherty:

When I was growing up, a vacation meant two weeks in Florida visiting my grandparents. Delray Beach, with its palm trees, warm beaches in midwinter, poolside restaurants and hibiscus hedges, seemed like another planet to this suburban NY kid. Most of my friends also visited relatives over school breaks; some of the more affluent went skiing in Vermont or Colorado, or on a Caribbean cruise. Only occasionally did we hear about someone going to Europe or Israel. Africa and Asia really were like other planets, as far as we were concerned.
Partly as a result, I grew up without a very developed sense of how the rest of the world worked. Of course I read books, studied French and Spanish, and saw the occasional foreign film, but in terms of actual human interaction or understanding, I was as provincial as they come. Examples:
I was once arranging to meet my friend Julie, who was originally from Taiwan. Going down a list of mutually convenient restaurants in my head, I said to her, “Do you like Chinese food?” (There was a thoughtful silence followed by cackling.)

Initial Thoughts on the Madison Prep Proposal

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Thanks to the Kaleem Caire his Urban League team for shining a spotlight on the very troubling issue of the lack of success experienced by so many of our students of color. Thanks even more for proposing a charter school intended to help address this problem. I want the proposal to succeed. But I need to know more about the legality of the proposal’s single-gender approach, a lot more about the projected finances for the school and the extent of the School District’s expected contribution, and more about how the school intends to remain true to its vision of serving Madison’s disadvantaged African-American boys before my sympathetic disposition can grow into active support.

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

New Jersey Governor Christie Takes on Parsippany School Board, Super at Town Meeting

Carrie Stetler

Gov. Chris Christie didn’t mention Superintendent of Schools LeRoy Seitz in his town meeting speech Friday afternoon at the Morris County Public Safety Training Academy.
But it didn’t take him long to get around to the subject.
When it was time for the audience to ask questions, Parsippany Township resident Hank Heller came to the microphone and asked if the board’s approval of Seitz’s contract made him consider stripping local school boards of their power.
“Since we’ve seen the results in Parsippany of home rule run amok with the superintendent’s contract, any thought of changing home rule to county rule or state rule?” asked Heller, who was first line at the event, which drew a crowd of more than 200.
Christie chuckled, then said, “All night, and the first question we get is about Lee Seitz.”

How to best educate future educators

Amy Hetzner and Becky Vevea

Ivelisse Cruz can barely watch the video footage from her first time teaching a math lesson.
The video shows Cruz, a first-semester sophomore at Alverno College at the time, hesitantly starting her lesson seated with a group of seventh-grade students around a small table at Fairview Charter School in Milwaukee. She doesn’t quite explain what the focus of their math lesson will be, looks slightly uncertain and speaks in what she would later criticize as a monotone voice.
“It was terrible, I don’t even know how these kids were even paying attention,” Cruz, now in her senior year at Alverno, said as she watched the video.
Fast forward through three more semesters, learning the art of teaching and spending time working with students.
Now the video shows a more confident woman standing at the front of her class, reviewing her work with the students from the week before, forecasting what the next lesson will be, calling a student to stand beside her at an overhead projector to walk through a practice problem.

Curated Education Information