Kevin Cullen:

The kids at St. Peter’s School have started asking questions, and like any good first-grade teacher, Colleen O’Dwyer is a master of deflection.
“I tell them nothing’s been decided,” she was saying, as she and Courtney Carthas, a second-grade teacher, sat with seven kids for the after-school book club.
Technically, that’s true, as the final decision to close the Dorchester parochial school has not been made by Cardinal Sean O’Malley. But the stars and the numbers are aligned against St. Peter’s, and it is only a matter of time.
To describe St. Peter’s as a victim of consolidation in an archdiocese trying to stem a decline in enrollment in its urban schools is to completely miss the importance of the building and those who people it. Sitting on Bowdoin Street, at the foot of Meetinghouse Hill, St. Peter’s is more than a school. It is a haven, a sanctuary, four stories of red-brick proof that all is not lost in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.
St. Peter’s has 156 students, but with its after-school programs serves about 400 children who live around Meetinghouse Hill. One of them is Alaister Santos, a chatty, personable first-grader. When they were preparing to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of the great Barry O’Brien, the school’s biggest private benefactor, Alaister had only one question: “Where was he shot?”

Peg Tyre:

In an age of media saturation and ubiquitous advertising, some schools are trying professional marketing campaigns to sell the notion that ‘school is cool.’
In most places kids may not be overjoyed to attend school, but they tolerate it. It’s a stepping stone, their parents remind them over and over, to better things, like college, an interesting, well-paying job and a stable family life. In other places, especially poor neighborhoods, though, kids don’t regard school as a necessary evil but rather as a burden. For a lot of kids in poor neighborhoods, school is definitely not cool.
“It’s no secret,” says New York City schools chief Joel Klein. “All you have to do is ask kids in these areas and they’ll tell you: school is not their thing. They don’t want to be identified as being good at it. Studying is not something they want to be seen doing,” he says.
So Klein is setting out to sell school achievement to schoolchildren—much in the same way that kids are sold soda, breakfast cereal or pop music. With the help of an as yet unnamed advertising agency, he’s launching a slick multimedia campaign complete with celebrity pitchmen, viral marketing schemes, free videos and give-away prizes aimed at “rebranding” academics.

Joe Richman:

What is it that makes us who we really are? Our life experiences or our DNA? Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were born and raised in New York City. Both women were adopted as infants and raised by loving families. They met for the first time when they were 35 years old and found they were “identical strangers”: they had been separated as infants as part of a secret research study of identical twins designed to examine the question of nature verses nurture. “When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study. But of course, they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes,” Bernstein said. The results of the study, that ended in 1980, have been sealed until 2066 and given to an archive at Yale University. Of the 13 children involved in the study, three sets of twins and one set of triplets have discovered one another. The other four subjects of the study still do not know they have identical twins.

Anneliese Dickman:

How many times have you heard of a lucky duck who wins the lottery, just to squander it all and return to his old work-a-day self? I’m sure those guys thought winning the lottery would turn their luck around forever.
Just like education reform proponents who are fond of calling school choice a “panacea” think that winning a voucher or attending a private school automatically results in a better student.
Well, there is new evidence that offering a choice isn’t, by itself, going to effect education reform. A newly released study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (authored by Julie Berry Cullen of UC-San Diego and Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan) attempts to focus on the “lottery” effect of school choice by tracking, over time, students who won the ability to choose their Chicago public schools in Kindergarten or first grade. By also following students who did not win, they are able to avoid what is the biggest hurdle to good research on the effect of school choice…non-random selection.
Here in Milwaukee vouchers are not awarded randomly to families. In our city, parents first must find a school, then apply for a voucher seat at that school. Only if there are more applicants than seats will random selection kick in, and even then, the student is only competing against the other students who have chosen that school…they are not in a pool with students choosing other schools. Not a random situation at all. (Which is not to say it isn’t in the students’ and schools’ best interests to operate the program that way, just that it is difficult to research rigorously due to this.)

Channel3000:

Madison residents met Thursday night to share ideas and concerns about the future of area schools.
A district-wide community roundtable tackled issues dealing with budget cuts, school closures, and school board leadership.
Residents from all over the city also discussed statewide education funding reform, keeping neighborhood schools open and improving the overall budget process.
Organizers said the roundtable helps stimulate new ideas and make current ones stronger.
“Even people who think they know each other and know each other’s points of view, when they really sit down and talk, they realize, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about you. I didn’t know you shared that concern,'” said Rebecca Kemble, co-chair of the East Attendance Area PTO.
A district-wide forum with the Madison School Board is set for Oct. 21 at 3 p.m. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union.

Shelby Steele:

ifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed–in a single day–1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas’s capital city.
For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television–then still a very new medium–the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness.
Finally, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus succumbed to a kind of madness, if not to a perverse politics of racial hatred, and withdrew the National Guard from Central High, effectively turning the school over to the raging mob. The nine courageous black students, who had suffered so much to integrate the school, were withdrawn for their own protection. So, for a time, the authority of the mob prevailed over all governmental authority–local, state and federal. And this was the provocation that pushed a reluctant President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops.

The Economist:

• Bac to School:
  

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

• Parent-Led Schools: B
  

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

• Latest Thinking on Education:
  

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

• Schools Unchained:
  

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

Stephanie Banchero & Heather Stone:

At a school where every other reform had failed, Montie Apostolos was the last, best chance for students to succeed.
She had been brought in because she produced impressive gains in reading test scores at her last school. She was tough. Her lessons were rooted in the best research, and she was trained for inner-city schools.
She’s an uncompromising, charismatic 56-year-old grandmother with an irresistible life story: She had fought off water cannons, attack dogs and white supremacists to get her own education in the segregated South. Nothing her students faced was going to surprise her.
But on a fall morning last year, at Sherman School of Excellence on Chicago’s South Side, Apostolos’ steely demeanor met its match.
A baby-faced 8th-grade boy stood at a lectern analyzing a poem. In a squeaky voice, he talked about feeling alone and neglected, like the narrator. And, matter-of-factly, he ticked off events that brought him there.
He had been taken away from his crack-addicted mother. His brother had been shot in the heart and head during a gang fight. His young cousin had died of neglect.

The Economist:

A YEAR ago Felipe Calderón won a desperately close election for Mexico’s presidency by a margin of barely 200,000 votes. While there were many factors behind his victory, one that may have tipped the balance was the support of Elba Esther Gordillo, the head of the National Educational Workers’ Union, as the country’s teachers’ union is called. Ms Gordillo is reckoned by many to be the most powerful woman in Mexico. Indeed, after Mr Calderón, she may be the second most powerful politician in the country.
Ms Gordillo’s political power comes mainly from the union’s sheer size: with 1.4m members teaching in primary and secondary schools, it is the largest labour union in Latin America. From that political base, Ms Gordillo controls a significant block of deputies in the lower house of the federal Congress, as well as two senators. And while no state governor will say so openly, “none of them will go against her will,” says Carlos Ornelas, an education specialist at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University.
“La maestra” (“the teacher”), as Ms Gordillo is known, is widely reckoned to have reached an unwritten—and maybe even implicit—agreement with Mr Calderón, under which she has swapped her support in other matters for his acquiescence in her grip over the country’s schools.

Sarah Carr:

During Rick Xiong’s first two years at Milwaukee’s Madison High School, his habit was to “go to school and get back home as fast as possible.”
Sometimes Xiong, now a 19-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, would hear about after-school activities advertised during the morning announcements. But they never enticed him to stay.
As another school year approaches, many of the extracurricular activities that have long interested Milwaukee students are relics of the past. Although there are notable exceptions, gone are the days when city high schools had an array of sports, a drama club, a school musical, a band, an orchestra, a choir, an active yearbook and an assortment of other organizations.
The gap in test scores and graduation rates between the city and suburban high schools has attracted the most attention from policy-makers and the media in recent years. But others worry that there’s another gap that’s just as meaningful: the difference in the richness and breadth of the high school experience available to children in cities and suburbs as urban districts slice after-school activities and clubs.

Stacy Cowley and Neil deMause:

The subway ads promise inspiration, fulfillment, and the kind of career satisfaction rarely found in an office cube. “Your spreadsheets won’t grow up to be doctors and lawyers,” one gently chides. “You remember your first-grade teacher’s name. Who will remember yours?” asks another.
The posters are an effective lure for enticing dissatisfied corporate professionals and idealistic college grads to apply for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Set up in 2000 as a collaboration between the city and the nonprofit New Teacher Project, the program aims to address the city’s chronic teacher shortage, epecially in hard-to-fill areas like math, science, and special education. It offers a subsidized master’s degree in education and a quick on-ramp to a new career. This year, nearly 20,000 would-be educators from across the country applied.
But recent fellows warn aspirants not to fall for the gauzy sales pitch. Recounting their initiation into leading a classroom, the novice teachers describe a scene that’s more Full Metal Jacket than Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Seven weeks of crash-course training and summer school student teaching, they say, is no preparation for the realities of city classrooms.
“The year before I came, the kids set three or four fires in the school,” recalls one fellow about to enter her fifth year of teaching first and second graders. “You’re prepared that some of the kids aren’t going to listen, but not for the things they’re going to do—like throwing desks across the room. I had a kid taken away in an ambulance my first year because he just flipped out and was ramming into the door.”

Robert Rothman:

As the unprecedented push to improve American education enters the midpoint of its third decade, reformers can claim some success. Yet no one would argue that the job is done, particularly in the nation’s cities. Even the most successful urban school districts, the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, would acknowledge that they have a long way to go toward ensuring that every child receives an excellent education and develops the knowledge and skills needed for a fulfilling and productive future.
There is no shortage of ideas for improving urban education, and there are efforts under way in nearly every city to improve schooling for urban youths: New schools are proliferating, high schools are being redesigned, new curricula are being developed and implemented, accountability systems are being strengthened, and much more. But there is also a growing recognition that improving schools and school systems, while essential, is not enough. Ensuring that every child becomes proficient and beyond will require the support and active engagement of organizations and agencies outside of schools as well.
The role of out-of-school factors in educational success has sparked heated debate. But the debate over whether in-school or out-of-school factors are more salient in children’s learning—a debate that has raged at least since the 1966 publication of James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity—is in many respects a false one. Both factors are important, and both must be addressed if the nation is to fulfill its 60-year-old promise of equal educational opportunity, and its more recent pledge to ensure that all children learn to high levels.
The experiences of middle-class and affluent children make this proposition clear. To be sure, relatively affluent students tend to have schooling advantages that support higher levels of learning. Numerous studies have documented the disparities in school facilities, teacher quality, and curriculum offerings that favor more-advantaged students.

Justin Pope:

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

Alan Borsuk:

They don’t have that at Marquette University High School anymore.
“I may have been in the last class where you were required to take Latin,” said Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who graduated in 1972. “There was something about the Gallic Wars the second year, that’s about all I remember.”
Some things do change at Marquette High. But look at all the things that haven’t changed over the past 150 years – it’s still in the heart of the city, still all-boys, still Jesuit, still producing a generous portion of the political, judicial, corporate and civic leaders of the city.
The school will celebrate its 150th birthday Saturday; its roots go back nearly to the founding of Milwaukee.
(Latin, by the way, is still offered as an elective, and 103 students are scheduled to take it this fall. Also, not everyone disliked Latin. Milwaukee historian and author John Gurda, a 1965 graduate, said he treasures his four years of Latin and two years of Greek, and they still strengthen his perspective on language and its roots.)

Nanette Asimov:

University Preparatory Charter High School in East Oakland bills itself as a high-end academy where students attract recruiters from the nation’s top universities.
Photos of young scholars in caps and gowns grace its Web site above the names of colleges that accepted them — Oberlin, Dartmouth, Pomona, Whitman.
But that bright image belies a grim truth: Someone at this inner-city public school, also known as Uprep, is cheating.
The state Department of Education has just concluded for the second year in a row that one or more adults interfered with state-required testing at the school. This spring, state investigators seized copies of 2005 tests being illegally used to prepare students for the 2007 exams.
State rules require that test booklets be turned in at the conclusion of testing each year because many exam questions remain the same. At Uprep, someone photocopied the 2005 test books and kept them.
“That’s a fairly significant security breach,” said Deb Sigman, testing director for the state Department of Education. “California statute specifically prohibits any preparation that is specific to this test.”
Last year, investigators found that someone changed hundreds of test answers from wrong to right before they were sent to the state.
In a rare move clamping down on a charter school’s autonomy, the state is ordering the Oakland school district to take over Uprep’s testing, Sigman said.

Winnie Hu:

When teachers are removed from their schools here, their first phone call is often to the powerful Newark Teachers Union. But now the union is telling as many as a dozen teachers at the troubled Newton Street School that they have to leave because they do not fit in with a plan to improve the school.
“It was probably the hardest thing that I’ve had to do,” said Joseph Del Grosso, the longtime union president, who helped push through raises for teachers this spring during a state budget crisis, and went to jail for nearly three months in 1971 for taking part in a teachers’ strike.
The 5,000-member teachers’ union, the largest in New Jersey, is part of a takeover team at Newton, one of the city’s worst-performing public schools. For the past six years, it has failed to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” on state achievement tests, the standard required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Jon Boone:

Two of the world’s most buccaneering education entrepreneurs have teamed up to build 60 multimillion-dollar schools in big cities across the world.
The network of high-end international schools will cater to the children of bankers, diplomats and executives who have to regularly uproot their families.
With annual fees between $15,000 and $40,000, depending on the city, the plan marks a serious departure for Chris Whittle, famous for starting the Edison Schools company, which runs facilities in some of America’s most deprived areas.
His new venture, Nations Academy, has been set up with Sunny Varkey, chairman of Dubai-based Global Education Management Systems, which runs private schools around the world.

Jennifer Medina:

Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator from Los Angeles, is seeking to expand into New York with the cooperation of the teachers’ union.
Under the proposal, Green Dot, which is heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, would open a high school in the South Bronx. The school, which must be approved by the state, would become one of only a handful of charter schools in the city to use a union contract.

The Economist:

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

A Capital Times Editorial:

The new elementary school on Madison’s far west side will not be named for Hmong Gen. Vang Pao, who has been arrested by federal authorities on charges of masterminding a plot to use money collected from Hmong refugees in the United States to massacre Laotians in a violent coup.
Whether the Madison School Board recognizes that fact immediately or in a few weeks — after what board President Arlene Silveira describes as an investigation into the “nature of the charges” against Vang — there is no way that Madison, or any other city, is going to build a “Vang Pao Elementary School.”
That’s the first reality of the moment.
It is not a judgment regarding the guilt or innocence of Vang. The charges against the general, who for many years during the Vietnam War era did the dirty work of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, are serious. But just as there must always be an assumption of innocence, there should also be a measure of skepticism when it comes to federal claims regarding conspiracies.

Much more on the Vang Pao Elementary School here.

Abdul Kargbo:

In today’s debates about how best to improve student performance, little mention is made of how students’ personal views on learning may affect their academic achievement. Specifically, commentators seldom discuss students’ understanding of the utility of an education and the effects of this perception on how much they value education and how well they perform in school. Perhaps because doing so can be controversial.
Ask talk-show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, who faced criticism earlier this year when, in comparing students in South Africa to those in U.S. inner-city schools, she indicated that the American students valued education less. “I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there,” Winfrey told Newsweek. “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” Winfrey quickly drew the disapproval of a Washington Post columnist, who countered that in the inner-city schools he’s visited, most students “desperately want to learn.”
As someone who attended school in both Africa and the United States, I think both Winfrey and her detractors are somewhat off the mark. It’s not enough to argue about whether or not inner-city students want to learn. Rather, we should be asking why these students don’t value education enough to want to do well at it.

Update: A reader emailed this article. by Fred Reed, author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.

Susan Lampert Smith:

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

A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:

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

More from Bessie Cherry:

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