I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 2010 Wisconsin Solo & Ensemble Festival. It is a true delight to enjoy the results of student and teacher practice, dedication and perseverance.
I very much appreciate the extra effort provided by some teachers on behalf of our children.
I thought about those teachers today when I received an email from a reader asking why I continue to publish this site. This reader referred to ongoing school bureaucratic intransigence on reading, particularly in light of the poor results (Alan Borsuk raises the specter of a looming Wisconsin “reading war“).
I’ll respond briefly here.
Many years ago, I had a Vietnam Vet as my high school government teacher. This guy, took what was probably an easy A for many and turned it into a superb, challenging class. He drilled the constitution, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers and the revolutionary climate into our brains.
Some more than others.
I don’t have the ability to stop earmark, spending or lobbying excesses in Washington, nor at the State, or perhaps even local levels. I do have the opportunity to help, in a very small way, provide a communication system (blog, rss and enewsletter) for those interested in K-12 matters, including our $400M+ Madison School District. There is much to do and I am grateful for those parents, citizens, teachers and administrators who are trying very hard to provide a better education for our children.
It is always a treat to see professionals who go the extra mile. I am thankful for such wonderful, generous people. Saturday’s WSMA event was a timely reminder of the many special people around our children.
Time for a Wisconsin Reading War….
Start the war.
What about Wisconsin? Wisconsin kids overall came in at the U.S. average on the NAEP scores. But Wisconsin’s position has been slipping. Many other states have higher overall scores and improving scores, while Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for phonics programs, points out something that should give us pause: If you break down the new fourth-grade reading data by race and ethnic grouping, as well as by economic standing (kids who get free or reduced price meals and kids who don’t), Wisconsin kids trail the nation in every category. The differences are not significant in some, but even white students from Wisconsin score below the national average for white children.
(So how does Wisconsin overall still tie the national average? To be candid, the answer is because Wisconsin has a higher percentage of white students, the group that scores the highest, than many other states.)
Start the war.
Related: Reading Recovery, Madison School Board member suggests cuts to Reading Recovery spending, UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg on the Madison School District’s distortion of reading data & phonics and Norm and Dolores Mishelow Presentation on Milwaukee’s Successful Reading Program.
Governance: Madison School Board Members Proposed 2010-2011 Budget Amendments: Cole, Hughes, Mathiak, Moss & Silveira. Reading Recovery, Teaching & Learning, “Value Added Assessment” based on WKCE on the Chopping Block
Well worth reading, particularly Maya Cole’s suggestions on Reading Recovery (60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use) spending, Administrative compensation comparison, a proposal to eliminate the District’s public information position, Ed Hughes suggestion to eliminate the District’s lobbyist (Madison is the only District in the state with a lobbyist), trade salary increases for jobs, Lucy Mathiak’s recommendations vis a vis Teaching & Learning, the elimination of the “expulsion navigator position”, reduction of Administrative travel to fund Instructional Resource Teachers, Arlene Silveira’s recommendation to reduce supply spending in an effort to fund elementary school coaches and a $200,000 reduction in consultant spending. Details via the following links:
Maya Cole: 36K PDF
Ed Hughes: 127K PDF
Lucy Mathiak: 114K PDF
Beth Moss: 10K PDF
Arlene Silveira: 114K PDF
The Madison School District Administration responded in the following pdf documents:
- AA-1LegislativeLiaisonRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-2CommunityEngagementandOutreachRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-3MSCRAdultParticipationFeesRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-6BuildingServicesReviewofOrgandOperations RESPONSE.pdf
- AA-10BoardofEducationSalariesRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-11SuppliesandMaterialsBudgetsRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-12ExpulsionNavigatorPositionRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-13ConferenceTravelBudgetsRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-17StrategicPlanSchoolForestRESPONSE.pdf
- AA-22AthleticsRESPONSE.pdf
Much more on the proposed 2010-2011 Madison School District Budget here.
Seattle’s Superintendent Performance Review
Well, while folks are talking about having the public kibbitz on school district labor contracts, I suppose we can’t help having comments on the Superintendent’s contract as well. The Board will soon take up the matter of the Superintendent’s annual performance review and action on her contract.
How has the Superintendent done?
I suppose the only proper way to answer that question would be to review her performance relative to her job description and the performance expectations for her that were established and defined in advance. These performance expectations should, of course, all be objectively measurable outcomes. That is, after all, her definition of accountability.
She wrote:
Changing Teacher Tenure: Last Teacher In, First Out? New York City Has Another Idea
Peter Borock, 23, is in his second year teaching history at Health Opportunities High School in the South Bronx. It could be his last.
With New York City schools planning for up to 8,500 layoffs, new teachers like Mr. Borock, and half a dozen others at his school, could be some of the ones most likely to be let go. That has led the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, into a high-stakes battle with the teachers’ union to overturn seniority rules that have been in place for decades.
Facing the likelihood of the largest number of layoffs in more than a generation, Mr. Klein and his counterparts around the country say that the rules, which require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs, are anachronistic. In an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Revolt Grows in New Jersey
NY Post:
New Jersey voters just sent another loud reminder of their disgust with out-of-control taxes.
Of 537 school budgets up for a vote in the Garden State, 315 — a whopping 59 percent — went down in flames Tuesday.
That’s more than the state’s seen in decades.
Why so many rejections?
Because some 80 percent of those budgets sought property-tax hikes.
For School Company, Issues of Money and Control
When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education.
Mrs. Bakke, a former teacher, said she had been interested in education since the summer she was a 12-year-old and, together with a friend, opened the Humpty Dumpty Day School, charging $2 a week in “tuition” to parents of the children attending. Mr. Bakke was eager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools.
The Bakkes became part of the nation’s new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools. Beginning with one failed charter school company they acquired in 2004, they have built an organization that has contracts with 71 schools in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Imagine is now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.
The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges
Paul Caron:
Since I am touring colleges with my daughter this week in advance of the May 1 acceptance deadline, I was particularly struck by the law prof blogosphere discussion (here and here) of The Price of Admission : How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, by Daniel Golden. From the Washington Post’s review:
Stepping into this cauldron of anxiety about admission to elite colleges is Daniel Golden, a Wall Street Journal reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for a series of articles on the inner workings of college admissions offices. In his provocative and stimulating book, The Price of Admission, Golden makes a powerful case that the number of well-to-do whites given preference to highly selective colleges dwarfs that of minorities benefiting from affirmative action. He follows this central theme in a wide-ranging series of case studies of systematic preference for the wealthy, the privileged and the famous, as well as legacies, faculty children and — most innovatively — athletes in such patrician sports as rowing, horseback riding, fencing and even polo. A tough investigative reporter, Golden does not hesitate to name names — not only of specific institutions (including Harvard, Duke, Brown, Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, Princeton, Stanford and Amherst) and administrators, but also of individual students (including the sons of Al Gore and Sen. Bill Frist) whom he deems to be beneficiaries of preferences for the privileged. The result is a disturbing exposé of the influence that wealth and power still exert on admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities.
That virtually all elite private colleges give preference to the sons and daughters of alumni will come as a surprise to no one. But preference also extends to wealthy applicants whose families have been identified as potential donors — “development cases” in the parlance of the trade. Golden documents that even Harvard, with its $25.9 billion endowment, is not above giving preference to the scions of the super-rich. His primary example, however, of development cases being central to the admissions process is Duke, where the university embarked on a systematic strategy of raising its endowment by seeking out wealthy applicants. Golden estimates that Duke admitted 100 development applicants each year in the late 1990s who otherwise would have been rejected. Though this may be something of an extreme case, special consideration for applicants flagged by the development office is standard practice at elite colleges and universities.
Also enjoying substantial preference at elite colleges, both public and private, are varsity athletes. In a fascinating case study of women’s sports at the University of Virginia, Golden shows how the effort to comply with Title IX, a gender equity law that has the praiseworthy goal of ensuring equality between female and male athletes, has had the unintended effect of giving an admissions edge to female athletes who play upper-class sports. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of college women nationwide in rowing, a sport highly concentrated in private schools and affluent suburbs, rose from 1,555 to 6,690; more recently, the number of female varsity horseback riders increased from 633 to 1,175 between 1998 and 2002. The net effect of the rise of these overwhelmingly patrician sports, Golden argues, has been to further advantage already advantaged women.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Montana Passes the Piggy Bank for Cost-Saving Ideas
Nothing is forcing Montana, one of only two states to boast a budget surplus, to cut costs.
Nothing, that is, except its voluble governor, Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat and deficit hawk.
“Four years ago, when most states were awash in cash and new revenues were rolling in, I didn’t allow the Legislature to spend it or commit it,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “I vetoed more than 40 bills.”
He also has vigilantly cut costs, but by January, he said, he had “exhausted all the easy ideas.” So he turned for help to his constituents. He featured a pink piggy bank on his Web site and invited them to click on it and submit their ideas for trimming state expenses.
The Montana Accountability Project attracted more than 1,000 suggestions that included placing sensors in state buildings to turn lights off, switching to a four-day workweek for state employees, abolishing the death sentence and reducing the cost of appeals.
Hundreds of Orange County teachers strike over pay and benefits cuts
Hundreds of Orange County teachers were walking picket lines Thursday, the first day of a strike protesting pay and benefits cuts in the Capistrano Unified School District.
Schools in the 51,000-student district remained open, but most after-school activities and sports events were canceled.
Scores of substitute teachers were hurriedly brought in to preside over classrooms with lesson plans that included enrichment activities in line with state education standards. But there were reports that some students were leaving campuses because there were too few substitutes.
Congratulations to MMSD Presidential Scholars Program Semi-Finalists
Four MMSD students have been named U.S. Presidential Scholars Program semi-finalists:
Timothy Choi – West HS
Laurel Hamers – Memorial HS
Ansel Norris – East HS (arts)
Valerie Shen – Memorial HS
In April, the Commission on Presidential Scholars reviews the applications of all semifinalists based on the same criteria used by the review committee. The Commission selects up to 121 academic scholars and up to 20 arts scholars. All scholars are honored for their accomplishments during National Recognition Week, held in June in Washington, D.C.
Presidential Scholars are guests of the Commission during National Recognition Week and enjoy an expense paid trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with government officials, educators, authors, musicians, scientists and other accomplished people. During the week, scholars have the opportunity to visit museums and monuments, and to attend recitals, receptions and ceremonies. To commemorate their achievement, the Scholars are awarded the Presidential Scholars medallion at a ceremony sponsored by the White House.
All Presidential Scholars are asked to identify those educators who have most influenced them. The selected educators are also invited to attend National Recognition Week. There, they are honored at a special reception to recognize and thank them for their efforts, and they are presented with the Teacher Recognition Award.
For over 45 years, this unique federal program has honored over 6,000 Presidential Scholars, who have demonstrated leadership, scholarship, and contribution to school and community. The work of the Commission on Presidential Scholars reaffirms, on behalf of the President, the Nation’s commitment to education.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Democrat Controlled Assembly & Senate pass Bill that Reduces Madison’s SAGE Funding by $2M; District must be prepared for More Redistributed State Tax Dollar Changes
A bill that Madison School District officials say could take state funding from the district passed the state Senate on Thursday without changes and is headed to the desk of Gov. Jim Doyle.
The measure would increase the maximum class size in schools receiving funding under the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program. The limit would become 18 students per class, up from the current maximum of 15, which would make SAGE more affordable for some school districts.
4K proponents have argued that the “State” will pay for this service over time. Clearly, counting on redistributed State tax dollars should be done with a measure of caution.
271 Literacy: Backward Mapping
“The Review embodies Will Fitzhugh’s idea about how to get students thinking and writing. In supporting him, you would be helping a person who is building what should and can become a national education treasure.” Albert Shanker, 1993
“What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put The Concord Review on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon.” Denis P. Doyle, 2010
Denis Doyle:
With recent NAEP results (holding steady) and the RTTT announcements (DE and TN are the two finalists in this round) everyone’s eye continues to focus on the persistent problem of low academic achievement in math and English Language Arts. And that’s too bad; it’s time for a change.
Instead of looking exclusively at the “problem,” it’s time to see the promise a solution holds. It’s time to “backward map” from the desired objective–universal literacy–to step-by-step solutions. Achieving true literacy–reading, writing, listening and speaking with skill and insight–is, as Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles; we must begin with a single step. Let’s begin at the end and work our way backwards.
How might we do that? Little noted and not long remembered is the high end of the literacy scale, high flyers, youngsters who distinguish themselves by the quality of their work. By way of illustration, young math and science high flyers have the Intel Talent Search to reward them with great fanfare, newspaper headlines and hard cash (the first place winner gets a $100,000 scholarship) and runners-up get scholarships worth more than $500,000 in total.
That’s as it should be; the modern era is defined by science, technology and engineering, and it is appropriate to highlight achievement in these fields, both as a reward for success and an incentive to others.
But so too should ELA receive public fanfare, attention and rewards. In particular, exemplary writing skills should be encouraged, rewarded and showcased.
It was the Council for Basic Education’s great insight that ELA and math are the generative subjects from which all other knowledge flows. Without a command of these two “languages” we are mute. Neither math nor English is more important than the other; they are equally important.
Indeed, there is a duality in literacy and math which is noteworthy–each subject is pursued for its own sake and at the same time each one is instrumental. Literacy serves its own purpose as the fount of the examined life while it serves larger social and economic purposes as a medium of communication. No wonder it’s greatest expression is honored with the Nobel Prize.
What is called for is a Junior Nobel, for younger writers, something like the Intel Talent Search for literary excellence. In the mean time we are lucky enough to have The Concord Review. Lucky because its editor and founder, Will Fitzhugh, labors mightily as a one-man show without surcease (and without financial support). We are all in his debt.
Before considering ways to discharge our obligation, what, you might wonder, is The Concord Review?
I quote from their web site: “The Concord Review, Inc., was founded in March 1987 to recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world. With the 81st issue (Spring 2010), 890 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-seven other countries. The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students.” (see www.tcr.org)
Lest anyone doubt the importance of this undertaking, permit me to offer a few unsolicited testimonials. The first is from former Boston University President John Silber, “I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously.”
The other is from former AFT President Al Shanker: “The Review also has a vital message for teachers. American education suffers from an impoverishment of standards at all levels. We see that when we look at what is expected of students in other industrialized nations and at what they achieve. Could American students achieve at that level? Of course, but our teachers often have a hard time knowing exactly what they can expect of their students or even what a first-rate essay looks like. The Concord Review sets a high but realistic standard; and it could be invaluable for teachers trying to recalibrate their own standards of excellence.”
Can an enterprise which numbers among its friends and admirers people as diverse as John Silber and Al Shanker deserve anything less than the best?
What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put TCR on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon. Will Fitzhugh has been doing this on his own for 22 years (he’s now 73) and TCR deserves a more secure home (and future) of its own.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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
Programs Train Teachers Using Medical School Model
What if we prepared teachers the same way we prepare doctors?
As school reformers lurch toward more innovative ways for training classroom teachers, this idea is getting a lot of attention. A handful of teacher “residency programs” based on the medical residency model already exist. Boston was one of the first to create one in 2003.
Tom Payzant had been Boston Public Schools superintendent when he founded the Boston Teacher Residency program. Payzant, who now teaches at Harvard University, says the city desperately needed to attract more talented teachers, especially for hard-to-fill positions like math, science and special education. But it wasn’t just about the numbers, Payzant says. It was about the quality of teachers coming out of colleges of education.
Minnesota Teacher Union Lobbying
Minnesota lawmakers felt their Race to the Top application was adversely affected by insufficient teacher union buy-in. So they heeded the union’s repeated calls for “a seat at the table” by giving Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher, well, a seat at the table. Unfortunately, it was a seat at the legislators’ table during a committee hearing and Dooher is not only the union president, but a registered lobbyist.
Republican state Rep. Mark Buesgens said it was “like having Vito Corleone watching over his foot soldiers.”
The Democrats said the meeting was a working group and not a full committee hearing, so Dooher’s presence at the legislators’ table was not a breach of protocol. However, the Minnesota House voted 128-2 yesterday to bar lobbyists and executive branch members from sitting at the committee table with lawmakers during official meetings.
How to get more value out of your college education
These days, it seems like most middle class kids go on to college.
In fact, many jobs are now requiring a Bachelor’s degree. Thus, many kids are going to college as almost a default stage of life. Some people are wondering if a college degree is still worth it. While it is difficult to quantify the benefits of a college education, if you are in college you should try to get the full value out of every dollar you pay.
Some of the key ingredients in preparing for college are getting college savings, applying for scholarships, reducing expenses, and getting student loans (and, of course, later paying student loans). However, the value of a college education is about a lot more than the cost of tuition.
Transforming Britain’s Schools
THE general election due in Britain on May 6th is not the one David Cameron was chosen to fight. The opposition Conservatives made him their leader in 2005 after a barnstorming speech delivered without notes to their annual conference. His pitch: that he could persuade the electorate to trust him with public services and offer tax cuts too, by “sharing the proceeds of growth”. It was a formula worthy of an earlier young, centrist, opposition politician: Tony Blair, who in 1997 led Labour to victory after 18 years of Conservative rule.
Now there is nothing to share: taxes will have to rise and public spending fall. But still Mr Cameron is reprising Mr Blair. In 1997 Mr Blair memorably said that his priorities were “education, education, education”. In the run-up to this election, education reform is the main, perhaps the only, broad and deeply thought-out proposal from his self-styled heir.
Bellevue School Board chooses traditional math, budget cuts next
The Bellevue School Board adopted a traditionalist-favored math curriculum last week, and the superintendent revealed her final budget-cutting recommendations on Tuesday, making April a pivotal month for the school district.
Regarding math, the school board voted 3-0 on April 13 to adopt the Holt series, snubbing an inquiry-based Discovering curriculum that had math purists and many district parents up in arms.
Board members Paul Mills, Peter Bentley, and Michael Murphy voted in favor of the Holt textbooks. Chris Marks, Karen Clark, Judy Bushnell and Cudiero were not present.
The math decision fell in line with a recommendation from the district’s textbook-adoption committee, which favored Holt over Discovering.
Your education, brought to you by…
t wasn’t too long ago that I was in high school, munching on Pizza Hut, In-N-Out and Kentucky Fried Chicken at lunch next to the Dasani and Coca Cola vending machines while wearing a school t-shirt sporting several local business sponsors.
The mix of education and corporate sponsorship seemed to be a win-win situation-the school district got money that was directed back into education and maintenance of facilities, the students were happy with non-cafeteria food, the cafeteria workers did little to prepare the meals besides handing them out and the sponsors maintained a steady stream of product and advertisement consumers. This was back in 2004, a few years before most of us could foresee the pending economic doom that awaited us.
In the past few years what seemed a relatively controlled partnership based solely on food has evolved into an intense, targeted marketing venture during a time when schools are hurting for money. In San Diego, Rancho Bernardo calculus instructor Tom Farber started selling ads on his exams at $10-30 a pop. The reason? Copies for tests would cost more than $500 per year, and his budget was only $316. The rest of the money would have to come from somewhere.
A Remarkable Headline: “WKCE results very similar to last year; non-low income students continue to do well”
Ken Syke, Madison School District Public Information:
Three conclusions from this year’s Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination results for Madison School District students:
- The performance of Madison School District students was relatively unchanged from last year in reading and math across the seven tested grade levels.
- MMSD’s non-low income students continue to outperform their Wisconsin peers in reading and math.
- Small gains were made in 10 of 14 scores on the achievement gap but the differences remain too significant.
1. In reading, across the seven grades tested, four grade levels had an increase in the percentage of students scoring at the Proficient or higher performance categories compared with the previous year while three grades showed a decline in the percentage. In math, four grades increased Proficient or higher performance, one grade declined and two grades remained the same. (See Table 1 below.)
The WKCE has been criticized for its lack of rigor. It may be replaced in the not too distant future.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: New Jersey’s Voters Turn Down Many School District Budgets
Today’s Wall Street Journal:
The election results are obviously a big setback for the Democratic Party-government union alliance that has ruled Trenton for the past decade. So far, Governor Christie is winning the spending debate. The lesson for other governors is that opposition from public-employee unions is not insurmountable if you can articulate to voters what’s at stake.
Joseph Marbach, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seton Hall:
I think the governor was very successful in … portraying the teachers union as out of touch with what’s going on with working families. The voters are more aligned with his position… I think it … gives him continued momentum to continue to rein in costs.
Montgomery County to weigh student performance as a third of teachers’ reviews
Montgomery County teachers and school system leaders signed an agreement Tuesday that calls for test scores and other student performance data to “factor strongly” in one-third of every teacher’s evaluation, saying theirs is the first school system in Maryland to specify how much that data will count as a factor in teacher ratings.
The teachers and administrators acted in response to a new state law that allows student test scores to be used as a “significant” component of teacher evaluations. The law is part of Maryland’s proposal for federal education aid under President Obama’s $4 billion “Race to the Top” competition. Maryland is seeking as much as $250 million in the contest, which awards money to states whose applications show the strongest commitment to the president’s education reform agenda.
Test scores have been a part of Montgomery’s decade-old Teacher Professional Growth System, just as they factor into teacher evaluations in many other school districts. But Race to the Top has put school systems under pressure to place test scores front and center in those evaluations and to quantify their role in rating teachers.
In NJ school cut debate, insults overshadow issues
They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.
But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie — and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.
In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.
“Never trust a fat f…,” read one profane post on the Facebook page, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.
“How do you spell A– hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” read another.
U.S. tapping S.F. school’s recipe for success
A top education official in the Obama administration sat in San Francisco’s Marshall Elementary School cafeteria taking notes Monday as parents, teachers and administrators recited a recipe for what it takes to turn around a struggling school.
The main ingredients included quality teachers, involved parents and a supportive principal mixed perhaps with a new dual-immersion language program. Time must be allowed to let it all take hold.
It is the kind of formula federal officials would love to see in place at schools across the country. Too many schools are failing year after year with no end in sight, said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller.
Houston Seeks Parent Input on High School Reforms
The Houston school district has scheduled meetings to discuss with parents its plans for reforming Lee, Jones, Kashmere and possibly Sharpstown high schools. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and his staff presented the plans, which include extending the school day and year and offering students small-group tutoring, at a school board workshop last week. District officials plan to implement the changes this coming school year, so the turnaround is fast — and the parent meetings are just around the corner. After columnist Lisa Falkenberg got a tip about the upcoming meeting at Lee from a peeved state lawmaker, I asked the district for a list of all the meetings. It took a day to get it, but here it is:
Census: Women match men in advanced degrees
Women are now just as likely as men to have completed college and to hold an advanced degree, part of an accelerating trend of educational gains that have shielded women from recent job losses. Yet they continue to lag behind men in pay.
Among adults 25 and older, 29 percent of women in the United States have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30 percent of men, according to 2009 census figures released Tuesday.
Women also have drawn even with men in holding advanced degrees. Women represented roughly half of those in the United States with a master’s degree or higher, due largely to years of steady increases in women pursuing a medical or law degree.
L.A. study affirms benefits of preschool
Children enrolled in Los Angeles Universal Preschool programs made significant improvements in the social and emotional skills needed to do well in kindergarten, according to a study released Monday. The gains were especially pronounced for English language learners, the study showed.
The findings confirmed observations of preschool teachers that children attending high-quality programs are better prepared for kindergarten. For the first time, the study provided data to back up those observations, officials with the nonprofit preschool organization said.
“This is unique because there’s very little research in terms of cognitive progression in the preschool years,” said Celia C. Ayala, chief operating officer for Los Angeles Universal Preschool. “We know there are differences, we see the differences, but this gives us a way to assess improvements.”
Clusty Search: Los Angeles Universal Preschool.
Primary school heads to boycott UK Sats
The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) confirmed today that industrial action to ”frustrate the administration of the tests” will go ahead, following meetings of their executives.
It comes after headteachers overwhelmingly supported a boycott in ballots carried out by the two unions.
Obama repeals Bush-era Title IX policy
The Obama administration is throwing out a Bush-era policy under the Title IX gender equity law that critics said made it easy for schools and colleges to avoid offering equal opportunities for women in athletics.
Title IX, passed in 1972, required schools to use a comprehensive evaluation to decide whether females were being given equal opportunity to participate.
In 2005, under then President George W. Bush, a new policy allowed schools to use a simple survey of women as its evaluation, and to combine non-responses with negative responses. Critics said gave institutions an easy way to avoid providing equal athletic opportunities for females.
The Education Mess: Can We Build a Better National School System? No….
Diane Ravitch was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, but in her new book she now admits that it isn’t working, and is in fact helping kill the kind of education she advocates. She continues to believe that the American public schools do a poor job, and that we can build a much more successful system of public education.
I agree with her on the first point. She’s dead wrong on the second. We can’t build a better system.
That’s not a cry of despair, it’s a statement of fact. There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won’t get much better.
We could build a better school system by the simple expedient of abolishing the Department of Education. Some of us thought we could manage that when Reagan was swept into office, but the liberal establishment with the support of the teachers unions wouldn’t permit that: and Reagan needed Congressional support for his defense measures. Some of us remember that when Reagan took office, only ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States looked to be in bad shape, with too many overseas commitments — what Walter Lippman called drafts on our power — and too little actual power, either military or diplomatic. The military needed a big shakeup and buildup, we needed to look into our overseas commitments, financial reforms were desperately needed, and the liberals, knowing all this, were willing to help — provided that they got their share of liberal programs. The Department of Education was one of their bastions, and they would fight to the death — or at least to the death of the Republic — to prevent it from being abolished.
Less centralization, including the breakup of big districts would be a great step forward.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: New Jersey voters reject school budgets in heated elections
New Jersey voters took a stand on school spending and property taxes Tuesday, rejecting 260 of 479 school budgets across 19 counties, according to unofficial results in statewide school elections.
In the proposed state budget he unveiled last month, Gov. Chris Christie slashed $820 million in aid to school districts and urged voters to defeat budgets if teachers in their schools did not agree to one-year wage freezes. The salvo ignited a heated debate with the state’s largest teachers union.
Christie said the cuts were necessary to help plug an $11 billion state budget gap.
In many districts Tuesday, the governor made himself heard as 54 percent of the spending plans were rejected, according to unofficial returns. If the trend continues, it would mark the most budget defeats in New Jersey since 1976, when 56 percent failed. Typically, voters approve more than 70 percent of the school budgets.
A Toxic Dispute With Teachers in Washington, DC
Last fall, Michelle Rhee, the tough-minded and creative schools chancellor in Washington, laid off 266 teachers, citing a budget crunch. She has since reported finding a budget surplus. The city’s teachers’ union, which challenged the layoffs unsuccessfully last fall, has now asked a judge to review them again. The atmosphere has grown increasingly toxic.
Some of Ms. Rhee’s critics have implausibly suggested that she might have withheld information to justify the layoffs. It would be terrible for the city’s children if the dispute reached a point where it upended the innovative union contract that Ms. Rhee and union leaders provisionally agreed to earlier this month.
The contract, which changes the terms under which teachers are paid and evaluated, could pave the way for better schools for the District of Columbia’s students and could become a model for agreements between school districts and teachers’ unions around the country.
California State Education Budget Update Event
Brian Kaplan, via email:
The state budget once again appears to be in flux. The Governor has promised no cuts to education. But education leaders have disputed this claim and are once again faced with significant program reductions. The governor’s May Revise will provide additional details on how the public school districts will fare in 2010-2011. Our panelists will address the impact of the budget on education from multiple perspectives.
Moderator
John Fensterwald, Writer of The Educated Guess and Journalist in Residence at Silicon Valley Education Foundation
What to do with ‘persistently underperforming’ schools?
San Francisco School Board Member Rachel Norton:
On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent’s plans for our 10 schools labeled “persistently underperforming” by the state of California.
This list was created as part of the state’s efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state’s schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There’s no choice in the matter, though it’s unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks–and begin the work within six months.
I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that–D’oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools–no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)
A Home Library’s Educational Edge
Now they tell you, just when you’ve sold the old Harvard Classics on eBay, hauled the Britannicas down to the dump and signed up Junior for online SAT prep. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller-McCune:
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.
Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” Program Offers Only a Muddled Path to the Finish Line
William Peterson & Richard Rothstein:
In short, the Race to the Top 500-point rating system presents a patina of scientific objectivity, but in truth masks a subjective and somewhat random process.
This competition was a trial run for Secretary Duncan of a policy approach he hopes to make permanent. The Obama administration has proposed that formula-driven Title I funding16 be frozen at its present level, without future adjustment for inflation, and that increases in federal education spending be devoted entirely to a new collection of competitive grants, some of which have similar requirements to RTT, and some of which, as indicated above, attempt to create incentives for initiatives not included in RTT. Because such a reduction in real Title I funding would further exacerbate state fiscal crises, and because this trial run of a competitive system has proven to have little credibility, the administration should rethink its approach to federal education aid and its relationship to school improvement.
Yet for now, the Department of Education proposes to go through an identical process for judging a second round of applications by July. States that lost in the March competition have been invited to re-apply, and several are doing so, again investing time and expense to re-do their applications. Experts in these states are likely to spend many hours studying the review process employed in March, so they can recommend small changes in their states’ applica- tions to exploit the quirks of the Department’s rating system. Such gaming is unlikely to reflect an actual improvement in the education policies of applicant states.
Comments on the Seattle Public Schools’ Strategic Plan Update
So I was just thinking about the progress on the Strategic Plan. I know I shouldn’t. It only serves to upset and frustrate me. Nevertheless…
Focusing just on the primary themes and elements of the Plan, it still doesn’t look good.
1. Ensuring Excellence in Every Classroom
1A. Adopt an aligned curriculum in math and science
They haven’t done this. They’re nowhere with regard to science; I don’t think they’ve even gotten started. They’re not much further along with math. They have standardized the textbooks (for the most part), and they have posted pacing guides, but there’s no evidence that they have aligned the curriculum. In fact, it doesn’t appear that they have any ability to align the curriculum, that they even know how to align curriculum, or that they know what aligned curriculum would look like. After making bold statements on PowerPoints and paying millions to vendors, they appear to be completely adrift.
1B. Develop districtwide assessments in math and reading
This is a reference to the MAP, but it isn’t districtwide yet and teachers either don’t know how to use the results or simply aren’t choosing to use them. There were supposed to be a lot of other common assessments, but there’s no evidence to suggest that they are either in use or useful. Mostly this was an excuse to funnel millions to a vendor for a data warehouse which isn’t ready yet and will be of questionable utility when it is ready.
Related: Madison School District Strategic Plan.
The Bad Teacher Protection Racket
Legislators trying to help save a generation of Milwaukee children from lives of poverty and unemployment want to add a new law to the books in Madison this week.
They should, if they want to make a real difference, also delete one.
Part of the new education bill passed by the Senate the other day, and now being considered by the Assembly, calls for rigorous, annual teacher performance evaluations – something that many districts all across America already supposedly administer.
But not really.
Last year, the New Teacher Project researched teacher evaluations in 12 districts, both big and small, across the country. Methods and frequency of evaluation differed from district to district, but one thing was found to be strikingly similar. Virtually all teachers in the districts studied are told over and over and over again that they are either good or great. In districts that use binary rating systems, for instance, (generally “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” categories are used) more than 99% of teachers are given the “satisfactory” designation, according to the researchers.
How Writing Can Improve Reading
Steve Graham & Michael Hebert:
Around the world, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which may be 25,000 years old, to the images left behind by the lost Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, to the ancient aboriginal art of Australia, the most common pictograph found in rock paintings is the human hand. Coupled with pictures of animals, with human forms, with a starry night sky or other images that today, we can only identify as abstract, we look at these men’s and women’s hands, along with smaller prints that perhaps belong to children, and cannot help but be deeply moved by the urge of our ancestors to leave some permanent imprint of themselves behind.
Clearly, the instinct for human beings to express their feelings, their thoughts, and their experiences in some lasting form has been with us for a very long time.This urge eventually manifested itself in the creation of the first alphabet, which many attribute to the Phoenicians.When people also began to recognize the concept of time, their desire to express themselves became intertwined with the sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy, a message about who they were, what they had done and seen, and even what they believed in.Whether inscribed on rock, carved in cuneiform, painted in hieroglyphics, or written with the aid of the alphabet, the instinct to write down everything from mundane commercial transactions to routine daily occurrences to the most transcendent ideas–and then to have others read them, as well as to read what others have written–is not simply a way of transferring information from one person to another, one generation to the next. It is a process of learning and hence, of education.
Ariel and Will Durant were right when they said,”Education is the transmission of civilization.” Putting our current challenges into historical context, it is obvious that if today’s youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they’ve read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they’ve learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential. (In that regard, the etymology of the word education, which is “to draw out and draw forth”–from oneself, for example–is certainly evocative.) Indeed, young people who do not have the ability to transform thoughts, experiences, and ideas into written words are in danger of losing touch with the joy of inquiry, the sense of intellectual curiosity, and the inestimable satisfaction of acquiring wisdom that are the touchstones of humanity.What that means for all of us is that the essential educative transmissions that have been passed along century after century, generation after generation, are in danger of fading away, or even falling silent.
Principal tells ninth graders to study, or leave
One of my education reporting maxims is that principals of schools in troubled districts never seek me out. Journalists are poison to them. We only want to write about bad stuff. Anything they say can be held against them.
So I was surprised when Charlie Thomas, principal of Crossland High School in Prince George’s County, began sending me emails. His school has been one of the worst in a low-performing district for a long time. But Thomas, who arrived in 2004, was trying to improve his school and was willing even to deal with a fault-finding columnist if it would help. Nearly 66 percent of his students were low-income, but he was not going to let that slow him down.
I confess he has gotten my attention with some unusual moves. For instance, he quickly discovered that close to 800 of his 1,800 students were still in the ninth grade. “I asked for a list of every ninth grade student that was 16 years old or older with a grade point average of less than 1.0 [a D average],” he told me. The list had 330 names. Some had been there four or five years.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The People & Their Government: Distrust, Discontent, Anger & Partisan Rancor
By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan- based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.
Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation’s problems – including more government control over the economy – than there was when Barack Obama first took office.
The public’s hostility toward government seems likely to be an important election issue favoring the Republicans this fall. However, the Democrats can take some solace in the fact that neither party can be confident that they have the advantage among such a disillusioned electorate. Favorable ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows while opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all- time high, continues to climb.
An analysis of pay-for-grades schemes
Roland Fryer is an economist at Harvard University who had an idea for a straightforward method of getting kids at urban schools more engaged: Pay ’em.
Four reward schemes were tried in four different cities, each in a randomized control trial lasting one year. The results are reported in Time magazine this week.
New York City: Students were promised pay for higher standardized test scores. There was no effect.
Chicago: Students were paid for higher grades. The rewards prompted higher attendance rates and higher grades, but standardized test scores were not improved.
Washington, D.C.: Students were rewarded for improved behaviors such as good attendance, refraining from fighting, and so on. There was a modest improvement on standardized test scores.
Alternate Path for Teachers Gains Ground
Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master’s degrees.
But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.
In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.
And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master’s degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.
Related, Janet Mertz: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.
Eduspeak: Seattle School District’s Governance Language
There are a number of people who believe that the District intentionally cultivates confusion around the definitions of the terms “curriculum”, “materials”, “content”, and “Standards”. The misuse of these terms on official District documents and by District staff is exactly the sort of thing that supports this suspicion. The misuse of these terms detracts from transparency and community engagement. This example is particularly egregious because it speaks to an adoption. These actions do NOT adopt a curriculum, only materials.
Truancy court in Oakland is for parents
One by one, mothers stepped forward to face Alameda County Superior Court Judge Cecilia Castellanos and explain why their children have repeatedly failed to show up to elementary school.
One mom said she couldn’t find her son’s school. Another blamed traffic. One said her son was repeatedly tardy to class because he had difficulty opening his locker.
To each, Judge Castellanos said, “That’s not an excuse,” and ordered them back to truancy court for a follow-up.
Five hard truths about charter schools
Many people get too excited about the latest hot education innovation. They lose their sense of perspective. It has happened even to me once or twice. When we wander off like that, we need someone with a sharp intellect and strong character to pull us back to reality.
One such person is Paul T. Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. He has written a short, wise book, “Learning As We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait,” which provides the clearest explanations I have seen for why independent public charter schools need more time to develop. Hill believes it is worth waiting for charters to make what he thinks will be widespread positive impact on the quality of education. He thinks they are more promising than a renewed fondness for strengthening bureaucracy and standardizing instruction that seems to be bubbling in some foundations and national advocacy groups.
Hill makes five simple points and more or less devotes a chapter to each. Here is what he says, with some fussing and worrying by me. If you want to add your ideas to these, or explain why these are nonsense, the comments box below awaits.
The teacher salary debate we long needed to have
Since 2001, spending by local towns across New Jersey has risen by 70 percent, with average 4 percent raises for teachers each year playing a major role in the increases. During that same period, property taxes have risen by 56 percent.
You don’t need to be a math major to know that you can’t pay for a 70 percent spending hike with “only” a 56 percent increase in tax revenues. So how did towns make up the difference?
Answer: Trenton.
For many towns and school districts, the revenue gap was filled in with state aid. And that state aid has come largely from income taxes and other fees.
But then came the recession and the sharp drop in incomes – and income taxes.
And then came Chris Christie, handily beating the well-funded, union-backed incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine.
Corzine did not lose because he wasn’t smart enough or because he did not have enough campaign cash of his own. He lost because voters no longer had confidence that he could deliver on his promise to find ways to cut spending and deliver some measure of property tax relief.
Merit Pay for Teachers
A heated debate surrounding merit pay for teachers has existed for decades in the United States, where since the 1920s public schools began awarding compensation primarily according to title and years of experience rather than performance.
Political leaders such as President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have recently expressed support for the notion of merit pay for teachers. In March 2009, Obama said that teachers should be treated “like the professionals they are while also being held more accountable. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools.”
This has reinvigorated the debate, with many groups staking out positions on either side. The National Education Association, for example, has opposed merit pay, while the United Federation of Teachers, at least in part, seems to support the idea.
Here is a summary of questions and pro and con responses within the debate.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Madison property values see first decline in 35 years
There’s new evidence the deep national recession has taken a toll on Madison: the value of all real estate dropped by 3.1 percent for 2010, the first decrease in at least 35 years, according to data released by the city Friday.
Falling values do more than reduce the net wealth of property owners. Along with a slowdown in construction, they mean that under current tax rates, fewer dollars will be available to fund the rising costs of city, school and other public services 2011.
“There can’t be new spending. We’re going to have to cut where we can,” Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said in a phone interview from a transit research tour in the Netherlands. “Despite that, there will be considerable pressure on taxes.”
Local government units have been living off of parcel and assessed value growth for decades. This change has significant taxpayer implications…
Training Teacher’s Pe(s)ts
Back in the Paleolithic period, when men and women wore their Sunday best, classroom decorum was unquestioned; the relationship between professor and student was based on a set of unspoken rules. One wonders what their reaction would be to an e-mail message I received from a student: hey prof, owt late last nite …. am sic today. pls emal cls notes. yah thatd b great. thx see u.
I teach a course in public speaking at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, in which students give speeches ranging from how to clean a trumpet to solar energy. My job is to show them how to arrange their thoughts, use language to its best advantage and, most important, perform in front of an audience without fear.
Madison School Board to Discuss the Superintendent’s Proposed Administrative Reorganization Monday Evening
Organization Chart 352K PDF
Reorgnanization Budget 180K PDF
February, 2010 background memo from Superintendent Dan Nerad.
I spoke with the Superintendent Friday regarding the proposed reorganization. The conversation occurred subsequent to an email I sent to the School Board regarding Administrative cost growth and the proposed reduction in Superintendent direct reports.
I inquired about the reduction in direct reports, the addition of a Chief Learning Officer, or Deputy Superintendent and the apparent increased costs of this change. Mr. Nerad said that he would email updated budget numbers Monday (he said Friday that there would be cost savings). With respect to the change in direct reports, he said that the District surveyed other large Wisconsin Schools and found that those Superintendents typically had 6 to 8, maybe 9 direct reports. He also reminded me that the District formerly had a Deputy Superintendent. Art Rainwater served in that position prior to his boss, Cheryl Wilhoyte’s demise. He discussed a number of reasons for the proposed changes, largely to eliminate management silos and support the District’s strategic plan. He also referenced a proposed reduction in Teaching & Learning staff.
I mentioned Administrative costs vis a vis the current financial climate.
I will post the budget numbers and any related information upon receipt.
Finally, I ran into a wonderful MMSD teacher this weekend. I mentioned my recent conversation with the Superintendent. This teacher asked if I “set him straight” on the “dumbing down of the Madison School District”?
That’s a good question. This teacher believes that we should be learning from Geoffrey Canada’s efforts with respect to the achievement gap, particularly his high expectations. Much more on the Harlem Children’s Zone here.
Finally, TJ Mertz offers a bit of commentary on Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: New Jersey’s ‘Failed Experiment’
‘I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer,” explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal’s editorial board. “And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I’ve done, they figure: ‘He’s just crazy enough to do it.'”
Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall’s campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie’s size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy–that he wasn’t serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.
Listen to Mr. Christie’s take on the state of his state: “We are, I think, the failed experiment in America–the best example of a failed experiment in America–on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times.” New Jersey’s residents now suffer under the nation’s highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven’t come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011.
On Stanford Education School’s Charter Difficulties
My take on the Stanford charter school situation is below. Punchline: This is sad in some powerful ways, it’s not funny.
But the New York Times story demands a bit more discussion. (Plus it buries the lede…check out the Shalvey quote)
In the story Linda Darling Hammond points out that the Stanford school takes all kids. Sure, but so do many other public schools (including some in the community including Aspire Public Schools, a network of public charters established by a former CA school superintendent) that have better results. More on that below. That uncomfortable reality also makes Diane Ravitch’s quote in the story really curious. This situation doesn’t illustrate much about the debate about schools and poverty overall, but it does again show that there are big differences among schools serving similar kids and that powerful and intentional instruction matters.
Are Business Schools Failing?
Paul Barrett:
The aftermath of a historic financial crisis seems an appropriate time to take stock of graduate business education. What are we teaching these people before they head off to the executive suite?
Three Harvard Business School scholars, Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin and Patrick G. Cullen, address this question in “Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads,” a thought-provoking examination of the curriculums that shape many top investment bankers, consultants and chief executives. After studying the nation’s most prestigious business schools, the authors conclude that an excessive emphasis on quantitative and theoretical analysis has contributed to the making of too many wonky wizards. M.B.A. recipients, according to this book, haven’t learned the importance of social responsibility, common-sense skepticism and respect for the dangers of taking risks with other people’s money.
Put even more bluntly: Business schools played a contributing role in creating the geniuses who brought us the economic meltdown of 2008.
Paying for College on Your Own
The federal government expects parents to help pay for college. But plenty of students can’t get one penny from them. “At Michigan State, we see several hundred of those students every year,” says Val Meyers, associate director of its financial aid office. Some parents don’t believe they can or should contribute, or maybe they don’t like a particular college, or aren’t living together. A father might refuse to take responsibility for the education of a child from a first marriage.
And here’s a sticky wicket: an 18- year-old may be an adult in most states, but for financial aid purposes, students aren’t independent until age 24.
Should high schoolers read aloud in class?
Recently I visited a history class at a local, low-performing high school where students read in turn from the autobiography of a famous American. The teacher was bright and quick. He interrupted often with comments and questions. The 18 sophomores and juniors seemed to be into it, but it was such an old-fashioned–and I suspect to some educators elementary–approach for that I decided to see what other educators thought of it.
I love spending time in classrooms, listening and watching. Often I see something new and surprising, or sometimes old and surprising like one young English teacher diagramming sentences. Was round robin reading (what educators usually call the read aloud technique I witnessed) bad or good? Was it a time-wasting throwback or a useful way to involve every student?
Yes and yes, teachers told me. That is the problem judging the way teachers teach. It all depends on the circumstances, the students, the object of the lesson, the style of the instructor and the judge. Read these and tell me who is right:
The Paper Debate
Before each tournament, Sam Crichton, a senior on the Wake Forest debate team, meticulously stocks a half-dozen Rubbermaid tubs with computer printouts. Each sheet of paper — perhaps 5,000 total — summarizes the argument in, say, a presidential speech or op-ed piece. These “cards” have been sorted into manila files, grouped into brown accordion folders, stacked into the tubs and labeled by argument type: affirmatives, disadvantages, counterplans, critiques, case arguments/negatives, backfiles.
There are 50 tubs for the entire Wake Forest team — a traveling library of debate research. With the aid of all those pages of argumentation, debaters can summon up well-reasoned, highly specific points about nuclear disarmament, this year’s topic for college policy debaters. What if an affirmative team contends that nuclear armament has hurt Africa? What if a negative team cites Heidegger to bolster its response?
“There’s a strange comfort in reading off a sheet of paper,” Mr. Crichton says. “Having all of this paper may seem like a form of chaos, but to me it actually seems more organized.”
Milwaukee’s Plans for a One Size Fits All Reading Curriculum
The textbooks and the workbooks and the teachers manuals and all the other materials were displayed attractively. There were mini-candy bars and cloth shopping bags for visitors to take.
America’s biggest text book companies – Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt – each had large, handsome displays.
For three days last week, the third-floor library of the Juneau High School building was the center of looming big change in the way children in Milwaukee Public Schools are taught reading. MPS officials are selecting a new reading program.
A special committee will make a recommendation and the School Board will make the choice in the winner-takes-all curriculum selection process. The sunlit scene in the Juneau library was the part of the process where anyone could take a look and give input.
It was an amiable scene. The representatives of the publishers were friendly, talkative, knowledgeable, and quite willing to schmooze. “Great tie,” one told me as I walked down the aisle. She appeared to know something about this tie that no one else had noticed in the 20 years I’ve owned it.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg has written a number of articles on Madison’s reading programs.
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Take the Quiz
1. To become a United States senator, a person must be at least how old?
2. President John Adams was a member of what political party at the time of his election?
3. What was the given name of the Civil War general Stonewall Jackson?
4. What revolutionary leader famously uttered the words “Give me liberty or give me death!” in a speech at the second Virginia Convention?
The Examined Life, Age 8
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
An Open Mind
At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it’s difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus’s largest lecture hall, with room for 736.
She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box’s contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, “because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?” The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.
Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world’s foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.
Why Homeschool? The Highlights of Free Education
An Education Life:
Why homeschool? Maybe to brush up for an exam, get a sense of what a college is like, or just to learn. In the articles listed below, writers who know the fields weigh in on some of the highlights of free education.
Every school should provide opportunities for their students to take advantage of online courses. They are a great complement to traditional teaching, and a way to reduce or eliminate local curriculum creation expenditures.
Oakland schools fact-finding report released
With a one-day teacher strike looming in Oakland, a fact-finding report released Thursday gave both the district and the teachers union some ammunition in the bitter battle over a new labor contract.
The report, a required step following failed contract negotiations, validated the district’s claims of financial desperation, but it also gave a nod to the Oakland Education Association’s claims of relatively low teacher pay and need for small class sizes.
It urged both sides to get over the past – a history mired in fiscal mismanagement and bitterness.
Seattle Teachers Union Bristles at New Coalition’s Effort to Muscle In on Contract Negotiations
Contract negotiations began this week between Seattle Public Schools and the teachers union, and the atmosphere is already getting testy–but not between the parties you might expect. Seattle Education Association president Olga Addae is peeved over a new coalition led by the non-profit Alliance for Education that is trying to muscle in on the talks.
Although technically no one else is allowed at the bargaining table besides the union and the district, the “Our Schools Coalition” last week launched a campaign to influence the process by unveiling a list of nine proposed changes it would like to see in the new contract–all of which are aimed at supporting good teachers and weeding out the bad.
While the group’s ideas are not necessarily new, its effort to influence the negotiations is. And the coalition may have the political clout to do just that.
Minnesota House approves crackdown on weapons at school
AP:
Minnesota lawmakers approved legislation that increases punishment for bringing weapons to school while going a little easier on fake guns and BB guns.
The bill, from Rep. Sandra Peterson, DFL-New Hope, passed the House 111-18 on Thursday.
It would punish bringing dangerous weapons onto school property with a sentence of up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both. That’s more than double the current prison sentence and twice the maximum current fine.
Emphasis on Ethics Schools want students to recognize that profits aren’t everything
The study of ethics, once an academic orphan, is grabbing a more central role at many business schools since the financial crisis shone a spotlight on the damage that can be done by irresponsible business practices and an exclusive focus on the bottom line.
Critics have suggested that B-schools bear some responsibility for the culture of excessive risk-taking that helped trigger the credit crunch, saying they failed to teach students that there is more to business than just making money. Many schools have responded by re-examining their priorities, and giving ethics more classroom time, either in modules of its own or incorporated into key classes like strategy, finance and accounting.
Faculty are defining the subject broadly, arguing that ethical business practice is not just about refraining from cheating and corruption, but recognizing that a company has responsibilities beyond its shareholders’ wallets–to employees, community, customers and the environment.
Florida Politics: Governor Crist Vetoes SB6 – Changes to Teacher Tenure
Gov. Charlie Crist has vetoed the Jeb Bush-backed, controversial SB6. The education bill would have eliminated tenure for newly hired teachers, and would have tied a portion of teachers’ salaries to test score results.
“I say we must start over. This bill has negatively affected the morale of our parents, teachers and students,” Crist said.
The bill was opposed by many teachers and school boards, including Miami-Dade’s. About 25 percent of county teachers called out “sick” on Monday to protest the bill.
Tom Vander Ark sees NEA’s hand in this veto.
Grade Inflation: Who Really Failed?
Dominique G. Homberger won’t apologize for setting high expectations for her students.
The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn’t use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn’t want students to get very far with guessing.
Students in introductory biology don’t need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university’s administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor’s right to set standards in her own course.
To Homberger and her supporters, the university’s action has violated principles of academic freedom and weakened the faculty.
Related: Marc Eisen: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?.
U.S. Falls Short in Measure of Future Middle School Math Teachers
America’s future math teachers, on average, earned a C on a new test comparing their skills with their counterparts in 15 other countries, significantly outscoring college students in the Philippines and Chile but placing far below those in educationally advanced nations like Singapore and Taiwan.
The researchers who led the math study in this country, to be released in Washington on Thursday, judged the results acceptable if not encouraging for America’s future elementary teachers. But they called them disturbing for American students heading to careers in middle schools, who were outscored by students in Germany, Poland, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan.
On average, 80 percent to 100 percent of the future middle school teachers from the highest-achieving countries took advanced courses like linear algebra and calculus, while only 50 percent to 60 percent of their counterparts in the United States took those courses, the study said.
UNDERFUNDED TEACHER PENSION PLANS: It’s Worse Than You Think
To all the other fiscal travails facing this country’s states and largest cities, now add their pension obligations, which are far greater than they may realize or are willing to admit. This paper focuses on the crisis in funding teachers’ pensions, because education is often the largest program area in state budgets, making it an obvious target for cuts.
Although it is generally acknowledged that education is the foundation of every modern society’s future prosperity, schools unfortunately will have to compete with retirees for scarce dollars. This competition is uneven, because retirees have a legal claim on promised pension benefits that supersedes schools’ budgetary needs. Consequently, Americans can look forward to higher taxes and cuts in services, resulting in fewer teachers, bigger classes, and facilities that are allowed to deteriorate. In several states, these developments have already arrived.
The crux of the problem is the gap between assets and liabilities affecting the fifty-nine pension funds that cover most public school teachers in America. Some of these are general state-employee pension funds, while others cover only teachers. Among the findings of our study of these funds:
Milwaukee Public Schools’ labor relations and the new superintendent
Over the past few days, four former MPS superintendents have met in two public forums to share the lessons they have learned about running the state’s largest school district. In both forums a recurring theme was Howard Fuller’s contention that: “I was in charge, but I wasn’t in control.”
His meaning, with which the other former superintendents generally agreed, was that the labor contracts with the teachers and principals unions constrained his ability to make dramatic changes in the district. The implication was that the district’s new superintendent, Gregory Thornton, would find it similarly difficult to improve outcomes under the current labor-management dynamic.
Whether this perception is accurate or not with regard to MPS, a new, still tentative, labor agreement in the Washington D.C. school district provides an example of a superintendent turning labor negotiating on its head. The D.C. superintendent, Michelle Rhee, has received much national press over the past two years as she pushed for a new paradigm of how, and how much, teachers are paid in D.C.
Why Smart, Ambitious People Rarely Become Teachers
WARNING: This blog post is utterly simple and obvious. There are some life phenomena, events, and trends that are widely recognized and accepted by most people as just plain Truth. (Majority perception isn’t always right, but it often is.) The argument that follows needs no regressions, 5-page data sets, or integration symbols.
This is a fact: Smart, ambitious people are rarely choosing K-12 teaching as a career these days.
Consider that, in 2007, among high school seniors who took the SAT and intended to major in education, the average scores were a dismal 480 in Critical Reading, 483 in Mathematics, and 476 in Writing. Compare those scores with the average scores of students intending to become engineers–524, 579, and 510. Or to students intending to enter the fields of communications and journalism: 523, 501, 519. Also consider that the most competitive, elite colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, aren’t offering undergraduate majors in teaching or education.
We’re the NEA. We think so that you don’t have to.
For almost a decade, No Child Left Behind has tested and labeled our kids and our schools. We know you care about your students, and we are eager to let Washington know just what you think about NCLB. Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey so we can let your representatives know exactly how this legislation has affected you and your students, and how it needs to be changed.
This is the introductory text to a new survey the National Education Association is using to ostensibly guage where its members stand on ESEA reauthorization.
But this “survey” is hardly a survey. C’mon.
Although the NEA claims to be eager to “let Washington know just what [its member-teachers] think about NCLB,” tools like this only serve to tell teachers what the NEA thinks they should think. This all-too-short, multiple-choice-only survey begins by using the rotten brand “NCLB” in the introduction to inflame the survey-taker. Next, it asks only two questions about the survey-taker’s identity: role and zip code.
Film: The Cartel – Children Left Behind
A mind-numbing barrage of random television clips and trash-talking heads, “The Cartel” purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it’s a bludgeoning rant against a single state — New Jersey — which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers’ unions and corrupt school boards.
Blithely extrapolating nationally, the writer and director, Bob Bowdon, concludes that increased financing for public schools is unlikely to raise reading scores but is almost certain to raise the luxury-car quotient in administrator parking lots. To illustrate, Mr. Bowdon rattles off a laundry list of outrages — like a missing $1 billion from a school construction budget — and provides a clumsy montage of newspaper headlines detailing administrative graft.
The evidence may be verifiable (and even depressingly familiar), but its complex underpinnings are given short shrift. Instead Mr. Bowdon, a New Jersey-based television reporter, employs an exposé-style narration lousy with ad hominems and emotional coercion. In one particularly egregious scene he parks his camera in front of a weeping child who has just failed to win a coveted spot in a charter-school lottery — another tiny victim of public school hell. Later, confronted with the president of the New Jersey Education Association, Mr. Bowdon performs the rhetorical equivalent of poking a lion with a stick and running away.
Florida Teacher Pay Bill an Outgrowth of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan
For many educators across the state, the Republican-led Legislature’s proposed overhaul of Florida schools is inspiring a wave of deja vu.
Florida’s last dramatic education shift in 1999 was also pushed by former Gov. Jeb Bush. It, too, was hurried through the legislative process by Republican leaders who used buzz words like accountability and performance measurements. Both efforts saw teacher unions and Democrats square off against big business and conservatives.
But, this time, critics said, it is worse. This time it is personal.
“They are going after the individual classroom teacher,” said Ceresta Smith, a Miami Language Arts teacher who drove to Tallahassee Wednesday to beg Gov. Charlie Crist to veto the legislation, which would link teacher pay and recertification to student learning gains.
Another Chicken Little Madison School District Budget
It’s a good thing Madison is a full of certified smarty-pants. It takes a high level of smarts just to comprehend the complex and shifting budget situation faced by the Madison school district. Even some school board members have a hard time making sense of it.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Lucy Mathiak, the board’s vice president, of the process by which the district has presented information about its proposed $372.8 million budget this year. “When you have the health and welfare of schools on the line, I feel like I have to ask for answers. It’s not a comfortable position.”
Frustrated, Mathiak first raised questions about how the district came to its projected $30 million budget hole in her School Daze blog. She notes, first of all, that the gap was closer to $18 million, presuming the board exercises its existing ability to raise taxes, as approved by voters in a 2008 referendum: “This means that the draconian school closings and massive staff layoffs reported earlier are unlikely to happen.”
But even if that gap is plugged, new ones are opening up. Recently the district was told by a consultant that it needs to do $85.7 million in repairs to existing buildings over the next five years, well beyond the $4 million a year it budgets to this end.
“Concerns about Collection of Student Data”
Representative John Kline (R-MN):
Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee’s senior Republican member, today warned sensitive student information could be at risk through vast data warehouses that collect private, personally identifiable information on school children. The committee heard testimony on the risks to students’ personal information during a hearing on data collection in the K-12 education system.
“Today’s hearing reinforces the need for federal, state, and local policymakers to ensure sensitive personal information about our children is safeguarded, and student and family privacy rights are protected. Efforts to collect vast troves of information on our students, tracking them from cradle to career, raise serious concerns,” said Kline. “Information on student performance, while important to a child’s success in the classroom and ensuring we have the best teachers serving in our schools, should not supersede our responsibility to protect a student’s personal information.”
The committee heard testimony from Professor Joel Reidenberg, academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at the Fordham University School of Law, who shared his research into security weaknesses in current state-based data systems and the potential that state data warehouses could be commandeered to create an unprecedented federal tracking system for maintaining private student information.
Better food at a school near you
Local foodies are cheering the news that Wisconsin lawmakers this week passed legislation that will help bring local farm products to school lunchrooms.
The Assembly passed AB 746, which creates a statewide council to coordinate the process of selling Wisconsin-grown products to schools. The Senate concurred on the Farm-to-School initiative which is cheering news to Wisconsin farmers and advocates for more fresh foods on school menus.
Meanwhile, a newly released report from chef Beth Collins and Lunch Lessons about Madison’s school meal program says the Madison school district’s food service facilities, staff and organization pose no barriers to putting healthier, less processed food on kids’ plates at school. But district budget woes and time constraints, plus the lack of a well-focused plan, still pose significant hurdles to upgrading what kids eat at school.
Middlebury to Develop Online Language Venture
Middlebury College, a small Vermont college known for its rigorous foreign-language programs, is forming a venture with a commercial entity to develop online language programs for pre-college students. The college plans to invest $4 million for a 40 percent stake in what will become Middlebury Interactive Languages.
The partnership, with the technology-based education company K12 Inc., will allow Middlebury to achieve two goals, said Ronald D. Liebowitz, the president of the college: It will help more American students learn foreign languages, an area in which they lag far behind Europeans; and it will give Middlebury another source of revenue.
“We wanted to do something about the fact that not enough American students are learning other languages, and it’s harder for students if they don’t learn language until college,” Mr. Liebowitz said. “It is also my belief, and I think our board’s belief, that finding potential new sources of revenue is not a bad thing. By doing what we’re doing with this venture, we hope to take some stress off our three traditional sources of revenue — fees, endowment and donations.”
There are many online opportunities today. These initiatives are an opportunity for school districts to think differently about traditional methods and their curriculum creation expenditures.
Incoming Milwaukee Public Schools chief lays out goals for district
Milwaukee’s incoming schools leader will focus on improving student achievement, creating more efficient and effective district operations, and partnering with parents, businesses and community members when he takes the reins of the state’s largest public school system in July.
That’s according to Gregory Thornton, Milwaukee Public Schools’ superintendent-in-waiting, who for the first time in public Tuesday began laying out his plan for improvement and hinting at the changes those inside and outside the system can expect to see over the next few years.
“I’m excited because I think Milwaukee is at a very key place,” Thornton said. “I think we’re at a tipping point . . . I believe we need to tip this thing in a way that young people can be successful.”
Thornton’s discussion was part of a Newsmaker Luncheon hosted by the Milwaukee Press Club at the downtown Newsroom Pub. He answered questions from a panel of local journalists as well as audience members.
From the start, Thornton said, he will have to do “some housekeeping” in the district. Change will happen, he said, and those standing in the way will not be encouraged to stick around.
Are charters’ students doing better? New way of grading schools will tell
The latest report on Michigan’s charter schools, to be presented to the state Board of Education today, does not compare the performance of charter students to those in traditional public schools — a controversial practice done in past years.
In previous years, the annual report compared test scores in all charter schools with the average score of 20 traditional (and mostly low-performing) districts in which about 75% of Michigan charter schools are located. By that measure, charter schools do better.
The new 33-page annual report, created by the Michigan Department of Education and Michigan State University, explores topics including student performance and profiles. The report also recommends giving the department more authority over charter schools and a small increase in funding to pay for that.
Fewer Minnesota school districts had excess debt in 2009
A new State of Minnesota report finds that fewer Minnesota school districts are in the worst category of financial hardship.
The report reveals six charter schools and five traditional public school districts were in what’s called “standard operating debt” last year.
Schools in standard operating debt don’t have to close, but they must follow certain spending rules aimed at improving their fiscal standing.
This year’s 11 districts in standard operating debt is a small decrease from the previous year’s number and it continues a mostly downward trend since 2001, when 45 districts had that label. This year’s tally is also the lowest number of schools to be in standards operating debt since the state started keeping track in 1990.
If New Jersey Was Indiana
Interesting development in Indiana regarding Race To The Top: the State Superintendent, Tony Bennett, has written a letter to the president of the Indiana State Teachers Association explaining that because union buy-in is so important to wining the federal competition, “I ask for your unequivocal agreement to the following proposals.” If the Union won’t support Indiana’s RTTT application then Indiana won’t even bother applying for the next round in June. (Hat tip: Flypaper.)
Mr. Bennett goes on to stipulate that the application will only be submitted if ISTA agrees to support a requirement that 51% of teacher evaluations be based on student growth data, and new legislation that uses teacher evaluations to inform tenure and compensation decisions. The Union must submit a “strong letter of support and a recommendation that local associations sign on in support.”
For Students, a Waiting List Is Scant Hope
Ashley Koski, ranked third in the senior class at Thomas Dale High School in Chester, Va., has wanted to attend Duke University since she was 12.
Late last month, she learned that Duke had neither accepted nor rejected her. It had offered her a spot on the waiting list — along with 3,382 other applicants. That is almost twice the size of the incoming freshman class.
“I kind of just went quiet the rest of the day,” Ms. Koski said. “I’d rather have a yes or no. I can’t make plans and be excited like the rest of my friends.”
Duke, which had a record 27,000 freshman applicants, has placed 856 more on its waiting list than a year ago. The reasons include the uncertain economy, which makes it hard for Duke to estimate how many of the 4,000 it has accepted will say yes.
Ex-Milwaukee Public Schools leaders speak out at forum
Milwaukee Public Schools can be turned around, but it will need a strong, visionary leader to chart a course of action and stick to it despite the pressures of special interests, the School Board and political forces, several former MPS superintendents said Monday night.
During a public forum hosted by the Marquette University Law School, four former leaders of the state’s largest public school system spoke with relative candor about their past leadership experiences and the challenges they see ahead for the district at a time when MPS is about to accept a new superintendent.
Panelists Robert Peterkin (superintendent from 1988 to ’91), Howard Fuller (1991-’95), Barbara Horton (1997) and Spence Korte (1999-2002) broke tradition with the silence on MPS issues that those who leave the top post generally adhere to and shared frustrations they encountered with a bureaucracy that too willingly accepts mediocrity and makes it hard to reward success.
They also made clear that Milwaukee should look to cities and states that have had success over the past 10 to 15 years in raising achievement levels for students.
“You cannot tell me it can’t be done – there are no unteachable children,” said Fuller, who after his superintendency became an advocate for choice schools as leader of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette.
100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
James Crow, professor emeritus of genetics at the UW-Madison recently gave a talk to the Madison Literary Club on “100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Click to download a 4.5mb .zip file that contains a few images from Monday’s Madison Literary Club talk.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin pension funding for teachers falls $10.9 billion short, report says
Wisconsin’s statewide pension system for public employees may not be as well-funded as the state reports, with a new study estimating it could be as much as $10.9 billion short in meeting its obligations just to teachers.
While the state estimates that the Wisconsin Retirement System is nearly 100% funded, the report by the conservative Manhattan Institute and Foundation for Educational Choice warns that the amount could be far less.
By using asset growth projection rates similar to what are required for private pension plans, the study found that Wisconsin’s retirement system would be considered only 78% funded. In addition, an analysis that takes into account recent stock market activity drops it to 72% funding, according to the report.
“We think this is more accurate than the stated market value of assets,” said Josh Barro, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the report, which was released Tuesday.
Pension plans that are not adequately funded could lead to higher property taxes or take resources away from the classrooms, Barro said. “Pension obligations are not some big ethereal thing,” he said.
Reading Period
When I was a student at Cambridge University, I was told that term time was for attending lectures and socializing, at Oxford and Cambridge, and vacation time was for reading lots of books (a reading period). When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, (this is my 50th reunion year), we were given a formal Reading Period before exams, to help us catch up on semester reading assignments and prepare for finals.
If we would like to expect high school teachers of English and History to work with their students on the sort of serious research paper from which they will learn a lot on their own, and which will prepare them for college term papers, we have to give teachers a Reading Period, too, but we don’t, so many don’t assign such papers, and the majority of our public high school students now go on to college unprepared for college writing and panicked when their first assignments come down.
Laura Arandes, when she was a Freshman at Harvard, was shocked at the newacademic writing expectations, because at her public high school in Southern California she had never been asked to write more than a five-paragraph essay. She wrote me that:
I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they’re right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.
It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn’t easily quantified and demonstrable.
A survey of college professors done a couple of years ago by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them thought the students they were seeing were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from 2008 found that more than one million of our high school graduates, with diploma and college acceptances in hand, are put into remedial courses when they arrive at college. The California State College people reported at a conference in Philadelphia last fall that 47% of their Freshman were in remedial writing courses. I asked the Director of Composition at Stanford if they had any remedial writing courses, and she told me that, no, all Freshman had to take a composition course.
So, what is the matter with all those public high school English and History teachers, that they are not preparing our graduates for college writing tasks? Many public high school teachers have five classes of thirty students each. With 150 students, if the teacher assigns a 20-page paper, she/he will have 3,000 pages of student research and writing to read, consider and correct when they come in. If she/he takes an hour on each paper, that would require 150 hours, or 30 days at five hours a day.
Even teachers who do a lot of their preparation and correcting after regular school hours, at night and on the weekends, do not have 150 hours to go over research papers. As a result, they do not assign them, students do not learn how to do the reading and writing required, and colleges (and students) complain when students arrive unprepared.
A sensible solution, it seems to me, would be to provide a Reading Period of perhaps eight school days for History and English teachers to do the necessary work to prepare their students for serious academic papers. This will seem excessive and unmanageable to administrators, but not, perhaps, if they consider the extra time already allotted in our public high schools for other things, like band practice, layup drills for basketball, yearbook, concerts, football and baseball practice, and on and on and on, when it comes to non-academic purposes.
If we do give the necessary time for teachers of English and History to work with their students on research papers, and to evaluate their work, I believe our students will learn how to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious term papers, but if we continue to expect the impossible of our teachers, they will continue to ask less academically of their students than they can do, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®
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Vicki McKenna & Don Severson Discuss the Madison School District’s Budget and Maintenance Referendum Accounting
24MB mp3 audio file. Much more on the 2010-2011 budget and 2005 maintenance referendum, and potential audit, here.
The States Are Concealing Teacher Pension Costs of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!
A new study by Josh Barro and Stuart Buck, co-sponsored by the Foundation for Educational Choice and the Manhattan Institute, finds that states have total teacher pension liabilities of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!
These days that doesn’t sound like much, does it? We’re getting to the point where raising an alarm about ONE TRILLION DOLLARS is a little like holding the world to ransom for a measly million.
But check out some other points from the study:
Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order
A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county’s only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.
The order, issued by Senior Judge Tom S. Lee of the U.S. District Court of Southern Mississippi, came after Justice Department civil rights division lawyers moved to enforce a 1970 desegregation case against the state and Walthall County.
Known as Mississippi’s cream pitcher for its dairy farms and bordering Louisiana 80 miles north of New Orleans, Walthall County has a population of about 15,000 people that includes about 54 percent white residents and 45 percent African American residents, according to the U.S. Census.
D.C. Contract Previsionist History!
I have a great deal of respect for Larry Cuban and his important work, but this blog post on Michelle Rhee reads like boilerplate applied to a situation that it doesn’t fit.
For starters, when you actually read the new contract you’ll see that Rhee didn’t compromise a lot away, she basically got everything she wanted – including tenure reform. If there is a lesson in the contact timeline and resolution it’s far less about compromise than about fortitude. Cuban says that the teachers got the raises they wanted. OK, sure. But Rhee wanted those, too!
The AFT’s Randi Weingarten deserves a great deal of credit (which so far she hasn’t gotten in the media in my view**) for signing a contract that effectively ends tenure and addresses layoffs in a respectful but cost-sustainable form, but the spin that this was a give and take deal evaporates when you actually read the document. It’s precedent setting in some key ways.*
Second, I don’t know where Cuban gets his 5 percent figure on the number of ineffective teachers in D.C.’s schools but while the percent can certainly be overstated in the public debate you’re hard pressed to find anyone with firsthand experience in the D.C. schools or around them who does not peg that number higher. I was a charter trustee in D.C. for seven years and have spent a lot of time in both sector’s of the city’s public schools and would place that figure higher than 5 percent in a lot of the city’s charter schools, too, by the way. This just isn’t something the field does well yet.
In Support of Madison School District’s Budget Growth
Despite the 2008 referendum which so many of us worked so hard to pass, state actions and inaction have once again placed the quality of our public schools in jeopardy. It is time to stand up for our schools (again).
On Sunday April 18th at 1:00 pm at Warner Park Community Recreation Center – 1625 Northport Dr. – the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will hold their second Public Hearing on the 2010-11 district budget. The Board needs to hear from the community that we value education and are willing to pay to keep our schools strong. Progressive Dane urges community members to attend and make their voices heard.
Even if you don’t want to speak at the meeting, you can attend register with positive message. If you can’t make on Sunday, the Board can be contacted at board@madison.k12.wi.us.
Teacher debate over Washington, DC contract heats up
Twenty percent over five years is the best we’re ever going to do. Yes, there are problems, but let’s sign and move on.
Private donors such as the Walton Family Foundation are not to be trusted. They’ll be gone, along with their money, the moment Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee leaves.
The deal is a trap, because it does nothing to limit the IMPACT evaluation system, which is a disaster, or to protect teachers from the kind of layoffs Rhee instigated last October.
This, in paraphrase, is some of the conversation among teachers over the tentative contract agreement announced last week. If District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi certifies the funding commitments of the four foundation donors as sound, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) will mail out ballots to begin a two-week voting period. This week, WTU president George Parker begins a series of informational meetings for teachers to discuss the proposed deal. The sessions, which all start at 4:30 p.m., will be Tuesday at McKinley High School, Thursday at Woodrow Wilson, Monday, April 19, at Ballou and Wednesday, April 21, at Spingarn.
Cameron’s UK parent school promise
BBC:
Conservative leader David Cameron has made an election centrepiece of plans to allow parents and other providers to set up schools with state funding.
Launching his party’s manifesto, Mr Cameron has promised parents “the power to get a good new school in your community”.
The manifesto also says all schools, including primaries, will be able to have the autonomy of academy status.
And there is a commitment that all pupils should read by the age of six.
Obama’s plan to reward schools for innovation sparks congressional debate
At Adelphi Elementary School, students peel away from their classrooms twice a week for tutorials in reading and math. Clusters of five or six children will shuffle into a book closet, a hallway, a computer lab or any place teachers can fit a few empty chairs for 45 minutes of catch-up lessons or enrichment.
Such all-out efforts helped this Prince George’s County school win a national award this year for steep gains in test scores. But the federal anti-poverty program that funds the academic drive at Adelphi represents a model of education reform — spreading aid to states based on population and need — that is fast going out of fashion.
President Obama aims to reinvent the Education Department as a venture capitalist for school reform, investing more in schools with innovative ideas. The Title I program, which supports Adelphi and thousands of other schools in low-income areas based on formulas of need, is not facing extinction. But Obama would freeze the core of that program even as he sends billions of dollars to states that harmonize their policies with his.
A Right Denied
Dear Public Education Advocate:
Yesterday I attended the premier showing of A Right Denied produced by Bob Compton who also produced 2 Million Minutes and few other related documentaries about education systems in the US and the world.
In between watching the Masters or the Yankees lose a few ballgames this weekend, please review this information and in particular, the attached 240 slide PPT presentation prepared by Whitney Tilson who is featured in A Right Denied. Whitney’s research and factual data took a few years to compile and is the basis for the documentary. I have been following Whitney’s work closely for a few years and if you asked me if I could have dinner with any one person in America today who would it be; my answer (after my wife of course) Whitney Tilson. Please review his material and feel free to share this with those you know.
While the achievement gap among racial groups and the sad inequities based solely one’s zip code are illustrated, so is the decline in the U.S. education system on a whole – the data is alarming.
Some select pieces from the PPT slides (5.5MB PDF):
Why hasn’t additional money resulted in improved results?
- Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades
- Our school systems have become more bureaucratic and unaccountable
- As a nation, have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching TV, listening to iPods, playing video games (up 25% in the last four years), going to sporting events, etc. rather than studying hard. These two pictures capture what’s happening in China vs. the U.S. (see slide number 15).
Americans watch more than twice as much TV as any other country. (Watching the Masters or Baseball is exempt however.)
Achievement Gap #1 – We are falling behind all economic competitors.
- 15-year-olds trail almost all other OECD countries in Math and Science.
- Our High School graduation rate lags nearly all OECD countries.
- US is among the leaders in college participation but ranks in the bottom half or college completion.
- The college completion rate in the US has stagnated and our competitors have surpassed us.
- American students score highly in self-confidence. 72% agree or strongly agree; “I get good marks in Mathematics”, yet we are near the bottom internationally in mathematics.
Achievement Gap #2 – Academic achievement of low-Income, minority students is dramatically lower than their more affluent peers. You already know this but, did you know;
- The black-white achievement gap is already one year in kindergarten?
- The majority of Black and Latino 4th graders struggle to read a simple children’s book.
- The achievement gap widens the longer students are in school.
- Black and Latino 12th graders read and do math at the same level as white 8th graders.
- Massachusetts and NYC have made great strides in math the past six years.
- Very few children from low-income households are graduating from any four-year college, and this has stayed consistent for the past 40 years.
- 74% of students at elite colleges are from the top quartile of households and only 9% are from the bottom half of households.
- Even the better high school graduates today are alarmingly unprepared for college. Close to half need remedial courses.
Two general approaches to fixing our schools
- Improve the current system and create alternatives to the current system. Adopt both strategies.
- Too many school systems today are dominated by the “Three Pillars of Mediocrity.”
- Lifetime Tenure
- Lockstep Pay
- System Drive by seniority (not merit)
- Teacher Quality and Effectiveness. Teacher quality has been declining for decades. College seniors who plan to go into education have very low test scores.
- Teacher certification has little impact on student achievement.
Please review the trailer http://www.2mminutes.com/films/ and the slide presentation attached which I know you will appreciate. I would encourage you to purchase the CD too or you can borrow mine if you like, I also have 2 Million Minutes and 2 Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution.
Doug
Teachers Embrace the Power of Prayer A New Jersey teacher’s union prays for Chris Christie’s death.
Hell hath no fury like a teacher’s union scorned. To close a $10.7 billion budget deficit, New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie last month proposed slashing education by $820 million, an equivalent to a 5% cut for each school district. That follows on the heels of an across-the-board pay freeze.
Not happy is the Bergen County Education Association, which sent a letter to 17,000 members asking them to pray for the governor’s death. The letter offers a sample prayer that begins: “Dear Lord, this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. . . . I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”
Milwaukee Representative Grigsby Statement on Education Reform Announcement
Today, State Representative Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) joined other education supporters to announce a new education reform proposal designed to increase supports for Milwaukee Public Schools and its democratically-elected school board. Grigsby issued the following statement regarding today’s activities:
“If this compromise were about mayoral takeover, I would not be here in support of it today. Over the past year, much of the debate surrounding MPS has been about who runs the schools, rather than the quality of education being given to our children. Now that the debate surrounding takeover has come to an end, I’m glad that so many different stakeholders have been able to join together to find common ground with the best interests of Milwaukee’s children in mind.
“This compromise is not about a change in governance, nor is it about school control. This compromise is about support for our schools and providing a consistent, quality education for our children. For education to improve, MPS needs more community support, more district support, and more state support. You will not find a takeover of any sort in this legislation. Instead, this proposal puts in place important policies designed to support and strengthen Milwaukee Public Schools and maintain its democratically-elected, empowered school board.
NJ gov wants teachers union leader fired for memo
The president of a state teachers union left a meeting Monday with Gov. Chris Christie after refusing to fire a local president who wrote a memo that joked about the governor’s death, further escalating a rift that began before Christie’s election.
Christie spokesman Mike Drewniak said the governor wants Bergen County teachers union head Joe Coppola fired for his “irresponsible” memo. The memo from the Bergen County Education Association to its locals included a closing prayer that read:
“Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”