Yvonne Wenger:

Home-schoolers and students attending public, private or charter schools can take online classes after Gov. Mark Sanford on Thursday signed a new law creating the South Carolina Virtual School Program.
The law, which will be administered by the state Department of Education, will allow students a chance to enroll in online courses that might not otherwise be available to them.
“It’s an incredibly important step forward because, among other things, it represents another choice in education,” said Sanford, who was joined in the Statehouse via the Internet by students at the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville.
Virtual schools are modeled after regular classroom courses, but students communicate with teachers online and e-mail their homework and other assignments. The law builds on a pilot program first offered last May with summer courses such as geometry and Web design available to students in 11 school districts.
The law will allow students to earn credits in Advanced Placement, remedial and specialty classes online. It will also ease scheduling conflicts, provide individualized instruction and help students meet graduation requirements.

Morning Edition:

Morehouse College President Walter Massey is set to speak to graduates for the final time this weekend. He’s due to retire this summer after 12 years. The all-male, historically black college has such notable alumni as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Spike Lee. Massey himself attended Morehouse, arriving when he was just 16. Massey tells Steve Inskeep that when he arrived at Morehouse as a student he wasn’t certain that he would succeed.

Susan Lampert Smith:

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

A Yin to that Yang – Capital Times:

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

More from Bessie Cherry:

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

Brock Bergey:

25% of students at one Madison high school spend the day at home, and it wasn’t a planned skip day. The students attend Memorial High School, where an alleged threat was supposed to be carried out Wednesday. Nothing happened, but the incident has the district talking policy.
“If we don’t communicate, obviously, it raises the concern of parents,” says MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater.
He says a new system is opening the lines of communication between administrators and parents.
“(It) allows us to call every single parent and give them a message,” says Rainwater.
A message like the one Rainwater says went out to every Memorial parent Tuesday night. It included information about a non-specific threat found at the school and indicated classes would continue Wednesday, as scheduled.

AFP:

Two Russian-born sisters are due to become assistant professors of finance in New York state later this year, even though they are only 19 and 21, university officials said Wednesday.
Angela Kniazeva and her younger sister Diana were due to take up their new positions in September at the University of Rochester, where half of their students will likely be older than them.
The pair, who already have masters degrees in international policy from Stanford University in California, were picking up their doctorates from New York University’s Stern business school on Wednesday after five years of study.
The talented twosome told the New York Post they did not consider themselves geniuses, despite their achievements.
“I don’t think this is the right word or right way of putting it,” the newspaper quoted Angela as saying. “I think we’ve been given valuable opportunities, and we found ourselves in very fortunate circumstances.”
The duo were home-schooled by their parents and earned the equivalent of their US high-school diploma at the ages of 10 and 11 before graduating college in Russia at the ages of 13 and 14. They graduated from Stanford in 2002.

More at NYU Today. Via Volokh.

2007 Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference WEBCAST
Support for Construction Careers-Focused Charter School & Successful Evolution of RENAISSANCE School for the Arts and ODYSSEY-MAGELLAN Charter School
Links to 40+ Green Charter Schools
Green Charter Schools in Wisconsin
www.GreenCharterSchools.org
New Financing Helps Milwaukee Charter School Expand
HOWARD FULLER, President of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University, has been inducted into the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ Hall of Fame. Howard and TED KOLDERIE, Senior Associate, Education / Evolving, were among an inaugural group of 4 charter school pioneers inducted into the Hall of Fame
EDUCATION / EVOLVING
Project Change Charter Recovery School
Number of Small High Schools Multiplying in Milwaukee

Alan Borsuk:

Two men, who often did not work together openly in the past, stood Monday in front of a crowd that, at many times, wouldn’t have been receptive to either of them.
“From our standpoint, this is a remarkable day,” said Sam Carmen, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, as he and schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos made a presentation to a luncheon of about 100 members of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, a private group of civic leaders that has played a big role in charting Milwaukee’s course for decades.
“This is the real deal,” Carmen told the audience, describing the impact that a new strategic plan for Milwaukee Public Schools could have. The draft of the plan, created largely by the teachers union and MPS leaders, was released recently and is expected to be presented for action by the Milwaukee School Board in June. The Greater Milwaukee Committee funded the process of creating the plan.
Carmen said the plan presents “a real opportunity to change teaching and learning in Milwaukee Public Schools.”

Nanette Asimov, Todd Wallack:

Teachers have helped students cheat on California’s high-stakes achievement tests — or blundered badly enough to compromise their validity — in at least 123 public schools since 2004, a Chronicle review of documents shows.
Schools admitted outright cheating in about two-thirds of the cases. And while the number reporting problems represents a small fraction of the state’s 9,468 public schools, some experts think the practice of cooking the test results is more widespread.
That’s because the California Department of Education relies on schools to come forward voluntarily, and to investigate themselves when a potential problem is flagged.
“The vast majority of educators are ethical and play by the rules. (But) when identification of potential cheating hinges largely on self-reports, it is almost certainly underreported,” said Greg Cizek, who teaches testing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of “Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It.”
Records show that California teachers who unfairly helped students boost scores usually did so during the test. For example:

Friedman Foundation; Dr. Susan L. Aud:

A landmark new study finds that school choice programs throughout the country generated nearly $444 million in net savings to state and local budgets from 1990 to 2006. Contrary to opponents’ predictions, the analysis also finds that instructional spending per student has consistently gone up in all affected public school districts and states.
“School choice saves. It saves children, and now we have empirical evidence that it saves money,” said Robert Enlow, executive director and COO of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. “In the face of $444 million in savings, another excuse to deny children a quality education has vanished before our eyes.”
Released by the Friedman Foundation, “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006” provides the first comprehensive analysis of how the nation’s school choice programs have affected state and public school districts. Of the 12 voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs that began operations before 2006, every program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce substantial savings. Seven more programs have been created since 2006.

Full Report: 800K PDF

Robert Tomsho & Daniel Golden:

Cazenovia, Wis.
When Eric Hainstock didn’t get his way in kindergarten, he told other children his father would kill them. In fifth grade, he tried to spray a homemade concoction he called blood into the mouths of classmates. In sixth grade, he threatened others, fought, and talked “about killing himself and others.”
Worried about these and other incidents recounted in internal school reports, teachers and a school psychologist recommended that Eric, who was diagnosed in second grade with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, get more one-on-one attention, or be placed in a special private school. Instead, he was one of millions of special-education students mainstreamed in regular classes.
After Eric transferred to Weston Public School here in 2002, his grades plummeted and he was suspended frequently. His only regular help with controlling his outbursts was a weekly, half-hour social-skills class.
On the morning of Sept. 29, 2006, Eric, then 15 years old, walked into Weston Public with two guns and shot dead the school’s principal, John Klang, police reports indicate. He told investigators he was tired of taunting by other students and aimed to “confront” Mr. Klang, teachers and students. He has been charged with first-degree murder.

The Economist:

“HORRIBLY divisive” is how Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, describes the recent distribution of $15m in bonuses to teachers in the largest school district in Texas. Most teachers received payments averaging close to $2,000. But an angry minority received none; and everyone learned what everyone else got when the Houston Chronicle’s website published a list of teachers and amounts. Raising hackles further, 100 teachers were asked to return part of their bonuses because a computer glitch had inflated them.
This was Houston’s first year of doling out such bonuses, and its troubles may have prompted the Texas House of Representatives to vote against a statewide merit-pay programme. The idea of merit pay is a good one: teachers should be paid more for teaching better. At the moment, few teachers in America receive bonuses, and their salaries are based mainly on length of service or their degrees. But the system, put in place early in the 20th century, is not working. Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas says that spending per pupil has doubled in the past three decades, while student-achievement measures such as high-school graduation rates are roughly flat.

New research shows that parental choice raises standards—including for those who stay in public schools

The Economist:

FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.

Joel Rubin:

UCLA professor says officials distorted pass rate on test required for high school graduation. Educators counter that analysis was flawed.
California education officials put forth artificially positive results on the number of students who passed the state’s controversial high school exit exam last year, according to a recent UCLA study.
The analysis also concluded that about 50,000 fewer students statewide earned diplomas last year compared to previous years, raising the prospect that the exit exam requirement is pressuring students to drop out. The decline in graduation rates was most pronounced in poor, heavily minority areas, the study found.
“We’ve constructed a system that sets in place incentives for disinformation,” said John Rogers, the study’s author and co-director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. “People who are making education decisions in this state need to think about how this policy is really playing out.”

Susan Troller:

Although the Madison School Board so far has held its ground on a host of unpopular decisions, it may be approaching a tipping point, at least on the issue of school consolidation.
The School Board’s meeting was a multi-ring circus Monday night as a capacity crowd presented a collective howl of anguish about many budget cuts and about the controversial decision to name the community’s newest elementary school for a Hmong military leader revered by his adherents.
It will be up to board members in coming days to decide whether to revisit any of the decisions they have made in recent weeks that are stirring passionate, and often angry, public commentary on topics ranging from the elimination of yellow school buses for parochial school students to a school closing on the near east side to the new school’s name.
Arlene Silveira, elected unanimously Monday night as the board’s new president, said she would return items to the agenda for possible reconsideration if four board members requested them. A supermajority, or five votes, would be necessary to reverse any budget-related decisions. So far, it appears that several board members are willing to revisit the budget item to consolidate Marquette and Lapham elementary schools.

Nelson Hernandez:

John E. Deasy, the superintendent of Prince George’s County schools, issued a decree soon after taking charge a year ago: Each of the county’s 22 high schools will offer at least eight Advanced Placement courses next year.
He got funding for the expansion, which would increase the number of students in the county taking AP courses by 25 percent. Now he just needs the teachers.
The effort to mobilize the teaching corps brought about 80 current and prospective AP teachers to Charles H. Flowers High School on a recent Saturday morning for a series of workshops in AP English, math, social studies and science. The workshops are run by the College Board, which administers the AP exams and recently announced that it will audit courses to ensure that they meet college standards.
“You can’t just say to people, ‘Get more kids in AP classes,’ unless you have the teachers,” Deasy said. He’ll need as many as 200 certified to teach the advanced courses by the fall. As he walked from classroom to classroom, he added: “I can’t hold you accountable for doing something without giving you the skills to do it.”

Jay Matthews:

Schools nationwide are calling on parents to get involved. The Maryland State Board of Education endorsed a broad range of family outreach initiatives in a 2005 report that called public education “a shared responsibility.”
Yet some parents in Montgomery County and elsewhere have discovered limits on the get-involved policy when they ask questions about individual teachers, whether those queries are about alleged abuse of students or a decision to fire a popular instructor.
Dawn Mosisa said she found an information void when she tried to follow up on her daughter’s story about a teacher who allegedly hit another second-grader at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. Likewise, scores of parents at Lakewood Elementary School, also in Rockville, said they had a hard time finding out why a teacher they considered top-notch was recommended for dismissal. They also felt their input was ignored.
School officials said they are required to hold back information because of privacy laws, union contracts and potential lawsuits. Some acknowledged that a more open policy would help families handle the repercussions of incidents involving teachers. But the officials said there is little they can do.

The Capital Times:

Members of The Capital Times nonsupervisory staff have chosen reporter Susan Troller as the winner of the 2007 Allegretti Award.
They judged Troller’s work as best carrying on the legacy of former Capital Times reporter and editorial writer Dan Allegretti in exposing injustices in the community.
Troller’s colleagues honored her coverage of Madison’s K-12 schools. The nomination said Troller “has worked tirelessly to bring the human face, the child’s face, to the messy bureaucracy that is our school system.”
Since being assigned to the schools beat in 2006, Troller has consistently brought readers into the classroom as well as chronicling the operations of the district administration and the School Board. Not only has she used words to describe children’s learning experiences, but she was the first staff member to delve into the multimedia world for the paper, creating an audio slideshow to accompany a portrait of the successes of high-poverty Mendota Elementary School.

Props to Susan!

channel3000.com

The decision to name Madison’s newest school after Gen. Vang Pao is creating a divide in Madison.
Opponents said that they plan to bring their concerns to the school board on Monday.
For people in the Hmong community, Gen. Vang Pao is a leader comparable to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They said that Pao led masses of Hmong refugees to the U.S., WISC-TV reported.
But opponents said that they still hope to convince the school board to change its mind and not honor a man that some say has a questionable past.

The “Stuyvesant of the East” has become one of the most sought-after public schools in the city. It got that way by leaving much of the public out.
Jeff Coplon:

As light faded on the first arctic day of winter, a band of 40 die-hard parents huddled on Seventh Avenue, outside Region 9 headquarters of the Department of Education. Mostly white and middle-aged, armed with signs and certainty, they stood shivah for a dream foreclosed on the Lower East Side: the notorious NEST+m, a school for the best and brightest in all New York.
Braced against the slicing wind, they chanted against the ousting of their founding principal, the feared and revered Celenia Chévere, and grieved for the motto she once posted outside her office door:
A public school with a private-school mission.
The sign dripped with hubris, but it had wooed the striving classes well. Since the troubled birth of New Explorations Into Science, Technology & Math, in 2001, its parents had tithed body and soul and disposable income—for their children, to be sure, but also for the urban impossibility: a truly great public school. In NEST they’d found a hothouse with record test scores, free of the usual tawdry concessions—sardined classes, peeling paint, creeping illiteracy.

Adam Nossiter:

Louisiana on Friday picked one of the nation’s most prominent education reformers to run the troubled school district of New Orleans, as schools here continue to grapple with physical and administrative damage from Hurricane Katrina.
The new superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, who is credited with changes in school systems in Chicago and, most recently, in Philadelphia, was chosen to take on what is seen as one of the more singular challenges in American education: creating a working school district where many of the buildings are ruined, many of the teachers are missing and thousands of students might return suddenly. When they do, they will be among the neediest — the poorest and lowest-achieving — in the nation.
As a superintendent in Philadelphia and Chicago, Mr. Vallas raised test scores with the help of after-school programs, new schools and revised curricula. He is generally regarded by schools experts as one of the more energetic practitioners in the field. But speaking Friday in a shuttered school in the Lower Ninth Ward, he seemed to recognize the special difficulty of this task.

NYT Letters to the Editor regarding Kristoff’s recent column on teachers:

To the Editor:
I retired to South Carolina in 2004 after 35 years as a teacher, administrator and superintendent in New York. I have permanent New York certification in secondary English, special education and as a school district administrator.
Thinking I might teach in South Carolina, I applied for information on certification. I learned that I would need to do the following: fill out an application; submit original college transcripts; submit teacher examination scores from the Educational Testing Service (to ensure that I was “highly qualified”); submit an F.B.I. fingerprint card; submit recommendations from the college where I completed my teacher preparation (36 years ago). There was more, along with a $75 fee.
I am enjoying my full retirement!

More here:

Several teachers argued that it’s ridiculous for someone who has never actually taught for a day in his life to offer proposals for school reform. That strikes me as a fallacy. Obviously doctors aren’t the only people who should offer views on health care reform. And reporters aren’t the only people entitled to views about the failures in the news media. Indeed, if we are going to see improvements in education, it will be only because a broader segment of society became involved. Obviously, teachers bring a special expertise to the discussion, but they have no exclusive claim to these issues.
Another common objection was that there is no way you can solve the school problems as long as parents are apathetic, or students are raised wrong, or resources are not increased. I don’t buy that either. Look, you could have said a generation ago that we’ll never solve the problem of traffic deaths as long as humans enjoy the sensations of speed and alcohol. But in fact we figured out how to engineer cars better, how to require seat belts and air bags, how to crack down on drunk drivers, how to design roads better and improve signs – and the result has been that we now save tens of thousands of lives a year. In the same way, there will always be troubled kids who fall through the cracks – and there are such kids in Singapore, which probably has the best public schools in the planet. But even if schools can’t be perfect, even if the backdrop is challenging, we can improve high school graduation rates, we can improve quantitative skills and ability to read.

Susan Troller:

Marquette Elementary students may be happy to know that if they must move to Lapham Elementary next year as part of a consolidation plan, the teachers they know from Marquette will most likely go with them.
The Madison teachers union and the Madison school district have reached an agreement, similar to one used in similar past situations, that will essentially allow current Marquette teachers to move to Lapham and apply for the job openings that will be available at the new consolidated school.
The School Board voted last Monday to join the two paired schools on the near east side as part of a series of cost-saving moves to keep the district operating in the black.
Currently Lapham, on East Dayton Street, houses kindergarten through second grade students and an early childhood program. Marquette, at 1501 Jenifer St., is home to third- through fifth-graders.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said he appreciated the union’s effort to work with the district to create the least possible disruption for students and staff.

Susan Troller:

When newly elected Madison School Board members Maya Cole and Beth Moss went into Monday night’s crucial budget meeting, both intended to vote against closing schools, consistent with their campaign promises.
But by the time the seven-member board patched together the various cuts, additions and compromises necessary to restore some programs and services while keeping the budget in the black, both Moss and Cole found themselves making a reversal and voting with Lawrie Kobza and Arlene Silveira to consolidate the paired elementary schools Marquette and Lapham at the Lapham site on East Dayton Street.
Now Moss, along with board members Carol Carstensen and Lucy Mathiak, would not mind reopening the discussion with the possibility of reconsidering that vote.
But Cole — who during the campaign was firmer than Moss in her opposition to school closings — says her decision to consolidate Marquette and Lapham is final.

Continue reading Board members explain votes to close schools →

Deborah Chamberlin:

Ho, hum. Another sunny morning, another cup of coffee, another disgusting story about the Milwaukee Public Schools. How’s this for an idea? Shut down MPS because it sure doesn’t seem to be working.
Initiate a 13-year plan (pardon the negative connotation) to eliminate grade levels, beginning next year with kindergarten. That way, students (or are they “combatants”?) are free to find other educational solutions from the beginning. No kindergarten means no first grade the next year and so on as the children pass through (or drop out).
Parents will be responsible for vying for precious space in private schools, which don’t seem to have the level of problems that MPS does, probably because they can remove disruptive thugs. Or try home schooling. Let parents sit home with their unruly kids and see how they like it.
Good teachers will have time to look for other employment. There surely will be more entrepreneurs opening schools to replace the MPS holding tanks. Just think – no more guns, no more weapons, no more crowd control. Just lessons, homework and appropriate discussions about grades.
Teachers have been shifted from being educators to baby sitters to interim parole officers. A couple of e-mails I received noted the situation at MPS is much worse than we even know. Worse than a week with two lockdowns, a fight resulting in a staff member being knocked unconscious and a seventh-grader with a gun and ammunition? Those are only the reported incidents.

Winnie Hu:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).
Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.
Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Marc Eisen:

What depressing news to read that Lapham School will be merged out of existence.
I sent two kids through Lapham, and it was single best experience our family has had with the Madison schools.
Lapham’s K-2 format was born out of a political compromise that reopened the Depression-era school in 1989 in return for Marquette serving grades 3-5. This turned out to be an inadvertent stroke of educational genius. Separated from the sometimes baleful influence of older kids, Lapham became its own little cozy world, a safe and encouraging place for the youngest of students.
As I wrote in a 2003 column, my kids were lucky enough to have Barb Thompson as principal. She ran a tight ship, kept a watchful eye on her charges and wasn’t afraid to battle “downtown” — the school district administration — for her school.

Bill Lueders:

Heidi Reynolds doesn’t deny that, ultimately, she’d like see the Madison school board rescind its decision to name a new school on Madison’s southwest side after General Vang Pao, a controversial Hmong leader implicated in drug trafficking and summary executions. But for now, “We just want to reopen the debate.”
Reynolds, the parent of children who will attend the new school when it opens in fall 2008, says the board’s April 9 vote to select this name “was done way too quickly, there was not enough debate. It was all done under the radar.”