Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes

The other major change to the CBA affects the hiring process for teachers. Currently, teachers have the opportunity to seek to transfer to vacant positions at other schools until four weeks prior to the start of the school year. Once the internal transfer process has been completed, principals can select applicants for teaching positions from outside the district. It is pretty obvious that the school district was placing itself at a competitive disadvantage in hiring if it could not tell a potential new hire where he or she would be teaching until a month before school starts.
According to the new procedure that is now set forth in the CBA, teachers who find themselves surplused will be placed in new positions by the school district by May 1 of each year. Then vacant positions will be posted for internal transfers. While a change was proposed in the district’s initial bargaining proposal, the final agreement retains the requirement that principals must select an internal transfer applicant if any applicants for a vacant position possess the minimum qualifications. The internal transfer process closes on June 15 and at that point principals can choose external candidates for any positions that remain unfilled. This change represents a big step toward a hiring process that maximizes our chances to hire the kind of skilled and diverse applicants we are looking for.
As I mention above, the new agreement does not address wages. At this point we don’t have sufficient information to make any sort of decision about raising salaries for the 2013-14 school year. Most importantly, we have no idea what the governor and new legislature will do about revenue limits for the next biennium and so we don’t know whether we will be able to increase our spending and by how much, or whether we will have to cut our per-pupil spending, as was the case for the first year of the current biennium.

Much more on the Madison School District’s rather unique action, here.

Bill Jackson, via a kind reader’s email:

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about my dream school information system – what I’d really like to see out there to power informed school choice.
Before we do that, though, I’d like to share how I would go about assessing the quality of an elementary school if I was choosing one for my daughters today. This is all in the spirit of keepin’ it real. I’d love to hear your ideas.
As the CEO of GreatSchools, I have to start with the data, of course. At GreatSchools.org, I can access data about test scores and student diversity. In some locations, I can also find about special programs, curriculum, extra-curricular activities and transportation options. This is great stuff – it helps get me oriented.

Jeanette Joran:

My job provides me the opportunity to travel a lot. I’ve visited many countries and cities of the world, but I still consider this area home.
I guess a love of math runs in my family. My sister is a math teacher, and it was my favorite subject, too. In fact, you could say she was my first teacher, as she would come home from school and teach me what she had learned that day.
While my math teachers were inspirational to me, there was another teacher who encouraged me to think more broadly and be open to new ideas. The encouragement I received from her helped me to build confidence in my own abilities. Math remained my favorite subject, but I was always interested in new ideas, exploring different concepts

Alan Schwarz:

When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.
The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Tony’s Math Blog:

I’m teaching graph theory this year. It was one of my favourite areas of mathematics when I was a student. It contains many gems, ranging from with Euler’s solution to the problem of the seven bridges of Konigsberg to the power of Ramsey’s Theorem. The arguments seem to me to be unusually varied, and often sufficiently elementary that great depth of study is not required.
I have had very little contact with graph theory in the time since I graduated. As an undergraduate I used Robin Wilson’s Introduction to Graph Theory, and I am now using it as the basis of my course. I remember enjoying the book in my youth, and finding it approachable, but I don’t remember finding the material as straightforward as it now seems. (My students aren’t finding it entirely straightforward, either, but that may be my fault.)
Why is this? I don’t think I’m a better mathematician than I was 35 years ago. In terms of solving exam questions, I would not perform as I did when I was twenty. Even with practice, I am sure I could not get back to that level, and not only because I no longer value that kind of cleverness enough to put the effort in. I now have a much better general understanding of mathematics and how it all fits together, but I no longer have the ability to master detail that I once did.

the local/Sweden:

A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings.
Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.
Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.

I’ve seen similar issues in Madison, with respect to extracurricular activities.

Vivian Yee:

Outside Pittsburgh, they are proclaiming a strike, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word. In a village near Milwaukee, hundreds staged a boycott. In a small farming and ranching community in western Kansas, they have produced a parody video. And in Parsippany, N.J., the protest is six days old and counting.
They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch — healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.

Kurt Streeter:

Kent Taylor, superintendent of education in southern Kern County, was selected Wednesday to lead the Inglewood school district — the first major move by the state after its takeover of the financially troubled district.
Before his Kern County stint, Taylor worked as a teacher, principal, administrator and school board member in several Southern California districts, mostly in the San Bernardino area. He grew up in Inglewood and graduated from Inglewood High in 1982, facts he emphasized repeatedly during a Wednesday news conference.
The appointment is about “coming back to the community that I love, the community that produced me,” he said, recalling several teachers who mentored him as a youngster. “This is a great district, a wonderful district, and we have great things happening here…. Do we need to figure out some fiscal things? Yes, we do. But I’m the guy who is going to come and work with everyone and listen to everyone…. We’re going to continue to move forward.”

The Wall Street Journal:

The unions are blaming Inglewood’s shortfall on education cuts, but per-pupil spending is about the same as it was five years ago. The real problem (other than too generous benefits, which are an issue in most districts) is that enrollment has declined by more than 20% since 2006, which has shrunk the total pot of available money. Many of the city’s working class families have left. Meanwhile, about 10% of students have fled to charter schools–and for that the unions have only themselves to blame.
Seven charters have sprouted up within the last five years as alternatives to Inglewood’s failing schools, which are among the worst in the state. Only 30% of seventh graders meet state math standards while merely a quarter of 11th graders are proficient in English. The charters outperform traditional schools by 100 to 200 points on the state Academic Performance Index (which ranges from 200 to 1000). Most charters also operate at lower cost.
The district intends to float bonds to renovate facilities in order to draw back students, but energy efficient buildings and a spiffy, new athletic center won’t make up for a poor education. And they sure won’t help close the district’s $10 million structural deficit.

Salman Khan:

In 1996, in a journal called the National Teaching & Learning Forum, two professors from Indiana University — Joan Middendorf and Alan Kalish — described how research on human attention and retention speaks against the value of long lectures. They cited a 1976 study that detailed the ebbs and flows of students’ focus during a typical class period. Breaking the session down minute-by-minute, the study’s authors determined that students needed a three- to five-minute period of settling down, which would be followed by 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus. Then — no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter — there would come a lapse. In the vernacular, the students would “lose it.” Attention would eventually return, but in ever briefer packets, falling “to three- or four-minute [spurts] towards the end of a standard lecture,” according to the report. This study focused on college students, and of course it was done before the age of texting and tweeting; presumably, the attention spans of younger people today have become even shorter, or certainly more challenged by distractions.
Middendorf and Kalish also cited a study from 1985 which tested students on their recall of facts contained in a 20-minute presentation. While you might expect that recall of the final section of the presentation would be greatest– the part heard most recently — in fact the result was strikingly opposite. Students remembered far more of what they’d heard at the very beginning of the lecture. By the 15-minute mark, they’d mostly zoned out. Yet these findings — which were quite dramatic, consistent and conclusive, and have never yet been refuted — went largely unapplied in the real world.

Doug Tuthill:

Long-time Democratic education activist Jack Jennings, in a recent Huffington Post column, argued that Republican support for private school choice is a somewhat recent (i.e., the last 45 years) phenomenon, driven by a political desire to appeal to segregationists and weaken teacher unions. Jennings writes, “The Republicans’ talk about giving parents the right to choose is a politically expedient strategy … Just beneath the surface of the education rhetoric are political motivations to thwart integration, weaken the Democratic coalition, and cripple the teachers’ unions.”
Jennings is being disingenuous by not acknowledging that Democrats have also changed their position on public funding for private school choice over the years. Democrats George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey both ran for president on platforms supporting tuition tax credits for private schools, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was the U.S. Senate’s leading advocate for giving parents public funding to attend private schools. The Democratic Party reversed its support of public funding for private school choice in the late 1970s – as a political payback to the National Education Association for giving Jimmy Carter its first ever presidential endorsement.

Peter Coy:

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.
That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

Related: Robert Francis, the Texan judge closing America’s jails

Until recently, these people would have been discarded in overcrowded prisons. After all they were caught in Texas – the toughest state of a nation that locks up more offenders than any other in the world, with more than one in every 100 adults behind bars. Instead they receive counselling and assistance with housing and employment, although they can be sent back to jail if they fail drug tests, abscond or reoffend. One woman, a crystal meth addict, tells me the sessions in court are like walking on eggshells. But there are small incentives for those doing well, such as $10 gift vouchers or – on the day I visited – barbecue lunch out with Francis. “These people have to believe we care and want them to succeed,” he tells me later. “Once they believe in me they can start to change.”
They are beneficiaries of a revolution in justice sweeping the United States, one with illuminating lessons for Britain. It is a revolt led by hardline conservatives who have declared prison a sign of state failure. They say it is an inefficient use of taxpayers’ money when the same people, often damaged by drink, drugs, mental health problems or chaotic backgrounds, return there again and again.
Remarkably, this revolution was unleashed in “hang ’em high” Texas, which prides itself on its toughness and still holds more executions than other states. But instead of building more prisons and jailing ever more people, Texas is now diverting funds to sophisticated rehabilitation programmes to reduce recidivism. Money has been poured into probation, parole and specialist services for addicts, the mentally ill, women and veterans. And it has worked: figures show even violent crime dropping at more than twice the national average, while cutting costs and reducing prison populations.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Sue Shellenbarger:

John Patriarche in Chandler, Ariz., logs on from home to check grades and assignments with his 13-year-old daughter, Anna.
Ever since her 12-year-old twin sons went back to school in August, Catherine Durkin Robinson has been telling herself, “Steer clear. Think first, and keep away,” she says.
The hazard she’s avoiding? Logging on to her school’s online grade-reporting system to see how her boys are doing. When she checked their grades online late last year, “I saw Cs and I almost lost my mind,” she says. Her sons’ teachers later explained that the grades weren’t up-to-date and that Zachary and Jacob were actually doing very well. But it was a shock she’d rather not repeat, says the Tampa, Fla.-based manager for a nonprofit education organization.

Karin Klein:

It’s hard to guess whether the topic of education will come up in this week’s presidential debate, or any of the others. With the economy and the whole 47% debacle on everybody’s mind, there hasn’t been much talk about the public schools, even though they’re at a critical juncture.
Of course, President Obama’s views are pretty clear because he’s been putting them into policy for the last few years. And in ways, those policies have been problematic. He’s obviously a big believer in giving the federal government a major role in education, which has traditionally been left to state and local governments in this country.
There are policies he can’t legally force on states, such as a common curriculum and rules about how they have to evaluate teachers. (He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are insistent that scores on standardized tests have to be a “significant” part of teacher evaluations; it’s not bad policy to include them in some way, but there’s a real lack of research to show that they are absolutely key to rating teachers or will improve learning significantly.) So what the administration has done is twist states’ arms by making funding via such programs as Race to the Top conditional on meeting its vision of what education should look like, or, more recently, allowing waivers to states from the more onerous and nonsensical elements of the No Child Left Behind Act if they go along.

Larry Cuban:

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These largely unnoticed structures in the policy landscape set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.
Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Isabel Sawhill & Ron Haskins:

Abstract: Good jobs in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy require advanced literacy skills such as categorizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from written texts. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by nearly all the states, combined with tough literacy assessments that are now in the offing, will soon reveal that literacy skills of average students fall below international standards and that the gap in literacy skills between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families is huge. The authors offer a plan to help states develop and test programs that improve the quality of teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, and thereby both improve the literacy skills of average students and narrow the literacy gap.
U.S. schools are struggling to enable students, espe­cially those from poor families, to attain the advanced literacy skills required by the twenty-first-century American economy. One approach to enhancing schools’ efficacy in this area is improved educational standards. Standards are routine in American life. Sports have them; businesses have them; profes­sions have them. Standards are useful in clarifying the knowledge, skills, and competencies that society expects from individuals and organizations. Society also needs a way to determine whether the standards have been met, usually through testing, certification, licensing, or inspection systems. And a respected body of experts must be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the standards.

Melanie Guzman, via a kind reader’s email

Philip V. Streich ’13, a Harvard student known for his exceptionally broad range of enthusiastic commitments, died in an accident Tuesday on his family’s farm near Platteville, Wis., Leverett House administrators wrote in an email Sunday.
At times an enthusiastic entrepreneur, a scientific prodigy, a political activist, a record producer, and a grandiose party host, Streich carved himself a Gatsby-esque role among the Class of 2013 during its first year at Harvard. Friends said Sunday that he will be remembered not only for his impressive accolades but also for serving as a socially unifying force for his freshman class.
“He was happiest at the center of anything,” said C. Tucker Pforzheimer ’13-’14, one of Streich’s freshman roommates.
At press time, information about the cause of Streich’s death was not available.

Melody Gutierrez & Diana Lambert:

The Public Employment Relations Board found Rocklin Unified School District retaliated against four nurses and ordered the district to reinstate them with two years of back pay, plus 7 percent interest.
In a ruling released today, Administrative Law Judge Robin Wesley found Rocklin school district violated the Educational Employment Relations Act by laying off nurses Jennifer Hammond, Genevieve Sherman, Susan Firchau and Jennifer Bradley.
“We’ve always been very unhappy with what happened and we feel vindicated,” Hammond said today. “I’m ready and willing to take my job back.”
The Rocklin Teachers Professional Association filed an unfair practice charge against the school district in 2010, alleging the four nurses were laid off in retaliation for asking their union for assistance regarding workload and safety issues.

Barry Garelick, via a kind email:

Mathematics education in the United States is at a pivotal moment. At this time, forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards, a set of uniform benchmarks for math and reading. Thirty-two states and the district have been granted waivers from important parts of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law. As part of the agreement in being granted a waiver, those states have agreed to implement Common Core. States have been led to believe that adoption of such standards will improve mathematics and English-language education in our public schools.
My fear (as well as that of many of my colleagues) is that implementation of the Common Core math standards may actually make things worse. The final math standards released in June, 2010 appear to some as if they are thorough and rigorous. Although they have the “look and feel” of math standards, their adoption in my opinion will not only continue the status quo in this country, but will be a mandate for reform math — a method of teaching math that eschews memorization, favors group work and student-centered learning, puts the teacher in the role of “guide” rather than “teacher” and insists on students being able to explain the reasons why procedures and methods work for procedures and methods that they may not be able to perform.

Al Baker, via a kind reader’s email:

A coalition of educational and civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Thursday saying that black and Hispanic students were disproportionately excluded from New York City’s most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy they say is racially discriminatory.
The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to change admissions procedures “to something that is nondiscriminatory and fair to all students,” said Damon T. Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint.
At issue is the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is the sole criterion for admission to eight specialized schools that, even in the view of city officials, have been troubled by racial demographics that are out of balance.
Although 70 percent of the city’s public school students are black and Hispanic, a far smaller percentage have scored high enough to receive offers from one of the schools. According to the complaint, 733 of the 12,525 black and Hispanic students who took the exam were offered seats this year. For whites, 1,253 of the 4,101 test takers were offered seats. Of 7,119 Asian students who took the test, 2,490 were offered seats. At Stuyvesant High School, the most sought-after school, 19 blacks were offered seats in a freshman class of 967.

Matt Miller

In 2011, Chicago’s public schools spent $7,946 per pupil for instructional (that is, classroom) purposes; the New Trier school district, a short ride up the road, spent $12,043, or 51 percent more. In a class of 25 kids, that’s a difference of more than $102,000. This explains why starting and maximum salaries for teachers in New Trier are much higher than in Chicago; and why the average teacher salary in New Trier is $103,000 compared with Chicago’s $71,000. (These figures are from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago, which tracks fiscal- equity trends.)
The point? When suburban schools pay better, have much nicer facilities and working conditions, and are filled with kids who are easier to teach (because they don’t have the many problems that come with poverty), it is no surprise that, over time, the best teachers gravitate to the best suburban schools. We are relying on the “missionary plan” to staff schools in poor neighborhoods.
The local property-tax basis of much school finance means wealthier communities can tax themselves at lower rates and still generate far more spending per pupil. New Trier has 7.5 times the property wealth per pupil that Chicago has, taxes its residents’ property at roughly half Chicago’s rate, and generates vastly more dollars per pupil.

Mr. Miller compares Chicago’s “instructional” spending, which is only a portion of spending. Chicago plans to spend $5,162,000,000 during the 2012-2013 school year for 404,151 students or $12,772/student. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the same school year.

Steve Peha:

The phrase “research-based”, or some variant thereof, appears more than 100 times in the language of No Child Left Behind. Grounding educational practice in solid science was, and still is, an important goal. But, as most people know, finding your way through the research landscape of teaching and learning isn’t exactly a walk in the park. That’s why “When Can You Trust the Experts?” is such an important book.
Written by Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, this informative and accessible book is a must-read for anyone trying to understand what works, what doesn’t, and whether or not good science is being used to support such judgments.

Jeff Coen, David Heinzmann and John Chase:

Chicago Public Schools officials expect about 53,000 of the district’s roughly 400,000 students will attend charter schools this year, and the number of charters will increase to more than 100. The city is aiming to add 60 charter schools in the next five years with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is trying to expand charters across the country.
The biggest push for charter schools locally comes from some of the wealthiest backers of Emanuel, including Bruce Rauner, a venture capitalist who regularly advises the mayor. At a seminar of business and political leaders held the same day teachers voted to return to school, Rauner said the strike would only energize reform efforts that he called a “multiyear revolution.”
“I think we’re going to have a coalescing of interests that’s a focus and drive some major change. And there are some plans in the works, some charter community education innovators who are now focusing on Chicago, and I think in the coming years we can innovate,” he said.
Experts called the union’s stand against privately run networks unique in the United States, where several big cities, including New York, also have pushed charter schools.
“What’s different is this is really the first mass movement against that comprehensive strategy” for privatization, said Janelle Scott, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies school policy.

Related:

• “Presumptions of invalidity”: Closing the Window on Charters in Madison?.

• Charter Caps, Laser Pointers and SuperPACs
• Milwaukee is wisely embracing charter schools.
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
• Notes and links on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy – rejected by the Madison School Board.
• Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
  

  “Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Mike Antonucci:

Here’s a partial list of proposed business items currently under review by the board of directors and various committees of the California Teachers Association:
* That CTA amend the first paragraph on charter schools to read “CTA believes the role of charter schools is to provide students, parents and CTA members with educational opportunities that supplement not supplant public school offerings.”
Rationale: Current language does not deal with the reality that charter school growth is often negatively impacting school districts’ programs and forcing our members to become subject to reduction in force.
* That CTA amend by addition to policy on charter schools the following first paragraph: “CTA believes in a cap on charter schools that does not exceed 10% of school districts’ enrollment.”

I recently spoke with Chris regarding his interest and activism in the education world.
I was particularly interested in his views on the glacial pace of change in our largely monolithic education system, his education reform”scorecard”, the Edison Project (now EdisonLearning) and Chris’s latest creation: Avenues “The World School”.
Whittle’s voice of experience on the glacial pace of education reform is one of the most astute observations I’ve heard, one that is molded by an entrepreneur.
The interview is available as an 45mb mp3 audio file, or via this transcript.
I am thankful for his time and wish Chris and Avenues the best.

Heather Mac Donald:

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD’s already-existing diversity infrastructure. As the campus itself acknowledges: “UC San Diego currently has many active diversity programs and initiatives.” No kidding. A partial list of those “active diversity programs and initiatives” may be accessed here.
Now UCSD has filled the position and announced the new vice chancellor’s salary. Linda Greene, a diversity bureaucrat and law professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will pull in $250,000 a year in regular salary, but that’s just the beginning: she’ll receive both a relocation allowance of $60,000 and 100 percent reimbursement of all moving expenses, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, two fully paid house-hunting trips for two to the San Diego area, and reimbursement for all business visits to the campus before her start date in January 2013. (By comparison, an internationally known expert in opto-electronics in UCSD’s engineering school, whose recent work has focused on cancer nanotechnology, received a little over $150,000 in salary from UCSD in 2011, according to state databases.) The UCSD press office did not respond to a request for the amount the university paid the “women-owned executive search firm with a diverse consulting team” it used to find Greene.

The Madison School Board recently discussed (first 15 minutes of this video) a new “charter school policy” drafted by Julie Mead, a UW-Madison School of Education Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis.
The following documents are worth reviewing:
“Using Charter School Education and Policy to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity” by Julie Mead and Preston Green [3MB PDF pages 12-44].
“Model Policy Language for Charter School Equity” by Julie Mead and Preston Green [3MB PDF pages 45-52].
Page 13 of this slide based 1.9MB PDF includes:

Rebuttable Presumptions of Invalidity
A. [A] proposed charter school that is unlikely to attract a student body whose composition of racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, students with limited English proficiency, and students from low-income families that is within 10% of the population for each of these sub-groups within the community or communities intended to be served by the charter school is presumed to be invalid;
B. The applicant can overcome this presumption by providing clear and convincing evidence that the charter school will satisfy the policy goal of providing equal educational opportunity for all students; and
C. Evidence of the support of parents for the proposed school approach may be considered but shall not be the primary evidence that the school positively serves the public’s interests and is therefore insufficient by itself to overcome this presumption of invalidity.

Related: Professor Mead along with School of Education Dean Julie Underwood published this paper: A smart ALEC threatens public education.
Via a kind reader.

Wong Yat-hei:

A survey on textbooks showed a huge gap in prices between different schools’ book lists. The school with the least expensive book list for Primary One charges only HK$509, while the most expensive list costs more than six times as much, at HK$3,089.
The council said the big difference was due to the number of books that schools want students to buy. Some ask students to only buy books for Chinese, English, maths and liberal studies, while others also ask students to buy books for computer studies, music, Putonghua and religious studies, and exercise and story books. The Education Bureau said it was concerned about the difference in prices and it would continue to monitor the amounts spent at different schools.
The price for primary textbooks has gone up by 2.2 per cent, and secondary school book prices are up 2.5 per cent. The average cost for secondary textbooks this school year is HK$2,186. The increase is greatest in Forms One, Two and Five. Book costs rose for all forms except for Form Six which saw their costs drop 2 per cent. The council says this decrease was due to the fact that sixth-formers used the fewest textbooks.

Verna Yu:

If not for his heart attack in 2005, Chen Pingfu would still be a maths teacher, leading an ordinary life in Lanzhou, Gansu province.
That misfortune was followed by several more. Having no medical insurance from the state or his college, the 55-year-old fell into debt paying for his operation. Then he lost his job when his state factory-affiliated college closed in 2008.
Without an income, he turned to playing violin on the street for money – an act regarded as begging on the mainland. Police and officials would rough him up. But the experience opened Chen’s eyes to how people at the bottom of society are often abused.

The Wall Street Journal:

In recent years, the number of children in the U.S. being treated with prescription medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has grown dramatically.
That trend has led to concern among some doctors, parents and child advocates that many children are taking ADHD medication unnecessarily.
These critics suggest that in many cases ADHD is a mistaken diagnosis for children who are simply immature or undisciplined. And even when the diagnosis is correct, they say, many children who are taking medication for ADHD could do as well or better with alternative treatments, including dietary and behavioral therapies, that have fewer side effects.

Richard Kahlenberg:

In 1960, when Albert Shanker and other members of New York City’s teachers union sought collective bargaining rights, they set a strike date for Monday November 7, the day prior to the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The timing would provide maximum leverage, they reasoned, because the Democratic mayor, Robert Wagner, would not want to come down hard on striking teachers the day before the election. This strategy was vindicated when teachers won an agreement that led to bargaining rights after just a single day on strike.
The same logic surely crossed the mind of the shrewd president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, who knew that calling a strike this week would be highly disruptive to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. At a time when Obama is trying to rally his base, the strike reminded teachers across the country of his support for merit pay and nonunion charter schools–policies also backed by Obama’s former chief of staff and the current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. And at a time when Obama is struggling in the campaign money chase, the strike negotiations have distracted Emanuel from helping the president raise dollars from wealthy donors. Both factors may help explain why the strike now appears close to settling.
But if the strike has been bad for Democratic presidential politics, it may ultimately be good for Democratic education policy, which for too long has aped right-wing rhetoric in the name of education reform. It can’t hurt to force a leading Democrat like Emanuel to spend a little more time negotiating with actual teachers and a little less time wooing hedge fund managers, many of whom passionately back the education policies that rank-and-file teachers despise.

Victor E. Ferrall, Jr.:

It is ceaselessly (and correctly) observed that college tuition has gone through the roof and something must be done to get the cost of higher education under control. In the 10 years between 2000 and 2009, while the median income of American families grew a modest 16 percent, the cost of attending college shot up 63 percent; more than 70 percent for in-state students at public universities. Even during the terrible year 2009, when family income actually fell more than 2 percent, average tuitions rose nearly 4 percent at all institutions; more than 4 percent at public universities. Today, the list price for a student from an average American family to attend a prestige college or university for 7 1/2 months is only slightly less than her family’s entire income in 12 months.
Free marketers champion for-profit universities as the answer. If they are, it is an odd answer: 80 to 90 percent of the for-profits’ income comes from federal tax dollars–$26.5 billion in 2009. Another odd “solution” presently in play is to radically cut state aid for state universities which, of course, forces the universities to increase tuition even faster (and to try to replace in-state students with out-of-staters, for whom tuition is typically two to three times higher).

ACT:

Nearly every state has adopted the goal of college and career readiness for all students. At the end of 2011, 45 states had adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics,1 with the stated goal to prepare students to “graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit- bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010a).2 Other states, such as Texas and Virginia, have also focused on aligning their content and performance standards with college and career readiness requirements (Virginia Department of Education, 2010; Texas Education Agency & Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2009).
Not surprisingly, current research shows that many students are not on target to meet college and career readiness requirements. For example, if performance standards for the Common Core State Standards are set at a level comparable to ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks–consistent with the goal of preparing students for college and careers–the majority of today’s students are not well prepared to meet those standards (ACT, 2010).

Ezra Klein:

Talks between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union broke down yesterday, and now the city’s teachers are on strike, just as class was about to start for the 2012-13 school year. Labor will insist that the strikes lead to contracts that attract good teachers who promote student learning in the long-run, while Emanuel notes that the teachers are striking over his proposed evaluation system, which he argues will help achievement going forward. Leaving that debate aside, what does the strike itself mean for students?
Nothing good, the best empirical evidence suggests. Two of the best recent studies on the effects of teacher work stoppages and strikes concern labor disputes in Ontario schools in the late ’90s and early 2000s. One, by the University of Toronto’s Michael Baker, compared how standardized test scores rose between grade 3 and grade 6 for students who lost instructional time because of the Ontario strikes, and for students who were unaffected.

Ada Lee: 15-year-old Joshua Wong Chi-fung, co-founder of the group Scholarism, has come to symbolise the anti-national education movement’s energy. You know Joshua Wong Chi-fung is a busy young man the moment he meets you. With the government headquarters in Admiralty alive with protest action, he walks fast, talks almost too quickly to catch his … Continue reading Scholarism’s Joshua Wong embodies anti-national education body’s energy (Hong Kong) →

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Joel Hood and Kristen Mack:

“This is about as much as we can do,” Vitale said. “There is only so much money in the system.”
The district said it offered teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years and a host of benefit proposals.
“This is not a small commitment we’re handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” Vitale said.
Lewis said the two sides are close on teacher compensation but the union has serious concerns about the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system and job security.

More from
Justin Katz and Daily Kos.

Chicago teachers are officially on strike.We stand with @ctulocal1 because they are fighting for what is best for our students.

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 10, 2012

Analysis: Striking Chicago teachers take on national education reform.

Chicago teachers walk picket lines for first time in 25 years.
Update: Madison Teachers’, Inc. [PDF] on the CTU Strike:

MTI Stands with Chicago Teachers
In August, over 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union voted for authorization to strike. Our CTU brothers and sisters have long been fighting against the charter school initiatives supported by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic city council. On August 22, several MTI members attended a “Solidarity with CTU” night at SCFL. MTI members made up almost half the room. CTU member Becca Kelly spoke passionately about the injustice, inequity and blatant racism present in Chicago Public School policies and closures. In an interview, Chicago Teachers’ Union President Karen Lewis stated, “Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. They deserve culturally-sensitive non-biased and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students and early childhood children. And all of our students deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings and a school system that partners with parents.” This is what the CTU is fighting for.
This past year CTU fought side by side with parents to halt 17 schools closings or “turn arounds” in the city. The parents did secure a meeting with the city council, but all 17 schools were closed. Next year, Kelly shared, there are over 70 Chicago Public Schools identified for “turn around or closing.”
On August 22, the MTI Board voted unanimously to support the resolutions put forth by the CTU. The MTI Board also recommended further fundraising efforts. MTI President Kerry Motoviloff spoke in support of the CTU that evening. She called for MTI members to stand with our CTU brothers and sisters as they stood with us when we called them. Speaking of the anti-worker movement, she said, “This is not a Madison issue. This is not a Chicago issue. This is not a Wisconsin issue. This is not even limited to a union issue. This is a worker issue.” She continued, “Scott Walker, Rahm Emanuel, they cannot define us. They can make things difficult. They can give us hoops to jump thorough. They can try to throw us off our focus to play defense. But the more we control our message, our voice, the more potent our acts become. This is all one fight. We are all one movement. We will win this.” The Chicago Teachers Union has published a booklet and a page of 10 talking points, both can be downloaded in PDF on the CTU website. Members are encouraged to visit it for more details. MTI will keep members abreast of future solidarity actions.

CTU Parent Flyer (PDF) and CTU in the news (PDF).
Stephanie Banchero:

The Chicago battle has pitted Karen Lewis, one of the country’s most vocal labor leaders, against Mr. Emanuel, one of its most prominent mayors and the former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. The Democratic mayor has made efforts to overhaul the city’s public education a centerpiece of his administration.
The two sides have been negotiating for months over issues including wages, health-care benefits and job security. The city has offered teachers a 3% pay raise the first year and 2% annual raises for the next three years. The average teacher salary in Chicago is about $70,000.
On Sunday night, city officials and union leaders said the wage issues aren’t the sticking point. Rather, the two sides are at loggerheads over a new teacher-evaluation system and how much of it should be weighted on student test scores, and over job security for teachers laid off from low-performing schools.

Alan Borsuk:

I probably shouldn’t do this, but I keep thinking about Heidi Ramirez when I should be focusing on Darienne Driver.
Ramirez is gone now after two years as chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools. Driver is freshly arrived as MPS’ chief innovation officer (a new position). The two jobs aren’t exactly the same, but there is reason to juxtapose Ramirez and Driver.
Specifically, when school opened in 2010, Ramirez was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with degrees from Harvard and Stanford. And when school opened in 2012, Driver was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with a lot of work done on a Harvard PhD.
More important, there are lessons from Ramirez’s time in Milwaukee that help frame the challenges Driver faces.

Paul Tough;

We are living through a particularly anxious moment in the history of American parenting. In the nation’s big cities these days, the competition among affluent parents over slots in favored preschools verges on the gladiatorial. A pair of economists from the University of California recently dubbed this contest for early academic achievement the “Rug Rat Race,” and each year, the race seems to be starting earlier and growing more intense.
At the root of this parental anxiety is an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. It is the belief, rarely spoken aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success in the U.S. today depends more than anything else on cognitive skill–the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests–and that the best way to develop those skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.
There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there. Fewer books in the home means less reading ability; fewer words spoken by your parents means a smaller vocabulary; more math work sheets for your 3-year-old means better math scores in elementary school. But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate group of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists has begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.
What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Madison School District PDF Summary Document:

The 2005 to 2011 Strategic Plan was adopted by the School Board in June 2005. It outlines major objectives for the Arlington Public Schools for the six years covered by the plan. The Strategic Plan process was designed to result in clear direction for the school system that focuses on improved student learning for all students. For each goal of the plan, the School Board has defined specific objectives, indicators, and targets or benchmarks to measure progress over each of the 6 years. This summary provides selected findings from the results presented for 2009-10.

Links:

• Arlington Schools Assessment Reports
• Arlington Schools Strategic Plan
• Arlington Schools Strategic Plan indicators (PDF)
• Arlington will spend $501,433,941 during 2013, for 22,723 students or $22,073 per student during the 2012-2013 school year. Madison plans to spend $15,132/student, or 45% MORE more.
• Arlington County’s median household income of $94,880 dwarf’s Dane County’s $60,519 (Madison’s is even less: $52,550.
• 30% of Arlington’s students receive subsidized meals, substantially lower than Madison’s approximately 49%
• How do Arlington & Madison compare to the world?
  
  
  
• Dane County property taxes highest in state.

I hope the Madison School Board reviews additional Districts. Arlington’s demographics and tax base are substantially different than Madison.

The Wall Street Journal:

The proposed amendment text would make the “rights” to organize and bargain collectively a constitutional guarantee, and any state law that would “abridge, impair or limit” collective bargaining would be repealed. Last Monday, the Michigan court of appeals ruled that the measure could appear on the ballot, and the state Supreme Court heard arguments on the case Thursday.
In a filing to challenge the ballot measure, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette say the huge impact of the law can’t possibly be captured in the 100 words of a ballot measure. It is misleading, Mr. Schuette wrote, for unions to “propose an innocuous-sounding constitutional amendment that has the secret effect of wholesale changes in Michigan law.”
The problem is that the amendment language is so broad that the courts could interpret any union-related measure as a violation. It explicitly refers to all current and future laws. In 1997, for instance, Michigan moved new state employees to a defined-contribution pension from a defined-benefit plan. If the amendment passes, unions will challenge the new plan as unconstitutional and it could be invalidated at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Clusty Search: Michigan “Protect Our Jobs” Amendment.

Amy Payne:

This election year, millions of Americans will donate to the political candidates and initiatives of their choice at the local, state, and federal levels. But for unionized workers, union dues come out of their paychecks and go to political causes–and they aren’t consulted on where that money will go.
In July, The Wall Street Journal’s Tom McGinty and Brody Mullins published an eye-opening report that “Organized labor spends about four times as much on politics and lobbying as generally thought.”
They broke down the unions’ political spending from 2005 to 2011: $1.1 billion “supporting federal candidates through their political-action committees, which are funded with voluntary contributions, and lobbying Washington, which is a cost borne by the unions’ own coffers.”

Julie Halpert:

WHEN ERIC WITHERSPOON became superintendent of Evanston Township High School (www site) near Chicago in 2006, he walked into a math class where all the students were black. “A young man leaned over to me and said, ‘This is the dummy class.'”
The kids at Evanston who took honors classes were primarily white; those in the less demanding classes were minority–a pattern repeated, still, almost 60 years after integration, across the nation. All of the Evanston kids had been tracked into their classes based on how they’d performed on a test they took in eighth grade.
Last September, for the first time, most incoming freshmen, ranging from those reading at grade level to those reading far above it, were sitting together in rigorous humanities classes. When I visited, students of all abilities and backgrounds met in small groups to discuss one of the required readings, which include A Raisin in the Sun and The Odyssey. This September, most freshmen will sit side-by-side in biology classes.
Mindy Wallis, the mother of a sophomore at Evanston Township High, agrees. She opposed the decision to detrack, and spearheaded a petition that advocated waiting for the results of a three-year evaluation before making changes that so substantively affected the freshman class. Angela Allyn, whose 14-year-old son just took a freshman humanities class, says her son was hungry to read more than two-thirds of The Odyssey, which was all the class required. He was encouraged by his teachers to read the entire book, but Allyn says the teachers didn’t help him navigate difficult portions during class, so she had to work with him into the late hours of the night. Her son was teased by classmates, she says, for “showing off and using big words,” something she believes wouldn’t have occurred if he’d been grouped with a similar cohort. Detracking, she contends, focuses “on bringing the bottom up–and there’s an assumption that our bright children will take care of themselves.” She acknowledges that because she’s seen as having “white privilege,” despite the fact that she put herself through school and even occasionally had to use soup kitchens to get by, she’s perceived as racist by merely making such a comment.

Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, also believes that race is part of the debate: “People who support tracking are more interested in productivity and less concerned about inequality, and people who are critics tend to focus on inequality and don’t spend too much time thinking about productivity.” Gamoran argues that schools that want to keep ability-grouping need to do a better job with the students in the lowest tracks, but he also believes that the most capable students may not always be sufficiently challenged in mixed-ability classes. “There’s no single solution,” he says. “The point is to try to address the limitations of whatever approach is selected.”

Links:

• English 10
• Small Learning Communities
• Evanston will spend $75,200,000 for 2,974 students, or $25,285/student (!) Madison will spend $15,132/student during the 2012-2013 budget year.
• Adam Gamoran notes and links.
• Madison parents’ Talented & Gifted complaint.

Abby Andrietsch, via a kind email:

Happy start to the school year! Our team is more excited than ever about the transformational work being done across Milwaukee.
Today, our 24 STCM partner schools serve over 10,000 students. As I hear the “first day” stories from several of our partner schools, I am reminded of all of the work put in by our coaches and school leaders to prepare: I am reminded of the four days of leadership training STCM held with more than 80 leaders from across the city coming together to focus on excellence in their schools; I am reminded of the more than 135 new urban teachers that came together for a STCM training focused on high-impact instructional practices.
The power of this group is real and the momentum is visible – these are the leaders that will change Milwaukee’s education system and prepare our future leaders. The results we have seen in each of the three STCM pathways (described below) are an early indication of what is possible for our city.
While I am more aware of the challenges facing our students, families, teachers, leaders and schools in Milwaukee, I am more hopeful than ever about what I know is possible. However, we can’t do it alone. It takes engagement from city leaders, educators, non-profit partners, business leaders and foundations. Join us in the movement to support quality across Milwaukee.
Warmest regards,
Abby Andrietsch
Executive Director
Schools That Can Milwaukee

(Tap or click to view a larger version)

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson & Ludger Woessmann

“The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said that the country “will not be able to keep pace–much less lead–globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.”
The report’s views are well supported by the available evidence. In a 2010 report, only 6 percent of U.S. students were found to be performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries.ii Nor is the problem limited to top-performing students.
Only 32 percent of 8th- graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions. Although these facts are discouraging, the United States has made substantial additional financial commitments to K-12 education and introduced a variety of school reforms.
Have these policies begun to help the United States close the international gap?
Progress was far from uniform across the United States, however. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.
Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole, ranked from the bottom, are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992-2011 time period for nine states–Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.

Related:

• www.wisconsin2.org
• Education wake-up call is looming.
• Madison MAP Assessment results.
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery …

Donnelle Eller:

The Des Moines metro area ranks 24th nationally for its relatively low gap between worker education and the education required for open jobs, a new report today shows.
The Brookings Institute developed an education gap index, looking at educational attainment and the education required for job openings between January 2006 and February 2012. The group also examined economic factors such as demand for a metro area’s products and housing prices.
The report said the education gap can have a long-term impact on the economy, resulting in “unemployment rates that are two percentage points higher in areas with large education gaps.”

Garth Sundem:

Students who average more study hours do better in school. But a study published last week in the journal Child Development shows that students who stay awake to study more than their average — i.e., to cram — up their odds of failing a test or having difficulty understanding instruction the next day.
To allay fears of correlation not implying causation and all the myriad other factors that could confound a study like this (perhaps students who cram are the same students most likely to do poorly in school?), the UCLA researchers Gillen-O’Neil, Huynh, and Fuligni had 535 students keep track of their sleep time, study time and academic problems for 14-day spans in 9th, 10th and 12th grades. The longitudinal data of these student “diaries” allowed the team to ask how individual students performed on days after average sleep/study, compared to the same student’s performance on days after which the student had traded sleep for study.
Interestingly, they found that in 9th grade, there was no penalty for cramming. In 10th grade, staying awake to study started to predict higher next-day hits for the responses “did not understand something taught in class” and “did poorly on a test, quiz, or homework.” And by 12th grade, kids who traded sleep for study showed a marked spike in academic problems the day after cramming.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

Sarah Koran was excited about applying for entry into the veterinary technician program at Madison College in 2010 but her application was denied. That meant hopes of starting the popular associate degree program, which often has a waiting list, was likely pushed down the road for two years.
So instead of putting her life on hold, she decided to investigate other options and was thrilled to learn that Globe University in Middleton, which is part of the burgeoning for-profit higher education industry, also offered a vet tech degree — and she could start classes almost immediately.
Although the total cost of that two-year program at Globe (about $51,000) would be more than four times the price she could expect to pay at Madison College (about $12,200), Koran was eligible for $5,500 per year in federal grant aid and figured it was worth it to take out student loans to help pay for the rest.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we know it’s expensive but you’re going to get a great education and a great-paying job,'” says Koran, noting she now realizes vet techs tend to earn between $10 and $15 per hour after first graduating, not exactly big bucks.

The good

• 2011-2012 budget information is provided, but previous budgets are not available.
• Budget gap and tax impact options are provided.[1]
• School board members and their individual contact information are listed.[2]
• School board meetings and minutes are posted.[3]
• Administrative officials in differing departments are listed.[4]
• Recent budget information is provided.[5]
• Some information is provided on contracts and employment.[6]
• Audits are posted.[7]
• Recent statewide test results are posted.[8]
• Background check information is briefly reviewed in the employment tasks information.[6]

[edit]The bad
Does not archive past budgets.
No public records information is provided.
[edit]School board
The school board is comprised of a superintendent and “such other officers as the legislature shall direct.” The superintendent is appointed by the state legislature in the same manner as members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The superintendent can hold office for 4 years.[9] According to the state constitution the board of education may not prevent a non−union teacher from speaking of a bargaining issue at an open meeting, as was ruled in the U.S. Supreme Court case Madison School District v. Wisconsin Employment Commission.[10]

I support the Sunshine review initiative. However, the last paragraph, regarding the Superintendent, is of course incorrect.

Stephen Burd:

Gregory McNeil, 49, is living out his days at a veterans home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His room is so cramped he can barely fit his twin bed, dresser, and the computer desk he had to sneak in because it was against regulations. His only income comes from the Social Security disability payments he began receiving last year after undergoing quadruple-bypass heart surgery. These payments go directly to the veterans home, which then gives him $100a month for his expenses. McNeil fears that if he leaves the home, the government will seize a portion of his Social Security to pay off the federal student loan he defaulted on two decades ago. “This veterans home may become my financial prison,” he says. “And this is no way to live.”
McNeil’s fears are well grounded. For years, private collection companies acting under contract with the U.S. Department of Education have hounded him. The government garnisheed his wages for a time, and threatened to sue him. He says he always wanted to repay, but has never had the income he would need. Meanwhile, interest continues to accrue on his debt, and has already tripled the amount he owes.

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones:

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of “good jobs” in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy.

Melissa Korn & Emily Glazer:

Schools are getting the message about messaging.
Elite colleges and universities are still attracting plenty of applicants, but weak job-placement numbers for graduates and heavy student debt loads have put schools on the defensive, forcing them to prove to families and state governments that a degree is worth the investment.
Enter the chief marketing officer. A relatively new academic position, these marketers manage schools’ identities and messaging, a role covering everything from admissions brochures and Twitter feeds to brand management.

Bill Joy coined a very useful phrase years ago: “The quality of a company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on marketing.” I have found this to always be true.

Stephanie Banchero:

Standing before a class of 28, Katie Filippini was losing the battle to teach her third-graders that the “er” in “germ” sounds the same as the “ir” in “dirt.” Ten minutes into the lesson, two boys fought over space on the blue carpet, a girl giggled at the commotion and a boy named Dandre stared out the window.
But Ms. Filippini wasn’t alone that winter day at the Morton School of Excellence. Veteran teacher Mauricia Dantes, Ms. Filippini’s yearlong mentor, quietly suggested having students clap out each sound, knowing that some children learn better with physical activity. Ms. Filippini did so, and Dandre and the other students began paying attention.
Now, as Ms. Filippini embarks on a new school year this week, she is drawing on those small victories as a trainee, confident that she is ready to teach on her own. “Last year gave me the confidence and experience to go into the classroom and control it.”

Mark Liberman:

Just out: Mark Seidenberg, “Politics (of Reading) Makes Strange Bedfellows”, Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Summer 2012. The article’s opening explains the background:
In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker created the Read to Lead Task Force to develop strategies for improving literacy. Like many states, Wisconsin has a literacy problem: 62% of the eighth grade students scoring at the Basic or Below Basic levels on the 2011 NAEP; large discrepancies between scores on the NAEP and on the state’s homegrown reading assessment; and a failing public school system in the state’s largest city, Milwaukee. The task force was diverse, including Democratic and Republican state legislators, the head of the Department of Public Instruction, classroom teachers, representatives of several advocacy groups, and the governor himself. I was invited to speak at the last of their six meetings. I had serious misgivings about participating. Under the governor’s controversial leadership, collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public service employees were eliminated and massive cuts to public education enacted. As a scientist who has studied reading for many years and followed educational issues closely I decided to use my 10 minutes to speak frankly. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks.
From the beginning of those remarks:

Much more on Mark Seidenberg, here.

Maria Konnikova:

There’s a certain allure to the elegance of mathematics, the precision of the hard sciences. That much is undeniable. But does the appeal mean that quantitative approaches are always germane? Hardly–and I doubt anyone would argue the contrary. Yet, over and over, with alarming frequency, researchers and scholars have felt the need to take clear-cut, scientific-seeming approaches to disciplines that have, until recent memory, been far from any notions of precise quantifiability. And the trend is an alarming one.
Take, for instance, a recent paper that draws conclusions about the relative likelihood that certain stories are originally based in real-world events by looking at the (very complicated) mathematics of social networks. The researchers first model what the properties of real social networks look like. They then apply that model to certain texts (Beowulf, the Iliad, and Táin Bó Cuailnge, on the mythological end, and Les Misérables, Richard III, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Harry Potter on the fictional end) to see how much the internal social networks of the characters resemble those that exist in real life. And then, based on that resemblance, they conclude which narratives are more likely to have originated in actual history: to wit, Beowulf and the Iliad are more likely reality-based than Shakespeare or Tolkien or–gasp–even that most real-life-like of narratives, Harry Potter. (Táin, on the other hand, isn’t very lifelike at all–but if you remove the six central characters, which you can totally do since they are likely amalgams of real ones, it, too, starts looking historical.)

Susan Howe:

For some reason, my family seems to have produced more than its share of teachers. I don’t remember anyone encouraging us or discouraging us, but somehow we ended up with nine teachers in our extended family, including my husband and myself.
For many years, we were proud to be in this profession. Then Scott Walker was elected. Up to that point, I had not realized to what extent public schools across the nation were being undermined and that teachers had become targets. Governor Walker’s election opened my eyes and awakened a political activist. The recall election did not go as we planned and hoped. After much disappointment and discussion, my husband and I realized that the most important cause on which to focus our efforts was supporting strong public schools and emphasizing the benefits they give to all people in the state and nation. This led us to the Opportunity To Learn Campaign.
Through the OTL Campaign, I hope to inform others about the plight of public schools and the inequalities between districts. To that end, here are two stories about teachers in my family, the districts that employ them and how the inequalities in those districts have affected their students.

Naomi Schaefer Riley:

Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ultimate hipster actress, stars in “Won’t Back Down,” an education-reform drama that hits theaters next month. When did school choice became cool?
The film is the tale of two parents (one a teacher) who decide to save their own kids and many others by taking over a failing school in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood.
This follows “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the 2010 documentary that depicted the fortunes of those desperately competing for a place at a charter school — from the same progressive filmmaker who gave us “An Inconvenient Truth.”

John Nichols:

The defeat AFC took was so sweeping that the group had to issue a statement Wednesday in which it “reaffirmed its support for legislators and candidates across Wisconsin who favor expanded educational options for families, following disappointing primary results last night.”
Yikes.
AFC, a group funded by billionaire right-wingers from Michigan (former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman Betsy DeVos and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos) and their wealthy allies across the country, poured more than $100,000 (perhaps a lot more) into “independent” campaigns on behalf of supporters of school “choice” and “voucher” schemes, which weaken public schools in Milwaukee and pave the way for privatization.
But the AFC candidates lost. Badly.
State Rep. Jason Fields, the Milwaukee Democrat whose re-election was the chief priority of AFC and its Wisconsin operative, former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, was defeated by community activist Mandela Barnes.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.

William Gormley:

Yet only a fraction of our teachers are the best and the brightest of their generation. According to a 2010 McKinsey report, nearly half of U.S. teachers come from the bottom third of their class.
Here’s a simple idea that could dramatically improve the teaching quality: Hire a few good men.
Despite some inroads by men, teaching remains a female-dominated profession. This is especially true for younger children. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers are men.
The situation is more balanced, but not evenly balanced, in secondary school, where 42% of teachers are men.

Juan Williams:

Mooresville, N.C., is best known as “Race City, U.S.A.,” home of Nascar. But these days Mooresville is leading the nation in a different way–by using digital technology to improve public education.
“Fixing Our Schools,” a documentary I am hosting for the Fox News Channel this Sunday, looks at how digital learning is being used by schools like those in Mooresville to help fix our broken education system.
Our schools are undoubtedly in crisis. Prize-winning documentaries such as “Waiting for ‘Superman'” have revealed the terrible cost of losing young minds to failing schools. Dropout rates are particularly high among minority children in urban schools. But even parents in the best suburban schools are alarmed by the fact that the U.S. now ranks 30th world-wide in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in literacy.

Melissa Hammann, via a kind reader’s email:

So, the great and powerful Madison School District has started MAP testing and the results are, well, as they should have expected when viewed as a whole. White kids are above national averages and children of color are below them. MAP testing stands for Measures of Academic Progress. They are taken at the computer by each student and the questions are tailored to the individual student. They keep answering questions until they hit the wall of achievement level and the test is ended. Scores are known immediately and areas of strength and areas that need improvement are highlighted FOR EACH KID. It is supposed to be a tool for teachers to use in order to more adequately provide instruction in their classroom. This is called differentiated instruction, or DI in the education vernacular. MAP results are not really effective for national achievement comparison.
OK, I’m going out on a limb here and going to say to the critics of ECSD that we have been doing MAP testing in our district for 5 years now. My newly minted graduate was in the guinea pig group in 7th grade, so I am keyed in on this topic. We can thank Paula Landers for being ahead of the curve on implementing this tool. What seems to escape the writer of the article as well as our district is this. It’s very nice to know how one’s district stacks up as a whole against the state (WKCE) and nation (MAP, NAEP), but what exactly does this data provide in the way of improving individual student achievement? Exactly squat. In this world of inclusive learning, school districts must have tools to provide DI for all levels of learners. If you insist on teaching to some arbitrary mean that various test data indicates as the level of your class, you’ll lose the top 30 and bottom 30 percent of the curve. That’s 60 percent of the students being lost. Used properly, MAP results could be a very effective tool for the teaching arsenal to solve this problem.
Sadly, it is my experience that my kids’ teachers use it to verify what they already know about my kids, that they are above average, and use their MAP data to rationalize being satisfied with mediocre performance the rest of the year “because they are still above their peer average.” I have no data to indicate it is otherwise with other children. In fact, I have spoken to other parents with similar issues. In addition, over 35 percent of the students in the quadrant report that began the school year above their peer group in reading in our district in 10-11 did not reach the achievement goal the MAP test sets for them. It seems that the district thinks it’s OK that a child does not achieve to their potential. I am not of the same opinion.
……
Not only did my kid fail to reach his personal achievement goal set for him by the MAP test (gain less than they projected he should), but he ended 5th grade at a lower achievement level in reading than where he started. This loss of achievement happened while he got straight As all year long in language arts. I began a slow burn that has not stopped. I went to the principal, I went to the teacher and I went to the administrator in charge. “He started out so high that it was hard for him to achieve.” This is an unacceptable response. My child deserves to show some damn achievement after a year of instruction. I don’t care if he started out higher than the mediocre goals you set for the masses. This is thievery, plain and simple. That year, as I recall, the entire grade level failed to meet the 50% level, which basically says they have achieved grade level performance. Interpretation of MAP results is a bit confusing, so go with me here. Anything less than 50% for a grade level indicates they have not achieved a years worth of learning. There has been a shake up in the 5th grade teaching team, but I think it goes beyond individual teachers. If there is an endemic attitude that high achieving students are OK to ignore and an insistence on mistakenly using MAP data to compare to national averages (like the article in the Madison paper did) instead of using it for the amazing tool it could be, there will be no dang improvement in overall achievement.

Related: Madison Schools’ Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment Results Released. Unfortunately, the Madison School District has not published the school by school MAP results, though the information made its way to Matthew DeFour’s Sunday article.

David Youngberg:

When I decided to become a professor, I was comforted by its employment projections. Professors hired to teach the baby boomers are retiring: It’ll be a seller’s market. Now I’m told Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s, threaten that rosy future. One person can teach the whole world with a cheap Webcam and an Internet connection. Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University research professor and co-founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, told Wired that in 50 years there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education.
I was scared. So in early 2012 I joined 90,000 other students who enrolled in one or both of Udacity’s first two courses. I selected CS101: Building a Search Engine. What with video lectures, online discussion boards, and learning from the field’s top minds, it was easy to believe that online education was the beginning of the end for the ivory tower. But I came to realize that MOOC’s have five fundamental problems.

I believe that Youngberg has taken a somewhat rose colored view of the changes at hand.
I see higher ed disruption playing out as follows (I have a $50 wager with a professor friend that in 20 years, the UW-Madison will have fewer on campus undergraduate students than today, God willing that I live long enough to collect!):
Investment groups will form relationships with certain professors and a few name educational institutions around the world. They will also cut bi-directional deals with business, NGO and Governments. These organizations will invest in the emerging, hybrid higher ed concerns AND, crucially, commit to hiring a fixed number of graduates. The big names will attract a good portion of the “best and brightest” students, offering a more wide-ranging experience than traditional bricks and mortar campuses. The hybrid institutions will provide both online and traditional education experiences along with a direct path to employment.
The synthesis between a number of “name” higher ed institutions, capital and employment will be very difficult to beat. Traditional institutions will need to soon rethink their mission and model. This being said, many new opportunities will arise during the transition.
“Lower ed” will not be exempt from such changes.

University of Chicago News, via a kind Beth Dorhn email: A bonus payment to teachers can improve student academic performance — but only when it is given upfront, on the condition that part of the money must be returned if student performance fails to improve, research at the University of Chicago shows. The study showed … Continue reading Student performance improves when teachers given incentives upfront →

Simon Sharwood:

High School teaching of IT as a career actually puts kids off pursuing careers in the field, according to John Ridge, Executive Director of the Australian Computer Society Foundation Trust Fund (ACSF).
Ridge says general computer literacy courses in early high school are important and welcome, as employers expect some level of skill with productivity applications when hiring. But once kids start to study IT as a career, he says, they tend to abandon the idea of actually working in the industry.
The reason for the rebound, he says, is that too few teachers have the skills and passion to teach IT well. In New South Wales, Ridge said he feels 100 to 200 IT teachers do well … but with more than 1000 high schools in the State that’s not a great strike rate. Without proper resourcing and relevant curricula – the NSW Higher Schools Certificate’s Software Development and Design course is unchanged since 2009 – Ridge therefore wonders if it is even worth teaching IT as a career in schools.

Heather Haddon:

After signing a bill to overhaul teacher tenure rules Monday, Gov. Chris Christie said the changes represented one of his signature political achievements, ranking only behind a successful effort to limit government employees’ pension and benefit costs.
“It’s right behind pension and benefit reform just because the level of skepticism that we would get anything done,” Mr. Christie said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal following a news conference at a middle school here. “There had been such inertia on this topic. I always enjoy defying expectations.”
The new law doesn’t go as far as tenure bills passed in other states in the past year. But it marks a significant shift in the nation’s oldest teacher job-security law, requiring all teachers to undergo annual performance reviews and making it easier to fire poorly performing educators.

Laura Waters:

For Senator Teresa Ruiz, who tirelessly shepherded NJ’s tenure reform bill through the gauntlet of the Senate, the Assembly, union opposition, aggressive reformers, and countless interest groups.
How collegial was the signing yesterday at a Middlesex middle school? Chris Christie sounded practically conciliatory, telling NJ Spotlight that he signed the bill because “my decision was there was enough really good things in this bill that I was not going to allow it not to become law because it didn’t have everything I wanted” and seating arrangements placed B4K’s Derrell Bradford in between NJEA President Barbara Keshishian and AFT President Joseph Del Grosso.

Valerie Strauss:

Here are 10 education terms with definitions that tell you what they really mean to people who use them in our national education conversation.
Yesterday I published the first installment of education jargon, written by Joanne Yatvin, a vet­eran public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is now teaching part-time at Portland State University.
Here’s more jargon from Joanne Yatvin:
School Reform Plans: Untested notions for improving public education, many of which have been tried before with negligible results
School Reformers: People with impressive titles who have had little or no practical experience in schools.
Charter Schools: Semi-private schools supported by public funds deemed superior by parents because they appear more elegant and exclusive than public schools.

The totalitarian left has been similarly clear that decision-making power should be confined to a political elite–the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the leader of a “master race,” or whatever the particular phrase that might become the motto of the particular totalitarian system. In Mussolini’s words, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”
Thomas Sowell
Intellectuals and Society
New York: Basic Books, 2011, pp. 104-106
…Reliance on systemic processes, whether in the economy, the law, or other areas, is based on the constrained vision–the tragic vision–of the severe limitations on any given individual’s knowledge and insight, however knowledgeable or brilliant that individual might be, compared to other individuals. Systemic processes which tap vastly more knowledge and experience from vastly more people, often including traditions evolved from the experience of successive generations, are deemed more reliable than the intellect of the intellectuals.
By contrast, the vision of the left is one of surrogate decision-making by those presumed to have not only superior knowledge but sufficient knowledge, whether these surrogates are political leaders, experts, judges or others. This is the vision that is common to varying degrees on the political left, whether radical or moderate, and common also to totalitarians, whether Communist or Fascist. A commonality of purpose in society is central to collective decision-making, whether expressed in town-meeting democracy or totalitarian dictatorship of other variations in between. One of the differences between the commonality of purpose in democratic systems of government and the totalitarian systems of government is in the range of decisions infused with that commonality of purpose and in the range of decisions reserved for individual decision-making outside the purview of government.
The free market, for example, is a huge exemption from government power. In such a market, there is no commonality of purpose, except among such individuals and organizations as may choose voluntarily to coalesce into groups ranging from bowling leagues to multinational corporations. But even these aggregations typically pursue the interests of their own respective constituents and compete against the interests of other aggregations. Those who advocate this mode of social decision-making do so because they believe that the systemic results of such competition are usually better than a society-wide commonality of purpose imposed by surrogate decision-makers superintending the whole process in the name of “the national interest” or of “social justice.”
The totalitarian version of collective surrogate decision-making by government was summarized by Mussolini, who defined “totalitarianism” in the motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside of the State, nothing against the State.” Moreover, the state ultimately meant the political leader of the state, the dictator. Mussolini was know as Il Duce–the leader–before Hitler acquired the same title in German as the Führer.
Democratic versions of collective surrogate decision-making by government choose leaders by votes and tend to leave more areas outside the purview of government. However, the left seldom has any explicit principle by which the boundaries between government and individual decision-making can be determined, so that the natural tendency over time is for the scope of government decision-making to expand, as more and more decisions are taken successively from private hands, since government officials constantly have incentives to expand their powers while the voters’ attention is not constantly focussed on maintaining limits on those powers.
Preferences for collective, surrogate decision-making from the top down are not all that the democratic left has shared with the original Italian Fascists and with the National Socialists (Nazis) of Germany. In addition to political intervention in economic markets, the democratic left has shared with the Fascists and the Nazis the underlying assumption of a vast gap in understanding between ordinary people and elites like themselves. Although both the totalitarian left–that is, the Fascists, Communists and Nazis–and the democratic left have widely used in a positive sense such terms as “the people,” “the workers” or “the masses,” these are the ostensible beneficiaries of their policies, but not autonomous decision-makers. Although much of the rhetoric on both the democratic left and the totalitarian left has long papered over the distinction between ordinary people as beneficiaries and as decision-makers, it has long been clear in practice that decision-making has been seen as something reserved for the anointed in these visions.
Rousseau, for all his emphasis on “the general will,” left the interpretation of that will to elites. He likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.” Godwin and Condorcet, also on the eighteenth century left, expressed similar contempt for the masses. Karl Marx said, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”–in other words, millions of human beings mattered only if they carried out his vision. George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the “detestable” people who “have no right to live.” He added: “I should despair if I did not know that they will die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.” As a young man serving the U.S. Army during the First World War, Edmund Wilson wrote to a friend: “I should be insincere to make it appear that the deaths of this ‘poor white trash’ of the South and the rest make me feel half so bitter as the mere conscription or enlistment of any of my friends.”
The totalitarian left has been similarly clear that decision-making power should be confined to a political elite–the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the leader of a “master race,” or whatever the particular phrase that might become the motto of the particular totalitarian system. In Mussolini’s words, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”
—————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Jay Matthews:

I almost never give advice to teachers. They live their work, while I just observe it and cannot hope to know as much as they do.
But on one subject, writing, I could teach most of them. My learning to put words together was long, painful and instructive. I know what works and what doesn’t.
That’s my excuse for suggesting in my last Local Living column a new kind of high school course. We should suspend the regular English curriculum for a semester and teach “Reading and Writing.” Every student would produce an essay each week and spend time at the teacher’s desk being edited. We would hire or train teachers to do what my first editors did: Cross out cute phrases, ask what I was trying to say, break overlong sentences into pieces, ask for specific examples, replace inactive verbs with active ones, and so on.
A class of 25 meeting five times a week for 50 minutes would allow only 10 minutes of editing a week for each student. But that adds up to 200 minutes of one-on-one editing per student by the end of the semester, a big improvement over what students get now, which often is zero. The usual written comments on graded papers lack the force of these personal exchanges.

Yasmeen Abutaleb:

The Wichita School District is just one of a growing number in the nation cracking down on teacher apparel. Jeans are banned in at least one elementary school in New York City. A school district in Phoenix is requiring teachers to cover up tattoos and excessive piercings. And several Arizona schools are strictly defining business casual.
In an increasingly diverse nation where what you wear may be the ultimate self-expression, teachers are falling victim to the same dress code rules as their students.
In most cases, schools are taking the actions because they believe some teachers are dressing inappropriately. School board members received parental complaints about teacher dress at Arizona’s Litchfield Elementary School District, Superintendent Julianne Lein says.
The move comes at a time when the number of public schools requiring uniforms has nearly doubled over the past decade to 19%, reports the National Center for Education Statistics. The center doesn’t track teacher uniforms or dress codes. But it soon may have to, as schools have moved to:

Wichita’s 2011-2012 budget was $606,000,000 for 50,103 students ($12,095/student). Madison spent 18.6% more, or $14,858/student during the 2011-2012 budget cycle.

The Advocate:

A deserved amount of controversy is generated by the state’s new vouchers for private school tuition, but it is not the only element of state law that changed this year. Significant changes are in store and new demands placed on traditional school systems by education bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal in this year’s Legislature.
Parts of the wide-ranging new laws — crammed together as Act 1 and Act 2 of the 2012 Legislature — affect the relationships between school boards and superintendents, giving the latter more untrammeled authority in hiring and firing. Other parts of the package include new alternative course work that might be available online for some students.
And amid all this is the looming implementation of a teacher evaluation system that could provide a significant amount of new work for principals and other supervisors of teachers, as well as paperwork demands. The state, for example, is working to assess whether computer capabilities in local systems are up to the task — for otherwise, the new demands could overwhelm the information technology that cash-strapped public schools can today afford.

Ellen Knickmeyer:

Dressed in caps and gowns, the college students packing a graduation ceremony in suburban Washington, D.C., acted like excited graduates anywhere in the United States.
Except, perhaps, when the men broke into tribal line dances. Or when the women, wearing headscarves, burst forth with zagareet, soaring trills of their tongues, in celebration.
The more than 300 graduates gathered at a hotel overlooking the Potomac River were all from Saudi Arabia, part of a massive government-paid foreign study program to earn bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees and return home to help run their country.

Stephanie Banchero:

The Tennessee State Board of Education has cleared the way for a charter school backed by neighborhood parents to open in middle-class West Nashville.
The board voted Friday to direct the Metro Nashville Public Schools to approve an application by Great Hearts Academies, a nonprofit that operates prep-school-like charter schools in the Phoenix area, to open a school in 2014. The group hopes to open four more schools across Nashville after that.
The Nashville school board, whose members are elected on a nonpartisan basis, approved two other charter schools last month. But it twice rejected Great Hearts’ application, claiming the school would recruit only affluent students and harm diversity efforts in the district, where 45% of elementary students passed state reading exams last year, and 33% passed math. The local teachers union didn’t take a public stand on the application.

Nashville schools spent $674,034,800 [PDF] to educate 79,117 students [District Fact Sheet PDF, 71% “economically disadvantaged”] during the 2011-2012 school year ($8519.47/student), 42% less than Madison’s $14,858.

Quinn Cummings:

I don’t know how most people spend their second morning home schooling. I spent mine hyperventilating into a paper bag. After less than 24 hours of educating my child at home, I was struck by the realization that I wasn’t up to the task and should move immediately to Plan B. Except I didn’t have a Plan B.
For two years leading up to this I had watched my daughter convince experienced, well-meaning teachers that she was incapable of mastering long division when, in fact, she simply didn’t like long division. Alice’s ploy raised a larger concern: At age 9, she appeared to be cruising along in school without actually doing any work. To my sorrow, it appeared I had given birth to myself, another pleasant slacker fated to a lifetime of successfully studying for midterms between classes until barely paying attention stopped working. Alice wasn’t learning how to learn, she was learning how to coast. Maybe I could wait and see if she came to learning on her own. Or maybe she needed a different kind of education.
Her father and I checked out a few middle-school programs known for their rigor. Each promised to challenge Alice academically but also promised hours of homework every night. I’m greedy. I want my child challenged, but I don’t want her staying up until 2 a.m. every night translating “The Aeneid.” I knew we had a small window of opportunity to teach Alice to love learning, but I also knew there was an equally small window for her to be a child. Her academic options seemed to lie on either side of a wide chasm: a fluffy pillow on one side, a jackhammer on the other. I tried home schooling because I couldn’t find a better alternative.

Paul Caron:

Following up on my previous post, Baylor Law School Sends Mass Email With Personal Data on Each of its 442 Admitted Students (Apr. 6, 2012): C. Michael Kamps, a CPA who was denied admission to Baylor Law School, has filed an age discrimination lawsuit agains the school based in part on the improperly released data, claiming that his 169 LSAT was higher than 97% of Baylor’s admitted class and that the school failed to take into account the fact that his 3.2 GPA from Texas A&M (Class of 1979) was earned in the days before rampant grade inflation.

From the complaint (2MB PDF):

Plaintiff, more than thirty years ago, graduated from a major and wel-respected university in the top quarter of his class comprising primarily his similarly aged peers.
Plaintiff first applied to Defendant Baylor University’s Law School in 2009, for the fall quarter commencing in 2010. Plaintiff also applied for a specific merit based scholarship with published and long-established qualifying criteria which Plaintiff met. The candidate pol for this class, and for the scholarship, generally consisted of applicants substantially younger than Plaintiff.
2. Plaintiff expected to be, and insists that he be, allowed to compete on an equal footing with the much younger candidates for admission to Law School and access to merit based scholarships.
Plaintiff expects, and insists, that Defendants judge and evaluate his application as one submitted by a top quarter graduate of a major and wel- respected university.
3. Defendants refuse and insist upon applying disparate standards to older vs. younger candidates. Defendants pretend that these are not disparate standards at all ,but rather one factually neutral and uniform standard.
These standards, as applied by Defendants, are biased with respect to age and are therefore in violation of the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, 42U.S.C.§6101etseq., (“the Act”) and its implementing Regulations at 34C.F.R. Part 10 (“Regulations”). Defendants persist in this practice
even while faced with overwhelming evidence of, and while actually acknowledging, the bias.
Plaintiff scored at the 97th percentile on the Law School Admissions Test (“LSAT”), with a score of 169. Plaintiffs “Baylor Index,” an index calculated by multiplying Plaintiff’s UGPA by a factor of 10 and adding that product to Plaintiffs LSAT score, is 201.

Maria Popova:

“The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.”
In an age obsessed with practicality, productivity, and efficiency, I frequently worry that we are leaving little room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are, ideas that we may later transform into new combinations with applications both practical and metaphysical.
This concern, it turns out, is hardly new. In The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (PDF), originally published in the October 1939 issue of Harper’s, American educator Abraham Flexner explores this dangerous tendency to forgo pure curiosity in favor of pragmatism — in science, in education, and in human thought at large — to deliver a poignant critique of the motives encouraged in young minds, contrasting those with the drivers that motivated some of history’s most landmark discoveries.

Spokane Superintendent Shelley Redinger recently posted a survey. Via a kind Laurie Rogers email.
Spokane plans to spend $316,584,805 [2012-2013 Budget Document] for 29,275 students or $10,814.17/student, about 28% less than Madison’s $15,132. Compare the community demographics here: Madison | Spokane.

Suresh Gupta:

In order to appreciate the recent explosion of business opportunities related to private education in China, we need to understand the cultural realities that have played a contributing role. Some of these factors include the traditional Chinese family structure with its emphasis on education, China’s one child policy and China’s explosive economic growth during the past twenty years. Additionally, with the rising growth of its middle class (currently at fifty-two plus million and projected to grow to over ninety-eight million people by 2015), one is far from surprised to see an education market currently valued at over $240 billion dollars and estimated to grow by 15% a year. Deloitte predicts that by 2015, the private education sector will have reached a market size nearing or in excess of $102 Billion.

S. Katherine Nelson, Kostadin Kushlev, Tammy English, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Sonja Lyubomirsky

Recent scholarly and media accounts paint a portrait of unhappy parents who find remarkably little joy in taking care of their children, but the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive. In three studies, we used a strategy of converging evidence to test whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than do non-parents (Study 1), feel relatively better than non-parents on a day-to-day basis (Study 2), and experience more positive feelings during childcare than other daily activities (Study 3). The results indicate that, contrary to previous reports, parents (and especially fathers) report relatively higher levels of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning in life.
Modern evolutionary psychologists position parenting at the top of the pyramid of human needs, reflecting its central role in human life (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010). Yet, some research has indicated that parenting is associated with reduced well-being (e.g., Evenson & Simon, 2005; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004; McLanahan & Adams, 1987). In particular, attention has revolved around a study showing that working mothers in Texas enjoy parenting less than watching TV, shopping, or preparing food (Kahneman et al., 2004).
Although recent media accounts paint a dismal picture of parenting, the underlying scientific research is surprisingly unclear and inconsistent. Meta-analyses have linked parenthood to lower marital satisfaction on average (Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003) and to decreases in life satisfaction in the months after childbirth (Luhmann, Hoffman, Eid, & Lucas, 2012). Few analyses, however, directly compare parents and non-parents on global measures of well-being. Instead, most investigations control for multiple demographic variables, which vary across studies. Some of these studies find that parents exhibit a higher prevalence of depression (Evenson & Simon, 2005), along with less positive and more negative affect (Ross & Van Willigen, 1996), than non-parents, whereas others reveal a net zero or small negative parenting effect (e.g., Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Di Tella, MacCulloch, & Oswald, 2003; Ferrer-i- Carbonell, 2005). Furthermore, other work suggests that parents do not experience these negative outcomes (Keizer, Dykstra, & Poortman, 2010; Kohler, Behrman & Skytthe, 2005; Rothrauff & Cooney, 2008), and, on the contrary, report relatively higher feelings of meaning, gratification, and reward (Russell, 1974; Umberson & Gove, 1989; White & Dolan, 2009). Such conflicting findings could be due to the use of divergent methods, analytical approaches, and measures, making it almost impossible to draw clear conclusions from this literature. The importance of this topic and its prominence in popular discourse demonstrates the need for rigorous examination of the link between parenthood and well-being, using multiple methods and broad well-being measures.

Terran Lane

There’s been a lot of excitement in the media about Stanford’s 100,000+ student computer science courses, MIT’s open-sourced classes, and other efforts at mass, distance-education. In some ways, these efforts really are thrilling — they offer the first truly deep structural change in how we do education in perhaps a thousand years. They offer democratization of education — opening up access to world-class education to people from all over the globe and of diverse economic and social backgrounds. How many Ramanujans might we enable, if only we could get high-quality education to more people?
But I have to sound three notes of caution about this trend.
First, I worry that mass-production here will have the same effect that it has had on manufacturing for over two centuries: administrators and regents, eager to save money, will push for ever larger remote classes and fewer faculty to teach them. Are we approaching a day in which there is only one professor of computer science for the whole US?
Second, I suspect that the “winners win” cycle will distort academia the same way that it has industry and society. When freed of constraints of distance and tuition, why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM? How long before we see the AT&T, Microsoft, or Google of academia? How long before 1% of the universities and professors garner 99% of the students and resources?

In ancient China, upper-class women had their feet tightly bound as children, preventing the bones from growing normally, so that they could be hindered in their walking, and only capable of cute little “feminine” steps around the house.
We don’t do that, of course. What we do instead with all our young people is see to it that they do not read a single complete history book in school (maiming their knowledge of history) and we confine their writing mostly to fiction, compositions about themselves, or brief little five-paragraph “essays” about something else (doesn’t matter what), which cripples their ability to write.
Even when we ask them to apply to college and show us their writing, admissions officers ask only for 500-word pieces in which they talk about themselves and their lives.
In Boston the Boston Globe has a competition that asks young people to write about courage. But is it the courage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or John Quincy Adams, or James Otis, or Patrick Henry or John Paul Jones, or Florence Nightingale that they want to hear about? Not a chance. They want the youngsters to write about their own courage, for instance perhaps when they spoke to a fellow student who was not popular, etc.
Thus we bind their learning and their imagination, and we try to prevent their access to knowledge of history and the achievements of mankind, and we try to keep them from learning how to write a serious term paper or read a substantial history book.
Why is this happening? One example of the problem is a writing consultant from Teachers’ College, Columbia, who was given a $50,000,000 (yes, $50 million) contract to teach students reading and writing in New York City. When I asked her if she would be having the students write about history, she told me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” So, naturally, the students her grant enabled her to “work” with probably didn’t get into content that much either.
Mark Bauerlein wrote (The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future) that on the NAEP history test 57 percent scored “Below Basic.” To score “Basic,” the student has to know who George Washington was. To score “Below Basic” the student has to know that Scooby-Doo was never President, but they probably could not name anyone who ever was President. “Of those taking the exam, a majority, 52 percent, when asked to identify a U.S. Ally during World War II selected a member of the Axis powers–Germany, Italy, and Japan–rather than the Soviet Union” [or Great Britain].
We hear lots of complaints from many quarters that our kids are ignorant of history and cannot write. It would have made as much sense to criticize upper-class Chinese women in the Imperial days because they had such poor times in the 100-yard dash.
If we continue to keep history books away from our students, and limit their writing to brief solipsistic exercises, then we can only expect that they will continue to demonstrate the damage we have done to them, when we test them and look over the writing they are able to produce for us.
==============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, via a kind reader’s email:

In a first-of-its-kind legal maneuver, students whose reading skills are below grade level are suing their state and school district. If successful, the lawsuit could spawn others nationwide
Students are suing the state of Michigan and their Detroit-area school district for violating their “right to read.”
The class-action lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind, and potentially signals a new wave of civil rights litigation in the United States to enforce laws intended to boost academic achievement, education law experts say.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed what it has dubbed the “right to read” lawsuit on behalf of the nearly 1,000 students in the impoverished district.
Two-thirds of 4th-graders and three-quarters of 7th-graders in the Highland Park school district are not proficient on state reading tests; 90 percent of 12th-graders fail the reading portion of the final state test administered in high school, according to the complaint. Nearly 100 percent of the district’s students are African-American.

Kohn Cowan:

This page comprises a list of 1009 “essentialist explanations” of the form “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z”. I have edited some entries for uniformity, clarity, or good English. The entries are grouped for convenience rather than correctness. In particular, fictional languages belonging to actual language families are grouped with their natural language relatives. New contributions are solicited, especially for American and African languages. No flames, please.
Note: Entries attributed to me (John Cowan) are often ones that I have heard or read somewhere, or ones that were suggested by other people’s contributions but heavily modified by me.
“[We] do but jest, poison in jest, no offence in the world.” –Hamlet

Jordan Weissman:

A dozen major universities announced that they would begin providing content to Coursera, an innovative platform that makes interactive college classes available to the public free on the web. Next fall, it will offer at least 100 massive open online courses — otherwise known as MOOCs*– designed by professors from schools such as Princeton, CalTech, and Duke that will be capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time.
Founded by Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera is one of a handful of efforts aimed at using the web’s cost savings to bring Ivy League-quality courses to the masses. Its peers include the joint Harvard-MIT project edX and Udacity, a free online university created by Google executive and former Stanford professor Sebstian Thrun. (Another high-profile startup, Minerva, is attempting to create an actual “online Ivy” that students will pay to attend.)
But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That’s because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia.
Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses, which according to the New York Times enrolled 680,000 students. It now adds to its roster Duke, Caltech, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, and Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Chris Rickert via several kind readers:

Wisconsin has a “long way to go in all our racial/ethnic groups,” said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
My hope is that, given Wisconsin’s overwhelmingly white population, proficiency problems among white students will spur more people to push for policies inside and outside of school that help children — all children — learn.
“I hate to look at it that way, but I think you’re absolutely right,” said Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. “The low performance of white students in our state may just lead to the type and level of change that’s necessary in public education for black and other students of color to succeed as well.”
Indeed, Gamoran said Massachusetts’ implementation of an evaluation system similar to the one Wisconsin is adopting now has been correlated with gains in reading and math proficiency and a narrowing of the racial achievement gap in math. But he emphasized that student achievement is more than just the schools’ responsibility.
Madison has known for a while that its schools are not meeting the needs of too many students of color.

The issue of low expectations and reduced academic standards is not a new one. A few worthwhile, related links:

• April 2004 West High School Math Teacher Letter
  

  Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
  It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?

• 2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• 2006: Math Forum audio, video and links
• 2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before
• “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!
• 2006: Connected Math
• 2005: English 10
• 2009: Action Needed, Please Sign on…. Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District
• Madison will spend $374,700,000 to educate 24,861 students during the 2012-2013 school year. $15,071/student.
• wisconsin2.org.

Daniel Willingham:

My new book, When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education is now available. (There’s a link for a free download of Chapter 1 on this page.) EDIT (7:17 pm 7/18) I just saw that it’s listed as “Recommended,” with a micro-review on the Scientific American website.
I wrote the book out of frustration with a particular problem: the word “research” has become meaningless in education. Every product is claimed to be research-based. But we all know that can’t be the case. How are teachers and administrators supposed to know which claims are valid?
It’s notable that this problem exists in many other fields. However good your training, research doesn’t stand still. So how does a pediatrician who has been in practice 10 years know that what she learned in medical school as the optimal treatment for, say, croup, is still the best treatment?

Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

“Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar (see Figure 1). While 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. Nor is U.S. progress sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.”
“Meanwhile, students in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana were among those making the fewest average gains between 1992 and 2011. Once again, the larger political climate may have affected the progress on the ground. Unlike in the South, the reform movement has made little headway within midwestern states, at least until very recently. Many of the midwestern states had proud education histories symbolized by internationally acclaimed land-grant universities, which have become the pride of East Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lafayette, Indiana. Satisfaction with past accomplishments may have dampened interest in the school reform agenda sweeping through southern, border, and some western states.”
Underlying study: “Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance“

Related:

• Student scores slip with new proficiency benchmarks by Erin Richards
  

  The results: Only 35.8% of Wisconsin’s WKCE test-takers in third through eighth and 10th grade in fall 2011 scored proficient or better in reading, and just 48.1% scored proficient or better in math.
  Compare that with March, when the state released 2011 WKCE results that showed 78% and 82% of students scored proficient or better in math and reading.
  Under the new benchmarks, just 41.9% of white students scored proficient or advanced in reading, and 55.2% met that mark in math on the latest state test. Previously, more than 87% of white students were considered proficient or better in reading, and 84.3% were considered to have scored proficient or better in math in 2011.
  As for the state’s black students – many of whom attend Milwaukee Public Schools – 13.4% are considered proficient or advanced in reading, down from 58.7% using the old grading scale.
  Rep. Steve Kestell, a Republican from Elkhart Lake who chairs the Assembly’s Education Committee, called the revised picture of student performance a “necessary and long-delayed wake-up call for Wisconsin.”
  “We’ve been trying to tell folks for some time that we’ve been looking at things through rose-colored glasses in Wisconsin,” he added. “It was a hard thing to communicate, and it was largely ignored. This is a new awakening.”
  State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said: “We’ve known for years that our proficiency-cut scores are way below where they should be, and really, this shows that we have got to do a better job.”
  Under the past decade of No Child Left Behind, Wisconsin had been criticized for having a more lenient bar for proficiency than other states.

• Less than half of state’s students measure proficient under new national standards by Matthew DeFour:
  

  Still, the new results should be a “smack in the face” for Wisconsin, said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
  “It’s going to be a wake-up call,” Gamoran said. “It’s a more honest reckoning of where Wisconsin students stand relative to other students across the nation and relative to the goals we want for all of our students.”
  The old results were based on whether students were meeting Wisconsin’s definition of being at grade-level, whereas the new results reflect more rigorous standards of what it means to be prepared for college or a career used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card.
  About 3,000 4th and 8th graders in Wisconsin take the NAEP every other year. In 2011, 32 percent of Wisconsin 4th graders scored proficient on NAEP’s reading test and 39 percent scored proficient on the math test.
  The data released Tuesday marks the first time DPI has converted results of the state test, which more than 430,000 students in grades 3-8 and 10 take in the fall, to the NAEP benchmarks.
  DPI won’t release recalculated results for individual schools and districts until the fall, when it also plans to release individual school report cards with ratings on a scale of 0 to 100.
  Kim Henderson, president of the Wisconsin Parent Teacher Association, said parents pay closer attention to state test scores than NAEP scores, so the results could “bring up a lot of good questioning.”

• State sets new, tougher standards for student tests by the Associated Press:
  

  To get the waiver, Wisconsin had to develop its own accountability system in addition to teacher and principal evaluations, among other things.
  The scores will be included on new school report cards to be released in the fall. How well individual students in grades 3-8 and 10 do on reading and math tests they take in November will be released next spring.
  The new school report cards were developed in conjunction with Gov. Scott Walker, legislative leaders and others over the past year. They will include a numerical rating for individual schools from 0-100 based on student achievement, growth, graduation rates and closing of achievement gaps between different groups of students. The scores will generate an overall total that will place each school into one of five categories ranging from “Fails to Meet Expectations” to “Significantly Exceeds Expectations.”
  “This new system will empower parents, allowing them to make education related decisions based on reliable and uniform data,” Walker said in a statement.
  Sample report cards, without actual school data, are posted online to solicit feedback through Aug. 12.

• Numerous notes and links on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.
• wisconsin2.org

In 1893, when the Committee of Ten published its recommendations for high school education, Upper Education and Lower Education academics were still talking to each other. Harvard president Charles William Eliot was the chairman, and the committee, Diane Ravitch reported in Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000), included four other college presidents, three high school principals, and a college professor. In 1918, when the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education issued its report, the chairman was, as Diane Ravitch wrote, “Clarence Kingsley, a former social worker, former teacher of mathematics at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, and–at the time of the report–supervisor of high schools in Massachusetts.” (Ravitch, pp. 42,123)
The main objectives for high school students in the NEA report were: “1. Health, 2. Command of fundamental processes, 3. Worthy home membership, 4. Vocation, 5. Citizenship, 6. Worthy use of leisure, and 7. Ethical character.” These “became famous among educators as ‘the Seven Cardinal Principles,’ the seven objectives based on the needs of life.” (Ravitch, p. 124)
With this new set of objectives in view, and with the transformation of the Normal Schools
into psychobabbling Graduate Schools of Education hostile to academic content, perhaps it is not surprising that college professors and other academics were increasingly estranged from the goings on in Lower Education. What professor of history or physics or Romance languages or nanotechnology could find common ground with those at the Lower Level who were dedicated to teaching secondary students the “worthy use of leisure”?
Nevertheless, as the number of high schools grew, along with the number of colleges, one Upper Education group formed a growing interest in what people were doing in sports at the Lower Level. This would be college coaches, who saw in the strong interest in athletics at the high school level a vital breeding ground for the athletes they would need to recruit for their college programs. As a consequence, college coaches began to keep track of the progress of especially promising high school athletes in a variety of sports, and in their Lower Education Level coaches. In fact, friendly relations were often formed between high school coaches and college coaches, so that news about really good athletes could get to the Upper Level in time to enable recruiting to begin (now at about the 10th grade).
Coaches in colleges recognized that success in their jobs depended in part on their ability to locate good candidates and persuade them to come to their place of work to be athletes after high school. Lower Education coaches understood that their work and their opinions were valued by those in the Upper Education reaches of their sports.
Meanwhile, among teachers of academic subjects in Lower Education, a very different situation could be found. Teachers who identified and prepared promising students of history or physics or literature realized that their counterparts in Upper Education did not want to know them or to hear about their students. Upper Education professors left recruitment of great candidates in their disciplines completely up to the Upper Education Admissions Committees.
By contrast, Upper Education coaches have decided not to depend on the Admissions people to find the best athletes for them. In fact, they typically bring the Admissions Committees lists of the athletes who they would like to have admitted to meet the needs of their teams. Upper Education professors rarely, if ever, come to the Admissions Committees with names of scholars from the high schools they wanted admitted to strengthen their academic departments.
Of course there are many differences in the reward systems for Upper Level coaches and for Upper Level professors. If the coaches do not get good athletes they will not be able to win games, matches, or other athletic competitions and before long their jobs will be in jeopardy. On the other hand, most Upper Education professors believe they lose nothing by simply ignoring their Lower Education colleagues, their students, and their curricula. Their jobs depend on their research and publications, for the most part, and they are content to let the Admissions Committees select their students for them. When the students arrive in their courses, they often complain that these recruits are ignorant and unable to do serious Upper Education academic work, but that never seems to increase their interest in meeting Lower Education teachers or finding out what academic work is being done at that Lower level.
One result of this situation is that Lower Education teachers and scholars are aware that Upper Education academics don’t much care about what they do, while Lower Education coaches and athletes (often the same people) are quite sure that Upper Education coaches are very interested in what they are doing, to the extent, in some cases of forming good relationships between them. It is understood that Upper Education coaches may even wish to visit promising high school athletes in their homes in an effort to recruit them for their programs. It is beyond imagination that an Upper Education professor would do anything like that.
In their battles against anti-intellectualism, Lower Education people can expect little or no interest or assistance from their Upper colleagues, and the professors in Upper Education will no doubt continue to bemoan the level of preparation of their students, especially in reading and writing, without wondering, it seems, if that is the result in part of anything they have failed to do.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
17 July 2012

Tennessee Department of Education:

In July 2011, Tennessee became one of the first states in the country to implement a comprehensive, student outcomes-based, statewide educator evaluation system. This implementation was a key tenet of Tennessee’s First to the Top Act, adopted by the General Assembly with bipartisan support during 2010’s extraordinary session under the backdrop of the federal Race to the Top competition. This landmark legislation established the parameters of a new teacher and principal evaluation system and committed to implementation during the 2011-12 school year. The act required 50 percent of the evaluation to be comprised of student achievement data–35 percent based on student growth as represented by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) or a comparable measure and the other 15 percent based on additional measures of student achievement adopted by the State Board of Education and chosen through mutual agreement by the educator and evaluator. The remaining 50 percent of the evaluation is determined through qualitative measures such as teacher observations, personal conferences and review of prior evaluations and work.
An important component of the First to the Top Act was the creation of the Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee (TEAC), a group of teachers, principals, superintendents, legislators, business leaders, and other community members, which met 21 times over the course of the following year to review and discuss various issues related to policy and implementation. The committee reviewed field tests of four different observation rubrics, which were conducted in the 2010-11 school year in approximately 125 schools across the state. The TEAC supported use of the TEAM (Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model) rubric as the state model and also voted on a number of key components of implementation, including the number and structure of observations for the year. By law, those recommendations were made to the State Board of Education, which was charged with adopting the final guidelines and criteria for the annual evaluation of all teachers and principals. The board ultimately unanimously adopted the TEAC endorsed TEAM model and, in addition, approved three alternative models – 1) Project Coach in Hamilton County; 2) TEM (Teacher Effectiveness Measure) in Memphis City; and 3) TIGER (Teacher Instructional Growth for Effectiveness and Results) in 12, mostly municipal, school systems statewide. The board also approved a menu of achievement measures that could be used as part of the 15 percent measure.
In the summer of 2011, the Tennessee Department of Education contracted with the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) to provide a four-day training for all evaluators across the state. NIET trained more than 5,000 evaluators intensively in the state model (districts using alternative instruments delivered their own training). Evaluators were required to pass an inter-rater reliability exam, in which they viewed video recordings of teachers delivering lessons and rated them to ensure they understood the distinction between differing levels of performance.

Laura Waters:

Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, has an editorial in the Wall St. Journal this week assailing the “explosive growth” in America’s public school work force. Since 1970, he charges, student enrollment has “flat-lined,” yet the number of teachers and instructional aides has doubled, from 3.3 million to 6.4 million, with concurrent increases in costs.
Coulson writes, “America’s public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement–people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year.”
But there’s a panacea readily available: create state voucher systems to send all our kids to private schools. (Also, elect Mitt Romney because President Obama’s education agenda is an “expensive and tragic failure.”)
Whoa, Nellie!
While it’s no doubt a challenge to squish a radical paradigm shift within the confines of the WSJ’s 600-word limit, that’s no excuse for specious logic or casual disregard for facts. Worse, this sort of inflammatory rhetoric gives education reform a bad name.
For example, let’s look at Mr. Coulson’s claim that American public schools hire too many teachers and aides (i.e., have too low a teacher/student ratio), and that private schools are cheaper and produce higher-achieving students.
He writes, “If we returned to the student-staff ratio of 1970, American tax payers would save about $210 billion in personnel costs.”

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes:

There is no mystery about the size of the overall pie. The last budget under Governor Doyle appropriated $5,025,190,300 for elementary and secondary school aids for 2009-10 and $5,271,555,900 for 2010-11. Under Governor Walker’s budget, this total was cut to $4,845,083,000 for 2011-12 and $4,913,986,100 for 2012-13. So Governor Walker slashed general state aid to schools by about $538 million over the biennium. This is hardly cause for celebration.
How next year’s $4.9 billion in general state aid is split up among the state’s 424 school districts is determined by the school funding formula. I describe how the formula works here. This year, to just about everyone’s surprise, the formula has turned out to be Madison’s friend.
Last year, application of the school funding formula resulted in MMSD qualifying for about $15 million in general state aid. This amount was increased to about $43 million by virtue of the hold-harmless provision of the law that capped each school district’s reduction in state aid at 10% of the previous year’s total.
How could it be that the same formula that calculated that MMSD was entitled to $15 million in state aid in 2011-12 would determine that the district was in line for $53 million for 2012-13?

Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding

• usgovernmentspending.com chart & data
• Wisconsin School Finance History
• PolitiFact on the current Wisconsin budget
• Wisconsin Budget Project
• Mike Ford on “Fair Funding for Our Future”.

Steven Pressfield:

My first real job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for an agency called Benton & Bowles in New York City. An artist or entrepreneur’s first job inevitably bends the twig. It shapes who you’ll become. If your freshman outing is in journalism, your brain gets tattooed (in a good way) with who-what-where-when-why, fact-check-everything, never-bury-the-lead. If you start out as a photographer’s assistant, you learn other stuff. If you plunge into business on your own, the education is about self-discipline, self-motivation, self-validation.
Advertising teaches its own lessons. For starters, everyone hates advertising. Advertising lies. Advertising misleads. It’s evil, phony, it’s trying to sell us crap we don’t need. I can’t argue with any of that, except to observe that for a rookie wordsmith, such obstacles can be a supreme positive. Why? Because you have to sweat blood to overcome them-and in that grueling process, you learn your craft.
Here it is. Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Cheryl Truman:

Lisa Samson is not yet up in the literary firmament with the likes of J.K. Rowling. But the Kentuckybased children’s author, who writes as L.L. Samson, is in the midst of writing a wonderfully arch yet educational series, The Enchanted Attic. It’s based on what might happen if some of literature’s greatest characters wandered into modern times.
In the process, she is sending a message to young readers and their parents that the classics get that designation for a reason. When you pause to consider the characters and themes at their most basic, you learn quite a lot.
In the latest book in series, Saving Moby Dick, Ahab trades his whalebone leg for a comfortable prosthetic and garners a few lessons in internet etiquette. Young readers learn new words, the definitions of which are delivered gently and with humour.

Alan Schwartz:

A 16-year-old, determined to succeed on her own merits, who finally bends under the pressure. Students with legitimate prescriptions who are hounded for their pills. Young men and women whose use of stimulants spirals out of control.
After inviting students to submit personal stories of the abuse of prescription drugs for academic advantage, The Times received almost 200 submissions. While a majority focused on the prevalence of these drugs on college campuses, many wrote about their increasing appearance in high schools, the focus of our article on Sunday. We have highlighted about 30 of the submissions below, almost all written by current high school students or recent graduates.
In often vivid detail — snorting their own pills, stealing pills from friends — the students described an issue that they found upsetting, valuable, dangerous and, above all else, real. Most of them claimed that it was a problem rooted not in drugs per se, but with the pressure that compelled some youngsters to use them.

Melissa Korn:

U.S. business schools are trying to master a new corner of the market: specialized master’s degrees.
The courses in topics such as management, accounting and analytics, generally lasting one year and aimed mainly at college graduates with little or no work experience, have a decadeslong history at many European and other international schools.
But the programs have gained particular traction in the U.S. recently, more than doubling student enrollment to 52,014 in the 2010-2011 academic year, compared with the 2006-2007 year, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. (Demand is still higher outside the U.S., where member schools enrolled 84,134 in the 2010-2011 year.)
The benefit for schools is obvious–more tuition revenue and a critical mass of students to entice recruiters when interest in traditional M.B.A. programs is declining. But the long-term value for students remains unclear, as graduates’ salaries and job titles often look very similar to those assigned to new hires coming straight from undergraduate schools.

Alex Lo::

Our public education system may be beyond reform. Every attempt at reform either ends up accentuating the very features we were trying to change or making life worse for teachers and students. Take, for example, the new liberal studies curriculum, a signature programme of the government’s dismal, decade-old education reform.
A new study by University of Hong Kong academics has found that liberal studies, introduced in September and compulsory for all pupils in forms four to six, has achieved the opposite of the government’s original intention.
Most teachers, the study found, admitted they just spoon-fed students with liberal studies materials taken directly from textbooks, a practice they were explicitly told to avoid. Predictably, many of the 70,000 students who sat the first liberal studies exam in May simply repeated answers they had learned from textbooks. Nearly 90 per cent of 300 teachers said their main source of teaching materials came from textbooks. Only a small number of teachers believed pupils should be encouraged to explore new ideas through critical thinking. And while more than 200 teachers said bringing different perspectives to students was vital in liberal studies, only 50 of them said they would do so.

Erica Phillips & Stephanie Banchero:

In the past three years, at least 30 states have begun to use student achievement to evaluate teachers, spurred in part by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative as well as by some Republican governors. California isn’t one of them.
That could change after a ruling by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. At a hearing Tuesday, Judge James Chalfant said the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the nation’s largest, violated California’s Stull Act, a 41-year-old law that requires teacher evaluations to take into consideration the performance of students.
The current evaluation system in Los Angeles focuses on teaching methods, such as how a teacher demonstrates knowledge or guides instruction, according to the district.
In his ruling, Judge Chalfant contrasted the high rate of positive teacher evaluations in the district–97.6 in the 2009-10 school year–with low student proficiency in English and math.

Mike Ford:

State aid, curriculum, technology, school boards. All are important factors in K-12 education; none educate a single child.
That task is of course in the hands of teachers. It follows that teachers are the most important employees in schools, and arguably the most important employees in the public sector. After all, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites send their kids to spend the bulk of their childhoods learning from these employees. It only makes sense for the public to treat teachers with respect. But, as Alan Borsuk argues convincingly in the Journal Sentinel Sunday, this is not always the case.
I have written numerous times about the increasing financial burdens placed on teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools and across the state. In general, districts offset some or all of last year’s 5.5% per-pupil reduction in revenue limits by increasing employee contributions to health and pension benefits. This means that teachers across the state received a cut to their take-home pay totally unrelated to their performance. It is easy to see why teachers felt they were being disrespected.

Matt Miller:

There’s plenty that divides the parties in this pivotal election — from taxes to drones, from public workers to private equity. But there’s one uber-policy that brings Democrats and Republicans together that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
That policy involves you, younger Americans. You’re in big trouble. You don’t even know it. You’re busy trying to get a degree, land a job, start a family, save for a home. You don’t follow the news. But trust me — you’ve been taken for a ride by your elders.
The question isn’t whether such talk will stir up generational war. That’s already being waged — and you’re losing. The question is whether you’ll wake up and engage in a little generational self-defense. Let me see if I can motivate you.
How are you being swindled today? Let me count just some of the ways:
As many as 100 million Americans live in households today that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. And this is happening well before we feel the full impact of global economic integration with rising economies like India and China.

Julie McGuire:

My son is in Primary Five and doesn’t seem to take any interest in world affairs. I try to encourage him to read the newspaper and watch the news on television with me, but he’d rather play video games or watch television. Any ideas?
Computers and other electronic entertainment media have a very strong pull on children and can easily distract them from other interests. Research tells us that the pros and cons of spending a lot of time with them are complex and vary by the individual. In the short term, at least, you could limit your son’s time in front of a screen so that he has the opportunity to take an interest in other things.

Jean Latz Griffin:

“It is idiotic to have an internal war when we are threatened with extinction from the outside,“ said Shanker. “We have to work together to improve public schools or the American taxpayers, in their wisdom, will simply go elsewhere.“
Shanker said public educators must do a better job of heeding the warning signs than automakers did.
“American car manufacturers went to Japan 10 years ago and saw what was happening, but they came back and did nothing,“ said Shanker. “They said that labor and management would have to make too many sacrifices to compete with the Japanese-style factories and predicted that no one would buy those little cars the funny names anyway.“
“We can`t make the same mistake,“ Shanker said. “Labor and management have to make significant changes, significant sacrifices to keep public education alive. Tinkering will no longer help.“
Shanker, head of the nation`s second largest teachers union for 10 years and its chapter in New York City for 20 years, has reversed several traditional labor stands since a number of national reports criticizing education spawned an education reform movement.