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Need based School Funding Formula Disputed



Peter Gascoyne made an excellent point in recent comment regarding “No free lunch”. In other words, a change that’s positive in one area may not be all that great for others. Beverly Creamer notes that Hawaii is implementing a new Weighted Student Formula that is not without controversy:

A new controversy is shaping up over how money is divided among the state’s public schools under a formula based on student need.
Small and rural schools were expected to suffer staggering monetary losses under a new Weighted Student Formula that will take effect with the new school year July 27. And even though the losses were averted with an extra $20 million from the Legislature, the outcry over the expected impact on small and rural schools generated widespread concern.
Now, a special Department of Education committee charged with re-examining the formula has proposed a key change intended primarily to address wide discrepancies in funding between the largest and smallest schools.
Under the plan, each school would receive a base amount — or “foundation grant” — to assure that each could afford essential positions. The foundation grants would amount to about 25 percent of total school funding, leaving much less to be divided according to student need.




Addressing the “Teacher Gap”



Pauline Vu:

States have two weeks to comply with the latest requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and come up with a solution to what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings calls teaching’s “dirty little secret”:
The disparity in teacher quality between poor, largely minority schools and their more affluent, white counterparts.
The challenge of ensuring that schools have equal numbers of good teachers will involve huge changes in the way schools recruit, train, prepare and compensate teachers, said Scott Emerick, a policy expert for the Center for Teacher Quality, a research organization based in Chapel Hill, N.C. “There’s no silver-bullet solution to do this on the cheap,” he said.
A recent Education Trust report [PDF] revealed large discrepancies in teacher qualifications in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin between poor and rich schools, and between mostly white schools and mostly minority ones.
In Ohio’s poorest elementary schools, for example, one of every eight teachers is not considered highly qualified, but in the state’s richest schools, that number falls to one in 67 teachers. In Wisconsin, schools with the highest minority student populations have more than twice as many novice teachers as schools with the lowest numbers of minority students.




The Politics of School Choice: An Update



Clint Bolick:

Yet Arizona is not an aberration. Already in 2006, a new Iowa corporate scholarship tax credit bill was signed into law by Gov. Tom Vilsack; and in Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill increasing the Milwaukee voucher program by 50%. Gov. Ed Rendell may expand Pennsylvania’s corporate scholarship tax credit program, as he did last year. Messrs. Vilsack, Doyle and Rendell are all Democrats.
And last year, hell froze over: Sen. Ted Kennedy endorsed the inclusion of private schools in a rescue effort for over 300,000 children displaced from their schools by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, tens of thousands of kids are attending private schools using federal funds, amounting to the largest (albeit temporary) voucher program ever enacted. Before that, a voucher program for the District of Columbia was established with support from Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Joseph Lieberman.




YearlyKos Education Panel



Much good stuff here but I’ll just point to the “Blueberry Story,” which encapsulates how public education differs from business.
Click the title link for a version with comments
TJM

The Yearlykos Education Panel – a review / reflection
by teacherken
Sat Jun 17, 2006 at 03:19:37 AM PDT
NOTE also crossposted at MyLeftWing
I had the honor and pleasure of chairing the Yearlykos Education Panel discussion on Saturday Morning, June 10. After soliciting ideas from a number of people, I had finally wound up with a principal speaker, Jamie Vollmer, a responder, Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and a moderator / commenter – me. I will in this diary attempt to cover as much as I can from my notes of what occurred. I did not take detailed notes during the 15-20 minutes of questions, although I may be able to reconstruct at least some of it.
I hope after you read it you will realize why many who attended considered this one of the best panels of the get-together. Perhaps now you will be sorry you slept in after the wonderful parties sponsored by Mark Warner and Maryscott. But if you got up for Howard Dean, you really should have walked over to Room 1 for our session. See you below the fold.
teacherken’s diary :: ::
We started a few minutes late. I began the panel by explaining that we would not be discussing NCLB but talking about education far more broadly. I introduced our two panelists and explained the format — that since people already knew much of what I thought about education I would not talk much until questions. Jamie Vollmer a former business executive who had come to realize that education is not like business would address us for about 20 minutes, then Tom Vilsack who as governor of Iowa had a real commitment to public education would respond for 10-12 minutes, and then we would take questions. I then mentioned that I had a diary with a list of online resources on education (which you can still see here). I then called Jamie up.
Jamie began by making a small correction. I had described him as CEO of the Great American Ice Cream Company and as he said it was not that broad – it was the Great Midwest Ice Cream Company, based in Iowa. He explained that in 1984 Dr. William Lepley, then head of the Iowa schools, invited him to sit on a business and education roundtable, which is what began his involvement with public education. As he got more an more involved he came to three basic assumptions which he said were reinforced by the other businessmen on the roundtable:
1) Public education was badly flawed and in need of change
2) the people in the system were the problem
3) the solution was to run education more like a business.
For several years he continued along this path until he received his comeuppance while presenting at an inservice. He recounted a brief version of the Blueberry story, which can be read here from Jamie’s website and which I used as the basis of my diary BLUEBERRIES – our wrong national education policy, which got over 170 comments, a similar number of recommendations and stayed visible for quite some time.
Back to the panel – as a result of the experience he described Jamie began to examine education more closely. He came to realize that there were four main building blocks of preK-12 public education:
1) curriculum
2) attempting to get around our national obsession with testing
3) going after instruction
4) the school calendar.
Jamie went through each of three key assumptions with which he had started, and explained how his misbelief in each was stripped away. He also bluntly said the No Child Left Behind might be filled with good intentions but it was taking our educational system straight to Hell. He pointed out that we needed authentic assessment of real world tasks and not tests in isolation.
Jamie came to realize that our schools cannot be all things to all people. He quickly came to realize that the people in the system were not the problem. He asked us who actually held the status quo of American schools in place, and his answer was they we did, our neighbors did, because we are the ones who elect the school board members and the legislators and council members who make the policies that maintain the status quo.
He said that we were afflicted with the TTSP hormone — “this too shall pass” – and that people resisted change. He reminded us of Pogo overlooking the swamp — that when it comes to public schools “we have met the enemy and he is us.” He pointed people at the work of organizational thinker Peter Senge (here’s a google search which will give you some access to his ideas).
Jamie emphasized that we needed to change our mental model of the educational system. As it currently exists, everyone inside the system is there to sort people into two groups. He offered us some statistics to explain.
For those alive in 1967 who had graduated high school, 77% of the workforce worked in unskilled or low skilled labor, and the school system was designed to sort people between that group and the far smaller group who went on for further education and more skilled employment. And yet today on 13% of the workforce is the unskilled or low skilled labor, and by 2010 it will be down to 5%. Yet our model of schooling has not changed, for all our rhetoric about how important schooling is. Vollmer said of such people
If they believed it was a high priority they would put their money where their mouth is and fully fund education.
He went on to outline what he saw as the prerequisites for educational success:
– build understanding We need to help each other understand . he does not see why it needs to be difficult. Most of educational decision making should, he believes, be left at the local district level, with state and national guidelines, not mandates. He said that every mile the decision making is removed from the school increases the stupidity of the decision.
– rebuild trust he talked about how we have spent over 20 years since A Nation at Risk tearing support away from public schools. Given that less than 1/3 of taxpayers have children in public schools this is a problem. it has lead to a decline social capital, the elements we have seen in schools and elsewhere towards privatization.
– get permission to do things differently We need to allow experimentation of doing things differently than we currently do. In order to achieve this, we need to encourage involvement of people in the community including the business community, but first they need to be informed. We need the informed support of the entire community.
– stop badmouthing one another in public and emphasize the positive if all people here about schools is what is wrong, with constant attempts to affix blame to one another, there will be no opportunity to fix what needs to be fixed. There are good things happening in most of our schools, and we have to stop being reluctant to talk about them. This will help rebuild the trust that we will need to make the changes that will make a difference.
Jamie forcefully reminded the audience that while this might be a national problem, the solution would have to be from the bottom up. We need to reclaim and renew our schools, one community at a time. This was a message that clearly connected with an audience of netroots activists.
Jamie could have gone on for much longer, but I gently urged him to bring things to an end, and then Governor Vilsack took over. He said that there are two man challenges facing this nation, and that are the economic challenge and the issues of safety and security. To address these require smart, innovative and creative people. He said we don’t need to create a nation of successful test takers, which is all the NCLB is giving us, which is one reason we need to replace it. He slightly disagreed with Vollmer when he said that he felt the principal responsibility for our current situation in public education belongs with those political leaders who have chosen to manipulate our feelings about schools for political advantage without providing the resources necessary to make our schools successful.
He told an anecdote of when he visited China and met with the principal of a school. He learned that Chinese children were learning their second foreign language in elementary school. That didn’t scare him. They were beginning physics in 7th grade. That didn’t upset him. But then the principal told him they were trying to teach the children how to be creative. Vilsack’s first reaction was that you couldn’t teach someone to be creative, and his second was that if the Chinese have figured out how to do that we are in real trouble.
My notes end at this point. I have memories of Tom talking about the resources they have put into public education in Iowa, that 97% of their communities have access to high speed internet connections. He remarked about his wife being a long-time classroom teacher and the respect that causes him to have for teachers. He knew that there was some concern that he had sign off on a bill that included tuition tax credits for elementary and secondary education, and explained that he was dealing with a Republican controlled legislature and that was part of the deal necessary to get increases in teacher pay and other important needs in education to be met.
I made few remarks during the main part of the session, but we all shared equally during the Q&A. There was a question on charters, here were questions about the loss of instructional time for subjects not tested under NCLB, it was moving fast, and there was little time for me to take notes.
Were I to summarize the session, I would say it met the goals i set for it, with guidance from Gina. We wanted the session to give the people something concrete they could take back with them. I feel that jamie Vollmer’s truly inspirational presentation helped with that. I have had several people communicate in different ways that they plan to explore running for school board in order to make a difference, others who said they would be come active in PTAs or other home-school or community-school associations. The other goal Gina had was to highlight the abilities and skills of our blogging community, and raise their visibility with policy makers and politicians. I think the relationships I have developed over the months with Tom Vilsack, and the obvious mutual respect we share on the key issue of education fulfilled that part of the mandate.
Of greater importance, almost all of the feedback on the session has been positive. Here I will exclude the snarky and inaccurate article in The New Republic by Ryan Lizza – that has been discussed in great detail in the dailykos community in a variety of diaries, both by Tom Vilsack and by me. I have noted remarks in diaries posted here by others, in postings at other websites, in offline electronic messages I have received, and in the words i heard while I was still at the Riviera, and from those with whom I traveled to McCarran Airport.
I believe that American public education is at serious risk. So do Jamie and Tom. I believe that we cannot make the kinds of changes we have to make until we can develop a broad commitment to the idea of public education. Jamie talked about that, and Tom addressed some of the things he has done, and why. I believe that unless and until we organize and build connections at the grass-roots level, we will not be able to have the influence on the policy makers that is necessary if we are going to preserve and improve public education as a public good, as something that is a right for all residents of this great nation. It is my belief that the panel session on education helped move us in that direction, something that is appropriate for the netroots, because we must do it one community at a time.
I look forward to the comments of others. I know there are many attendees of that panel whom will able to contribute more than my memory and my notes can sustain — I was at times distracted by my responsibilities as moderator and timekeeper, and at others by thoughts of what I wanted to say in response to questions or to the remarks of my co-panelists.
I look forward to any additions or corrections that others may offer. I also encourage further dialog on this topic. I will, to the best of my ability, try to monitor the diary for any comments posted, especially should the community deem this diary worthy of elevation to a higher visibility in the recommended box. As always, what happens to this diary at dailykos (it will be cross-posted elsewhere) is subject to the judgment of the community as a whole, a judgment to which I am happy to submit this posting.
UPDATE Look for the comment by Chun Yang for some good info on the Q&A for which I did not have notes, but which I can assure you is quite accurate.




Graduate Gets Hard Lesson in Concession



Jim Stingl:

He looked out over the 100 kids in caps and gowns and wondered aloud what happened to everyone else. Their freshman class was nearly 500, school records show. Sure, some had transferred to other schools, but too many just gave up and quit.
Matt cried as he talked about classmate David Franklin. “This kid was one of the most talented, radiant and brilliant kids I ever knew, and he was shot and killed because he wore a T-shirt in the wrong part of town,” he said. “Something needs to change.”
Matt told me he picked Marshall because its international baccalaureate program earned him college credits. He has joined the National Guard and will attend Hawaii Pacific University to study psychology, English and theater.

Joel McNally has more.
Umstot’s myspace blog and the original speech text.




Analysis of Connected Math and Core Plus Textbooks



A reader deep into math issues emailed these two reviews of curriculum currently used within the Madison School District:

  • Connected Math (Middle School); R. James Milgram:

    The philosophy used throughout the program is that the students should entirely construct their own knowledge and that calculators are to always be available for calculation. This means that

    • standard algorithms are never introduced, not even for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions
    • precise definitions are never given
    • repetitive practice for developing skills, such as basic manipulative skills is never given. Consequently, in the seventh and eighth grade booklets on algebra, there is no development of the standard skills needed to solve linear equations, no practice with simplifying polynomials or quotients of polynomials, no discussion of things as basic as the standard exponent rules
    • throughout the booklets, topics are introduced, usually in a single problem and almost always indirectly — topics which, in traditional texts are basic and will have an entire chapter devoted to them — and then are dropped, never to be mentioned again. (Examples will be given throughout the detailed analysis which follows.)
    • in the booklets on probability and data analysis a huge amount of time is spent learning rather esoteric methods for representing data, such as stem and leaf plots, and very little attention is paid to topics like the use and misuse of statistics. Statistics, in and of itself, is not that important in terms of mathematical development. The main reason it is in the curriculum is to provide students with the means to understand common uses of statistics and to be able to understand when statistical arguments are being used correctly.

  • Core Plus (some high schools); R. James Milgram and Kim Mackey:

    In a recent issue of the NCTM Dialogues, Prof. R. Askey comments on a particular and remarkably inept misunderstanding in CorePlus, of some basic methods in probability Prof. R. Askey’s comments on a problem with Core Plus.
    Recently, Core Plus has begun to appear in the Minnesota High Schools, with the usual results, including servere questions from parents and the withdrawal of a significant number of students from the school system. This has also prompted a number of independent analyses of the program by other professional mathematicians. Here are the comments of Larry Gray, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. A Sample List of Mathematical Errors in the Core Plus program.




2006 Condition of Education Statistics



National Center for Education Statistics:

This website is an integrated collection of the indicators and analyses published in The Condition of Education 2000–2006. Some indicators may have been updated since they appeared in print

Chester Finn has more:

–A huge fraction of U.S. school children now attend “schools of choice”: more than half of K-12 parents reported in 2003 that they had the “opportunity” to send their kids to a “chosen public school.” It appears that 15 percent actually sent them to a “chosen” public school (including charter schools), to which must be added the 10 to 11 percent in private schools, the 1 to 2 percent who are home schooled, and what seems to be 24 percent who moved into their current neighborhood because of the schools. Though there is some duplication in those numbers, it looks to me like a third to a half of U.S. schoolchildren’s families are exercising school choice of some sort.
–Class-size data are elusive but it’s easy to calculate the student/teacher ratio in U.S. public schools, which has been below 17 to 1 since 1998. Even allowing for special ed, AP physics, and 4th year language classes with 5 kids in them, one may fairly ask why a country with fewer than 17 kids per public-school teacher remains obsessed with class-size reduction. (When I was in fifth grade, the national ratio was about 27:1.)
–Total expenditures per pupil in U.S. public schools reached $9,630 in 2003—up 23 percent in constant dollars over the previous 7 years. At 17 kids per teacher, that translates to almost $164,000 per teacher. Why, then, are teachers not terribly well paid? Because (using the NCES categories) the U.S. spends barely half of its school dollars on “instruction.”

Joanne does as well.




Advocating More Student Mobility Under No Child Left Behind



“Helping Children move from Bad Schools to Good Ones”:

the brief summarizes the challenges related to educating students in schools with high concentrations of poverty; reviews local efforts to address these challenges; and offers a guide for specific changes to the No Child Left Behind Act that would provide the opportunity for more children to attend economically integrated middle-class public schools.

The report is available here. Author’s presentation.




Making the Grade: Madison High Schools & No Child Left Behind Requirements



Susan Troller:

Don’t assume that a school is bad just because it’s not making adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. That comment came today from Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak, whose children attend or have attended East High School.
East and three other Madison public high schools were cited for not making the necessary progress outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. In addition to being cited for not making adequate yearly progress, East was also rapped for not having made sufficient progress for two straight years.
La Follette High School, which was on the list last year for not making progress two years in a row, was removed from that list this year. However, there were other areas this year where La Follette did not meet the required proficiency levels for some groups of students.
“I’m not saying I’m thrilled to see the results,” Mathiak said. “But it’s not as if all schools have equal populations of students facing huge challenges in their lives, chief among them issues of poverty.”

Sandy Cullen:

Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, said the preliminary list of schools that didn’t make adequate yearly progress, which the Department of Public Instruction released Tuesday, “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know.”
“Sooner or later, between now and 2013, every school in America is going to be on the list,” Rainwater said.
Rainwater said there are students at all schools who aren’t learning at the level they should be, and that the district has been working hard to address the needs of those students.

WKOW-TV:

It’s a list no school wants to land on. In Wisconsin, the number of schools not meeting federal guidelines more than doubled, from 45 last year to 92 in 2005-06. The lists can be seen here. One list contains schools not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for one year. Schools in need of improvement are schools who have failed to meet AYP for two or more years in a row.
Of the 92 schools were the four main Madison high schools, though Superintendent Art Rainwater cautioned against reading too much into it.
At many local schools this past school year, only one or two segments of students failed to score high enough on state tests.
In Madison, East, La Follette, West, and Memorial high schools all did not make enough yearly progress. The state department of public instruction cited low reading scores at three of those four.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said those lower scores came from special needs and low-income students. “Certainly this in a very public way points out issues, but the fact that they didn’t do well on this test is secondary to the fact that we have children who are in the district who aren’t successful,” said Rainwater.
Staff at Memorial and LaFollette were already working on changes to those schools’ Read 180 programs, including adding special education teachers.

DPI’s press release.
DPI Schools Identified for Improvement website.
Much more from Sarah Carr:

The list has “broken some barriers relative to different parts of the state,” Deputy State Superintendent Tony Evers said. Still, the majority of schools on the list are from urban districts such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine.




School Board OK’s 23.5M November Referendum: Three Requests in One Question



Sandy Cullen:

he Madison School Board will put one $23.5 million referendum question to voters in the Nov. 7 general election.
If approved, the referendum would provide $17.7 million for a new elementary school on the Far West Side, $2.7 million for an addition at Leopold Elementary, and $3.1 million to refinance debt.
It also would free up $876,739 in the portion of next year’s operating budget that is subject to state revenue limits. Board members could use that money to restore some of the spending cuts in the $332 million budget they recently approved, which eliminated the equivalent of about 86 full-time positions to help close a $6.9 million gap between what it would cost to continue the same programs and services next year and what the district can raise in taxes under revenue limits.

Susan Troller has more:

The board voted unanimously to hold the referendum in November, rather than placing in on the ballot during the fall primary in September. The later date, board members said, provides more time to organize an educational effort on why the projects are necessary.
“We’ll see what happens,” said board member Ruth Robarts, the lone dissenting voice on the decision to bundle all three projects together in a single question to voters in the general election. Robarts, who preferred asking the three questions separately, said she was concerned that voters who did not like one project might be likely to vote against all three.

What’s the outlook for a successful referenda? I think, as I wrote on May 4, 2006 that it is still hard to say:

(more…)




English 11 Planned for 2009?



Reprinted from the newest West High School publication, The Scallion.
In response to the popularity of the recently proposed English 10 curriculum, school administrators have begun to plan English 11, a standardized syllabus they believe will promote “equality in the school and confidence in the student.” The course is to be implemented in the 2009-2010 school year so that West High School can end the decade “with a bang!”
However, many teachers and officials disagree on which books to feature. One faction desires a challenging curriculum that would include Othello, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and the short stories of William Faulkner. Noting that this list may expose intellectual differences between students and will thus lessen the net confidence gain of the school, an opposing faction has titled their proposal “The Life Works of Dr. Seuss: from The Cat in the Hat to Green Eggs and Ham.”
The growing rift between the two factions has increasingly been manifested through harsh words. One teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, referred to the more classical curriculum as “pandering to the bourgeois interests of the University Heights junta.” In response, the classical teachers noted that while “Dr. Seuss is a widely respected author and his rhymes are humorous and entertaining, his works are inappropriate for the High School setting.”
Augmenting the current debate, the feminist movement has made clear their opposition to the Dr. Seuss curriculum. Says junior Anna James, “we don’t need to place another dead white man up on a pedestal. The Dr. Seuss proposal is representative of the sexist academia placing the unqualified man over the more qualified woman.” James has proposed her own curriculum of Virginia Wolff and Maya Angelou in a gesture the MENS club referred to as “reverse sexism.”
In the end, it seems likely that Dr. Seuss will feature prominently in the English 11 curriculum. As Art Rainwater says, “why have intellectual standards when you can have artificially contrived equality that engenders undeserved confidence and intellectual apathy in the students?”
Many thanks to the Scallion staff responsible for this humorous and insightful piece.




Weighted Student Formula : Putting Funds Where They Count in Education Reform



This is an excerpt from the conclusion of an recent paper posted on the Education Working Paper Archive by Bruce S. Cooper, Timothy R. DeRoche, William G. Ouchi, Lydia G. Segal, and Carolyn Brown. WSF stands for Weighted Student Formula, a means of budgeting that assigns money to students based on a number of factors instead budgeting by position or building. The Equity Formula in Madison is similar in some ways, but recent budget cuts have left very little money to be distributed. To read the full paper click here.
TJM
IV. Twelve Suggestions for Successful Implementation of WSF
Based on lessons learned from Edmonton, Seattle, and Houston, we have compiled the following list of “commandments” that may be useful to districts beginning to implement a WSF system. By following these guidelines, district leaders can ensure that the WSF program allocates funds equitably and provides local educators with the right kinds of incentives.
Distribute as much as possible of the operating budget via the WSF. Schools will feel the impact of budgetary discretion only when they have significant resources at their disposal.
Avoid subsidies for small schools. If small schools are to succeed, they must do so within the same per-pupil budget as larger schools.
Phase-in the financial impact of WSF over 2-3 years. Schools need time to prepare for the significant budget changes that often result from the implementation of WSF. Pilot programs may not be effective, since they can pit schools against one another.
Phase-in the use of actual teacher salaries over 5-10 years. Schools need an extended period of time to address the complex financial consequences of their hiring decisions.
Establish a public forum for making weighting decisions. Weighting decisions must be driven by the educational needs of different types of students. Principals, district administrators, parents, and teachers must all accept the weights as valid.
Base funding on a mixture of enrollment and attendance. Schools should receive a financial incentive to improve attendance rates. However, policies should not penalize schools that serve students with high rates of truancy.
Fund secondary schools at a higher base rate than elementary schools. Historically, secondary schools have required more funds per student than elementary schools, and WSF should reflect this difference.
Give schools information on expenditures as soon and as often as possible. To make responsible spending decisions, principals must have access to up-to-date financial information. Financial systems must be transparent, accurate, and up-to-date.
Make it easy for schools to purchase from outside vendors. When schools are allowed to purchase products/services from outside vendors, Central Office units must compete for business and therefore push themselves to improve services. Credit cards allow schools to make instantaneous spending decisions.
Provide appropriate support and oversight for principals and support staff. To operate in a world of budgetary discretion, new principals need management training. Each school may need one highly-trained support person to serve as the site’s business manager.
Allow parents to choose the public school that best fits their needs. Public school choice complements a WSF system by creating a financial incentive for schools to improve their educational programs, thereby attracting more students (and more dollars). Weightings ensure that schools have an incentive to recruit and serve students with special needs.
Share information on school performance with educators and parents. Decision makers must see the educational consequences of their spending decisions. Since WSF empowers schools to target programs to the local student population, local educators need accurate, up-to-date information on student achievem




Teaching Inequality



Heather G. Peske and Kati Haycock for Edtrust [PDF Report]:

Next month, for the first time, leaders in every state must deliver to the Secretary of Education their plans for ensuring that low-income and minority students in their states are not taught disproportionately by inexperienced, out-of-field, or uncertified teachers.
For many, this process will be the first step in helping the citizens of their states to understand a fundamental, but painful truth: Poor and minority children don’t underachieve in school just because they often enter behind; but, also because the schools that are supposed to serve them actually shortchange them in the one resource they most need to reach their potential – high-quality teachers. Research has shown that when it comes to the distribution of the best teachers, poor and minority students do not get their fair share.
The report also offers some key findings of soon-to-be released research in three states – Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin – and major school systems within them. Funded by The Joyce Foundation and conducted with policymakers and researchers on the ground, the research project reveals that schools in these states and districts with high percentages of low-income and minority students are more likely to have teachers who are inexperienced, have lower basic academic skills or are not highly qualified — reflecting troublesome national teacher distribution patterns.

Edspresso has more




Supreme Court to Hear Education Race Case



SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1154AP_Scotus_Schools_Race.html
Monday, June 5, 2006 · Last updated 8:37 a.m. PT
Supreme Court to hear schools race case
By GINA HOLLAND
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
With the addition of the Supreme Court’s newest member, Justice Samuel Alito Jr., top row at right, the high court sits for a new group photograph, Friday, March 3, 2006, at the Supreme Court Building in Washington. Seated in the front row, from left to right are: Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, and Associate Justice David Souter. Standing, from left to right, in the top row, are: Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. The Supreme Court said Monday, June 5, 2006, that it will decide the extent to which public schools can use race in deciding school assignments, setting the stage for a landmark affirmative action ruling (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday it will decide the extent to which public schools can use race in deciding school assignments, setting the stage for a landmark affirmative action ruling.
Justices will hear appeals from a Seattle parents group and a Kentucky parent, ruling for the first time on diversity plans used by a host of school districts around the country.
Race cases have been difficult for the justices. The court’s announcement that it will take up the cases this fall provides the first sign of an aggressiveness by the court under new Chief Justice John Roberts.
The court rejected a similar case in December when moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was still on the bench. The outcome of this case will turn on her successor, Samuel Alito.
“Looming in the background of this is the constitutionality of affirmative action,” said Davison Douglas, a law professor at William and Mary. “This is huge.”
Arguments will likely take place in November. The court’s announcement followed six weeks of internal deliberations over whether to hear the appeals, an unusually long time.
In one of the cases, an appeals court had upheld Seattle’s system, which lets students pick among high schools and then relies on tiebreakers, including race, to decide who gets into schools that have more applicants than openings.
The lower court decision was based in part on a Supreme Court ruling three years ago, written by O’Connor, which said that colleges and universities could select students based at least in part on race.
The court also will also consider a school desegregation policy in Kentucky. That case is somewhat different, because the school district had long been under a federal court decree to end segregation in its schools. After the decree ended, the district in 2001 began using a plan that includes race guidelines.
A federal judge had said system did not require quotas, and that other factors were considered including geographic boundaries and special programs.
A mother, Crystal Meredith, claimed her son was denied entrance into the neighborhood school because he is white. The Jefferson County school district, which covers metropolitan Louisville, Ky., and has nearly 100,000 students, was ordered to desegregate its schools in 1974.
The court will also consider whether Seattle’s so-called integration tiebreaker system, which has been discontinued, is tailored to meet a “compelling interest” by the school.
A group called Parents Involved in Community Schools sued in July 2000, arguing that it was unfair for the school district to consider race, and Seattle halted the system.
Lawyers for the Seattle school district had told justices that it was not known what the district’s new school board and new superintendent would do now.
Under the district’s plan, the first tiebreaker was whether an applicant has a sibling already at the school. The second tiebreaker was race: which applicant would bring the high school closer to the districtwide ratio of whites to nonwhites, roughly 40 percent to 60 percent. The third tiebreaker was distance, with closer students getting preference.
Seattle has about 46,000 public-school students. The racial tiebreaker helped some whites get into predominantly minority schools, and vice versa.
The cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, 05-908, and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 05-915.




Private Tutors & Homeschooling



Susan Saulny:

In what is an elite tweak on home schooling — and a throwback to the gilded days of education by governess or tutor — growing numbers of families are choosing the ultimate in private school: hiring teachers to educate their children in their own homes.
Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, these families are not trying to get more religion into their children’s lives, or escape what some consider the tyranny of the government’s hand in schools. In fact, many say they have no argument with ordinary education — it just does not fit their lifestyles.




Musical principals – official announcement



For immediate release
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Six elementary principals to lead different schools for 2006-07
Six elementary school principals will lead different schools next year in a series of transfers within the Madison School District. All six principals have been at their current schools for at least five years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Craig Campbell to Elvehjem from Kennedy (10 yrs.)
Lisa Kvistad to Lowell from Elvehjem (5 yrs.)
Bev Cann to Kennedy from Lowell (5 yrs.)
Linda Allen to Chavez from Thoreau (5 yrs.)
Howard Fried to Crestwood from Chavez (6 yrs.)
Liz Fritz to Thoreau from Crestwood (6 yrs.)
In making these assignment changes, Superintendent Art Rainwater said, “All of these principals have been at their schools for several years, and I believe these changes are good for the district, the principals, the staff and the students.”
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 5 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist his or her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879




State Test Scores Adjusted to Match Last Year



Sandy Cullen:

A new statewide assessment used to test the knowledge of Wisconsin students forced a lowering of the curve, a Madison school official said.
The results showed little change in the percentages of students scoring at proficient and advanced levels.
But that’s because this year’s Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations- Criterion Referenced Tests proved harder for students than last year’s assessment, said Kurt Kiefer, director of research and evaluation for the Madison School District, prompting adjustments to the statewide cut-off scores for determining minimal, basic, proficient and advanced levels that were in line with last year’s percentages, Kiefer said.
“The intent was not to make a harder test,” Kiefer said, adding that the test was particularly more difficult at the eighth- and 10th-grade levels. “It had nothing to do with how smart the kids were.”
While scores can differ from district to district, Kiefer said, increases in students testing proficient and advanced are not as profound as districts might have hoped.

Kevin Carey recently wrote how states inflate their progress under NCLB:

But Wisconsin’s remarkable district success rate is mostly a function of the way it has used its flexibility under NCLB to manipulate the statistical underpinnings of the AYP formula.

I’m glad Sandy is taking a look at this.
UW Emeritus Math Professor Dick Askey mentioned changes in state testing during a recent Math Curriculum Forum:

We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.

Alan Borsuk has more:

This year’s results also underscore a vexing question: Why does the percentage of students who are proficient or advanced drop from eighth to 10th grades? The decline was true almost across the board, including across ethnic groups, except in language arts. In reading statewide, the percentage of students who were advanced and proficient held close to steady from third through eighth grade and then dropped 10 points, from 84% to 74% for 10th grade. The decline was even steeper for black and Hispanic students – in each case, 17-point drops from eighth to 10th grade.
Overall, lower test scores at 10th grade are part of a broader picture of concern about how students are doing in high school that has put that level of education on the front burner nationwide, whether it is special programming from Oprah Winfrey or efforts by the National Governors Association, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or others.
But assistant state schools superintendent Margaret Planner said one factor in the 10th-grade drop simply might be that many students at that level do not take the tests very seriously. Their own standing is not affected by how they do, although the status of their school could be affected seriously. She referred to the tests as “low stakes” for students and “high stakes” for schools under the federal education law.

Planner was most recently principal at Madison’s Thoreau Elementary School.
Madison Metrpolitan School District’s press release.




Lapham Students Run to Build Library for African Orphans



In an effort to build community, enhance self-esteem and inspire the
spirit of giving among its students, Lapham Elementary School has
organized a very special service-learning project. The “Lapham to
Lubasi Run-a-thon”, held Wednesday May 10th, was led by one of the
school’s second grade classes to raise awareness of poverty in Africa
and to collect books to build a library for the Lubasi Children’s
Home, an orphanage in Livingstone, Zambia.
Lubasi is a community-supported home for over sixty Zambian children
ranging in age from 5 to 15 years. As part of their Africa curriculum
this spring, a class of Lapham second graders made a connection with
this special home, and has been writing back and forth to learn more
about life in Africa. And learning about some of the challenges of
growing up in a poor country made the students eager to help.
Inspired by teacher Catherine McCollister’s passion for running and
fitness, they selected the run-a-thon as their way to support their
new friends, and they enlisted the entire school to help.
The event was a great success. The students had a collective goal of
832 laps around the field. With each lap representing 10 miles, this
goal would symbolically take the runners the 8,320 miles from Lapham
School all the way to the Lubasi Home for Children. Nearly 250
students ran the course in three waves. Parents and teachers cheered
the students on and everyone celebrated together as laps accumulated.
An old school bell was rung at every one hundred laps reached. By the
time the third wave had finished, the students had run over 1,200
laps.
The students also surpassed their goal for book donations. With a
goal of collecting at least 200 books, their efforts have raised over
450 beautiful new books so far, as well as several hundred dollars to
cover shipping and help Lubasi with library construction costs.
Next week Lapham students will write letters to their friends in
Zambia, and pack up their gift to send the 8,320 miles to Lubasi.
For more information, please contact:
Katherine Davey, (608) 770-9066 or katherine_davey@yahoo.com




Schools in seven Wisconsin metro areas rated highly



Seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin are in the top 25 metros for public schools in the country, according to a survey ranking U.S. school districts with 3,300 students or more. The survey was conducted by Expansion Management Magazine, a monthly business publication for executives of companies that are actively looking to expand or relocate facilities within the next three years. The seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin—Sheboygan (5), Eau Claire (7), Madison (8), Wausau (11), Appleton(16), Oshkosh-Neenah (20), and Fond du Lac (24)—appeared in a list of the 25 Top Metros for Public Schools. Schools in these areas, plus Green Bay and La Crosse, were named to the magazine’s 5-Star Public Schools Metros list.
“I am extremely proud of Wisconsin teachers and students for their dedication to quality teaching and learning, and their hard work shows in this survey of the best metropolitan school systems in the nation,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster. “Our students, overall, consistently score among the very best in the nation on the major college entrance exams and high school graduation rates. This affirmation of the quality of Wisconsin schools from an independent, unbiased study, underscores our students’ dedication to excellence in learning and academic achievement, and the support they
receive from their teachers, families, and communities.
“Public education in Wisconsin is moving forward, supported by our early learning and classsize reduction programs. This recognition tells us that we are on the right track and must continue to invest in education, pre-kindergarten through university. Our sustained efforts as students, educators,parents, community volunteers, and citizens will ensure that our students graduate with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in postsecondary education, the workplace, and as citizens of our 21st century global society,” she said.
The magazine rated the metro area schools as a way of providing a basis for executives to compare the type of work force they are likely to encounter in various communities around the country. Using the data from its 15th annual Education Quotient ratings, which compared 2,800 secondary school districts throughout the country, Expansion Management grouped school districts into Metropolitan
Statistical Areas (MPAs). Public schools in those 362 MPAs were compared according to a variety of categories, including college admission test scores, graduation rates, beginning and average teacher
salaries, per pupil expenditures, and student-teacher ratio.
Bill King, chief editor of Expansion Management Magazine, speaking to the importance of quality schools to business success, said, “Today’s workers, most of whom are high school graduates, must possess skills far beyond those needed just a generation ago. Clearly, the quality of the public schools is a pretty good indicator of the type of manufacturing work force a company is likely to encounter in a
particular community.”
NOTE: A list of the Best Overall U.S. Metros for Public Schools with 3,300 students or more, according to Expansion Management magazine, follows.
Top Metros for Public Schools
1. State College, Pa.
2. Ithaca, N.Y.
3. Lawrence, Kan.
4. Iowa City, Iowa
5. Sheboygan, Wis.
6. Charlottesville, Va.
7. Eau Claire, Wis.
8. Madison, Wis.
9. Columbia, Mo.
10. Harrisonburg, Va.
11. Wausau, Wis.
12. Ames, Iowa
13. Missoula, Mont.
14. Grand Forks, N.D.-Minn.
15. Billings, Mont.
16. Appleton, Wis.
17. Bloomington, Ind.
18. Flagstaff, Ariz.
19 Glens Falls, N.Y.
20. Oshkosh-Neenah, Wis.
21. Blacksburg-Christianburg-Radford, Va.
22. Jonesboro, Ark.
23. Burlington-South Burlington, Vt.
24. Fond du Lac, Wis.
25. Ocean City, N.J
For further information, contact Joseph Donovan, Communications Officer, DPI, 608.266.3559




The Model Students



From the New York Times a discussion of how Asian families value education and how those family values result in successful students.
The Model Students
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.
Increasingly in America, stellar academic achievement has an Asian face. In 2005, Asian-Americans averaged a combined math-verbal SAT of 1091, compared with 1068 for whites, 982 for American Indians, 922 for Hispanics and 864 for blacks. Forty-four percent of Asian-American students take calculus in high school, compared with 28 percent of all students.

(more…)




Assist students who enter high school with poor academic skills



A report from an organization called MDRC strikes a responsive chord because the report stresses the need to “assist students who enter high school with poor academic skills” instead of dumping them in English 10 and to improve instructional content and practice:

[The report] offers research-based lessons from across these evaluations about five major challenges associated with low-performing high schools: (1) creating a personalized and orderly learning environment, (2) assisting students who enter high school with poor academic skills, (3) improving instructional content and practice, (4) preparing students for the world beyond high school, and (5) stimulating change in overstressed high schools.
The overall message of this synthesis is that structural changes to improve personalization and instructional improvement are the twin pillars of high school reform. Small learning communities and faculty advisory systems can increase students’ feelings of connectedness to their teachers. Especially in interaction with one another, extended class periods, special catch-up courses, high-quality curricula, training on these curricula, and efforts to create professional learning communities can improve student achievement. School-employer partnerships that involve career awareness activities and work internships can help students attain higher earnings after high school. Furthermore, students who enter ninth grade facing substantial academic deficits can make good progress if initiatives single them out for special support. These supports include caring teachers and special courses designed to help entering ninth-graders acquire the content knowledge and learning skills that they missed out on in earlier grades.




Speak Up For Strings – Thanks for Emailing the School Board: Keep The Emails Coming



MMSD’s School Board meets tonight to discuss the 2006-2007 school budget. There are no public appearances on tonight’s agenda, but the Madison community can continue to email the School Board in support of elementary strings at: comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Thank you to the parents and community who have attended the public hearing and who have sent emails to the School Board in support of elementary strings for Madison’s 9- and 10-year old students.
Cutting elementary strings will hurt low-income children! Keep the emails coming in support of about 550 low-income children who signed up for elementary strings – no other organization in Madison or Dane County offers an academic year long class that teaches this many children how to play an instrument. Madison School Board: Let’s work together to enhance this learning experience for our children; not tear it down and not tear it down before hearing from and working with the community.
I support restoring elementary strings to 2x per week, and I support forming a community task force on elementary strings and fine arts education to build fine arts education in Madison, not continue to tear it down. I reject late spring reports from the District administration that are clearly biased against this course and have not engaged teachers, music professionals, the community in the preceding 4 years! It’s not a administrative staffing issue, but it is poor, poor planning. We’ve had revenue caps since the early 1990s, and the Superintendent has been cutting fine arts since 1999 with no long-term plan in place, no community task force formed.
Call for an end to unfair cuts to elementary strings – cut 50% last year. No other high demand, highly valued course has been targeted in any year let alone year in and year out for cuts for 5 springs!
The state needs to take action on school financing; Madison needs the MMSD School Board to take action on elementary strings and fine arts educationl. Work with the community – please start now!




MSRI Workshop on Equity in Math Education



This is to briefly summarize from my point of view what went on at the MSRI workshop on equity in math education last week. (Vicki was also there and may wish to give her side of the story so you get a more complete picture. It was a very broad workshop, 13 hours a day for 3 days. The web site is down right now, but you can view a cached version here.)
The charge of the workshop was to brainstorm solutions to the underrepresentation of (racial and ethnic) minorities in mathematics and mathematics courses which frequently serve as gatekeepers to other areas.
The participants were thus rather heterogeneous, policy-makers, mathematics educators, mathematicians and teachers, including several groups of young people from various projects who serve as mentors and tutors in mathematics.
The talks and presentations were thus rather mixed, from talks by a law professor about constitutional issues on education to examples of math games played by young tutors and an actual 9th grade math class right with 22 students from a nearby high school right in front of all participants.
There were also some chilling descriptions of the abominable conditions at some schools serving mostly black and native American students.
The usual disagreements between research mathematicians and math educators were not brought to the surface much, but were brought up in many personal conversations during breaks and meals. However, there was general agreement that the underrepresentation of minorities is a serious national problem, and that more resources and better teachers are crucial to its solution.
However, no firm solutions or consensus emerged.
The two things I took away from the workshop are:

  1. the need for more math content by math teachers, mainly at the elementary and middle school teachers, and
  2. a small but important comment by a representative from the American Indian Science and Engineering Society: Asked about cultural sensitivity in math classes for her students, she answered that even though there are some issues around this, but in the end, her students need to learn “main-stream” mathematics in order to succeed, not take watered down courses; and the earlier this starts, the more beneficial it will be to her students.



The Model Students



Nicholas Kristof:

Why are Asian-Americans so good at school? Or, to put it another way, why is Xuan-Trang Ho so perfect?
Trang came to the United States in 1994 as an 11-year-old Vietnamese girl who spoke no English. Her parents, neither having more than a high school education, settled in Nebraska and found jobs as manual laborers.
The youngest of eight children, Trang learned English well enough that when she graduated from high school, she was valedictorian. Now she is a senior at Nebraska Wesleyan with a 3.99 average, a member of the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team and a new Rhodes Scholar.

(more…)




MSCR: Middle School After-School Programs wins in top award category



A Madison School’s TV Channel 10 video, MSCR: Middle School
After-School Programs received a “Significant Community Programming”
distinction at the annual awards for the Wisconsin Association of PEG
Channels (WAPC). WAPC represents local public, educational and
government access cable channels across the state.
The TV program, cooperatively produced by Lindy Anderson of the
Madison Schools’ media production department and Nicole Graper of
Madison School & Community Recreation (MSCR), highlights the
variety of after-school programs and services available to Madison’s
middle school children.
This award marks the third year in a row MMSD-TV has been honored at
the annual ceremony. Previous awards have been presented to MMSD-TV
from the Wisconsin School Public Relations Association, the National
Alliance for Community Media and the Wisconsin Educational Media
Association.
MMSD-TV 10 can be seen on the Charter Cable system in Madison and
surrounding areas.
For more information, contact:
Marcia Standiford, 663-1969




Confessions of an Engineering Washout



Douglas Kern:

Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon.

via edspresso.




Speak Up For Strings – Monday At Midnight? Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.



In my previous post on Speak Up for Strings, I wrote about two ways to contact the School Board – one way is by speaking to the School Board at public appearances; which,is normally after the minutes of a meeting – at the beginning, before the board begins it’s business. A special Board meeting is scheduled for today, but public appearances will not be until agenda item 10, which follows many substantive agenda items, so chances to speak will not be until later in the evening – perhaps quite late.

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Marshmallows and Public Policy



A longtime reader emailed David Brooks most recent column:

Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.
In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

Lots of Mischel test links here. Sara has more on this at the Quick and the Ed.

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Civics Education in Schools



Liam Julian:

Last month, the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote a column trumpeting the value of teaching civics to American students. He interviewed Sandra Day O’Connor and former Colorado Governor Roy Romer (now serving as Superintendent of Los Angeles’s schools), both of whom are spokespersons for the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (CMS).
A trip to CMS’s website reveals many applause-worthy sentiments—indeed, simply acknowledging the importance of civics education is commendable.
Yet both CMS and Broder’s fawning column make the same mistake that plagues many civic education initiatives. Instead of proposing that students learn civics through rigorous study of historical events, meaty biographies of important Americans, or lessons that integrate American history and politics with philosophy and character education, CMS offers a different model. One that puts the cart before the horse.
CMS offers “six promising approaches to civic learning” of which “Guided discussion of current local, national, and international issues and events” is one. What does this look like? The organization envisions teachers discussing “issues students find personally relevant … in a way that encourages multiple points of view.”
The problems with this proposal are legion. It says that issues discussed be limited to those that “students find personally relevant.” One wonders how relevant most 14-year-olds would find many international events, such as the recent country-wide protests in Nepal or Chinese President Hu Jintao’s U.S. visit. A major objective of civics instruction should be to educate students and make international events and issues relevant in their lives. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Joanne comments as well: “All opinion, no facts”. Jeff Jarvis on a new French-German history text.




Report Card on American Education



American Legislative Exchange Council:

LEC has released its newest edition of The Report Card on American Education: A State by State Analysis 1983-1984 to 2003-2004. The Report Card contains over 50 tables and figures that display in various ways more than 100 measures of educational resources and achievement. It strengthens the growing consensus that simply spending more taxpayer dollars on education is not enough to improve student achievement. In addition, the report includes analysis on numerous factors that affect the public education system, including demographics, school choice and charter school initiatives.

full report[pdf]




Announcement from Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (and the 04 / 07 elections)



Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. MMSD email:

It is with great humility that I announce that I have been elected to serve as President of the Madison School Board. I am honored to have the opportunity to provide leadership to our school district and community. Serving as President is the culmination of part of a life long dream to be a public servant.
I was elected to the board in 2004. During my tenure, I have served as Chair of the Finance and Operations and Partnership Committees and most recently as role of Vice President. I welcome working with the entire elected school board. Some of the critical matters for us to address include but are not limited to: the building of new schools to accommodate our growing district, student achievement, parent involvement and strengthening communication and partnership efforts in our community. Together, we can identify and implement creative solutions to these issues.

Johnny, along with Shwaw and Ruth’s seat are up for election in April, 2007. Today’s public announcement by former Madison School Board member Ray Allen that he’s running for Mayor [more on Ray Allen] (same 04/07 election) and MTI’s John Matthews recent lunch with Mayor Dave mean that positioning for the spring election is well under way.
Another interesting element in all this is the proposed fall referendum for a new far west side elementary school [west task force] and the Leopold expansion (I still wonder about the wisdom of linking the two questions together…., somewhat of a do-over for Leopold linked to another question). Have the local prospects for passing a referendum improved since the May, 2005 vote where two out of three failed (including a much larger Leopold expansion)?
I think it’s hard to say:

Televising all board meetings and a more active district website may or may not help, depending of course, on what’s being written or mentioned.
Jason Shephard’s seminal piece on the future of Madison’s public schools will resonate for some time.
It will be an interesting year. I wish the entire Board well as they address these matters. It’s never too early to run for school board 🙂 Check out the election pages for links and interviews.

(more…)




Good Teaching for Poor Kids



Former Teacher and Principal Ruby Payne:

To survive in poor communities, Ms. Payne contends, people need to be nonverbal and reactive. They place priority on the personal relationships that are often their only significant resources and rely on entertainment to escape harsh realities. Members of the middle class, in contrast, succeed or fail through the use of paper representations and plans for the future. They value work and achievement.
. . . teachers must recognize that children from poor families often benefit from explicit instruction and support in areas that could be taken for granted among middle-class students. Those include the so-called unspoken rules, mental models that help learners store symbolic information, and the procedures that it takes to complete an abstract task.
A teacher attentive to the needs of her low-income students fills the day with pointers and checklists. She puts tools for organizing information into her students’ hands, and helps them translate it from its “street” version to its school one. She spells out reasons for learning.

via Joanne Jacobs.




Virtual Schools Must Still be Great Schools



WEAC President Stan Johnson:

The Wisconsin Education Association Council has always believed that virtual education can benefit students in Wisconsin. Advocates of an Assembly bill that WEAC opposed have criticized us, in newspapers and elsewhere, as opponents of virtual education.
However, as they criticize WEAC for opposing Assembly Bill 1060 they never inform readers that other providers of virtual education also opposed this bill and they avoid details about the actual content of the bill.

More on Stan Johnson & WEAC.




Going the Behavior Route



Sandra Boodman:

What non-drug treatments work to combat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?
It’s a question more parents are asking doctors, prompted by new concerns about the safety of medicines used to treat a problem that affects an estimated 4.4 million American children.




Work on education gap lauded



From the Wisconsin State Journal, May 2, 2006
ANDY HALL ahall@madison.com
Madison made more progress than any urban area in the country in shrinking the racial achievement gap and managed to raise the performance levels of all racial groups over the past decade, two UW- Madison education experts said Monday in urging local leaders to continue current strategies despite tight budgets.
“I’ve seen districts around the United States, and it really is remarkable that the Madison School District is raising the achievement levels for all students, and at the same time they’re closing the gaps,” Julie Underwood, dean of the UW- Madison School of Education, said in an interview.
Underwood said she’s heard of no other urban district that reduced the gap so significantly without letting the test scores of white students stagnate or slide closer to the levels of lower-achieving black, Hispanic or Southeast Asian students.
“The way that it’s happened in Madison,” she said, “is truly the best scenario. . . . We haven’t done it at the expense of white students.”
Among the most striking trends:
Disparities between the portions of white and minority students attaining the lowest ranking on the state Third Grade Reading Test have essentially been eliminated.
Increasing shares of students of all racial groups are scoring at the top levels – proficient and advanced – on the Third Grade Reading Test.
Graduation rates have improved significantly for students in every racial group.
Underwood commented after one of her colleagues, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, presented a review of efforts to attack the racial achievement gap to the Schools of Hope Leadership Team meeting at United Way of Dane County.
Gamoran told the 25- member team, comprised of community leaders from the school system, higher education, nonprofit agencies, business and government, that Madison’s strategy parallels national research documenting the most effective approaches – one-to-one tutoring, particularly from certified teachers; smaller class sizes; and improved training of teachers.
“My conclusion is that the strategies the Madison school system has put in place to reduce the racial achievement gap have paid off very well and my hope is that the strategies will continue,” said Gamoran, who as director of the education-research center oversees 60 research projects, most of which are federally funded. A sociologist who’s worked at UW-Madison since 1984, Gamoran’s research focuses on inequality in education and school reform.
In an interview, Gamoran said that Madison “bucked the national trend” by beginning to shrink the racial achievement during the late 1990s, while it was growing in most of America’s urban school districts.
But he warned that those gains are in jeopardy as Wisconsin school districts, including Madison, increasingly resort to cuts and referendums to balance their budgets.
Art Rainwater, Madison schools superintendent, said Gamoran’s analysis affirmed that the district and Schools of Hope, a civic journalism project of the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV (Ch. 3) that grew into a community campaign to combat the racial achievement gap, are using the best known tactics – approaches that need to be preserved as the district makes future cuts.
“The things that we’ve done, which were the right things to do, positively affect not just our educationally neediest students,” Rainwater said. “They help everybody.”
John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, and Rainwater agree that the progress is fragile.
“The future of it is threatened if we don’t have it adequately funded,” Matthews said.
Leslie Ann Howard, United Way president, whose agency coordinates Schools of Hope, said Gamoran’s analysis will help focus the community’s efforts, which include about 1,000 trained volunteer tutors a year working with 2,000 struggling students on reading and math in grades kindergarten through eight.
The project’s leaders have vowed to continue working until at least 2011 to fight gaps that persist at other grade levels despite the gains among third- graders.
“I think it’s critical for the community to know that all kids benefited from the strategies that have been put in place the last 10 years – the highest achievers, the lowest achievers and everybody in between,” Howard said.
“To be able to say it’s helping everyone, I think is really astonishing.”




Doyle Flunks Test on Virtual Schools



Bob Reber:

Governor Doyle recently vetoed Assembly Bill 1060 which would have reaffirmed and clarified the state’s commitment to virtual public schools in Wisconsin. Prior to his decision to veto the bill, WEAC (the teacher’s union) was making noise about the “outsourcing of education” to people who would not be qualified teachers, instructors or presenters to our children. In other words, parents! Governor Doyle reiterated the concerns of WEAC after vetoing the bill by stating, “Actual pupil instruction could be delivered by persons without a state-issued license or permit.”
Both WEAC and Governor Doyle misstate the intent of the bill to suit their own political agenda.
Interestingly enough, their take also ignores the reality of what goes on in public schools today. Currently in our public school system there are teacher aides, substitute teachers and guest presenters that instruct pupils on a daily basis. These individuals are not required to hold state-issued licenses or permits. In fact, state statutes and DPI administrative rules allow for the local school boards to determine the requirements for these persons.

West Bend Parent Owen Robinson calls the recent court decison on virtual schools “A Victory for Children“. Kristof’s recent article addresses this isue as well.




Budget proposes ESL/bilingual advisory council



An inconspicuous provision in the newly unveiled MMSD budget document would establish an ESL/bilingual advisory council (Department & Division Detailed Budgets, page 55).
I encourage the Board of Education to remove the provision and give any proposed council the careful and detailed attention the board gave to the attendance task forces and equity task force.
As the provision stands, the budget document provides absolutely no justification, no charge, no detail, no membership, no cost, and no staffing for the proposal.
The advisory council might be valuable, but it needs much more consideration before the board acts on it.
Last year a similarly obscure phrase led to the creation of two new classrooms and an expenditure of $350,000 at Marquette.
I see a pattern here. Cryptic language being use to launch new initiatives without board or public input.

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Fund 80 Is Worth Our Support



Carol Carstensen:

What is Fund 80, and why are people saying such awful things aboutit?
Fund 80 is the state accounting code for community services expenditures,the major portion of which is for Madison SchoolCarstensen Community Recreation (MSCR) and the district’s cable channel 10.The current budget for community services is $11 million. Of that $8 millionis from the tax levy; the remainder comes from fees and grants.
MSCR programs range from exercise programs for seniors to swim lessons forinfants and toddlers, from adult sport leagues to summer day camps forelementary students, plus art and dance classes for all ages.
The 2001-03 state budget allowed community services expenditures to bemoved out from under the revenue cap imposed on school districts. This wasdone so that adult softball leagues could be funded without reducing a schooldistrict’s core educational program for students.

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What Makes A Good High School?



NPR’s Elaine Korry:

How can U.S. high schools do a better job? A new study identifies key characteristics of high schools that work. And at Granger High in Washington state, the principal demands high standards for students and staff.

audio




Opening Classroom Doors



A good teacher friend emailed this article: Nicholas Kristof:

Suppose Colin Powell tires of giving $100,000-a-pop speeches and wants to teach high school social studies. Suppose Meryl Streep has a hankering to teach drama.
Alas, they would be “unqualified” for a public school. Elite private schools would snap them up, of course, but public schools that are begging for teachers would have to turn them away because they don’t have teacher certification.
That’s an absurd snarl in our education bureaucracy. Let’s relax the barriers so people can enter teaching more easily, either right out of college or later as a midcareer switch.

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Weekly Email Message



Carol Carstensen:

Parent Group Presidents:
MEMORIAL AND WEST AREA SCHOOLS: NOTE FORUM DESCRIBED UNDER MAY 8.
BUDGET FACTOID:
The 2006-07 proposed budget is on the district’s web site (www.mmsd.org/budget). The Executive Summary provides an overview of the budget. The list of specific staff cuts is found on pages 3 & 4 of Chapter 3, Department & Division Reports.
None of the cuts are good for the district or for the education of our children but they are required to keep the budget in compliance with the state revenue caps. Since there is likely to be considerable discussion about the cut affecting the elementary strings program, I wanted to provide a little additional information. The administration is proposing to continue the current structure (strings once a week for 45 minutes) for 5th graders only. Additionally, there is a recommendation to have a committee of district staff and UW music education specialists develop a new approach for K-5 music that will include, for all students, experience playing an instrument.
There are forums on the budget scheduled for Tuesday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. at LaFollette and Tuesday, May 9 at 6:30 at Memorial.

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Florida Links Teacher Pay to Student Test Scores



Peter Whoriskey:

A new pay-for-performance program for Florida’s teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils’ standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students’ exam results.
The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans that award raises based largely on academic degrees and years of experience.
Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has characterized the new policy, which bases a teacher’s pay on improvements in test scores, as a matter of common sense, asking, “What’s wrong about paying good teachers more for doing a better job?”
But teachers unions and some education experts say any effort to evaluate teachers exclusively on test-score improvements will not work, because schools are not factories and their output is not so easily measured. An exam, they say, cannot measure how much teachers have inspired students, or whether they have instilled in them a lifelong curiosity. Moreover, some critics say, the explicit profit motive could overshadow teacher-student relationships.




MMSD Budget Mystery #6: FTEs from the Black Box Budget



Once again the strange MMSD budget process presents uncountable mysteries for our intrepid investigators.
Somehow the administration puts this year’s budget and staff into a black box somewhere in the Doyle Building and miraculously out comes a prediction of the FTEs needed to continue the current level of services, as well as proposed FTEs for a balanced budget.
A look at this year’s FTEs compared to the balanced budget FTEs produces a much different picture for investigation, as you can see from the attached Excel file.
Train your spy glasses on the puzzling FTEs in a couple of job classifications.
In 2005-2006 the district employed 34.70 supervisors. However, the administration said only 11 are need under the cost to coninue budget (page 41) and 12 under the balanced budget. Page 41 then shows an increase of one position, when the comparison between current FTEs and the balanced budget shows a reduction of 22.7. (As an aside, does the cost to continue with 11 supervisors mean that last year the district employed 23.70 supervisors who really weren’t needed?) Very strange.
In another inexplicable change, the district employed 94.57 food service workers in 2004-2005. This year’s balanced budget proposes 105.89 FTEs for Food Service Workers. Why? Why does the district need 11.32 more FTEs to serve about 300 fewer students? Maybe we’re getting bigger eaters in the MMSD. Who knows?
Check this writer’s facts, the district’s facts, and come up with soluitons to the Mysteries of the Black Box Budget!




MMSD Cross-High School Comparison — continued



I recently posted a comparative list of the English courses offered to 9th and 10th graders at Madison’s four high schools. The list showed clearly that West High School does not offer its high achieving and highly motivated 9th and 10th grade students the same appropriately challenging English classes that are offered at East, LaFollette and Memorial.
Here is the yield from a similar comparison for 9th and 10th grade Social Studies and Science.

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Fifth Verse – Same, Sorrowful Tune: Superintendent Proposes to Elminate Elementary Strings



Other districts facing fiscal and academic achievement challenges have had successes maintaining and growing their fine arts education – through strategic planning, active engagement and real partnerships with their communities. In Tuscon, AZ, with a large low income and hispanic population, test scores of this population have climbed measurably (independent evaluations confirmed this). This state has received more than $1 million in federal funding for their fine arts education work. School districts in Chicago, New York, Texas and Minneapolis have also done some remarkable work in this area.
In my opinion, the administration’s music education work products and planning efforts this year are unsatisfactory, unimaginative and incomplete. In spite of research that continues to demonstrate the positive effects on student achievement (especially for low income students) and the high value the Madison community places on fine arts, the administration continues to put forth incomplete proposals that will short change all students, especially our low-income students, and the administration does its work “behind closed doors.”
Three or four weeks ago, I spoke at a board meeting and said I thought we needed to do things differently this year – Shwaw Vang and other board members supported my idea of working together to solve issues surrounding elementary strings. Apparently, the administration saw things differently. Since my public appearance the Superintendent has issued two reports – one eliminating elementary strings replacing K-5 music with a “new, improved” idea for K-5 music and a second report with enrollment data presented incompletely with an anti-elementary strings bias. Teachers had no idea this proposal or data were forthcoming, saw no drafts, and they did not receive copies of statistics relevant to their field that was sent last week to the School Board. Neither did the public or the entire School Board know these reports were planned and underway. During the past 12 months, there were no lists of fine arts education priorities developed and shared, no plans to address priorities, processes, timelines, staff/community involvement, etc. String teachers received no curriculum support to adjust to teaching a two-year curriculum in 1/2 the instructional time even though they asked for this help from the Doyle building, and they never received information about the plans for recreating elementary strings in the future. None.
I don’t feel the Superintendent proceeded in the manner expressed to me by Mr. Vang nor as demonstrated by the School Board’s establishment of community task forces over this past year on a number of important issues to the community. Madison’s love of fine arts lends itself well to a community advisory committee. I hope other Board members support Mr. Vang’s community team approach, rejecting the Superintendent’s recent music proposal as incomplete and unacceptable.
In his fifth year of proposals to eliminate elementary strings, the Superintendent is proposing a “new and improved” K-5 music that is not planned for another year, but requires elimination of Grade 4 strings next year. The recent proposal, once again, was developed by administrators without any meaningful involvement of teachers and no involvement of the community. Elementary strings and fine arts education are important to the community. The Superintendent did not use a process that was transparent, well planned with a timeline, open and involved the community.
Music education, including elementary string instruction, is beneficial to a child’s developing, learning and engagement in school. However, music education, also directly supports and reinforces learning in math and reading. Instrument instruction does this at a higher level and that’s one of the reasons why MMSD’s music education curriculum introduces strings in Grade 4, following a sequence of increasing challenges in music education. In fact, all the points made in the Superintendent’s “new” K-5 music program, including multicultural experiences, exist in MMSD’s current music curriculum. The only thing “new” in the Superintendent’s proposal is the elimination of elementary strings.
It is not acceptable to say that we have to do something, because we have to cut money. Also, this is not about some folks being able to “yell” louder than others. To me, this is about five years that have been wasted – no planning, no community involvement, no shared visions. Our kids deserve better. Let’s get started on a new path working together now.

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Milwaukee Graduation Rates – Poverty & Governance



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial:

t is simply nothing short of catastrophic that so many Milwaukee youngsters are being left behind in a world in which a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma. It’s a trend that bodes ill for the region’s capacity to grow and compete.
Yes, Milwaukee again makes a list it should wish it weren’t on with a ranking that should properly make every Milwaukee Public Schools official, School Board member, teacher, parent and taxpayer intensely introspective, not to mention angry.
That’s because, whether the graduation rate is 45% – ranking it 94th among the 100 largest school districts in the country, according to the generally conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute – or 61% or 67%, what, respectively, the state and district say it is, that’s too few high schoolers graduating.
And the gap between African-American and white achievement in Wisconsin (and between boys and girls) should be topics getting more focus than they have to date. The Manhattan Institute study, released Tuesday, says Wisconsin overall enjoys an 85% graduation rate, but for African-Americans statewide, it’s 55%, the second lowest in the country.
Yes, we know all the societal factors involved in low graduation rates, mostly revolving around poverty. However, these graduation figures also point to a degree of failure in the district in dealing with these realities




DC Public Schools & Charters



Kevin Carey:

Normally I leave charter school issues to my colleagues Eduwonk and Sara Mead. But this morning’s front page article in the WaPo struck me as too obvious to pass up. It details how DC Public Schools is considering a novel arrangement with KIPP, one of the city’s most successful charter schools. KIPP wants to start a new middle school, but is having a hard time finding space. Meanwhile, one the regular DCPS elementary schools is losing enrollment and thus has too much space, to the point that it’s in danger of being closed. Thus, the arrrangement: co-locate in the same building, don’t overlap grades, and coordinate curricula so students from the elementary school can stay in the building and go to the KIPP middle school if that’s what they want to do.

Sounds great, right? Not to DC school board vice president Carolyn Graham, who said:

“We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don’t want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability,” she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. “We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students would benefit.”

Hmmm. You know, that’s kind of wordy, let’s tighten that up a little:

“We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don’t want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability,” she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. “We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students I would benefit.”

There we go. Much more clear.

It’s true that more students in charter schools means less students in DCPS. But if you’re going to complain about that, you’ve got to at least make an attempt to say why that would be bad, particularly wih the test scores, parental demand, and the best judgment of the DCPS superintendant providing evidence to the country. The fact that Graham offers nothing of the kind is enormously telling




6% Success Rate: From High School to the Future: A first look at Chicago Public School graduates’ college enrollment, college preparation, and graduation from four-year colleges



Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago:

Following CPS (Chicago Public Schools) graduates from 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2003, this report uses records from Chicago high schools and data from the National Student Clearinghouse to examine the college experiences of all CPS alumni who entered college in the year after they graduated high school.
The study paints a discouraging picture of college success for CPS graduates. Despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of seniors state that they expect to graduate from a four-year college, only about 30 percent enroll in a four-year college within a year of graduating high school, and only 35 percent of those who enroll received a bachelor’s degree within six years. According to this report, CPS students’ low grades and test scores are keeping them from entering four-year colleges and more selective four-year colleges.

Complete study [14.9MB PDF]

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AP Poll: Teachers & Parents on No Child Left Behind



Ben Feller:

Teachers are far more pessimistic than parents about getting every student to succeed in reading and math as boldly promised by the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s left a huge expectations gap between the two main sets of adults in children’s lives.
An AP-AOL Learning Services Poll found nearly eight in 10 parents are confident their local schools will have students up to state standards by the 2013-14 school year target. Yet only half of teachers are confident the kids in their schools will meet that deadline.
The finding underscores a theme in the poll. Parents and teachers often disagree on daily aspects of education, from the state of discipline to the quality of high schools.
A major reason is that adults see the children differently. Parents tend to focus on their own children, while teachers work with dozens of students from different backgrounds.

Ms. Cornelius has more




Carol Carstensen’s Weekly Email



Carol Carstensen:

Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The administration’s proposed budget for the 2006-07 school year will be made public on Friday, April 21. Board members and the media will have hard copies of the budget and an electronic version should be up on the web site shortly. The Board begins discussion and consideration of the budget on Monday April 24th at about 6:30 p.m. There are forums scheduled for Tuesday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. at LaFollette and Tuesday, May 9 at 6:30 at Memorial.

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2006-2007 School Budget Already Implemented: What’s the Current Fanfare About?



The Superintendent, along with the President and Vice President of the School Board, is holding a press conference to announce the 2006-2007 school budget. They’re performing as if this is the start of the public discussion of the budget for next year, which it is. While late April may be the first time the School Board and the community have seen next year’s school budget, this budget has already been implemented, beginning in early April and possibly earlier –
Was the School Board involved with any aspect of the implementation of next year’s budget? NO. On April 3rd, under the Superintendent’s direction, all schools received their staffing allocations for the next year – 85% of the district’s budget is staffing. The administration says deadlines for layoff notices and surplus notices to teachers per the union contract drive this timeline, because it takes the district two months to figure out who will need to be laid off – last year it was about 10 people who received layoff notices.
What does this reason have to do with School Board’s responsibility to see that proposed resources are being allocated according the the School Board’s goals and objectives for next year? Nothing. If the Superintendent feels he needs to give allocations to schools in early April, he then needs to present the budget earlier if he is implementing allocations with budget cuts. (I do not feel the School Board understood that the budget is implemented when allocations are given when they set the budget timeline.)
Prior to the implementation of next year’s school budget, I believe the School Board needs to know what is in the budget, what cuts (if any) are being proposed, what curriculum changes are being implemented. Also, they need to know what planning is underway in other areas of the budget for next year that is using current staff time and dollars. In order to perform their responsibilities, the School Board needs some form of an Executive Budget that lays out the framework and gives the School Board the opportunity to publicly discuss the Superintendent’s proposed changes. I would recommend strongly that the School Board consider this for next year.
When could the School Board do this? I would suggest the School Board consider doing this during the month of March prior to April 3rd if that deadline is firm. Did any budget discussions take place this year, prior to April 3rd and the April 4th school board elections. NO. Johnny Winston, Jr., who chairs the Finance and Operations Committee, held no meetings in March to discuss next year’s school budget, so this might be the time to hold those meetings, asking for the presentation of an Executive level budget with proposed changes.
There is another reason to do this – staffing confusion and uncertainty. Building principals give surplus notices, but staff has no idea what the budget is, if the School Board approved these decisions (School Board has not approved the staffing allocations).
I believe budget objectives, an executive budget (by department) and any cuts to the budget need to be packaged together and the School Board needs to publicly discuss this prior to implementation. As one principal said to me years ago, “Once the Superintendent gives us our allocations, there won’t be any changes.” That’s what I have observed over the past five years. By the time the School Board receives the budget document, next year’s budget is already in place and being implemented, and the School Board ends up talking in great detail about less than $1 million of the budget, is unable to make/direct changes.
Sure, the School Board has the authority and can make any changes the majority approves, but a) why isn’t the School Board “approving” the budget vs. the Superintendent and b) why would a School Board want to waste precious resources implementing and then reimplementing the budget?




Nan Brien on Local Property Taxes



Nan Brien:

In recent weeks Madison homeowners received their 2006 assessments. Most of us saw an increase in the value of our homes. What will this mean for the next property tax bill?
Last spring Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools attempted to explain that school property taxes had actually gone down for many Madison homeowners over the previous 10 years.
Now it’s time to revisit five factors that influence the school district’s role in your property tax bill.
School District tax levy: Property taxpayers fund a little less than two-thirds of the Madison School District budget, which was $321 million in 2005-06.




Teachers Unions as Agents of Reform



Sara Reed:

Voters in Denver, Colo., in 2005 overwhelmingly approved a $25 million tax increase to fund a new, nine-year performance-based pay system for the city’s teachers. Brad Jupp taught in Denver’s public schools for 20 years, and was the lead DCTA negotiator on the team that negotiated the pilot project in 1999, and for the next 5 years he worked on the team that implemented the ProComp pilot.
ES: Why were you able to develop a pay-for-performance model in Denver when other places haven’t been?
BJ: Denver had a combination of the right opportunities and people who were willing, once they saw the opportunities, to put aside their fears of losing and work with other people to try to take advantage of those opportunities. The people included a school board president willing to say, “If the teachers accept this, we’ll figure out how to pay for it. They included the teacher building reps who said, “This is too good to refuse outright; let’s study it.” They included a local foundation that, once we negotiated the pay for performance pilot, realized we might actually be serious and offered us a million dollars to help put it in place. They included the Community Training and Assistance Center, the group that provided us with technical support and a research study of our work. They were willing to take on the enormous and risky task of measuring the impact of the pilot. And they included 16 principals in Denver who were able to see that this was going to be an opportunity for their faculties to build esprit de corps, to make a little extra money, to do some professional development around measuring results. I don’t really think there was a secret ingredient other than people being able to move past their doubts and seize an opportunity. It was a chance to create opportunities where the rewards outweighed the risks. I don’t think we do that much in public education.
………
But public schools have a harder time making changes, especially in the way people are paid, for a number of reasons. First, we don’t have a history of measuring results, and we don’t have a results-oriented attitude in our industry. Furthermore, we have configured the debate about teacher pay so that it’s a conflict between heavyweight policy contenders like unions and school boards. Finally, we do not have direct control over our revenue. It is easier to change a pay system when there is a rapid change in revenue that can be oriented to new outcomes. Most school finance systems provide nothing but routine cost of living adjustments. If that is all a district and union have to work with, they’re not going to have money to redistribute and make a new pay system.

Fascinating interview.




Can We Talk 3: 3rd Quarter Report Cards



Ms. Abplanalp and MMSD District Staff (cc’d to the Board of Education),
 
I read with some confusion your letter [350K PDF] sent to all elementary school parents about the lack of measurable change in students marking period as too small to report to parents on their third quarter report cards.  
 
Here’s my confusion.  I have complained many times about the lack of communication from MMSD to parents concerning students grades or progress.  At the elementary level the “grade issue” seems to do with the lack of any measurable assessments.  While I know testing is a bad word in the education world I find it amusing that between the end of Jan. and beginning of April,  my two elementary students failed to have any measurable change in their grades.  My 7th grader had a full report card…..with grades and everything.  I’m old at 42, but we used to have report cards come home every 6 weeks. My parents could assess my progress rather well that way, and I got lots of candy from Grandma.  I accept the quarter system as being more practical but seriously…you can’t even accomplish quarterly reports.  
 
I am wondering why my two elementary students were sent home early on April 4th.  My tax dollars went to pay for what?…..four grades evaluated out of 31 (not including behavior grades).  The teachers spent the time to log onto the computers to tell me about one grade in reading and 3 in math.  My daughter who is in 5th grade tells me lots of social studies and science occurred from Jan. to April but I guess none was graded.  The paper work, the early release, the time spent logging on for four grades has to rank up there with the last day of school with the amount of  waste of tax payer money (last day is one and 1/2 hour of school with bus service and all). 

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The School Transformation Plan



A Strategy to Create Small, High-Performing College-Preparatory Schools in Every Neighborhood of Los Angeles
Green Dot Public Schools, Bain & Company [180K PDF]:

Public school reform has become the #1 issue for the City of Los Angeles. While most acknowledge the poor state of the public education system, the discussion to date has largely focused on governance issues, such as mayoral control and district break-up. This whitepaper is intended to refocus the debate on a future vision for public schools in Los Angeles about which all stakeholders will be enthusiastic. Simply put, every child in Los Angeles should have the opportunity to attend a small, safe, college-preparatory public school. This whitepaper also provides a strategy for how the City of Los Angeles can take advantage of its historic opportunity to make this vision a reality. With $19 billion in bond funding, the Los Angeles Unified School District has unparalleled resources to execute a dramatic transformation.

via Eduwonk.

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States Help Schools Hide Minority Scores



Frank Bass, Nicole Ziegler Dizon and Ben Feller:

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.
With the federal government’s permission, schools aren’t counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.
Minorities – who historically haven’t fared as well as whites in testing – make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.
“I can’t believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she’s not being counted,” said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta’ Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren’t broken out by race at her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school.
To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected – the latest on record – and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use.
Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students – or about 1 in every 14 test scores – aren’t being counted under the law’s racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed.
Less than 2 percent of white children’s scores aren’t being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren’t broken out, AP found.

Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights website.
Carrie Antifinger notes that the loophole snares 33% of Wisconsin minority students.
Andrew Rotherham:

First, a reader of some of the back and forth might end up thinking that the law requires some minimum subgroup or that the feds set the subgroup size. It doesn’t, they don’t. Here are the exact AYP regulations from the Federal Register (pdf) and here is Ed Trust’s explanatory piece. It’s left up to the states although the feds approve the state plans and consequently have approved the various sizes in effect now. Now they’re trying to figure out how to clean up (pdf) some of the mess they’ve created.




Madison Schools, New Population, New Challenges



Sandy Cullen:

Twenty-five years ago, less than 10 percent of the district’s students were minorities and relatively few lived in poverty. Today, there are almost as many minority students as white, and nearly 40 percent of all students are considered poor – many of them minority students. And the number of students who aren’t native English speakers has more than quadrupled.
“The school district looks a lot different from 1986 when I graduated,” said Madison School Board member Johnny Winston Jr.
The implications of this shift for the district and the city of Madison are huge, city and school officials say. Academic achievement levels of minority and low-income students continue to lag behind those of their peers. Dropout, suspension and expulsion rates also are higher for minority students.
“Generally speaking, children who grow up in poverty do not come to school with the same skills and background” that enable their wealthier peers to be successful, Superintendent Art Rainwater said. “I think there are certainly societal issues that are race-related that also affect the school environment.”
While the demographics of the district’s students have changed dramatically, the makeup of the district as a whole doesn’t match.
The overall population within the school district, which includes most of Madison along with parts of some surrounding municipalities, is predominantly white and far less likely to be poor. And most taxpayers in the district do not have school-age children, statistics show, a factor some suggest makes it harder to pass referendums to increase taxes when schools are seeking more money.
Forty-four percent of Madison public school students are minorities, while more than 80 percent of residents in the city are white, according to U.S. Census figures for 2000, the most recent year available. And since 1991, the percentage of district students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches has nearly doubled to 39 percent; in 2000, only 15 percent of Madison’s residents were below the poverty level.
Although the city’s minority and low-income population has increased since the 2000 census, it’s “nowhere near what it is in the schools,” said Dan Veroff, director of the Applied Population Laboratory in UW- Madison’s department of rural sociology.

Barb Schrank asked “Where have all the Students Gone? in November, 2005:

There’s a lot more at work in the MMSD’s flat or slightly declining enrollment than Cullen’s article discusses. These issues include:

Thoreau’s most recent PTO meeting, which included 50 parent and teacher participants, illustrates a few of the issues that I believe are driving some families to leave: growing math curriculum concerns and the recent imposition of mandatory playground grouping without any prior parent/PTO discussion.
Student losses, or the MMSD’s failure to capture local population growth directly affects the district’s ability to grow revenue (based on per student spending and annual budget increases under the state’s revenue caps).
The MMSD’s failure to address curriculum and govenance concerns will simply increase the brain flight and reduces the number of people supporting the necessary referendums. Jason Shepherd’s recent article is well worth reading for additional background.
Finally, Mary Kay Battaglia put together some of these numbers in December with her “This is not Your Grandchild’s Madison School District“.




“Keep Option To Recount Ballots By Hand”



Paul Malischke:

Because of Madison’s close School Board election, you may be witnessing the last manual recount of election results in Wisconsin for some time to come. A bill in the Legislature, poised to become law, will outlaw manual recounts for municipalities that use machine-readable ballots.
Under current law, the board of canvassers may use automatic voting machines for recounts, but the board may also perform a manual count of the ballots.
Senate Bill 612 would change that. Buried on page 18 of this 120-page bill is a requirement that all recounts be done by machine for machine-readable ballots, unless a petition for a manual recount is approved by a circuit court. The bill passed the Senate unanimously and is under consideration by a committee in the Assembly.
This bill should be changed. We need to preserve the ability to conduct a manual recount.
In September 2005, the non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office summarized the flaws in the computerized voting machines now being sold. The conclusion of the GAO was that “key activities need to be completed” before we have secure and reliable electronic voting systems.
In the Madison School Board race there was a large number of undervotes (ballots that were not counted by the machine). Seven wards had an undervote of more than 20, and three more were more than 10 percent.

I observed the recount of Ward 52 this week. Interestingly, hand recounts (by two different people) confirmed Maya’s 231 votes while the same people counted Arlene’s votes and ended up with 300, twice. The machine, however, counted 301 on election night and during the recount. I agree with Malischke.
Greg Borowski and Tom Kertscher looked at another unusual election issue (from the November, 2004 election) last spring, voting gaps:

“In Madison, the city counts of the number of ballots cast, but doesn’t routinely try to reconcile that figure with the number of people recorded as having voted in an election. The firm found in Madison 133,598 people were recorded as having voted but 138,204 ballots were cast, a difference of more than 4,600. The actual number of ballots cast overall was 138,452, but the city doesn’t have a figure for the number of people recorded as having voted, Deputy City Clerk Sharon Christensen said.”

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San Diego School District Overhauls Physics Curriculum



Robert Tomsho:

When San Diego’s school district began overhauling its science-education curriculum five years ago, it wanted to raise the performance of minority, low-income and immigrant students.
But parents in middle- and upper-income areas, where many students were already doing well, rebelled against the new curriculum, and a course called Active Physics in particular. They called it watered-down science, too skimpy on math.
A resistance movement took hold. Some teachers refused to use the new textbooks, which are peppered with cartoons. They gathered up phased-out texts to use on the sly. As controversy over the issue escalated, it played a part in an election in which the majority of the school board was replaced. Now, further curriculum changes are under consideration.
The skirmishes in the nation’s eighth-largest urban school district reflect a wider battle over how to make science classes accessible to a broader array of students while maintaining their rigor.
Amid mediocre U.S. scores on international science tests and predictions of future shortages of scientists and engineers, policy makers have begun requiring more science in schools. By 2011, 27 states will require high-school students to take at least three science courses to graduate. In 1992, only six had such requirements.




Affordable Health Care: Four Wisconsin Proposals



A forum hosted by Progressive Dane and The Edgewood College Human Issues Program.
Thursday, April 6th 6:30 to 8:30 at Edgewood College’s Anderson Auditorium, in the Predolin Humanities Center.
Access to health insurance has become a national crisis, but there are bold, creative proposals to fix it. Please join us to hear four great proposals to make affordable health care widely available locally and statewide. Representatives from each plan will briefly describe their proposal, followed by ample time for audience questions and open discussion.
Co-Sponsors include: The League of Women Voters, The Democratic Party of Dane County, The South Central Federation of Labor, The Four Lakes Green Party, and The Center for Patient Partnerships at the UW-Madison.
The presenters and four major health care plan proposals are:

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Teaching the Unreachable



Joanne Jacobs:

Stuart Buck recounts a conversation with a friend, a black man teaching high school English at a mostly black school in Georgia, about the challenge of teaching students who’ve made it to 10th grade without learning how to read. The friend says:

“It’s just impossible for me to spend one or two semesters and get someone caught up on 9 or 10 years of schooling. And then there are always some kids that just don’t care, and no matter what I try, they just won’t do the work. So the government is going to tell me that because of a handful of students that are unreachable, therefore I’m a bad teacher? No way.”

The teacher also talks about confronting a boy, who says, “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my dad.”

“Then I said, ‘No, I am your dad. I’m the only grown male who is willing to stand out here, before God and before anyone else who is listening, and to tell you that I love you and that I’m here for you. Now you tell me, if that’s not a dad, then what is?’

“That’s when the kid just started sobbing.”

The boy’s behavior improved. But he’s still going to flunk the class. He hasn’t done most of the work and has no chance of passing the test.

Update: On Right Wing Nation, the prof writes about trying to teach a bright, hard-working student who’d made it to college without understanding how to compute a mean or median or how to abstract an idea from an example. The professor wonders why nobody taught him math in high school.




Should Schools Be Included in Taxpayer Amendment



Mike Ellis:

Unfortunately, it appears the controls proposed for school districts under the constitutional amendment could undo all that. Just as troubling, it also appears the amendment could seriously disequalize taxes and spending across school districts in Wisconsin – something that itself would appear to violate an existing constitutional mandate that requires school districts to be “as nearly uniform as practical.”
When the proposed amendment was introduced last month, I asked the Legislative Fiscal Bureau to analyze its effect on school levies compared to the statutory revenue controls in current law. Because the proposed constitutional limits would not be in effect until the 2009-10 fiscal year, the bureau analysis estimated the effect of the amendment if it had been in effect for the current school year rather than the current statutory controls.
According to the Fiscal Bureau analysis, “In the absence of the statutory revenue limits, the total allowable levy under the joint resolutions would have been $3.71 billion, which would have been an increase of $117.8 million compared to the actual 2005-06 levy.”
That begs the question, why would we amend the constitution to increase property taxes more than $100 million? How can that be labeled taxpayer protection?




For The Record



Sunday 10 a.m., Channel 3’s For the Record will feature a debate among the four candidates for school board.
Here is my email to Neil Heinen regarding the station’s coverage including a discussion of some of the issues at stake in the race: To: Neil Heinen Subject: Sunday show
Dear Neil,
A new post up on SIS (https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/) discusses a debate at East yesterday covered by your station. Thank you for this and for dedicating Sunday’s show to the race.
One point that I’m not sure was reported correctly however, is the assertion in your coverage that the current board has not said who they support. The five-member majority has clearly stated their support for Silveira and Lopez (who is of course part of that majority and a candidate) while Robarts and Kobza have stated their support for Mathiak and Cole.
This race truly is for control of the majority and will dictate how we go forward on matters of heterogeneous classrooms (the dismantling of honors and possibly AP at West is part of that), school boundary changes, the construction of new and closure of existing schools, budget concerns, how to responsibly provide teachers health insurance, etc.
The Silveira/Lopez line is that Mathiak and Cole are focused merely on “process”. This significantly minimizes what’s at stake. The board is currently divided and removed from community input. For instance, when a school board member can’t get an item on the agenda because she’s in the minority, or she can’t get information she has requested from the superintendent, we’ve got closed, dysfunctional governance. Mathiak and Cole may not always vote the same with each other or Kobza or Robarts, but the four of them are dedicated to transparency and public participation. With that, I believe the community will be better informed and more likely to support the hard decisions facing our district as we go forward into a land of $40 million more in budget cuts over the next five years.
But there’s an even bigger topic that might be coming up soon. I’d appreciate if you could ask the candidates what they’d look for in a new superintendent. Rainwater has made no secret of his plan to retire in the not too distant future and it’s no stretch to believe that the next board majority will determine whether we hire someone like Art or someone who is less, shall we say, autocratic/didactic, someone who takes his direction FROM the board on policy matters rather than dictating it TO them?
Let me close by focusing on hetergeneous classes. The trend everywhere else is to have more not less AP and honors classes. I met a woman recently who is an education professor at Marquette. She was shocked to learn of MMSD’s policy changes, pointing out that in Milwaukee even the most impoverished schools have AP, with the focus being how to increase participation by more students, especially minority students. Extending the K-8 model into high school is irresponsible. The data clearly indicate that this model is failing our students. Indeed, even at West, the internal data show that the one-size-fits-all English 9 and now English 10 doesn’t work as advertised. Our children attend Stanford and Macalester. Almost all their classmates have had the full range of AP courses in their high schools, even those coming from small towns. Especially in science and math, this is critical. Success after MMSD is a measure that doesn’t get much play, but it really should be the ultimate measure of our students’ success, not just those who go on to college and post-graduate careers, but all our students. Are they prepared to participate meaningfully in society. Do they have the skills they need to be good critical thinkers, to make informed decisions.
As our district grows increasingly more diverse ethnically, and as the disparity socieconomically widens, we have to ask whether we can meet all students’ needs with the little red school house approach, if that model ever worked in a town our size. More important, perhaps, will be how the community will perceive this—a posting a few months back on SIS looked at the district’s demographic data and demonstrated that brain flight has already happened out of the West HS district. Folks will be voting with their feet if they feel those setting policy don’t care about all the children.
How we see ourselves and whether Madison continues to draw new folks to our community depends heavily on the strength of our schools. Obviously I believe we need a fresh start, but however you come down on it, the stakes are high.
Best,
Joan




Budget Forum Audio / Video



Rafael Gomez held a “Parent and Taxpayer Perspective on School Budgets” last evening. Participants included: Carol Carstensen, Peter Gascoyne, Don Severson, Jeff Henriques, Shari Entenmann, Jerry Eykholt and Larry Winkler. This 70 minute event is well worth watching (or listening via the audio file).

  • Carol discussed the “three legs” of school finance and passed around an article she wrote recently “State Finance of Public Education and the MMSD Budget” [112K pdf version];
  • Peter Gascoyne suggested that we embrace long term financial forecasts as a means to guide our planning. Peter also expressed doubts about any material change to state school financing of public education over the next five years (I agree with this assessment).
  • Don Severson mentioned Madison’s historic strong financial support for public education and the need to be as efficient as possible with the District’s $321M+ budget.

Audio [mp3] and video




Madison Schools’ Proposed Comprehensive Food Policy



Madison Metropolitian School District News Release:

Community asked for feedback on proposals, Board will begin to consider next month
As the next step in developing a Madison School District comprehensive food policy, recommendations are being released today by a student work group for consideration by the Board of Education.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this topic here.

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The fate of the schools



Will the Madison district sink or swim?
April 4th elections could prove pivotal

At the end of an especially divisive Madison school board meeting, Annette Montegomery took to the microphone and laid bare her frustrations with the seven elected citizens who govern Madison schools.
“I don’t understand why it takes so long to get anything accomplished with this board!” yelled Montgomery, a Fitchburg parent with two children in Madison’s Leopold Elementary School. She pegged board members as clueless about how they’ve compromised the trust of the district’s residents.
“You don’t think we’re already angry? What do we have to do to show you, to convince you, how angry we are? If I could, I’d impeach every single one of you and start over!”
Impeachment isn’t being seriously considered as solution to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s problems. But infighting and seemingly insurmountable budget problems have increasingly undercut the board’s ability to chart a positive course for Madison schools.

And that’s not good, given the challenges on the horizon for a district of 24,490 kids with a $319 million budget. These include declining enrollment of upper- and middle-class families; continuing increases in low-income families and racial minorities; an overall stagnant enrollment which limits state funding increases; and prolonged battles with parent groups over everything from boundary changes to curriculum choices.
By Jason Shepard, Isthmus, March 23, 2006

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MMSD administrators will propose cutting 92 positions



According to a document apparently floating around the Doyle Administration Building and MTI offices, the MMSD administration will recommend cutting 92 positions when the Board of Education meets on April 3.
Disappointment best describes my reaction. I’m not surprised, of course. I’m not even upset that the union has the information even before the board, since it might be wise to alert John Matrhews rather than surprise him on April 3.
I’m disappointed. Disappointed because the board and administration have not listened to a single plea about following a new budget process. This is the same-old same-old. The administration puts last year’s spending into a black box. And presto! Cuts come out.
For years, those of us on schoolinfosytem.org and others throughout the community have begged and pleaded for a more understandable budget process, for input on the budget from the community, for a budget that reflects some set of priorities, and this year a budget that reflects the $100 budget exercise.
We should have saved our breath.
The administration and board don’t hear.
They only want to talk AT us — to tell us that we don’t understand the state budget, don’t understand the district’s changing demographics, don’t understand the complexity of school issues – like we’re all dummies.
But we DO understand all of that!
What we don’t understand is the MMSD budget process, the MMSD budget document, and the MMSD budget priorities. And to tell you my frank opinion, neither does a single soul on the board because they too never get to see inside the black box and they have no priorities to reflect in the budget.
It’s time to throw the bums out and replace them with board members who will listen, respond, and create an open process and understandable budget.




Dumbing Down Proficient: Intel, State Farm Heads Say Easy State Tests Sap U.S. Education



Bloomberg:

After only 50 percent of Arizona’s eighth-grade public school students passed a standardized reading test, state education officials took decisive action: They made the exam easier. Last year, 71 percent of students were rated “proficient” in reading.
As students throughout the U.S. undergo the latest round of tests this month, corporate leaders including Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel Corp., and Edward Rust, chief executive officer of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., say they’re concerned about slipping standards among states. They’re exploring whether to renew a decade-old push for national tests.

A commenter over at Joanne Jacobs notes that “Every state must participate in the NAEP every year”.




Back to School



The Economist:

“TEACHERS, teachers, teachers.” Thus the headmistress of a school near Helsinki, giving her not-exactly-rocket-science explanation for why Finland has the best education system in the world.
…….
It has achieved all this by changing its entire system, delegating
responsibility to teachers and giving them lots of support. There is no streaming and no selection; no magnet schools; no national curriculum; and few national exams. It is all, as that Finnish headmistress suggested, about getting good teachers–and then giving them freedom. If there is a lesson for EU leaders, it is: forget about multiple priority areas and action plans. European governments should go back to school. In Finland.

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MMSD Staffing Resources/Cuts Go To Schools April 3rd – Where’s the School Board, Where’s the Board Governance?



It’s nearly the end of March, and there’s a strange quiet at the Madison School Board. Every March for the past five plus years has meant public School Board discussions and meetings about next year’s budget, budget cuts and referendum. Earlier this year, Superintendent Rainwater informed the School Board there would be budget discussions throughout the month of March. Yet, here we are at the end of March – silence on a $320+ million budget, but cuts are being planned just out of the public’s eye while pets in the classroom take front and center stage.
Funny – isn’t there a school board election on April 4th?
On Monday, April 3rd, on the eve of the 2006 spring school board election, MMSD school principals will receive their staffing allocations for the 2006-2007 school year according to the District’s published budget timeline (updated March 15, 2006). The administration will provide school principals with the number of staff they will have for next year, and the principals will need to provide the Human Resources Department of MMSD with information on April 10th about how they will use the staff – number of teachers, social workers, psychologists, etc. For the most part principals have little say about how their staffing is allocated, especially in the elementary school. These dates are driven in part by teacher contract requirements for surplus notices and layoff notices that are due in late May.
Earlier this year, the Superintendent advised the School Board that $8 million in cuts will be needed next year. That means the staffing allocations going out on April 3rd will need to include these cuts. There are also plans afoot to avoid a referendum to add an addition to Leopold and borrow the money in a way that does not require a referendum. However, this approach will negatively affect the operating budget. The estimated additional cost will mean $350,000 in cuts on top of the $8 million in cuts estimated for next year. Where will those $350,000 in additional cuts come from – you can expect more cuts in teachers in the classroom, districtwide classes such as elementary strings, social workers, TAG resources, books, larger class sizes.
In opinion, this is one of the worst, closed budget processes I have seen in years. On March 9th, I blogged about five points that I feel are important considerations in a budget process, especially when we are in a financial crisis. Our School Board majority is missing most, if not all of them and will not even discuss budget items in March! Parents and the community ought to be alarmed. Madison will have to pass referendums to keep our schools strong in these punative financial times that Madison and all WI schools are facing. Conducting Board budget business in this way – behind closed doors, will not build community confidence and will not pass referendums!
I asked Superintendent Rainwater where was the cut list and what budget was he using to determine the allocations. He said this year the Board would be discussing cuts in the context of the entire budget? Huh? Decisions about cuts and reductions in allocations are being made now – what budget is being used? Why isn’t the School Board publicly discussing the budget? Who’s making the decisions and governing the school district – not the current School Board majority. We need a School Board majority that will do the business the public entrusted them with and who will do their work in public.




Providence School forum will explore fresh approach to math



Linda Borg writing in the Providence Journal:

Michael Lauro, the district’s new math coordinator, will discuss plans for a curriculum called FASTT Math.
PROVIDENCE – Osiris Harrell, an outspoken critic of the school district’s math curriculum, has invited parents and school officials to a meeting March 22 to discuss the effectiveness of the math program.
The forum will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Federal Hill House, 9 Cortland St., Providence.
Michael Lauro, the district’s new math coordinator, will discuss plans for a fresh approach to math called FASTT Math. The district is considering trying it on a limited basis next year.
Harrell has met with Lauro to discuss his concerns about the current math program and to agree on how to work together, according to school spokeswoman Maria Tocco.
Harrell, in a recent interview with The Providence Journal, said he was distressed by the district’s approach to math instruction, a program called Math Investigations that teaches students how to think about problem-solving rather that drilling them in the basics. The district adopted it in 2003 at the urging of then-Supt. Diana Lam.

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Candidates agree education is at crossroads



Madison School Board candidates Juan Jose Lopez and Lucy Mathiak look at what is happening in schools here in very different ways, but on at least one issue they are in complete agreement: Public education here and throughout the Badger State is at a critical crossroads.
But the two candidates vying for School Board Seat No. 2, which Lopez has held since 1994, have quite distinct notions about the nature of the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, March 21, 2006

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When Ability Grouping Makes Good Sense



By James J. Gallagher
I am posting this article from 1992 given the recent debate on one size fits all classrooms. Professor Gallagher makes the point that the argument that homogeneous grouping hurts no one is clearly false: research consistently shows that high ability students do better when they are in classes with similarly able peers.
The recent educational literature has been filled with discussions of the effects of ability grouping, tracking, etc., and new virtues have been found in the concept of heterogeneous grouping of students. The homogeneous grouping of slow-learning children does not appear to be profitable, but the homogeneous grouping of bright students is a very different matter, and often ignored in these discussions. (See “Tracking Found To Hurt Prospects of Low Achievers,” Education Week, Sept. 16, 1992.)
The goal of heterogeneous grouping appears to be a social one, not an academic one.(emphasis added) The desirability of that goal needs to be argued on its own merits, which I believe to be considerable. The argument is clouded, however, by the insistence of the proponents that nothing is lost in academic performance by such grouping. This position is clearly false, in my judgment, as it applies to bright students. Apart from the meta-analyses which indicate substantial gains for gifted students grouped for ability, there is a small matter of common sense.

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New Glarus Parent Files Gifted Ed Lawsuit Against DPI, DPI Superintendent Burmaster



New Glarus parent and Madison attorney Todd Palmer has filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and DPI Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster for their failure to promulgate rules for the identification and appropriate education of Wisconsin’s 51,000 academically gifted students, as is required by Wisconsin state law. Here is the press release; a link to the lawsuit itself may be found at the end.
Todd will be joining us for the beginning portion of our Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building. We will also be discussing the INSTEP process and the District’s new TAG education plan, currently under development. Come share your experiences and offer your input. All who care about rigorous curriculum and high educational standards are welcome.

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What’s an AYP Rating? And Why it Matters



Eduwonk:

Most everyone in the political and policy world was fixated on all the “what does it mean” questions about Sunday’s NYT Mag story on Mark Warner. But there was also some chattering about the Outlook spread on No Child Left Behind in the Wash. Post. It was well done including reactions from DC-area principals, an NCLB primer by Jay Mathews, and a map of DC-area schools (pdf) not making “adequate yearly progress” or AYP.

But despite the primer, readers might have been left wondering about these adequate yearly progress targets. That’s understandable, it’s confusing, and they’re not the result of a single calculation. Instead, it’s a multi-step process with opportunities to increase or decrease the level of difficulty at each one. It goes something like this:

First, the state chooses a test to use. This can be a pre-existing test used elsewhere, a custom-designed one based on the state’s standards, or a combination of the two. Obviously, the degree of difficulty is a big issue here.

Second, the state decides what the cut score on the test will be for a student to be “proficient” as well as “basic”, “advanced”, and any other delineations of performance the state wants to have. In other words, how many questions does a student need to answer correctly? For No Child Left Behind the most important category is proficient because that is what the law’s “adequate yearly progress” ratings are based on. There are several methods for determining cut scores. What’s most important to remember about them is that they all rely on professional judgment. There is no revealed source of truth about what a fifth-grader or a high school student needs to know and be able to do. At the risk of oversimplifying too much, the three most common methods are based on using expert judgment from a panel of experts to come up with cut scores, comparing and contrasting how various groups of test takers do on the test, and scaling the questions from easy to hard and determining various delineations for performance along the scale. Again, plenty of chances to increase or reduce the level of difficulty in this process.

But, while newspapers commonly report the percentage of students passing a test, they rarely report on what the cut scores are and when and how they are set. The composition of the professionals involved also matters a lot. Is it just K-12 teachers, or outside experts for instance representatives of higher education, too? Lack of attention to this process is unfortunate because there is plenty of opportunity for mischief and a state with a difficult test and a high cut score, say 40 out of 50, is going to have different results than a state with an easier test or a low cut scores. But, cut scores of half to 2/3 of the questions correct in order to be “proficient” are not at all uncommon. All this is public information or can be obtained through a FOIA. And it’s all extremely relevant to all this.

Dick Askey commented on test scores vis a vis local, state and national results here.




Kalamazoo, Mich., Pegs Revitalization Plan on Tuition Plan



Neal E. Boudette:

Last year, Greg DeHaan and his partner built 189 homes in the leafy, middle-class suburbs ringing this downtrodden industrial city, but not one in Kalamazoo itself. “There was no demand,” says Mr. DeHaan, whose company, Allen Edwin Homes, is one of the largest home builders in Michigan.
By early December, however, a market had suddenly materialized, prompting the developer to pay $7 million for three separate tracts of land. Out-of-state investors began scouring the area for opportunities, too.
Mr. DeHaan and others in town trace this new interest in Kalamazoo to an unusual, anonymously funded plan. Beginning this June, college tuition will be free for any student who enters the Kalamazoo school system by the ninth grade — regardless of income or need. The program, unveiled in November by the city’s superintendent of schools and underwritten by a group of local philanthropists, is to run for at least 13 years.
Called the “Kalamazoo Promise,” the tuition plan requires only that students live in Kalamazoo or neighboring Oshtemo township, graduate from public high school and attend a public university or community college in Michigan. Students who go from kindergarten through the 12th grade get a full ride. The program will cover 65% of tuition costs for those who spend at least their four high-school years in the city’s schools, with the percentage of aid rising for those who spend more years in the system.

Interesting relationship between education, economic development and a community.




California’s Proposed $50/Parcel Tax



Friends of Dave.org:

Put your hand on your wallet! Check out this North County Times article. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and EdVoice are working to get a measure on the ballot called the “Classroom Learning and Accountability Act”. This measure would add a $50/parcel tax on every piece of property in California. The only parcels exempted would be those owned by the disabled or senior citizens.

The measure would create about a pot of over $500M for a variety of uses. The money would allocated as follows:

  • $225M for additional class size reduction
  • $100M for textbook purchases
  • $100M for school safety
  • $90M for school modernization
  • $20M for the CALPADS student longitudinal data system

I’m quite surprised that liberals like O’Connell would even support this regressive tax which would have a greater impact on low-income homeowners who would pay a larger portion of their income than wealthy homeowners. That seems to go against their usual “tax the wealthy” strategy. I guess he feels that $50 is such as small amount that even the low-income families would be OK with paying it. Of course, the real problem is that this $50 wouldn’t be the end of it. In the article, it even says that O’Connell plans to add another $50 every 4 years, so this tax would just keep increasing. Also, if this tactic works, rest assured that other special interests will be running to the ballot with their own $50 parcel tax measures.




A wealthy school district asks: How much is too much?



Teacher contract up for vote this week.
Jessica T. Lee:

n Hanover, where public school teachers are already the highest paid in the state, voters this week will decide whether a proposed teachers’ contract is too generous, as some residents contend, or appropriate for the affluent school district.
People on both sides of the issue ask that voters compare the school district’s $59,236 average teacher salary to the salaries of others.
Opponents of the contract, which includes the majority of the school district’s finance committee, point out that the pay is 35 percent higher than the state average of $43,941. The finance committee has long noted a “premium” that residents pay for education, and is asking for evidence students are receiving an education proportional to that premium.
Teachers point to a different comparison: $70,877, the median household income in Hanover and Norwich, Vt., is 20 percent higher than last year’s average teacher salary. Teachers said they are asking for salaries comparable to those in the schools’ community.
“People can point to our salaries, and make claims or ask, ‘Is it really worth it?'” said Pamala Miller, president of the Hanover Education Association, the teachers’ union. “I would ask the parents in the community that question, and I guess we’ll get the answer with the vote.”
The debate comes as the Concord School Board and the local teachers’ union are struggling to reach their own three-year contract; both salaries and health insurance are n disput




Schools to share what works through charter dissemination grants



State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster has announced $1.3 million in dissemination grants to 12 charter schools in nine school districts. The grants are part of the state’s $52 million, three-year federal funding to create 100 new charter schools in Wisconsin. Four of the grants renew previous dissemination projects; eight are for new projects, some of which include partnerships with existing schools to improve student achievement.

“Charter school practices keep getting better each year of the program,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing $1.3 million in dissemination grants to 12 charter schools in nine school districts. . . .

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Madison Schools’ Board of Education Candidate Take Home Test: Week 7



Isthmus:

There’s no doubt that Isthmus has the juice in this campaign. The traditional daily newspapers haven’t covered any substantive issues in this race. I’d like to see some links/words that contrast my opinion on their lack of “beef” (Have they attended any forums?). Focusing on personalities is a simple, self made “pass” that avoids issues critical to our children:

  • World Class Curriculum; ineffective curriculum choices can place a lifelong tax on our children. Ironic, from a community that includes the University of Wisconsin.
  • Leadership that can pass referenda (will the current approach and personalities be successful?)
  • Transparency with respect to the District’s growing $321M+ budget. Again, will the current approach pass the necessary referenda?

Isthmus’s work represents the best of local journalism. Rather amazing, given the resources they have vs the enormous dailies. Interestingly, the Fitchburg Star has posted some useful articles as well.
The Memorandum to Local Media represented one attempt to at least look at the issues rather than simply compare and contrast personalities.




Standards, Accountability, and School Reform



This is very long, and the link may require a password so I’ve posted the entire article on the continued page.
TJM
http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=11566
Standards, Accountability, and School Reform
by Linda Darling-Hammond — 2004
The standards-based reform movement has led to increased emphasis on tests, coupled with rewards and sanctions, as the basis for “accountability” systems. These strategies have often had unintended consequences that undermine access to education for low-achieving students rather than enhancing it. This article argues that testing is information for an accountability system; it is not the system itself. More successful outcomes have been secured in states and districts, described here, that have focused on broader notions of accountability, including investments in teacher knowledge and skill, organization of schools to support teacher and student learning, and systems of assessment that drive curriculum reform and teaching improvements.

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A 5 Year Approach to the Madison School District’s Budget Challenges; or what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year?



Two weeks ago, Roger Price presented a 5-year forecast for the district, which included a projection that there would be a $38 million budget gap, by 2011, if the district proceeded with it’s present operations.  He emphasized the presumption that this was before changes are implemented to address the gap.  He also emphasized his discomfort with the accuracy of any forecast beyond one year.
 
As a consultant who has done economic modeling and forecasting for almost 20 years, I can certainly understand this discomfort.  However, I note that the district website contains a list of budget cuts enacted by the board since 1993, a list which includes over $32 million in cuts over the last 5 years.  With prices only increasing over time, and with the special concerns raised over health care and energy costs, the initial $38 million deficit projection does not seem unreasonable.  My preference would be to round it to $40 million, and to recognize that it may require six years (give or take) to achieve that gap.  But the forecast makes clear that we are talking about a very large amount, and that there is a structural budget gap.  By structural, I mean that anticipated revenue increases are expected to consistently fail to keep up with expenses, and that over time ever-more drastic cuts will be required to remain in budgetary balance.
 
How might the district address this ominous gap?  I think there are two basic approaches that can be taken.  One is to endeavor to cut approximately $8 million each year, to address each budget year on its own, and to effectively ignore the looming structural gap.  This approach implies keeping the same district structure as today, and essentially tearing away different pieces of it each year.  Of course, this approach continues to be more and more painful each year, as the easy cuts are long completed and now only more critical programs and services remain for the knife.
 
I would like to respectfully recommend a second approach.  That rather than look at the budget picture one year at a time, that you instead look at where the budget will be (approximately) five years from now.  In effect, that you determine how to cut $40 million from the budget, not $8 million.  Last month, numerous efforts were made to find $3.77 in cuts from a $100 budget.  Few were able to find that amount.  I am suggesting a group be formed to find the equivalent of $15 in cuts, and by the way, they will have five years over which to implement those cuts.  You may laugh at the prospect, but that is exactly the situation this district is facing – it indeed must find $15 or more in cuts over the next five years.
 
How to find $40 million?  By asking a very different question, one which has nothing to do, and everything to do, with that amount.  By asking, what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year.  Start with a completely clean slate.  Identify your primary goals and values and priorities.  Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s.  Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything.
 
When it’s all done, this group will have likely shaped an educational structure for this district that is quite different than the one you use today.  The second task of this group, therefore, would be to determine how to implement the necessary changes.  Perhaps one school is run under the new model in the first year, then additional schools, or perhaps all other schools, would be so run the following year.
 
I have no idea what this new structure, what this new district, will look like.  But I am sure of this:  I will be much more likely to prefer my two kids attend a district that is the outcome of a process such as this which is well-thought out and planned, than I will a district that has continued to endure the annual relentless torturing of it’s current structure.

I read these words during the public appearances segment of last night’s School Board meeting.




UW Madison Hosts Summer Opportunities Fair



University of Wisconsin News:

How can middle- and high-school students get a leg up on preparing for college? In many cases, summer recreation, academic and athletic programs play a valuable role.
The Youth Opportunity Fair, designed to promote summer youth activities, will be held from 10 a.m.-noon on Saturday, March 4, at the Villager Mall, 2300 S. Park St.
Parents and students will find exhibitors from many of the skill-building programs – academic, recreational and athletic – offered by post-secondary educational institutions in Dane County for this summer.




Leveling the Playing Field: Creating Funding Equity Through Student-Based Budgeting



When the Cincinnati Public Schools devised a reform strategy for improving student performance, it became clear that the district’s traditional budgeting system was inadequate. The authors trace the district’s process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting: funding children rather than staff members and weighting the funding according to schools’ and students’ needs.
By Karen Hawley Miles, Kathleen Ware, and Marguerite Roza, from Phi Delta Kappan magazine, October 2003.

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WI School Funding Update



Funding reform resolution introduced — your chance to act
Funding system continues to erode quality education
School-funding reform calendar
The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) is a statewide network of educators, school board members, parents, community leaders, and researchers. Its Wisconsin Adequacy Plan — a proposal for school-finance reform — is the result of research into the cost of educating children to meet state proficiency standards.
*************
Funding reform resolution introduced — your chance to act
School-funding reform is finally in front of the Wisconsin Legislature. Where it goes now is up to you.
Wednesday, March 1, a press conference was held in the Assembly Parlor in the Capital (http://www.thewheelerreport.com/releases/Mar06/Mar1/0301demsschoolfunding.pdf) to introduce a joint resolution (http://www.excellentschools.org/events/ReformResolution/School%20Funding_AJR.pdf) calling for a new funding system by July of 2007. The call for reform is based on a set of core principles that include adequate resources to prepare all children for high school graduation, additional resources for children and communities with special circumstances, and a reduced level of local property taxes.

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Transparency



Eduwonk:

Public schools are public. Consequently, it seems a reasonable principle that unless privacy is at issue, the processes by which major decisions about them are made should be public, too. But too often this isn’t the case. Teacher collective bargaining negotiations are a primary example. They’re usually conducted behind closed doors and with some noteworthy exceptions it is generally difficult to find the contracts themselves despite the enormous influence they have. But, Rick Costa, the president of the Salem Education Association in Oregon is setting a good standard for how it should be done (via Intercepts). More transparency in bargaining is a key recommendation of Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change In Today’s Schools




“Black Flight: Minneapolis Exodus to Charter Schools”



Katherine Kersten:

Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.
Black parents have good reasons to look elsewhere. Last year, only 28% of black eighth-graders in the Minneapolis public schools passed the state’s basic skills math test; 47% passed the reading test. The black graduation rate hovers around 50%, and the district’s racial achievement gap remains distressingly wide. Louis King, a black leader who served on the Minneapolis School Board from 1996 to 2000, puts it bluntly: “Today, I can’t recommend in good conscience that an African-American family send their children to the Minneapolis public schools. The facts are irrefutable: These schools are not preparing our children to compete in the world.” Mr. King’s advice? “The best way to get attention is not to protest, but to shop somewhere else.”
They can do so because of the state’s longstanding commitment to school choice. In 1990 Minnesota allowed students to cross district boundaries to enroll in any district with open seats. Two years later in St. Paul, the country’s first charter school opened its doors. (Charter schools are started by parents, teachers or community groups. They operate free from burdensome regulations, but are publicly funded and accountable.) Today, this tradition of choice is providing a ticket out for kids in the gritty, mostly black neighborhoods of north and south- central Minneapolis.




Are Administrators Golden?



Next year’s projected operating budget shortfall is $8 million – projected expenses will exceed revenues by that amount. For 13 years the growth in expenses have exceeded what the district received and was allowed to receive from the a) state and federal government revenues and b) allowed growth in revenues from property taxes. Further, the state and federal governments do not pay for their promised share of expenses for mandates that local school districts are to provide special education and ELL, to name a few areas. The financing of public education is broken in WI and neither the Republicans nor Democrats are taking this issue on and working through toward viable solutions. One step we can all take is to write your legislators – local, state and federal. Tell our state legislators to stop twiddling their thumbs on financing of public schools, because the problem is “too tough for them to ‘figure out.'”
At the same time, drastic financial times will continue to stress Madison’s public schools and our School Board and administrative staff will have no choice but to think in different ways PLUS go to referendum. I’m a solid supporter of school referendums – I have voted yes each time. However, I feel the School Board needs to take a different, more proactive approach to how the School Board thinks about and addresses a number of issues, including administrative contracts. Not doing so, will only compound the difficulties and stresses of our current fiscal situation.
Lawrie Kobza pointed out last night that 2-year rolling administrative contracts may be important for some groups of administrators and that the School Board should consider that issue. Otherwise, if the annual pattern continues, extensions will occur in February before the School Board looks at the budget and makes their decisions about staffing. Even though the Superintendent has indicated what positions he proposes to eliminate for next year, when the School Board has additional information later in the budget year, they may want to make different decisions based upon various tradeoffs they believe are important for the entire district.
What might the School Board consider doing? Develop criteria to use to identify/rank your most “valuable” administrative positions (perhaps this already exists) and those positions where the district might be losing its competitive edge. Identify what the “at risk” issues are – wages, financial, gender/racial mix, location, student population mix. Or, start with prioritizing rolling two-year contracts for one of the more “important,” basic administrative groups – principals. Provide the School Board with options re administrative contracts. School board members please ask for options for this group of contracts.
Ms. Kobza commented that making an extension of contracts in February for this group of staff could make these positions appear to be golden, untouchable. Leaving as is might not be well received in Madison by a large number of people, including the thousands of MMSD staff who are not administrators on rolling two-year contracts nor a Superintendent with a rolling contract (without a horizon, I think). The board might be told MMSD won’t be able to attract talented administrators. I feel the School Board needs to publicly discuss the issues and risks to its entire talent pool.

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Cole: New schools should be green



Maya Cole posted an interesting idea on her Web site:

Energy efficiency stands out as one island of excellence in the MMSD. The Wisconsin Focus on Energy program features the Madison school district in one of its case studies on energy-efficient schools.
I’d like to take the MMSD’s excellent energy-efficiency commitment one step further by directing the district to construct any new school or other building with environmentally sensitive practices, including natural lighting, energy efficiency, water conservation, recycled products, and other green building practices.

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NCLB Area Comments



Kurt Gutknecht and Bill Livick pen an interesting article, published recently in the Fitchburg Star:

Several teachers at area schools did not return calls asking for their opinion on the act. Administrators were less reluctant to weigh in.
The principal of a Madison middle school, who did not want to be identified, gave a qualified endorsement to the act for focusing on essential skills and for including all students.
“They’re reasonable standards. A student can’t solve problems if she can’t read well,” the principal said.
Madison schools have a good foundation in addressing the needs of all students, which predated the act, according to the principal. Of greater concern was the act’s requirement that specialists teach every content area, which could force many qualified teachers from the profession. Although it’s not unreasonable to focus on formal teaching standards, “it seems ludicrous” because “many of our most effective teachers are generalists,” said the principal, particularly when there’s no funding for training.
The requirements of the act have “terrified” some teachers, who fear being labeled as ineffective and are concerned about teaching in a school that’s labeled as having failed, according to the principal.

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Madison and Wisconsin Math Data, 8th Grade



At a meeting on February 22 (audio / video), representatives of the Madison Metropolitan School District presented some data [820K pdf | html (click the slide to advance to the next screen)] which they claimed showed that their middle school math series, Connected Mathematics Project, was responsible for some dramatic gains in student learning. There was data on the percent of students passing algebra by the end of ninth grade and data from the state eighth grade math test for eight years. Let us look at the test data in a bit more detail.

All that was presented was data from MMSD and there was a very sharp rise in the percent of students scoring at the advanced and proficient level in the last three years. To see if something was responsible for this other than an actual rise in scores consider not only the the Madison data but the corresponding data for the State of Wisconsin.

The numbers will be the percent of students who scored advanced or proficient by the criteria used that year. The numbers for Madison are slightly different than those presented since the total number of students who took the test was used to find the percent in the MMSD presented data, and what is given here is the percent of all students who reached these two levels. Since this is a comparative study, either way could have been used. I think it is unlikely that those not tested would have had the same overall results that those tested had, which is why I did not figure out the State results using this modification. When we get to scores by racial groups, the data presented by MMSD did not use the correction they did with all students ( All 8th grade students in both cases)

MMSD Wisconsin
Oct 97 40 30
Feb 99 45 42
Feb 00 47 42
Feb 01 44 39
Feb 02 48 44
Nov 02 72 73
Nov 03 60 65
Nov 04 71 72

This is not a picture of a program which is remarkably successful. We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.

It is worth looking at a breakdown by racial groups to see if there is something going on there. The formats will be the same as above.

Hispanics
MMSD Wisconsin
Oct 97 19 11
Feb 99 25 17
Feb 00 29 18
Feb 01 21 15
Feb 02 25 17
Nov 02 48 46
Nov 03 37 38
Nov 04 50 49
Black (Not of Hispanic Origin)
MMSD Wisconsin
Oct 97 8 5
Feb 99 10 7
Feb 00 11 7
Feb 01 8 6
Feb 02 13 7
Nov 02 44 30
Nov 03 29 24
Nov 04 39 29
Asian
MMSD Wisconsin
Oct 97 25 22
Feb 99 36 31
Feb 00 35 33
Feb 01 36 29
Feb 02 41 31
Nov 02 65 68
Nov 03 55 53
Nov 04 73 77
White
MMSD Wisconsin
Oct 97 54 35
Feb 99 59 48
Feb 00 60 47
Feb 01 58 48
Feb 02 62 51
Nov 02 86 81
Nov 03 78 73
Nov 04 88 81

I see nothing in the demography by race which supports the claim that Connected Mathematics Project has been responsible for remarkable gains. I do see a lack of knowledge in how to read, understand and present data which should concern everyone in Madison who cares about public education. The School Board is owed an explanation for this misleading presentation. I wonder about the presentations to the School Board. Have they been as misleading as those given at this public meeting?

Richard Askey




More MMSD Administrators in 2004-2005 than in 1998-1999?



Early 2005, School Board members received a spreadsheet that summarized administrative contracts from 1998-1999 through plans for 2005-2006. That spreadsheet showed 147 administrative contracts in the 1998-1999 school year and 149.65 administrative contracts planned for 2005-2006. In 2003-2004 the total administrative contract budget for wages and benefits was approximately $15.1 million ($100,000 average wage and benefit per administrative contract). This information differs from the information posted in a recent blog by Board President Carol Carstensen (15 central administrators vs. 10.8), and both these sets of numbers differ from what is reported to DPI.
I feel the School Board needs to consider definitions:

a) how are administrative personnel defined – activity, contract, b) how does the board want information about personnel who perform administrative tasks summarized and presented to them, c) what is the number of personnel doing various administrative tasks, d) how has this number and cost (wages and benefits) changed over time – over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, e) how are these positions funded?

A bigger picture question, though, seems to me to be: what will happen to MMSD’s administrative functions if 5%, 10%, 20% are cut? The public in the $100 budget process zeroed in on cutting administration, which was no surprise to MMSD’s administration. However, telling us that “x” number of positions have been cut and will be cut does not give the type of information the public can use to understand what the loss is to the District’s ability to function and to support educational services. Further, recent board discussions were over a February deadline date to give extension of administrative contracts where MMSD administrators felt this was a firm date. If the date can be flexible, don’t Board members want to keep the flexibility? If the board does not do this, aren’t they giving the appearance to the Madison community that the School Board values administrators more than teachers? I don’t feel they do.
Clearly, an organization needs administrative functions to operate appropriately. I don’t think that’s the issue in anyone’s mind. It’s not for me anyway. I simply would like Madison’s School Board to have the flexibility to make the decisions the board feels are in the best interest of the school district when the time comes to make budget cuts.
The State of WI’s inability to address financing public education has put many school districts in the position of having to beg for funding via referendums and sadly for our children, this is not changing anytime soon. In the meantime, numbers need to be clear, consistent and understandable as do the risks and tradeoffs. I’d suggest starting with agreed upon definitions.




Lost in Numbers



Ms. Cornelius (an anonymous AP History high school teacher):

All of my grades are based on percentages. I’m not one of these teachers who wants to convert someone’s scores in my head, so I just weight grades differently. But all grades are based on 100 possible points. I can tell at a glance how a student is doing this way.
But this habit often makes it interesting when students are trying to figure out their grades on quizzes. I usually have a rather simple number of questions in terms of being able to calculate grades easily: 5, 10, 12, 20, 25, or 33 items. As I watched several of my AP students struggle with figuring out their grades, I had to suppress a groan of frustration. It was a 20 item quiz– therefore each question would be worth 5 points, right? Young Frederick wanted to pull out his calculator to figure out what his score would be if he missed 7.
“No calculator. You can do this,” I urged.
He couldn’t begin to figure out how to determine his grade without a calculator. He is 16 years old and taking pre-calculus and other college-track classes (I never took a course beyond algebra 2, much to my chagrin). He doesn’t immediately know that 7×5=35, and then subtract 35 from 100, nor can he figure out that 13×5=65. As a matter of fact, he stumbled over the 100-35 part and insisted the answer was 75.
It is obvious that his only problem is NOT that he didn’t do his reading for my AP US history class carefully enough last night. His problem begins with a basic innumeracy. Of course, many would say that he is a victim of a larger educational trend which I pray to God is finally being placed on the pyre of idiotic educational theories: that rote memorization is bad, bad, baddety bad bad.




President to School Board: New ideas are OK, sometimes…



Carol Carstensen, President of the Madison School Board, announced in a recent letter to The Capital Times that new ideas are OK with her, so long as they are not illegal, in violation of contracts, can save money and are capable of implementation. School Board ideas must be feasible
The Madison district will spend $37M on health insurance for its employees this year. That’s about 10% of the operating budget. The district also foresees an $8M gap between its expenses and revenues for 2006-07.
Looking for ways to provide high quality health insurance for the teachers at lower costs would seem like a good idea in these circumstances. The district had even set the stage for this new idea by forming a task force with the teachers union to explore options for different coverage.
However, Ms. Carstensen had zero interest in this new idea. Not one Board meeting on the topic, not one instruction to the district’s representatives. She skipped the two meetings of the task force. When the union announced that the talks were over, she had no comment.
Illegal? In violation of contracts? Not a good way to save money? Impossible to implement? Which of the four tests did the health insurance task force fail?




Math Forum Audio / Video and Links



Video and audio from Wednesday’s Math Forum are now available [watch the 80 minute video] [mp3 audio file 1, file 2]. This rare event included the following participants:

The conversation, including audience questions was lively.

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Carol Carstensen’s Weekly Update



Carol Carstensen:

Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The Community Service Fund (known for its state accounting code, Fund 80) is not under the revenue cap; these services are funded by a combination of fees and a separate portion of the tax levy. Madison School Community Recreation (MSCR) represents more than 80% of these expenditures. Some of the MSCR programs are: adult exercise programs, youth swimming classes, summer day camp, adult sports leagues, and after school programming at the elementary and middle schools.
FEBRUARY 20th MEETINGS:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting, executive session – expulsions
6 p.m. Finance and Operations Committee (Johnny Winston, Jr., chair):
5-year budget forecast shows that the district will need to make cuts of $8 million for next year, and by 2010-11 the 5 years of cuts will total $38 million. One caveat this is based on the assumption that current laws continue.
The Committee heard proposals from community agencies for after school activities that would be funded from unallocated money in the Community Service fund (Fund 80). The 4 community agencies are: WiCATY (WI Center for Academically Talented Youth), GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network), Kajsiab House, and the Youth Empowerment Academy. The Committee supported having these proposals go to the entire Board for funding.
7 p.m. Partnerships Committee (Lawrie Kobza, chair)
The Committee considered a policy governing gifts/donations to support activities during and/or after school; the policy will cover gifts of $10,000 or more and directs the Superintendent to review the impact of such a gift on the district to make a determination whether the district should accept it. This policy was approved by the Committee and will be on the Board’s agenda on March 6.
Future Meetings:
February 27:
5:00 p.m. Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) legislation that would increase the number of administrators who could be designated “at-will” employees; requirements for school district reports; requiring developers to pay fees to support the building of new schools; newly proposed TABOR amendment.
5:45 p.m. Special Board Meeting: the Board will respond to the Swan Creek petition our original agreement with the Oregon School District requires both districts to reject any such petition; discussion of the East Area Task Force recommendations; the Task Force will have a chance to talk with the Board; discussion about future uses of the Doyle Building; administrator contracts.
March 6:
5 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair) report on 2005 summer school and proposals for the 2006 summer school.
6 p.m. Special Board Meeting: report from the administration on possible land acquisition in Fitchburg and a look at long term use of space added to Leopold.
7:15 p.m. Regular Board Meeting
N.B. I spent most of Tuesday, Feb. 21 at the Capitol with Joe Quick (the district’s legislative liaison) lobbying our Dane County legislators to oppose the latest TABOR proposal. (Since the authors of TABOR seem only concerned about taxpayers, I have started referring to our students as “pre-taxpayers.”)
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
“Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified.” – African Proverb