Without opponents in their races for Madison School Board seats, candidates Ed Hughes and Marjorie Passman have spent more time identifying issues that unite rather than divide them.
Although both candidates said they were concerned by the lack of interest in this spring’s school board race, they admitted that it had offered some unique opportunities.
“In a contested election, there’s a tendency to pigeonhole the candidates,” Hughes, a Madison attorney who is running for his first elected office, said in a recent interview.
Hughes said that in a more normal election, Passman’s extensive classroom experience and passionate enthusiasm for teaching and teachers would have labeled her as the teachers’ union candidate.
“She would have been pushed towards MTI. It’s likely I would have been pushed in the other direction. It’s far more subtle than that and it’s not fair to either one of us,” he observed.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
School Board? Who…. me?
According to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, candidates for local office should have these qualifications:
- A belief that all kids are entitled to a good education
- An open mind
- A willingness to attend seminars to help them make intelligent decisions about school affairs
- An ability to work with other school board members
- Time
There are a few others, but you get the idea; it’s not like you need a graduate degree in economics for this gig. So why, according to a recent Journal Sentinel analysis, are almost 70% of local school board races in the five-county metro area going uncontested?
Seems like with all the concern over achievement rates, No Child Left Behind testing and cuts to school programs that more people, rather than fewer, would be interested in having a vote on what happens to their local district. One person has told us that part of it may be because so many schools have cut civics courses that illuminate how local government works.
Salute to D.C.’s College Tuition Champion
He is a seven-term U.S. representative and a prominent Republican, but Tom Davis hasn’t forgotten what it was like to grow up as one of five children in a struggling family, with a father serving time in prison.
“We had no money,” Davis (R-Va.) said recently at a reception, recounting how he went to Amherst College thanks to a scholarship. “I understand what it means to be a young kid, when you talk about college, and make that a reality.”
Davis is a champion of a federally funded initiative that has sent thousands of D.C. residents to college. He and other supporters of the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program were honored at the reception this month in the Senate.
The program, launched in 2000 and recently renewed, provides tuition subsidies of up to $10,000 per year to D.C. residents to attend public colleges elsewhere in the country. It offers smaller amounts to those choosing private colleges in the D.C. metropolitan area or historically black colleges around the nation. It aims to compensate for the District’s lack of a full public university system.
RISE OF THE ‘ROCK STAR’ SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT
No Child Left Behind has created a demand for school administrators who can take the pressure, and some 20 percent of school districts are now seeking superintendents because of a shortage.
The list reads more like demands from a Hollywood agent than from a candidate to lead the schools for an antebellum-tinged suburb of Atlanta.
To come to work here in Clayton County, a failing school district in Georgia, former Pittsburgh superintendent John Thompson wants $275,000 in salary, a $2 million consulting budget, a Lincoln Town Car with a driver, and money to pay a personal bodyguard.
Sound a bit hefty for someone likely to pull a power lunch in a junior high cafeteria? Maybe not.
Fewer qualified candidates, rising expectations, and a near-impossible job description are creating a new breed of superintendents: Call them central office rock stars. These candidates say that, for the right price, they’re willing to do an unpopular job that can take a heavy personal and professional toll to whip underperforming districts into shape.
The trend is exacerbated in struggling minority districts – many in the South – the very ones feeling the greatest pinch from new federal and state accountability laws.
Restructuring at Pasadena’s Muir High School
Pasadena ‘school in crisis’ requires all teachers to reapply for their jobs as part of arduous restructuring.
The statistics at John Muir High School are alarming: five principals in six years and test scores so dismal that the state has been monitoring the Pasadena school for four years. To turn around the troubled school, administrators, teachers and community members are undertaking an ambitious — and unusual — effort that includes requiring all teachers and staff to reapply for their jobs.
The rehiring process, the most emotionally difficult piece of the school’s reconstitution so far, was completed Friday, but educators predict a tumultuous road ahead.
“It is a school in crises,” said Renatta Cooper, a member of the Pasadena Board of Education. “Turning a school around is always very difficult. People are so protective of Muir that the amount of change that is going to have to take place to really change the academic climate at the school is going to make people uncomfortable.”
Muir High School, a mission-style complex nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, serves nearly 1,300 students from northwest Pasadena and Altadena. Open as a high school for more than half a century, Muir occupies a sentimental spot in the community, most visible in the large alumni turnout at the annual Turkey Tussle football game between the Muir Mustangs and arch-rival Pasadena High School’s Bulldogs.
Clusty search: Pasadena Muir High School.
What’s Missing from Math Standards? Focus, Rigor and Coherence
Why do some countries, like Singapore, Korea, and the Czech Republic, do so much better than the United States in math? I’ve heard all sorts of reasons; diversity and poverty top the list. But after some 15 years conducting international research, I am convinced that it’s the diversity and poverty of U.S. math standards—not the diversity and poverty of U.S. students—that are to blame.
The single most important result of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is that we now know that student performance is directly related to the nature of the curricular expectations. I do not mean the instructional practices. I mean the nature of what it is that children are to learn within schools. (In the U.S., the curricular expectations are usually referred to as standards; in other countries they are known by various names.) After all, what is more central to schooling than those things we, as a society, have chosen to pass on to our children?
The TIMSS research has revealed that there are three aspects of math expectations, or standards, that are really important: focus, rigor, and coherence. Let’s take a brief look at each.
Washington’s Math Evolution Takes Another Detour
AP:
The people revising the way students learn math in Washington would like the adults in the state to do them a favor.
Please stop saying: “Math is hard. I’ve never been good at it.”
But if math is so easy, why is the process to revise the state’s math standards taking so long?
The journey that began in the summer of 2006 with a consultant-led review of the old learning requirements is nearing its second anniversary. The new completion goal — a third extension granted by the Legislature earlier this month — is the end of summer.
Lawmakers and education officials say the process is taking so long because they want to make sure they get it right. They have a lofty goal: to finish the process with the best math system in the country.