Cap on Virtual Schools Jeopardizes Wisconsin’s Eligibility for Federal Education Funds

Brian Fraley:

Online public charter schools (or virtual schools) are charter schools under contract with a school board in which all or a portion of the instruction is provided through means of the Internet, and the pupils enrolled in and instructional staff employed by the school are geographically remote from each other.
Virtual schools have become an incredibly popular option throughout the country. In Wisconsin, thousands of families from Green Bay to Lancaster, from Racine to Rhinelander and other communities in every county in the state, have chosen to enroll their children in these unique and innovative public schools. School districts across Wisconsin (including those in Grantsburg, Appleton, Monroe, Fredonia, Waukesha and McFarland) currently offer or are exploring this option.
But in Wisconsin, even though online public charter schools are successful and embraced by parents, teachers and administrators alike, access to this innovation is rationed.

Special-Education Stigmatization
School vouchers may be the best way to curb abuse of public funds.

Marcus Winters & Jay Greene:

Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.
Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don’t worry–it’s not “something in the water.”
Better means of identification explain part of special education’s expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.

Grand Rapids Teacher Union Ratifies Contract

Kym Reinstadler:

The Grand Rapids Education Association has ratified a four-year tentative labor agreement with the Grand Rapids school district.
The contract was approved 727-236, with one ballot thrown out.
The Grand Rapids Board of Education has a special meeting to consider the contract at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the district’s administration building, 1331 Franklin St. SE.
After informational meetings last week, several teachers said they were frustrated the pact includes no retroactive salary increase for the two years they worked without a contract and a modest 2 percent salary raise for the coming school year.
Many are also dismayed the contract does not cap class sizes, language they say claim they sought to include.

Free education for Thai disabled

Bangkok Post:

All disabled people will be entitled to free education to the level of graduating with a bachelor’s degree starting next year, Education Minister Jurin Laksanavisit said on Tuesday.
Mr Jurin said this was a resolution made by the Committee on Education for the Disabled.
The disabled will be entitled to free education to the bachelor’s degree level in either state-run or private universities.
They will not have to pay tuition or other fees to the universities where they study. Their expenses will be covered by the offices of he Basic Education Commission and the Higher Education Commission, he said.

Dangling Money, Obama Pushes Education Shift

Sam Dillon:

Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.
That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is provoking heated debates over the uses of standardized testing and the proper federal role in education, issues that flared frequently during President George W. Bush’s enforcement of his signature education law, called No Child Left Behind.
A recent case is California, where legislative leaders are vowing to do anything necessary, including rewriting a law that prohibits the use of student scores in teacher evaluations, to ensure that the state is eligible for a chunk of the $4.3 billion the federal Education Department will soon award to a dozen or so states. The law had strong backing from the state teachers union.
Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states have moved to bring their laws or policies into line with President Obama’s school improvement agenda.

Kevin Carey has more.

Nigeria: Outdated Curricula, Challenge to West Africa Education – UNESCO

Aisha Umar:

The problem of education in Sub-Saharan Africa is due to outdated curricula and minimal sustainable reforms undertaken since independence, the Director, Regional Bureau of Education (BREDA) UNESCO, Mrs. Ann-Therese Ndong-Jatta, has said.
Speaking at a regional workshop held yesterday in Abuja on Revitalising Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) provision in the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) region, she said: “It is unfortunate that there is a bifurcation if not undervaluing of skills development in the provision of education.
This, she said, “has resulted in school graduates without skills, and led to the present disenchantment among young people who are loosing faith in education system and political leadership to address their needs.”
Education minister Sam Egwu said regular curriculum review, followed by appropriate staff development and the expansion of the knowledge base on information and communication technology, are vital ingredients in reversing the situation.

The education business: Lapdesks

Maria Karaivanova:

Imagine you are nine years old, you go to school, it’s winter. You enter the unheated classroom and sit on your chair or on the floor. And then you start your daily lessons.
But wait – you don’t have anything to write on. You don’t have a desk… 
I have just had a life-altering experience. I helped with the handover ceremony of 385 desks at the King Zwelithini primary school in the impoverished black township of Soweto, only 20 minutes from Johannesburg’s glossy financial district. The ceremony was masterminded by Lapdesk in Johannesburg, where I am now an intern.
I heard about Lapdesk on my first day of class at Harvard Business School, when I was handed a case study about the company.
But why, I asked myself, were we focused on a South African company whose goal was to eradicate classroom desk shortages throughout Africa, by making desks out of recyclable plastic? Why was I not learning about a Fortune 500 company?
After the discussion I realised why: there are 80m children in Africa without a desk and Lapdesk is addressing this social problem with a private-sector proposition.

More here.

Washington, DC School Choice Advocates Step Up Campaign

Tim Craig:

School choice advocates are gearing up for a final push this week to try to get U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to reverse his decision to rescind scholarships for 216 low-income District students.
The advocates, led by D.C. Parents for School Choice and DC Children First, are planning radio, newspaper and Internet ads. The advocates, who have formed www.savethe216.com, are also holding a vigil at noon Thursday outside the U.S. Department of Education.
The campaign, billed as a major escalation of their efforts, is designed to get Duncan to reinstate the scholarships before the school year begins.
“Time is truly running out for Secretary Duncan to reverse his disastrous decision and to save these 216 children,” said former Ward 7 D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous, a Democrat who is heading up efforts to save the students’ scholarships. “Scholarship money is already available for the 216 students and there is no law or regulation preventing them from accessing these scholarships. Secretary Duncan needs to show the nation that this administration is serious about reforming education.”

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

New York Times via a Doug Newman email:

In a Room for Debate forum in June on the value of liberal arts master’s degrees, one group of readers — teachers and education administrators — generally agreed a higher degree was well worth the investment. They pointed out that pay and promotion in public schools were tied to the accumulation of such credentials and credits, specifically from colleges of education.
But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation’s 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.” And Obama administration officials support a shift away from using master’s degrees for pay raises, and a shift toward compensating teachers based on children’s performance.
Should the public schools reduce the weight they give to education school credentials in pay and promotion decisions? Is this happening already, and, if so, what is replacing the traditional system for compensating teachers?

Teacher salaries raising eyebrows

Jim Siegel & Catherine Candisky:

Some ask if educators are sharing the pain
As scores of Ohioans are seeing their paychecks frozen, cut or taken away, pressure is mounting on teachers unions and school administrators who continue enjoying healthy raises to share in the sacrifice.
While 60 percent of schools are getting a cut in state aid over the next two years, and the rest will see annual increases of less than 1 percent, pay raises for teachers top 5 percent in some districts once all the automatic pay bumps are included.
In light of state workers and many other government-paid employees already taking concessions, such raises are getting the attention of weary taxpayers in many school districts, particularly those asking voters to approve higher taxes.
State Superintendent Deborah Delisle told The Dispatch that it’s time for “a reality check in every single community to see what we are able to sustain.”

Still time to fix Wisconsin school finance

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

School finance reform should be at the top of Gov. Jim Doyle’s to-do list before he leaves office.
Reform won’t be easy.
Yet fixing the state’s broken system of paying for public education has always been a monumental task. That’s why so many politicians — Democrats and Republicans — have largely ignored it for so long.
Doyle, who announced Monday he won’t seek a third term, has advantages in pressing for major change now, even if he’s viewed as a lame duck.
The Democratic governor won’t have to fear the political repercussions of reform because he’s leaving anyway. And his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature might be happy to let Doyle take ownership of the thorny and complicated issue. Then Doyle can be the fall guy if special and local interests balk at difficult yet necessary state decisions.

Madison School Board Talented & Gifted (TAG) Plan Discussion & Approval

There were several public appearances [4.1MB mp3 audio] Monday evening related to the Madison School District’s Talented & Gifted plan. TJ Mertz, Kris Gomez-Schmidt, Janet Mertz (not related) and Shari Galitzer spoke during the public appearance segment of the meeting. Their comments begin at 3:13 into this mp3 audio file.
The School Board and Administration’s discussion can be heard via this 6MB mp3 audio file. The previous week’s discussion can be heard here. Madison United for Academic Excellence posted a number of useful links on this initiative here.
Finally, the recent Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys provides a useful background for the interested reader.

Hard-Hit Schools Try Public-Relations Push

Stephanie Simon:

Public schools in the U.S. have added professional marketing to their back-to-school shopping lists.
Financially struggling urban districts are trying to win back students fleeing to charter schools, private schools and suburban districts that offer open enrollment. Administrators say they are working hard to improve academics — but it can’t hurt to burnish their image as well.
A bus in Washington, D.C., carries an ad for the city’s public schools, which have seen enrollment plunge from nearly 150,000 students in 1970 to less than 50,000 last year. The district spent $100,000 this spring on a campaign that also included radio spots in an effort to win back students who have left public schools. The ads include quotes from students who say they are glad they stayed in public school.
So they are recording radio ads, filming TV infomercials and buying address lists for direct-mail campaigns. Other efforts, by both districts and individual schools, call for catering Mexican dinners for potential students, making sales pitches at churches and hiring branding experts to redesign logos.
“Schools are really getting that they can’t just expect students to show up any more,” said Lisa Relou, who directs marketing efforts for the Denver Public Schools. “They have to go out and recruit.”
Administrators working on the public-relations push say the potential returns are high. State funding for public schools is based on attendance, so each new student brings more money, typically $5,000 to $8,000 per head. In addition, schools with small enrollments are at constant risk of being shuttered in this recession, and full classrooms help.
Some districts also hope a better image will entice more local business sponsorship and persuade voters to support school levies and bond issues

Substance, such as a rigorous curriculum, strong school leadership, extensive education options (languages, arts, science and math, among others) will always be better than simple pr/marketing/advertising efforts. General Motors tried re-brand their business repeatedly over the past few decades.

Age-Old Problem, Perpetually Absent Solution: Fitting Special Education to Students’ Needs

Jay Matthews:

Miguel Landeros is a lanky, well-spoken 12-year-old about to begin seventh grade in Stafford County. He is severely learning disabled, with reading, writing and math skill levels at least two years below his peers, and needs special teaching, according to a licensed clinical psychologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and other specialists.
Last February, Stafford officials refused to accept that evaluation and left him in regular classes. He performed poorly, failing all core subjects. Recently, they promised to give him more specialized services, but not the ones the experts who examined him say he needs.
I admit that education writers in general, and I in particular, write very little about learning disabilities and the many failures of federally mandated public school programs to help students who have them. I often say the cases are so complicated I have difficulty translating them into everyday language, and even then readers struggle to understand.

An Interview with Diane Ravitch

John Merrow:

The Obama Administration and nearly every state have now endorsed national or common standards. Is this a good thing? Or is now the time to get worried, the logic being that, when ‘everyone’ is for something, the rest of us should watch out?
I have favored common standards for a long time. When I worked for Bush I in the early 1990s, I helped to launch federally funded projects to develop voluntary national standards in the arts, English, history, geography, civics, economics, science, and other essential school subjects. Some of the projects were successful; others were not. The whole enterprise foundered because a) it was not authorized by Congress, and b) it came to fruition during the transition between two administrations and had no oversight, no process of review and improvement. So, yes, I believe the concept is important.
However, I worry about today’s undertaking, first, because it will focus only on reading and mathematics, nothing else; and second, because I don’t know whether the effort will become a bureaucratic nightmare. But I won’t prejudge the outcome. I will hope for the best, and hope that today’s standardistas learned some lessons from what happened nearly two decades ago.

Related:

Teach for America: Elite corps or costing older teachers jobs?

Greg Toppo:

In 2007, fresh out of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Chris Turk snagged a coveted spot with the elite Teach For America program, landing here at Cherry Hill Elementary/Middle School in a blue-collar neighborhood at the city’s southern tip. For the past two years, he has taught middle-school social studies.
One recent afternoon, during a five-week “life skills” summer-school course, Turk tells his five students that their final project, a movie about what they’ve learned, has a blockbuster budget: $70.
“We can go big here,” he says. “We can go grand.”
He might as well be talking about the high-profile program that brought him here.
Despite a lingering recession, state budget crises and widespread teacher hiring slowdowns, Teach For America (TFA) has grown steadily, delighting supporters and giving critics a bad case of heartburn as it expands to new cities and builds a formidable alumni base of young people willing to teach for two years in some of the USA’s toughest public schools.

B.C. university adds grade worse than F

Stuart Hunter:

There are two new scarlet letters in academia.
Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., recently introduced a grade called FD to deal with cheaters.
The letters stand for failure with academic dishonesty.
Rob Gordon, the university’s director of criminology, said the FD grade was introduced to catch cheaters who use the Internet and was part of a larger package of reforms “relating to student misconduct issues and honesty.”
“It is a penalty that can only be imposed by department heads, not by individual professors,” Gordon, acting chairman of the university’s senate committee on academic integrity, said Thursday.
“It would be used in egregious cases of academic dishonesty.”

At Sinclair Community College, Focus Is Jobs

Steven Greenhouse:

When Todd Sollar was laid off after 11 years at General Motors, he enrolled at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton to study robotics.
“Hopefully, with a degree I’ll be marketable for a job,” said Mr. Sollar, 32, who has overcome his nervousness about not fitting in because of his age. In fact, he is thriving, getting A’s and B’s, far better than in high school where he said officials had wrongly pegged him as having a learning disability.
As legions of displaced autoworkers and others face the prospect that their onetime jobs may be gone forever, many like Mr. Sollar will need training for a fresh start.
And perhaps the best place for them will be community colleges, long the workhorses of American higher education, workhorses that get little respect. In an unforgiving economy, these colleges provide lifelines not only for laid-off workers in need of a new career, but for recent high school graduates who find that many types of entry-level jobs now require additional skills.

School spotlight: Program provides taste of medical research

Pamela Cotant:


West High School student Tulika Singh spent part of her summer studying epilepsy in rodents — an experience that made her feel like a contributor to research being conducted at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Singh, who will be a senior this year, was one of 15 students in a Research Apprentice Program based at the school.
“Tulika (was) basically doing the work that college undergrads do for research experience and credits during the year,” said Dr. Thomas Sutula, neurology department chairman. He said apprentices are part of the team for the summer.
Singh, who wrote a research paper and presented it, was involved in a study of how genes influence epilepsy. Her mentor was Craig Levenick, senior research specialist.
“It’s just absolutely cool,” Singh said of the experience.
In its 29th year, the seven-week Research Apprentice Program is designed to help increase diversity in science and health professions. The program is geared toward incoming juniors and seniors from Dane County high schools. It’s based on academic performance and an interest in medicine.

A Hand Up for Students Facing a Mountain of Debt

Ron Lieber:

The biggest problem for consumers of American higher education is that many of them must take on a mountain of debt to get the degree they want. That intimidating quandary has inspired some unique, though often unsuccessful, attempts to make student loans more affordable over the years.
One of the most innovative sprang from a handful of trailblazers, including an economist who later won a Nobel and some entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, who tried to persuade undergraduates to sell a portion of their future income to investors in exchange for money for college. Critics fretted about “indentured servitude,” and the idea never amounted to much.
Others have tried to let strangers finance students’ fixed-rate loans via Web sites. The idea of “peer to peer” lending hasn’t gained much traction either so far.

Swine flu vaccinations likely to be offered in Dane County public schools

Gayle Worland:

In Dane County, vaccinations for the H1N1 virus likely will be offered to students at public schools this fall — but stay tuned for details.
The Dane County Immunization Coalition — a broad group of health providers that also includes school district representatives — will meet Tuesday to discuss logistics for administering the vaccine, which isn’t expected to arrive here until mid- or late-October, said Judy Aubey of the Madison-Dane County Public Health Department.
The coalition, Aubey said, will look to guidelines from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine who should be first in line for immunizations, which are given in two doses, 21 to 28 days apart. Unlike the seasonal flu vaccine, which traditionally focuses on the old and the young, the priority groups for H1N1 immunizations include pregnant women, adults in regular contact with infants under 6 months old, health care workers and children and young adults ages 6 months through 24 years.
So schools could be key players, Aubey said. “There are 80,000 kids in Dane County schools and we certainly don’t have the numbers to carry this ourselves,” she said. “We are going to need help.”
Since April, the Madison school district has been communicating closely with the health department on swine flu issues, and that partnership will continue into the fall and beyond, said Freddi Adelson, health services coordinator for the district.

Newt Gingrich, Al Sharpton won’t hold back on education tour

Mark Silva:

Reporting from Washington – Here’s an unlikely trio for a road tour:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to take the Obama administration’s vision of educational improvements, innovation and the “challenges facing America’s school systems” on a multi-city tour. And he’s taking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as well as the Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights leader and onetime Democratic presidential candidate.
Duncan, who met with Gingrich and Sharpton earlier this year, called them “two of the most candid people I have ever known.”
“They are willing to challenge conventional thinking, and I can absolutely promise some provocative conversations on education reform.”
The tour starts Sept. 29 in Philadelphia, heads to New Orleans Nov. 3, then Baltimore on Nov. 13 — cities selected for what they can teach others about school reform. The Department of Education plans to add other stops, including a rural venue.

You Need Teachers for School Reform

Marietta English:

Critics of public education love to point fingers. But condemning teachers unions (“Pay Your Teachers Well,” Review & Outlook, Aug. 3) is not only counterproductive to reform, it aims at the wrong target.
School improvement is only possible with the buy-in of teachers, whose collective voices are brought together by their unions. And many unions, notably the two you single out, have initiated a number of successful reforms.
The Baltimore Teachers Union has been deeply involved in efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in city schools, where students have posted double-digit gains the past several years. We are pleased that improvements also are taking place at the KIPP school you highlight. Contrary to your assertion, the union seeks only to have KIPP honor its agreement to pay teachers for their time worked. No other extended-day school in Baltimore has refused to do so.

More on the Madison School District’s Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan

Gayle Worland:

The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.
Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school — but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
“We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we’re very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work,” Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren’t being met in the classroom.”
So Raihala’s children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.

Life is transformed

Financial Times Editorial:

Genetic engineering is beginning to live up to its name. Over the past 30 years it has meant transferring existing genes, one at a time, between organisms. Now – under the banner of “synthetic biology” – scientists are using the principles of systems engineering to transform whole organisms and potentially even to create novel forms of life.
Synthetic biology is sufficiently different from old-style genetic engineering to need a new system of regulation and governance, plus a fresh effort by its practitioners to tell the public what they are up to. Enormous benefits could flow from their work – practical pay-offs, such as new medicines and biofuels, as well as scientific insights into the nature of life.
But there are serious concerns too. First is bio-safety. Synthetic biology involves the production of novel living organisms that are self-replicating and potentially uncontrollable if something goes wrong.
Such fears were voiced in the mid-1970s when scientists first discovered how to snip a piece of DNA out of one organism and splice it into another. Indeed everyone in the field agreed to a voluntary moratorium on genetic engineering while they considered the safety consequences. Soon work resumed and, to this day, no serious accident can be blamed on the genetic manipulation of microbes.

Tulsa Public Schools Proposal to the Gates Foundation

Tulsa Public Schools:

America is at a crossroads. After leading the way in universal primary and secondary education, the academic achievements of American students have fallen behind those in many other countries. Over half of these deficiencies come as a result of the wide achievement gaps that exist along racial/ethnic and socio-economic lines. Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) represents just one of many American school districts combating the challenges of deficient academic performance.
Tulsa Public Schools believes that the best weapon in the battle to bring about greater academic success and college-readiness in the American student is an effective teacher. It is eager to seize the opportunity to become a model and catalyst for change for the rest of the nation.
TPS will swiftly implement its Teacher Effectiveness initiative with the support of a Gates’ partnership but is determined to execute this initiative in the absence of a Gates’ partnership if necessary. The plan outlined below was developed out of the painstaking work of dozens of teachers, principals, and central office employees. Three Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association officers were intimately involved in every step of the development process. The TPS Board of Education is enthusiastically supportive and will make all necessary changes to local regulations to enable the full implementation. Likewise, Oklahoma legislative leadership and senior executives at the Oklahoma State Department of Education have committed to promoting changes in state law and practice necessary to make these strategies possible. Moreover, local business leaders and philanthropists have pledged to generate local funding support.

View the complete Tulsa proposal here (7MB PDF).

A Real-Life School Of Rock

NPR:

Do you really need to go to school to learn about rocking out? Many musicians might say no: Lock yourself in your room with a bunch of records and a guitar, put in your days on the road playing in scummy clubs, and you’ll master the craft eventually.
Or, starting this Monday, you could go to the real-life “school of rock” — the brand-new Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma. The program has true rock cred — it was started by Steven Drozd and Scott Booker, respectively the guitarist and manager of the Flaming Lips, a Grammy-winning rock band.
“The idea here is not that we’re just a school of rock,” Booker says. “The idea behind this program is really as much about business and learning how the industry works while you’re learning to play better.”
Unlike the original Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, England, the University of Central Oklahoma ACM offers an actual college degree. Booker adds, “not only are you taking general ed, but you’re also taking aural skills and music theory and those things that anyone who’s getting a music degree has to take.”

Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village.

Alan Kazdin & Carlo Rotella:

Let’s say you find out that your child is being bullied by a schoolmate. Naturally, you want to do something right now to make it stop. Depending on your temperament and experience, one or more of four widely attempted common-sense solutions will occur to you: telling your child to stand up to the bully, telling your child to try to ignore and avoid the bully, taking matters into your own hands by calling the bully’s parents or confronting the bully yourself, or asking your child’s teacher to put a stop to it.
These responses share three features:
1) They all express genuine caring, concern, and good intentions.
2) You will feel better for taking action.
3) They are likely to be ineffective.

More on the Madison School District’s $12M Budget Deficit

Channel3000:

A multimillion-dollar budget shortfall means major decisions are afoot for Madison Metropolitan School District officials.
The district’s school board is getting a first look this week at how to deal with a budget massively in the red, and Superintendent Dan Nerad gave a breakdown on Friday on the proposal being put forward.
Overall the district is facing a $12 million shortfall in the next school year. Nerad said that he has a plan to address it. He said he thinks the proposal will affect learning and taxpayers as little as possible.
Nerad said he has had his staff hard at work scouring the district budget, trying to find out how to mitigate two major changes in state funding. The first is a nearly $3 million drop in the revenue cap and the second is a 15-percent cut in state aid.
“We’re really pushing to say what’s out there, where can we make these budget decisions and I’m looking from this point forward and I’ve been here for a year, and we feel real good about these options,” Nerad said.
To cover the loss in revenue cap funding, district officials are contemplating taking $300,000 from its contingency fund and adjusting budget amounts for elementary teachers’ salaries and substitute teacher days. The district came in under budget in the new teachers hired this year and fewer sub days have been used, WISC-TV reported.

Hong Kong School drug tests will go ahead, Henry Tang says

Martin Wong:

The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.
Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community’s different opinions about the plan.
“Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year,” he said. “We still have plenty of time … when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it.”
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers’ Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups – the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! – have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: “We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully.”
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday’s seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.

Milwaukee Schools’ Power struggle likely to be messy

Alan Borsuk:

The decision by Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett last week to push for giving Barrett control of some major aspects of Milwaukee Public Schools will prompt a historic, intense and almost surely messy test of the body politic of the city and the state when it comes to education issues.
Here’s an early guide on what to watch for when it comes to body parts and their role in the debate:
• Spine: Any major change in the status quo around here takes a lot of backbone – this is Milwaukee, after all. Making a change as controversial as this will take an especially large amount of determination. Are Doyle and Barrett willing to put that much of their spines into this fight?
Are opponents such as the Milwaukee teachers union sufficiently determined to fight a powerful list of backers, including not only Doyle and Barrett but major business leaders, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state school superintendent Tony Evers?

Cold Prospects

The Concord Review
13 August 2009
Today’s Boston Globe has a good-sized article on “Hot Prospects,”–local high school football players facing “increasing pressure from recruiters to make their college decisions early.”
That’s right, it is not the colleges that are getting pressure from outstanding students seeking admission based on their academic achievement, it is colleges putting pressure on high school athletes to get them to “sign” with the college.
The colleges are required by the AAU to wait until the prospect is a Senior in high school before engaging in active recruiting including “visits and contact from college coaches,” and, for some local football players the recruiting pressure even comes from such universities as Harvard and Stanford.
Perhaps Senior year officially starts in June, because the Globe reports that one high school tight end from Wellesley, Massachusetts, for example, “committed to Stanford in early June, ending the suspense of the region’s top player.”
The University of Connecticut “made an offer to” an athletic quarterback from Natick High School, “and a host of others, including Harvard and Stanford, are interested,” says the Globe.
In the meantime, high school football players are clearly not being recruited by college professors for their outstanding academic work. When it comes to academic achievement, high school students have to apply to colleges and wait until the college decides whether they will be admitted or not. Some students apply for “Early Decision,” but in that case, it is the college, not the athlete, who makes the decision to “commit.”
Intelligent and diligent high school students who manage achievement in academics even at the high level of accomplishment of their football-playing peers who are being contacted, visited, and recruited by college coaches, do not find that they are contacted, visited, or recruited by college professors, no matter how outstanding their high school academic work may be.
In some other countries, the respect for academic work is somewhat different. One student, who earned the International Baccalaureate Diploma and had his 15,000-word independent study essay on the Soviet-Afghan War published in The Concord Review last year, was accepted to Christ Church College, Oxford, from high school. He reported to me that during the interview he had with tutors from that college, “they spent a lot of time talking to me about my TCR essay in the interview.” He went on to say: “Oxford doesn’t recognize or consider extra-curriculars/sports in the admissions process (no rowing recruits) because they are so focused on academics. So I thought it was pretty high praise of the Review that they were so interested in my essay (at that time it had not won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize).”
There are many other examples from other countries of the emphasis placed on academic achievement and the lack of emphasis on sports and other non-academic activities, perhaps especially in Asian countries.
One young lady, a student at Boston Latin School, back from a Junior year abroad at a high school in Beijing, reported in the Boston Globe that: “Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of U.S. students could imagine…teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction.”
That is not to say that American (and foreign) high school students who do the work to get their history research papers published in The Concord Review don’t get into colleges. So far, ninety have gone to Harvard, seventy-four to Yale, twelve to Oxford, and so on, but the point is that, unlike their football-paying peers, they are not contacted, visited and recruited in the same way.
The bottom line is that American colleges and universities, from their need to have competitive sports teams, are sending the message to all of our high school students (and their teachers) that, while academic achievement may help students get into college one day, what colleges are really interested in, and willing to contact them about, and visit them about, and take them for college visits about, and recruit them for, is their athletic achievement, not their academic achievement. What a stupid, self-defeating message to keep sending to our academically diligent secondary students (and their diligent teachers)!!
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon

Geoffrey Fowler:

Thinking about making the leap to digital books? First, you’ll need to add a jumble of new lingo to your dictionary: .epub, pdb, BeBB, and Adobe Content Server 4, just to name a few.
The burgeoning marketplace for e-books is riddled with inconsistent and incompatible formats. That means there’s often little guarantee that an e-book you buy from one online store, like the new Barnes & Noble store, will work on popular reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader.
In fact, most popular reading devices and e-book stores use proprietary formats. Amazon only sells Kindle-format books (called “.azw”), which can only be viewed on its Kindle e-reader and with software Amazon has made for Apple’s iPhone. Barnes & Noble uses a proprietary format (called “.pdb”), which can only be read with software the bookseller has made for PCs, iPhones and BlackBerrys.
That’s why Sony won applause from some e-book watchers by announcing Thursday that its e-book store was switching from a proprietary format called BeBB to Epub, an open standard put together by an industry group called the International Digital Publishing Forum. Sony’s Reader has long been able to open files in the Epub format.

The case against national school standards: Obama’s push would homogenize education even further

Andrew J. Coulson:

President Obama recently announced a $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund that he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will use, among other things, to “reward states that come together and adopt a common set of standards and assessments.” Duncan has championed uniform national standards as a key to educational improvement since taking office. “If we accomplish one thing in the coming years,” he said back in February, “it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.”
That goal now seems within reach.
Both the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers recently stepped forward to lead the charge, and 46 states are already behind them. The day may soon come when every student in the country is expected to master the same material at the same age.
Let’s hope that day never comes.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Dane County Expects Higher Property Tax Growth

Matthew DeFour:

For only the second time in 13 years, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk said she won’t be able to hold property tax growth to her self-imposed index.
Coupled with the value of existing Dane County residential property this year dropping $700 million, or 2 percent, that means homeowners may see a higher county property tax increase than usual.
County property tax increases have been relatively low in recent years because of the county’s tremendous growth and Falk’s practice of increasing the property tax levy by the rate of population growth plus inflation. But the index for next year would be based on inflation of 0.75 percent and population growth of 0.44 percent, or 1.19 percent — “the lowest in recent memory,” Falk wrote to the County Board.
If she stuck to the limit, the total tax levy would increase $1.4 million. But next year, Human Services faces $2 million in state cuts and the Sheriff’s Office costs $1 million more just to maintain services.

American High Education is Sliding Lower & Lower

Steve Salerno:

You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, she’s suing her alma mater, Monroe College, to recover $70,000 in tuition. The Thompson case may not turn out to be the precedent-setter that some theorize, because Monroe makes unusually bold promises to students about post-college success.
But the sad truth is this: Practically all colleges are failing their students nowadays, and in most cases at far greater expense than Monroe failed Thompson.
Historically, criticism of education in America has targeted grade-school and secondary education. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about the K-12 is that in these polarized times, it is the great uniter: Maligned by liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, and just about everyone else in the grand American cultural stew.

Technical colleges foresee big growth

Amy Hetzner:

Technical colleges throughout the state are bracing for a fall enrollment boom, spurred by unemployed workers who need retraining and students looking for affordable alternatives to four-year universities.
The schools got a glimpse of the heightened demand last year when Blackhawk and Mid-State technical colleges were flooded with new enrollment, giving them double-digit percentage increases for the year. Overall enrollment for the Wisconsin Technical College System increased about 3.2% in 2008-’09, according to system spokeswoman Morna Foy.
But that was then.
“I think it’s not going to be too far off to say we’re expecting enrollment increases this year about 10% statewide, and that’s pretty significant,” Foy said.
Final numbers won’t be apparent at the state’s 16 schools until mid-September, when classes have started and students have settled in for the semester.
But most technical colleges are girding themselves based on what they’ve seen so far.

Doyle, Barrett say mayor should pick Milwaukee Public Schools’ leaders

Erin Richards & Larry Sandler:

Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett both said for the first time Thursday that achieving significant reform in Milwaukee Public Schools would require the mayor to lead the school system and select the next superintendent.
Mayoral control of the school system – a tactic that experts say has improved the academic and fiscal performance of some other urban districts – has been hinted at in Milwaukee since late spring, but wasn’t formally endorsed until Doyle did so Thursday in an interview with a member of the Journal Sentinel’s editorial board.
In addition to selecting the superintendent, Barrett said, the mayor should also appoint the School Board. Doyle did not commit to that but indicated he was open to new ways for the School Board to operate.
If done correctly, he added, changes to the governance of MPS could bring significant benefits to the district.
The comments from Doyle and Barrett, which were supported by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, set off immediate criticism from Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds.

Hillsborough schools and teachers’ union join hands with Florida voucher advocates to train private school teachers

Tom Marshall:

On a normal day, oil and water just don’t mix.
Public schools and teachers’ unions don’t say nice things about those who support school vouchers, sending kids to private schools with public money. Most of the time, such folks just don’t get along.
But Wednesday wasn’t a normal day.
In a move that experts are calling nearly unprecedented, the Hillsborough County schools and teachers’ union have joined forces with a nonprofit Florida voucher group to help train private school teachers.
Step Up for Students — which runs the state’s tax credit voucher program — plans to spend at least $100,000 on classes for teachers who serve its scholarship students, among the county’s most economically disadvantaged children. The school district and union will provide space in the jointly developed Center for Technology and Education.

Pa. education board OKs new high-school tests

Peter Jackson:

The state Board of Education on Thursday approved proposed new tests to measure Pennsylvania students’ competence to graduate from high school.
The 14-2 vote clears the way for months of regulatory review of the proposed Keystone Exams, including scrutiny by the Legislature, where critics still could block the new requirements if they can muster majority support in both houses.
The Keystone Exams, developed after two years of discussion and revision, would replace the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests now administered in the 11th grade.
Students would take the exams on specific subjects as they complete their course work throughout their high school years , generally grades nine through 12. The scores would count as at least one-third of their final grade.
Proponents say the Keystones would more effectively measure student progress toward meeting statewide academic standards, reducing district-to-district discrepancies evident under the present system, while allowing local districts to substitute their own tests with state approval.

Detroit School Woes Deepen

Alex Kellogg:

Five employees of the Detroit public school system were charged Wednesday with multiple felonies as part of an investigation into alleged corruption and the loss of tens of millions of dollars in school funds.
The charges come as the Detroit Public Schools is struggling with an estimated budget deficit of $259 million and weighing a potential bankruptcy filing.
Zuma Press
Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, shown last week, is expected to decide this month whether to make a bankruptcy filing.
Kym Worthy, the prosecutor for Wayne County, announced the charges Wednesday. If convicted, the accused could face decades of jail time because Michigan law allows harsh penalties for public officials found guilty of wrongdoing.
The allegations include eight felony embezzlement charges against a district administrative staffer and a high-school teacher’s aide who together allegedly embezzled more than $50,000. Another clerical worker at an elementary school was charged with writing checks and withdrawing roughly $25,000 of the district’s money. The smallest alleged crime was related to a food-services employee accused of stealing more than $400 of lunch money at another elementary school.

Expanding the Charter Option

Anne Marie Chaker:

Andrea Byrd, mother of two boys, had enough with her son’s school. After she and her older son, Andrae, moved from Mississippi to Memphis a year ago, the formerly straight-A student “started dumbing himself down,” she says, to fit in with the other boys at his new school.
“I needed to get my child into a school where there were high expectations,” Ms. Byrd says. A charter school had recently opened nearby, but the 34-year-old single mom hesitated over getting an application since Tennessee law required her son to either be considered low-performing–which he wasn’t–or attend a low-performing school–which he didn’t–in order to get in. But all that changed a few weeks ago, when the state enacted a law for charter schools to also include students from low-income families. Two weeks ago, Ms. Byrd went into the Power Center Academy for an application. Later that same day, she got a call to say Andrae had been accepted.
The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund, Race to the Top, that encourages more charters as one of the criteria for states to qualify for a piece of the pie. A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools.

EDITORIAL: Revolutionize the classroom

Palm Beach Post:

We hope that the Palm Beach County School District gets the $120 million grant it’s seeking from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But first we need to deal with the infamous “70 percent” number.
In charts and text, the grant application says several times that only 30 percent of the district’s 13,000 teachers are “effective.” Which means that 70 percent must be “ineffective.” Last week, Laura Green of The Post reported those percentages. Of course, teachers have been outraged.
In a “Management Letter” to employees, Superintendent Art Johnson blamed the media. He said it was “unfortunate” that The Post article “left teachers to believe that 70 percent of PBSD teachers are ineffective.” He said that conclusion was based on a statistic in the application “which indicated that only 30 percent of PBSD reading and math teachers taught students who achieved MORE than a year’s growth in the same year.”
Dr. Johnson’s blame-shifting is disingenuous. His explanation of the statistics is not in the Gates application, so Ms. Green could not have reported it based on that document. Rather than blame The Post, Dr. Johnson should have accepted responsibility for the confusion and moved on.
And now, we will move on – to the proposal itself. The remainder of the district’s application contains remarkable candor and worthy goals. It also hints at – but does not nail down – how to achieve those goals. The foundation’s money and a hefty chunk from the district would help provide those specifics.
A big goal is to close racial achievement gaps. The graduation rate for white students is 87 percent, but it’s 20 points lower for Hispanics and 30 points lower for African-Americans – in a majority-minority district.

Pittsburgh schools polish final pitch for big Gates grant

Joe Smydo:

Invited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to compete for half a billion dollars in teacher-effectiveness grants, Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma put about 80 people to work on a proposal.
Pittsburgh Public Schools, also invited to apply, invested hundreds of employee hours on its plan and worked so closely with outside technical advisers, McKinsey and Co., that it gave them office space at district headquarters in Oakland.
Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida assembled focus groups of teachers, administrators and community members to gather input for a proposal, which has been through nine or 10 drafts.
The proposals had to be turned in by Friday, but the unusually rigorous application process isn’t over yet.
In all, 10 invitees — most of them urban districts in various stages of broad improvement campaigns — will meet Wednesday in Seattle to make presentations to Gates officials. Then they’ll wait to see who is selected for prestigious Gates funding — and wonder whether Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife will have a hand in the decision-making.

Little Hearts, Big Problems
Few Drugs or Devices to Treat Cardiovascular Disease Are Designed With Children in Mind

Ron Winslow:

Matthew Emmerling was just three days old and barely home from the hospital when his mother noticed his feet were unusually cold to the touch. Hours later, doctors determined that he was born with a critically narrowed aortic valve that prevented his heart from getting an adequate supply of blood to the rest of his body. He was in shock, and without quick intervention, his life was in danger.
To avoid risky open-heart surgery on the infant, doctors figured they could thread a tiny balloon into his heart and inflate it to stretch open the obstructed valve. The problem was that a balloon designed and approved to treat heart defects in patients as tiny as Matthew didn’t exist. Instead, Robert Beekman, a pediatric cardiologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, chose an angioplasty balloon that normally serves a different function: opening up clogged kidney arteries in adults.
The adult kidney balloon “is the right size for a newborn’s aortic valve, so we use it,” Dr. Beekman says. But, he adds, using a device in small children that wasn’t designed for that purpose puts them at heightened risk for procedural complications and medical errors.
Matthew’s situation highlights an enduring reality for children born with life-threatening heart defects: Hardly any of the myriad drugs and devices developed for the multibillion-dollar market for cardiovascular disease are designed with kids in mind. Children with heart disease represent too small a segment of that market to justify companies’ investing the time and resources needed to develop specialized products. Litigation worries over products intended for children–and the challenge of conducting clinical trials for treatments often administered to newborns–are other impediments.

Three Peas in a Pod

Aaron Pallas:

Mike Bloomberg’s comments at Monday’s press conference announcing plans to extend a test-based promotion policy to grades four and six were eerily reminiscent of Arne Duncan’s and Joel Klein’s reactions to two reports on social promotion released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research in 2004. The Chicago Consortium, an independent research group studying Chicago schools, examined the effects of promotional gates at the third-, sixth- and eighth-grade levels. (I reviewed one of the draft reports at the request of the Consortium.) The findings were unequivocal: Test-based retention did not alter the achievement trajectories of third-graders, and sixth-graders who were retained had lower achievement growth than similar low-achieving students who were promoted. Implementing the eighth-grade promotional gate reduced overall dropout rates slightly, but clearly lowered the likelihood of high school graduation for very low achievers and students who were already overage for grade at the time they reached the gate.
David Herszenhorn, writing in the New York Times at the time, described a Chicago press conference releasing the reports. He quoted Arne Duncan, then the chief executive of the Chicago public schools, as saying, “Common sense tells you that ending social promotion has contributed to higher test scores and lower dropout rates over the last eight years … I am absolutely convinced in my heart, it’s the right thing to do.” Herszenhorn delicately noted that Duncan made claims about the promotional policies that were not supported by the two reports. “While the report drew no such conclusion,” he wrote, “[Duncan] credited the tough promotion rules for improvements in the system as a whole, including better overall test scores, higher graduation and attendance rates and a lower overall dropout rate.”
In the same article, Herszenhorn suggested that NYC Chancellor Joel Klein had “seemed to push aside the findings.” He cited a statement by Klein that, “The Chicago study strongly supports our view that effective early grade interventions are key to ending social promotion and preparing students for the hard work they will encounter in later grades.” Klein’s statement was patently false: the Chicago studies didn’t examine early grade interventions. Rather, authors Jenny Nagaoka and Melissa Roderick pointed out that a great many students in Chicago were struggling well before the third-grade promotional gate, suggesting the desirability of early intervention with struggling students.

Pay Wisconsin teachers for performance

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:


“You’re finally going to begin to see some innovation in teacher compensation.”
— Gov. Jim Doyle
It’s about time.
For too long, Wisconsin public school teachers have earned their pay based on years of service and advanced degrees.
Their performance wasn’t a factor.
Finally, it appears, that’s going to change, thanks to pressure from President Barack Obama and his reform-minded Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Obama recently announced $4.35 billion in competitive grants for states that propose innovative ways to improve student achievement, especially among disadvantaged students. But to qualify for Obama’s “Race to the Top” grants, states must allow local school districts to use student test scores in evaluating teachers — something Wisconsin law now bans.
Duncan recently called Wisconsin’s law “simply ridiculous.” And Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, and Sen. Randy Hopper, R-Fond du Lac, introduced legislation Tuesday to repeal the state’s silly ban on pay for performance.
No one is suggesting that testing be the only factor in evaluating teachers. Moreover, the focus should be on student progress over time — not a single test. School districts should compare student performance at the beginning of a school year with their performance at the end to help gauge the effectiveness of teachers and teaching techniques.

Buckling up on a Janesville School Bus

George Hesselberg:

The first of what will surely be many, many sighs emitted by school children here came at about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday from a serious 7-year-old, Sullivan Saliby, as he buckled his seat belt in a brand new school bus.
That’s right, his seat belt.
Sullivan and his sister, Emily, 12, were recruited along with Keaton Eichman, 14, and Kaleb Eichman, 19, to try out the first full-size seat-belt-equipped bus in a Wisconsin school district. The Janesville School District took delivery Wednesday of five school buses, purchased via Van Galder Bus Co.
The buses, Saf-T-Liner C2 models from the Thomas Bus Co. in North Carolina, are the rolling result of an 18-month effort to bring seat belts to school buses in Janesville. Whether the rest of the fleet of more than 30 full-size buses will eventually be similarly equipped has not been decided. Seat belts are not required on full-size school buses.

Six States in National Governor’s Association Center Pilot Project See Rise in Number of Students Taking and Succeeding on AP Exams

NGA [Complete Report 1.6MB PDF]:

To maintain the competitiveness of America’s workforce and ensure that U.S. students are prepared to succeed in college, states increasingly are recognizing the importance of offering a rigorous, common education curriculum that includes Advancement Placement (AP) courses. A new report from the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) titled Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, has demonstrated that it is possible for states to raise rigor and get results at scale by increasing student access to AP courses.
The report looks at the efforts of six states–Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin–that received funding as part of the NGA Center’s Advanced Placement Expansion project toincrease the participation of minority and low-income students in AP courses at 51 pilot high schools in rural and urban school districts.
“Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of smart, ambitious students have the ability, but lack the opportunity, to get a head start on college through AP courses,” said John Thomasian, director of the NGA Center. “With nearly two-thirds of jobs in 2014 expected to require at least some college, this report demonstrates that increasing students’ participation in challenging coursework bolsters their ability to compete in a highly skilled, 21st century workforce.”

Madison East High School ranked “19th in this list of increases in enrollment by pilot school”



Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offerings and proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan.
Amy Hetzner has more.

The Madison School District = General Motors?

A provocative headline.
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on “What Wisconsin’s Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late.” 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”
In light of this talk, It has been fascinating to watch (and participate in) the intersection of:

Several years ago, former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater remarked that “sometimes I think we have 25,000 school districts, one for each child”.
I found Monday evening’s school board meeting interesting, and perhaps indicative of the issues Zimman noted recently. Our public schools have an always challenging task of trying to support the growing range of wants, needs and desires for our 24,180 students, staff members, teachers, administrators, taxpayers and parents. Monday’s topics included:

I’ve not mentioned the potential addition of 4K, high school redesign or other topics that bubble up from time to time.
In my layperson’s view, taking Zimman’s talk to heart, our public schools should dramatically shrink their primary goals and focus on only the most essential topics (student achievement?). In Madison’s case, get out of the curriculum creation business and embrace online learning opportunities for those students who can excel in that space while devoting staff to the kids who need them most. I would also like to see more opportunities for our students at MATC, the UW, Edgewood College and other nearby institutions. Bellevue (WA) College has a “running start” program for the local high school.

Chart via Whitney Tilson.
Richard Zimman closed his talk with these words (@27 minutes): “Simply throwing more money at schools to continue as they are now is not the answer. We cannot afford more of the same with just a bigger price tag”.
General Motors as formerly constituted is dead. What remains is a much smaller organization beholden to Washington. We’ll see how that plays out. The Madison School District enjoys significant financial, community and parental assets. I hope the Administration does just a few things well.

The Best Colleges

David Ewalt & Hana Alberts:

Forbes’ list of public and private colleges and universities ranks the best schools–from the students’ point of view.
The best college in America has an 11:30 p.m. curfew. It doesn’t allow alcohol in the dorms, which must be kept meticulously clean. Students have to keep their hair neat, their shoes shined, their clothes crisply pressed. They also receive a world-class education, at no cost, and incur no debt–except for a duty to their country.

10 online textbooks ready for use in California classrooms

Seema Mehta:

Painting online textbooks as a boon to student achievement and school district coffers, state Education Secretary Glen Thomas announced today that 10 free digital high school math and science textbooks are ready to be used in California classrooms.
The likelihood of students tapping them when schools open in a couple of weeks is slim, because of school districts’ textbook-adoption policies and teacher training needs, but Thomas said the move marks the first step in something that will revolutionize education in California.
“This is a groundbreaking initiative,” he told more than 100 representatives of schools, technology companies and others gathered at the Orange County Department of Education. “We think that technology is one of the ways to reform and improve education.”

A Hard Lesson for Teachers

Dana Mattioli:

Widespread layoffs caused by tight school budgets are forcing thousands of teachers out of the classroom, in some cases, permanently. Many are taking other jobs or considering changing careers, even as they anxiously hope to be recalled.
When school begins this month, as many as 100,000 of last year’s teachers won’t have jobs, resulting in an overall drop in education jobs in the U.S., estimates Carmen Quesada, director of field operations for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.
That’s a jolt to people drawn to teaching in part for its recession-proof reputation. The number of people working in local education has increased every year since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That streak is now in jeopardy: Local schools employed fewer people overall, including nonteachers, in July, the latest month available, than in July 2008. The majority of the layoffs have involved nontenure teaching positions, with cuts determined by seniority.
Judith Franco is among those affected. She taught typing and business technology at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Fla., for two years before being laid off in June–one of 394 teachers laid off by the Broward County Public Schools.

Out of College at 17, and en Route to Law School at 19: A Father’s Perspective

Jacques Steinberg:

We’ve published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.
Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family’s willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.
Missing from the conversation — other than in the original article in the Orange County Register — were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate’s father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter’s life.

Admissions 101: College Pitfalls for Poor Students

Jay Matthews:

It’s conventional wisdom that talented, but underpriveleged, students are often turned away from college for lack of funds. Jay Mathews tried to dispell that idea in a column this week. He asked for readers to throw out examples of such students. No one wrote in.
Jay wrote the real challenge for needy students is not getting into school, but staying in once the scholarship and aid money runs short. Jay proposed investing money to keep these kids in school. The column has generated a significant amount of email and Jay has thrown the topic open for discussion over at Admissions 101:

Milwaukee boarding school plan revived, tweaked

Erin Richards:

When a proposal for a public boarding school in Milwaukee failed to win financial support from state lawmakers this summer, the concept of a college preparatory boarding school for local, urban teens appeared dead.
But now, Milwaukee Board of School Directors President Michael Bonds is reviving the idea, with a twist:
He wants to open a boarding school for 150 high school students next fall that would operate as a charter school by an organization other than MPS. The district would provide funding for the day school, while the charter school would handle the costs of supervision and instruction outside of normal academic hours.
“It’s an opportunity to provide at-risk kids an environment that’s conducive to learning,” Bonds said. “We would have to put out a (request) to see what kinds of proposals are out there. There may be models of boarding schools that are feasible academically and economically.”
Members of the School Board’s Innovation/School Reform committee will vote on Bonds’ boarding school resolution Tuesday. It would put the board on record for supporting the idea and ask for outside proposals.

Picking junior’s teacher: Should parents weigh in?

Diana Marszalek:

After doing some research, including sitting in on classrooms, Valerie Gilbert thought she knew which third-grade teacher would be perfect for her son, Stanley.
Impressed by that teacher’s creative, visually stimulating style, the Berkeley, Calif., mother lobbied on Stanley’s behalf. “I did my best to make my opinion known,” Gilbert said.
The school, however, placed Stanley in a different class. And to his mother’s surprise and delight, the year wound up being so successful for him that Gilbert said she is approaching his pending entry into fourth grade in a new way: by vowing to stay out of the process.
“I’m learning to be more open-minded,” she said.
With parents becoming increasingly involved in their children’s lives and educations, Gilbert’s foray into her son’s classroom placement process is not unique, particularly around this time of year when anxieties about the coming school year run high.

Ms. Cornelius has more.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, educational kingmaker

Nia-Malika Henderson:

When Arne Duncan was the head of the Chicago public schools, one of the calls he dreaded most came from a certain federal bureaucracy — the Department of Education.
“It wasn’t a call about teaching kids to read,” Duncan recalled. “It was a call about a compliance report or something.”
Now Duncan sits atop the Education Department — meaning he’s the one making those calls to school systems across the country, hoping to reshape education and the role of the federal government in what traditionally has been a state and local effort.
With nearly $5 billion in stimulus funds at his disposal, Duncan has the chance to be a sort of educational kingmaker, doling out money to states as he sees fit. He’s also got something intangible but just as important — a close friend in the White House, in President Barack Obama.
And that’s a combination that some are saying could end up making Duncan the most powerful education secretary in the history of the job.

Wealthy Suburbs Accept Low-Income Homes

Nick Timiraos:

Westchester County, a mostly affluent suburb outside New York City, agreed Monday to build hundreds of affordable housing units in heavily white communities, part of a settlement that could challenge other U.S. counties to expand housing for minorities.
The settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development ended a $180 million federal lawsuit brought by the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, a nonprofit housing group in New York, over Westchester’s responsibility to enforce fair housing laws.
Westchester, which runs along New York City’s northern boundary, will spend more than $50 million over the next seven years to build or acquire 750 homes, including at least 630 in cities with few minorities.
Federal housing officials portrayed the settlement as a warning sign they would step up enforcement on communities that accept federal money for housing redevelopment.

Pilot math project involves SRI, USF and Helios Education Foundation

Tampa Bay Business Journal:

SunBay Digital Mathematics, a math education pilot project, began this week in Pinellas County.
The Helios Education Foundation and the Pinellas County School District are partnering with SRI International and the University of South Florida’s College of Education in a project to set the direction for middle school mathematics, a release said.
The one-year project involves 15 seventh-grade teachers in seven Pinellas schools. They will attend workshops and monthly meetings focused on using technology-based curriculum based on advanced math concepts.
The Pinellas Education Foundation is the fiscal agent for funding the project.

Monona Grove School District “Tentative” Goals

Peter Sobol:

The board met 7/22 to discuss district goals for the coming year. The tentative goals, which we will be discussing at Wednesday’s board meeting are currently:
1) Achieve measureable increase in student achievement in core academic areas using these assessments: DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
2) Develop measures ot assess student achievement in Encore areas and electives.
3) Align curriculum, instruction and assessment wiht standards/skill in core academic areas as defined by DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
4) Close the achievement gaps with attention to race, ethnicity and socio economic status, using measureable assessments provide DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT and reduce disproportionality with regard to placement of minority students in special edcuation.

Monona Grove School District.

MPS struggling to create stable corps of principals

Alan Borsuk:

To be a successful principal, Julia D’Amato says, you need to be “a 29-baller.”
That’s someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them. That’s what it feels like to run a school, says D’Amato, principal of Reagan High School, the south side school she has led from birth in 2003 to the top bracket of Milwaukee high schools now.
It’s hard to find people who can juggle like that.
And it’s hard for Milwaukee Public Schools to find top-notch people to lead approximately 200 schools.
As a new school year approaches, MPS is struggling with creating a strong, stable corps of principals. How so?
More than 20% of elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools have someone different at the helm now than a year ago, and turnover in recent years has, in general, been high. MPS officials say there are 58 principals with three years of experience or less, almost one-third of the total.

$11,654,078 Additional Madison School District Spending Via the Federal Taxes & US Treasury Borrowing (“Stimulus”)

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad [838K PDF]:

As part of Federal Stimulus funding iliat will be made available the district will receive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds to be used over a two year period.
These funds are in IDEA, IDEA EC and Title 1.
Program Costs/FundingiConsultation Service Employment Contract
The district has prepared a two year funding proposal along with a budget analysis for 2009-10 and 2010-11 for each of the sources for your review. The proposal amounts are as follows:
IDEA – $6,199,552
IDEA EC – $293,082
Title I – $5,161,444
Salary Savings
The funding proposals would increase FTE’s and include funding sources during the two year period of the ARRA funds

The proposal includes quite a bit of professional development, such as $400,000 for dual language immersion, $1.48M for 4K staff and $456,000 for 4K furniture and $100,000 for talented & gifted assessment.
Plan B, without 4K spending, includes $1,150,000 for professional development in the following areas: Topics include universal design, differentiation, mental health,
inclusive practices, autism, and quality IEPs.

The growth of home-schooling
Barack Obama could hasten the spread of educating children at home

The Economist:

THE first thing you notice about Karen Allen’s house is that it is spotless. Even in her teenage boys’ bedrooms, not a thing is out of place. And her boys, Thomas and Taylor, are polite and engaging. Your correspondent found himself being grilled about his travels by a boy who had clearly Googled him. In this household, every chance to learn something new is eagerly seized, explains Mrs Allen.
The Allens are home-schoolers. Instead of sending their children to a public (non-fee-paying) or private school, they teach them at home. They are far from alone. A generation ago, home-schooling was rare and, in many states, illegal. Now, according to the Department of Education, there are roughly 1.5m home-schooled students in America, a number that has doubled in a decade. That is about 3% of the school-age population. The National Home Education Research Institute puts the number even higher, at between 1.8m and 2.5m.
Why do people teach their children at home? Many of the earliest were hippies who thought public schools repressive and ungroovy. Now they are far more likely to be religious conservatives. At a public school, says Mrs Allen, her boys would get neither much individual attention nor any Christian instruction. At home they get plenty of both.
In a 2007 survey by the Department of Education, 88% of home-schooling parents said that their local public schools were unsafe, drug-ridden or unwholesome in some way. Some 73% complained of shoddy academic standards. And 83% said they wanted to instil religious or moral values in their children–a number that has risen from 72% in 2003.

I think the article overplays the religious angle.

Local Program Teaches Teenagers How To Join Workforce

Channel3000:

Despite good news this past week about the nation’s unemployment rate, the job market remains tough.
But one group in particular – teenagers – is facing harder prospects than ever.
In fact, the employment rate nationwide for 16- to 19-year-olds is only about 29 percent, which is the lowest recorded rate for teens in history.
Now a local group, Common Wealth Development, is hoping to change teenagers’ employment fortunes.
One local employed teen, LaFollette High School senior Cieria Childress, finds bagging groceries at Metcalfe’s Sentry to be a pleasure.
In the six months since she landed her job, Childress has learned many life lessons – including simply being thankful to be employed.

The truth about grit
Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue – and uncovers new secrets to success

Jonah Lehrer:

It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England – he was avoiding the city because of the plague – when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.
There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall – it took Newton to explain why.
Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight – it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.

Property Tax Implications of the Madison School District 09/10 Budget Deficit

Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad [100K PDF]:

The 2009-11 State of Wisconsin Biennial budget created two issues for the Madison Metropolitan School District as it relates to the 2009-10 budget. The two main issues are from a reduction in the amount of revenue the school district is projected to receive in 2009-10 and a reduction in the amount of state aid the school district is projected to receive in 2009-10.
The amount of revenue the district is projected to lose amounts to $2,810,851 for the 2009-10 school year compared to the preliminary budget approved by the board of education, This amount is due to the decrease in numerous categorical aids the school district receives annually and the reduction of the per pupil increase from $275 per child to $200 per child.
The amount of state aid the school district is projected to lose is in 2009-10 is approximately $9.2 million, Under current revenue limit laws, for every dollar of state aid lost, the school district would have the ability to increase taxes by that same amount. Over the past month, administration has worked to mitigate the tax impact due to the loss in state aid.

Duncan on Chicago School Violence

Mary Mitchell:

.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan got a painful reminder last week that not enough has been done to save schoolchildren from violence.
On July 25, Christina Waters, 18, was shot in the head in the 8700 block of South Wood after leaving a picnic.
Waters’ best friend, Kris Owens, was wounded in the attack. Waters remains in a coma, fighting for her life.
Duncan was in Florida, heading for Chicago, when people started calling and e-mailing him about the tragedy.
Waters had attended Ariel Community Academy, a small school founded by John W. Rogers Jr., head of Ariel Investments. The school is part of the Ariel Education Initiative, which Duncan led before becoming the Chicago Public Schools CEO.
Best friends since childhood, Duncan and Rogers went to see Waters together.
Duncan was in town to discuss the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” fund. The will award states an unprecedented amount of money to dramatically overhaul schools.

A middle school for the artist

Jessica Jordan:

An educational dream pitched by three Hall County teachers takes flight Monday when 120 students and six teachers come together for the first day of school at the da Vinci Academy.
The pilot program provides innovative learning opportunities for gifted students with a penchant for the arts and sciences. But that’s only half of the reason it’s making a splash with educators across the Southeast. The program also will operate at about 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost per student compared to a traditional middle school, Hall County school Superintendent Will Schofield said.
Though states have made unprecedented cuts to public school funds, educators are trying to make the most of every penny while pushing programs that engage students and get results.
Schofield said the da Vinci Academy is a great example of how schools can do more with less.
“I think it truly is some Renaissance thinking is these difficult times,” he said. “It’s the exciting side of chaotic and difficult times.
That’s when you see the best in people and that’s when you see the worst in people, and I think what we’re seeing is the best in terms of innovative thinking, new ways of doing something that we’ve done the same way for a long time.

Madison School District Elementary Math Curriculum Purchases

Superintendent Dan Nerad [64K PDF]:

MMSD has begun a three-year implementation plan to achieve an equitable and balanced mathematics program at tbe elementary level. The plan was developed and refined through collaboration with teachers, Instructional Resource Teachers and principals over the course of the past several years. The plan includes the materials described below (details via this 64K PDF),
With the attached order, MMSD has provided each classroom teacher in the District with a Learning Mathematics in the Primary/Intermediate Grades instructional guide and the set of teacher resources from the Investigations program. The third component of the teacher materials is Teaching Student Centered Mathematics by John Van de Walle, which is in place in most classrooms but will continue to be ordered using ELM or Title I funds, as necessary. Additional professional resources have been or are being purchased at the building level to create a library available for all staff to access as needed. Those resources include Primary Mathematics textbooks and teacher guides, Thinking Mathematically and Children’s Mathematics by Thomas Carpenter, Teaching Number series from Wright, among other recommended titles.
MMSD has provided all Title I schools with the Primary Mathematics (Singapore) workbooks and Extra Practice workbooks for the 2009-2010 school year. All manipulatives have been ordered for Title I schools over tbe past two years and are in place. Non-Title I schools have been and will continue to use ELM funds to purchase tbe student components for the implementation of a balanced mathematics classroom.

Related:

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History

Tamar Lewin:

At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

Oregon’s a slow starter in race to better schools

The Oregonian:

Public school systems, like cross-country teams, are only as good as their slowest runners.
Oregon has to remember that as it toes the starting line in the Race for the Top, a competition for $4 billion in stimulus money the Obama administration is offering to states that demonstrate they are ready to adopt serious school reforms, and run with them.
As hard as it is to admit, that doesn’t sound much like Oregon. This is a state where the Democratic Legislature, urged on by the state teachers union, just passed a law blocking the expansion of popular virtual charter schools. It’s a place where charter schools, performance pay for teachers and other reforms strongly supported by President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are disdained by most of the educational establishment.
Yes, there are Oregon schools, and some entire districts, doing creative, impressive things. The Oregonian’s Betsy Hammond last week described the tremendous effort by teachers and administrators that led Clackamas High School to become the largest high school in Oregon to reach every federal performance target. There are many other pioneering, innovative efforts in places such as Redmond, Forest Grove, Sherwood, Beaverton and Tillamook

Who’s holding royal flush in MPS superintendent search?

Alan Borsuk:

The Milwaukee School Board took its stand last week on how it will play Superintendent Draw, the big-time game of poker coming up for Milwaukee schools:
With a lot of money in the pot and the usual players at the table.
But the politics and atmosphere surrounding the search for a school chief could be overshadowed by an even bigger and more colorful game: MPS Hold ‘Em, in which the battle is over who calls the shots when it comes to directing the state’s largest and most challenging school system.
MPS Hold ‘Em has been brewing for months, particularly since the release of a consultant’s report in April that described MPS as a poorly run business. That triggered talk of a mayoral takeover of MPS or other changes in the system.
Now it is shaping up that MPS Hold ‘Em will either come to a head soon or the game will cease for at least the foreseeable future.
Why is MPS Hold ‘Em linked to Superintendent Draw? Two reasons:

The fruitful alliance of Arne Duncan and Rupert Murdoch

Elizabeth Green:

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”
New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.
“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.
Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Madison Public Schools’ Arts education gets needed support

Anne Katz & Barbara Schrank, co-chairwomen, MMSD Arts Task Force, via a kind reader’s email:

Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.
The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison’s public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students’ talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.

1 Year Summary of Madison’s Implementation of “Standards Based Report Cards”

Notes and links on “Standards Based Report Cards” here.

Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad’s memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:

Background
Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:

  • Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;
  • The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;
  • An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;
  • Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and
  • A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.

Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD’s commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.
MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:

Continue reading Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan

East High School Principal Steps Down Harris Takes Job In Racine School District

Via a kind reader’s email:

Alan Harris has stepped down as principal at East High School.
Harris is taking a job in the Racine School District, WISC-TV reported.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad said he will look at all available candidates, including an interim candidate, as school starts in 26 days.
Harris was the third principal at East High School since the spring of 2002, when the late Milt McPike retired after 23 years there.

An Education Lived

David Steiner [PDF], via a kind reader’s email:

Two lucky accidents served to take this education out of the realms of the ordinary.
First, the Perse had, years earlier, been home to a remarkable teacher of English who had invented something called the “mummery system.” The English classrooms had as a result been converted into mummeries–small theatres complete with stages, costumes, lights, and sound. Four mornings a week, half the class would perform scenes from Shakespeare while the other half would watch and then critique. On some of these days, we would instead have to recite poems or engage in debates with our classmates. On the fifth day we would discuss other readings or study grammar. I owe much to those many hours of oral presentations–it gave me the skills I would one day use in the Oxford Union Society, and a life-long ease with the demands of public speaking. More importantly, acting Shakespeare gave us a familiarity with those plays that went well beyond what was available through reading alone.
The second piece of luck was our history teacher, one “Charlie T,” a gentleman of indeterminate age, whose grimy ancient gown trailing halfway down his torn tweed jacket belied a mind of brittle precision, extraordinary passion, and relentlessly demanding standards. Only once in the seven years in which I studied with Mr. T. did I see him use notes (during a lecture on some military campaigns in Turkey). His memory for detail rivaled any I have ever encountered, and his ability to weave these details into compelling accounts left an indelible impression. Several of Mr. T.’s students would later become noted historians–one of international renown. While my pre-O level years–marred by dyslexia–passed with no sign of academic distinction, Charlie T.’s teaching produced a hint of better to come.

David Steiner is the new New York State Commissioner of Education.

Depth vs. Breadth

Jason Sterlace:

The school year is approaching, and teachers around the nation are trying not to think too much about tweaking our courses for the next go-round. Most of us have been blowing it off for months and we really have to give it some thought here in early August. Part of my current focus is inspired by an article printed in the Washington Post this past February. Jay Matthews wrote on the age old educators’ debate of breadth vs depth:

The debate goes like this: Should they focus on a few topics so students have time to absorb and comprehend the inner workings of the subject? Or should they cover every topic so students get a sense of the whole and can later pursue those parts that interest them most?
The truth, of course, is that students need both. Teachers try to mix the two in ways that make sense to them and their students. But a surprising study — certain to be a hot topic in teacher lounges and education schools — is providing new data that suggest educators should spend much more time on a few issues and let some topics slide.

One of the (probably) unintended side effects to standardized testing is that teachers get together to parse the numbers and figure out what they can afford to skip over in our subjects. Standardized tests become predictable to some degree, enough that teachers can figure out which chapters are valued and which ones are not. In fact, that’s the whole point–make sure that every teacher knows what chapters are considered the most important. Make sure they know to cover those topics well.

via Jay Matthews.

Charter Schools Eschew Teacher Tenure

Danielle Williamson:

The agreement between teachers and management at the North Central Charter Essential School is similar to one that may be found at almost any traditional public school. There is a salary scale with lanes and steps, and stipends for extra duties. Some teachers serve as representatives for the larger group in a “collaborative bargaining process.”
Absent from the school’s teachers’ employee handbook, however, is a clause that gives veteran teachers job protection. “Professional status,” more commonly known as tenure, doesn’t exist there. Everyone is an employee at will, and a teacher of 10 years can be dismissed as easily as a first-year educator.
“If a teacher is not a fit, we have to be honest about that,” said Patricia May, principal of the Fitchburg school. “That’s not working for anybody.”
Having no union affiliations appears to be working for the area’s charter schools. Despite a full-court press from the state’s second largest teachers union, charter schools in Central Massachusetts haven’t hopped onto the union bandwagon. Statewide, only one charter school has signed up with the American Federation of Teachers in the two years the organization has been approaching charters, which are publicly financed but operate outside of school districts.

Toddler to Teen, Decor That’s Not a Chore

Terri Sapienza:

Very soon, parents everywhere will start gearing up for a new school year: plotting schedules, reorganizing desks and going though drawers and closets to remove items their children no longer use. In some cases, parents may find that it’s not only clothes their children have outgrown, it’s their bedroom, too.
Pastels, primary colors, firetrucks and fairy princesses: all sensible choices for a baby or toddler’s room but not so cool for a tween or teen. Unfortunately, a makeover every few years isn’t budget-friendly. Nor is it practical, says D.C. designer Annie Elliott. “If you’re running around with kids, you’re not going to have the energy to update their rooms,” she says. “You’re just going to be too exhausted to want to deal with it.”

F in Exams

Richard Benson:

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to childhood and enters adultery.
Q: How can you prevent milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
We’ve all been there. You’ve been studying hard, the day of the BIG test arrives, you turn over the paper, and ‘what the *&%@ does that mean?!’ Not a clue.
Some students, rather than admit defeat, choose to adopt a more creative approach to answering those particularly awkward exam questions.
Packed full of hilarious examples, this book will bring a smile to the face of teachers, parents and students alike – and anyone who’s ever had to sit a test.

Confucianism at large in Africa

Bright B Simons:

A features writer for the Economist once insisted that the Mandarin character for Africa means “wrong continent”. This is perhaps because there is a perception that the teachers have frequently been wrong-headed about Africa, and have tended to get it wrong whenever they have moved out of their comfort zones in trading and infrastructure development.
Such a view is not entirely right, and China has in recent years taken great pains to show the world that it is a well-rounded emerging power with a complete strategy for engagement in places like Africa.
Its Confucius institutes are an interesting feature in this show of sophistication. The Hanban – the Chinese National Office for teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language – began spreading them from 2004 when it set up the first one in the South Korean capital of Seoul.
Top Chinese officials have made no effort to disguise the propaganda value they perceive in the spread of the institutes, but so far very little in the way of a coherent strategy has emerged as to how they can be integrated into the mainstream of Chinese foreign policy, which nowadays is driven, as everyone knows, by a mercantilist view of global politics and economics. Africa has not been spared this ambiguity.

‘Obama Effect’ at school: Black parents volunteer, expect more

Greg Toppo:

A new survey suggests that President Obama’s victory last November had a positive effect not just on the academic expectations of black Americans — it may have raised parents’ interests in volunteerism.
The “Obama Effect,” documented last winter, showed that Obama’s rise during the 2008 presidential election helped improve African Americans’ performance on skills tests, which helped narrow a black-white achievement gap.
In the new findings, African-American parents of children in K-12 schools say they’re much more likely to volunteer in a classroom this fall, in effect narrowing a volunteering gap.
The survey, being released today by GreatSchools, a San Francisco non-profit that promotes parental involvement, finds a jump of 37 percentage points in the portion of African-American parents who say they’ll volunteer in their child’s school — 60% vs. 23% a year ago.

Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

Stephanie Raposo:

Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com–a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms–she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with–and sometimes police–their children.

Milwaukee Public Schools targeted in complaint over instruction of English as second language

Georgia Pabst:

Milwaukee Public Schools is not complying with civil rights law in effectively teaching English to Spanish-speaking students, according to a federal complaint filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin.
The complaint, filed at the Office of Civil Rights in the U. S. Department of Education office in Chicago, claims MPS and the Milwaukee School Board are not complying with the Civil Rights Act.
The district receives federal funds for teaching English to students who speak another language, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school districts must help such students overcome language barriers so they can succeed in all of their classes, said Darryl Morin, state director of LULAC.
“LULAC of Wisconsin has serious concerns regarding the education theory, programming and resources allocated to these efforts at MPS,” he said.
Morin said MPS has used uncertified and unqualified teachers in the program.
The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that its Office of Civil Rights has received the complaint. Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the department in Washington, D.C., said the office is evaluating the complaint to determine whether an investigation is appropriate. The evaluation process should take about a month, he said.
MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said district officials can’t comment because they just received the complaint Tuesday and have not reviewed it.

IB Teacher Takes Risks, With Impressive Results

Jay Matthews:

The nation’s most important education policymakers are holding news conferences these days. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced that they want states to strengthen their standards so more students will be ready for college. Dozens of governors have signed on to a plan to align their states’ required high school courses so all graduates are prepared for the shock of big papers and two-hour exams at the college of their choice.
Yet in my experience, the most effective work getting high-schoolers ready for higher education is being done by classroom teachers in a thousand different ways as they adjust their rules and experiment with ideas. The innovative teachers I know would laugh if anyone suggested that they call a news conference. They are just trying stuff, they say.
To get a taste of this stealth reform, step into Room 252 at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Fairfax County. That’s where Bill Horkan works. The 44-year-old math teacher is a busy man. He is married, with three children ages 6, 8 and 9. His school has the largest portion of disadvantaged students in the county — 58 percent are low-income. Many of them yearn for a good education, but learning is hard, and math is a particularly daunting challenge.
What has the overburdened Horkan done about this? Last year, he loaded up Room 252 with even more students taking one of the most challenging math courses for students like his — International Baccalaureate Math Studies. Designed for students who are not planning to major in college math or science, the course offers advanced math topics related to technology.

Brain Emotion Circuit Sparks As Teen Girls Size Up Peers

Science Daily:

What is going on in teenagers’ brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female brain during a developmental stage in which girls are at increased risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders.
“During this time of heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress and peers’ perceptions, girls are becoming increasingly preoccupied with how individual peers view them, while boys tend to become more focused on their status within group pecking orders,” explained Pine. “However, in the study, the prospect of interacting with peers activated brain circuitry involved in approaching others, rather than circuitry responsible for withdrawal and fear, which is associated with anxiety and depression.”
Pine, Amanda Guyer, Ph.D., Eric Nelson, Ph.D., and colleagues at NIMH and Georgia State University, report on one of the first studies to reveal the workings of the teen brain in a simulated real-world social interaction, in the July, 2009 issue of the Journal Child Development.

Michelle Rhee: Partnering With City Year DC to Tackle Dropout “Catastrophe”

Alice Korngold:

Washington, D.C.’s public school system has 45,000 students and an abysmal dropout rate of about 50%, typical of large cities. With a goal to remedy this dropout “catastrophe” (Gen. Colin Powell’s term), while being constrained by a tight economy, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to–in her words–“leverage opportunities for the greatest change.”
To this end, Rhee believes that one of the best investments that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has made in the past year is its partnership with City Year DC. In 2008/09, City Year corps members proved themselves in a pilot program in 4 of Washington’s most challenging elementary schools.
Jeff Franco, Executive Director of City Year DC explained that “we offered to help the Chancellor to solve her worst headaches.” After rigorous training, corps members coached, tutored, and mentored children in grades K to 2, and successfully demonstrated that they could help improve children’s reading ability. This achievement will be instrumental in changing the life trajectory of these kids–ultimately increasing the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, go to college, and later, earn greater incomes.
“I’ve been thrilled with the results of this first year,” Rhee told me. So thrilled that she and Franco plan a “feeder pattern” strategy to have corps members continue working with these same children all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, while also expanding City Year’s involvement with additional schools. The end game: reduce the dropout rate.

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

Steve Lohr:

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.
“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.
Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.
Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

Fixing D.C.’s Schools: The Charter Experiment

Dan Keating & Theola Labbe-DeBose:

A 2008 Post review finds that charter schools are outperforming public schools.

NPR:

As part of the program’s ongoing series focusing on education, host Michel Martin talks to Kavitha Cardoza, a reporter for NPR member station WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C.
Cardoza explains a significant development in the education world: recent test scores of public school children in the nation’s capital notably surpassed their charter school counterparts, adding yet another layer to the national debate on the value of charter schools vs. public schools.

Scholarships 101: How to fund an education after high school

Marnie Ayers:

Getting an education is vital to financial stability and future success but the cost of education beyond high school continues to rise. Luckily Federal Student Aid offers financial aid programs that help millions of students attend college, universities and trade schools each year.
The billions of dollars of help from Federal Student Aid is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and comes in the forms of grants such as the Pell and National SMART Grant and work-study and low interest loans such as the Federal Perkins Loan and the Stafford Loan. Some grants require a cumulative GPA of 3.0 while loans have interest rates around 5%.
Each year, millions of students benefit from federal financial aid programs. For information on programs you might qualify for visit FederalStudentAid.ed.gov or call 800-4Fed-Aid. Applying for federal aid is free and the application is called FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Free help is available throughout the application process. The College Scholarship Fraud Protection Act protects people from financial aid fraud.

Education reforms will never work unless teaching attracts more high-fliers

The Economist:

“I SET up a Fantasy Football competition between some of my toughest pupils,” one young man explains. “They get goal-keeping points for good attendance, and defence points for behaving well. Good punctuation and spelling translate into their midfield performance, and coming up with good ideas, into attack.” Around the room, pens scribble furiously. “Pupil X hated me,” a woman tells the group; she describes how she changed that with weekly phone calls to his parents and postcards praising his (intermittent) good behaviour. More notes are made.
This is the Teach First summer institute: six weeks in Canterbury, a southern cathedral city, at the end of which nearly 500 new university graduates will teach full-time, for £15,000 ($24,500) a year, in some of England’s toughest schools. The 360 who started the programme last year are here too, handing on to the raw recruits their tips for coping with bad behaviour and keeping lessons fresh, and demonstrating to their tutors what they have learned. In another year, those old hands will be qualified teachers, trained on the job and in tutorials and summer schools.
Recruiting the right kind of teachers has been difficult in England for some time, and though recession has brought temporary relief, the task is getting bigger as those hired to teach the baby boom near retirement. Head teachers, worn down by constant official policy changes and an avalanche of paperwork, are retiring early. A study in 2007 by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that countries whose students perform well tend to recruit teachers from the top of the class. But a recent report by Politeia, a think-tank, found that the bar for getting into teacher training in England is, by international standards, unusually low. Trainee teachers can resit basic literacy and numeracy tests as often as they like–and 13% need at least three goes at the latter. Around 1,200 each year graduated with the lowest class of degree, a third.