Although public charter schools are required by law to admit all students who apply, a common criticism is that charters fail to enroll enough special education students. Statistics show that public charter schools have proportionately smaller special education enrollments than conventional public schools, but recent trends suggest the difference will continue to dwindle.
According to the Center for Educational Performance and Information, 13.6 percent of students in conventional schools in the 2008-2009 school year were enrolled in special education programs, compared to 9.6 percent in charter schools. While a difference still exists between charter and conventional schools, special education enrollment is rising quickly in charter schools.
Since the 2000-2001 school year, the proportion of charter school students enrolled in special education programs grew by 76 percent. Charter schools served nearly four times as many special education students at the end of the last decade as they did at the beginning.
All posts by Jim Zellmer
Fix schools with ideas, not money
President Obama is apparently about to tell the nation he wants to freeze federal spending for three years in several areas, including education. I like the idea. I would also support cutting back entitlement payments for financially secure geezers like me, and find ways for everyone to make some sacrifices for our country.
I can hear the objections. We can’t fix our economy by shortchanging our kids. They are our future. True, but we don’t have much evidence that spending more money on their schooling has had much effect on what they have learned. The most exciting and productive schools I have studied are driven by ideas, not bucks. If they need money for special projects, they find it. But the power of their teaching comes from the freedom they are allowed to help with their students, as a team, in ways that make the most sense to them.
More money often prevents that from happening. It has strings that force teachers to do stuff, and spend time on paperwork, that doesn’t work for them. The recent history of the stimulus funds used for education makes this clear.
I agree.
What If Our Schools Are Working?
Thousands of protesters showed up at New York City’s Brooklyn Technical High School on January 26 to protest against the closing and reorganization of 19 public schools. Three hundred parents, teachers, students, and local politicians testified that the closings were arbitrary and ignored the struggles and successes taking place in these buildings. The hearing went on until after 2:30 in the morning, when the Panel for Educational Policy, whose majority is appointed by Mayor Michael “Money Bags” Bloomberg, did exactly what it planned to do at the start; it voted to rubber stamp the closings.
The panel’s decision will mean phasing out six comprehensive high schools, including Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens, Paul Robeson and William Maxwell in Brooklyn, and Alfred Smith and Christopher Columbus in the Bronx. This is part of Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein’s campaign to replace the comprehensive high schools with small mini-schools and charters. Since 2002, Bloomberg/Klein has closed, or is in the process of closing, over ninety schools. What the Mayor and Chancellor were unable to explain was why if smaller schools are the panacea for educational problems six of the schools being closed in this round were small high schools created in previous rounds of school reorganization.
Cheat Sheet for New Jersey Governor Christie’s Educational Agenda
Here’s a Spark’s Notes version of Gov. Christie’s Education Subcommittee Report, which constitutes a list of recommendations to improve public education in N.J. Some are considered “early action,” i.e., to be completed within 90 days. The rest have a whopping 6 months for completion. Okay: maybe it’s more of a wish list, but it gives any reader a clear sense of Christie and Schundler’s agenda.
We’ve divided these 17 pages of pre-K through 12th grade recommendations (there’s another 8 on higher education) into 3 basic categories: School Finance, School Reform, and NJ DOE Oversight.
School Finance:
National Australia Schools comparison website going live
The federal government’s controversial website giving information on the performance of all schools will go live from this Thursday.
The site, called My School, will provide profiles for almost 10,000 schools and will allow parents to compare schools in their area as well as statistically-similar schools in other regions.
In navigating the web page, parents will be able to look at the profiles of their child’s school which includes the numbers of students, teachers, attendance rates and the percentage of indigenous students.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard made no apology for the introduction of the website.
“I’m passionate about this and I believe this is the right direction for this country,” she told Sky News on Monday.
Criticism of Australia’s National School Comparison Website
Independent policy think-tank the Grattan Institute has added to growing criticism of the Federal Government’s My School website, saying it will not give an adequate assessment of a school’s performance.
My School, scheduled to be launched tomorrow, has already come under heavy criticism.
The Education Union says it will unfairly stigmatise disadvantaged schools, and the Secondary Principals Council says it fails to include crucial data about school funding.
However, several parent groups have supported the proposal to provide information on school performance.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says it will provide parents and the community with accurate information, allowing them to be their own judge.
In Oklahoma, One in Five Children Live in Poverty
A year ago, the life Demetria Overstreet and her family knew slowly began to fade.
Her husband, Lenzie, was diagnosed with kidney failure and had to leave his job to begin treatment.
With its main money-maker out of work, mounting medical bills and three children to care for, the family saw its financial problems beginning to build.
At one point, their home’s gas and electricity were turned off. Car payments lagged. And at times, the family survived on eating hotdogs and chips.
“It was depressing, especially when my son would come home and said ‘Momma, nothing comes on,’ ” Overstreet said, referring to the electricity.
Lawsuit Challenging the Seattle School District’s use of “Discovering Mathematics” Goes to Trial
Martha McLaren, DaZanne Porter, and Cliff Mass:
Today Cliff Mass and I, (DaZanne Porter had to be at a training in Yakima) accompanied by Dan Dempsey and Jim W, had our hearing in Judge Julie Spector’s King County Superior Courtroom; the event was everything we hoped for, and more. Judge Spector asked excellent questions and said that she hopes to announce a decision by Friday, February 12th.
The hearing started on time at 8:30 AM with several members of the Press Corps present, including KIRO TV, KPLU radio, Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, and at least 3 others. I know the number because, at the end, Cliff, our attorney, Keith Scully, and I were interviewed; there were five microphones and three cameras pointed towards us at one point.
The hearing was brief; we were done by 9:15. Keith began by presenting our case very clearly and eloquently. Our two main lines of reasoning are, 1) that the vote to adopt Discovering was arbitrary and capricious because of the board’s failure to take notice of a plethora of testimony, data, and other information which raised red flags about the efficacy of the Discovering series, and 2) the vote violated the equal education rights of the minority groups who have been shown, through WASL scores, to be disadvantaged by inquiry based instruction.
Realistically, both of these arguments are difficult to prove: “arbitrary and capricious” is historically a very, very difficult proof, and while Keith’s civil rights argument was quite compelling, there is no legal precedent for applying the law to this situation.
The School District’s attorney, Shannon McMinimee, did her best, saying that the board followed correct procedure, the content of the books is not relevant to the appeal, the books do not represent inquiry-based learning but a “balanced” approach, textbooks are merely tools, etc., etc. She even denigrated the WASL – a new angle in this case. In rebuttal, Keith was terrific, we all agreed. He quoted the introduction of the three texts, which made it crystal clear that these books are about “exploration.” I’m blanking on other details of his rebuttal, but it was crisp and effective. Keith was extremely effective, IMHO. Hopefully, Dan, James, and Cliff can recall more details of the rebuttal.
A lawsuit challenging the Seattle School District’s math curriculum went to trial Monday in King County Superior Court.
A group of parents and teachers say the “Discovering Math” series adopted last year does a poor job, especially with minority students who are seeing an achievement gap widen.
A spokeswoman for the Seattle School District, Teresa Wippel, says it has no comment on pending litigation.
KOMO-TV reports the district has already spent $1.2 million on Discovering Math books and teacher training.
On Tuesday, January 26th, at 8:30 AM, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector will consider an appeal by a group of Seattle residents (including yours truly) regarding the selection by Seattle Public Schools of the Discovering Math series in their high schools. Although this issue is coming to a head in Seattle it influences all of you in profound ways.
In this appeal we provide clear evidence that the Discovery Math approach worsens the achievement gap between minority/disadvantaged students and their peers. We show that the Board and District failed to consider key evidence and voluminous testimony, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously by choosing a teaching method that was demonstrated to produce a stagnant or increasing achievement gap. We request that the Seattle Schools rescind their decision and re-open the textbook consideration for high school.
A study in intellectual uniformity: The Marketplace of Ideas By Louis Menand
As his title hints, Louis Menand has written a business book. This is good, since the crisis in American higher education that the Harvard professor of English addresses is a business crisis. The crisis resembles the more celebrated one in the US medical system. At its best, US education, like US healthcare, is of a quality that no system in the world can match. However, the two industries have developed similar problems in limiting costs and keeping access open. Both industries have thus become a source of worry for public-spirited citizens and a punchbag for political opportunists.
Menand lowers the temperature of this discussion. He neither celebrates nor bemoans the excesses of political correctness – the replacement of Keats by Toni Morrison, or of Thucydides by queer theory. Instead, in four interlocking essays, he examines how university hiring and credentialing systems and an organisational structure based on scholarly disciplines have failed to respond to economic and social change. Menand draws his idea of what an American university education can be from the history of what it has been. This approach illuminates, as polemics cannot, two grave present-day problems: the loss of consensus on what to teach undergraduates and the lack of intellectual diversity among the US professoriate.
Much of today’s system, Menand shows, can be traced to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades after 1869. Faced with competition from pre-professional schools, Eliot had the “revolutionary idea” of strictly separating liberal arts education from professional education (law, medicine, etc), and making the former a prerequisite for the latter. Requiring a lawyer to spend four years reading, say, Molière before he can study for the bar has no logic. Such a system would have made it impossible for Abraham Lincoln to enter public life. Funny, too, that the idea of limiting the commanding heights of the professions to young men of relative leisure arose just as the US was filling up with penurious immigrants. Menand grants that the system was a “devil’s bargain”.
Clusty Search: Louis Menand – “The Marketplace of Ideas”.
Opinion: Obama’s Quiet Education Revolution
A week ago, President Obama announced that he is planning to spend $4.4 billion on his Race to the Top education program. If you missed the news, don’t kick yourself. Obama’s entire education reform plan had been largely overshadowed by the yearlong health care debate, the economy, Afghanistan and other big-ticket news items.
It’s unfortunate, since this may be the most impressive reform his administration has accomplished in the past year.
Obama announced Race to the Top in July. The program awards grant money to states on a competitive basis, based on their implementing education reforms that include assessment standards, turning around worst-performing schools, and recruiting and rewarding quality teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has met with education leaders throughout the country, working tirelessly to get state education leaders and providers, legislators, reform groups, unions and others to support reforms that will bring true accountability and competition to our nation’s public school systems.
Minnesota withholds payments to schools to pay the bills
School districts across Minnesota got word Tuesday that the state will withhold some of their funding in coming months.
Withholding payments will free up some of the state’s cash so it can pay its own bills. Today’s action is in addition to more than $1 billion in delayed payments to schools that were announced last summer.
School districts get their funding from the state in the form of twice-monthly payments.
Today’s move means both payments in March and one in April will be smaller than expected for many districts.
State finance officials predict they won’t have enough money in the bank during those months to meet their cash flow needs. So, the state will hold back a total of $423 million from schools. All of it will be paid back in May.
State of the Union on Education
Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation’s education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.
The boost that the Administration’s Race to the Top initiative – which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education – has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration’s biggest domestic policy success of 2009 – all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What’s more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.
These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept – in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth – to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate – for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
2010 Madison School Board Election: Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Questionnaire
Beth Moss (running for re-election unopposed) 311K PDF.
James Howard (running against Tom Farley) 432K PDF.
Audio: The 2010 State of the Madison School District
39MB mp3 audio. I recorded this from Monday evening’s video stream. Unfortunately, the sound level was quite low. Notes and links on the 2010 State of the Madison School District here.
566K State of the District PDF.
Honor student world: Where all the students are above average
Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don’t hurt the feelings of kids who don’t earn awards.
This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.
In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be “too hard,” not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of “survival of the fittest” still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more “adapted” to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
Ah, yes. One size fits all education uber alles.
Facebook case: Deposition reveals Teacher Barrow didn’t know e-mail source
Many of you have been asking me about the fate of Ashley Payne, the Barrow County high school teacher who lost her job over her Facebook page and whose experience sparked a national debate about Internet privacy, anonymous e-mails and teacher rights.
One of the Facebook photos that a “parent” complained about in an anonymous e-mail
The legal case is proceeding. Ashley Payne’s lawyer just deposed the principal and assistant principal. She is fighting to get her job back.
I asked attorney Richard Storrs if Barrow ever traced the source of the incriminating e-mail that led to Payne being called in by her principal in August and told to consider resigning rather than face losing her teaching license. Under that pressure, the 23-year-old UGA honors graduate says she felt she had no recourse but to resign – a mistake according to veteran teachers.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Federal Budget Freeze in the Works Effort to Curb Deficits Would Affect 17% of Budget; Defense, Medicare Exempt
Laura Meckler & Jonathan Weisman:
President Barack Obama intends to propose a three-year freeze in spending that accounts for one-sixth of the federal budget–a move meant to quell rising voter concern over the deficit but whose practical impact will be muted.
To attack the $1.4 trillion deficit, the White House will propose a three-year freeze on discretionary spending unrelated to the military, veterans, homeland security and international affairs, according to senior administration officials. Also untouched are big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The freeze would affect $447 billion in spending, or 17% of the total federal budget, and would likely be overtaken by growth in the untouched areas of discretionary spending. It’s designed to save $250 billion over the coming decade, compared to what would have been spent had this area been allowed to rise along with inflation.
The administration officials said the cap won’t be imposed across the board. Some areas would see cuts while others, including education and investments related to job creation, would realize increases.
More Than Academics at Chicago’s Morton Alternative
A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.
Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.
Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.
Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time — those judged to have some chance for improvement — though they come and go throughout the academic year.
‘Inconvenient Truth’ director turns to US education
AFP:
After his Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” spotlighted climate change, Davis Guggenheim is hoping to do for the US public education system what he did for the environment.
Guggenheim’s new film, “Waiting for Superman,” is vying for honors in the Sundance Film Festival’s US documentary competition, and offers a searing look at the problems facing schools and colleges in the United States.
Like the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth,” Guggenheim’s film utilizes graphs and animated charts intercut with interviews with students and educators to illustrate the sector’s woes.
New School Ecosystems
Tom Vander Ark:
There are interesting parallels between charter schools in the US and affordable private school in India. Both focus on the urban poor, promote choice, and often develop within an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Whether it’s New Orleans or Hyderabad, there are a dozen accelerants that promote access and quality:
1. Incubation support for new/existing operators with multi-campus potential. including planning support and seed funding (e.g., New School Venture Fund, Charter School Growth Fund, NY Charter School Center). Mumbai-based Dasra incubates social entrepreneurs but with limited access to seed capital.
New Jersey’s 2010 Race to the Top Application; 11 Wisconsin School Districts Don’t Participate
New Jersey Department of Education, 3MB PDF:
In New Jersey, we are proud to be ranked among the top 5 NAEP performers in reading, writing, and mathematics. We are proud to have invested so successfully in admired and effective early childhood programs, high-quality charter schools, and high school redesign. We are proud to see the success of our efforts.
However, while we are making inroads to close the achievement gap, we also recognize that more work is needed to prepare all of our students for the demands of the global economy. The existing minority achievement gaps and the gaps for economically-disadvantaged and non- disadvantaged students are unacceptable. There is an urgent need for these further reforms.
The landmark Abbot decisions over the last three decades in conjunction with the creation of the new school funding formula in 2008 solidified New Jersey’s commitment to equitable school resources and ensuring that all student sin the State have access to needed resources. Although this has been a significant step, we have not yet achieved outcomes commensurate with the State’s investments in education in all districts. Furthermore, we have not yet solved the problems of how to place great teachers and leaders in struggling schools and districts.
Eleven Wisconsin school districts want nothing to do with a highly touted federal grant program that could direct thousands of dollars to their classrooms.
The districts were the only ones out of 425 that refused to take part in the state’s application to receive money under the nearly $4.5 billion Race to the Top grant program.
That means if Wisconsin is awarded the $254 million it seeks, the 11 districts won’t get a cut, and the money they would have gotten will go to the remaining schools.
That’s just fine with Mary Dean, administrator of the Maple Dale-Indian Hills School District just north of Milwaukee. She said the requirements under the state’s Race to the Top application were too onerous for her 500-student district to comply with, so instead of giving itself the option of declining to take part later, it decided not to participate at all.
“We really had too many questions, too many unknowns,” she said. “We thought the costs would outweigh the benefits.”
Considering Wisconsin Teacher Licensing “Flexibility”
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
In classrooms across Wisconsin, students learn mathematics, reading, social studies, art, science, and other subjects through integrated projects that show great promise for increased academic achievement. The catch: the collaboration between students and teachers often involves multiple academic subjects, which can present licensing issues for school districts.
“There is no question that parents and students want innovative programs,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “The reality of some of today’s educational approaches requires that we look at our licensing regulations to increase flexibility and expand routes to certification to ensure that these programs are taught by highly qualified teachers.”
Related, by Janet Mertz: “An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria”
Advanced Pressure
The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.
Berkeley High may cut lab classes to fund programs for struggling students
Trying to address a major ethnic and racial achievement gap, the school could divert funds from before- and after-school science labs filled mostly with white students. The plan has sparked debate.
Aaron Glimme’s Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn’t officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases.
In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley’s AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school’s AP biology and physics students are even more successful.
Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High’s science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics.
Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs — decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% — and using that money to fund “equity” programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state.
Related: English 10.
Freshmen applications to selective area colleges surge
High school seniors are applying to selective colleges around Washington in record numbers this year, particularly to schools with reputations for meeting the full financial needs of admitted freshmen. The trend suggests that the weak economy has driven applicants to schools that offer a bigger bang for the tuition buck.
A surge in applications is not what admission deans expected this year, after a fiscal downturn and a flattening population of college-age students.
But applications to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are up 13 percent over last year, with a projected pool of 18,150 students competing for 1,235 seats in the freshman class. The University of Richmond received 8,500 applications for 805 slots, a 9 percent increase. Applications are up 6 percent at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and 3 percent at George Washington University in the District. The University of Virginia fielded 22,396 applications, an all-time high. The College of William and Mary, too, expects a record number of applicants.
“It shouldn’t be happening, should it?” said Bill Hartog, dean of admissions at Washington and Lee. “My take on it is, financial aid, financial aid, financial aid.”
Five areas where colleges could use some schooling
My family has much experience in higher education, not all of it happy. I spent six years as an often struggling undergraduate and grad student. My journalist wife did ten years in higher ed, including three of what she considered hard labor as a visiting professor. Our kids add another 11 years, with the youngest child about to sign up for three more. Please don’t ask me what that will cost.
American colleges and universities are the great strength of our education system. They are revered around the world. But those schools put heavy stress on our families, since getting into, paying for and graduating from the ones we most want often exceeds our capabilities. We need to know more about what they are doing to us, so I am happy to see washingtonpost.com launch two higher education blogs: College Inc. by Daniel de Vise and Campus Overload by Jenna Johnson. Let me celebrate that event by grumbling about what I consider higher education’s five biggest blind spots:
1. College privacy rules are a mess. They are difficult to understand and infuriating when they exacerbate a family crisis. I have heard many stories about students getting into trouble, and their parents being among the last to know. University officials will sometimes take pity on a frantic dad and reveal important things in the kid’s personal file. But why can’t we have more reasonable procedures? Academics who fear intrusive helicopter parents should read the National Survey of Student Engagement report, which reveals that the children of such people do better in college than kids like mine, who didn’t hear much from us.
2. Professors know too little about what high schools are doing to prepare students for their classes.
Values Statement for Seattle Teacher Contract Negotiations
As I mentioned previously, for the past couple of months I have been part of a coalition group to form a joint values statement for parents/community groups to give to the School Board, district and SEA. The groups include Campana Quetzel, Seattle Council PTSA, Successful Schools in Action, CPPS, Stand for Children, the Alliance for Education and others. Organized by the League of Education Voters (our leader is Kelly Munn of LEV), we sought to create a streamlined document that is simple and basic.
Here’s a link to that document, “Give Every Child a Great Education: A Community Value Statement in Support of Public Schools”. We will have, at this writing, shown the document to nearly all the Board members, SEA leaders and school district leaders.
Here is a link to the district’s opening remarks about the negotiations.
The Lottery
Since we’re talking about school choice–and the role of the teachers’ unions not only in preventing needed reform, but in keeping parents from choosing to place their kids in good schools that are good fits for them–check out the trailer above.
The story of teachers’ union intransigence when it comes to the extremely time-sensitive matter of kids’ futures urgently needs to be told. And finally, with films like this one and like The Cartel (which attracted a nasty, tellingly defensive hit piece from the New Jersey Education Association), that story is beginning to be told.
Water Drop at 2000 frames per Second
From Discovery Channel’s series ‘Time Warp’ where MIT scientist and teacher Jeff Lieberman and digital-imaging expert Matt Kearney use the latest in high-speed photography to turn never-before-seen wonders into an experience of beauty and learning.
Definition: coalesce – To come together so as to form one whole; unite (from Latin coalescere com- ‘together’ + alescere ‘to grow up’)
Convicted sex pests may still be teaching in Hong Kong
Liz Heron, Elaine Yau and Fox Yi Hu:
More than 30 teachers and classroom assistants have been convicted of sex offences in the past 10 years – but the Education Bureau will not say if they are still working in the city’s schools.
Since January 1, 2000, at least 31 staff have been convicted of offences ranging from indecent assault of their pupils to secretly filming girls getting undressed for a dance class.
The catalogue of convictions and the names of the offenders was compiled by the Sunday Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) and presented to the Education Bureau, which was asked what action had been taken against the offenders.
But the bureau, responsible for registering teachers and advising schools on vetting prospective staff, refused to say how many of the 31 were still registered as teachers and how many were working in schools.
A spokeswoman also refused to explain why it would not release the information to the public. She did say 13 teachers were deregistered from 2006 to 2008 and seven of these had been convicted of sex offences.
A Few Comments on Monday’s State of the Madison School District Presentation
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad will present the “State of the Madison School District 2010” tomorrow night @ 5:30p.m. CST.
The timing and content are interesting, from my perspective because:
- The nearby Verona School District just approved a Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote. (Watch the discussion here). Madison lags in such expanded “adult to student” learning opportunities. Madison seems to be expanding “adult to adult” spending on “coaches” and “professional development”. I’d rather see an emphasis on hiring great teachers and eliminating the administrative overhead associated with growing “adult to adult” expenditures.
- I read with interest Alec Russell’s recent lunch with FW de Klerk. de Klerk opened the door to South Africa’s governance revolution by freeing Nelson Mandela in 1990:
History is moving rather fast in South Africa. In June the country hosts football’s World Cup, as if in ultimate endorsement of its post-apartheid progress. Yet on February 2 1990, when the recently inaugurated state President de Klerk stood up to deliver the annual opening address to the white-dominated parliament, such a prospect was unthinkable. The townships were in ferment; many apartheid laws were still on the books; and expectations of the balding, supposedly cautious Afrikaner were low.
How wrong conventional wisdom was. De Klerk’s address drew a line under 350 years of white rule in Africa, a narrative that began in the 17th century with the arrival of the first settlers in the Cape. Yet only a handful of senior party members knew of his intentions.I sense that the Madison School Board and the Community are ready for new, substantive adult to student initiatives, while eliminating those that simply consume cash in the District’s $418,415,780 2009-2010 budget ($17,222 per student).
- The “State of the District” document [566K PDF] includes only the “instructional” portion of the District’s budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 “Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization’s mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple “citizen’s budget” financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes’ very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
- A new financial reality. I don’t see significant new funds for K-12 given the exploding federal deficit, state spending and debt issues and Madison’s property tax climate. Ideally, the District will operate like many organizations, families and individuals and try to most effectively use the resources it has. The recent Reading Recovery report is informative.
I think Dan Nerad sits on a wonderful opportunity. The community is incredibly supportive of our schools, spending far more per student than most school Districts (quite a bit more than his former Green Bay home) and providing a large base of volunteers. Madison enjoys access to an academic powerhouse: the University of Wisconsin and proximity to MATC and Edgewood College. Yet, District has long been quite insular (see Janet Mertz’s never ending efforts to address this issue), taking a “we know best approach” to many topics via close ties to the UW-Madison School of Education and its own curriculum creation business, the Department of Teaching and Learning.
In summary, I’m hoping for a “de Klerk” moment Monday evening. What are the odds?
A Diverse Milwaukee IB High School with Rigor…. Problem or Opportunity?
Picture a Milwaukee Public Schools high school that college-bound students are clamoring to attend. The school has grown from 100 to 1,000 in six years. Its program is rigorous, its test scores are strong. Hundreds are on a waiting list for admission for next year.
You might think MPS leaders would look at the meteoric rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan College Preparatory School on the far south side and say, "Terrific! This is an opportunity. What can we do to satisfy the obviously huge appetite for what this program has to offer?"
Or, if you were perhaps a bit more cynical, you might think MPS leaders would look at the Reagan situation and say: "OK, who screwed up? Who allowed this school to grow so fast? Can we get a lot of these parents to switch their kids to other high schools where – for some reason – there is no waiting list?"
Reagan arguably has provided the biggest shot in the arm that MPS has gotten in the last decade or so. It provides a rigorous International Baccalaureate program for all its students – "We have one vision, one mission, one focus – IB," says Julia D’Amato, the principal and chief driver behind Reagan’s success. Reagan is working with other MPS schools to develop a kindergarten through high school IB continuum in MPS.
But in recent months, Reagan has had to fend off an attempt to cap its enrollment and it has been ordered to reduce sharply the number of students next fall who do not fall into the special education category. Reagan leaders clearly feel frustrated by how much work is going into protecting their success from MPS leaders.
"All the buzzwords that are supposed to make a successful school, that’s what we have here," says Mary Ellen McCormick-Mervis, one of the school’s administrators. "If we’re doing everything right, why not help us?"
Parent meeting set
In Galileo’s Footsteps
Teaching Without Gimmicks
In discussions of “effective” teaching, we often hear about the “objectives” that teachers should spell out and repeat, the “learning styles” they should target, the “engagement” they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide–all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.
Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: “No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!”
Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson’s content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students “on task,” reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.
Bill Gates Goes to Sundance, Offers an Education
When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, came to the Sundance Film Festival here this week, it wasn’t movies on his mind, it was education — your kids’ education.
A new documentary, “Waiting For Superman,” by director Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) looks at what Gates and Guggenheim say is a U.S. public school system in shambles.
“The quality of our educational system is what made America great. Now it’s not as good as it was, and it needs to be a lot better,” Gates told Reuters after the film’s premiere on Friday.
“Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, ‘Waiting for Superman’ by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way,” he said.
Milwaukee Custer High School: Our Daughters Fighting, Not Learning
The person who posted this video on YouTube said this fight happened 1/5/10… that’s some way to say Happy New Year.
I know some of you readers cannot stand when I post video of US acting the fool… well that’s life. Here’s some reality for US to look at for the next 30 seconds and do something about OUR kids.
It’s one thing to see these young girls fighting so viciously. It’s a damn shame to see ALL the other kids are cheering on this ish. Where’s the teachers and what took the security so long? I know this isn’t going on everyday, but this ish is getting tired.
Goal for federal stimulus money was to help at-risk students and disabled; is goal realistic?
When Gov. Jim Doyle announced last April that $366 million in federal stimulus money was headed for Wisconsin schools, the stated goal from Washington was to help children with disabilities and at-risk students in poor schools — “while stimulating the economy.”
But it’s unclear if the almost $12 million distributed to the Madison School District, with a third of that going to teacher training and coaching, will accomplish those goals.
“I think at the end of this period we will have spent a lot of money and I don’t know what we’ll have to show for it,” said Lucy Mathiak, vice president of the Madison School Board. “Professional development is a really nice thing, but how do you even measure the in-class result?”
About $1 million of the Madison district’s $11.7 million in stimulus money will buy technology for schools, welcomed by school officials. Programs for students with behavioral and mental health needs will be beefed up as well, and the district estimates about 40 new short-term jobs will be created.
Cheating at a Springfield, MA Charter School to Improve Test Scores
One staff member at a Springfield charter school told state education investigators he felt so pressured by his principal last spring to improve MCAS scores that, in order to keep his job, he helped one student write an essay for the test.
Another staff member said he was fired after he accused the principal of encouraging cheating, while another staff member observed a colleague pull some students away from watching a movie so they could fix answers on their tests.
The findings, released yesterday by state education officials, offer the first public glimpse into the specific cheating allegations that have been leveled against Robert M. Hughes Academy, which was ordered last winter to improve its scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests to avoid being closed.
Previously, Mitchell Chester, commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, had said only that the cheating, described as pervasive and systemic, was orchestrated by the principal and carried out by several adults at the school, which teaches 180 students in kindergarten through grade 8.
More teens are choosing to wait to get driver’s licenses
The quest to get a driver’s license at 16 — long an American rite of passage– is on the wane among the digital generation, which no longer sees the family car as the end-all of social life.
The holdouts include Kat Velkoff, who turned 17 in Chantilly without a license. Focused on tough classes, the debate team, dance and color guard, she turned 18 without taking the wheel. Then 19.
“It just wasn’t a priority,” said Velkoff, who got her license last fall at 20. “It was just never the next thing that needed to get done in my life.”
Federal data released Friday underscore a striking national shift: 30.7 percent of 16-year-olds got their licenses in 2008, compared with 44.7 percent in 1988. The downtrend is even sharper in Virginia and Maryland, state figures show. Numbers from the District, which go back to 2003, show a decline in the past two years.
“People over Programs”: Better School District Administration….
The most interesting session I attended concered Kewaskum schools program they call “People over programs“. I have long noted that compared to the private sector, school district management structures are very weak – the Kewaskum program deals with this problem by focusing on high professional standards for their staff. I was encouraged to see an alternative model that acknowledges this issue and attempts to address the problem directly.
Along similar lines I hear a presentation from the Janesville schools – they are working with a management consulting firm (that is donating their services) to develop standards of professionalism and accountability in management. The Superintendents evaluation is published on the district website with progress toward specific measurable goals.
I also attended a session with ideas about using incentives with HRA’s to reduce health insurance costs, and a session about district consolidation – I think that looking at collaborative or consolidated support services with neighboring district might be a way to save money.
Wisconsin School Open Enrollment Period Begins 2/1, Ends 2/19
Parents wishing to send their children to a different school district next year will be able to participate in the open enrollment program the first three weeks of February.
From Feb. 1 through Feb. 19 parents can apply for their children to attend a public school other than the one in which they live. Last school year, more than 28,000 students participated.
Participation in the program has grown each year since it began in 1998 when just 2,500 were enrolled.
Learn more about full and part time Wisconsin open enrollment here.
A “Fight Club” at Madison West High School
Cassie Frankel seems an unlikely martial arts warrior.
The sophomore at West High heard about the Mixed Martial Arts Club from her chemistry teacher and decided to give it a try. The group meets Thursdays at noon, learning and practicing a variety of fighting styles, including boxing, wrestling, judo and jujutsu.
“I like that it’s an individual sport because I’m not that athletic,” Frankel says during a break in practice. “It’s more about how your body works.” She likes boxing best: “I feel really tough with the boxing gloves, even though they’re pink.”
Frankel acknowledges the controversy over teaching kids to fight. But, she says, “I think it’s a good idea because if you know how to fight you’re less likely to get hurt.”
What Makes a Great Teacher–Not Just for the Gifted, but for All Students
The January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic features a noteworthy article titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? Although the article does not focus on gifted education per se, it is still worth a close read. The article discusses specific attributes that excellent teachers with exceptional track records tend to display in the classroom. (It is important to note that these attributes are based on research that was conducted by the nonprofit organization, Teach for America, which advocates for teacher reform. It is also important to note that the group’s research focuses solely on teachers who work in underperforming school districts where the primary goal in the general education classroom is to get students to perform at or above grade level.) The article outlines several specific recommendations that the organization makes for recruiting and hiring successful teachers, particularly in underserved communities.
For those of us in the gifted education community, the traits identified in the article may be ones that we should perhaps consider first before we consider any additional teacher characteristics that might be specific to gifted education. (See my previous blog entry titled, Training and Competencies of Teachers of the Gifted.)
Elementary gifted ed made easy
Two weeks ago I explored the possibility that high schools could challenge all students, gifted or otherwise, without having gifted programs. Quaker Valley High School outside of Pittsburgh, for instance, seemed able to create new opportunities for a variety of kids by ignoring standard procedures that had outlived their usefulness, such as homework requirements or rules against taking more than one course in the same period.
One wise reader said, in effect: Yeah, but that will never work in elementary schools.
As if by fate, I received an email shortly after from Susan Ohanian, a delightful teacher, speaker, author and blogger whose work I love, even when she is portraying me as a test-addled idiot. We may disagree on policy issues, but we have shared tastes about what good teaching looks and sounds like. In her email, she described how she brought a free-form gifted non-program to an elementary school in Troy, N.Y.
Here is what she said. Don’t forget to take a look at her blog at susanohanian.org.
Three Quick Steps to Clear Writing
“Few appreciate brilliance, but everyone appreciates clarity.”
I came up with that line on Twitter, and thought . . .
Why waste it there?
Here’s the quick and clear guide to clarity in writing:
Short
Short words are the rule that makes your exceptional words sing.
Short sentences make powerful points faster.
The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.
Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.
South Africa’s education system No one gets prizes Blacks suffer most, as schools remain ill-equipped and children are ill-taught
SOUTH AFRICA spends a bigger share of its GDP on education than any other country on the continent. Yet its results are among the worst. Fifteen years after apartheid was buried, black children continue to receive an education that is vastly inferior to most of their white peers. Instead of ending inequality, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) promised, the country’s schools are perpetuating it.
For Graeme Bloch, an education expert at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, his country’s education system is a “national disaster”. He says around 80% of schools are “dysfunctional”. Half of all pupils drop out before taking their final “matric” exams. Only 15% get good enough marks to get into university. Of those who do get in, barely half end up with a degree. South Africa regularly comes bottom or near the bottom in international literacy, numeracy and science tests.
University heads increasingly complain about students totally unprepared for higher education. Employers bemoan a dearth of skilled manpower, yet–by some measures–one in three South Africans has no job. A study of first-year students by Higher Education South Africa, the universities’ representative body, found only half the 2009 intake to be proficient in “academic literacy” and barely a quarter in “quantitative literacy”, while no more than 7% were deemed to have the necessary mathematics skills.
Interest up in Students Learning Personal Finance
Each day after school, 17-year-old Phyllis Quach goes to a warehouse filled with silk flowers, stuffed animals and other gift items her parents sell through their South Florida wholesale business.
The recession hit the family hard and they can no longer afford the building. Quach helps pack the goods for a move to a cheaper location. On weekends, her mother often goes door to door, hoping to find new retail customers.
“I never want to go through what they go through,” Quach said, tears gathering in her eyes.
So Quach is taking a a personal finance course at her Miami high school — getting early lessons on managing credit, balancing a budget and buying a first home. Experts say the recession’s length and severity means it could affect the students’ lifelong financial behavior, as the Great Depression affected their grandparents’ frugal generation.
The State of the Madison School District, 2010
588K PDF, Dan Nerad, Superintendent:
Dear Members of Our Community, The mission of the Madison Metropolitan School District is as follows:
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
A year ago, a group of community and school staff members committed time to develop a revised Strategic Plan for the school district. As part of this, our mission statement was revised. This plan was approved by the Board of Education in September 2009 and will be reviewed and updated annually. For the foreseeable future, the plan will serve as our road map to know if we are making a difference relative to important student learning outcomes and to the future of our community. To make the most difference, we must continue to partner with you, our community. We are indeed very fortunate to be able to educate our children in a very supportive, caring community.
As a school district, our highest priority must be on our work related to teaching and learning. For our students and the community’s children to become proficient learners and caring and contributing members of society, we must remain steadfast in this commitment.
Related to our mission, we have also identified the following belief statements as a district:
- We believe that excellent public education is necessary for ensuring a democratic society.
- Webelieveintheabilitiesofeveryindividualinourcommunityandthevalueof their life experiences.
- We believe in an inclusive community in which all have the right to contribute.
- Webelievewehaveacollectiveresponsibilitytocreateandsustainasafe environment that is respectful, engaging, vibrant and culturally responsive.
- Webelievethateveryindividualcanlearnandwillgrowasalearner.
- We believe in continuous improvement in formed by critical evaluation and reflection.
- We believe that resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.
- Webelieveinculturallyrelevanteducationthatprovidestheknowledgeandskills to meet the global challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Purpose of this report
The purpose of this State of the District Report is to provide important information about our District to our community and to share future priorities.
This report will be presented at Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.
School Finance 2009-10: Budget Cataclysm and its Aftermath
Trying to make sense of the 2009-10 education budget and a year when everything went topsy turvey?
This 20-page report looks at how California got to this point and leads you through the cuts, funding delays, and policy changes that lawmakers implemented in 2009 to address a state budget crisis that just kept getting worse. It also explains the impact on local education agencies, including the changed rules around many K-12 programs such as Class Size Reduction.
Some key messages from the report:
- California has struggled with creating sound state budgets since the early 2000s, so the national economic downturn hit the state particularly hard.
- K-12 spending cuts have been a major part of the budget solutions and were accompanied by substantive changes in how education funds are allocated, including some new flexibility.
- Local school agencies must absorb funding cuts, address cash flow challenges, and plan carefully in order to avoid insolvency.
- Going forward, Californians may either have to accept the “new normal” of continued education reductions or push for schools to be exempted from further cuts as another bad year begins.
Chicago Mayor Daley on The Schools
CBS 2’s Mike Flannery recently received a little one-on-one time with Mayor Daley when he interviewed the mayor while riding along in his town car. The crux of the interview was about the future of Northerly Island and if a casino would be built there, to which Daley replied, “It’s strictly a park, always will be; because it belongs to the people.” He also reiterated comments from his verbal spat with Han Solo last week, saying that he’s “very proud” of his decision to bulldoze Meigs Field to create Northerly Island and that it was all part of the Burnham Plan. When asked if he felt it was one of his major accomplishments, Daley responded, “No. No, I think the schools are.”
Your school’s AP secrets
Ever seen the Advanced Placement Grade Report for your high school? I thought not. Most people don’t know it exists. That is why I have so much pleasure going over the reports. It is like reading the principal’s e-mails, full of intriguing innuendo and secrets that parents and students aren’t supposed to know.
Although these subject-by-subject reports rarely appear on public Web sites, some schools will show them to me if I ask, for the following reasons: 1. I am very polite; 2. no reporter has ever asked for them before, so there are no rules against it; and 3. they don’t think anyone will care.
They are wrong on that last count. The AP Grade Report allows the public to see which AP courses at a school produce the most high grades, and the most low grades, on AP exams. You can gauge the skill of the teachers and the nature of the students who take various AP subjects.
This region’s schools have made AP (and the similar International Baccalaureate, which provides comparable reports) the most challenging and influential courses they have. On Feb. 1, The Post will publish my annual rankings of Washington area schools based on participation in these tests, written and scored by outside experts. Students who do well on them can earn college credit. Many people would be interested in the actual results (different from the participation figures I use in the rankings) if they were readily available. To my surprise, that is beginning to happen.
Foreign Languages Fade in Class — Except Chinese
Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.
But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.
Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world — and paying part of their salaries.
At a time of tight budgets, many American schools are finding that offer too good to refuse.
In Massillon, Ohio, south of Cleveland, Jackson High School started its Chinese program in the fall of 2007 with 20 students and now has 80, said Parthena Draggett, who directs Jackson’s world languages department.
National K-12 Foreign Language Survey. Verona recently approved a Mandarin charter school.
New turnaround target: 76 schools by 2012
Pennsylvania’s application for a piece of the $4 billion federal Race to the Top money calls for Philadelphia to "turn around" 76 low-performing schools by 2012-13 — eight schools in 2010-11, 40 the following year, and 28 in 2012-13.
That is close to a third of all schools in the District. Such schools will be required to adopt one of four drastic reform strategies approved by the US Department of Education.
High cholesterol puts 1 of 5 teens at risk of heart disease
One out of every five U.S. teenagers has a cholesterol level that increases the risk of heart disease, federal health officials reported Thursday, providing striking new evidence that obesity is making more children prone to illnesses once primarily limited to adults.
A nationally representative survey of blood test results in American teenagers found that more than 20 percent of those ages 12 to 19 had at least one abnormal level of fat. The rate jumped to 43 percent among those adolescents who were obese.
Previous studies had indicated that unhealthy cholesterol levels, once a condition thought isolated to the middle-aged and elderly, were increasingly becoming a problem among the young, but the new data document the scope of the threat on a national level.
“This is the future of America,” said Linda Van Horn, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who heads the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee. “These data really confirm the seriousness of our obesity epidemic. This really is an urgent call for health-care providers and families to take this issue seriously.”
Credibility of UW-Madison Voucher polling project questioned
One Wisconsin Now argues:
** UW-Madison is receiving nearly $18,000 from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute — which One Wisconsin Now calls a “conservative think tank” — for the polling project to cover a part of Goldstein’s salary.
** Poll results showed a 46.6 percent to 42.4 percent statewide opposition to private school vouchers. However, due to political concerns, it appears WPRI President George Lightbourn was able to keep these numbers from being played up. In the end, references to statewide opposition to private school vouchers were not used in a press release touting the poll. Instead, a press release talking about the poll results put out on the UW-Madison website included only figures from Milwaukee County, where the majority supported vouchers.
“This is a lesson about the credibility and the trustworthiness of materials produced by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute,” Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, says in the press release. “If polling results don’t fit its pro-voucher agenda, then those polling results are erased from the final analysis. Most unfortunately, the UW is now tied directly to this manipulation to serve the political agenda of WPRI.”
One Wisconsin Now does extensive voter data collection and mining for certain candidates.
Madison School Board Spring, 2010 Election Climate: Tommy Boy (oh boy) Farley, what a candidate!
Tom Farley Jr., the brother of the late comedian Chris Farley, is emerging as perhaps the oddest candidate for local public office since Will Sandstrom.
First there was the confusion he caused in announcing on Twitter last September that he was running for lieutenant governor as a Republican. He later backtracked, saying he was merely considering the idea, a claim undercut by the words he’d used: “I’m in.” (His announcement of candidacy has apparently been unTwittered.)
Farley later announced his candidacy for Madison school board; he’s running for an open seat against James Howard, an economist with the Forest Products Laboratory. Commenting on the Advocating on Madison Public Schools (AMPS) blog, Farley sought to distance himself from the notion that he is a Republican merely because he announced his plans to run for office as one.
Milwaukee’s Michael Bond’s Letter to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle on Race to the Top & Governance
Michael Bonds, President, Milwaukee Board of School Directors [1.3MB PDF]:
January 18, 2010
Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702
Dear Governor Doyle:
As President of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, I am writing to express my disappointment with your cynical statement regarding Wisconsin’s Race to the Top (RTT) application. In your release, you predict that the application will fail because it does not include mayoral control of the Milwaukee Public Schools District (MPS). You also argue that the Legislature’s refusal to adopt your mayoral control proposal in Milwaukee will cost other school districts millions of dollars.
Since mayoral control is not a requirement for Race To the Top dollars, your statement can only be interpreted as a political attempt to tum the rest of the state against MPS and to intimidate legislators who oppose mayoral control into supporting your proposal.
The facts are as follows:
via The Milwaukee Drum.
Who’s Pulling the Milwaukee Public School Takeover Strings?
National pro-privatization organizations led by former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Joe Williams and backed by Wall Street hedge fund managers are emerging as a driving force behind the mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
Williams is the executive director of the affiliated groups named Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Education Reform Now (ERN), based in New York City. ERN has a nine-month-old chapter in Wisconsin, and DFER has branches in Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and New Jersey.
The Wisconsin state director of both groups, Katy Venskus, has been lobbying in support of the pro-mayoral takeover Senate Bill 405, authored by state Sen. Lena Taylor and state Rep. Pedro Colon.
Venskus also has organized a group of Milwaukee business leaders–including Julia Taylor of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, Tim Sheehy of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and Tim Sullivan of Bucyrus International–to push for a mayor-appointed superintendent of MPS with enhanced executive powers.
More screen time for youth than adults on the job
Youth are spending more time with nearly every form of media than ever, according to a report released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They spend more hours on the computer, in front of television, playing video games, texting and listening to music than an adult spends full-time at work.
The only media young people aren’t soaking up, the study says, are newspapers, magazines and other print publications.
Youth spend more than 7 1/2 hours a day using electronic media, or more than 53 hours a week, the 10-year study says. “And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours.”
Affirming parents’ fears, the study showed those habits ripple throughout a youth’s life. Those who were big media consumers were more likely than kids and teens who are only seldom in front of a screen to earn average or poor grades in school. Those who use more electronic media get in more trouble, and say they are often sad.
Education Grant Effort Faces Late Opposition
The Obama administration’s main school improvement initiative has spurred education policy changes in states across the nation, but it is meeting with some last-minute resistance as the first deadline for applications arrives Tuesday.
Thousands of school districts in California, Ohio and other states have declined to participate, and teachers’ unions in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida have recommended that their local units not sign on to their states’ applications. Several rural states, including Montana, have said they will not apply, at least for now, partly because of the emphasis on charter schools, which would draw resources from small country schools.
And Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said last week that his state would not compete for the $700 million that the biggest states are eligible to win in the $4 billion program, known as Race to the Top, calling it an intrusion on states’ rights.
Still, about 40 states were rushing to complete applications for the Tuesday deadline, the first in the two-stage competition. The last-minute opposition is unlikely to derail efforts by most of those states to win some of the federal money.
Vermont Education Board Supports District Consolidation
The State Board of Education voted on Tuesday to support Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca’s campaign to sharply reduce the number of school districts in Vermont.
The board avoided setting a specific number of school districts. But it made it clear that it backs the idea of reducing the present 290 local school districts to a much smaller number of larger, regional districts.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate
The Next Liberal Cause: Could It Be Education?
President Obama announced plans yesterday to expand the Race to the Top education program, which invites states to apply for slices of a $4 billion pie of additional school funding. Last year Obama launched the program with two major messages: (1) We need to locate effective teachers by studying student data, and (2) we need better standards to keep some states (ahem, Mississippi) from setting their education bar so low that they gut the word “standard” of all meaning.
In future iterations, Race to the Top will allow not only states, but also individual districts, to apply for additional federal funding. This change makes sense for two reasons. The first is wholly practical. Most school funding comes from local property taxes, and accordingly education policies, and their success, can vary dramatically on a district-by-district basis within a state. The second reason this makes sense for the administration is more political. Appealing to individual districts provides a way to circumvent governors like Texas’s Rick Perry who don’t want to accept additional education funds.
Verona School Board Approves Mandarin Chinese Charter School: 4 to 3
channel3000, via a kind reader:
A new Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school will open this fall in Verona.
The Verona school board voted 4-3 on Monday night to approve the school, making it the first of its kind in the state.
The school will be called the Verona Area International School. It will have two halftime teachers, one who teaches only in English and the other who teaches only in Mandarin. Math, science and some social-science classes would be taught in the Chinese language. Students will spend half the day learning in English and half in Mandarin Chinese.
Smart and timely. Much more, here.
Former Dem lawmaker, DPI superintendent Grover advocates smaller districts within the Milwaukee Public Schools
Grover is not real sanguine with current education policy ideas, such as Mayor Tom Barrett’s bid for a takeover of Milwaukee public schools. Fundamentally, smaller school districts (500 kids) should be the goal, and structural changes will never trump upbringing and parental involvement in their children’s education, he said.
“The difference between the kid headed to a Milwaukee school and one in Whitefish Bay is what they bring to the school house door,” he said. “The aspiration level of the parents is key. They want the best for their kids.”
As for the contest to succeed Jim Doyle as governor in 2010, Grover isn’t sure Barrett can be tough enough but suggests he’d be an improvement.
“Jim Doyle started out life at third base and thought he hit a triple,” Grover said, using an aphorism to denote “an elitist west side (Madison) upbringing.”
“Barrett is absolutely a decent human being. I have the feeling he won’t be as aggressive as he will need to be. He’s almost like Barack (Obama) …’Let us reason together.'”
Smaller districts certainly make sense, including places like Madison.
Two New Governors Pick Reform Oriented Education Chiefs
Kudos to the country’s two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.
Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia’s next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state’s next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it’s especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
Mississippi School Panel Hires Consultant for K-12 Consolidation
The advisory committee Gov. Haley Barbour appointed to study K-12 school consolidation voted Monday to hire an outside consulting firm, using $72,000 in private funds from unnamed sources.
Bringing on board a Denver-based firm that specializes in public education systems and policies will allow the committee to have data-driven discussions as opposed to ones mired in emotion and politics, said Johnny Franklin, Barbour’s education policy adviser.
Committee Chairman Aubrey Patterson, the CEO of BancorpSouth Inc., said he did not have permission to release the names of the one individual and two organizations that have agreed to pay the contract with Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Inc.
He described the donors as “interested supporters of public education” and would not say where the donors were from.
Monday’s meeting at the Capitol marked the initial gathering for the Commission on Mississippi Education Structure appointed in late December to study the best way to go about consolidating the state’s 152 districts.
Yale: The musical
A new Yale admissions video released Friday starts as most campus tours do: an uncomfortable question-and-answer session with an over-caffeinated admissions officer. Some kid asks what year the school was founded. A dowdy mom elbows a nerdy dad.
And then a sultry young woman in a red sundress in the back row asks: “Why did you choose Yale?”
There’s a reflective pause. A reflection piano overture. Reflective looks around the room. And then — bam! — the boring admissions video turns into a musical. The admissions officer serenades the no-longer-bored students: When I was a senior in high school, colleges called out my name. Every day I debate where to matriculate, but every place seemed the same. Yet after I went through the options, only one choice remained. I wanted to hail from a college called Yale . . . .
It feels like an episode of Glee, the popular TV show that overnight made it socially acceptable and even sexy to sing in the high school show chorus. Those involved admit they watched the movie “High School Musical” for inspiration. And since the video was posted on YouTube on Friday evening, it has been viewed nearly 50,000 times.
Will China Achieve Science Supremacy?
A recent Times article described how China is stepping up efforts to lure home the top Chinese scholars who live and work abroad. The nation is already second only to the United States in the volume of scientific papers published, and it has, as Thomas Friedman pointed out, more students in technical colleges and universities than any other country.
But China’s drive to succeed in the sciences is also subjecting its research establishment to intense pressure and sharper scrutiny. And as the standoff last week between Google and China demonstrated, the government controls the give and take of information.
How likely is it that China will become the world’s leader in science and technology, and what are the impediments to creating a research climate that would allow scientists to thrive?
Every School a Quality School
There is increasing talk these days about making every school in the district a “quality” school. The New Student Assignment Plan has increased the frequency, volume, and urgency for this bumper sticker talk. But despite those increases, there has not been much increase in action or even understanding of the goal.
Everytime I hear someone spout this talk about “every school a quality school” I stop them immediately and ask them what they mean by that. What is a “quality school”? How will we know one? I pretty much tell them that if they cannot accurately define a quality school then they should just shut the hell up about it. I hate it when people use words without knowing what they mean.
So, for the record, I have my own idea about what is a quality school. It is a school where the students are taught – at a minimum – the core set of knowledge and skills that they should be taught at their grade level and they learn it. It’s a school in which students working beyond grade level are appropriately challenged with more rigor, meaning accelerated lessons, more ambiguous ideas, more complex ideas, a wider range of contexts, or a deeper understanding of the ideas. It’s a school were the students who are working below grade level are given the early and effective interventions they need to get to grade level. In short, students are taught at the frontier of the knowledge and skills and are brought at least to grade level. There are plenty of examples of such schools here in Seattle.
Indeed….
Colorado scrambles for dollars with new school reform plan Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_14219116#ixzz0d7Rk1eL0
Jessica Fender & Jeremy Meyer:
Colorado education officials will unveil a reform proposal today that asks for $380 million in federal Race to the Top funding, but they are missing a key plank regarding teacher evaluations that will likely give other states a leg up in the contest.
Months of work have led to a nearly 150-page plan that touches on nearly everything, including incentives for top teachers, resources focused on failing schools and sharing data across the state.
But while Colorado’s application vows to address such issues as teacher performance, tenure and dismissal through a commission born today of an executive order from Gov. Bill Ritter, other states with more advanced teacher-tracking systems have put their evaluation plans into law.
Colorado began the competition as a front-runner, but analysts say the lack of guidelines for tenure and dismissal will likely hurt the state’s chances at being among the first chosen for a share of the $4.35 billion program. As many as 45 states nationwide are revamping their K-12 systems to compete for hundreds of millions in stimulus dollars that will be granted in two rounds of competition.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien has spearheaded Colorado’s Race to the Top effort and said she would rather have the support of teachers and their union than forge ahead with a plan that schools are unhappy with.
Colorado’s P-12 academic standards.
The Opening of the Academic MindHow to rescue the professoriate from professionalization.
The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that’s always in crisis. The academy is too distant from the concerns of everyday life, or else it’s too politically engaged. The academy has become completely irrelevant, except for the fact that it’s too relevant. We ought to be grateful to our universities for this. Academic wrongheadedness is one of the few things people across the political and cultural spectrum can agree upon.
One popular way of describing the failure of the contemporary academy is to complain that it no longer produces special things called “public intellectuals,” so it is either a great relief or a rule-proving exception to read a blazingly sane take on the academy’s troubles by one of the few professors who pretty safely deserves the term. Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas manages to do many things in four short essays–describe the changing self-conception of the university, identify the difficulties behind curricular reform, and analyze the anxieties of humanities professors. But the book’s chief accomplishment is its insistence that what we take for academic crises are probably just academic problems, and they are ours to solve.
New York Fights Over Charter Schools
Jacob Gershman & Barbara Martinez:
New York, home of the nation’s largest school district, is on the verge of rejecting key components of the White House’s education effort amid a state fight over charter schools.
The Democratic-led legislature, with heavy backing from teachers’ unions, is behind a law that critics, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, say will curb the growth of charter schools.
Tuesday is the deadline for states to submit initial bids for a slice of the $4.35 billion that is up for grabs under the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” competition, which is intended to coax policy concessions such as opening charter schools and getting approval of merit-pay systems through stubborn legislatures.
Late Monday, New York Governor David A. Paterson and lawmakers were negotiating a compromise to salvage the state’s application for the first phase of the contest. Although it is seen as unlikely that Albany leaders will strike a compromise by the deadline, it is expected that New York will submit a bid either way.
The maximum amount that New York could win is $700 million and it is unclear if program’s financial lure will be enough to forge a breakthrough.
Rigor vs. Relevance
We argue about testing in the US, but the focus on and stakes related to testing is much higher in China and India where the tip of the human funnel is the 12th grade exam; to a large life options hang in the balance. In the US, there are lots of options and second chances; not so in India and China. As a result, the singular secondary focus is marks leading to success on the exit exam.
Yesterday, I visited an expensive private school in Hyderabad. The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program looked familiar and rich. I dropped in on a primary teacher staff meeting that was informed by student work.
However, it was a different picture in the middle grades where the school abandoned IB for the Cambridge curriculum. Students sat in rows quietly plowing through workbooks while teachers sat at their desk. It was among the most stifling middle grade programs I’ve ever seen.
On Firing Bad Teachers
Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn’t the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don’t belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.
The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.
So we find it a heartening coincidence that on the same day Yaffe ordered Kim’s firing, the president of the American Federation of Teachers called for new procedures making it easier to remove bad teachers. Randi Weingarten, who has been one of the more progressive teachers union leaders, said the AFT would develop a proposal, with the project overseen by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the federal government’s “pay czar” on executive compensation.
Just who made the young so doltish?
WHY are the young so disappointing, when it comes to their manners, dress codes, or knowledge of the canon of Western civilisation? Ask a British or American conservative, and he will blame the left: the 1960s vintage teachers who disdain dead white guys like Shakespeare, the college campuses where Derrida and deconstruction have displaced reading actual literature or the egalitarian ethos of “all shall have prizes”.
Ask someone from the left, for example in Britain, and they will trace the rot back to Thatcherism: the hostility to pure research, the focus on commercially-driven vocational education (all those degree courses in golf course management or marketing, elbowing aside history or Ancient Greek), or the dumbing down of examinations by ministers who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Luc Ferry, a prolific French philosopher and former education minister in the conservative government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has a new book out, “Face à la crise: Matériaux pour une politique de civilisation”, offering a distinctly Gallic view of the problem: the fault lies with globalisation.
Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says
Many of the nation’s public universities eliminated courses and raised tuition last year, but the salaries and benefits of their presidents continued to rise, though at a slower rate than in years past, a new study has found.
In its ninth annual examination of the pay of 185 public university leaders, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Monday that the median rose to $436,111 in 2008-9, an increase of 2.3 percent when compared with the year before. (When adjusted for inflation, The Chronicle said, the median increase was 1.1 percent.)
By contrast, in the previous four years, The Chronicle said, public university leaders’ salaries and benefits rose, on average, by at least 7.5 percent each year, and, in 2005, by 19 percent.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor of The Chronicle, said in a statement that while the increases of past years had “riled parents, students and politicians,” it was most likely “the bad economy and the fiscal crisis facing many states” that “finally put a halt to these large pay increases.”
Charter schools are separate & uneqeal; serve fewer disadvantaged students
As New York finalizes its application for the federal Race to the Top program, a proposal to end the cap on the number of charter schools has been promoted as key to our success in getting these new federal funds. But promoters of this proposal are ignoring two other critical issues: The small role that charter schools play in the Race to the Top application, and the fact that city charters are not serving a representative sample of our neediest students.
Despite the heated rhetoric from charter proponents, the fact is that the charter cap accounts for only eight of the 500 points New York can earn on its Race to the Top application.
What’s more, Race to the Top guidelines state that charter schools should “serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students.” But the evidence is clear that New York’s charter schools are actually becoming a separate and unequal branch of public education.
Mulgrew is the president of the United Federation of Teachers.
The Four “R’s” – A Charter School That Works
“Good audience skills are imperative,” Danielle Johnson reminds her restless 10th-graders as one, Raquel, nervously fiddles with her laptop before holding forth on her project portfolio at City Arts and Technology High School (known as CAT), a charter school of 365 students on a green knoll above the blue-collar southern reaches of Mission Street in San Francisco.
“I decided to use the story of my mom getting to this country as an immigrant,” Raquel says, moving into her personal-memoir segment, sniffing back tears as a blurry photo of her mother at age 18 appears on the screen. “I had never asked my mother about how she got here.”
CAT exemplifies President Obama’s push to seed innovative schools that demand much from all students, echoed by Sacramento’s $700 million reform plan that goes to Washington this week. How to bottle the magic of CAT teachers like Johnson – listening carefully to each teen, strengthening each voice with basic skills and motivating ideals – is the challenge facing would-be reformers.
One size does not fit all kids
President Obama and his aides, like their predecessors in the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, are attempting to force states to comply with rigid federal standards in order to qualify for so-called “Race to the Top” stimulus funds.
During a visit to Madison last November, President Obama outlined the $4.35 billion program in great detail and Gov. Jim Doyle quickly embraced its agenda. The Doyle administration is going after $254 million in Race to the Top money, and Wisconsin schools, which have suffered sharp cuts in promised state funding, could use it.
But the money comes with strings attached. To qualify for the money, states are pressuring school districts to agree to abide by the new standards. Last Monday, the Madison School Board voted 5-1 to do so.
In fairness, many of the requirements are good ones. But tailoring education policy to fit agendas set in Washington is a bad approach. And it is especially bad when school districts with traditions of excellence start trimming their sails and altering their approaches in order to satisfy the whims of distant bureaucrats.
The Problem with Grants Driving Strategy: In Race for U.S. School Grants Is a Fear of Winning
Crystal Yednak & Katie Fretland:
As Illinois jockeys for position as a leader in education reform with a $500 million application for Race to the Top money, the state’s inability to pay current bills makes educators skeptical of Illinois’s capacity to take on such new initiatives.
One major concern is that should Illinois succeed in the national competition for Race to the Top money, it might not have the ability to finance the long-term costs of any new programs once the federal money has been spent.
A $4.35 billion federal grant competition, Race to the Top, intends to reward states that promote innovations in education. While new money would seem to be a boon for Illinois schools, educators who have seen other programs ramp up only to be shut down are concerned about it happening again.
State Representative. Suzanne Bassi, a Republican from suburban Chicago who sits on the House appropriations committee for education, said she feared what would happen to any new Race to the Top programs in a few years.
“The federal funds run out, and we all of sudden can’t do anything about it,” Ms. Bassi said. “Then it falls on individual districts, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
Our Opinion: If only wishing could pay the education bills
Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state’s investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.
Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways — not all of them monetary — to improve public education, and therefore our state’s chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story “than in the state of Florida?”
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the “education wish list” of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
Closing the Talent Gap: A Business Perspective (January 2010) 3MB PDF.
Updates, via a Steven M. Birnholz email:
Press Release.
“Political, Business Leaders: Overhaul Education in Fla.” Lakeland Ledger
“Business groups propose major changes to education,” Daytona Beach News Journal.
Special Education Stimulus Spending
Last year’s stimulus legislation (American Recovery and Recovery Act of 2009, a/k/a “ARRA”) provides a one-time boost (to be spent for the 2009-10 and 2010-2011 school years) in federal funding for students with disabilities in elementary and secondary schools under IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), Part B.
According to the State of Wisconsin’s stimulus tracker web site, IDEA Special Education Grants to the states under ARRA totaled $11.3 billion (for context, “regular” IDEA Part B appropriations were $11.51 billion in 2009 and in 2010, according to the New America Foundation’s 2010 Education Appropriations Guide). Wisconsin has received ARRA IDEA Part B funding of $208.2 million, with $6.199 million to the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Walking the Walk on School Reform
The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.
The federation’s president, Randi Weingarten, set the contrast quite effectively with a speech last week in Washington, in which she offered a proposal to reform teacher evaluation. She not only echoed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call for evaluation systems that take student achievement into account but also expressed support for “a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers.”
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
Education initiative is not needed
Just what we need, more charter schools.
oth Gov. David Paterson and the state Legislature need to be shown the woodshed. The so-called Race to the Top federal education initiative that we’re being rushed into accepting by the governor would lift the cap on the number of charter schools in this state and in the process throw teachers under the bus for the failures of inner-city public education. It’s another chuckleheaded set of directives from Washington. The big Bush push, No Child Left Behind, left a lot of kids behind, and school districts and even states that became disenchanted with education policy that never matched funding for the mandates involved. Race to the Top is headed for the same dust heap, but not before we pay through the nose for it.
And once again New York is panting to go along with the feds because of extra stimulus money available, up $700 million possibly, maybe, if we’re one of the winners of the race. On the other hand and by way of perspective, we spend more than $20 billion a year in this state on public education. So essentially we’re giving up our right to set our own policy, as flawed as it is, for a short-term handout. How New York of us.
Market fixes for California’s schools
Ronald Reagan must be grinning in his grave.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento’s plan echoes Washington’s own reform strategy – built on President Obama’s surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools.
Oddly mimicking Reagan’s game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento’s agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance.
“This is about parental choice in public education,” said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan.
Five Strikes And You’re Out! Plus, Houston We Have A Problem…
A lot of back and forth in Rhode Island over Race To The Top. The teachers’ union there is not down with the Obama Administration’s requirements around teacher effectiveness. But they apparently also can’t live with the idea that after three years of an unacceptable evaluation a teacher would lose their license. The standard they want is, seriously, five years of poor evaluations. Given what we know about the effects of under-performing teachers – especially on low-income youngsters — this stance is literally pick jaw up off floor time…
Race to the Top’ – the view from Oakland
We applaud Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums for refusing to join the Race to the Top parade by not signing the letter by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (“Dellums ducks out of mayors coalition,” Chip Johnson, Jan. 5).
Dellums should not be whipsawed into the frenzy just to run after more federal and state dollars that will do little to address the major issues of educational equity that we need in Oakland.
I was asked for the Oakland Education Association’s opinion on the proposed letter and concurred with others that it would be a mistake to sign it. The lure of a minuscule amount of money is not justification for further decimating a compromised program in Oakland schools, especially when that money comes with serious strings attached.
Why US high school reform efforts aren’t working
Since it began in 2004, the Baltimore Talent Development High School has posted some impressive graduation rates and achievement scores, among other things.
Even more notable, efforts by educators at nearby Johns Hopkins University to replicate the school’s gains in dozens of other locations have also met with some success. Slowly, the network of Talent Development High Schools is helping student groups that often seem most at risk.
But good news at the high school level is unusual. Despite vigorous calls for change and a host of major reform efforts, encouraging results have been scarce. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores – considered the “Nation’s Report Card” – tend to be stagnant for high-schoolers, even when they rise for elementary school students.
Only about half of low-income and minority students in US high schools graduate, and many of those who do are unprepared for college. The isolated examples of success often fail when administrators or education reformers try to reproduce them on a large scale.
Consider community college, three-year plan to cut costs
For years, Kiplinger’s has been advising parents that one way to keep higher-education costs under control is to have their kids attend community college for a year or two and then switch to a four-year school. This year, they finally listened to us — with a vengeance.
Community colleges are packed to the gills, and students are flocking to state institutions across the board. The average annual sticker price for a four-year public school remains a tad over $15,000 — less than half the tab at a private institution. In our exclusive rankings of the 100 best values in public colleges, nearly 40 percent charge in-state students less than the average price, reports Senior Associate Editor Jane Bennett Clark.
There’s nothing like a financial crisis to get families to focus on how much they’re paying for big-ticket items such as college expenses. Surprisingly, they haven’t always done that. In 2008, a survey of parents and students by Sallie Mae found that when deciding whether to borrow for college, a whopping 70 percent said a student’s potential postgraduate income did not factor into the discussion.
What Randi Really Said and Meant
Last week, the nation’s press reported something that most teachers found unbelievable: Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that teachers should be evaluated by their students’ test scores.
Teachers hate this idea because they know that teachers are not solely responsible for their students’ scores. The students bear some responsibility, as do their families, for whether students do well or poorly on tests. District leaders bear some responsibility, depending on the resources they provide to schools. Teachers also are aware that the tests are not the only measure of what happens in their classrooms and that even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that we need better tests. There is a fairly sizable body of research demonstrating that test scores are affected by many factors beyond the teachers’ control.
I was surprised too when I read the headlines and the press accounts.
Davenport pulls support for Race to the Top funds
A requirement to negotiate plans to overhaul Iowa’s lowest-performing schools with teacher unions prompted the Davenport School District to abandon its support of state efforts to nab a portion of $4.3 billion in federal funds, its top leader said today.
Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent, said the Iowa Department of Education went beyond federal rules in its application for up to $175 million of federal Race to the Top dollars by requiring districts with state-identified low-performing schools to agree with teacher unions on plans to overhaul them.
Currently, school boards and administrators have the sole authority to make those decisions.
“What you are going to have is unions determining intervention models for schools,” Almanza said. “If you can’t reach an agreement (with the union), the district loses money for the school. There are no penalties for anyone else, and the kids lose.”
The Iowa Department of Education also excluded parents, students and the community from the decision-making process, which goes against the intent of U.S. Department of Education, Almanza said.
Vice-principal calls the bomb squad over an 11-year-old’s science project, recommends counselling for the student
A San Diego school vice-principal saw an 11-year-old’s home science project (a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics), decided it was a bomb, wet himself, put the school on lockdown, had the bomb-squad come out to destroy X-ray the student’s invention and search his parents’ home, and then magnanimously decided not to discipline the kid (though he did recommend that the child and his parents get counselling to help them overcome their anti-social science behavior).
When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.
A Gangland Bus Tour, With Lunch and a Waiver
Randal Archibold:
The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.
Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations” of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.
On the right, Los Angeles’s biggest jail, “the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.,” as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard’s command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours.
Finalists for Milwaukee Superintendent outline priorities, qualifications
Members of the public got their first chance Thursday to listen to and ask questions of the man likely to become the next superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, during back-to-back interviews Thursday at the district office.
The contenders – Robert Alfaro, Stacy Scott and Gregory Thornton – all hail from outside Milwaukee, all have served in a variety of administrative posts in large and smaller districts, and all say that MPS can significantly improve its quality of instruction.
No candidate revealed specific knowledge about Milwaukee’s issues, or specific thoughts on how to solve its challenges, and most of the discussion steered toward generalities: supporting good teachers, making room for the arts, encouraging communication with parents.
A community stakeholder group that included Mayor Tom Barrett interviewed the candidates in closed session Thursday afternoon, and the full School Board was scheduled to interview the candidates again in closed session Thursday night.
Before the end of the month, the School Board will take a final vote so that the new superintendent can be named by Feb. 1, Board President Michael Bonds said.
2010 Madison School Board Election Notes and Links
A number of folks have asked why, like 2009, there are two uncontested seats in this spring’s Madison School Board election. Incumbents Maya Cole and Beth Moss are running unopposed while the open seat, vacated by the retiring Johnny Winston, Jr. is now contested: Tom Farley (TJ Mertz and Robert Godfrey have posted on Farley’s travails, along with Isthmus) after some nomination signature issues and an internal fracas over the School District lawyer’s role in the race, faces James Howard [website].
I think we’ve seen a drop on the ongoing, very small amount of school board activism because:
- The current board is, in my view, doing a much better job overseeing the District than a few years ago.
- There are a number of issues that have been simmering for awhile, including TAG, Fine Arts, Math and Equity.
- Outbound growth of open enrollment from the Madison School District; some activist parents have opted out.
- Superintendent Dan Nerad’s very different PR approach from the past – though folks are now looking for substantive action, as exemplified by these recent public comments to the Board.
Finally, with respect to the Howard / Farley contest, I look forward to the race. I had the opportunity to get to know James Howard during the District’s 2009 strategic planning meetings. I support his candidacy.
Writing English as a Second Language
Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from.
I knew I would enjoy that, and I have–I’ve been doing it ever since. I’m the doctor that students get sent to see if they have a writing problem that their professor thinks I can fix. As a bonus, I’ve made many friends–from Uganda, Uzbekhistan, India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Iraq, Nigeria, Poland, China, Colombia and many other countries. Several young Asian women, when they went back home, sent me invitations to their weddings. I never made it to Bhutan or Korea, but I did see the wedding pictures. Such beautiful brides!
Best Value Colleges 2010
The Princeton Review’s 100 “Best Value Colleges” list for 2010 is based on data compiled and analyzed by The Princeton Review, the education services and test-prep company known for its annual college listings.
The analysis uses the most recently reported data from each institution for its 2009-10 academic year. The top 10 public and private “Best Values” are ranked; the rest are listed alphabetically.
FULL STORY: Can getting a degree be affordable?
The Princeton Review selected the schools based on surveys of administrators and students at more than 650 public and private college and university campuses.
US Education Chief Criticizes NBA and the NCAA
Education Secretary Arne Duncan entered some of the most contentious debates in college sports on Thursday when, in a speech at the N.C.A.A. convention, he called for stricter consequences for college teams that do not graduate their athletes and said the N.B.A.’s age-minimum policy sets up young athletes for failure.
“Why do we allow the N.C.A.A, why do we allow universities, why do we allow sports to be tainted when the vast majority of coaches and athletic directors are striving to instill the right values?” said Duncan, who was a co-captain of his Harvard basketball team and played in an Australian professional league from 1987 until 1991.
He said his time as a college athlete was one of the most valuable periods of his life, but feared the N.B.A.’s age rule, which requires that a player be at least 19 years old and at least one year removed from high school before entering the league, does a disservice to athletes.