WITH unemployment rising, house sales falling and retirement accounts shrivelling, college students are not at the top of most people’s worry lists. But they face a miserable set of financial circumstances. Tuition costs and other fees are soaring: up 439% since the early 1980s, says a recent report from the National Centre for Public Policy and Higher Education. Family incomes have not begun to keep pace. This year’s average bill from a private college is about $25,000, according to the College Board, a body that, as well as managing standardised tests such as the SAT, also studies financial aid for students. Public universities are far more affordable, with an average price tag of $6,500 for in-state tuition. But that is still a big chunk of the budget for a poor or middle-class family. And living expenses quickly run up the tab, even if a student makes do with a grotty apartment and lives on noodles.
The unsurprising result is that more students are borrowing to finance their education. According to the College Board, student debt has ballooned from $41 billion ten years ago (in 2007 dollars) to $87 billion today. Nearly two-thirds of those who graduate from a four-year programme, public or private, are in debt. Last year a borrower’s average burden, according to the Project on Student Debt, was slightly more than $20,000.
All posts by Jim Zellmer
How to Become a More Effective Learner
I’m always interested in finding new ways to learn better and faster. As a graduate student who is also a full-time science writer, the amount of time I have to spend learning new things is limited. It’s important to get the most educational value out of my time as possible. However, retention, recall and transfer are also critical. I need to be able to accurately remember the information I learn, recall it at a later time and utilize it effectively in a wide variety of situations.
1. Memory Improvement Basics
I’ve written before about some of the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips such as improving focus, avoiding cram sessions and structuring your study time are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.
Making Room for Miss Manners Is a Parenting Basic
For years, I took care of a very rude child. When he was 3, I called him rambunctious — and I talked to his mother about “setting limits.” At 4, I called him “demanding.” At 5, he was still screaming at his mother if she didn’t do what he wanted, he still swatted me whenever I tried to examine him, and his mother asked me worriedly if I thought he was ready for kindergarten.
I could go on (he didn’t have an easy time in school), but it would sound like a Victorian tale: The Rude Boy. I never used the word “rude” or even “manners” when I spoke to his mother. I don’t describe my patients as rude or polite in the medical record. But I do pass judgment, and so does every pediatrician I know.
It’s always popular — and easy — to bewail the deterioration of manners; there is an often quoted (and often disputed) story about Socrates’ complaining that the young Athenians have “bad manners, contempt for authority.” Sure, certain social rubrics have broken down or blurred, and sure, electronic communication seems to have given adults as well as children new ways to be rude. But the age-old parental job remains.
And that job is to start with a being who has no thought for the feelings of others, no code of behavior beyond its own needs and comforts — and, guided by love and duty, to do your best to transform that being into what your grandmother (or Socrates) might call a mensch. To use a term that has fallen out of favor, your assignment is to “civilize” the object of your affections.
Misguided Colleges Skewer Score Choice
I’m so old I took the SAT only once.
That was the way we did it back in the middle of the last century. My score had room for improvement. So did my friends’ scores. But we would have been stunned if any of us tried again. We were regarded as nerds already. Taking the SAT twice would have ended any chance of a girl ever talking to us.
Times, as you know, have changed. The hot topic this year is not whether to try the exam twice, but whether you should be able to hide the worst of the two or three tests it is assumed nearly everyone will take.
The right to obliterate the results of a bad testing day is called Score Choice by the College Board, owner of the SAT test. Some say it is a marketing device to respond to the SAT’s rival, the ACT, which has had such a policy for years. The first group eligible under the new rules will be members of the high school class of 2010 participating in this March’s test administration. If they don’t like their scores on that or any subsequent testing day, they may tell the College Board not to send them to any colleges.
Fairfax County School Board Leans Toward New Grading Scale
A groundswell of parents have urged the school system, which requires a 94 for an A and a 64 to pass, to adopt the more broadly used practice of giving an A for 90 or better and setting 60 as the passing score. They also have argued that Fairfax should add extra points to the grade-point averages of those who take honors courses or college-level classes. They maintain that the current policy puts students at a disadvantage when they apply to colleges and for scholarships.
On Jan. 2, Dale recommended changing how the school system calculates GPAs but not the grading scale.
In a work session yesterday, board members listed advantages of changing the scale and advantages of keeping it. The list of reasons offered for change was twice as long. For example, members said a change would align Fairfax with other school systems and lessen parents’ confusion. But an advantage to keeping the scale, some said, would be that students would work harder for better grades.
Some parents applauded yesterday’s development.
Union Seeks List of Targeted Teachers
The Washington Teachers’ Union says the District is improperly withholding the names of instructors who have been given 90 school days to improve their performance or face dismissal.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said the disclosure would be counterproductive, but the union said she is obligated by contract to share the information. The issue is likely to be discussed at today’s D.C. Council hearing on school personnel practices.
The 90-day plans are part of Rhee’s attempt to remove “a significant share” of the 4,000-member teacher corps, which she regards as “not up to the demanding task of educating our youth effectively,” according to the long-range action document she presented in October.
Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies
The Internet Safety Technical Task Force was created in February 2008 in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced in January 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace. The scope of the Task Force’s inquiry was to consider those technologies that industry and end users – including parents – can use to help keep minors safer on the Internet.
A few words for Obama on closing the ‘achievement gap’
As a candidate, President-elect Barack Obama promised to reduce the “pervasive achievement gap” that for decades has separated many white, middle-class students from their poor, often minority, peers. As president, he’ll have an opportunity to keep his promise. But what should he do first? Four big education thinkers offer their advice:
YOUR VOICE: How do you think Obama should close the minority ‘gap’?
Amy Wilkins, vice president of The Education Trust, a non-profit advocacy group for low-income and minority students:
The American education system consistently shortchanges the students with the greatest need on almost everything that matters when it comes to academic success. You need to discard the policies that cheat these students.
This is especially important when it comes to quality teaching. Nothing is more important to high achievement than strong teachers. But the very children who most need our best teachers are least likely to get them. Through personal leadership, the use of federal authority and strategic funding, the president can help change thi
Evidence that dumbing down is not inevitable
FOR a quarter of a century, surveys of reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federally-funded body, have been favourite material for anyone who thinks America is dumbing down. Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason“, for example, cites the 2007 NEA report that “the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004.”
So it is a surprise that this bellwether seems to have taken a turn for the better. This week the NEA reported that, for the first time since 1982 when its survey began, the number of adults who said they had read a novel, short story, poem or play in the past 12 months had gone up, rising from 47% of the population in 2002 to over 50% in 2008.*
The increase, modest as it is, has thrown educationalists into a tizzy. “It’s just a blip,” one professor told the New York Times. It is certainly a snapshot. But it is not statistically insignificant. As the NEA’s research director, Sunil Iyengar, points out, almost every demographic and ethnic group seems to be reading more.
On 4K in Madison
Abplanalp, who has been working on the 4-K project for the seven years since joining the district as lead elementary principal, said there isn’t a timetable in place as to when the program would start.
But she wouldn’t count out the 2009-10 school year if three main issues can be ironed out.
“Could we get things in place by the fall? We think we could if we got the go-ahead,” Abplanalp said Thursday afternoon. “If not, it’s because we have issues to work out contractually with MTI (the teacher’s union). … We also have to work out community site issues, negotiating (contract) issues and financial issues.”
Madison’s Leopold Elementary could add dual-language program in fall
Madison Metropolitan School District officials will unveil plans to offer a dual-language program at Leopold Elementary beginning next fall.
The new curriculum for the south side school would include education in English and Spanish, and discussion of the plan is anticipated at a Madison School Board meeting on Feb. 2.
Three sections of kindergarten classes with approximately 48 children will become part of the program, which will progress one grade level each school year until the program’s initial students finish fifth grade. The school will join east side’s Nuestro Mundo as the second public school in the Madison Metropolitan School District to offer a dual-language program. Nuestro Mundo, a charter school, has been in operation for five years.
Eight of Leopold’s 44 classrooms are bilingual, and the school is a perfect fit for the immersion program, according to Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp.
“We know the benefits of dual-immersion programming,” Abplanalp said. “This is a perfect place to begin such a program because we know could get the enrollment that we need to make it a viable program for the future.
“We want native speaking Spanish children as well as non-native Spanish children, and that’s the population that is at that building,” she said.
Trends in College Spending: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go?
The Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability [3MB PDF Report]
Our country’s system of higher education — long extolled as the best in the world — is showing serious fault lines that threaten capacity to meet future needs for an educated citizenry. There are many causes for concern, but chief among them is a system of finance that will be hard to sustain in the current economic environment.
To be sure, higher education has gone through hard times before. But looking at the economic and political horizon in January of 2009, only the rosiest of optimists can believe that what lies ahead is going to be similar to what we have seen before. The shock waves from the international upheaval in credit markets are just now beginning to be felt — in greater demand for student aid, tightening loan availability, dips in endowment assets and earnings, rising costs of debt payments, and deep state budget cuts. Families are going to find it harder to find the resources to pay for the almost-automatic increases in student tuitions that have been the fuel for higher education in the past decade. Even with increases in tuition, most institutions will still face deficits that require deep spending cuts.
Individual state data (Wisconsin).
Jack Stripling:
Most college students are carrying a greater share of the cost of their education, even as institutions spend less on teaching them, according to a report released today.
The report, published by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, gives a potentially troubling picture of spending and revenue trends in higher education. Spanning from 2002 to 2006, the report indicates that tuition hikes have resulted in little if any new spending on classroom instruction at public research universities.
“The public’s got it exactly right,” said Jane Wellman, head of the Delta Project. “They are jacking up tuition, and they’re not re-investing it in quality.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around, however, for this predicament. With state support waning for public colleges, rising tuition dollars are merely being used to make up for lost revenue — not for hiring more faculty or taking other steps that would arguably improve classroom instruction, the report asserts. On the other hand, the Delta Project suggests that colleges haven’t made the hard choices required for adapting to lower subsidies, as evidenced by relatively small changes in spending levels.
US House Stimulus, Splurge or Recovery Bill Text
458K PDF. The 258 page document references “education” 157 times. House Report.
Related:
Democrats Push for Stimulus Package to Include Education Spending
As Barack Obama’s roughly $800 billion stimulus package comes together on Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to include provisions for education, from college tuition tax credits to block grants for state and local education budgets.
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The Obama Factor in Israel’s Gaza War
As Congress firms up the package’s outlines, spurred on by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s deadline of Presidents Day, the bill seems likely to include a “handful” of measures for education, says New York Sen. Charles Schumer. Meanwhile, recent plans to provide more than $160 billion to state and local governments seem certain to use education as a primary venue for the funding.
Specific components will include infrastructural spending on building and renovating schools, Schumer says. Another likely provision in the bill will be expanding college tuition tax credits, a cause Schumer has been promoting.
“Every time the economy prevents one young man or young woman from going to college because they can’t afford it even though they deserve to get in, it hurts them, it hurts their families, and it hurts America,” he says. “We all know that while college is priced like a luxury, it has become a necessity.”
Teacher Union Contracts and High School Reform
Are teachers unions and collective bargaining agreements barriers to high school reform and redesign efforts in Washington, California, and Ohio? The short answer: sometimes, but not as often as many educators seem to think.
On one hand, collective bargaining agreements (CBAs)–long, complex, and unwieldy documents which can be difficult for an overworked principal to navigate–are often perceived as obstacles by many principals and other educators, and to a certain extent this perception becomes reality. And, while these perceptions can limit school-level flexibility and autonomy, there are also restrictive provisions within CBAs that do so as well.
On the other hand, CBAs tend to have waiver provisions. In many cases, districts and teachers unions can also negotiate side agreements on individual issues (e.g., memoranda of understanding, or MOUs) to provide desired flexibility. And, in perhaps our most significant finding, many of the CBA provisions that we analyzed were more flexible than educators and reform advocates often suggest.
Finally, many CBA provisions that we studied were simply ambiguous. This ambiguity could potentially allow for greater latitude for an aggressive principal who is looking for greater flexibility and willing to push the envelope, while serving to limit a more cautious or timid principal who looks to the CBA for explicit authority or permission first before acting.
Arts & the Economy Report
Mariel Wozniak, via email: The National Governor’s Association 4.5MB PDF Report:
Today, the National Governors Association (NGA) has released Arts & the Economy: Using Arts and Culture to Stimulate State Economic Development. This comprehensive report is a product of the long-standing partnership between the NEA and NGA, with extensive research support from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA). At this moment, the report is enjoying front page status on the NGA website at www.nga.org . It’s not often that governors receive information from the NGA that gives such high priority to the arts as a policy solution to the issues they are facing. Arts & the Economy arrives on the desks of governors at what is obviously a critical decision-making period for all states. We’re confident you will find it is a valuable resource to share with your governor, legislators, constituents and advocates as you move through the budget process for FY 10.
This page discusses the importance of the arts and culture to states, and lists all the arts reports and issue briefs the NGA has produced with the NEA, with NASAA’s assistance.
Here is a quotation I placed in one of the meeting rooms in the Ruth Bachhuber-Doyle Adm. Building during my tenure at MMSD. It ought to be in every school:
“Our greatest scientists are generally skilled in non-verbal thinking yet we usually discourage science students from studying artistic subjects. Unless we reverse this trend, they will continue to be cut off from thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs.”
Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, Professor of Physiology at Michigan State University, formerly scientist with the Salk Institute.
Should Students Be Paid for Good Grades?
According to a study released today by the social-policy research group MDRC, a nonpartisan organization perhaps best known for evaluating state welfare-to-work programs, cash incentives combined with counseling offered “real hope” to low-income and nontraditional students at two Louisiana community colleges. The program for low-income parents, funded by the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, was simple: enroll in college at least half-time, maintain at least a C average and earn $1,000 a semester for up to two terms. Participants, who were randomly selected, were 30% more likely to register for a second semester than were students who were not offered the supplemental financial aid. And the participants who were first offered cash incentives in spring 2004 — and thus whose progress was tracked for longer than that of subsequent groups before Hurricane Katrina abruptly forced researchers to suspend the survey for several months in August 2005 — were also more likely than their peers to be enrolled in college a year after they had finished the two-term program. (Read “Putting College Tuition on Plastic.”)
Students offered cash incentives in the Louisiana program didn’t just enroll in more classes; they earned more credits and were more likely to attain a C average than were nonparticipants. And they showed psychological benefits too, reporting more positive feelings about themselves and their abilities to accomplish their goals for the future. “It’s not very often that you see effects of this magnitude for anything that we test,” notes Thomas Brock, MDRC’s director for young adults and postsecondary-education policy.
Melinda Gates’ Mission to Improve Education
MICHELLE MAJOR and TERI WHITCRAFT:
But Melinda Gates is especially passionate about improving education here in the United States. The foundation has invested nearly $4 billion in education, with $2 billion going to high schools. It has helped 2,602 struggling schools create new models of teaching and learning to improve performance and graduation rates.
One of those schools is the Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy. The school is filled with academic superstars, but it wasn’t always that way.
BETA was once part of the failing John F. Kennedy School, which in 2002 had 5,000 students. That big school was divided into five smaller schools with more intense curriculums.
The kids at BETA have made a big turnaround since then. Principal Rashid Davis said 78 percent of the students came into the school performing below grade level, but the school’s graduation rate for the class of 2008 is 90 percent. Ninety percent of the students are also going on to college.
“The great thing is that as you see in a school like BETA, these kids can do the work, and it doesn’t matter what Zip code they’re from,” Gates said. “You put kids in a school with a great curriculum, they’ll rise up and they’ll do it. They like to be challenged. And I see it over and over again in schools across the U.S.”
Putting More School in Bremerton Preschools
Kneeling on a furry white rug at Friends Childcare and Preschool in Bremerton, 3-year-old Damari Bowers leans forward as teacher Wanda Selg-Gonzales reads from a book of rhymes.
“Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,” she reads, pausing to look at her students. “What rhymes with John?”
“Lawn! Fawn!” Damari shouts, throwing his hands up in the air.
“That’s right,” answers Selg-Gonzales, who since 1999 has operated the child care from her home on Cogean Avenue.
Selg-Gonzales runs an independent child care, but her tight connection to the Bremerton School District for the past four years means she receives training and classroom materials from the district.
As a result, her child-care kids are already familiar with the district reading curriculum, called Open Court, and other important academic skills before they hit kindergarten classrooms.
Advanced Math Courses at UW-Madison for High School Students
Tonghai Yang, via email:
Math 234 (Calculus III, after Calculus BC) this Fall on MWF 7:45-8:35am to accomodate advanced High School Students in Madison area so that they can take this course without missing too many their regular school work.
We did it last semester for the first time and had excellent reception from high school students attended (about 20). Another 20 were regular college students. I am teaching this course next Fall.
We will also offer
Math 340 (Linear Algebra) during Spring 2010 onMWF 7:45-8:35am for the same reason. Dr. Meyer will teach this course.
Madison’s Cherokee PTO/Math Meeting Cancelled Tonight
Weather conditions have caused this evening’s Cherokee Middle School PTO/Math Meeting to be cancelled. The event will be rescheduled soon, hopefully in February.
Much more on the Madison School District’s Math Task Force Report here.
Afghan Schoolgirls Undeterred by Attack
One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside Shamsia on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.
“Are you going to school?”
Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.
But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.
Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well — about 1,300 in all.
“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”
Governor Doyle’s Federal Stimulus List for the State of Wisconsin
Sun Prairie School Board Approves 4-Year-Old Kindergarten Plan
The Sun Prairie School Board on Monday night approved moving forward with plans to offer 4-year-old kindergarten in the school district.
Sun Prairie Assistant Superintendent Alice Murphy said the board approved the plan with a 6-1 vote.
More than 200 schools across the state offer a 4K program. Sun Prairie school district officials said that the classes could be taught in day care centers.
“That would be the ideal setting that 4-year-old comes to the day care in the morning, is dropped off, and then at 8:30 a.m. or 9 in the morning the certified teacher moves in and presents the 4K instructional program for two and a half hours,” Murphy said.
Records show Waunakee School District didn’t slow drinking party investigation
In the weeks following an underage drinking party near Waunakee in September 2007, rumors swirled about why the School District didn’t move more quickly to discipline football players who were involved.
Though the insinuation in some circles was school officials were dragging their feet to keep Waunakee at full strength in the playoffs, recently released documents show the district investigation was delayed at the insistence of a Dane County sheriff’s detective investigating criminal activity at the party.
State law allows law enforcement agencies to release reports that could help school officials discipline students, but individual police departments set their own policies and not everyone agrees on the best policy.
If a police agency is stingy with how it chooses to share information, it can delay the school’s ability to mete out swift punishment intended to deter underage drinking in the first place.
In the case of the Waunakee football players, the district got mixed messages from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office.
Middleton-Cross Plains students embrace creative problem soloving
Each year, students from the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District head over to the Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to spend a day stretching their mind.
The activity emphasizes creativity, teamwork and problem solving skills.
Fourth- and seventh-grade students from the district participate on two different days. The event is run by staff members who work with gifted and talented programs in the district– Ruth Frawley, Kelle Anderson, Jacki Greene, Cheryl Saltzman and Amy Weber.
The creative problem solving day is designed to “give them an opportunity to get away from their normal environment and work with a small team,” said Anderson, gifted and talented research teacher in Cross Plains.
“It tests your mind skills,” said Derek Rogeberg, a seventh-grader from Glacier Creek Middle School.
For the recent event, 120 fourth-graders and 120 seventh-graders came from Elm Lawn, Northside, Park, Sauk Trail, Sunset Ridge and West Middleton elementary schools and Glacier Creek and Kromrey middle schools.
California must preserve its higher-ed mission
Thanks to California’s chronic budget shortages, there isn’t any room for Californians in state prisons, on state highways or within the state’s medical insurance programs. So why shouldn’t there be less room for Californians within the state’s most prestigious university system?
Recently, some UC officials suggested that increasing the number of out-of-state and international students could help close deficits within the university system. (In a meeting with The Chronicle editorial board on Friday, UC President Mark Yudof said there are 11,000 undergraduates for whom the UC system gets no state money, putting it $125 million in the hole.)
There is a sound economic reasoning behind this strategy: Students from other states and countries annually pay many thousands of dollars more than in-state students.
They are also often better students because they are generally held to higher admissions standards. And there’s plenty of room, and precedent, for the UC system to adopt this strategy. Only about 6 percent of UC undergraduates are non-Californians. Prestigious state universities in Michigan and Virginia, meanwhile, regularly enroll more than 30 percent of their freshman classes from out-of-state students. To quote Yudof, the UC system is “leaving money on the table.” (Yudof also said that while he is “leaving all options on the table” as far as increasing revenues, “there is no plan” to increase out-of-state enrollment, and that he “couldn’t imagine a worse time to do it.”)
The Madison School District’s 2009 Strategic Planning Team
Members include:
Abplanalp, Sue, Assistant Superintendent, Elementary Schools
Alexander, Jennifer, President, Chamber of Commerce
Atkinson, Deedra, Senior Vice-President, Community Impact, United Way of Dane County
Banuelos, Maria,Associate Vice President for Learner Success, Diversity, and Community Relations, Madison Area Technical College
Bidar-Sielaff, Shiva, Manager of Cross-Cultural Care, UW Hospital
Brooke, Jessica, Student
Burke, Darcy, Elvehjem PTO President
Burkholder, John, Principal, Leopold Elementary
Calvert, Matt, UW Extension, 4-H Youth Development
Campbell, Caleb, Student
Carranza, Sal, Academic and Student Services, University of Wisconsin
Chandler, Rick, Chandler Consulting
Chin, Cynthia, Teacher, East
Ciesliewicz, Dave, Mayor, City of Madison
Clear, Mark, Alderperson
Cooper, Wendy, First Unitarian Society
Crim, Dawn, Special Assistant, Academic Staff, Chancellor’s Office, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dahmen, Bruce, Principal, Memorial High School
Davis, Andreal, Cultural Relevance Instructional Resource Teacher, Teaching & Learning
Deloya, Jeannette, Social Work Program Support Teacher
Frost, Laurie, Parent
Gamoran, Adam Interim Dean; University of Wisconsin School of Education
Gevelber, Susan, Teacher, LaFollette
Goldberg, Steve, Cuna Mutual
Harper, John, Coordinator for Technical Assistance/Professional Development, Educational Services
Her, Peng,
Hobart, Susie, Teacher, Lake View Elementary
Howard, James, Parent
Hughes, Ed, Member, Board of Education
Jokela, Jill, Parent
Jones, Richard, Pastor, Mt. Zion Baptist Church
Juchems, Brian, Program Director, Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools
Katz, Ann, Arts Wisconsin
Katz, Barb, Madison Partners
Kester, Virginia, Teacher, West High School
Koencke, Julie, Information Coordinator MMSD
Laguna, Graciela, Parent
Miller, Annette, Community Representative, Madison Gas & Electric
Morrison, Steve, Madison Jewish Community Council
Nadler, Bob, Executive Director, Human Resources
Nash, Pam, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools
Natera, Emilio, Student
Nerad, Dan, Superintendent of Schools
Passman, Marj, Member, Board of Education
Schultz, Sally, Principal, Shabazz City High School
Seno, Karen,Principal, Cherokee Middle School
Sentmanat, Jose, Executive Assistant to the County Executive
Severson, Don, Active Citizens for Education (ACE)
Steinhoff, Becky, Executive Director, Goodman Community Center
Strong, Wayne, Madison Police Department
Swedeen, Beth, Outreach Specialist, Waisman Center
Tennant, Brian, Parent
Terra Nova, Paul, Lussier Community Education Center
Theo, Mike, Parent
Tompkins, Justin, Student
Trevino, Andres, Parent
Trone, Carole, President, WCATY
Vang, Doua, Clinical Team Manager, Southeast Asian Program / Kajsiab House, Mental Health Center of Dane County
Vieth, Karen, Teacher, Sennett
Vukelich-Austin, Martha, Executive Director, Foundation for Madison Public Schools
Wachtel, Lisa, Executive Director of Teaching and Learning
Zellmer, Jim, Parent
Much more here.
The Strategic Planning Process Schedule [PDF]
A “Stimulus” for Schools
n the past few months, the federal government has engineered massive bailouts of distressed economic institutions from Wall Street to the Big Three automakers.
But for the upcoming stimulus package, politicians want to shore up local governments — from counties beset by Medicaid costs to local school districts forced to deal with cuts to state funding.
“There’s a very strong likelihood that (school aid) will be included in the package,” U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday as he unveiled a plan — being pushed by several governors as well as members of Congress — to allocate stimulus money to local school systems.
If approved as part of President-elect Barack Obama’s $750 billion package, New York could get an extra $6.4 billion in local school aid over the next two years.
“It’s going to put less stress on the local school districts,” said Gov. David Paterson, who joined Schumer for a news conference at the state Capitol.
It marked the second time in two weeks that Schumer said he wants stimulus funds to pay for ongoing local government functions.
“Fewer Teachers, More Automation”
We constantly think that we need more teachers. That may not be the case. In fact we may need fewer, better teachers in combination with better automation (particularly in college). Some points:
- The delta of experience between attending a lecture and watching a video of a lecture? Nada. If anything, the video is better since you can rewind it, view it at the best vantage point (vs. at the back of a big lecture hall), and view it in a quiet relaxed space.
- Video lectures (as most colleges are doing now) make it possible to get the best. A dozen of the best lecture series could serve to replace 99% of lectures now being given by less gifted teachers.
- Interactive education, like what MIT is providing now, is highly computerized. Almost all of it could be done online.
- The interactive process of learning/application via collaboration is something that is perfectly suited for virtual worlds. JIT information in combination with simulated real world application within a collaborative environment is something that is going on with WoW right now (on a massive scale).
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.
The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.
“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.
Certainly worth exploring as part of Madison’s strategic plan. School Board member Ed Hughes has mentioned virtual learning and collaboration a number of times.
Coming to Attention: Basketball at St. Johns Military Academy
They are young, but they’re not children.
They’re from all over North America, but right now they’d just like to challenge for basketball championships at a boarding school in Delafield.
They’ve found a place that has given them a chance to make something out of their dreams.
That’s why kids like Carlos Toussaint and Kevin Mays and Devin Johnson and Isaiah Gray are attending St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy.
And their approach to school and basketball is why the Lancers are off to a 6-0 start this season, with nothing but bright skies in the forecast.
“The scary thing is that we start three sophomores and a freshman,” St. John’s Northwestern coach Brian Richert said. “The sky is the limit as to what these guys might be able to achieve down the road.”
But to one, Toussaint, it’s all about this year. He’s the Lancers’ only senior starter, and his statistics match his impressive basketball pedigree.
Toussaint’s father, Jorge, is the president of Federacion Mexicana de Basquetbol, the Mexican Basketball Federation. That’s the organization that organizes national teams at various age levels, up to and including the Olympics, and hires coaches who then select the various squads.
School Leaving Age: Extending compulsory education is no panacea for idle youth
WORKLESS children were “idling in the streets” and “tumbling about in the gutters”, wrote one observer in 1861 of the supposedly baleful effects of a reduction in the use of child labour. Such concerns eventually led to schooling being made mandatory for under-tens in 1880. The minimum school-leaving age has been raised five times since then and now stands at 16; but panic about feral youths menacing upright citizens and misspending the best years of their lives has not gone away.
Today’s equivalent of the Victorian street urchin is the “NEET”–a youth “not in education, employment or training”. And the same remedy is being prescribed: by 2013 all teenagers will have to continue in education or training until age 17, and by 2015 until 18. Now there are political rumours that the education-leaving age could be raised sooner, perhaps as early as this autumn. Bringing the measure forward is said to be among the proposals being prepared for the “jobs summit” Gordon Brown has grandly announced.
During downturns young people tend to have more difficulty finding, and staying in, work than older ones. So a policy that would keep them off the jobless register has obvious appeal for the government. Youngsters who have studied for longer may, moreover, be better placed for an eventual upturn, whenever that might be. And, unlike other measures on Mr Brown’s wish-list, this one is achievable by ministerial edict.
Florida’s Governor Explains His Charter School Choice
Your editorial “A Charter Setback in Florida” (Jan. 7) might lead some people to infer that my administration is not a champion of school choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as a state senator I co-sponsored the original 1996 legislation that created charter schools in Florida. Florida now ranks third nationally in the number of charter schools and fourth in the number of charter-school students, and I am committed to championing school choice in Florida.
Charter schools are not only critical to a successful public education system, but they also represent the ingenuity of communities throughout the Sunshine State.
Florida has made great strides when it comes to education, as evidenced by the “2009 Quality Counts: Portrait of a Population” report released this week. Issued annually by “Education Week,” the report tracks state policies and performance across key areas of education. Florida’s education ranking jumped from 14th to 10th in the nation, and its overall grade improved from a C+ to a B-. Among our many achievements, we are also closing the achievement gap between minority students and white students — and have even eliminated it when you consider the number of Florida’s Hispanic students passing Advanced Placement exams in 2007. Students in the Sunshine State excel in AP course participation and performance, with more than one-fifth of 2007 graduates passing an AP exam.
Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap
It is not acceptable for minority students to be four grade levels behind.
Dear President-elect Barack Obama,
In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.
That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation’s capital — home to one of the worst public-school systems in America — only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today’s global economy?
This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. As you observed when naming Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education, “We have talked our education problems to death in Washington.” Genuine school reform, you stated during the campaign, “will require leaders in Washington who are willing to learn from students and teachers . . . about what actually works.”
We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to “what works” to dramatically boost academic achievement — rather than clinging to reforms that we “wish would work.”
Educators Resist Even Good Ideas From Outsiders
With two massive parental revolts nearing victory in Fairfax County, and mothers and fathers elsewhere in the area plotting similar insurgencies, it is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know: As much as they deny it, they really don’t like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.
I don’t like that either. Do you? We know what we are doing. Most other folks don’t. We are polite to outsiders, but only to mollify them so we can hang up and get back to work.
The problem is that schools, unlike most institutions, are handling parents’ most precious possessions, their children. That aggravates the emotional side of the discussion. It makes it more likely that smart educators are going to write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.
I was a school parent for 30 years. The last kid graduated from college in 2007, but a grandchild has just appeared. That sound you hear is California teachers muttering at the thought of me at their door, brimming with helpful suggestions. I know how this works. The school people smile and nod, but nothing happens. Sure, some parent ideas are daft. But important queries are also shrugged off.
A Look at California Teacher Salaries
The average teacher salary last year was $65,808, an increase of 3.4 percent from 2007, according to new state figures. Teacher pay varies widely by district. And some districts have seen average salaries drop as they replace a large number of experienced teachers with new recruits.
Notes: Average salaries are often a reflection of three things: An area’s cost of living; how much the district is willing to pay and the number of experienced teachers the district employs. So if your district is low on this list but you see it has a high maximum salary, it probably means that it’s got a lot of teachers fresh out of college.
About 5 percent of the state’s districts didn’t submit data in 2008; for most of these, The Bee used 2007 salary data. Please note the year of the data as listed in your results. Districts with no data for 2007 or 2008 were excluded from this database. Salary changes were calculated using inflation-adjusted 2004 average annual salary figures.
On a Milwaukee School Board Member’s Trip
To anyone who would dismiss School Board member Charlene Hardin’s junket to Philadelphia as an insignificant amount of money, Karen Ruehl would suggest a visit to her school.
Ruehl, a 33-year veteran of Milwaukee Public Schools, is the librarian at the Milwaukee High School of the Arts.
Her library is in desperate need of help. She has repeatedly asked her boss at the city arts school to drop a few dollars to allow her to make improvements to it for the benefit of the students.
But nearly all of her proposals have been rejected, she has been told, because there was no money.
Ruehl is now having trouble squaring her experience with the news that her school blew thousands of dollars to send Hardin and a secretary to a national conference in Philadelphia last summer – a series of meetings that the pair ultimately skipped. Hardin, who was bumped off the spring ballot last week, is now under investigation by her colleagues on the board.
“I saw that money, and I thought, ‘That should have been for me,’ ” Ruehl said Friday from the school library.
A portion of the funds used to pay for Hardin’s excursion could have gone to buy, for instance, arts-related magazines. Earlier this school year, Ruehl asked for but didn’t get $600 worth of such periodicals.
A Charter Setback in Florida
As Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan has found innovative ways to skirt the restrictive cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Illinois, thus expanding opportunities for low-income kids. So it’s instructive to contrast Mr. Duncan’s can-do attitude with that of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose inaction last week handed a victory to opponents of school choice.
On December 2 a Florida District Court struck down a law that created the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, an alternative authorizer of charter schools formed in 2006 under Governor Crist’s predecessor, Jeb Bush. The state had 30 days to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court but let the deadline pass last week.
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The upshot is that only local school boards will be able to authorize charter schools, creating a fox-in-the-hen-house situation in which the same institutions that most oppose school choice will be in a position to block its expansion. Charter schools compete with district schools for students and teachers. And the teachers unions that control the traditional public school system fear that more charters mean smaller school districts and fewer dues-paying union jobs.
Locally, the Studio School charter initiative was killed by a slight Madison School Board majority.
Marketing Milwaukee High Schools
Anything can happen in high school in Milwaukee.
It could be a day of boat building at the Inland Seas High School of Expeditionary Learning.
Or establishing connections to some of the nation’s historically black colleges at schools in the Outlook University Independent School Network.
Or writing tunes at the Milwaukee High School of the Arts.
In Milwaukee, students have a choice – and many of them, along with their parents, spent Saturday checking out options at the Great Schools Milwaukee High School Fair at the Shops of Grand Avenue.
More than 1,000 students and their families were expected to attend the event that showcased 53 schools.
The goal of the fair that resembles an exhibition of colleges or potential employers is to give Milwaukee families one place to gather information about local public and private schools, said Jodi Goldberg, director of Great Schools Milwaukee, a local affiliate of the San Francisco-based organization that focuses on parental involvement in school choice.
“We still want them to visit the schools, because it’s not enough to just have a packet of information to make a decision,” Goldberg said. “But here, parents can see what’s available for their child.”
Madison Math Task Force Public Session Wednesday Evening 1/14/2009
The public is invited to attend the Cherokee Middle School PTO’s meeting this Wednesday, January 14, 2009. The Madison School District will present it’s recent Math Task Force findings at 7:00p.m. in the Library.
Cherokee Middle School
4301 Cherokee Dr
Madison, WI 53711
(608) 204-1240
Notes, audio and links from a recent meeting can be found here.
A few notes from Wednesday evening’s meeting:
- A participant asked why the report focused on Middle Schools. The impetus behind the effort was the ongoing controversy over the Madison School District’s use of Connected Math.
- Madison’s math coordinator, Brian Sniff, mentioned that the District sought a “neutral group, people not very vocal one end or the other”. Terry Millar, while not officially part of the task force, has been very involved in the District’s use of reform math programs (Connected Math) for a number of years and was present at the meeting. The 2003, $200,000 SCALE (System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators” (Award # EHR-0227016 (Clusty Search), CFDA # 47.076 (Clusty Search)), from the National Science Foundation) agreement between the UW School of Education (Wisconsin Center for Education Research) names Terry as the principal investigator [340K PDF]. The SCALE project has continued each year, since 2003. Interestingly, the 2008 SCALE agreement ([315K PDF] page 6) references the controversial “standards based report cards” as a deliverable by June, 2008, small learning communities (page 3) and “Science Standards Based Differentiated Assessments for Connected Math” (page 6). The document also references a budget increase to $812,336. (additional SCALE agreements, subsequent to 2003: two, three, four)
- Task force member Dr. Mitchell Nathan is Director of AWAKEN [1.1MB PDF]:
Agreement for Releasing Data and Conducting Research for
AWAKEN Project in Madison Metropolitan School District
The Aligning Educational Experiences with Ways of Knowing Engineering (AWAKEN) Project (NSF giant #EEC-0648267 (Clusty search)) aims to contribute to the long-term goal of fostering a larger, more diverse and more able pool of engineers in the United States. We propose to do so by looking at engineering education as a system or continuous developmental experience from secondary education through professional practice….
In collaboration with the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), AWAKEN researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER) will study and report on science, mathematics, and Career and Technical Education (specifically Project Lead The Way) curricula in the district. - Task force member David Griffeath, a UW-Madison math professor provided $6,000 worth of consulting services to the District.
- Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater is now working in the UW-Madison School of Education. He appointed (and the board approved) the members of the Math Task Force.
Madison School Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak recently said that the “conversation about math is far from over”. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I am particularly interested in what the ties between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District mean for the upcoming “Strategic Planning Process” [49K PDF]. The presence of the term “standards based report cards” and “small learning communities” within one of the SCALE agreements makes me wonder who is actually driving the District. In other words, are the grants driving decision making?
Finally, it is worth reviewing the audio, notes and links from the 2005 Math Forum, including UW-Madison math professor emeritus Dick Askey’s look at the School District’s data.
Related: The Politics of K-12 Math and Academic Rigor.
Madison School Board Discusses its Open Enrollment Policy
One of the items on Monday evening’s (12 January, 2009) agenda includes the District’s Open Enrollment Policy [344K PDF]. Pages 5 to 7 discuss policies covering those transfering out of the Madison school district. The proposed policy change (page 6) appears to eliminate the rejection of requests based on race, an issue that was addressed in recent legal actions. Virtual schools have been another controversial aspect of open enrollment.
Like a Virgin: The Press Take On Teenage Sex
The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don’t. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.
Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.
“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” screams CBS News. “Virginity pledges don’t mean much,” adds CNN. “Study questions virginity pledges,” says the Chicago Tribune. “Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds,” heralds the Washington Post. “Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data,” reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.
In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: “Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study.”
Here’s the rub: It just isn’t true.
In fact, the only way the study’s author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers,” and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.
The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that “virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general — a fact that many media reports have missed cold.”
School Tries to Beat Drop Out Odds
High schools are supposed to produce graduates. But some schools are dubbed drop out factories. At Chicago’s Robeson High, on the city’s South Side, the graduation rate is just 39 percent. It is a place where more students quit than graduate. Almost all of the 1,300 kids here fail to meet state standards. But everyday, there are administrators, teachers and students who come to school hoping to make a difference. We’re spending time at Robeson High because we want to understand the complex issues that go into a student’s decision to quit. And we want to know why other students in the same place hang in there and graduate against the odds.
“This school is not for the faint of heart.”–Principal Morrow.
Related: Meet the students and teachers from 50/50: The Odds of Graduating.
A week before school starts, Robeson staff gathers in the media center to go over what to expect.
Dane County schools tighten security measures
The Verona School District is planning to become the first in Dane County to lock all doors at some schools and require visitors to appear on camera to receive permission to enter, and the first to require that high school students display identification badges at all times. Many students support the moves, even as others question whether they’re really needed in the community that calls itself “Hometown, USA.”
In Middleton, educators are deep into discussions that could lead to asking taxpayers for $3.5 million for cameras, other equipment and remodeling projects to tighten security at their 10 schools. Madison school officials have begun a major review of security measures that by spring could lead to proposals to control the public’s access to that district’s 48 schools.
These are signs that despite tight budgets, Wisconsin educators are pushing ahead in their efforts to keep schools safe — efforts that took on added urgency with the 2006 slaying of Weston High School principal John Klang by a student, and other tragedies across the nation.
Related: Gangs & School Violence forum and police calls near Madison high schools: 1996-2006.
New Data on AP’s Impact
On one wall of my cubicle is a large chart extracted from Tom Luce and Lee Thompson’s 2005 book “Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America’s Public Schools.” It shows that a study of 78,000 Texas students found college graduation rates much higher for those who, while in high school, took Advanced Placement exams — but failed them — than those who took no AP exams at all.
At this point, you may be saying, “Huh?” We AP wonks are an odd breed. We often cite statistics that make no sense to normal people. But I will try to explain this one, and why it was greeted with such excitement by AP teachers four years ago.
AP courses are given in nearly 40 subjects. They allow high school students to earn college credit, or at least skip college introductory courses, if they do well on the final exams. Many AP teachers argue that students’ grades on the three-hour exams, given in most U.S. high schools every May, are not as important as taking the college-level course and exam and getting a taste of college trauma. Many of their students who flunk the AP exam still report, when they come back to visit after their freshman year of college, that the AP experience made it easier for them to adjust to fat college reading lists and long, analytical college exams. They may have failed the AP exam, but by taking it, and the course, they were better prepared for the load of stuff dumped on them in college. When they took the college introductory course in the subject that had been so difficult for them in high school AP, they did much better.
The Texas study showing that failed AP students were more likely to graduate from college than non-AP students was thus greeted as proof that the AP teachers’ view on this issue was correct. But the researchers who had done the work cautioned against putting too much weight on it. There were too many variables to reach hard conclusions.
Linda Hargrove, Donn Godin & Barbara Dodd 660K PDF Report.
More from Matthews:
On pages 35 and 36 of their report, the Texas researchers revealed what was for me the most interesting of their many new disclosures. They show that even students who only get a 2 on their AP exams after taking the AP course have significantly better college outcomes than non-AP students. Students who get 1s on the exam do not do better than non-AP students, but as I have often heard AP teachers say, they have no chance to build those students up to a 2 or a 3 unless they are allowed in their courses.
These are complicated issues. This study is not the last word. Critics of AP may say that these researchers’ work is tainted by the fact that the College Board, which owns the AP program, paid them for their study. But there is no question they are reputable, independent scholars, and their data is there for all to see.
Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offerings: 2008/2009.
In Minnesota, Charter Schools for Immigrants
Fartun Warsame, a Somali immigrant, thought she was being a good mother when she transferred her five boys to a top elementary school in an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Besides its academic advantages, the school was close to her job as an ultrasound technician, so if the teachers called, she could get there right away.
“Immediately they changed,” Ms. Warsame said of her sons. “They wanted to wear shorts. They’d say, ‘Buy me this.’ I said, ‘Where did you guys get this idea you can control me?’ ”
Her sons informed her that this was the way things were in America. But not in this Somali mother’s house. She soon moved them back to the city, to the International Elementary School, a charter school of about 560 pupils in downtown Minneapolis founded by leaders of the city’s large East African community. The extra commuting time was worth the return to the old order: five well-behaved sons, and one all-powerful mother.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, were conceived as a way to improve academic performance. But for immigrant families, they have also become havens where their children are shielded from the American youth culture that pervades large district schools.
The curriculum at the Twin Cities International Elementary School, and at its partner middle school and high school, is similar to that of other public schools with high academic goals. But at Twin Cities International the girls say they can freely wear head scarves without being teased, the lunchroom serves food that meets the dietary requirements of Muslims, and in every classroom there are East African teaching assistants who understand the needs of students who may have spent years in refugee camps. Twin Cities International students are from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, with a small population from the Middle East.
The diversity of Minneapolis charter schools is one reason my niece and her family remain in the city, rather than retreating to the burbs.
Concert will have personal meaning for Memorial junior
When the Memorial High School A Cappella Choir sings Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” Saturday night, it will have special meaning for Samantha Harper, her family and a relative who can only be there in spirit.
“You Raise Me Up” was the favorite song of Samantha’s aunt Joanne Papanek, who died in May of a brain tumor at age 52. The piece is just one part of a variety concert designed to honor Papanek and to raise money for brain cancer research.
The concert was inspired and coordinated by her 16-year-old niece.
After her aunt died, and with her father’s help, Samantha created the nonprofit Project A.J. Inc. (for “Auntie Joanne”).
“Our whole family was grieving,” says Samantha, a junior at Memorial who will sing tonight with the choir. “Midway through summer, I realized that I needed to do something with all my sadness. I was thinking about how we could help other people and stop other families from going through this.”
Wisconsin Task Force on Arts & Creativity
In March of 2008, Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton and State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster formed the Wisconsin Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education and they began their work to assert the central role of the arts and creativity in education in this 21st century global economy. (You can watch a short video on the Task Force’s launch here.) The Co-Chairs and Task Force members alike understand creativity to be the bedrock of the arts, the renewable resource that will be the sustainable energy of this economy. As international expert Charles Landry says, “Creativity is one of the last remaining legal ways to gain an unfair advantage over the competition.
Through this web site you will learn about the Task Force and its workgroups. You can listen to the testimony from the Public Forums and experience the resources that influenced the Task Force’s work.
Bush Praises Results of No Child Left Behind Law
Before he was a war president, George W. Bush fashioned himself as an education president. He campaigned as a school reformer and held his first policy speech at a Washington elementary school, where he began laying the groundwork for the controversial No Child Left Behind education law.
Nearly eight years later, Bush devoted his final public policy address to the same topic, traveling to an elementary school in Philadelphia yesterday to claim success in education reform and to warn President-elect Barack Obama against major changes to the landmark federal testing program.
Bush argued that No Child Left Behind has “forever changed America’s school systems” for the better, forcing accountability on failing public schools and leading to measurable improvements among poor and minority students.
“I firmly believe that, thanks to this law, students are learning, an achievement gap is closing,” Bush told the audience at General Philip Kearny School.
He also suggested that Obama, who has vowed to overhaul the program, should tread carefully before following through on promises of reform. “There is a growing consensus across the country that now is not the time to water down standards or to roll back accountability,” Bush said.
Why Obama’s Stimulus May Retard Education Reform and What to Do About It
Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn Jr., & Frederick M. Hess
:
As President-Elect Barack Obama and his Congressional allies shape — and debate — their big economic-stimulus package any day now, governors are pleading with them to include hundreds of billions for state governments that face whopping deficits. Most analysts of the stimulus measure will ask whether such spending will truly goose the economy, whether Obama kept his campaign promises, or how much of the bill is just pork. But those who worry about k-12 education should be asking: will it be good for education reform? And to date there’s ample reason to suspect that the answer will be “no”.
Livescribe SmartPen
Records and links audio to what you write. Interesting.
Wisconsin’s Pet Goat: School Finance Reform
Most of us have seen the 2001 footage showing the commander in chief crouched on a small elementary school chair to while the nation was under attack. That day many soccer moms who cast their top-of-the-ticket ballots for better schools were transformed into security moms.
Matt Miller’s article advocating a nationalized education system, “A Modest Proposal to Fix the Schools: First, Kill All the School Boards,” published in The Atlantic early last year, gave fits to a few people at the National School Boards Association but largely went unnoticed among its target audience in Washington, D.C. Public education was no longer at the top of the national agenda.
Public policy discussion about student achievement, performance accountability and class size now seem sepia-tone images of a more innocent era when Americans had the luxury of thinking about public education.
“Why educate your kid in math and science if he’s going to be up to his rear end in seawater?” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Sharpless ironically asked last year, astutely predicting a bipartisan election-year decampment to newer, fresher national crises.
The economy, job losses, national security, energy and health care have shifted public priorities, all but drubbing public education off the national editorial page.
I felt melancholy recently listening to the quavering voice of a U.S. Department of Education official trying to tap passion, anger or any emotion about the federal Reading First program, the darling of phonics advocates and the demon of the whole-language crowd. The vitriolic Reading Wars now seem a bucolic luxury given the present state of world affairs.
Advocating Open Enrollment and Wisconsin Virtual Schools, Via Direct Mail
Click for larger versions.
Appleton based Wisconsin Connections Academy is running a direct mail campaign seeking students to open enroll into the virtual school. Learn more about Wisconsin Open Enrollment here.
Utah Prepares for School Budget Reductions
Utah education leaders are preparing for the worst when it comes to budget cuts.
State Superintendent Patti Harrington said Thursday her office is eliminating a tuition reimbursement program for employees, will offer early retirement incentives for staff and might have to lose 15 to 45 people depending on how much lawmakers cut. State Board of Education members on Thursday also approved guidelines for school districts to follow, possibly this year and in the future, when it comes to making major unexpected cuts.
Lawmakers voted during a special session in the fall to hold education harmless for this fiscal year. But in the face of widening budgetary gaps, legislative leaders have urged a 7 1/2 percent cut to education by June 30. The education appropriations subcommittee will meet Monday to begin discussing strategies.
Rep. Merlynn Newbold, R-South Jordan, who co-chairs that committee, said it is unlikely lawmakers will continue to spare education this fiscal year.
“It just becomes increasingly difficult without annihilating every other department in the state,” Newbold said.
But the committee’s other co-chair, Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said cuts to education in general likely still won’t be as deep as to other programs. However, the State Office of Education will likely endure the same depth of cuts as other agencies, he said.
Greg Haws, a State Board of Education member, noted that cuts to education this fiscal year would be especially hard on schools because the fiscal year is already nearly half over.
Madison Math Program Public Input Session
The Madison School District Administration held a public input session on the recent Math Task Force report [3.9MB PDF] last evening at Memorial High School. Superintendent Dan Nerad opened and closed the meeting, which featured about 56 attendees, at least half of whom appeared to be district teachers and staff. Math Coordinator Brian Sniff ran the meeting.
Task force member and UW-Madison Professor Mitchell Nathan [Clusty Search] was in attendance along with Terry Millar, a UW-Madison Professor who has been very involved in the Madison School District’s math programs for many years. (Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater recently joined the UW-Madison Center for Education Research, among other appointments). UW-Madison Math professor Steffen Lempp attended as did school board President Arlene Silveira and board members Ed Hughes and Beth Moss. Jill Jokela, the parent representative on the Math Task Force, was also present.
Listen via this 30MB mp3 audio file. 5.5MB PDF Handout.
Related:
Thinning on Top
People come into the world ready to count its wonders
THE baby is just one day old and has not yet left hospital. She is quiet but alert. Twenty centimetres from her face researchers have placed a white card with two black spots on it. She stares at it intently. A researcher removes the card and replaces it by another, this time with the spots differently spaced. As the cards alternate, her gaze starts to wander–until a third, with three black spots, is presented. Her gaze returns: she looks at it for twice as long as she did at the previous card. Can she tell that the number two is different from three, just 24 hours after coming into the world?
Or do newborns simply prefer more to fewer? The same experiment, but with three spots preceding two, shows the same revival of interest when the number of spots changes. Perhaps it is just the newness? When slightly older babies were shown cards with pictures of household objects instead of dots (a comb, a key, an orange and so on), changing the number of items had an effect separate from changing the items themselves. Could it be the pattern that two things make, as opposed to three? No again. Babies paid more attention to rectangles moving randomly on a screen when their number changed from two to three, or vice versa. The effect even crosses between senses. Babies who were repeatedly shown two spots perked up more when they then heard three drumbeats than when they heard just two; likewise when the researchers started with drumbeats and moved to spots.
Immigration to the US, 1820-2007
Good Teaching: Art or Science?
had my first day back in class today. We started with a lesson on graphing quadratic equations. Tricia Colclaser, the teacher, gave a mini-introduction and walked around the room while we practiced.
As she checked in with everyone, Colclaser got some props from a student, who was getting it. He said: “I like math when I have a good teacher.”
Of course, teacher quality is the laser focus of education reform lately. Pretty much any study shows it’s the most important factor for student learning. But few experts can tell you what it means or how to evaluate it.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outlier” and a former Washington Post reporter, had an interesting piece in The New Yorker recently about this very issue. He likened teacher recruiting to recruiting quarterbacks in the NFL. You never know how they will do until they get onto the field, under pressure, with split-second decisions to make and everything at stake.
He dropped in on a group of education researchers at U-Va. who have determined that teacher feedback, or the ability to respond meaningfully to each student, is linked most strongly to academic success. This kind of talent, as well as the ability to have eyes in the back of your head, or defuse problems before they erupt…all have nothing to do with the academic credentials of the teacher or the scores on their Praxis test, or the things that the federal government and states are focusing on.
LA’s Tioga High students push to recall school board
Reporting from Groveland, Calif. — When the school board in this rural community voted to get rid of popular math teacher Ryan Dutton in September, the students at Tioga High School were so upset, the entire school boycotted class the next day. Then they decided to save his job.
What started as a civics class project soon became much more: a campaign to remove all five board members of Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District.
Believing in their teacher, the students organized a petition drive to hold a recall election in this sparsely populated district near Yosemite National Park. With the help of parents, teachers and even their principal, the campaign turned in about 1,200 signatures last week for each board member — 910 were needed to call a special election. The students expect to learn this week whether the recall qualifies. If so, an election will be held in May.
Dutton, 31, a former professional football player, lost his job over allegations that he cheated in a course he took last spring at Cal State Fresno. The university cleared him and apologized for “any misunderstanding,” but the board has refused to reinstate him.
“We didn’t like what was happening in our district,” said Elise Vallotton, Tioga student body president and president of the newly formed Students for a Better School District. “Many of us stood up at board meetings and explained our point of view. Obviously, they weren’t listening. They didn’t do anything to try and help us, and that’s why we started the recall.”
A New Indoor Pool/Parking Complex at Madison West High School?
A proposed $17,624,450 eight lane indoor pool, diving well, fitness center, community activity/wellness pool and a two-level parking deck for Madison West High School was on Monday evening’s Madison School Board agenda [441K PDF].
I found this interesting and wondered if funding might come from an earmark (McCain / Feingold on earmarks), or possibly the Obama stimulus (the “splurge”, or borrowing on our grandkids credit cards).
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s wishlist (it includes $14,000,000 for “public pools at Warner Park and Reindahl”, but no funds for this, as far as I can see).
I have not seen the details of Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle’s “stimulus” list.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, in light of the District’s strategic plan, academic priorities, other high school facilities and how the operating costs are covered.
Listen to the discussion: 23MB mp3 audio fileDoug Erickson.
Madison School Board Election: April 7, 2009
Via the Madison City Clerk’s Office, Seat 1 will have a competitive race with Donald Gors, Jr. facing incumbent Arlene Silveira. Arlene has served as President for the past two years. The current occupant of seat 2, Lucy Mathiak is running unopposed.
A bit of history: Arlene was first elected in April, 2006. Her victory over Maya Cole (subsequently elected a year later) occurred in one of the narrowest local election wins in recent history. Seat 1 was previously held by former Madison Teacher Bill Keys. Lucy Mathiak defeated incumbent Juan Jose Lopez in that same election.
There’s no shortage of local history contained within the links above.
Better Grades for 2009?
School starts again today after the winter break. I hope everyone found some time to relax. I did! I will find out tomorrow how much math I forgot when my class meets again.
One big change we’re likely to see in the new year in Fairfax schools is a new grading policy. Superintendent Jack D. Dale recommended Friday that the school system add extra points to the grade-point average for students who take Honors or AP/IB classes.
This would not effect my own GPA, as my class is just regular old Algebra II! But it would effect the thousands of students who are enrolled in college-level and honors classes.
The change is a response to a huge parent-led movement to level the playing field for Fairfax students who are competing for colleges and scholarships with kids who are racking up astronomical GPAs elsewhere thanks to the extra weights. (It’s not uncommon in some districts to earn a 5.4 GPA on a 4.0 scale).
Pumping Up High School Grades Not a Panacea for Va. Parents’ Anxiety
W hy are some parents in Fairfax and Loudoun counties up in arms about whether an A in a high school course means the student averaged a 90 or a 94?
The controversy coming to the Fairfax School Board this month is about one thing: anxiety over college admission. That emotionally fraught issue has blurred the vision of many parents, who have come to believe that if only schools would artificially pump up their little sweeties’ grades, their just-slightly-less-than-perfect children just might get into colleges that otherwise would give them the big dis.
Fairfax uses a six-point grading system in which you need a 94 to get an A. Loudoun’s scoring grid is similar. But in many parts of the country, an A represents a numerical grade of 90 or more.
Parent groups in the two Virginia counties contend that college admissions officers cannot comprehend these distinctions and therefore put applicants from these two strong school systems at a competitive disadvantage.
Study: Risky behavior prominent on teen MySpace profiles
More than half of adolescent MySpace users mention risky behaviors such as sex, violence or substance use on their personal Web profiles.
That’s according to the findings of Megan Moreno, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and other researchers who analyzed 500 MySpace profiles in 46 states to determine how young people use the Internet as a means of presenting themselves to their peers.
The study, along with a companion study on how to reduce such postings, is published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. Moreno was co-leader of the study while a research fellow at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
According to Moreno, 37 percent of profiles mentioned alcohol use, 24 percent mentioned sex, 14 percent mentioned or implied they were involved in acts of violence, and 13 percent mentioned tobacco use. In a number of cases, the profilers claimed to have engaged in several of these activities.
On Eliminating Wisconsin Teacher Salary Growth Caps (QEO)
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Spend more with less money.
That’s the impossible demand Democrats who run the state Capitol seem anxious to make on local school boards across Wisconsin.
Democrats who control the governor’s office and the Legislature suggest they’re going to repeal a long-standing law that effectively caps annual pay raises for public school teachers. Democrats have been promising to remove the cap for more than a decade and now have the political power to do so.
But allowing higher annual raises for teachers will require more money from somewhere. And state leaders don’t have any dollars to spare. They’re staring at a record state budget shortfall.
So where will the money come from?
Not from property taxes. Gov. Jim Doyle and other Democrats suggest they’ll keep in place a state cap on local school district revenue. Revenue caps limit how much local property tax levies can increase.
That will leave school boards with higher salary expenses but no easy way to pay for them.
Dave Blaska noted that WEAC spent $2,100,000 on five Wisconsin Assembly races in 2008.
Mathmetician The Best Job in the US; Madison Math Task Force Community Meetings Tonight & Tomorrow
Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
“It’s a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school,” says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. “It’s the science of problem-solving.”
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)
The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac,” and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions — indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise — unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren’t expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching — attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.
The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job’s median income and growth potential. Mathematicians’ annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.
Related:
- The Madison School District is holding public meetings tonight (LaFollette High School) and tomorrow (Memorial High School) on the recent Math Task Force Report.
- Math Forum audio/video
- West High School Math Teachers Letter to Isthmus
- Madison and Wisconsin Math Data, 8th Grade by Richard Askey
- UW-Madison Math Faculty letter to the Madison School District
- Math report commentary by TJ Mertz, more here
Parents and citizens have another opportunity to provide input on this matter when Brian Sniff, Madison’s Math Coordinator and Lisa Wachtel, Director of Madison’s Teaching & Learning discuss the Math Report at a Cherokee Middle School PTO meeting on January 14, 2009 at 7:00p.m.
Wisconsin State Tax Redistribution to K-12 Districts: Inverse Robin Hood, or Accounting Trick?
A change in how the state finances schools is having an effect that is the reverse of what Robin Hood would do, an advocacy group contends.
It is aiding the rich at the expense of the poor.
Increases in the state’s school levy tax credit in recent years mean that taxpayers statewide saw $822.4 million taken off of their property tax bills in December. But the Association for Equity in Funding argues that credit amount, which is distributed based on property tax burden, results in more help for school districts where residents generally have higher incomes and already spend more on education than for low-income districts.
How much so? In an analysis released in December, the group found that all but one of 46 school districts that received more than $1,500 per pupil from the levy credit spent above the state average. In contrast, 35 of the 57 school districts that received less than $500 per pupil from the credit had below-average spending.
That result is contrary to the general aim of the state’s school funding system to distribute aid in a way to help reduce the gap between rich and poor communities, the association said.
“The governor and the Legislature should stop increasing the school levy credit now!” wrote Doug Haselow, executive director of the association, which unsuccessfully sued to overturn the state’s school funding system earlier in the decade.
That might be difficult to do.
One main reason that the levy credit has increased in every budget since Gov. Jim Doyle took office is that “it’s an accounting trick,” said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Although the levy credit can be counted toward funding the state government’s two-thirds portion of school costs in one year, it actually isn’t paid to municipalities until the following fiscal year, Berry said. That has helped the state balance its budgets while claiming to cover its obligations, he said.
Soft Skills–Call Them What They Are
It grates on me when I hear people talk about “soft skills.” Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com’s Kate Lorenz describes these as “interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals.”[i]
“Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior ‘soft skills’ says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals.[ii] Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.
Our language is part of the problem. By calling them “soft,” we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let’s find a more fitting term for them.
ACLU Report Reveals Arrests At Hartford-Area Schools On Rise
ACLU:
Police arrests of students at Hartford-area schools are on the rise, according to a new American Civil Liberties Union report released today, a trend that disproportionately impacts children of color.
The ACLU report, entitled “Hard Lessons: School Resource Officer Programs and School-Based Arrests in Three Connecticut Towns,” also shows how the use by school districts in Hartford, East Hartford and West Hartford of school resource officers who are not adequately trained and whose objectives are not clearly defined leads to the criminalization of students at the expense of their education.
The report’s findings are just the latest examples of a disturbing national trend known as the “school to prison pipeline” wherein children are over-aggressively funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
“Our goal is to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to receive a quality education,” said Jamie Dycus, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program and the primary author of the report. “Relying too heavily on arrests as a disciplinary measure impedes that goal and only serves to ensure that some of our most vulnerable populations are criminalized at very young ages before alternatives are exhausted that could lead to academic success.”
According to the report, students in West Hartford and East Hartford are arrested at school at a rate far out of proportion to their numbers. During the 2006-07 school year, for example, black and Hispanic students together accounted for 69 percent of East Hartford’s student population, but experienced 85 percent of its school-based arrests. In West Hartford during the same year, black and Hispanic students accounted for 24 percent of the population, but experienced 63 percent of the arrests.
Related:
Wisconsin’s 2007-2008 Final Budget Deficit: $2,500,000,000
It usually goes unnoticed, but each year at this time, the state issues its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) prepared by the state controller using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). This year’s CAFR puts the state’s 2008 GAAP deficit at $2.5 billion. Relative to population or state income, Wisconsin has the largest GAAP deficit of all 50 states.
N o newspaper, pundit, major Web site, or broadcast outlet covered it. No politician or pressure group commented on it. Yet release of the state’s official financial statements for the most recent fiscal year contained a major news item: Wisconsin closed its books on 2007-08 with a $2.5 billion (b) deficit.
CAFR reports official deficit
The deficit figure is buried in the state’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). The report was prepared by the state controller, audited by the Legislative Audit Bureau, and recently posted on a state government Web site (ftp://doaftp04.doa.state.wi.us/doadocs/2008CAFR_Linked.pdf).
Much more on the proposed deficit spending trillion dollar Obama “splurge” here.
George Lightbourn: The Dodgy Thinking Behind the State Budget Bailout:
Did government avoid this tsunami of overspending? Of course not, it bellied up to the trough and blithely went about spending money it simply did not have. We all know about the skyrocketing federal debt, but state governments have found ways around their balanced budget requirements. For example, Wisconsin state accountants recently closed the books on the last fiscal year showing a deficit of $2.5 billion. That was the deficit as of July 31, before the current recession hit full stride.
When we see state government carrying a deficit of that size from year to year, it should set off warning lights. State government spending is unsustainable even in good times. It is logical then to use this time of fiscal stress to confront the unsustainable level of state spending, to reassess, to change, to shrink. It would be good for everyone to have government spending reduced to a sustainable level. But that is probably not in the cards.
Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, articulates the philosophy that will drive the thinking as to how Wisconsin will address its budget crisis. “It’s true that the economy is shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending too,” wrote Krugman. Krugman’s line of thought is not only wrong; it stands to make Wisconsin’s long-term prospects much worse.
Call Grows to Cap Property Taxes
Support for property-tax rollbacks is building from Arizona to New York, fueled by angry homeowners in some locales who are seeing rising tax bills despite plunging home prices.
Legislatures in New York, Georgia, Oklahoma and Wyoming are considering taking up proposals to curb property taxes in their 2009 sessions. In Indiana, a cap on property taxes enacted last year became effective Jan. 1, and lawmakers are planning to vote this year on whether to put before voters a constitutional amendment that would cap taxes permanently at 1% of a property’s value.
In recent months, citizen groups in Montana, Nevada and Arizona have organized to get property-tax-relief measures on state ballots. Florida voters last year amended the state’s constitution to increase a number of property-tax exemptions, lowering their assessments.
“We just can’t afford these increases in property taxes,” said Lynne Weaver, a 59-year-old retired swimsuit saleswoman in Phoenix, who said her investment nest egg “has pretty well been cut in half” by market declines. She is a leading volunteer for Prop. 13 Arizona, an organization collecting signatures seeking a 2010 ballot measure that would roll back home valuations to 2003, before the boom that preceded the bust in home prices, and which would also cap annual property-tax increases at 2% of home value.
Related: Wistax:
Total taxes collected from Wisconsin averaged $12,281 per person in 2007-08. The $69.4 billion in annual collections was up 3.4%. Relative to personal income, however, taxes were down slightly, from 34.9% in 2007 to 34.2% in 2008.
HomeSchooling Grows in the United States
The ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. “There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.
Traditionally, the biggest motivations for parents to teach their children at home have been moral or religious reasons, and that remains a top pick when parents are asked to explain their choice.
The 2003 survey gave parents six reasons to pick as their motivation. (They could choose more than one.) The 2007 survey added a seventh: an interest in a “non-traditional approach,” a reference to parents dubbed “unschoolers,” who regard standard curriculum methods and standardized testing as counterproductive to a quality education.
“We wanted to identify the parents who are part of the ‘unschooling’ movement,” Mulligan says. The “unschooling” group is viewed by educators as a subset of home-schoolers, who generally follow standard curriculum and grading systems. “Unschoolers” create their own systems.
Taliban Bans Education For Girls in Swat Valley
Taliban militants in a former tourist region of Pakistan have banned girls from school beginning this month, claiming female education is contrary to Islam.
“From January 15, girls will not be allowed to attend schools,” Mullah Shah Doran, the Taliban second in command in the scenic Swat Valley, announced in a recent radio address. Mullah Doran said educating girls is “un-Islamic.”
The announcement is a further blow to a system in which female enrollment already has plunged because of ongoing violence. Three years ago, more than 120,000 girls attended schools and colleges in the region, which has a population of 1.8 million. Now only about 40,000 are enrolled.
“More than 30 percent [of the] girls dropped out of educational institutions in 2006 and 2007 due to speeches of [militant leader] Mullah Fazlullah on his FM radio against girls’ education,” said an official in the Swat education department, who asked not to be named to avoid becoming a target for militants.
Homework on an iPod…..
A PILOT program in which teenagers used iPods for school work has increased attendance and increased enthusiasm for homework.
A class of year 8 students at Shepparton High School in central Victoria are the first in Australia and among the first in the world to use iPod touches in the classroom for a global “mobile learning” project.
The students use the hand-held media players to search the internet, download music, do quizzes, research and submit assignments and collaborate with a school in Singapore.
Preliminary research on the program found students were more willing to come to school, did more homework and used their iPods more than laptops or desktop computers.
Five running for state schools chief
Five people are vying to become the next superintendent of education in Wisconsin, a position that will help shape education policy in the state for the next four years.
The five come from a variety of backgrounds — one is a school superintendent, two are college professors, one is a virtual schools leader, and another is the deputy superintendent.
Tuesday is the deadline for those who want to run for the position to file signatures with the state. It’s also the deadline for all other spring elections, including judicial openings and the state Supreme Court.
The field for the education secretary race and any other with more than two candidates will be narrowed to two in a Feb. 17 primary. The election is April 7. The new education secretary takes over July 1 for Libby Burmaster, who decided against seeking a third term.
The state superintendent is largely an administrative post, with little actual power over setting policy, but able to use the position to advocate for their priorities across the state.
The superintendent is responsible for governing Wisconsin’s public schools, administering state and federal aid, and offering guidance to teachers and administrators. The superintendent also crafts a spending request every two years to run the agency and provide state aid to public schools, which is subject to approval by the Legislature.
Despite the diverse field seeking the post this year, all five candidates agree on many issues such as the need for reform statewide, changes to the No Child Left Behind Law, and improving Milwaukee schools. But they also disagree on major areas, such as the need to repeal a law affecting teacher salaries, that could play a major factor in who wins.
The candidates:
Baltimore Symphony Trains Disadvantaged Kids
On a block with boarded-up row houses and broken windows sits Baltimore’s Harriet Tubman Elementary School. Practically all of the students at the school get free or reduced-price lunches. Some of the kids live in homeless shelters.
But a remarkable new music program lives inside the school’s unremarkable walls. OrchKids is a collaboration between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the school. The idea is to introduce disadvantaged students to classical music, and maybe change their lives in the process.
The Baltimore Symphony’s Dan Trahey runs the OrchKids program. This is the first year of the project, which has started with the younger students — mostly first-graders. Each year, it’ll grow to eventually encompass the whole school.
Trahey has an advanced music degree and is a trained orchestra musician. Before taking over OrchKids, he says he felt like he was performing for the wrong audience — symphony subscribers who really didn’t need the music.
Obama’s Education Wish List May Have To Wait
Early on in his campaign, Barack Obama’s education agenda included a long wish list of proposals for early childhood education, dropout prevention and after-school and college outreach programs among others. Obama called it his “Children First” agenda.
With the economy on life support and just about every state now slashing education funding, President-elect Obama is likely to focus less on his wish list and more on the political consensus he says he wants to build around education.
“For years, we’ve talked our education problems to death,” he said last month. “Stuck in the same tired debates, Democrat versus Republican, more money versus more reform, all along failing to acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and good intentions. We can’t continue like this.”
Related:
On Milwaukee’s Graduation Rate
If you’re looking for good news about Milwaukee Public Schools, consider this: The graduation rate has risen steadily in recent years and is more than 18 percentage points higher than it was in 1996-’97.
Those who say only half of MPS students graduate are right – if they’re using figures from a few years ago. But they’re wrong now. The official graduation rate is pushing 70%, and even independent analysts, using different ways of calculating the rate, put the figure at closer to 60%.
It appears clear that MPS is doing a better job of keeping teens in school and getting them to the point where they cross a stage and receive a diploma.
Maybe the cause is the creation of a couple of dozen small high schools or changes in the programs inside some of the remaining big schools. Or maybe it’s simply success in spreading the message that a diploma is important. But dropout rates are down and kids who used to drift away from school are staying connected.
Before you get too cheery about the improving picture, however, you might want to consider a few more aspects of the crucial question of whether MPS is graduating a sufficiently large number of students who are ready for life after graduation.
To sum up: There just isn’t much evidence that MPS high school students are actually doing much better academically. In short, graduation is up, but actual readiness to take on the world might not have changed much.
Nature Makes a Comeback on Wisconsin School Classes
Geeta Dawar takes her seventh grade science students outside their Madison school to examine cracks in the sidewalk.
David Spitzer gets his Madison elementary students to notice flocks of migrating geese overhead as the kids walk to school.
And David Ropa has his seventh graders, even on an arctic morning, use their bare hands to dip testing vials into Lake Mendota.
Nature is on the rise in many schools across Wisconsin, as educators strive to reverse a major societal shift toward technology and indoor activities. Today’s students are the first generation in human history raised without a strong relationship with the natural world, said Jeremy Solin, who heads a state forest education program at UW-Stevens Point for students in kindergarten through high school.
The phenomenon of “nature deficit disorder” — a term coined by author Richard Louv in his 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods” — is contributing to childhood obesity, learning disabilities, and developmental delays, experts say.
On Adoption: My Secret Life
I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.
I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in the novel I’m writing. The character and I are both fond of the idea. We can think of ourselves as living in the dense pages of 19th-century fiction, where one’s origins — the exact mother and father — are not nearly as important as one’s “circumstances.”
Some might say I came to this rationalization because, until recently, everything surrounding my adoption was kept secret from me. Even the date it was finalized was a secret. (The woman on the phone said, “Those records are sealed.” I said, “I know I can’t see what’s in them, but can I find out the date from which I couldn’t see what’s in them?” She replied, “Even the outsides of the records are sealed” — a confounding statement, as I envisioned envelopes surrounding envelopes, all sealed into infinity.)
Of course, mysterious origins are a confusing business these days. One might be gestated in an unknown womb while having genes from some combination of one’s mother and father and a stranger; from a mother’s womb with some combination of known and unknown genes — not to mention the complication of untold numbers of half-siblings who might be out there from the sperm donations of one man. There are adoptive parents and biological parents, surrogates and donors — adults of all sorts claiming parenthood by right of blood, genes, birth, law and affection.
Ullman is author of The Bug.
2009 Wisconsin Superintendent of the Year
If there was any doubt that Jon Bales would be a good fit for the DeForest School District, it was quickly erased when he arrived here nearly a decade ago.
The School Board had set up a program to solicit input from residents about the future direction of the district. Another superintendent might have been more eager to put his own stamp on the district. But Bales embraced the project, which led to a renewed commitment to technology, quality facilities and individualized learning programs.
“When we did that, it just really made a connection between the district and the community,” said Bales, 56. “For me that was one of the most gratifying things we’ve done. All that community input is like gold.”
In February, the district plans to hold a similar program, this time looking to the year 2025.
Bales’ role in implementing those goals is among the reasons he has been named Wisconsin’s 2009 Superintendent of the Year by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.
The Big Cram for Hunter High School
While their friends played video games in pajamas or vacationed in the tropics, a dozen sixth graders spent winter break at Elite Academy in Flushing, Queens, memorizing word roots. Time was ticking as they prepared to face the thing they had talked about, dreamed about and lost sleep over for much of the past year: the Hunter College High School admissions exam, a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it.
On Wednesday, the final day of test-prep boot camp before the Jan. 9 exam, there seemed to be nothing more terrifying to these 11-year-olds than the risk of failure.
Some had taken up coffee; others, crossword puzzles and cable news shows to glean vocabulary words. A few of their parents had hired private tutors and imposed strict study hours, and several had paid up to $3,000 for a few months of English and math classes at Elite, a regimen modeled on the cram schools of South Korea, China and Japan.
The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way.
Seat belts to be in more Dallas-area school buses
Some buses serving Dallas County schools will soon have seat belts installed despite an ongoing debate about their effectiveness on school buses.
Dallas County Schools, which provides buses for Dallas ISD and eight other school districts, will have dozens more large buses with lap-shoulder belts. And district officials said they hope belts will be in more buses in the future.
“Common sense says we need to protect our kids every way possible, and that includes seat belts,” said Larry Duncan, Dallas County Schools board president. “I would like to see them all with seat belts overnight, but we can’t get that done.”
Dallas County Schools already has installed shoulder-lap seat belts on two buses that serve DISD elementary schools in North Dallas. This month, the district expects to receive 70 new large buses equipped with lap-shoulder belts similar to those in passenger cars, officials said.
Despite the district’s decision to have the seat belts, the debate remains about the benefits of seat belts on buses.
High school football stars on display
On Sunday, ESPN will televise the Under Armour High School All-America High School football game from the Florida Citrus Bowl in Orlando at 5 p.m. PT.
USC and UCLA fans will be able to see several players who have committed to their teams.
For the Trojans, playing on the White team: Santa Ana Mater Dei quarterback Matt Barkley; Calhoun (S.C.) County wide receiver Alshon Jeffrey; and Agoura High offensive lineman Kevin Graf.
For the Bruins, also playing on the White team: Rancho Cucamonga Los Osos quarterback Richard Brehaut; Carson High receiver Morrell Presley; and Kapolei, Hawaii, offensive lineman Stan Hasiak.
Blue Man Group Creates High-Tech NYC Preschool
You may have come across Blue Man Group over the years — the humanoid trio with blue heads who play weird instruments on stage and do crazy things. But Blue Man Group is no longer three quirky performance artists; they are a multimillion dollar operation with seven companies in North America, Europe and Japan.
The original founders of the group have started a preschool in New York’s East Village that is called — appropriately — Blue School.
At first glance, Blue School seems very normal in comparison to the blue-headed performance artists. There are cheery classrooms, books, clay, blocks — all the things expected in a good preschool. There are a few Blue Man things, like the speaking tubes that snake along the ceiling and allow kids to speak to each other from a distance.
Unspoken Link Between Credit Cards and Colleges
When Ryan T. Muneio was tailgating with his parents at a Michigan State football game this fall, he noticed a big tent emblazoned with a Bank of America logo. Inside, bank representatives were offering free T-shirts and other merchandise to those who applied for credit cards and other banking products.
“They did a good job,” Mr. Muneio, 21 and a junior at Michigan State, said of the tactic. “It was good advertising.”
Bank of America’s relationship with the university extends well beyond marketing at sports events. The bank has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets. Under certain circumstances, Michigan State even stands to receive more money if students carry a balance on these cards.
Hundreds of colleges have contracts with lenders. But at a time of rising concern about student debt — and overall consumer debt — the arrangements have sounded alarm bells, and some student groups are starting to push back.
The relationships are reminiscent of those uncovered two years ago between student loan companies and universities. In those, some lenders offered universities an incentive to steer potential borrowers their way.
Claiborne Pell 1918-2008, champion of accessible higher education
Over six million low-income college students this year received Pell Grants, and its likely that most of them aren’t familiar with their originator, Claiborne Pell. This morning, the Rhode Island senator (who retired in 1997 after his sixth term) passed away at his home in Newport. He was 90, and died after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. His work will live on, however, in the lives and deeds of the students who attend college due in large part to his insistence that access to higher education be available to as many students as possible.
In 1972, Pell drafted legislation that created the Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, which were renamed Pell Grants in 1980. At the time of his retirement in 1994, the Grants provided aid to over 54 million low- and middle-income students (90% of recipients have family incomes of $40,000 or less). In 2008, the US Department of Education reports that the program awarded almost 5.6 million grants totaling $16.4 billion.
The New York Times in September called Pell Grants “the most important form of aid to needy students, and for millions, whether recent high school graduates or those who have been working for years, higher education would be impossible without such aid.” The grants have been threatened with funding cuts throughout their 36-year existence. Pell told Times in 1996 that although the Grant program “exceeded [his] wildest hopes,” he believed it should have become an entitlement, protected from Senate budget conflicts.
Online Education Today
A. Frank Mayadas, John Bourne and Paul Bacsich:
Online education is established, growing, and here to stay. It is creating new opportunities for students and also for faculty, regulators of education, and the educational institutions themselves. Much of what is being learned by the practitioners will flow into the large numbers of blended courses that will be developed and delivered on most campuses. Some of what is being learned will certainly improve pedagogical approaches and possibly affect other important problems, such as the lengthening time to completion of a degree. Online education is already providing better access to education for many, and many more will benefit from this increased access in the coming years.
Bookmarks
Outstanding bookmarks vintage and modern
Bookmark design in manifold shapes and make-up.
Report outlines cost-savings, no new revenues for Massachusetts education
The governor’s ambitious overhaul of public education — from universal preschool to free community college — appears likely to be placed on hold, as the state grapples with a massive budget deficit that could lead to funding cuts for local school districts.
An education finance committee that was appointed by the governor last summer said today that the economic downturn is preventing it from recommending any immediate measures to raise revenue to pay for the governor’s plan. Instead, the committee recommended modest cost-saving measures that could yield $550 million.
“The commission recognized that the state is facing completely different fiscal realities than were contemplated this past summer,” according to a report released today by the commission. “The most recent estimates for the fiscal year 2010 budget predict a deficit of between $2 and $3 billion dollars. … The commission’s deliberations, therefore, concentrated on the urgent need to find opportunities for cost savings and to maintain support for our education system in a time of inadequate resources.”
The cost-saving measures focus heavily on encouraging local school districts to pool together resources to increase their ability to negotiate better purchase prices for things such as health insurance, energy contracts, and classroom supplies as well as share some administrative jobs.
Is the Minnesota Depart of Education Too political to think big on education policy?
With the start of Minnesota’s legislative session nearing, several education groups have been pushing the Legislature to establish an independent commission to research state education policy and look at efficient, innovative ways to educate Minnesota students.
Groups such as Parents United for Public Schools and the Association of Metropolitan School Districts say it will help the state’s education system if legislators are armed with good, independent peer-reviewed research. And they say it will help the state’s taxpayers when education policies that are ineffective or inefficient are proven to be so, and are ended.
“We as legislators are constantly asked to make some very hard decisions that impact many, many lives, and we don’t always have good research at our disposal,” said Sen. Sandy Rummel, DFL-White Bear Lake, who is working on drafting the legislation.
An independent research group would likely be funded by start-up money from the state — maybe $200,000, according to Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. Then, it would seek independent foundation and grant money, and try to get some help from higher education research institutions, he said.
Advocating Increased Minnesota K-12 Funding
Tom Weber:
As lawmakers head to the Capitol next week to face a massive budget deficit, two new reports are making the case that lawmakers need to put more money into education.
One report, from the Minnesota Budget Project, concludes what many school leaders have said for years: That state funding hasn’t kept up with inflation this decade.
Analyst Katherine Blauvelt says the state dropoff has resulted in higher property taxes. And Blauvelt says that might leave homeowners thinking schools are flush with cash.
“But what we actually found was the increased property taxes didn’t plug the budget hole that the drop in state dollars left,” she said.
The report also analyzes data on college tuition increases over the past decade.
Another report, from the Bush Foundation, found unprepared kindergartners are more likely to drop out of high school, which costs Minnesota schools $42 million a year in lost state aid.
Social Networking Meets College Reviews
Unigo is a new platform for college students to share reviews, photos, videos, documents, and more with students on their campus and across the country.
It’s also the best place for high school students to find out what life is really like at North America’s colleges, and to make friends who can help them find the school that’s right for them.
Unigo is the result of a community of students across the country dedicated to getting the truth out about college life, and it’s growing bigger every day.
Madison School District seeks input on proposed math changes
A series of potentially controversial proposals will be outlined next week as residents are invited to help shape how math is taught in the Madison School District.
Among the recommendations from a task force that recently completed a one-year study:
• Switch to full-time math teachers for all students in grades five through eight.
• The math task force’s executive summary and full report
• Substantially boost the training of math teachers.
• Seriously consider selecting a single textbook for each grade level or course in the district, rather than having a variety of textbooks used in schools across the district.
The task force was created in 2006 by the Madison School Board to independently review the district’s math programs and seek ways to improve students’ performance.
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Vermont Attempts to Slow School Spending Growth as Enrollments Decline
Pelham said Vermont schools are among the best-funded in the nation and have been getting more money and more staff while the number of students continues to decline.
“Vermont’s best-in-the-nation spending on K-12 education provides a very reasonable basis to ask the education lobby to temper their exuberant self-interest and to work with others to find a more balanced response to Vermont’s current economic and fiscal concerns,” Pelham said in a Dec. 29 letter to legislative leaders.
John Nelson of the Vermont School Boards’ Association said he took exception to Pelham’s letter.
“What I know from talking with board members around the state is that there are truly agonizing discussions going on about this year’s budget,” Nelson said. “We’re aware of the economic climate, but we’re also aware of the continuing demand on schools.”
State Sen. Peter Shumlin, a Putney Democrat, the senate president pro tem and one of the lawmakers to whom Pelham’s letter was addressed, said it was “disrespectful and destructive” to blame school boards for rising costs.
“Clearly, the tone of the letter suggests there is real animosity between the governor, the tax commissioner and hard working school board members. When that spills over into the public dialogue it is a disservice to all Vermonters,” Shumlin said.
Links:
The Worst Jobs in History
The history we are taught usually features the lives and times of the great and the good, of the haves but not the have-nots. However, the monarchs, aristocrats and magnates could not have existed without the battalions of minions who performed the tasks that were beneath their masters and mistresses.
In this website, we take you on a journey through 2,000 years of British history and the worst jobs of each era, as seen in both Channel 4 Worst Jobs series. Tony Robinson has devised a quiz to see how suited you would be to certain jobs, and we have an extract from his book on the worst children’s jobs. The skills agency learndirect has provided information on offbeat careers, and we show you how to take your interest further.
2008 NCAA Division 1 Sports Graduation Success Rates
The NCAA Graduation Success Rate (GSR) and the Academic Success Rate (ASR) were developed in response to college and university presidents who wanted graduation data that more accurately reflect the mobility among college students today. Both rates improve on the federally mandated graduation rate by including students who were omitted from the federal calculation.
The GSR measures graduation rates at Division I institutions and includes students transferring into the institutions. The GSR also allows institutions to subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.
The ASR measures graduation rates at Division II institutions and is very similar to the GSR. The difference is that the ASR also includes those freshmen who were recruited to the institution but did not receive athletics financial aid.
Obama Pledges Schools Upgrade in Stimulus (“Splurge”) Plan
Barack Obama probably cannot fix every leaky roof and busted boiler in the nation’s schools. But educators say his sweeping school modernization program – if he spends enough – could jump-start student achievement.
More kids than ever are crammed into aging, run-down schools that need an estimated $255 billion in repairs, renovations or construction. While the president-elect is likely to ask Congress for only a fraction of that, education experts say it still could make a big difference.
“The need is definitely out there,” said Robert Canavan, chairman of the Rebuild America’s Schools coalition, which includes both teachers’ unions and large education groups. “A federal investment of that magnitude would really have a significant impact.”
Educators argue that spiffy classrooms help children learn and also remove health risks. But they warn that Obama’s school spending plan won’t stimulate the economy if it requires matching funds from state and local governments whose tax revenues have been slashed by the recession.
And they caution that throwing huge sums of money at programs that haven’t proven effective, such as the federal “E-Rate” program that gives technology discounts to schools, won’t help student achievement or the economy.
New High-School Elective: Put Off College
Like many motivated, focused high-school students, Lillian Kivel had worked hard academically and in community service in hopes that her efforts would win her acceptance into a good college. It did. Trouble was, Ms. Kivel’s focus was much less clear when she had to decide which college to attend — the Boston-area senior had applied to 38 schools because her interests were so varied.
At the suggestion of friends, Ms. Kivel decided to take a gap year — a year outside of academia between high-school graduation and college matriculation. It wasn’t rest and relaxation that Ms. Kivel sought, but rather an opportunity to gain life experience and focus her goals. Gappers, as they’re called, typically feel that taking a year off will give them a head start in college — and life. “I [have] the opportunity to explore my interests, like medicine and China, outside the classroom,” she says.
Ms. Kivel eventually decided to attend Harvard College, but deferred entrance until fall 2009. Ms. Kivel lived at home this fall and interned at the Boston branch of Partners of Health, a global health outreach nonprofit. She’s also serving as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts Statehouse. And she’s auditing at anthropology class at Harvard.