All posts by Jim Zellmer

My Virtual Summer Job

Alexandra Alter:

While his friends scramble for jobs flipping burgers or bagging groceries this summer, 18-year-old Mike Everest will be working as a trader in the fantasy Web world of Entropia Universe, buying and selling virtual animal skins and weapons. His goods exist only online, but his earnings are real. In the past four years, he’s made $35,000.
Mr. Everest, of Durango, Colo., is among a new breed of young entrepreneurs seeking their fortune online in imaginary worlds. As the pool of traditional summer jobs shrinks, tech-savvy young gamers are honing their computer skills to capitalize on growing demand for virtual goods and services. Some work as fashion designers, architects and real-estate developers in Second Life, a fantasy world populated by digital representations of real people. These so-called avatars shop in malls, buy property, hang out with friends or sit “home” watching TV, all manipulated by their real-life counterparts with computer key strokes and a mouse.

America’s High School

Bob Herbert:

At a time when the nation is faced with tough economic challenges at home and ever-increasing competition from abroad, it’s incredible that more is not being done about the poor performance of so many American high schools.
We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.
Mr. Wise is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a policy and advocacy group committed to improving the high schools. The following lamentable passage is from his book, “Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation“:

DC Chancellor Dismisses 24 Principals

Bill Turque:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has fired 24 principals, including 13 who headed schools deemed to be failing under the federal “No Child Left Behind Act,” officials confirmed yesterday.
Principals work on year-to-year agreements. About 15 to 20 principals are let go annually, according to the Council of School Officers, the principal’s union.
This year’s reshuffling has drawn heightened interest because it provides another window into Rhee’s still-new leadership of the school system. The personnel changes also have added urgency because of the federal mandate to make major changes in 26 schools that have failed to show adequate progress under “No Child Left Behind.”

We’ve tipped over, fellas

Gail Perry-Daniels:

Like many in Madison’s Black community, I waited anxiously last week to get my hands on the report titled, The State of Black Madison 2008: Before the Tipping Point. Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical even before reading the report, because I believe we’ve tipped over and are now fighting to get back on our feet.
The report, which had been kept secret until its release last week, documents a number of issues which have for decades contributed to the economic and social digression of Madison’s Black community. The major issues examined in the report were criminal justice, economic well-being, education, health care, housing, and political influence.
I had hoped that the report, produced by six noted Black male leaders in Madison, would offer some solutions to this crisis or trumpet a call to action. But all I found were recommendations. For me, recommendations are like ideas: If they are never acted on, they just fade away or are brought up in conversations beginning with, “Remember when?”
Well, I’ve got a great starting point, and it’s spelled JOBS. One of the major problems facing ex-offenders is the inability to find a JOB. The road to economic well-being begins with a JOB. Affordable housing requires a well-paying JOB just to enter the housing market. Having a JOB lessens or corrects many of the issues cited in the report.

A Surgeon’s Path From Migrant Fields to Operating Room

Claudia Dreifus:

At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has four positions. He is a neurosurgeon who teaches oncology and neurosurgery, directs a neurosurgery clinic and heads a laboratory studying brain tumors. He also performs nearly 250 brain operations a year. Twenty years ago, Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa, now 40, was an illegal immigrant working in the vegetable fields of the Central Valley in California. He became a citizen in 1997 while at Harvard.

Waukesha Schools May End Junior Kindergarden

Amy Hetzner:

Gov. Jim Doyle on Friday let stand a provision in the state budget-repair bill that would force school systems by 2013 to expand their limited 4-year-old kindergarten programs to all eligible students or – as could be the case in Waukesha – end the programs.
The budget amendment is seen as a reprieve from state school Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster’s stricter interpretation this year.
Burmaster had told school systems in January that junior-kindergarten programs that were not offered to all 4-year-olds in a district would not be funded in 2008-’09.
Spokesman Patrick Gasper said the Department of Public Instruction knew of five districts other than Waukesha with programs that the change would affect, including large systems such as Kenosha Unified and Beloit.
The other districts are Monona Grove, Beaver Dam and Two Rivers.
Kenosha has been thinking of expanding its 4-K program, which was started about seven years ago in a fourth of its elementary schools through a special state-financed program, said Kathleen Barca, the district’s executive director of school leadership.
But Waukesha Superintendent David Schmidt said that even with the five-year phase-in, the new requirement made it unlikely that his district would be able to maintain a decades-old kindergarten-readiness offering for students identified as needing extra help.
The district educates about 100 students a year in its 4-K program.

Waukesha’s Executive Director of Business Services, Erik Kass, will assume a similar position in Madison this summer.

The science teacher: Memorial’s Ben Senson goes the extra mile to challenge and engage his students

Maggie Rossiter Peterman:

With a meter stick in his hand, Ben Senson instructs his ninth-grade science students on how to calculate formulas for force using levers and fulcrums.
He sketches out an equation on the whiteboard, turns around, adjusts the meter stick on a spring scale and calls for a reading.
“Where do I put the weight for a third-class lever?” the Memorial High school [Map] teacher quizzes.
No one answers.
“Come on, man,” Senson cajoles. “We have to pre-read our labs so we know what we’re going to do. If you’re running short of time, make sure you get the spring scale reading. Do the math later.”
Grabbing their lab sheets and purple pens, the freshmen split into groups to complete the assignment for an Integrated Science Program.
“The equations are hard to remember,” Shannon Behling, 14, tells a classroom visitor. “It gets confusing.” But she sees the value of the assignment: “We may not use this stuff, but it gets your brain to think in a different way.”

Brown vs. Board of Education

Britannica:

A Law case in which, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that no state may deny equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction. The decision declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. Based on a series of Supreme Court cases argued between 1938 and 1950, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka completed the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had permitted “separate but equal” public facilities. Strictly speaking, the 1954 decision was limited to the public schools, but it implied that segregation was not permissible in other public facilities.

May 17, 1954.

District Puts All the World in Classrooms

Winnie Hu:

For nearly a decade, the lesson that the world is interconnected — call it Globalization 101 — has been bandied about as much in education as in economics, spurring a cottage industry of internationally themed schools, feel-good cultural exchanges, model United Nations clubs and heritage festivals.
But the high-performing Herricks school district here in Nassau County, whose student body is more than half Asian, is taking globalization to the graduate level, integrating international studies into every aspect of its curriculum.
A partnership with the Foreign Policy Association has transformed a high-school basement into a place where students produce research papers on North Korea’s nuclear energy program or the Taliban’s role in the opium trade. English teachers have culled reading lists of what they call “dead white men” (think Hawthorne and Hemingway) to make space for Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini. Gifted fifth graders learn comparative economics by charting the multinational production of a pencil and representing countries in a mock G8 summit.

Cyber Bully Charges

Scott Glover & PJ Huffstutter:

Invoking a criminal statute more commonly used to go after computer hackers or crooked government employees, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles on Thursday charged a Missouri mother with fraudulently creating a MySpace account and using it to “cyber-bully” a 13-year-old girl who later committed suicide.
The girl, Megan Meier, hanged herself in her upstairs bedroom two years ago, shortly after being jilted by an Internet suitor she thought was a 16-year-old boy. The case caused a national furor when it was alleged that the “boy” was actually Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends.

Odyssey Project Celebrates its Latest Graduates

Maria Bibbs:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Odyssey Project held its fifth annual graduation ceremony for its 2007-2008 graduates on May 7. Family, friends, and loved ones gathered at the UW Memorial Union to celebrate the students’ accomplishments and the exciting journey that lies ahead of them.
“This is the beginning of a journey: for some, a journey to college, while others are returning to college,” said Odyssey Project Director Professor Emily Auerbach.
The Odyssey Project offers members of the Madison community an opportunity to begin a college education through an intensive, two-semester course. The program’s goal is to provide wider access to college for nontraditional and low-income students by offering a challenging classroom experience, individual support in writing, and assistance in applying for admission to college and for financial aid.
Auerbach said that the Langston Hughes poem “Still Here” embodies this remarkable class’s collective sentiment, after they had spent a year engaged in rigorous study while handling financial and family responsibilities that had previously made a college education seem little more than a dream deferred. “Sometimes you can make a way out of no way. If you open the door to education, you can change lives,” Auerbach said.

An End to Classroom Surfing

University of Chicago Law School:

The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most classrooms in order to ensure the value of the classroom experience.
With the implementation of wireless Internet access in Law School classrooms came better opportunities for students, who typically carry laptop computers, to be online during class—a common practice at institutions across the country, said Saul Levmore, Dean of the Law School.
“As soon as we discovered that we had the capacity turn off Internet access during class time, we felt that we ought to move in that direction. Our goal is to provide the best legal educational experience in the country, with students and faculty focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner,” said Levmore, who noted that many students have expressed support of the decision to remove wireless access in classrooms, including second-year Law School student Peter Rock Ternes.
“What makes our Law School is our faculty,” Ternes said. “I think it makes sense to encourage focusing on them and on the classroom discussions.”

More at Freakonomics.
Locally, the Madison School Board will discuss “Modifications to Board Policy and Procedure 4403 concerning Student Possession and Use of Cell Phones and Other Electronic Devices” Monday evening, May 19, 2008.

Caught in a Swirl of Drug Violence, Mexico Vows to Fight Back

James McKinley:

President Felipe Calderón and dozens of federal agents attended the funeral of the chief of the federal police on Friday morning, a day after his assassination, even as investigators focused on the possibility that someone inside the police force had tipped off the killers to his location.
The services for the federal police chief, Commander Edgar Millán Gómez, and two other agents killed in the line of duty this week started just a half-hour after four armed men shot and killed a commander in Mexico City’s police force outside his home.
Newspapers here, moreover, were full of reports of battles between drug gangs in Sinaloa State, including one involving a bazooka. A sense that violence by organized crime had spun out of control seemed to hang over the country.
After the service, Mr. Calderón, escorted by heavier security than usual, traveled to Tamaulipas State on the border with Texas, where drug dealers have clashed repeatedly with troops and the federal police, to send the message that his administration would not be intimidated by Mr. Millán’s assassination.

Letters on: Improvements to New Orleans Schools

Letters regarding “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores“:

Re “Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores” (news article, May 7):
We’re pleased to see that New Orleans schoolchildren are making academic gains, such as improving their scores on the latest Louisiana Educational Assessment Program.
As your article points out, post-Katrina schools have invested in reforms like intensifying tutorial and after-school programs. These reforms have long been promoted by the United Teachers of New Orleans.
But one should not get the impression that the higher scores are a direct result of importing new teachers to the city. We applaud the efforts of every teacher who has come to work in New Orleans schools. But some of our most successful schools, like Bethune Elementary and Sophie B. Wright, are those that employ the highest percentages of veteran teachers who are familiar with their students’ communities

Dot McDonald – A Rising Star

A. David Dahmer:

The sky is the limit for the Madison area senior who will be graduating from Madison West in June. Dot has been involved in just about everything possible at her school, and people have noticed. She was recently recognized by the Madison Metropolitan Links Inc. at the annual Student Recognition Program as a 2008 Links Scholarship recipient. She won the Project Excel Award at West High and the Jewel of the Community Award from the Ladies of Distinction for making a difference in the community. She’s involved with the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth where she received a leadership award and also recently won the Joe Thomas Community Service Award for her extensive community involvement. “I do like to stay active,” Dot laughs.

Girls Who Play Too Much

Ruth Conniff:

Everyone knows an athlete who has been sidelined by injury. I can think of two off the top of my head: star football players I knew in high school and college, both of whom suffered career-ending knee injuries and struggled with almost existential crises as they adjusted to life as regular humans instead of campus gods.
But in a provocative cover story this week in The New York Times Sunday magazine, “Hurt Girls” (adapted from the forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports), author Michael Sokolove posits that female athletes suffer far greater rates of injury than males. The injury crisis is so severe, relates Sokolove, it casts the whole Title IX revolution in women’s sports in a grim light.
“I’m afraid for her and for all these girls,” Sokolove quotes the mother of an injured soccer player saying. “What’s it going to be like for them at 40 years old? They’re in so much pain now. Knees and backs and hips, and they just keep on going…. Are they going to look back and regret it?”

Educational Romanticism: On Requiring Every Child to Be Above Average

Charles Murray:

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools — its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways.
Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

Clusty Search on Charles Murray.

School Funding’s Tragic Flaw

Kevin Carey:

Public education costs a lot of money — over $500 billion per year. Over the last century, there have been huge changes in where that money comes from and how it’s spent. In 1930, only 17 percent of school funding came from state sources, and virtually none came from the federal government. Today, the state / local / federal split is roughly 50/40/10 (individual states vary). People still say all the time that “most” school funding comes from local property taxes, but that hasn’t actually been true since the mid-1970s.
On the whole, this change has been of tremendous benefit to disadvantaged students. As states have assumed the primary role in funding education, they’ve tended to distribute money in ways that are, on the whole, more equitable. The same is true for federal funding, most of which is spent on behalf of poor students and students with disabilities. (This works because taxpayers have a weird psychological relationship with their tax dollars. Rationally, people should view every dollar they pay in taxes and receive in services as equal, regardless of the basis of taxation or the source of the services. But they don’t. People feel very strongly that locally-generated property taxes should be spent locally, while they feel less ownership over state taxes and even less over federal dollars. As a result, they’ll tear their hair out if you propose transferring 10 percent of their local property tax dollars to a low-income district across the state, but they’re far more sanguine if you propose a state school funding formula with precisely the same net result in terms of the taxes they pay and the dollars their local school district receives. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s okay, because this irrational jurisdiction-dependent selflessness is what allows for the redistributionist school funding policies that poor students depend on to get a decent education.)

Madison’s revenue sources are a bit different than Carey’s example: 65.1% from local property taxes, 17.2% redistributed state taxes and the rest from grants, contributions and other sources.
Related links:

Finally, Patrick McIlheran notes that Wisconsin’s tax burden continues to rise:

Wisconsin’s entwined state and local governments taxed a sum equal to 12.3% of Wisconsinites’ income last year. That was up from 12.2% the year before and 12.1% the year before that. This biennium, the state is spending 10.5% more than last. Ever, the numbers rise.
They rise because the state’s costs do. But taxpayers, too, pay more for gasoline, food, power and practically everything else. Times are tough. You’d think the least government could do would be to avoid piling on.

Prince William Schools Join to Design Regional Science/Technology Magnet

Ian Shapira:

Prince William County, after years of longing, may finally get a selective magnet school to serve as a mini-rival to Fairfax County’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
The Prince William, Manassas and Manassas Park school systems recently won a $100,000 state grant to design a regional “governor’s school” that would open by fall 2010 and specialize in math, science and technology.
The yet-unnamed school, which would have rigorous admissions requirements, would differ in key respects from Thomas Jefferson, a full-day governor’s school in the Alexandria section of Fairfax that draws students from across Northern Virginia. Students would still attend neighborhood schools, traveling to the new magnet campus only for high-level classes.

Pennsylvania Charter Schools Growth

Eleanor Chute:

More than a decade after charter schools became legal in Pennsylvania, it is safe to say the schools, once considered experimental and still sometimes controversial, are here to stay.
About 64,000 students are enrolled in 126 charter schools statewide, and about 20,000 are on charter school waiting lists, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools.
Nearly half of the schools are in Philadelphia. But parents of Western Pennsylvania students — including 2,355 children living in Pittsburgh — also have chosen charter schools, which can be bricks-and-mortar buildings or cyber schools.
Their staying power will be in evident this week as the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools, a statewide advocacy and support organization, conducts its state convention at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center, Uptown. The meeting, which began yesterday, runs through tomorrow and is expected to attract more than 1,000 people.

Madison West Rocketry Club Travels to the Team America Rocketry Challenge

TARC website:

The scores are in, and all the hard work has paid off for the 100 finalists for the Team America Rocketry Challenge. Those teams will face one another during the exciting final fly-off on Saturday, May 17 in The Plains, Va. for the title of national TARC champion. After a full day of launches, held at the Great Meadows facility, the winners will be crowned and $60,000 in scholarships will be divided up among the top finishers.

West Rocketry website.

11 Madison-area students win at National History Day

Wisconsin Historical Society:

We are proud to announce the national finalists and alternates for the 2008 Wisconsin History Day State Event held on May 3, 2008. The national finalists represented Wisconsin at the national contest June 15-19, 2008 at the University of Maryland – College Park.
The first and second alternate in each category are offered the opportunity to attend the national contest in the event that the finalist entry is unable to attend.
Each finalist designs their entry to reflect the annual theme. The entries below reflect the annual theme for 2008: Conflict and Compromise in History.
This year’s local winners: Amanda Snodgrass (Mount Horeb High School), Joanna Weng (Velma Hamilton Middle School), and Alexandra Cohn and David Aeschlimann (Madison West High School). The following students from Eagle School were also winners: Hannah O’Dea, Carolyn Raihala, Sophie Gerdes, Sonia Urquidi, Nate Smith, Jeffrey Zhao and Eli Fessler.

Via the Capital Times.

Some Rich Students ‘Merit’ Financial Aid

Kim Clark:

Although college tuition prices are at an all-time high, colleges are, on average, issuing stingier financial aid packages this year, say counselors who’ve been helping families with their college finances.
Counselors who have examined awards from many colleges say that only a few dozen extremely generous schools are making sure that every student who needs financial help gets enough scholarships to attend. Meanwhile, a growing number of schools and states are awarding scholarships to students from wealthy families. Some of the wealthy students are receiving “merit” awards because of their top grades or test scores, but counselors say they are increasingly seeing run-of-the-mill but wealthy students receive “merit” awards, too. Meanwhile, the vast majority of low- and middle-income students are receiving far less aid than they need.

The Haskins Literacy Initiative

Michael F. Shaughnessy:

First of all, what exactly is this Haskins Literacy Initiative?
Haskins Literacy Initiative promotes the science of teaching reading in three main ways.First, we provide comprehensive professional development, coaching and classroom support to make teachers masters of effective literacy practices. Teachers, not programs, teach children to read.By becoming informed consumers about the myths and realities of teaching reading, teachers can become “method-proof,” knowing what to teach which child when.
Second, we conduct field research about how knowledge and practice impacts student reading achievement.
Our parent, Haskins Laboratories, has conducted more basic reading research for over 40 years.Finally, we engage in advocacy to inform public policy to improve reading achievement for every child.

Waukesha begins looking at an operating referendum

Amy Hetzner:

District officials blame the financial troubles on the discrepancy between what they can raise under revenue caps, which increase roughly 2% a year, and expenditures that grow about 4% a year.
A $4.9 million annual addition to the district’s operating revenue that was approved by voters in an April 2001 referendum gave the district only a few years free from cutting programs and services. Another referendum attempt in April 2005 that would have raised taxes to help avoid further staff reductions failed by a substantial margin.
Board member Patrick McCaffery warned that the board risked another referendum setback if it proceeds without searching for additional efficiencies, including closing a school and realigning attendance boundaries

Waukesha’s Executive Director of Business Services, Erik Kass will soon join the Madison School District in a similar capacity. K-12 Tax & Spending Climate.

YES, A New Approach for the Inner City

Nidya Baez, Douglas Cruickshank:

Reinventing our schools with a greater emphasis on student needs and community engagement is, I believe, one of the most broadly beneficial ways to apply the “think globally, act locally” philosophy. Indeed, many students, parents, teachers, administrators and education experts would probably agree that our education system must be radically retooled to increase its relevance and effectiveness in ways that enable all individuals to prosper in what’s already shaping up to be an extremely challenging century.
That was what I and some of my fellow high school students were thinking in 2002, even if we didn’t express it in quite those words. Nonetheless, by 2003 we’d helped develop an Oakland high school called YES (Youth Empowerment School), part of the city’s Small Schools Initiative. Last year, I graduated from UC Berkeley. I’m now working as a substitute teacher and language tutor, and I’ve recently interviewed for a fall 2008 faculty position at YES.
In 2002, and today, Oakland’s students and its schools were coping with problems endemic to education in big cities across the United States.

Foundation for Madison Public Schools Celebrates Carol Carstensen’s School Board Tenure

Samara Kalk Derby:

More than 100 friends, colleagues, family members and parents showed up at a farewell party Wednesday at Olbrich Gardens to say goodbye and thank you to Carol Carstensen, who served six terms on the Madison School Board and stepped down after the spring elections.
“There will never be another Carol Carstensen. I will predict that,” said School Board member Johnny Winston Jr. “There will never be another School Board member in this community that will serve 18 years. I miss her already.”
Winston called it a wonderful experience to work with Carstensen.
“She really not only knew the material and had a grasp of the issues going on, but she also had her pulse on the community as well,” he said.
Former board member Nan Brien, who served with Carstensen in the early 1990s, said that for 18 years Carstensen was the spokesperson on the board for all the kids in the district.
“She was particularly adamant that all kids, no matter their background, have an opportunity for the best education. That is the heart and soul of who Carol Carstensen is,” Brien said.

Carol reflects on her tenure, including three accomplishments she takes personal pride in: Wright Middle School, renaming 5 middle schools to reflect the diversity of our community and establishment of the Joe Thomas award.
Much more on Carol Carstensen here. Watch a brief video interview with Carol during her most recent campaign.
More on the Foundation for Madison Public Schools here. John Taylor’s 2003 challenge grants energized the formation of FMPS.

Teach For America’s Growth

Sam Dillon:

Teach for America, the program that recruits top college graduates to teach for two years in public schools that are difficult to staff, has experienced a year of prodigious growth and will place 3,700 new teachers this fall, up from 2,900 last year, a 28 percent increase.
That growth was outpaced, however, by a surge in applications from college seniors. About 24,700 applied this spring to be teachers, up from 18,000 last year, a 37 percent increase, according to figures released by the organization on Wednesday.
The nonprofit program sent its first 500 recruits into American public school classrooms in 1990. It has a large recruiting staff that visits campuses, contacting top prospects and recruiting aggressively. Founded by a Princeton graduate, it has always carefully sifted through applicants’ grade-point averages and other data in recruiting. But with the numbers of applicants increasing faster than the number of teachers placed, it was even more selective this year than before, the organization said.

Wisconsin’s Structural Deficit: $1,700,000,000

Steven Walters:

State government faces a long-term imbalance between spending commitments and tax collections of almost $1.7 billion – even if the budget-repair bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday becomes law.
That figure is $800 million more than last fall, when the budget was adopted.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau blamed the higher long-term deficit on the sluggish economy, because tax collections are expected to grow by only 2% – less than half the 5.5% annual growth in the past. Every 1% lag in tax collections means state government collects $130 million less in taxes.
Fiscal Bureau Director Bob Lang gave legislators the $1.7 billion estimate of the so-called “structural deficit,” which is the projected shortfall Gov. Jim Doyle and legislators face next year when they must pass the 2009-’11 budget.

Parents are Less Strict on Their Younger Children

Raina Kelley:

It’s considered a “fact” of sibling relations: the baby of the family always gets away with murder. If the oldest brother had a curfew of 11 p.m. on weekends, his baby sister just has to call if she’s staying out all night. But can it be proven that parents are always stricter with their first born?
Researchers from the University of Maryland, Duke University and The Johns Hopkins University say yes, if there are younger siblings in the family, out of concern for the example that is being set for them. Using economic game theory, which is the use of mathematical analysis to determine what kinds of choices people make, the research team looked at more than 11,000 subjects in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to predict levels of parental discipline. They also discovered that having one additional younger brother or sister can lower the chance that an adolescent will drop out of high school by 3 percentage points. Researchers also found that though parents are much less likely to financially support or put up with a rebellious teen if there are still younger children at home, their resolve weakens as older siblings move out and younger siblings grow up. “As a result, the theory predicts that last-born and only children, knowing that they can get away with much more than their older brothers and sisters, are, on average, more likely to engage in risky behaviors,” says University of Maryland economist Ginger Jin, one of three coauthors of the study. NEWSWEEK’s Raina Kelley spoke to Gin about the study and the games teens play. Excerpts

Assistant LA Superintendent Sounds Off

Mitchell Landsberg interviews Ramon Cortines:

“I’ve tackled some of the sacred cows in my recommendations, such as the issues of contracts, how much money we could receive from that. Such as the issue of health benefits, and how much money we could receive by capping that. And increasing the co-pay.”
Cortines was at times unsparing of LAUSD’s failures, saying that the district is organized for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the children they are hired to serve. He said the school board passes too many resolutions that “aren’t worth the paper [they’re] printed on.” And he said the district had “abdicated our responsibility” for Locke High School, which is about to be turned over to Green Dot Public Schools, the big charter operator. Students didn’t get a pass, though: He said the district needs to enforce “a code of behavior” based on the idea that they don’t just have rights — they also have responsibilities.

Clusty Search: Ramon Cortines.

Hawaii lawmakers push keiki education

Loren Moreno:

With milestone legislation poised for passage, Hawai’i is expected to join a growing list of states that have established some form of an early childhood education system.
State lawmakers said last week they are likely to pass the “Keiki First Steps” legislation — Senate Bill 2878 — which would set aside at least $250,000 to establish a state council on early learning. The council is intended to be the governing body of what is likely to become Hawai’i’s public-private early education system.
The system would be a private-public partnership, with services offered by existing and new childcare or preschool facilities.
The state eventually would make money available to the private schools to use for kids age 3 to 4. As a condition of taking the money, a school would have to agree to meet state standards.

Legal Advocacy and Education Reform: Litigating School Exclusion

Deann Hill Rivkin:

School exclusion has existed as a dark side of public education since the creation of America’s public schools. Several cases in the United States Supreme Court memorably invalidated State and school system efforts to deny equal educational opportunities to marginalized school children and youth. In these cases, the over-riding multiple values of education were poignantly articulated in the majority decisions.
School exclusion has stubbornly persisted. It takes many forms. This article surveys the most prominent pathways to school exclusion, highlighting what has been called the “School-To-Prison-Pipeline.” Various legal challenges are also evaluated. The pros and cons of litigating school exclusion cases are also assessed.

Commentary on: Should Student Results Count in Grading Teachers?

Followup on Student Test and Teacher Grades:

I am a retired elementary school principal from Long Island, N.Y. I was also a teacher, counselor and school psychologist during my 39 years in public education.
It was, to say the least, appalling to learn in John Merrow’s “Student Tests — and Teacher Grades” (op-ed, May 9) that teachers’ unions prevailed, at least in New York state, in eliminating the quality of student performance in determining a teacher’s tenure. Besides violating common sense, it is counter to most other evaluations. For instance, aren’t coaches in any sport evaluated by the performance of their respective charges, be they teams or individuals?
In my estimation, the evaluation of a teacher’s performance for tenure consideration at K-12 level should be based primarily on that teacher’s students performance, i.e., results, just as we judge the quality of performance in many other activities, be it sports, sales, etc.
Leon W. Zelby
Norman, Okla.
Blame the teachers and the unions — how often do we have to hear the same old tired arguments as to why the American educational system is failing?
I taught music for 20 years in both public and private schools, and there have always been good students and bad students.
Sorry, parents — when your kids don’t do well in school, it is usually due to lack of discipline at home. Parents who acquiesce to the whims of a child, refuse to impose rules, and blame the teacher are begging for their child to fail. Through the years, I watched as good teachers left the profession in disgust. For all their hard work, the pay is still low, administrators and parents still lack respect, and when something goes wrong, well, we still blame the teacher.

Matching Newcomer to College, While Both Pay

Tamar Lewin:

When Xiaoxi Li, a 20-year-old from Beijing, decided she should go to college in the United States, she applied only to Ohio University — not that she knew much about it.
“I heard of Ohio, of course,” Ms. Li said. “I knew it was in the middle, and has agriculture.””
What brought her here was the recommendation of a Chinese recruiting agent, JJL Overseas Education Consulting and Service Company. For about $3,000, JJL helped Ms. Li choose a college, complete the application and prepare for the all-important visa interview.
“Everyone I know used an agent,”” she said. “They are professionals. They suggested Ohio University might be the best for me. They have a good relationship with Ohio University.”
Actually, JJL has more than a good relationship with Ohio University. Unknown to Ms. Li, it has a contract, under which the agent gets a $1,000 commission for each undergraduate it sends.

Who will teach our children?

Daniel Meier:

I teach people who want to become public school teachers. Although the needs of our children and schools have never been greater, the number of people going into teaching has dropped by 23 percent between fiscal 2001-02 and 2004-05, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. California has about 300,000 teachers, half of whom are over 45 years of age. We need approximately 10,000 new teachers each year. But as our teachers age and get closer to retirement, and younger teachers enter the profession in increasingly smaller numbers, who will teach our children?
I have been a teacher educator for 11 years, and I teach in a high-quality program, but there are at least four critical reasons why we are not attracting enough teachers to California’s public schools.

Football, Dartmouth and a Third Grade Teacher

George Vecsey:

Williams, 53, is not just any retired player. He has been a shining light of the N.F.L., his name even floated around when the commissionership was open a couple of years ago. And he won awards for citizenship and sportsmanship while playing in two Super Bowls.
Before the 1982 Super Bowl near Detroit, not far from his childhood home in Flint, Mich., he told reporters how he had been underachieving in the third grade until his teacher, Geraldine Chapel, sent him off for tests that proved he was quite smart but hard of hearing. The hearing improved, and so did his self-image and his schoolwork.
Williams majored in psychology at Dartmouth and was all-Ivy linebacker for three years as well as an Ivy heavyweight wrestling champion. Undersized at 6 feet and 228 pounds, Williams merged his intelligence and his outsider’s drive to make the Bengals.

Leapold Elementary’s Population Again Rises to the Top

Channel3000:

Dozens of parents and staff members attended Monday night’s Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education meeting to shed new light on an old problem: overcrowding at a local elementary school.
The issue of overcrowding at Aldo Leopold Elementary School is prompting some parents and teachers to tell the board solutions they’d like to see to relieve the problem.
Some said that the obvious solution would be to build a new Leopold Elementary or perhaps to adjust the school’s boundaries. The group presenting the board with the findings of a parent-teacher survey about the challenges at the school, WISC-TV reported.
The school is at 99 percent attendance with 718 students and can only handle eight more students, officials said.

Monday evening’s Board meeting included a brief discussion of a much larger Leapold School – perhaps similar to the failed 2005 referendum that would have created a building suitable for 1100+students.

American man jailed after daughter fails exam

Tom Leonard:

A father who was ordered by a judge to keep a close eye on his daughter’s education has been jailed for six months after she failed a maths exam.
Brian Gegner, of Fairfield, Ohio, was sentenced to 180 days in prison for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”.
His daughter, Brittany, now 18, had a history of school truancy and a judge warned her father to make sure she passed her General Educational Development tests.
Her family said that she passed four of the five parts, except for maths which she has failed several times

Moms team up to battle influence of gangs: ‘We didn’t raise our kids this way’

Annie Sweeney:

It’s what everyone wants to know after a gang member terrorizes a neighborhood: Where are the parents?
For the last several months, at least some of them have been meeting in a South Side church basement to pray and cry and face a deep shame: They are mothers of the gang-bangers on the corners. Or they fear their child is about to join a gang.
Many are also single parents, struggling to pay bills. They work 16 hours a day, and every time they hear a gunshot, they worry their child has been shot or has shot someone else’s child. Some chase after their kids at 2 a.m.; others have stood in defiance when they won’t leave a corner.
And yes, they wonder what they did wrong.

Push Continues for the Wisconsin Covenant

John Burton:

Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor is traveling the state, urging eighth graders to sign up for the Wisconsin Covenant. The program seeks to get kids into higher education.
In Rhinelander, Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton told students education is necessary to have good job prospects. She says every student should have some form of post-high school education if they want to have a family supporting job.

Wisconsin Covenant Website:

Enrollment for current 8th graders is now open!
Students who want to sign the Wisconsin Covenant Pledge must do so by September 30th of their freshman year.
To join online, click here.

Pair Break Barriers for Charter Schools

Jay Matthews:

They won a legal battle to force Maryland to increase public funding for charter schools more than 60 percent. They opened two charter schools in Prince George’s County and befriended the superintendent there even though the county had a reputation as hostile to the charter movement. They run one of the largest charter school networks in the country.
Yet Dennis and Eileen Bakke remain relatively unknown in local education circles.
Dennis, 62, and Eileen, 55, live in Arlington County. He knows business; she is into education. Few people guess, and the Bakkes never volunteer, what an impact they have had on education in the region and beyond. Their Imagine Schools organization, based in Arlington, oversees 51 schools (four in the Washington area) with 25,000 students. By fall, it plans to have 75 schools with 38,000 students.
Jason Botel, who directs KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, is one educator who knows what the Bakkes have accomplished. “Their funding of advocacy efforts has helped make sure that . . . charter schools like ours can provide a great education for children in Maryland,” he said.

Imagine Schools’ report card.

Start school early and we can help poor kids

Andy Fleckenstein:

In Milwaukee, one out of three school-aged children lives in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Milwaukee ranks sixth highest in the nation. Many of these children do not have access to quality education at an early age, which gives them a disadvantage when entering school. It also affects their academic achievement, odds of graduating and potential for earning a family-sustaining wage as adults.
In other words, early childhood literacy is crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty.
Research shows that successful programs don’t teach just children. Academic performance improves when parents are involved. This might seem obvious, or even easy. But, for the single mother of three working two jobs, it’s anything but easy. It’s much harder to help with homework when you’re focused on getting food on the table.
For the past four years, the Fleck Foundation has supported United Way’s early childhood education initiative because the programs it funds require parents to be involved. We know that this key component leads to success. As a result, each year we challenge the community to support the initiative by matching donations dollar-for-dollar that are designated to address early childhood literacy. Our hope is to stimulate growth in donations and increase attention to this important issue.
One program in particular, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters or HIPPY, conducted by COA Youth and Family Centers, sends “coaches” to the homes of low-income families. The coaches show parents how to teach their children through reading.
The results speak for themselves.

Gang Activity in Suburbs Acknowledged

Christina Sanchez:

Two weeks before the fatal shooting of a Franklin teenager in what appears to be a gang-related fight, Nashville police gave gang awareness training to Williamson County school faculty.
The school officials’ request in March for the training suggests a willingness to acknowledge, although not yet publicly, what they and local law enforcement had long been reluctant to admit:
Gangs exist in suburbia.
“Gangs have always been here, probably much longer than the Police Department was aware or recognized,” said Sgt. Charles Warner, a detective with the Franklin Police Department. “We’ve started to see a slow increase. By no means is there an epidemic.”
Several smaller communities outside of Nashville have seen an increase over the past few years in gang presence and gang-related crime. Local police departments attribute gangs’ migration to growth — and to Metro’s aggressive police crackdown on street gangs in Nashville, which pushes criminal activity to outlying cities.

Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison.

Check the Facts: Few States Set World-Class Standards
Summer 2008 (vol. 8, no. 3) Table of Contents CHECK THE FACTS: Few States Set World-Class Standards
In fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless

Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess:

As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014, states disagree on the level of accomplishment in math and reading a proficient child should possess. A few states have been setting world-class standards, but most are well off that mark—in some cases to a laughable degree.
In this report, we use 2007 test-score information to evaluate the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an achievement measure that is recognized nationally and has international credibility as well. The analysis extends previous work (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005, and “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006) that used 2003 and 2005 test-score data and finds in the new data a noticeable decline, especially at the 8th-grade level. In Figure 1, we rank the rigor of state proficiency standards using the same A to F scale teachers use to grade students. Those that receive an A have the toughest definitions of student proficiency, while those with an F have the least rigorous.
Measuring Standards
That states vary widely in their definitions of student proficiency seems little short of bizarre. Agreement on what constitutes “proficiency” would seem the essential starting point: if students are to know what is expected of them, teachers are to know what to teach, and parents are to have a measuring stick for their schools. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to determine how student achievement stacks up across states and countries.
One national metric for performance does exist, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP is a series of tests administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP tests measure proficiency in reading and math among 4th and 8th graders nationwide as well as in every state. The NAEP sets its proficiency standard through a well-established, if complex, technical process. Basically, it asks informed experts to judge the difficulty of each of the items in its test bank. The experts’ handiwork received a pat on the back recently when the American Institutes for Research (AIR) showed that NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” was very similar to the standard used by designers of international tests of student achievement. Proficiency has acquired roughly the same meaning in Europe and Asia, and in the United States—as long as the NAEP standard is employed.

No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite: Worst-Performing Schools Rarely Adopt Radical Remedies

Robert Tomsho:

Critics of the federal No Child Left Behind law, including Democratic presidential candidates vowing to overhaul or end it, have often accused it of being too harsh. It punishes weak schools instead of supporting them, as Sen. Barack Obama puts it.
But when it comes to the worst-performing schools, the 2001 law hasn’t shown much bite. The more-radical restructuring remedies put forth by the law have rarely been adopted by these schools, many of which aren’t doing much to address their problems, according to a federal study last year.
The troubles in the restructuring arena reflect broader questions about whether NCLB is a strong enough tool to bring about the overhaul of American education. In many ways, the law was an outgrowth of “A Nation at Risk,” a pivotal 1983 federal report that warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in education could undermine the nation’s competitiveness. That report ushered in the era of accountability and testing, which eventually spawned NCLB.
Supporters maintain the law is helping to fuel learning gains. In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders rose compared to 2005, albeit only by a few points.
But NCLB gave states — not the federal government — authority to set the academic standards for local schools. And so, while NCLB requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, states determine what proficiency is and how they will test for it. A 2007 federal study found states don’t exactly agree on proficiency.

Related: Commentary on Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction Standards. DPI Website.

New BadgerLink training videos

Wisconsin DPI:

Four new programs on the BadgerLink website make it easy to learn how to make the most of the BadgerLink databases. BadgerLink is a free service for Wisconsin residents which provides access to articles from thousands of newspaper and periodical titles, image files, and other specialized reference materials and websites. BadgerLink is a project of the Department of Public Instruction, in cooperation with the state’s public, school, academic, and special libraries and Internet service providers.
The new videos cover how to use databases such as EBSCO, Kids Search, Searchasaurus, TeachingBooks, ProQuest, Newspaper ARCHIVE, the African American Biographical Database, and LitFinder

Folks, We’ve Reached an Awkward Age

Monica Hesse:

Things that are ” awk-ward,” according to a group of University of Maryland students hanging out on the campus quad:
1. Elevators.
2. That guy in the dorm who is so tall that he sees over shower stalls without even trying.
3. Having dinner with your new girlfriend when your ex-girlfriend and her new girlfriend show up at the same restaurant (you, in this instance, are a he).
4. Vegetarian chopped liver, which looks like the most “feces-like food ever,” and which what’s-his-name was eating in public for Passover.
5. Curry.
When any of these are encountered, the appropriate reaction is to say, loudly and in falsetto, awk-ward

‘College material’ label doesn’t stick for all – and that’s OK

Steve Blow:

I’ve got an assignment for you.
As you’re out and about over the next couple of days, I want you to notice all the jobs that don’t require a college degree.
I’ll get you started with a few – bus driver, cashier, plumber, cop, construction worker, waiter, sales clerk, janitor, child care worker, mechanic, appliance technician, cable installer, postal carrier, carpenter, barber, truck driver …
OK, you get the idea.
Now, let’s think about a pervasive philosophy in public education. It’s summed up in a bumper sticker I saw last week: “Our Students Are COLLEGE BOUND.”
That particular sticker was from the Garland Independent School District, but it’s the same mantra expressed in every district these days.
Our schools have turned into Lake Woebegone ISD, where every student is above average and on the way to a Ph.D.

No Small Plan: Public Boarding Schools for Chicago

Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:

Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.

Continue reading No Small Plan: Public Boarding Schools for Chicago

Take That AP Test or Flunk

Jay Matthews:

J. David Goodman’s story in the New York Times last week about the new Advanced Placement policy at two high schools in New Jersey at first made me cringe.
His lead paragraph read: “Students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes at two schools in the Northern Valley Regional High School District in Bergen County are now required to take the AP exams this month — or receive a failing grade in the courses under a new school policy being questioned by some parents and students.”
Take the AP exam or you flunk the course? It seemed un-American. U.S. high schools are famously forgiving of students who don’t want to subject themselves to the three-hour college level exams at the end of AP courses. Most leave it up to the student. Some remove the AP designation on their transcript if they don’t take the exam. In a few areas, such as Northern Virginia, the schools require that all AP students take the AP exams in May, but if they decide at the last minute to spend those lovely days at the beach, the only penalty is they don’t get the extra grade-point credit for taking an advanced course. To a senior who has already been admitted to college by May, that has no more sting than a disappointed look from his mother.

A Look at LA’s Small Learning Communities

Jason Song:

Like many large districts throughout the nation, L.A. Unified has been trying to increase the number of smaller learning communities, hoping that personalized instruction would boost student achievement and offer an alternative to charter schools, including the five Green Dot campuses near Jefferson.
The academy, one of four Los Angeles Unified campuses that opened almost two years ago, is partially funded through the New Tech Foundation, a Napa, Calif.-based nonprofit that supports 35 schools throughout the country. Two of the others, Arleta High School of Science, Math and Related Technologies and the Los Angeles High School for Global Studies, have increased their test scores dramatically. However, at Jordan New Tech High School, the API score was 25 points lower than that on the regular Jordan High campus.
Unlike charters, which are publicly funded but are not regulated by L.A. Unified, New Tech schools are run by district administrators. “We’re under a lot of pressure: pressure from parents, pressure from the public, to find results that work,” said Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, adding that New Tech “clearly works.”

Raikes to Take the Gates Foundation’s Reigns

AP:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says Microsoft Corp. executive Jeff Raikes will be its next CEO.
The world’s largest charitable foundation has been looking for a new leader since chief executive Patty Stonesifer announced in February that she would be stepping down.
Raikes has been the top executive in Microsoft’s business software division, responsible for such things as the Office software suite, Microsoft’s server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.

Clusty Search: Jeff Raikes.
The Gates Foundation initially supported the Small Learning Community High School approach. Clusty on Small Learning Communities.
The Economist:

CONGRATULATIONS, Jeff Raikes, on your great new job as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And good luck: you will certainly need it.
Unlike most other foundation CEO jobs, this is unlikely to be a comfortable pre-retirement sinecure. The Gates Foundation is by far the biggest charitable organisation in the world, and growing quickly. Next year, it is expected give away at least $3 billion, up from barely $1 billion a couple of years ago. Some insiders expect that number to rise as high as $6 billion in the near future.

Philadelphia safe-schools advocate say the lack of discipline violates the law

Kristen Graham:

Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is “dysfunctional and unjust,” according to a report by the district’s safe-schools advocate.
In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.
Prompted by questions from The Inquirer and two months after receiving Stollsteimer’s report – which he is required by law to complete – the state blasted the safe-schools advocate’s document and said it would release its own version next week.
“The draft report has serious problems – some of the data analysis is inaccurate, the legal analysis is flawed. We are releasing the official report on Monday,” said Sheila Ballen, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Some of California’s most gifted students are being ignored, advocates say

Carla Rivera:

If you reviewed Dalton Sargent’s report cards, you’d know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.
Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.
With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students — who usually perform well on standardized tests — too often are ignored, advocates say.
Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.
There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students — whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems — deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.

Linda Scholl @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research: SCALE Case Study: Evolution of K-8 Science Instructional Guidance in Madison Metropolitan School District [PDF report]

In addition, by instituting a standards-based report card system K-8, the department has increased accountability for teaching to the standards.
The Department is struggling, however, to sharpen its efforts to reduce the achievement gap. While progress has been made in third grade reading, significant gaps are still evident in other subject areas, including math and science. Educational equity issues within the school district are the source of much public controversy, with a relatively small but vocal parent community that is advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students. This has slowed efforts to implement strong academic equity initiatives, particularly at the middle and early high school levels. Nonetheless, T&L content areas specialists continue working with teachers to provide a rigorous curriculum and to differentiate instruction for all students. In that context, the new high school biology initiative represents a significant effort to raise the achievement of students of color and economic disadvantage.

WCER’s tight relationship with the Madison School District has been the source of some controversy.
Related:

Scholl’s error, in my view, is viewing the controversy as an issue of “advocating for directing greater resources toward meeting the needs of high achieving students”. The real issue is raising standards for all, rathing than reducing the curriculum quality (see West High School Math teachers letter to the Isthmus:

Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?

)
A friend mentioned a few years ago that the problems are in elementary and middle school. Rather than addressing those, the administration is trying to make high school changes.
Thanks to a reader for sending along these links.

Proximity & Power
Why do the headquarters of state teachers’ unions tend to be so close to state capitol buildings?

Jay Greene & Jonathan Butcher:

If you stand on the steps of a state capitol building and throw a rock (with a really strong arm), the first building you can hit has a good chance of being the headquarters of the state teachers’ union. For interest groups, proximity to the capitol is a way of displaying power and influence. The teachers’ union strives to be the closest. It wants to remind everyone that it is the most powerful interest group of all.
To see who has the most powerful digs, we actually bothered to measure just how close interest group offices are to state capitol buildings. We started with a list of the 25 most influential interest groups, as compiled by Fortune magazine. We then used Google Maps to plot the location of the state offices of those 25 interest groups and measured the distance to the capitol building.
The results are illuminating. Of the 25 most influential interest groups, the teachers’ union is the closest in 14 of the 50 states. By comparison, the AFL-CIO is the closest in seven states. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the National Federation of Independent Business are the closest in five states, each. The American Association for Justice (AAJ)—the leading organization of U.S. trial lawyers, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, or ATLA—is the closest in four states.

Middle schools pitch college to low-income students early

AP:

Most students at Mildred Avenue Middle School come from low-income, minority families and have parents who didn’t go to college. Many don’t speak English at home and have no plans to attend college.
Which is exactly why officials decided to make it the only middle school in Boston with a full-time college counseling office. They want to convince the school’s 560 students that college is attainable.
Middle school offices specifically dedicated to college guidance are part of a growing trend at schools across the country as officials try to make sure students don’t begin planning too late.
“Middle school is when students are still open to all the opportunities and options they have, because by the time they get to high school they are often at the point where they say ‘Oh, I can’t do that,”‘ said Jill Cook, assistant director of the American School Counselor Association.

General Vang Pao’s Last War

Early in 2007, the Madison School Board decided to name a new far west side elementary school after Vang Pao. This decision became ingreasingly controversial after Pao was arrested as part of a plot to overthrow the Laos Government (the school has since been named Olson Elementary). Tim Weiner Interviews Vang Pao Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes digs into this latest chapter in the Hmong / US Government relationship:

The case against Vang Pao grew out of a sting operation, a crime created in part by the government itself. What evidence there is rests largely on secretly recorded conversations led by an undercover federal agent, and while the transcripts implicating some of the co-defendants in the case seem damning, the agent barely met Vang Pao. The talk between them was brief; though Vang Pao may have dreamed aloud of a glorious revolution in Laos in years gone by, his role in the conspiracy charged by the government may be hard to prove. The government presents the case as a clear-cut gunrunning conspiracy in violation of the Neutrality Act, which outlaws military expeditions against nations with which the United States is at peace. But the old general’s defenders contend that the case against him is the consequence of a misguided post-9/11 zeal. If convicted in a trial, the former American ally could face the rest of his life in prison. And already his indictment has apparently emboldened Laotian and Thai authorities to crack down on the beleaguered Hmong who remain in refugee camps or in hiding in the jungles of Laos.
The government has a checkered record of late in its sting operations against people subsequently charged with planning acts of political terror. In 2006, to take one example, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that a joint terrorism task force had broken up a plot to “levy war” and to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago. In that case, as two trials have shown, an F.B.I. informant known to the defendants as Brother Mohammed created some of the key evidence — leading the group in an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda, for instance. He provided them with plans and plots and gave them military gear like combat boots. The defendants never had contact with actual terrorists, never obtained weapons or explosives. Two juries have failed to see the logic of the case; a federal judge has had to declare two mistrials. (The government plans to try the case a third time.)
The sting operation against Vang Pao exhibits some similar traits. It has also dismayed a number of American intelligence officers who worked with the Hmong against the army of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. “We taught him how to do these things — to fight political warfare, to try to defeat the enemy,” I was told by Larry Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief who worked with the general in Laos. “We helped Vang Pao learn to do some of the things that he and his troops are now charged with.”

Britannica on the Hmong.

School turnaround projects are enormously difficult propositions. They must be guided by four basic realities.

Frederick M. Hess:

Across the nation, educators are struggling to turn around troubled schools. In the District of Columbia, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has teams seeking to overhaul 27 schools targeted for “restructuring” by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
This is hardly uncharted territory. Reformers have spent decades proposing new remedies for low-performing schools. Magnet programs, schools without walls, block scheduling, site-based management, and a litany of other popular ideas have emerged, only to disappoint.
Today, NCLB’s mandated restructuring of schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” for five consecutive years has fueled extensive new efforts. NCLB spells out five options for such schools: reopening as a public charter school; replacing most staff; contracting out operations to a new organization; turning the keys over to the state; or adopting “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” Modest variations of the amorphous fifth option have proven the most popular, by far.
More than 2,000 schools across the United States are currently in the process of restructuring, which has given rise to a nascent “turnaround” industry. The Louisiana School Turnaround Specialist Program is recruiting and grooming a cadre of school leaders. In New York, the Rensselaerville Institute runs a school turnaround program. At the University of Virginia, the graduate schools of education and business have partnered to train “turnaround specialists.” In Chicago, the Chicago International Charter School has launched ChicagoRise to provide management expertise and support for turnaround projects.

Transition School Wins Reprieve

Andy Hall:

A Dane County alternative high school that faced possible shutdown over finances has won a reprieve that will keep the school open for at least one more year.
“The good news is we got it to stay open. And we got some time to recommit ourselves to how we might keep it open, ” said Belleville School District Superintendent Randy Freese, who worked with the superintendents of the Mount Horeb and Oregon school districts to recommend measures approved Friday at a meeting of Dane County superintendents.
Under the plan to save Dane County Transition School, 10 school districts in and around Dane County will purchase at least 24 slots at $13,690 apiece for high school students who struggle academically or socially in traditional schools.

Charter Schools are Great, but Not Why You Think

Kevin Carey:

Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation’s first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on.
Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel. They’ve just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that’s all they did, that’s way more than enough.

Carey is spot on. Cracking the legacy public school governance monolith is essential to progress. “Progress requires conflict”.

Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year

AP:

Carleen Gulstad, who teaches 8th and 9th grade language arts at Hopkins North Junior High School, was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year on Sunday.
Gulstad said in an interview that she tries to see each student as an individual.
“Every kid counts. Every kid has a story. And every kid has value,” she said.
The Teacher of the Year honor is awarded annually by the teachers union Education Minnesota, which cited her commitment to teaching students good communication skills as well as how to interact positively in a diverse and changing world.

Bad Rap on the Schools

Jay Matthews:

Oh, look. There’s a new film that portrays American teenagers as distracted slackers who don’t stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America’s public schools. If we don’t do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go- getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between after school jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in ’08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates’s distress at seeing Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey’s Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half hearted stabs at their math homework.

Via Flypaper.

UK Reading Recovery Study

Institute of Education:

New research into the progress of 500 children published today shows that young children who were the poorest readers – and the very lowest-achieving in their class – can go on to outperform the national average within two years. They must be given four to five months of one-to-one tuition by specially trained Reading Recovery teachers for about 30 minutes a day while the children are aged six.
The research by the Institute of Education into the Every Child a Reader project shows that boys benefit to the same extent as girls and that one-to-one tuition helps to reduce the gender gap. The presence of Reading Recovery teachers also helps the other children in the school who do not attend the Reading Recovery lessons.
The two-year research project looked at the reading and writing progress of the lowest achieving children in 42 schools in ten inner London boroughs with the biggest social problems. The eight poorest readers in each class, then aged six, were selected. Eighty-seven of these children had the benefit of the Reading Recovery special tuition programme and their progress was compared to a group of children of similar ability and backgrounds, who did not receive the same tuition.
After one year children who had received the tuition had reading ages that matched their chronological age, and were 14 months ahead of the children in the comparison group.

Complete report here.
Much more on Reading Recovery here.

“No Surprises in School Budget, but Referendum Looms”

Tamira Madsen:

Facing a possible referendum and $9.2 million hole for the 2009-10 school year, no major alterations are anticipated to the school 2008-09 budget that will be finalized Monday by Madison School Board members.
When new superintendent Dan Nerad starts in July, referendum discussion will come to the forefront for the Madison Metropolitan School District. If Board members decide to propose a referendum, which could occur as early as November, they will request taxpayers consider overriding state-imposed revenue gaps so that services and programs won’t have to be severely slashed from the district’s budget.
In the meantime, only one administrative amendment and two Board amendments are on the agenda and approval is expected at the School Board meeting as superintendent Art Rainwater presents plans for the final budget of his tenure. Rainwater, who has worked with the district for 14 years — including the last 10 as superintendent — will retire this summer. Nerad will take over on July 1.
School Board members are well aware of the multi-million budget cuts looming for the 2009-10 school year, and Rainwater said he wasn’t surprised with short list of amendments.
“I think the overall intention for the Board from day one was really and truly to work to preserve exactly what we have,” Rainwater said during a telephone interview Friday.

Notes and links on the proposed $367,806,712 2008/2009 budget.
Three proposed budget amendments:

  • Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [19K PDF]
  • Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [19K PDF]
  • Increase technology purchases by $100,000 and reduced the reserve for contingency
  • Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [9K PDF]
  • Increase the Fund 80 tax levy by $60,000 for the Madison Family Literacy / Even Start Literacy Program [9K PDF]

Much more on Fund 80 here.

On Madison’s Lack of a 4K Program

Andy Hall:

In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially “the next best tool” for raising students’ performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
“It’s one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do,” said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
“We’ve never been able to get around the money,” said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state’s limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he’s “always believed that those things could have been resolved” if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state’s school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts’ startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
“I am excited about it,” said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district’s Web site. “He’s gone out and he’s made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison’s inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin’s approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state’s largest district, long has offered 4K.
“It’s been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
“The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way.”

Related:

  • Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
  • MMSD Budget History: Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).

District to review whether other child abuse cases went unreported

Tami Abdollah:

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District officials are trying to make sure no other child abuse allegations went unreported to the district, in the wake of allegations that a middle-school teacher charged with molesting five students had been investigated but not charged two years earlier.
“We need to do a districtwide assessment on all our windows and all our doors, and find out if our classrooms are safe as they can be,” Assistant Supt. Mike Matthews told more than 100 parents at a meeting Thursday night at Lincoln Middle School. “We have begun that process.”
Thomas Arthur Beltran, 60, who is married and worked at Lincoln for two decades, was arrested Saturday after a 12-year-old student told her parents he had abused her, and they notified police. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 14 felony counts of sexual molestation: eight counts of a lewd act on a child, three counts of continuous sexual abuse and three counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object on a child under 14. All the alleged incidents occurred in Beltran’s classroom, police said.
The charges include an incident in 2006 that was reported to the principal; at the time, police investigated, but prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to file charges.

Seattle Drops Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support; Downsizes Teaching & Learning

Jessica Blanchard:

After four years and a number of embarrassing public-relations gaffes, Seattle Public Schools plans to cut its controversial Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support as part of a central office shake-up.
The move is part of the first phase of a staff reorganization aimed at saving money, helping departments collaborate more and better aligning resources with the goals in Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s upcoming strategic plan.
The reorganization will go into effect in July and will merge some departments in the district’s “learning and teaching” division, elevate some positions and combine others.
About 15 managers and other staff members in the district’s “learning and teaching” division will lose jobs, but can apply for other district work, including nine new positions.
Though the Office of Equity, Race and Learning Support will be eliminated, its responsibilities will be transferred to other departments, district spokeswoman Patti Spencer said Thursday. “The district’s dedication to this work remains as strong as ever,” she said.

Related: “When Policy Trumps Results“.
Diversity on Affirmative Action for Law Schools by Bryan Atwater.

Stanford students try writing a graphic novel

Justin Berton:

Tom Kealey has taught a lot of writing classes at Stanford University, but never one that asked students to consider the dramatic pause provided by the “page flip.”
Or how wide to draw “the gutter.”
Kealey and co-instructor Adam Johnson taught a winter course titled The Graphic Novel, and assigned their students to write, edit and illustrate a collaborative final project. The result is a 224-page graphic novel titled “Shake Girl,” based on the true story of a Cambodian karaoke performer named Tat Marina who was the target of an “acid attack” after she had an affair with a married man.
“In a normal writing class, you’d write a poem or finish a chapter and you’d own it,” Kealey said. “In this class, we had to collaborate every step of the way, every idea, and make compromises. It was the most difficult and rewarding class I ever taught.”
While the study of comics and graphic novels has steadily become an acceptable part of college curricula – “Maus” creator Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University last year – the project-based graphic novel class offered at Stanford appears to be the first of its kind.

Shakespeare reduced for pupils to pass exams

Graeme Paton:

Shakespeare productions are being cut into bite-sized chunks to make them easier for children to understand.
Theatres are staging productions of individual scenes, rather than the entire play, to meet the requirements of secondary school examinations.
Plays such as Richard III, The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing are being performed for just a few minutes each.
The move has been criticised by traditionalists, who claim students are being denied the chance to properly appreciate the playwright. The comments come amid claims that the league table culture is narrowing the curriculum as schools are forced to “teach to the test” to inflate their position on national rankings.

Art Project at Winnequah

Peter Sobol:

Kristin is spearheading an effort to bring artists Jeanne and David Aurelius to the district next fall for an artist-in-residence program with the goal of rendering a large tile mural in the Winnequah cafeteria. The project is meant to enhance the environment at Winnequah and mark the transition to an elementary school.
The project involves the artists working with the elementary students to select a theme, create the artistic elements and merge them into the overall design, manufacture the individual tiles (one per student) and then install them as a mural. The result is a unique and permanent creation that is an expression of the students and the school community.
More details of the process can be found on the Clay Bay Pottery website.

A Look at the Chicago Teachers Union

Alexander Russo:

CTU one of the most conflicted, colorful organizations out there – having their dirty laundry aired on District 299.
Drama and infighting is better than anything on reality TV – “Real World, CTU” – but about a serious issue.
Happy May Day – appropriate and timely for this discussion
WHAT”S BEEN HAPPENING
Scads of comments this winter and spring about what’s going on inside the teachers union.
Makes sense – there are tens of thousands of Chicago teachers, as well as teachers in training and parents with kids in CPS schools – directly affected by what happens in CPS and within the CTU.
Most recently: Letter sent to me in which Stewart complains about being treated rudely by her own Secretary (Linda Porter), elected on a slate with MS last spring.

Student Tests and Teacher Grades

John Merrow:

Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he’d taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?
Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?
These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.
However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don’t have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?
Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That’s because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.

Clusty search: John Merrow.

The Uneven Playing Field

Michael Sokolove:

BY THE TIME JANELLE PIERSON SPRINTED ONTO THE FIELD for the start of the Florida high-school soccer playoffs in January, she had competed in hundreds of games since joining her first team at 5. She played soccer year-round — often for two teams at a time when the seasons of her school and club teams overlapped. Like many American children deeply involved in sports, Janelle, a high-school senior, had traveled like a professional athlete since her early teens, routinely flying to out-of-state tournaments. She had given up other sports long ago, quitting basketball and tennis by age 10. There was no time for any of that, and as she put it: “Even if you wanted to keep playing other sports, people would question you. They’d be, like, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ ”
Janelle was one of the best players on a very good high-school team, the Lady Raiders of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale. A midfielder and a 2007 first-team, all-Broward-County selection, she had both a sophistication and a fury to her game — she could adroitly put a pass right on the foot of a teammate to set up a goal, and a moment later risk a bone-jarring collision by leaping into the air to head a contested ball.
That she was playing at all on this day, though, was a testament not to her talent but rather to her high threshold for pain, fierce independence and formidable powers of persuasion. Janelle returned to action a little more than five months after having an operation to repair a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, or A.C.L., in her right knee. And just 20 months before that, she suffered the same injury to her other knee.

Sacramento Area Superintendent Search

Kim Minugh:

Wanted: A good manager, effective communicator and academic visionary to take over a school district reeling from millions of dollars in budget cuts, declining enrollment and the ongoing pressure of raising student achievement.
Make that two.
Two of the region’s largest school districts are looking for new leaders to navigate them through these tough times. On Wednesday, San Juan Unified Superintendent Steven Enoch confirmed that he will leave at the end of June for a position in the East Bay.
Two months ago, Sacramento City Unified Superintendent Maggie Mejia said she will leave the district when her five-year contract expires, also at the end of June.
Officials in both districts – and outside observers – say finding replacements in the current climate could be a tall order.

Media Education Coverage: An Oxymoron?

Lucy Mathiak’s recent comments regarding the lack of substantive local media education coverage inspired a Mitch Henck discussion (actually rant) [15MB mp3 audio file]. Henck notes that the fault lies with us, the (mostly non) voting public. Apathy certainly reigns. A useful example is Monday’s School Board’s 56 minute $367,806,712 2008/2009 budget discussion. The brief chat included these topics:

  • Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s view on the District’s structural deficit and the decline in it’s equity (Assets – Liabilities = Equity; Britannica on the The Balance Sheet) from $48,000,000 in the year 2000 to $24,000,000 in 2006 (it is now about 8% of the budget or $20M). (See Lawrie Kobza’s discussion of this issue in November, 2006. Lawrie spent a great deal of time digging into and disclosing the structural deficits.) Art also mentioned the resulting downgrade in the District’s bond rating (results in somewhat higher interest rates).
  • Marj asked an interesting question about the K-1 combination and staff scheduling vis a vis the present Teacher Union Contract.
  • Lucy asked about specials scheduling (about 17 minutes).
  • Maya asked about the combined K-1 Art classes (“Class and a half” art and music) and whether we are losing instructional minutes. She advocated for being “open and honest with the public” about this change. Art responded (23 minutes) vociferously about the reduction in services, the necessity for the community to vote yes on operating referendums, ACT scores and National Merit Scholars.
  • Beth mentioned (about 30 minutes) that “the district has done amazing things with less resources”. She also discussed teacher tools, curriculum and information sharing.
  • Ed Hughes (about 37 minutes) asked about the Madison Family Literacy initiative at Leopold and Northport. Lucy inquired about Fund 80 support for this project.
  • Maya later inquired (45 minutes) about a possible increase in Wisconsin DPI’s common school fund for libraries and left over Title 1 funds supporting future staff costs rather than professional development.
  • Beth (about 48 minutes) advocated accelerated computer deployments to the schools. Lucy followed up and asked about the District’s installation schedule. Johnny followed up on this matter with a question regarding the most recent maintenance referendum which included $500,000 annually for technology.
  • Lucy discussed (52 minutes) contingency funds for energy costs as well as providing some discretion for incoming superintendent Dan Nerad.

Rick Berg notes that some homes are selling below assessed value, which will affect the local tax base (property taxes for schools) and potential referendums:

But the marketplace will ultimately expose any gaps between assessment and true market value. And that could force local governments to choose between reducing spending (not likely) and hiking the mill rate (more likely) to make up for the decreasing value of real estate.
Pity the poor homeowners who see the value of their home fall 10%, 20% or even 30% with no corresponding savings in their property tax bill, or, worse yet, their tax bill goes up! Therein lie the seeds of a genuine taxpayer revolt. Brace yourselves. It’s gonna be a rough ride.

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue noted recently that Wisconsin state tax collections are up 2.3% year to date [136K PDF]. Redistributed state tax dollars represented 17.2% of the District’s revenues in 2005 (via the Citizen’s Budget).
Daniel de Vise dives into Montgomery County, Maryland’s school budget:

The budget for Montgomery County’s public schools has doubled in 10 years, a massive investment in smaller classes, better-paid teachers and specialized programs to serve growing ranks of low-income and immigrant children.
That era might be coming to an end. The County Council will adopt an education budget this month that provides the smallest year-to-year increase in a decade for public schools. County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has recommended trimming $51 million from the $2.11 billion spending plan submitted by the Board of Education.
County leaders say the budget can no longer keep up with the spending pace of Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who has overseen a billion-dollar expansion since his arrival in 1999. Weast has reduced elementary class sizes, expanded preschool and kindergarten programs and invested heavily in the high-poverty area of the county known around his office as the Red Zone.
“Laudable goals, objectives, nobody’s going to argue with that,” Leggett said in a recent interview at his Rockville office. “But is it affordable?”
It’s a question being asked of every department in a county whose overall budget has swelled from $2.1 billion in fiscal 1998 to $4.3 billion this year, a growth rate Leggett terms “unacceptable.”

Montgomery County enrolls 137,745 students and spent $2,100,000,000 this year ($15,245/student). Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
I’ve not seen any local media coverage of the District’s budget this week.
Thanks to a reader for sending this in.
Oxymoron

Teacher Content Knowledge Exams: Connecticut’s Reading Requirement

Arielle Levin Becker:

Aspiring early childhood and elementary school teachers will have to prove they know how to teach reading on a test the State Board of Education has added to Connecticut’s teacher certification requirements. The change, which was made Wednesday, comes amid worries about stagnating or declining student reading scores statewide and concerns that not all state teachers know the mechanics of teaching reading.
“This sends a message to teacher preparation institutions that they need to make sure they have a focus on the art and science of teaching reading,” state Department of Education spokesman Tom Murphy said.
Introducing a test on teaching reading was among the recommendations offered by educators at a reading summit the state education department held last fall. Legislators also have pushed for adding a test on reading instruction to certification requirements.

Related by Jason Kottke regarding Malcolm Gladwell’s forthcoming book:

A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.

Red ties and boys’ pride: Sowing the seeds of good schools in the Midwest

The Economist:

EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago’s South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago’s business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.

Schools of Hope teachers recognized for narrowing racial achievement gap among Madison students

Sandy Cullen:


Madison teachers who participate in the Schools of Hope tutoring program were recognized Tuesday for their role in narrowing the racial achievement gap among students over the last 10 years.
“That’s what school districts around the country are trying to do, and Madison is accomplishing it,” First Lady Jessica Doyle told more than 50 elementary school teachers treated to the first outdoor reception of the season at the governor’s residence overlooking Lake Mendota on National Teacher Appreciation Day.
“Because of you and that extra energy you put in,” Doyle said, “more students can succeed and this whole community can be living with hope.”

Bill allowing Rockford schools to share data gets 1st OK

Aaron Chambers:

Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey has said for months that state law should be changed to require the Rockford School District to share names and personal information about students suspected of being truants.
The latest plan spearheaded by the mayor and introduced in the General Assembly on Tuesday does not compel the School District to disclose students’ information. Instead, the proposed law says the School District “may” do so.
Even if the proposal becomes law, the School District still must decide whether to provide the information in the format and within the time frame Morrissey prefers.
“I don’t think any board members would have supported legislation that compels us to share that, no matter what the situation is,” said Nancy Kalchbrenner, president of the Rockford School Board. “The collaboration and our constant communication and working together is what’s important. And this is a tool to allow us to share information.”

Accelerated Math in Maryland Middle Schools

Daniel de Vise:

The most noticeable change is a dramatic increase in students taking accelerated math classes in the middle years, an initiative that seems to have spread to every school system in the region. Educators view math acceleration as a gateway to advanced study in high school and, in turn, to college. Higher-level math classes have helped middle schools cultivate a community of students similar to those in honors and Advanced Placement high school classes.
At Samuel Ogle Middle School in Bowie, the number of students taking Algebra I, a high-school-level course, has doubled from 60 to 120 in the past two years.

Barry Garelick references Montgomery County’s experiment with Singapore Math. About Singapore Math. More here.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success

Samuel Freedman:

Set just a few subway stops apart in blue-collar Brooklyn, drawing from a similar pool of new immigrants and American-born blacks, two high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.
Since the late 1990s, Lafayette High School in the Bath Beach neighborhood graduated fewer than half its students, posted dismal scores on standardized tests and, in the view of federal civil rights officials, “deliberately ignored” a series of bias attacks against Chinese-American students, including a valedictorian.
The principal appointed in 2005 to improve the school shut down its program for gifted students and, in front of the assembled faculty, likened Lafayette to a Nazi death camp. Finally, at the end of 2006, the Department of Education announced that it would close Lafayette and transform it into five mini-schools.

National Science Bowl for High School Students

US Department of Energy:

The National Science Bowl® is a highly visible educational event and academic competition among teams of high school students who attend science seminars and compete in a verbal forum to solve technical problems and answer questions in all branches of science and math. The regional and national events encourage student involvement in math and science activities, improve awareness of career options in science and technology, and provide an avenue of enrichment and reward for academic science achievement.

Teacher Opposed to Standardized Tests Reconsiders

Weekend Edition:

As part of Weekend Edition Sunday’s monthlong education series, we hear from teacher Chela Delgado. She once hated standardized tests and didn’t want to make her students take them, but then she started listening to some of the children’s parents. Her commentary reveals how families in under-resourced schools are pursuing what they see as best for their kids.

audio

Six Books a Week: Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet

The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th’s Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.
The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

The Future of Reading

Ezra Klein:

The title of a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts was “Reading at Risk.” The follow-up, released in November 2007, upped the ante. “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” placed the consumption of Moby Dick up there with questions of poverty and health care. Weighty stuff. Around the same time, Newsweek published a cover story entitled “The Future of Reading”—I assumed the gist was along the lines of, “Nobody will be doing any, and the Russians will win.” I was wrong. In an almost uniquely American take on the subject, Newsweek decided to peer past the decline in reading and instead enthuse about the creation of new, expensive technologies that would help us read—namely, Amazon’s Kindle. The newsmag’s decision made a sort of perverse sense. After all, books may be in sharp decline, but compared to, say, 1992, reading on computer screens is way, way up. If you could put books on a computer screen, and maybe connect that to the Internet, you might really have something.

Bucky’s Little Helper

Todd Finkelmeyer:

With final exams coming up, Renee figures she could fetch about $20 per capsule for Adderall, a prescription amphetamine widely known across campus as a “study drug.” But she sells her surplus only to close friends, generally charging $5 per pill, which helps her cover her monthly refill costs of $25.
The UW-Madison senior first tried Adderall, which is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), during finals week of her freshman spring semester three years ago.
“I hadn’t slept in about two days and I had back-to-back finals coming up and, you know, you procrastinate a little and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘How am I going to get through this?'” says Renee, one of three Adderall users interviewed for this story who asked that her last name not be used due to fear of prosecution. “And a friend was like, ‘Here, take this, it’s just Adderall.'”

Priya Venkatesan Interview

Dartlog:

Review correspondent Tyler Brace conducted the following two interviews with Prof. Priya Venkatesan after news broke here on Saturday afternoon that she was threatening to sue seven students from her Writing 5 classes. Prof. Venkatesan—now of Northwestern University—is currently still planning to sue the College. —A.S.
……………
DR: Thanks for that. Why do you think a pretty significant amount of your students did complain about you? Why do you think that is?
PV: I think that sometimes when you have some students and some instructors they mix like oil and water. That could just be the explanation. It happens all the time, Tyler. Sometimes when a person goes into a corporation, they mix like oil and water. Sometimes when a person goes into a fellowship at a research institution like the one that I’m at now, the supervisor and the fellow mix like oil and water. It just happens a lot.

Joseph Rago:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Writer of the Week: I Would Go Out of my Way to Step on That Crunchy-Looking Leaf

“Featured Writer of Week:

Yael’s defining quality as a writer is her rich imaginary aesthetic. She received a 2008 gold regional key from the Scholastic’s Art & Writing Awards for her latest piece. Please celebrate Yael’s accomplishment by reading:

Yael Weisenfeld:

When I first heard the question I thought it was rather ridiculous. “Would you go out of your way to step on a crunchy-looking leaf?” It seemed so… strange. Really, who but a child would? Of course I replied in the negative and received a look from the man in return that was somewhere midway between pity and disappointment. I don’t see what made me deserve that response; how does he know that I’m just not a leaf-crunching kind of person? Maybe the sound of leaf-crunching is my pet peeve. It isn’t, but that’s not the point. Apparently I can’t possibly enjoy life without stepping on crunchy leaves. I suppose I wouldn’t know, but that man doesn’t seem too experienced in life-enjoyment either, as he always acts as though he’s got a stick up his a*#.

Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores

Adam Nossiter:

A broad education overhaul under way here has produced improvement in test scores, results released Tuesday showed, though many students are still struggling.
The number of fourth graders who passed a state promotional exam increased by 12 percentage points over the previous year, and eighth graders improved by four percentage points.
School officials also noted significant increases in the numbers of students with passing scores in the test’s various components — English, math, science, social studies and reading.
Nonetheless, more than half the students who took the test in those grades did not pass, and 60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana.

Why Milwaukee’s Busing Won’t End

Bruce Murphy:

As I’ve noted in the past, the headlines and placement of stories can heavily influence how readers perceive the news. A classic case was a story that ran in the Journal Sentinel two weeks ago, headlined “MPS board slashes busing.”
The Milwaukee Public Schools board did no such thing. The board simply set a goal to cut busing without spelling out how it would be accomplished – sort of like announcing a budget cut without specifying any spending to be reduced. As reporter Alan Borsuk noted in his second graph, “what will actually result will not be clear for perhaps several years.” Borsuk, never shy about caveats, also noted that most busing is required by state law (for special education students, students attending private schools, minority students traveling to suburban schools under Chapter 220, etc.) and cannot be changed by the school board.

Tutor faces exam leak probe

Carol Chung & Jeffrey Tam:

The Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating tutorial center Popular Modern Education and top tutor K Oten over alleged buying of Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination papers.
The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority said yesterday the case has been “forwarded to the law enforcement agency.”
The center and the tutor were accused of texting messages on the HKCEE English-language examination during a 45-minute break.
The messages allegedly contained an “immediate analysis” helpful to answering questions.
Oten, 32, yesterday denied cheating and bribing invigilators to acquire the papers, saying it is a “deliberate defamation.”
The tutorial center also denied providing the service to students. It said it will look into the matter and that it has terminated Oten’s services.
The matter came to light when some students claimed the tutor had unlawfully obtained the papers and used them for commercial gain.

Exploring KIPP

Roy Romer:

Part of the reason KIPP charters have seen success is because of their rigorous standards and extended learning day. These are both concepts that the campaign has been advocating since its beginning — we believe that charter schools, when coupled with high standards, effective teachers, and time and support for learning, hold bold promise for academic excellence.

Be Quiet and Rejoin the Herd

Ed Wallace:

The easiest way to demonstrate that our education system is designed to create order instead of embracing creative chaos is the morning traffic jam. Let’s take the people traveling on Interstate 35 E into Dallas: Every morning they’ll find that starting somewhere in Oak Cliff the traffic will come to a virtual standstill, until the last 3 or 4 miles into Dallas often turns into a 20- to 30-minute drive. And every morning you will find thousands upon thousands of drivers wasting gas, fuming in their cars that something needs to be done about congestion. Yet there is an easy answer: All they have to do to zip into Dallas quickly is take the South Marseilles exit, go 1.5 blocks north and turn right on E. Jefferson Boulevard. It’s that simple.
Crossing the Jefferson Street Viaduct with the 30 other drivers who have made that same quick critical decision to improve their morning commute, you can look south and see, extending for miles, a traffic jam that avoiding took you only two quick turns and cut 15 minutes off your commute. So why do thousands of intelligent people each and every day go through the same frustrating and wasteful ritual, when an easy and satisfying answer to the problem has always been there? That’s how we were taught.
Stuck in your car, waiting impatiently in traffic is exactly like being in sixth grade when your class filed into the cafeteria; you were told to stand there quietly without complaining, no matter how hungry you were. It’s this ingrained habit of non-critical thinking and unquestioning acceptance that makes morning traffic jams worse than they need to be. It makes ideology — obedience to a concept, as opposed to reasoning through a solvable problem — the basis for our daily decisions.

Related: Frederick Taylor. Britannica on Taylor.

Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison

Rose Johnson-Brown:

Many times people hide their heads in the sand when there is an accusation of behavior in Madison that might put the community at risk. “Not in my neighborhood” seems to be the response from many citizens in denial when the community is tainted with the reality of the growth of gang activity in Madison.
On this note, a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison social work students wanted to raise awareness in Madison of the prevalent increase in gang activity in Dane County communities. As a group project, they have researched the existence of gangs, their history, their trends and movement that could put children at risk.
On April 23 at Leopold Elementary School, Erin Wearing, Corrina Flannery, Amanda Galaviz, Teresa Rhiel, and Yer Lee, students of Professor Sandy Magana’s Advanced Macro Practice Social Work class, coordinated a community outreach event and informational session. It was presented for parents and educators in the Madison and surrounding communities by the Dane County Youth Gang Prevention Task Force.
Madison Police Detective George Chavez and Officer Lester Moore, along with Frank Rodriquez of the DARK Progam shed some light on the growing activity surrounding gang involvement in this area.

Gangs & School Violence Forum audio and video.

The Growing Wave of Teenage Self-Injury

Jane Brody:

“I feel relieved and less anxious after I cut. The emotional pain slowly slips away into the physical pain.”
“It’s a way to have control over my body because I can’t control anything else in my life.”
“It expresses emotional pain or feelings that I’m unable to put into words.”
“I usually feel like I have a black hole in the pit of my stomach. At least if I feel pain it’s better than nothing.”
These are some of the reasons young people have given for why they deliberately and repeatedly injure their own bodies, a disturbing and hard-to-treat phenomenon that experts say is increasing among adolescents, college students and young adults.
Experts urge parents, teachers, friends and doctors to be more alert to signs of this behavior and not accept without question often spurious explanations for injuries, like “I cut myself on the countertop,” “I fell down the stairs” or “My cat scratched me.”