All posts by Jim Zellmer

Fundraising: Hope for Education

Samsung:

The winner of the Samsung and Microsoft Hope for Education Essay Contest will receive up to $200,000 in Samsung electronics and Microsoft educational software for his/her school. Entrants must provide an original, sincere, no more than 100-word essay answering the following question: “What is the single most significant benefit that technology can provide in the classroom?” Entrants must be legal residents of the 50 U.S. states or the District of Columbia, and minors must obtain parent/guardian’s consent. Entry deadline: July 22, 2007.

Via a reader.

“A Loss of Innocence: Young brothers’ lives are example of the lure of gangs”

Donovan Slack:

Seven-year-old Brajon Brown is clearly a child. He hasn’t committed a crime, though he talks about it. His 12-year-old brother, Malcolm also is not in a gang – at least not one police recognize. He runs with a “crew” of friends formed when Malcolm was 9. Boston police call them “wannabes” and say they usually don’t show up on police radar until they are teenagers and committed to gangs known for more serious crimes. Some experts say Boston neglects such gangs, allowing momentum to build for a coming crime wave that would dwarf the record violence of the mid-1990s. Malcolm, who says the young males in the crew protect their territory by beating up challengers, faces charges in the beating and robbery of a boy earlier this year. “When you look into the eyes of a kid like that, in three or four years, you know he could take a life, no problem,” a former prosecutor and community activist says. He estimates that dozens of gangs like Malcolm’s – semi-organized groups of middle and elementary school-age youth who mimic the actions of older gangs – operate in Boston. Last year, 49 of 102 city-run youth programs allowed only participants 13 or older. And of 180 young people who received city counseling and intervention services, only 49 children were preteens. Stressing the diversion of preteens from lives of crime, Boston’s mayor launched an effort this year to enroll every child between 8 and 14 in a summer program. Teams of city workers knocked on more than 1,700 doors in attempts to reach families who need help. An official says 233 households signed up for services, but he doesn’t know how many were for preteens. Brajon, meanwhile, already walks the streets as if he owns them, slapping pay phones off the hook as he passes and knocking items from first-floor window ledges.

Utah wins $4.6M for school data tracking

Nicole Stricker:

Utah schools have won $4.6 million from the U.S. Department of Education to improve student data tracking, the Utah State Office of Education announced Wednesday.
The money will fund design and implementation of a better transcript transfer system. The proposed system will allow student records to follow them across districts, grade levels and even into college, the State Education Office said.
The current system requires transcripts to be mailed when a student transfers to a new school or applies to college. Because districts choose their own student-tracking software, transferred records often must be manually transcribed for the new system, said John Brandt, the State Education Office’s information technology director. But the proposed system would allow schools to send or request automatic electronic copies of those records.
“Because this is a federal grant, the improvements won’t come at the expense of classroom funding,” Judy Park, associate superintendent for data, assessment and accountability, said in a prepared statement.
Twelve other states also won grants based on the merit of their proposals, their need for the project and available funds. Grants went to Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

“No Child Left Behind Needs Fixing”

Robert Reich and Kai Ryssdal:

Worried about American competitiveness? Worry about our schools.
The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to fix our broken system of K-12 education by setting higher standards and requiring lots of tests. But the system’s still broken.
Of course, some testing is necessary to measure whether students are learning. But the No Child Left Behind Act has overdone it, turning our nation’s classrooms into test-taking factories where the curriculum is how to take tests rather than how to think.
The one thing we do know about successful classrooms is they require talented and dedicated teachers. And that’s the other problem with the Act. It hasn’t included enough money to pay salaries needed to attract the best and brightest into K-12 teaching — especially into classrooms populated mainly by poor and working-class kids.

10 Ways to Test Facts

Gregory McNamee:

We live in a sea of information, as Britannica’s Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there’s raw sewage floating on it. Sometimes that sea is so choppy that it’s dangerous to enter. In a time of educational crisis, when reading and analysis are fading skills, teaching students how to recognize the condition of the waters seems an ever more difficult task. Yet, for all the doomsaying of some observers, including some of my fellow conferees here, I prefer to be optimistic, to think that with a little coaching we all have in us the makings of champion freestyle surfers on that great ocean of data, knowing just where to look for tasty waves and a cool buzz, to quote the immortal Jeff Spicoli, and knowing too just where the riptides are.

2007 Streetball and Block Party on Saturday August 11th

Via an email from Johnny:

The 2007 Johnny Winston, Jr. Streetball and Block Party will be held on Saturday August 11th from 12 noon to 7:00 p.m. at Penn Park (South Madison). Activities include an adult men’s basketball tournament, youth drill team competition, music, entertainment, free bingo sponsored by Dejope gaming, youth and family activities, information booths, food vendors and more. Proceeds from this event will be donated to non-for-profit organizations. For more information please contact (608) 347-9715 or johnnywinstonjr@hotmail.com.

Virginia Governor Supports “Universal” Pre-Kindergarden

Tyler Whitley and Linday Kastner:

Despite slowing revenues, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he still plans to offer a universal, but not mandatory, pre-kindergarten program in Virginia without raising taxes.
Kaine said the program for 4-year-olds will have to be phased in. He has estimated the program, one of his main proposals when he ran for governor in 2005, will cost about $300 million a year.
He spoke to reporters after putting in a plug for the program at a meeting of the Virginia School Boards Association at the Richmond Marriott Hotel.
His remarks came the same day as the release of a new study that says while publicly funded preschool is a wise investment for Virginia it could cost more than Kaine predicts.

Rural Teachers Trained to Pass Along Math and Science Knowledge to Peers

Seean Cavanagh:

Taking a job as a mathematics or science teacher in rural Kentucky or Tennessee is an appealing career choice for educators who grew up in those communities. It’s stable work, which means a lot in farming and mining towns where jobs are scarce. It pays well, in an area where the cost of living is cheap. And it allows some young educators to work in the same schools where their parents and grandparents once taught.
But persuading math and science teachers from big cities and suburbs to move to isolated communities lacking in cultural amenities is a much tougher sell.
“We’re small,” said Kristal Harne, an elementary school math and science teacher from Liberty, Ky., population 1,897. “We don’t even have a Wal-Mart.”

How Hard Can It Be to Teach? The Challenges Go Well Beyond the Classroom

David Herszenhorn:

Working with children looks easy. It is not.
In four and a half years on the city schools beat, I have often repeated this anecdote to principals. And typically they chuckle, grateful for the recognition that many people, including the mayor, may underestimate how difficult it is to work in schools on a daily basis, and not just because of the intellectual challenges of teaching.
School professionals are called upon not only to educate children, but also to nurture curiosity and civic values, and even to teach the most basic manners. Once, while waiting to have lunch with my mother, now retired after more than 30 years as a teacher in a city elementary school, I stood in her school’s main entrance and watched a teacher walk by with her class, shouting: “Fingers out of your nose! Fingers out of your nose!”
Not only do professional educators have to know how to deal with children, they have to be clever about soothing an even wackier bunch: parents.

Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits

Motoko Rich:

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.
And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

Teen Site has X-Rated Link

Brad Stone:

Parents and child safety experts concerned about the online activities of teenagers have been particularly nervous about a Web site called Stickam, which allows its 600,000 registered users, age 14 and older, to participate in unfiltered live video chats using their Web cameras.
But those Internet safety advocates might be even more anxious if they knew of Stickam’s close ties to a large online pornography business.
On its Web site and in press reports, Stickam says that it is owned by Advanced Video Communications, or AVC, a three-year-old Los Angeles company that sells video conferencing and e-commerce services to businesses in Japan and other Asian countries.
But according to Alex Becker, a former vice president at Stickam, and internal company documents, Advanced Video Communications is managed and owned by Wataru Takahashi, a Japanese businessman who also owns and operates DTI Services, a vast network of Web sites offering live sex shows over Web cameras. Mr. Becker alleges that Stickam shares office space, employees and computer systems with the pornographic Web sites.

Transferring Up: In Support of Cross-District Transfers

Jonathan Kozol:

Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law gives children the right to transfer from a low-performing school to a high-performing school if the low-performing school has failed to demonstrate adequate improvement two years after being warned of its shortcomings.
Unfortunately, the transfer provision has until now been a bust. Less than 3 percent of eligible children have been able to transfer, in part because of the scarcity of space in high-performing schools within most urban districts. Although the law does not prohibit transfers between urban and suburban schools, it offers no inducements to the states to make this possible.
Democrats in the Senate should therefore introduce an amendment to authorize and make easier cross-district transfers — not on a specifically race-conscious basis, but solely to fulfill the professed intention of the law.

LA School Board Approves Governance Reform Package

Howard Blume:

The city’s new school board majority Tuesday pushed through its first wave of reform measures — and fast.
As a result, the Los Angeles Unified School District has new initiatives aimed at measuring student performance, paying employees on time, decreasing the dropout rate, helping English learners, building smaller schools, recruiting new employees, training principals and increasing parent involvement.
For new board President Monica Garcia and her three allies — who are backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — the meeting was nothing less than change on the march.

An “Honest Look at Charter Schools”

Jay Matthews:

Charter School City, otherwise known as Washington, D.C., has 25 percent of its public school students attending those independently run, taxpayer-supported schools. That is more than any other American city except New Orleans and Dayton, Ohio. Given their unique political location, the D.C. charters have gotten the most publicity, including surveys showing that the D.C. charter parents are very satisfied.
But exactly how satisfied are they? How does that satisfaction compare to parental feelings about the regular public schools? Do those good feelings about charter schools change over time? Those important questions are among the many charter school issues that are relentlessly examined in one of the deepest and most even-handed examinations of charter schools I have ever read–“Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?” by Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider. It is difficult to find a book or study of charter schools these days that does not take sides in the raging argument over whether charter schools are the salvation or the scourge of our nation’s schools. But Buckley and Schneider have pulled it off. Their book looks just at D.C. charters but is a useful indicator of what is going on with charters nationwide.

School Districts Seek to Fund a Lawsuit over Funding

Chet Brokaw:

South Dakota school districts and a coalition they formed are seeking a court order that would establish their legal right to fund a lawsuit that challenges the state’s school financing system.
The request was prompted by Attorney General Larry Long’s argument that the South Dakota Coalition of Schools and approximately 70 school districts have no legal standing to challenge the state’s system of funding education.
A judge should be able to rule on the legal issue quickly because no facts are in dispute, Long said Monday. The question of whether the districts and the coalition can support the school funding lawsuit involves only an interpretation of the law, he said.
“They’ve done what they’ve done, and the law is the law,” Long said.

Why does Congress hate the one part of No Child Left Behind that works?

Charlotte Allen:

In a classroom at Ginter Park Elementary School, a century-old brick schoolhouse on a dreary, zoned-commercial truck route that bisects a largely African-American neighborhood in Richmond, a third-grade teacher, Laverne Johnson, is doing something that flies in the face of more than three decades of the most advanced pedagogical principles taught at America’s top-rated education schools. Seated on a chair in a corner of her classroom surrounded by a dozen youngsters sitting cross-legged on the floor at her feet, Johnson is teaching reading–as just plain reading. Two and a half hours every morning, systematically going over such basics as phonics, vocabulary words, and a crucial skill known as “phonemic awareness” that entails recognizing the separate sound components of individual words–that the word “happy,” for example, contains five letters but only four sounds, or phonemes.
Phonemic awareness is an important prelude to phonics: learning which phonemes are represented in written English by which graphemes, or combinations of letters. According to the principles Johnson is following, it is the mix of phonemic awareness and phonics that enables children (and adults learning how to read for the first time) to sound out, syllable by syllable, unfamiliar-looking words they might encounter on a page and then link those words to meaning. In the world of forward-thinking educational pedagogy, phonemic awareness is deemed useless, phonics of only intermittent value, and the sounding out of words deadening to a child’s potential interest in books.

Joanne has more.

“School Choice Increases School Segregation”

Erin Zagursky:

Choice is generally thought to be a good thing. But with any choice comes consequence–intentional or otherwise.
When it comes to choosing where our children go to school, researchers have found as educational choices increase, our public schools become more racially segregated.
Salvatore Saporito and Deenesh Sohoni, faculty in William and Mary’s sociology department, wanted to see if the racial mix and poverty rates of students in public schools matches those of the neighborhoods the schools serve. For instance, if census data identifies the population of the area served by a certain elementary school as 48 percent white, 37 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic, then shouldn’t the school’s enrollment reflect that mix?
It should, but research by Saporito and Sohoni indicates that it often doesn’t, at least in many of the nation’s largest school districts. So what’s going on? It’s important to know; so important that their research is part of evidence presented in two current U.S. Supreme Court cases.
Their research draws a connection between school choice and segregation, but hasn’t yet tackled the “whys.” Are some parents more financially able to exercise school choice than their neighbors? Are there racial motives? And what motivates parents to keep their children in neighborhood schools, because staying in the local schools is also a choice–or is it?
Saporito and Sohoni’s next step is to investigate those thousands and thousands of individual family decisions that drive the trend–the individual tiles that make up the mosaic their research already has revealed. The size and scope of their work so far will make that next step a daunting task, but their mastery of mapping technology will make it a little easier.

Waukesha School Property Tax Levy Might Rise up to 8%

Amy Hetzner:

The School District’s property tax levy could rise more than 8% for the second consecutive year, despite staff layoffs that have increased class sizes and will leave elementary schools without librarians and counselors in the fall.
District officials cautioned that their estimates, released Monday at a meeting of the School Board’s Finance and Facilities Committee, are a best guess based on history and conservative mathematics. Nevertheless, the board is to be asked to vote on them as part of a preliminary budget next month.
Student enrollment could affect how much revenue the district can raise. In addition, the state Legislature has yet to approve its budget for the next two years, which could have a great impact on property taxes, depending on how much it allocates in state aid.

The Boy on the Bus

Joel Achenbach:

Every morning when I was in fifth grade, I walked a mile down the road to Stephen Foster Elementary, my neighborhood school. Then I got on a yellow school bus and rode across town. The Supreme Court had issued a desegregation order. It was 1970. Men had landed on the moon twice. Now white kids and black kids would go to the same schools.
The court order roiled Gainesville, Fla., and the rest of Alachua County. Private academies sprouted overnight to accommodate white families that bailed on the public schools. But most white folks hoped for the best, and their kids headed to what many of them had always considered the wrong side of the tracks.
The Supreme Court has recently revisited school integration, declaring, to gasps from many liberals and academics, that the government can’t use race as a criterion for assigning students to schools. But 37 years ago, the government not only took race into account, it also assembled a fleet of buses and began hauling white kids and black kids back and forth across town like so much cargo.
It was, in retrospect, an ambitious social experiment. It was also clumsy, and at some level outrageous, reducing all of us to a single characteristic of white or black.

Using a Robot to Teach Human Social Skills

Emmet Cole:

Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing.
Now, a humanoid robot designed to teach autistic children social skills has begun testing in British schools.
Known as KASPAR (Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics), the $4.33 million bot smiles, simulates surprise and sadness, gesticulates and, the researchers hope, will encourage social interaction amongst autistic children.
Developed as part of the pan-European IROMEC (Interactive Robotic Social Mediators as Companions ) project, KASPAR has two “eyes” fitted with video cameras and a mouth that can open and smile.
Children with autism have difficulty understanding and interpreting people’s facial expressions and body language, says Dr. Ben Robins, a senior research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire’s Adaptive Systems Research Group, who leads the multi-national team behind KASPAR.

Public computer surfaces are reservoirs for methicillin-resistant staphylococci

Issmat I Kassem, Von Sigler and Malak A Esseili:

The role of computer keyboards used by students of a metropolitan university as reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci was determined. Putative methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant staphylococci isolates were identified from keyboard swabs following a combination of biochemical and genetic analyses. Of 24 keyboards surveyed, 17 were contaminated with staphylococci that grew in the presence of oxacillin (2 mg l-1). Methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), -S. epidermidis (MRSE) and -S. hominis (MRSH) were present on two, five and two keyboards, respectively, while all three staphylococci co-contaminated one keyboard. Furthermore, these were found to be part of a greater community of oxacillin-resistant bacteria. Combined with the broad user base common to public computers, the presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci on keyboard surfaces might impact the transmission and prevalence of pathogens throughout the community.

Education Leadership Policy Toolkit

Education Commission for the States, via MetLife:

The Toolkit is the product of a two-year effort by ECS, underwritten by the MetLife Foundation, to enlarge awareness and understanding of the policies, practices and processes that serve to strengthen leadership for reform and improvement in schools and districts.
Policymakers and educators across the nation can tap the lessons learned in eight critical areas – ranging from decisionmaking processes to resource allocation to instruction, professional development and accountability – in three outstanding school systems: Boston Public Schools, Memphis City School District and National City (California) School District.
The Toolkit is organized around what the ECS study team found to be the defining features of the improvement efforts under way in Boston, National City and Memphis. Foremost among them is a clearly expressed, widely shared acceptance of responsibility for the educational success of all children.
This commitment is reflected in – and reinforced by – purposeful efforts to enhance collaboration, communication and leadership capacity within and across schools, and to forge stronger connections with families, community organizations, higher education institutions and other partners; a versatile infrastructure of support for teachers and principals; consistent, continuous evaluation of student performance, instructional practices and program implementation; and creative, strategic use of resources – not just money but also time, space and talent.

Madison Police Chief on Gangs in Schools

Madison Parent:

Madison Police Department Chief Noble Wray spoke on downtown safety at the monthly meeting of Downtown Madison, Inc. on June 28, 2007, and also briefly addressed the topic of gang activity in Madison schools during the program, as reported in The Capital Times (via the MadCrime101 blog, a welcome and valuable new resource focusing on concerns and issues relating to crime in Madison).
Chief Wray acknowledged the growing problem of gangs in Madison and their presence in Madison schools, and spoke of the need to quantify the extent of the problem and its trends, rather than reacting based on anecdotal “information”. I couldn’t agree more. The MPD can make much progress toward this goal by fuller and consistent disclosure to the public of incidents and statistics on gang activity (whether through its police district newsletters or its public information office news releases). But to quantify the gang problem in schools, the MPD will need to rely on data from the MMSD, since much can happen in a school which is relevant to quantifying the gang problem but isn’t brought to the attention of the MPD. Can the gang problem in Madison schools be accurately and reliably quantified and assessed for those schools that don’t have ERO’s (Education Resource Officers)? Of if the policies on when calls for service are to be made to MPD vary from school to school? Or when the MMSD relies on suspension and expulsion rates, instead of actual incidents of disruptive and violent behavior, to gauge school safety (all the while moving toward a policy of discouraging suspensions and expulsions)?

Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio / Video. More here [RSS].

When Discipline Starts a Fight: Pressured to Handle Disabled Children, A School Tries Restraints


Robert Tomsho:

When Eva Loeffler walked into her daughter Isabel’s classroom at Waukee Elementary School on Dec. 15, 2004, she says a male guidance counselor was trying to contain the shrieking 8-year-old by wrapping his arms around hers in a restraint hold.
Isabel, suffering from autism and other disabilities, had a history of aggressive behavior, but Mrs. Loeffler had never seen her so agitated. Her eyes were glazed and her face was red. “She was like a wild animal,” says Mrs. Loeffler, who, at the time, felt sorry for the counselor who had to deal with her daughter in such a state.
That sympathy waned as Mrs. Loeffler and her husband learned all the measures the school district used on Isabel. These included restraint holds by three adults at once and hours in a seclusion room that teachers called “Isabel’s office.” There the girl sometimes wet herself and pulled out her hair, according to documents filed in a 2006 administrative-law case the Loefflers brought against the school district.
In March, the presiding administrative-law judge ruled that the district had violated federal law by educating Isabel in overly restrictive settings and failing to adequately monitor its methods. The district has appealed. Its lawyer, Ronald Peeler, says it used “established educational principles” in addressing Isabel’s problems, and made adjustments when its discipline wasn’t working. “We are not dealing with an exact science here,” says Mr. Peeler.

Schools fuel tax increases

Amy Rinard:

Driven by rising school taxes, overall property tax collections in southeastern Wisconsin rose 4.6% this year, compared with a 2.4% increase the year before, a new Public Policy Forum study shows.
Most taxpayers were insulated from having to pay more because rising property values allowed government to spread the burden across an expanded tax base, the study says, but a local official warns that the trend in overall tax collections is bound to eventually push up tax bills as property values cool down.
“There’s no question in my mind that the inflationary factor is not going to be that high,” said Norm Cummings, director of administration for Waukesha County. “We’ll start to see it slow down; it’s not going to be like the ’90s.”
That will cause homeowners to watch local property tax levy increases more closely than they have in many years, Cummings predicted.

The slowdown in assessment increases (decreases?) will change the “we’re keeping the mill rate flat” sales pitch.

2007 International Mathematical Olympiad – Hanoi

hanoi42007zmetro.jpg
VietNamNet:

The organizing board said around 600 contestants from 100 countries and territories will take part in the IMO.
The organisation of the IMO aims to encourage students to study mathematics and create favourable conditions for countries to exchange information on the curriculum in schools.

48th International Mathematical Olympiad website. International Math Olympiad Website. US Site. MATC’s math club.
Photo taken at the Hanoi Temple of Literature.

Prep School Mired in Cheating Claims

Nanette Asimov:

University Preparatory Charter High School in East Oakland bills itself as a high-end academy where students attract recruiters from the nation’s top universities.
Photos of young scholars in caps and gowns grace its Web site above the names of colleges that accepted them — Oberlin, Dartmouth, Pomona, Whitman.
But that bright image belies a grim truth: Someone at this inner-city public school, also known as Uprep, is cheating.
The state Department of Education has just concluded for the second year in a row that one or more adults interfered with state-required testing at the school. This spring, state investigators seized copies of 2005 tests being illegally used to prepare students for the 2007 exams.
State rules require that test booklets be turned in at the conclusion of testing each year because many exam questions remain the same. At Uprep, someone photocopied the 2005 test books and kept them.
“That’s a fairly significant security breach,” said Deb Sigman, testing director for the state Department of Education. “California statute specifically prohibits any preparation that is specific to this test.”
Last year, investigators found that someone changed hundreds of test answers from wrong to right before they were sent to the state.
In a rare move clamping down on a charter school’s autonomy, the state is ordering the Oakland school district to take over Uprep’s testing, Sigman said.

Duking it out over teacher pension

Scott Elliott:

The DDN’s editorial board weighed in Saturday on the war of words between the Fordham Institute (the research arm of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation) and the State Teachers Retirement System over the health of the state’s teacher pension program.
Fordham, a frequent critic of the public education status quo, fired the first shot last month in a report that sounded alarms, saying the pension program was in serious danger.
What was unusual was the tough talk in reply from the state agency. STRS ripped Fordham’s study and the researchers methods, aruging that the pension program is solid.

Preparing STEM Teachers: The Key to Global Competitiveness

Sean Cavanaugh 884K PDF:

The document, produced by the Washington-based American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, provides descriptions of 50 teacher-education programs around the country. Although the report does not identify any single program or approach as most effective in swelling the ranks of math and science teachers, it says that more institutions are establishing stronger ties between colleges of education, which focus on teacher preparation, and academic programs, which are devoted to training undergraduates in specific academic subjects.
Barriers between those academic departments sometimes prevent talented math and science undergraduates from considering teaching careers, advocates for improved teaching have argued. Those intrauniversity divides also make it more difficult for aspiring teachers to obtain vital content knowl-edge in math and science before entering the classroom, some say.

Idaho Evaluating Math Ed

Joshua Palmer:

In an effort to prepare students for the rigors of increasing math requirements, the Idaho State Department of Education is re-evaluating the way schools teach and assess student proficiency in mathematics.
The Idaho Legislature approved $350,000 in research funding earlier this year, which paid for the development of a task force to examine issues such as various assessment methods, teacher training and remedial opportunities for students who struggle in mathematics.
The department will ask lawmakers in the 2008 legislative session to approve funding for the changes it will likely propose in math education and assessment.
Cindy Johnstone, mathematics coordinator for the state department, said the changes are part of the state’s math initiative, which was implemented to improve student proficiency in mathematics.
In Idaho and throughout the nation, math scores are steadily falling in elementary and middle schools – a problem that has forced high schools to devote more resources to math remediation.

Much more on math, here.

“Candidates vying to be teachers’ pet”: Obama Endorses Merit Pay

Thomas Fitzgerald:

Fifteen minutes before Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was scheduled to speak yesterday, teachers in the audience were crawling across the floor, trying to get closer to the lectern for a better camera angle.
When the Democratic presidential candidate finally took the stage, cheers from the delegates to the National Education Association were deafening, and nobody booed or hissed when, near the end of a 40-minute appearance, Obama endorsed the idea of merit pay for teachers.
Merit pay is a no-go for most in the teachers union – members say they are concerned it would not be implemented fairly – but Obama softened the blow by promising he would not propose “arbitrary measures” to link pay to performance.
“I want to work with teachers. I’m not going to do it to you, I’m going to do it with you,” the Illinois Democrat told the crowd of 9,000 at the Convention Center. As he spoke, cameras flashed around the hall.

Joanne has more.

Tutor Vista

www.tutorvista.com:

Our mission is to provide world-class tutoring and high-quality content to students around the world. TutorVista.com is the premier online destination for affordable education – anytime, anywhere and in any subject. Students can access our service from the convenience of their home or school. They use our comprehensive and thorough lessons and question bank to master any subject and have access to a live tutor around the clock. TutorVista helps students excel in school and in competitive examinations.

The Economist:

but TutorVista, an online tuition service, is aimed squarely at customers in the developed world. Mr Ganesh founded the company in late 2005 after spotting that personal tutoring for American schoolchildren was unaffordable for most parents. His solution is to use tutors in India to teach Western students over the internet. The teachers all work from home, which means that the company is better able to avoid India’s high-wage employment hotspots. TutorVista further hammers home its labour-cost advantage through its pricing model. It offers unlimited tuition in a range of subjects for a subscription fee of $100 per month in America (and £50 a month in Britain, where the service launched earlier this year) rather than charging by the hour. Tutors are available around the clock; appointments can be made with only 12 hours’ notice.
It is too early to gauge the impact of the service on educational outcomes, says Mr Ganesh, but take-up is brisk. TutorVista has 2,200 paying subscribers at the moment (most of them in America) and hopes to boost that figure to 10,000 by the end of the year. The company is expected to become profitable in 2008. Even cheaper pricing packages are on the way. Launches of the service are planned for Australia and Canada. Mr Ganesh is also investigating the potential of offering tuition in English as a second language to students in South Korea, where high rates of broadband penetration make the market attractive. Get that right, and China looms as an even bigger prize.

TutorVista, along with Rosetta Stone and other online tools offer practical options for families who seek new learning opportunities unavailable via traditional models. The nearby Oregon school district may add languages to their elementary programs. CyraKnow offers handy “phrase books” for the iPod.

Review Finds Nutrition Education Failing

Martha Mendoza:

– The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this year on nutrition education – fresh carrot and celery snacks, videos of dancing fruit, hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you eat well.
But an Associated Press review of scientific studies examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real success in changing the way kids eat – or any promise as weapons against the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

Extending what schools do risks diluting their core purpose

The Economist:

REJIGGING government departments is an easy way for a new leader to signal a break with the past. And this is exactly what Gordon Brown has done in his first week as prime minister, with a good deal of reshuffling of ministerial duties and two departmental eviscerations.
The most eyecatching of these divided the education department down the middle. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) inherits most responsibilities for under-19s, including some taken over from other departments, such as youth justice and the “Respect agenda” (cracking down on anti-social behaviour) from the Home Office. The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) takes up where DCSF leaves off, overseeing further and higher education and doling out research funding, much of which previously came from Mr Brown’s other main casualty, the now-deceased Department of Trade and Industry.

Many school libraries open so… Beat the Heat – Read!

Madison Metropolitan School District:

This summer the Madison School District is again running a summer library access project. The project’s primary goal is to ensure that Madison elementary-age school children, from both public and private schools, have easy access to library materials during their summer break.
By providing such access, the district hopes to minimize reading achievement loss during the summer months for students who might not otherwise have ready access to reading materials. Some studies suggest that 80% of the achievement difference between high income and low income students may be attributable to summer reading loss.

Northfield has a heroin problem

MPR:

Police in this upscale college town say they’re fighting an unusual heroin epidemic among high school kids.
More than 150 kids are hooked on the drug, Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith said Tuesday. He decided to publicize the problem with a news conference, where he said that as many as 250 current and former Northfield High School students could be involved – some feeding heroin habits of as much as $800 a day.
The epidemic has increased crime and caused consternation in Northfield, one of the most educated and affluent cities in Minnesota, and home to both Carleton and St. Olaf colleges.
“This is affecting our ability to deal with other community concerns,” Smith said. “We find ourselves more often reacting to crimes than preventing them.”
Smith said investigators first caught wind of the problem when crime started spiking, including a doubling in burglaries and tripling in thefts from autos from 2005 to 2006. It led them to the informal heroin ring at the high school of about 1,300 students.

With rise in autism, programs strained

Carey Goldberg:

A decade ago, it took a few months to get a child into Melmark New England, a special school largely for children with autism. Now, the wait can be five years
Boston-area parents, worried their child may be autistic, routinely face delays as long as nine months to confirm the diagnosis — even though current wisdom holds that treatment should begin as early as possible.
And LADDERS, a Wellesley autism clinic, has all but closed its doors to new patients: “We’re backed up well over a year here, and other clinics are struggling the same way,” said Dr. Margaret Bauman, its director.
Statewide, the number of schoolchildren diagnosed with autism has nearly doubled over the last five years, from 4,080 to 7,521, according to soon-to-be-published data from the Department of Education.

Hoping to Retain Graduates, Maine Helps With Loan Costs

Katie Zezima:

Seeking to discourage Maine college graduates from leaving the state, Gov. John Baldacci signed a bill Monday giving tax credits to lower the cost of student loans for those who stay in the state.
The program, called Opportunity Maine, starts in January and will apply only to new loans. The tax credit will last 10 years, or until the recipient moves out of state.
“This is about our generation helping the next one,” Mr. Baldacci, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We’re telling our students, If you live, work and pay taxes in Maine, you’re not going to have this student debt hanging around your neck.”
The tax credits will be capped at $2,100 a year, about the cost of taking 10 credits at the Orono campus of the University of Maine, not including fees.

In School Takeover, Newark Union Tries to Prove It’s Part of the Solution

Winnie Hu:

When teachers are removed from their schools here, their first phone call is often to the powerful Newark Teachers Union. But now the union is telling as many as a dozen teachers at the troubled Newton Street School that they have to leave because they do not fit in with a plan to improve the school.
“It was probably the hardest thing that I’ve had to do,” said Joseph Del Grosso, the longtime union president, who helped push through raises for teachers this spring during a state budget crisis, and went to jail for nearly three months in 1971 for taking part in a teachers’ strike.
The 5,000-member teachers’ union, the largest in New Jersey, is part of a takeover team at Newton, one of the city’s worst-performing public schools. For the past six years, it has failed to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” on state achievement tests, the standard required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Oregon may teach foreign languages in grade school

Gena Kittner:

Even as they are first taught to read, kindergartners here could be learning to say hello, goodbye and much more in Japanese, German, Spanish, Arabic or another foreign language.
The Oregon School District is considering teaching a different language at each of the district’s three elementary schools, starting in kindergarten and continuing through fourth grade.
It’s an idea that has been tried in the Menasha School District for about 14 years and one that’s getting more interest from districts around the state.
“Our hope is that in fall of 2008 we will get this up and running,” said Courtney Odorico, Oregon School Board member. “The idea is the kids don’t learn to be (just) Spanish speakers; they learn to be language learners. Kids are going to need to learn a second language.”
The program, which needs board approval, integrates the foreign language into lessons on science, math and language arts — in addition to a dedicated class just for language instruction every other day. It could be phased in over several years, continuing to the middle school and high school.

Smart. Great to see some public districts increasing academic opportunities (Virtual language learning is also on offer in some local schools).

So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach

Samuel Freedman:

Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class.
Ms. Rabenau had left a long career as a stage manager in the commercial theater to learn how to teach English as a second language to immigrant children in New York’s public schools. The only problem, she quickly discovered, was that the avalanche of paperwork and other assignments meant she actually got to teach only sporadically.
In a perfect, if dispiriting bit of symmetry, her initial year at Public School 123 in Harlem ended the same way it began. Ms. Rabenau lost the last six weeks of the spring term to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency.
Essentially, her teaching year, and her students’ learning year, had run only from mid-October to mid-April, with numerous interruptions even then. During the time when the students were entitled to instruction in English, they were sitting in other courses that they may or may not have understood.

Jefferson on Public Education: Defying Conventional Wisdom

Tom Shuford:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
The Fourth of July is fireworks, festivities and images of a gathering of remarkable men determined “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
For me the Fourth of July is those things and a question: What sort of education produced these men? What schools might produce their like again? There are clues. The author of the Declaration of Independence had much to say about educating the very young.
Thomas Jefferson lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to implement a system of publicly-funded schools. He failed. It would be sixty years before Horace Mann traveled the state of Massachusetts on horseback advocating a system of “common schools” and decades more before most states would follow Massachusetts’ lead.
Jefferson’s vision for public education is, nonetheless, illuminating and provocative. The main source is his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785. Here are some of the key features of his plan — in the original spelling, where quoted:

  1. Attendance is voluntary. “It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent’s refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father.” (1)
  2. Every child is entitled to three years of instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
  3. The reading for the primary school years is mainly history. “The first stage of this education . . . wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction, the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history.”
    And later in the text, Jefferson writes that “of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”

  4. The “best genius in the school of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education” is entitled to a fourth and fifth year at a “grammar school.”
  5. Students at grammar schools study “Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic.”
  6. After a trial period of one or two years, the best student at each grammar school is selected for six years of further instruction. “By this means . . . the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go.”
  7. After the sixth year, the best half of these go to college. “At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall chuse, at William and Mary college.

Jefferson believed in selection by merit from an early age: “By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of youths of genius from the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought and cultivated.”

Related: Jefferson’s last letter, written on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Superintendent Credentials

The Doyle Report:

Announced two days ago by Mayor Adrian Fenty, Michelle’s appointment is part of two trends. The first is mayoral control of schools; the second is appointing “uncredentialed” or “unlicensed” leaders to fill the post of superintendent (or in the case of DC and NYC, chancellor).
The nightmare of credentialing is ordinarily thought of in terms of teachers, a challenge that reformers like Michelle and Wendy Kopp have taken on in their respective spheres; in their earliest incarnation, credentials were meant to be a floor beneath which teachers would not fall. In their modern incarnation they have become a ceiling through which they may not pass. For example, the head of the Sidwell Friends math program, a trained mathematician with 30 years experience of superlative high school teaching couldn’t get a job in a public school. Nor could Einstein.
By way of contrast, the most ordinary time-server could muddle through a college of teacher education and “earn” a credential. So too administrative credentials. Most important, the credentialitis that afflicts public K-12 education, while originally well intentioned, is not linked to performance.

How about private funding for public education? How about private funding for public education?

Milwaukee Teacher Thomas Biel:

The 2008 budget for a cash-strapped Milwaukee Public Schools comes in at $1.2 billion. What is so staggering about that amount is that the amount turns out to be minimal operating cost.
Throwing more money into the pot does not guarantee improved cooking. As long as a reasonable amount of money is made available, good management, excellent leadership, skillful workers and societal support are still the keys to success.
However, if we are in the business of improving the product, more financial resources are essential.
If the public is tapped out, then public education needs to tap into the private sector. The private sector of society should be asked to kick in more money. Basically, public education needs to do more to build bridges to private business and the private sector needs to do more to fund public education.
Why? Because it’s good business.

Milwaukee Public School’s Spending Rush Questioned

Alan Borsuk:

As the end of its budget year approached last week, Milwaukee Public Schools had not spent more than $50 million slated to be used for the 2006-’07 school year.
Administrators say that if they hadn’t spent the money by June 30, it would have hurt MPS in the future because of state school aid rules – with Milwaukee property taxes rising as a result. So they unloaded some big payments at the last moment, including $37.8 million to prepay costs such as debt service expected in 2007-’08.
This was routine – and good – practice in the eyes of Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and Chief Financial Officer Michelle Nate.
But it set off alarms with others, particularly Michael Bonds, chairman of the School Board’s Finance Committee, who said board members were not given straight information from administrators and did not have a chance to deal with the issue effectively. Bonds wondered if there were ways the money could have been used to increase programs for children.
He said he met Sunday afternoon with Andrekopoulos and Nate to talk about the issue, but he refused to accept what he called “a party line document” that suggested to board members what they should say to anyone who asked them about what was going on.

Ten Ways to Reduce College Application Stress

Jay Matthews:

Three of America’s smartest and most experienced college admissions officers, Sarah D. Donahue, William R. Fitzsimmons and Marlyn McGrath Lewis of Harvard, had a piece in the Harvard Crimson recently saying, among other things, that they planned to “work with secondary schools in a renewed effort to make applying to college less complicated and stressful than it is today.”
I am not certain how that is going to happen in their case. They rejected a record 91.03 percent of applicants to Harvard this year. It seems to me the only way to reduce stress in their process is to franchise the brand name so we can have McHarvards in Beltsville, Md., Kankakee, Ill., Pismo Beach, Calif., and other deserving locales.

Race in Schools

Tom Ashbrook, Luke Massie, Michael Steel, ,Gary Orfield and Lani Gunier:

Across the country today, American schools and educators are still trying to figure out the full implications of last week’s big Supreme Court ruling on race and school assignments.
A half century after the court declared that “separate but equal” does not work in education, the Roberts court seemed to point straight back to separate but equal. Or maybe forward to some new effort at colorblind equality.
This is bedrock stuff. Critics are shouting “resegregation.” Supporters say “So what?”
This hour On Point: the surprising range of response to the court’s big new message on race and schools.

20mb mp3 audio.

“No Child Left Behind” in the Crosshairs

Washington Post Editorial:

Nor can some of his arguments about the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind be denied. For example, the law’s requirement that states test students annually and show progress toward proficiency has caused some states to lower standards and water down assessments. It’s difficult, though, to see how giving states even more flexibility will solve this problem. Wasn’t the trouble caused by letting states decide what’s good enough?
We’ve been unequivocal in our support of standards that have rigor and meaning. It’s encouraging that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a proponent of No Child Left Behind who chairs the education committee, has identified this as one of his priorities. Some promising ideas come from the nonprofit advocacy group Education Trust. One is to encourage states to raise their standards to a “college-and-career-ready level” with the trade-off of getting more time to reach more realistic goals of proficiency. The law’s original goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014, while laudatory, may be unrealistic.

NY Governor Spitzer on School Choice

Eliot Spitzer:

In a 30-minute presentation entitled “Unfinished Business,” given to more than 400 of the state’s most powerful and influential television and radio professionals, Gov. Spitzer made the case his administration has much to be proud of since he took office in January.
Among the educational accomplishments touted in his talk was the doubling of charter school choices across New York. “The more you get alternative models out there, the better,” he remarked. “Even if charter schools never have more than a small piece of the market share, they nonetheless provide an alternative example people can look to for learning.”

The New Age of Ignorance

Tim Adams:

Fifty years on, and exponential scientific advance later, it seems unlikely that the response of dinner guests would be much different. I was reminded of Snow’s test when reading the new book by Natalie Angier, science editor of the New York Times. Angier’s book is called The Canon, and subtitled ‘A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science’. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person.
In many places, I found myself cringeing all over again. I’ve read a fair amount of popular science, tried to follow the technical arguments that underpin debates about global warming, say, or bird flu, listened religiously to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, but still I discovered large black holes in my elementary understanding of how our world works. Angier divides her book into basic disciplines – biology, chemistry, geology, physics and so on – and each chapter offers an animated essay on the current established thinking.
The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school – full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: ‘This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.’ For physics: ‘Almost everything we’ve come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.’ Along the way there are all sorts of facts that stick: ‘You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent’, for example; or, if you imagined the history of our planet as a single 75-year human life span: ‘The first ape did not arrive until May or June of the final year… and Neil Armstrong muddied up the Moon at 20 seconds to midnight.’

Excerpt: The Two Cultures by CP Snow.

New Hampshire Begins to Define an “Adequate Education”

Norma Love:

New Hampshire will be responsible to pay for more than the three Rs under a new law defining a constitutionally adequate education but taxpayers won’t get the bill for months.
Gov. John Lynch signed the law yesterday, the first step in the state’s effort to answer a court ruling that it define its responsibility for education and pay for it.
“With this new law, we are fulfilling our responsibility to define an adequate education,” said Lynch. “The broad educational opportunities outlined in this law will ensure our children have the skills and knowledge they need to compete in today’s world.”
Lynch noted that the definition includes kindergarten — not currently mandated in New Hampshire.
The next step facing lawmakers is to put a price to the broadly worded definition, then craft a new aid distribution system. Lawmakers have insisted for months they won’t wait to do that.

Text of HB 0927-FN:

AN ACT relative to the specific criteria and substantive educational program that define an adequate education, the resources required to provide an adequate education, and the establishment of a timetable for costing an adequate education.

A More Global Approach to Education

Jon Boone:

Two of the world’s most buccaneering education entrepreneurs have teamed up to build 60 multimillion-dollar schools in big cities across the world.
The network of high-end international schools will cater to the children of bankers, diplomats and executives who have to regularly uproot their families.
With annual fees between $15,000 and $40,000, depending on the city, the plan marks a serious departure for Chris Whittle, famous for starting the Edison Schools company, which runs facilities in some of America’s most deprived areas.
His new venture, Nations Academy, has been set up with Sunny Varkey, chairman of Dubai-based Global Education Management Systems, which runs private schools around the world.

Schools Banning iPods to Curtail “Widespread” Cheating

Christian:

Mmm. Seems that before we had iPods, we had tiny sheets of paper that were folded up and hidden in shirt sleeves full of answers. And easily chewable after-the-fact. And we also had kids collecting tests over years and passing them down when teachers were predictable about their tests.
What’s really changed? Has iPod really brought the boogey-man into the school? Or are we forgetting simple things? Forgetting the past? The paper version of the past?
Leaves me to wonder something else. Why are the MP3s allowed to be ON and/or the earphones/buds IN the students ears or near their vision?

Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

Juan Williams:

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.
With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”

College seems out of reach to most Latinos

Tyche Hendricks:

San Leandro High School senior Veronica Santana strode across the stage in a scarlet cap and gown to receive her high school diploma at a graduation ceremony earlier this month on the hillside campus of Cal State East Bay.
Come September, Veronica, 17, will join her older sister Erika at the Hayward campus overlooking San Francisco Bay and become part of the first generation of college students in her family. It’s a point of pride for the girls’ parents, a retired factory worker and a hair stylist, both Mexican immigrants who studied no further than middle school.
Attending college sets Veronica and her 20-year-old sister apart from most of the state’s Latinos, who are expected to become a majority of California’s population in another generation, according to state estimates, but who currently have the lowest levels of education of any racial or ethnic group in California.

Patrons’ Sway Leads to Friction in Charter School

David Herszenhorn:

The Beginning With Children Charter School, housed in a former factory in Brooklyn, landed on the state’s list of high-performing schools this year, thanks to rising English and math test scores among black and Hispanic students.
But its founders and wealthy patrons, Joseph H. and Carol F. Reich, who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school, think it could be better. “It’s above average,” said Mr. Reich, 72, “but considering the effort and the capability and the resources, we don’t feel we’re getting the best we can.”
So last month, the couple — threatening to cut ties, including financial support — forced most of the school’s trustees to resign in a push for wide management changes, and better student achievement.

‘Time of healing’ needed in Palo Alto school district

Consultants warn of ‘escalated hostility’ if Board of Education, superintendent don’t address dysfunctional management practices

Susan Hong:

New Palo Alto schools’ Superintendent Kevin Skelly and the Palo Alto Board of Education ought to spearhead a “time of healing” in the school district, consultants Geoff Ball and Associates advised the school board Tuesday night.
The recommendation — and numerous others — were outlined in a report commissioned to assess allegations from the Palo Alto Management Association (PAMA) that outgoing Superintendent Mary Frances Callan and her senior cabinet members treated employees unfairly.
Overall, the report found, the district lacks clarity on decision making, meeting management and purposes and is confused about the relative roles of the school board, superintendent and managers, consultants said.

Palo Alto School District. Interestingly, Palo Alto has a High School Task Force underway. The 17 member task force includes a student, 4 teachers and 4 parents among others. There are no University level Ed school folks present, unlike Madison’s.

MG considers a block schedule: Proposal eyes 4 periods a day

Karyn Saemann:

A decade after dismissing the idea, Monona Grove High School is once again eyeing a block schedule.
The Monona Grove School Board may be asked next month to consider an alternating block schedule beginning in the fall of 2008 in which each day has four 95-minute periods. The school currently has eight 47-minute periods.
Under the proposal, students would still take eight classes per semester because each class would meet every other day. Over two weeks, students would see each teacher five times.
The board will meet July 12 at 7 p.m. at the district office, 5301 Monona Drive.
Such a schedule is a bit different from a straight block used at Madison La Follette. In a straight block, students typically take four classes per term, meeting every day for 90 minutes.

Cyber-bullying gathers pace in US

BBC:

One third of US online teenagers have been victims of cyber-bullying according to research by the Pew Internet Project.
The most common complaint from teens was about private information being shared rather than direct threats.
Girls were more likely than boys to be targets and teens who share their identities online are the most vulnerable, the survey found.
But teenagers still think that the majority of bullying happens offline.

Union to Help Charter Firm Start School in the Bronx

Jennifer Medina:

Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator from Los Angeles, is seeking to expand into New York with the cooperation of the teachers’ union.
Under the proposal, Green Dot, which is heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, would open a high school in the South Bronx. The school, which must be approved by the state, would become one of only a handful of charter schools in the city to use a union contract.

Special Ed Students in NYC Lag in Entering Mainstream

Jennifer Medina:

New York City lags behind the rest of the state in placing special education students into mainstream classrooms, the state said yesterday.
While other school systems across the state have significantly increased the number of students who attend classes in schools with mainstream students, the number of students in separate schools — spending all their time with other special education students — has been mostly stagnant in the city, according to a report released by the state’s Board of Regents.
The report, issued annually, cited modest gains in test scores and graduation rates for special education students statewide, though officials acknowledged that the results were “disturbing.”

Supreme Court Limits Use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Schools

Robert Barnes [PDF Opinion]:

A splintered Supreme Court today threw out school desegregation plans from Seattle and Louisville, but without a majority holding that race can never be considered as school districts try to ensure racially diverse populations.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. authored the most important opinion of his two terms leading the court. He held that both plans, which categorize students on the basis of race and use that in making school assignments, violate the constitution’s promise of equal protection, even if the goal is integration of the schools.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote.
He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who agreed with the four in striking down the desegregation plans, would not go as far as Roberts in ruling out racial considerations.
“Parts of the opinion by the Chief Justice imply an all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account,” Kennedy wrote. “The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race.”
The court’s four liberals delivered a scathing dissent — twice as long as Roberts’s opinion. It said the plurality’s decision was, in the words of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who read his opposition from the bench, a “cruel distortion” of the court’s landmark decision more than 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, which demanded an end to segregated schools.

Links & Commentary:

  • David Stout:

    n the hours after the ruling, reaction varied greatly, with some groups denouncing it as virtually inviting a return to the days of segregation, and others asserting that it need not be seen that way, in view of Justice Kennedy’s unwillingness to fully embrace Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion.
    The rationale of the chief justice’s opinion relied in part on the historic 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.
    Chief Justice Roberts said the officials in Seattle and in Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville, had failed to show that their plans considered race in the context of a larger educational concept, and therefore did not pass muster.
    “In the present cases,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, recalling words from an earlier Supreme Court ruling, “race is not considered as part of a broader effort to achieve ‘exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.’ ”

  • Robert Tomsho: More Schools Likely to Spur
    Diversity via Income.

    By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court struck down voluntary school desegregation efforts in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle. The vote “will encourage districts now using race to shift to income,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank. (See related article.)
    Income-based plans began spreading in the 1990s as race-based policies came under growing pressure in the federal courts. Most seek to limit the percentage of low-income students in any one school by dispersing them beyond their neighborhood schools and assigning higher-income students to schools with a lower-income profile. The programs generally identify low-income students as those qualifying for the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program.

  • Sherrilyn Ifill: Supreme Disappointment
  • TJ Mertz: “Sad Day, the End of an Era”
  • Joanne Jacobs
  • Andy Hall notes some local commentary:

    Art Rainwater, superintendent of Madison’s public schools, said none of the district’s school-assignment policies would be directly affected by Thursday’s decision, because the district relies upon criteria other than race — particularly poverty — when drawing school boundaries. And it uses poverty and concentrations of special-education students and students with limited English proficiency when staffing the schools.
    “In general, we don’t do anything based on race in our district,” Rainwater said.

  • Nina Totenberg:

    In a decision with profound implications for the nation’s public schools, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated two voluntary desegregation plans because they used race in some students’ school assignments in an effort to end racial isolation or prevent re-segregation.

  • Wall Street Journal Opinion
  • Cato:

    “Racial integration advocates will be frustrated and discouraged by today’s Supreme Court ruling striking down the racial assignment programs of Louisville and Seattle. They shouldn’t be. These were not only the right rulings constitutionally, they were also right educationally and socially. The belief that involuntary, race-based student assignment promotes socially and educationally valuable interaction among white and minority students finds little empirical support.”

Q & A on the decision.

Study: Federal Tutoring Helping Students

Nancy Zuckerbrod:

Taxpayer-funded tutoring for poor children is paying off in some city schools, a federal study has found. Students who received the tutoring under the federal No Child Left Behind law improved on reading and math tests, according to the study conducted by independent researchers for the Department of Education and released Wednesday.
Students in schools that fail to hit academic targets for three years in a row are given free tutoring under the 2002 education law.

The new school year

Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira:

This is the first in a series of articles focusing on the Madison School Board. The purpose is to familiarize you with who we are, how we do our work, and how we can work together to keep the Madison Metropolitan School District strong.

July 1 marks the start of the 2007-08 fiscal school year. For the Madison School Board, this will be a year filled with many challenges and tremendous opportunities. We are coming off several rocky months.
State-imposed revenue caps forced us to make budget cuts that will affect every school and student in the District. Special interest groups lobbied for specific schools and programs for their children and sometimes found themselves pitted against other groups. Decisions had to be made where there were no good choices. In addition, the public was divided on the naming of a new school. As a community we were fragmented in actions yet united in our belief that quality schools are vital for the future of our children and society.
A new year provides us with an opportunity to look ahead and make plans to move the District forward. As a Board, we are committed to working hard to make this happen. We have set our Board priorities for the year, all integral to the success of our District and our community.
Our single most important priority is to hire a new Superintendent to lead our District. This will be an exciting process, directed by the Board, that will involve staff and the community in developing a leadership profile for the new Superintendent and the future of our District. Ways in which you can participate in this effort will soon be announced.
In other priorities, we will evaluate the need and weigh the options for going to another referendum in order to eliminate painful budget cuts again next year. We will consider revisions to the Board’s equity policy and the development of guidelines to implement this policy. We will develop specific, measurable goals to evaluate student progress and success. We will study and address the issues that affect educational environment and student achievement such as attendance, dropouts, truancy, expulsions and bullying.

Continue reading The new school year

Montgomery, MD Superintendent Says NCLB is Lowering Standards: “Shooting Way too Low”

Daniel de Vise:

Thanks, Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said yesterday that the federal No Child Left Behind law has created a culture that has education leaders nationwide “shooting way too low” and that it has spawned a generation of statewide tests that are too easy to pass.
In a meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters, Weast said the federal mandate, with its push for 100 percent proficiency on state tests, has driven states toward lower standards that don’t prepare most students for college or careers.
“I think we’ve got to adjust up,” he said. “Or at least give some flexibility for those who would like to adjust up.”
Although some states, including Maryland, have been praised for holding children to comparatively high standards, Weast said the state curriculum, the statewide Maryland School Assessment and the High School Assessment all measure a minimal level of academic proficiency. The reason, he said, is that Maryland and most other states have leaders who want their kids “to look good” on such assessments.

Blacks in Fairfax, Montgomery Outdo U.S. Peers in AP

Daniel de Vise:

Black students in Montgomery and Fairfax high schools are far more successful in Advanced Placement testing than their peers in nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Participation in the AP program has more than doubled in 10 years. But this surge in college-preparatory testing has not reached most African American students, according to a review of 2006 exam results in 30 school systems with about 5,000 or more black high school students.
Still, black students in both Montgomery and Fairfax counties passed AP tests in spring 2006 at the rate of more than eight tests for every 100 black students enrolled in the high school grades, the analysis found.
That is far greater than the success rate of African Americans nationwide, who produced about one passing AP test for every 100 students. None of the other school systems studied produced successful AP tests at even half the rate of Maryland’s and Virginia’s largest school systems.

Wisconsin “Languishing” on Policies Affecting Teachers

National Council on Teacher Quality: [864K PDF Report]

Area 1 – Meeting NCLB Teacher Quality Objectives: Grade C

Wisconsin has better data policies than many states, which can help it ameliorate inequities in teacher assignments. The state’s subject matter preparation policies for future elementary teachers need improvement. Its requirements for future high school teachers are adequate, but its expectations for middle school teachers are insufficient. The state also needs to define a subject matter major. Wisconsin is phasing out the use of its HOUSSE route.

Area 2 – Teacher Licensure Grade F

Wisconsin’s teaching standards do not clearly refer to the knowledge and skills that new teachers must have before entering the classroom. State policies do not ensure that teachers are prepared in the science of reading instruction. New teachers are allowed to teach for up to two years before passing state licensure tests. The state needs to reduce its obstacles to licensure for out of state teachers. Wisconsin does not recognize distinct levels of academic caliber at the time of initial certification for new teachers.

Area 3 – Teacher Evaluation and Compensation Grade D

While Wisconsin’s minimal teacher evaluation guidelines require subjective observations, they do not ensure that evaluations are based primarily on a preponderance of evidence of classroom effectiveness that includes objective measures. Teacher accountability is further undermined by only requiring evaluations once every three years, by a lack of value-added data, and by not ensuring districts wait five years prior to granting teachers tenure. The state does not burden districts with a minimum salary schedule.

Area 4 – State Approval of Teacher Preparation Programs Grade D

Wisconsin does not do enough to hold its programs accountable for the quality of their preparation. It has failed to address their tendency to require excessive amounts of professional coursework. Wisconsin does require applicants to pass a basic skills test and has a sensible accreditation policy.

Area 5 – Alternate Routes to Certification Grade F

Wisconsin does not currently provide a genuine alternate route into the teaching profession. The alternate routes the state offers have serious structural flaws combined with low and inflexible admissions standards. Wisconsin does not ensure that programs do not require excessive coursework, and it does not ensure adequate support is provided to new teachers. In addition, the state collects little objective performance data from alternate route programs and does not use the data to hold programs accountable for the quality of their teachers. Wisconsin has a restrictive policy regarding licensure reciprocity for teachers from out of state who were prepared in an alternate route program, making it difficult for some teachers to transfer their licenses.

Area 6 – Preparation of Special Education Teachers Grade D

Wisconsin’s standards for special education teachers do not ensure that teachers will be well prepared to teach students with disabilities. The state places no limit on the amount of professional education coursework that its teacher preparation programs can require of special education candidates, resulting in program excesses. While elementary special education teachers are required to pass a subject matter test, this policy does not sufficiently ensure that candidates will have the knowledge relevant to all of the topics they will have to teach. The state’s secondary special education candidates are likely to finish their preparation program highly qualified in at least one subject area, but the state has not developed a streamlined HOUSSE route to help them meet additional subject matter requirements once they are in the classroom.

Wisconsin DPI’s Tony Evers comments via Channel3000.com:

Deputy state superintendent Tony Evers attributes the state’s low marks to a difference in philosophy over teacher education. The state believes in a mixture of subject matter, such as English and science, and courses on how to teach, while the council wants more of an emphasis on content.
Evers also said that the report represented only a superficial view and he took particular issue with a D grade for Wisconsin’s preparation of special education teachers.
He said that teachers in that area are so well-trained that there is a problem with other states recruiting them away.

Reshaping the Portland, Oregon Public Schools Summit

Portland Public Schools:

On May 16 and 17, Portland Public Schools, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects along with our sponsors, Innovation Partnership, Comcast, the City of Portland, the Portland Schools Foundation and PGE, held a community summit to identify ideas, explore possibilities and develop a set of guiding principles regarding the nature of Portland Schools Facilities.
Over 200 Portland citizens attended the two-day summit representing a cross section of the community including creatives, teachers, community activists, students, administrators, parents, business leaders, architects, contractors, developers and governmental leaders. They were engaged by speakers from the United Kingdom, New Orleans, Palo Alto, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C. with cutting edge thinking.

Christian has more:

In my opinion? Probably the most impressive effort of a city trying to re-imagine the entire concept of ‘school’ across its entire urban complex. And even more impressive that what started as a consideration of building a few new schools has become a re-imagination of ‘learning’ and communities on a much deeper level.

Students Map Bus Routes with GPS – and Eliminate one Route

John Lyon:

A project by three Harrisburg High School students to map school bus routes using satellite technology drew accolades Tuesday from state lawmakers who said the project could serve as a model for the rest of Arkansas.
In testimony before the legislative Academic Facilities Oversight Committee, students Ryan Murphy, Jon Thompson and Morgan Reddmann described their project to use Global Positioning System, or GPS, satellite images to map the bus routes in the Harrisburg School District.
The maps will help the district maximize efficiency, minimize students’ travel time and promote safety, the students said.
The students are enrolled in the Environmental And Spatial Technology, or EAST, program, in which students create projects that combine math, science and technology.
Because of the students’ work, the school district expects to eliminate one bus route in the coming school year. The students said they compared bus routes and the locations of students’ homes and found ways to shorten and consolidate trips.

Classic “Cathedral and Bazaar” approach. Clusty GPS search.

One class, many incredible journeys

Erin Einhorn:

The Daily News spent two months tracking down the 23 kindergarteners who enrolled at Harlem’s PS 36 in 1994. Their journeys illuminate hardships students face in earning their high school degree.
They were smart children who tested into a gifted kindergarten at Harlem’s Public School 36 in 1994, but Lance Patterson and Ronnie Rodriguez would each fall in with the wrong crowd.
Lance would be arrested. Ronnie would join a gang.
Their challenges were similar, but they’ve ended up in very different places. One has a mother who will watch him don a cap and gown this week. The other has a mom who blames herself.
“I should have kept a closer eye on him,” Sandra Lugo said of her son, Ronnie. “I should have been on him maybe a little harder, been a little stricter.”

KIPP’s Mysterious Tale of Three Cities

Jay Matthews:

Houston, where KIPP was born in 1994, and New Orleans, the site of a preliminary KIPP program before Katrina hit in September 2005, have been welcoming KIPP’s attempts to find more space for families who want a challenging public education for their children. The children who enrolled in KIPP NOW, all of them low-income and 99 percent of them African American, showed what good teaching and longer days could do, even in less than ideal conditions.
I am going to cite scores from nationally standardized tests, many of them given by KIPP teachers to diagnose students’ learning problems without oversight from state officials. These results have to be treated cautiously, but they are similar to KIPP results in dozens of other schools around the country and look legitimate to me. In their first year in Houston, KIPP NOW students did very well. For instance, first graders jumped from the 18th to the 43rd percentile in reading, sixth graders from the 19th to the 66th percentile in math and eighth graders from the 21st to the 40th percentile in reading.

Organizational Life Cycles

Tom Peters:

Extract “lessons learned” or “best practices.”
Thicken the Book of Rules.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today’s franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.

Peters has a useful quote from Eleanor Roosevelt contained within the above link.

Florida’s “Flawed Special Ed Vouchers”

Sara Mead:

Students with disabilities have long had the right, under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), to attend private schools at public expense if the public schools in their community are unable to provide them with appropriate special educational services. But less than 1 percent of students with disabilities have such private placements, in part because these placements can be costly, complicated, and time-consuming to obtain under the existing law.
Florida’s popular McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program seeks to tilt the balance in these students’ favor. The program provides parents with an alternative to expensive legal proceedings and complicated bureaucracy—a voucher that they can use at a public or private school of their choice. Florida’s legislature approved the program in 1999 and named it after a then-state senator, John McKay, who is also the father of a special-needs child.

Educators react strongly to study citing Milwaukee in high turnover of young teachers

Alan Borsuk:

Nicole Campeau is heading to Arizona after a year teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools for which, she says, no education program could have prepared her.
Jenni Gavin is staying as an MPS teacher after “the most rewarding and exhausting 2 1/2 years of my life.”
The national study listed leadership of a school as a key factor in making or breaking new teachers, and Campeau said her experience fit that.
In an interview, she said that in the classroom, “I was a referee. I was breaking up fights constantly. I was doing little to no teaching.”

Key Special Education Legislation & School Climate


Click for a larger version

The recent Wall Street Journal article “Mainstreaming Trend Tests Classroom Goals” by John Hechinger included some useful charts along with a look at Key US Special Education Legislation:

  • 1966—Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Amendments): Creates Bureau of Education of the Handicapped. Establishes federal grants to help educate special-needs students with disabilities in local schools rather than state institutions. At left, President Lyndon Johnson with the first lady at the signing.
  • 1975—Education for All Handicapped Children Act: Requires school districts receiving federal funds to provide a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment to special-needs children.
    Mandates creation of an individualized education program (IEP) for such students. Establishes procedures for parents to challenge related decisions about their children.
  • 1990—Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Revised and renamed version of 1975 law adds autism and traumatic brain injury to categories of special education. Calls for transition services to help older students prepare for post-secondary education, employment and independent living.

  • 1997—IDEA reauthorization: Expands school administrators authority to discipline special education students in certain situations to include removal to alternative education settings for up to 45 days. Prohibits cutting off educational services to special-education students who are expelled.
  • 2002—No Child Left Behind Act: Requires all students to take annual assessment tests although states can make reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities. Special-education teachers must be “highly qualified” in core subjects they teach. At left, President Bush talking up the law at an Arkansas school.
  • 2002—No Child Left Behind Act: Requires all students to take annual assessment tests although states can make reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities. Special-education teachers must be “highly qualified” in core subjects they teach. At left, President Bush talking up the law at an Arkansas school.
  • 2004—IDEA reauthorization: Requires all special education teachers to hold at least a bachelors degree and full state certification. Places a two-year statute of limitations on parents ability file a complaint or request a hearing regarding childs treatment.
    Requires review of relevant records by parents and school officials within 10 days of a childs change of placement for disciplinary reasons.



Challenging the High School “Challenge Index”

Sara Mead and Andrew Rotherham:

Until a few years ago, America’s elementary and secondary schools generally escaped our national obsession with lists. Almost every week another ranking of best communities, most beautiful people or top hospitals is published.
But in 1998 Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post, began publishing a list of “The 100 Best High Schools in America.” The ranking is based on “The Challenge Index,” a measure developed by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews. The list, published annually the past few years, has become increasingly influential. Other media outlets now cover it like a horserace, and high schools all over the country are reacting to the scrutiny.
Unfortunately, the Challenge Index is a flawed proxy for America’s “best” high schools. Using publicly available student performance data, we have found that many schools in Newsweek’s ranking have high dropout rates or glaring achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. At the same time, many schools that fail to make the Newsweek list may be doing a better job educating all of their students.
The Challenge Index is a simple measure: It’s the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Cambridge tests a high school’s students take, divided by its number of graduating seniors. This simplicity is both its primary virtue and fatal flaw.

Birth Order and Intelligence

Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal:

Negative associations between birth order and intelligence level have been found in numerous studies. The explanation for this relation is not clear, and several hypotheses have been suggested. One family of hypotheses suggests that the relation is due to more-favorable family interaction and stimulation of low-birth-order children, whereas others claim that the effect is caused by prenatal gestational factors. We show that intelligence quotient (IQ) score levels among nearly 250,000 military conscripts were dependent on social rank in the family and not on birth order as such, providing support for a family interaction explanation.

Benedict Carey:

The average difference in I.Q. was slight — three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling — but significant, the researchers said. And they said the results made it clear that it was due to family dynamics, not to biological factors like prenatal environment.
Researchers have long had evidence that firstborns tended to be more dutiful and cautious than their siblings, and some previous studies found significant I.Q. differences. But critics said those reports were not conclusive, because they did not take into account the vast differences in upbringing among families.
Three points on an I.Q. test may not sound like much. But experts say it can be a tipping point for some people — the difference between a high B average and a low A, for instance. That, in turn, can have a cumulative effect that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private liberal-arts college and a less exclusive public one.

Carey’s followup article:

Dr. Trapnell compared this process to the so-called jigsaw approach used in classrooms, in which complex projects are divided up and each child becomes an expert in a particular task and instructs the others.
Younger siblings often have something more to pass on than the tricks of their favorite hobby, or the philosophy behind their social charm. Evidence suggests that younger siblings are more likely than older ones to take risks based on their knowledge and instincts.

Mandarin 2.0: How Skype, podcasts and broadband are transforming language teaching

The Economist Technology & Education:

IT IS early evening in Berkeley, California, and Chrissy Schwinn, a sinophile environmentalist, walks ten feet from her kitchen to her home office for her Chinese lesson. She has already listened to that day’s dialogue, which arrived as a free podcast, on her iPod. She has also printed out the day’s Chinese characters, which arrived along with the podcast. Now her computer’s Skype software—which makes possible free phone calls via the internet—rings and “Vera”, sitting in Shanghai where it is late morning, says Ni hao to begin the lesson.
One might call it “language-learning 2.0,” says Ken Carroll, an Irishman who in 2005 co-founded Praxis, the company that provides Ms Schwinn’s service, after hearing about these “Web 2.0” technologies from his slightly geekier co-founders, Hank Horkoff, a Canadian, and Steve Williams, a Briton. The penny dropped at once.

Praxis Language www sites and rss feeds: Chinese | Spanish.

Prepare for the SAT Test, or Play With Your iPod? Have It Both Ways

Maria Aspan:

Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.
The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.
“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”

Mainstreaming” Trend Tests Classroom Goals

John Hechinger:

The strategy backfired. One morning, Andrea swept an arm along the teacher’s desk, scattering framed photos of Ms. McDermott’s family across the classroom. A glass frame shattered, and another hit a student in the arm. Though no one was hurt, Ms. McDermott says she lost hours of instruction time getting the children to settle down after the disruption.
From the first weeks of school, Ms. McDermott found Andrea’s plight heartbreaking. “No! No! No!” she remembers her student screaming at times. “Want Mommy! Want Mommy!”
“She looked at me, like she was saying, ‘Help me,’ and I couldn’t. How could I possibly give Andrea what she needs?”
Years ago, students like Andrea would have been taught in separate classrooms. Today, a national movement to “mainstream” special-education students has integrated many of them into the general student body. As a result, regular teachers are instructing more children with severe disabilities — often without extra training or support.
This year, Ms. McDermott counted 19 students in her class at Whittier Elementary School. Five had disabilities, including attention deficit disorder and delays in reading and math. The teacher worried that she was failing all her students — especially Andrea. “It used to be a joy to go to work,” she says. “Now all I want to do is run away.”
In Scranton and elsewhere, the rush to mainstream disabled students is alienating teachers and driving some of the best from the profession. It has become a little-noticed but key factor behind teacher turnover, which experts say largely accounts for a shortage of qualified teachers in the U.S.

More on mainstreaming.
Background: Special Education Legal history and a few charts/graphs.

More city children get extra help for kindergarten

Andy Hall:


Record numbers of Madison children — and their parents — this summer are enrolled in programs aiming to make sure children are ready when they begin kindergarten.
The significant rise in publicly and privately funded kindergarten-readiness efforts is an investment that will pay off, educators and parents say, in students’ higher rates of success in school and as adults.
“My daughter needs to learn lots of things,” said Claudia Diaz, who has signed up for a new privately funded program called KinderReady with her daughter, Michelle Villegas-Diaz, 3.
“And if I learn these, in the future Michelle is going to be a better person.”
While Diaz and her daughter are receiving help at home and at a day-care center, record numbers of incoming kindergartners are heading off to summer school across Madison.

School co-founder, teacher wins scholarship

Erica Perez:

Just before Owen started ninth grade in Texas, she testified against her father, sending him to prison after years of sexual abuse.
She took a risk and wrote that story for an assignment in ninth-grade English class. But her teacher gave her an “F,” telling her not to talk about it.
“Ironically, I ended up teaching ninth-grade English,” Owen said. “I wanted to be different as a teacher. I wanted to be someone that students could talk to.”
Owen went on to do just that, co-founding a school in Milwaukee as a haven for bullied and harassed students. And now, she has won a national scholarship for her efforts, paving the way for her to help others form similar schools across the country.
Owen, who helped start The Alliance School on W. Galena St. in 2005, is one of 38 undergraduate and graduate students in the nation to win scholarships this year from the Point Foundation. The Los Angeles-based non-profit has honored outstanding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students for six years.
While the majority of the students who attend The Alliance School are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, the campus serves any student who struggled in the traditional high school environment because of harassment, intimidation or abuse.

New Jersey has become the new front in the fight for school vouchers

The Economist:

Now some supporters of school vouchers, frustrated with state legislators, are testing a new tactic: going to court. Last July a group of parents in New Jersey filed a lawsuit against the state and 25 poorly performing districts. In Crawford v Davy they are arguing that since public schools deny students their constitutional right to a proper education, the court should refund their money so they can spend it at any school they choose. This is not the first attempt to use courts to permit the use of vouchers: similar efforts failed in Illinois and California, for example. But in New Jersey, such a suit might actually succeed. New Jersey’s courts have no qualms about meddling in education—they have been doing so for decades.
In 1973 the New Jersey Supreme Court said the government was failing to provide poor children with the “thorough and efficient” education guaranteed by the state constitution, and that the school-funding formula must change. Since a 1985 case, Abbott v Burke, the court has issued rulings laying out its remedy in detail: the state must send more money to poor school-districts, so that their budgets match those of the state’s highest-spending areas.

Small Companies That Try to Bring New Technology to Teaching

James Flanigan:

Those three companies along with 27 others are members of the Northwest Education Cluster, a four-year-old organization in the Portland area that holds quarterly meetings at which these entrepreneurial companies can share ideas on directing sales efforts to school districts and teachers’ conventions, or on the intricacies of staffing, finances and other routines of managing a company.
Most Cluster members are relatively small. Vernier Software has $30 million in revenue and 75 employees; Learning.com has under $20 million in revenue and 50 employees; and Saltire has $1 million in revenue and nine employees.
Saltire, which often works on grants from the National Science Foundation, wants to expand use of its geometry program in high schools across the nation. “That’s where the big market for scientific calculators is today,” said Philip Todd, Saltire’s founder.

MMSD student/teacher assaults/injuries 2006-2007

Madison Parent:

Details of the data behind the “School assaults, by the numbers” item (thank you, Bill Lueders) in this week’s Isthmus are posted here (sorted by school name), and here (subtotals of incidents by school type). The reports included incidents through June 4, 2007, so any incidents that occurred during the final fortnight of the school year aren’t included. There are a couple of entries whose dates predate the school year and may be typos, but they are replicated as is.

Student-on-student assault/injury information is not included in these reports, nor do these reports include incidents of verbal threats of violence against staff (even those serious enough to result in the issuance of a restraining order). Police were called in only 13 of the 224 incidents. We don’t know whether there is a district-wide policy that requires that all such incidents be reported, and, if there is, whether the policy is followed consistently from school to school. I concur with the commenters at School Information System that this is only a part of the picture, that we need to know more, and that we need to do more.

Governor’s Graduation Speeches

Pauline Vu:

Most Popular: Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D), who — with eight commencement speeches — far out-orated his fellow governors.
Most Unique: Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), who delivered an address to a graduating class of one.
Class Clown: Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R), who drew laughs from Southern Utah University students for his frank talk about the bottom line: “Cost of tuition for a semester at SUU: $1,800. Cost of textbooks for that semester: $400. The looks on your family members’ faces when you’ve finally reached today: priceless.”
This year at least 22 governors — 15 Democrats and seven Republicans — made the commencement rounds to laud graduates.

Insurance coverage teachers’ top priority

John Matthews:

The union is obligated to represent its members interests. The union surveyed its members prior to entering bargaining and the members spoke loudly and clearly: Retain our health insurance options.
MTI members value Wisconsin Physicians Service because it enables freedom of choice in medical providers. And MTI members value the services of Group Health Cooperative. However, both GHC and WPS coverage would be in jeopardy under the district’s proposal.
GHC has the option of increasing its premium by 2 percent for each additional HMO offered by the district. Adding other HMOs would undercut the financial base of employees necessary to maintain the foundation of the WPS option.
Insurance is supposed to assure economic stability. Revenue controls undercut this basic principal of employment benefits, as it causes even the best intentioned individuals to think about reducing the quality of insurance to provide wages. MTI members have not been willing to take that risk.

Lawrie Kobza’s statement. Madison School Board discussion & vote on the recent MTI Teacher contract. Matthews is Executive Director of Madison Teachers, Inc. and sits on the Board of Wisconsin Physicians Service.

Schools Pinched in Hiring

Michael Alison Chandler:

“It’s not that you don’t have some terrifically talented people going into teaching. You do,” said Richard J. Murnane, an economist at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “The issue is that you don’t have enough. And many are the most likely to leave teaching, because they have lots of other opportunities.”
A study co-written by Murnane and published this year reports that minorities and poor children are most likely to be taught by teachers with weak academic backgrounds or little preparation. Overall, the proportion of women who pursue teaching after college, as well as the caliber of recruits, has declined significantly since the 1960s.

The High School Kinship of Cristal and Queen

Sara Rimer:

The Dominican boys in the back of the freshman English class at the high school in Washington Heights were making fun of the timid African-American girl, Queen Bond. One of the boys got down on one knee in front of her as if he were Romeo — they had been studying “Romeo and Juliet” — and delivered the final crushing insult.
“He was saying something about that I smelled,” recalled Queen, now 17. “I just put my head down. I started crying.”
Then something remarkable happened, she said: “Cristal stood up.” Cool, streetwise, 4-foot-11-inch Cristal Pimentel.
“This short, like, two-foot-tall person is standing up to these guys who are up to the ceiling,” Queen said. “She’s screaming, getting angry, waving her arms. She stood up, she defended me. No one ever stood up for me in that way.
“I’m, like, ‘Wow, this girl is the most beautiful person.’ ”
For four years now, Queen and Cristal have been a team: two teenage girls who are striving to make something of themselves in the face of tremendous adversity.

Cut Costs for Teacher Health Insurance (Or Not)

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

The district proposed to add two more HMO options for teachers. If a teacher chose any of the three HMO options, the district would pay the full premium. But if a teacher chose the high-cost WPS option, the district would pay only up to the cost of the highest-priced HMO plan. The teacher would be responsible for the remainder.
The change would have saved the district enough money to permit salaries to increase 2.8 percent, rather than 1 percent.
Madison Teachers Inc., however, resisted. Although bargaining units for food service workers, custodians and other district employees had accepted similar changes to their health insurance plans, the teachers union preferred to sacrifice higher pay to maintain the WPS health insurance option.
The School Board’s mistake was to cave in to the union’s position. While the cost to taxpayers was the same whether money was devoted to health insurance or salaries, it was in the district’s long-term interest to control health insurance costs and shift more money to salaries.

Audio / Video and links of the Madison School Board’s discussion and vote on this matter.
Lawrie Kobza’s statement.
MTI’s John Matthews offers a different perspective:

he union is obligated to represent its members interests. The union surveyed its members prior to entering bargaining and the members spoke loudly and clearly: Retain our health insurance options.
MTI members value Wisconsin Physicians Service because it enables freedom of choice in medical providers. And MTI members value the services of Group Health Cooperative. However, both GHC and WPS coverage would be in jeopardy under the district’s proposal.
GHC has the option of increasing its premium by 2 percent for each additional HMO offered by the district. Adding other HMOs would undercut the financial base of employees necessary to maintain the foundation of the WPS option.
Insurance is supposed to assure economic stability. Revenue controls undercut this basic principal of employment benefits, as it causes even the best intentioned individuals to think about reducing the quality of insurance to provide wages. MTI members have not been willing to take that risk.

School assaults, by the numbers

Bill Lueders:

In the 2006-07 school year, there were 224 instances in which staff members in Madison schools were assaulted or injured by students, according to records provided to Isthmus. (This represents a significant increase from 2005-06, when the district tallied 173 such incidents.)
Most occurred in elementary schools, and eight out of nine involved special education students. The incidents are mostly minor — kicks, bites, scratches and such — although 43 required some medical attention. Police were called on nine occasions.
Luis Yudice, the district’s safety coordinator, says the most serious incidents were the two reported recently in Isthmus (Watchdog, 6/8/07), both involving injuries to staff members trying to break up fights.
The most startling revelation is the extent to which a handful of students drive these numbers upward. A single fourth-grader at Chavez Elementary accounted for 41 of this year’s incidents. At the middle school level, a seventh-grader at Sennett and eighth-grader at Cherokee had 19 and 12, respectively. And a ninth-grader at East had 10.
Together, these four students generated 37% of the total assaults for the 24,576-student district. (In 2005-06, a single student at Lowell logged 36 incidents; no one else had more than seven.)

Evaluating the 50 States on Students with Disabilities

Christina Samuels:

The U.S. Department of Education released evaluations this week of each state’s efforts to teach children with disabilities, from infants to secondary school students, giving most midding grades.
The evaluation process is based on data submitted by the states as mandated by the 2004 reauthorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The law attempts to move states away from monitoring compliance with the complex legislation, and toward a focus on educational outcomes for students with disabilities.

New Berlin School Board & The City Discuss Park & Recreation Costs

Erin Richards:

The disagreement raises questions about how communities, in times of tight budgets, find the dollars to provide recreation and enrichment programs for their residents.
School Board President Keith Heun said he expects the ad hoc committee to make some headway on a new agreement before the School Board’s next meeting July 9. Members have not yet been chosen, but likely will include representatives from the School Board and Common Council.
The board also voted this week to rework its classification of school facility users. Since 1968, the city’s Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department has been classified as a group two user along with other non-profit civil and service organizations that don’t have to pay rental fees, Heun said.

Locally, spending growth in the Madison School District’s Fund 80 (property taxes outside the state’s school revenue growth limits, or “caps”) has been controversial.

Schools Have No Handle on $7 Billion Cost of Teacher Turnover, Study Finds

Vaishali Honawar:

Teacher turnover is “spiraling out of control” and is estimated to have cost the nation more than $7 billion in the 2003-04 school year alone, asserts a report released today.
The study from the Washington-based National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says that despite the staggering expense, virtually no school district now has systems in place to track or control such turnover.
The last attempt to put a price tag on teacher attrition, long acknowledged as a resource drain, was a 2005 report from the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, which came up with the more modest but still hefty estimate of $4.9 billion.
NCTAF officials say their figure of $7.3 billion is higher because it is based on an increased teacher workforce and a slightly higher attrition rate.

Alan Borsuk looks at Milwaukee’s teacher turnover:

Our education system is losing half of all teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness,” the report from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says. “Students, especially those in at-risk schools, are too often left with a passing parade of inexperienced teachers who leave before they become accomplished educators.”
In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the report says, “low-performing schools have double the teacher turnover of high-performing schools.”
Teacher turnover rates in MPS went up as the percentage of students in poverty went up, according to the report, which may be the most elaborate analysis of teacher movement in MPS. The same was true as the percentage of students from minority groups increased and the overall achievement of students decreased.

Nelson Hernandez has more.

A Graduate of Stanford by Way of a Transfer

Samuel Freedman:

The bridge between past and present, the ligament connecting her five years as an undergraduate, was a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, one specifically intended for students like Ms. Alcazar who make the leap from a community college to an elite university. In its seven years of operation, the foundation has given $10 million to 249 such recipients.
These students are often immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the first in their families to attend college. Most have gone to community college not because they lack the academic talent for a four-year institution, but because they lack the money. And by the time they would enter a college or university, generally as a junior, much of the available financial-aid money would have been spent enticing incoming freshman to enroll.