Gregg Toppo:

Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008.
The law requires that about half of all students take the tests and that schools improve each spring so they can stay off federal “needs improvement” lists. Many educators say that’s turning schools into test-prep factories where history, science and even recess get shortchanged.
Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md.
The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. USA TODAY’s Greg Toppo talks with her about testing:
Q: You spent a year getting to know kids at Tyler Heights Elementary School. How did this change your outlook on their education and tests?
A: I don’t have a problem with testing children. I have a problem with thinking test results tell you most of what you need to know. They simply don’t — these tests are often very narrow instruments. Where reforms have forced educators to notice children who might otherwise have been neglected, I give credit. But I wrote this book because school reforms intended to abolish a two-class system were in some ways exacerbating it. There’s one world where students pass the test as a matter of course and get to write poems, and another where children write paragraphs about poems.
Meanwhile, there’s supposed to be a movement in American schools to educate each child as an individual. The teachers at Tyler Heights work mightily to do that, but they have to get everybody to the same place in the same amount of time, and follow daily curriculum agendas handed down from above.

Rob Manning:

Portland schools superintendent Vicki Phillips starts her job as education director at the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation on Wednesday.
With more than $3 billion in grant money to give away, Phillips is arguably in one of the most powerful K-12 jobs in the country.

Audio.

Alan Borsuk:

“Welcome back! Today is Monday, August 6, 2007.”
That was the message on a chalkboard in Debra Alpert’s classroom at Wheatley Elementary School, 2442 N. 20th St.
It was humid and warm outside and inside the building – no question about it, an August day.
And school was in session?
Indeed, as it was on Monday at 17 other schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, all of them using a “year-round” schedule, which does not mean kids go to school year-round, or even that they go to school more days than the 175 to 180 of students on traditional schedules. But they do have a school calendar that gives them a shorter summer break (six weeks or so) and three breaks of three to four weeks throughout the year.
Some educators – as well as many teachers, parents and even kids – think that schedule is preferable when it comes to the impact on a child’s learning and, in some cases, a child’s safety or social development.
Research overall is mixed on the impact of reducing that three-month break. But there are arguments for saying maybe that long summer vacation isn’t such a hot idea after all.

OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook:

Entrepreneur Steve Barr is on a mission to replace the worst public school in Los Angeles with charter schools. Barr has got an army of supporters behind him, from union organizers to teachers unions, from LA’s mayor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Barr has got brass knuckles, and with ten schools up and running he is getting results.
On Point speak with Steve Barr about fixing America’s troubled schools.

Audio.

Karin Brulliard:

But he knows that not everyone sees people such as him — an immigrant who prefers to speak his mother tongue — that way. To this, he responds that the U.S. government should demand that newcomers know English — and help them learn it.
“This country was founded by immigrants. There should be a lot of cultures,” Ruiz, 48, said. “But at the base is the government.”
Ruiz’s idea lies at the heart of a question that has recently entered the national immigration debate, one some researchers say is important as new trends challenge old integration patterns: Should the government encourage assimilation?
The Bush administration is taking steps to do that. The Task Force on New Americans, created by executive order last year, recently presented initiatives that supporters say will help immigrants “become fully American.”

Tom Kertscher & Erica Perez:

A movement that began in Germantown is spreading in Ozaukee County, where the county itself and the Cedarburg Common Council, School Board and Town Board are all exploring the possibility of leaving the Milwaukee Area Technical College District.
In addition, an alderman in Mequon says he plans to ask city staff to look into whether a secession by Mequon is feasible.
The movement began with a Germantown Village Board trustee who is upset about MATC’s property tax levy, which has risen nearly 25% in the past four years.

Stephen Provasnik, Angelina KewalRamani, Mary McLaughlin Coleman, Lauren Gilbertson, Will Herring, and Qingshu Xie:

This report presents a series of indicators on the status of education in rural America, using the new NCES locale classification system. The new system classifies the locale of school districts and schools based on their actual geographic coordinates into one of 12 locale categories and distinguishes between rural areas that are on the fringe of an urban area, rural areas that are at some distance, and rural areas that are remote. The findings of this report indicate that in 2003-04 over half of all operating school districts and one-third of all public schools in the United States were in rural areas; yet only one-fifth of all public school students were enrolled in rural areas. A larger percentage of public school students in rural areas than those in any other locale attended very small schools. A larger percentage of rural public school students in the 4th- and 8th-grades scored at or above the Proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading, mathematics, and science assessments in 2005 than did public school students in cities at these grade levels. However, smaller percentages of rural public school students than suburban public school students scored at or above the Proficient level in reading and mathematics. In 2004, the high school status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of persons not enrolled in school and not having completed high school) among 16- to 24-year-olds in rural areas was higher than in suburban areas, but lower than in cities.

Bruce G. Charlton:

In a recent Medical Hypotheses editorial, I suggested the name psychological neoteny (PN) to refer to the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally associated with youth. I further suggested that PN is a useful trait for both individuals and the culture in modernizing societies; because people need to be somewhat child-like in their psychology order to keep learning, developing and adapting to the rapid and accelerating pace of change. Thirdly, I put forward the hypothesis that the major cause of PN in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education. Here I present a preliminary empirical investigation of this hypothesis of psychological neoteny. Marriage and parenthood are indicative of making a choice to ‘settle down’ and thereby move on from the more flexible lifestyle of youth; and furthermore these are usually commitments which themselves induce a settling down and maturation of attitudes and behaviors. A sevenfold expansion of participation in UK higher education up to 2001 was reflected in delay in marriage and parenthood. Increasing number of years of education is quantitatively the most important predictor of increasing age of the mother at the time of her first birth: among women college graduates about half are aged 30 or older at the time of their first birth – a rise of 400% in 25 years.

Via Tyler Cowen. Clusty search on Bruce Charlton.

Joseph Berger:

Should cash be used to spur children to do better on reading and math tests?
Suzanne Windland, a homeowner raising three children in a placid enclave of eastern Queens, doesn’t think so. Her seventh grader, Alexandra, she said, had perfect scores last year. But she doesn’t want New York City’s Department of Education to hand her $500 in spending cash for that achievement. That’s what Alexandra would earn if her school was part of a pilot program that will reward fourth and seventh graders with $100 to $500, depending on how well they perform on 10 tests in the next year.
Mrs. Windland wants Alexandra to do well for all the timeless reasons — to cultivate a love of learning, advance to more competitive schools and the like. She has on occasion bought her children toys or taken them out for dinner when they brought home pleasurable report cards, but she does not believe in dangling rewards beforehand.
“It’s like giving kids an allowance because they wake up every morning and brush their teeth and go off to school,” she said. “That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Amy Hetzner:

The School District’s virtual high school has delivered its first financial surplus to the school system more than a year after it faced an uncertain future amid budgetary losses.
The district received about $65,000 more than it spent on the 3-year-old school, called iQ Academies at Wisconsin, for 2006-’07 in the first year of a renegotiated contract with KC Distance Learning, the private company that manages the virtual high school.
The school raised about $4 million through the state’s open enrollment system; special-education and tuition payments; and student fees, said Erik Kass, Waukesha’s executive director of business services. A little more than $1.5 million of that revenue went to the School District, which pays employee salaries and benefits as well as some supply costs for iQ.
In a report Monday to members of the School Board’s Finance and Facilities Committee, district officials attributed the financial turnaround to a change in the revenue-sharing arrangement with the company as well as better cost controls in the recently ended school year.

Stacy Cowley and Neil deMause:

The subway ads promise inspiration, fulfillment, and the kind of career satisfaction rarely found in an office cube. “Your spreadsheets won’t grow up to be doctors and lawyers,” one gently chides. “You remember your first-grade teacher’s name. Who will remember yours?” asks another.
The posters are an effective lure for enticing dissatisfied corporate professionals and idealistic college grads to apply for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Set up in 2000 as a collaboration between the city and the nonprofit New Teacher Project, the program aims to address the city’s chronic teacher shortage, epecially in hard-to-fill areas like math, science, and special education. It offers a subsidized master’s degree in education and a quick on-ramp to a new career. This year, nearly 20,000 would-be educators from across the country applied.
But recent fellows warn aspirants not to fall for the gauzy sales pitch. Recounting their initiation into leading a classroom, the novice teachers describe a scene that’s more Full Metal Jacket than Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Seven weeks of crash-course training and summer school student teaching, they say, is no preparation for the realities of city classrooms.
“The year before I came, the kids set three or four fires in the school,” recalls one fellow about to enter her fifth year of teaching first and second graders. “You’re prepared that some of the kids aren’t going to listen, but not for the things they’re going to do—like throwing desks across the room. I had a kid taken away in an ambulance my first year because he just flipped out and was ramming into the door.”

Robert Rothman:

As the unprecedented push to improve American education enters the midpoint of its third decade, reformers can claim some success. Yet no one would argue that the job is done, particularly in the nation’s cities. Even the most successful urban school districts, the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, would acknowledge that they have a long way to go toward ensuring that every child receives an excellent education and develops the knowledge and skills needed for a fulfilling and productive future.
There is no shortage of ideas for improving urban education, and there are efforts under way in nearly every city to improve schooling for urban youths: New schools are proliferating, high schools are being redesigned, new curricula are being developed and implemented, accountability systems are being strengthened, and much more. But there is also a growing recognition that improving schools and school systems, while essential, is not enough. Ensuring that every child becomes proficient and beyond will require the support and active engagement of organizations and agencies outside of schools as well.
The role of out-of-school factors in educational success has sparked heated debate. But the debate over whether in-school or out-of-school factors are more salient in children’s learning—a debate that has raged at least since the 1966 publication of James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity—is in many respects a false one. Both factors are important, and both must be addressed if the nation is to fulfill its 60-year-old promise of equal educational opportunity, and its more recent pledge to ensure that all children learn to high levels.
The experiences of middle-class and affluent children make this proposition clear. To be sure, relatively affluent students tend to have schooling advantages that support higher levels of learning. Numerous studies have documented the disparities in school facilities, teacher quality, and curriculum offerings that favor more-advantaged students.

Both articles below are at best, thinly related to this site’s purpose. However, I think they each merit a link and a read:

• Thailand to keep on repatriating Hmong to Laos by Pracha Hariraksapitak:
  

  Thailand has no plans to halt its repatriation of ethnic Hmong to communist Laos despite appeals by U.S. Congressmen and the United Nations, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said on Monday.
  Thailand had not sent any Hmong, many of whom fought alongside the United States during the Vietnam War, back forcibly, he told reporters.
  We did not deport them. There have been repatriations as they hold the nationality of our neighbour. The process is under the care of third countries to ensure no human rights are violated after their return,’ Surayud said.
  Thailand’s policy was influenced partly by the burden of caring for Hmong who continued to cross over from Laos three decades after the end of the war, he said.

  Madison has a large Hmong community which was recently in the news over the naming of a new elementary school.

• Former Wisconsin DPI Employee Madeline Uranek:
  

  In November 2006, I left my home in Madison, trading a wonderful, decently paid job with the state Department of Public Instruction for the opportunity to volunteer two years with the Peace Corps. I am posted in Lesotho, in southern Africa.
  Lesotho is a tiny country, about the size of Maryland, with a population of about two million. It is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, the continent’s richest country. The wealth of South Africa is a magnet for the men of Lesotho, who travel there to work in diamond and copper mines, and for Lesotho’s handful of professionals, who go to be teachers, lawyers, nurses and electrical engineers. But most women venture no further than the nearest grimy camp town, and most children have never left their village.
  I sense desolation in the tired red soil, the wispy corn plants, marching in bedraggled rows like defeated soldiers. Yet the beauty of this country is breathtaking, and it comes in 360-degree vistas. I can stand in any high place and see ranges upon ranges of mountains in all directions, vast open valleys through which a river trickles.
  In Madison, it is summer, lush and green. In Lesotho, it is winter, brown and windy. Before the missionaries and Boer settlers came, the Basotho people wore animal skins to keep warm. Now they wear beautiful blankets, whose designs are based on English mill weavings of the mid-1800s, evolved over the decades since to be uniquely Basotho. The blankets come in patterns dominated by a single color, and have intriguing names meaning, for example, blanket of royalty, heart of the chief, or thigh of a woman in labor.

Neal McCluskey:

NCLB’s biggest problem is that it’s designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, “adequate yearly progress” goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB’s perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB’s first “needs improvement” list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB’s power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, “We don’t lower standards in this state!” A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. “Michigan stretches to do what’s right with our children,” Mr. Watkins said, “but we’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Today, evasion syndrome is epidemic. According to a report last month from the Institute of Education Sciences, a research branch of the U.S. Department of Education, while states are declaring success on their tests, almost none have standards even close to those of the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” Almost all states have set their standards below NAEP’s “proficiency” level.

National Council on Teacher Quality:

A letter to the editor in today’s Wall Street Journal brings more attention to the low academic performance of the average teacher with more meaningful data than just how well (or poorly) aspiring teachers perform on the SAT. On the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) which many teachers take before entering a Master’s program, we find the best evidence to date of substandard performance for the nation’s educators.
While the letter cited older data, more recent data from the ETS site tells a sorrowful tale. With the notable exception of secondary school teachers, the large majority of teachers score at the bottom. Out of the 50 intended graduate majors ETS collected data on, seven of the lowest scoring 10 majors on the list are education fields. Only one field–social work–scored lower.
The most popular choice of graduate degrees for teachers with aspirations for school or district leadership is a degree in education administration. The average GRE score was 948, comparing poorly with the national average score of 1058 for all fields of study.

Tom Shuford:

“When public officials want to reduce crime,” says Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, “they listen to police officers. When they want to control flooding, they talk to engineers. . . .” (Letters, July 16). Implication: Want to improve education? Talk to the teachers union. A laughable proposition. Digest these data: Applicants for graduate study in education administration — tested between July 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004 — had a combined mean total GRE (Graduate Record Examination) score of 950 (Verbal, 427; Math, 523). That is sixth from the bottom of 51 fields of graduate study tabulated by the Educational Testing Service.
The mean total GRE score across all fields was 1066. Which applicants had still lower total GRE scores than applicants in education administration? Social work, 896; early childhood, 913; student counseling, 928; home economics, 933; special education, 934 —
education fields all. Other fields with mean GRE scores on the far left side of the GRE bell curve? Seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th from the left tip of the curve, respectively: public administration (“practices and roles of public bureaucracies”), 965; other education, 968; elementary education, 970; education evaluation and research, 985; other social science, 993. Note the pattern: Eighty-plus percent on the far-left-side-of-the-GRE-bell-curve are headed for — or, more likely, already employed by — public education systems. Ninety-plus percent are headed for some form of government employment. This GRE snapshot of the capabilities of the people who run government schooling monopolies is not unrelievedly bleak: There is one education “outlier,” secondary education, that has a mean score of 1063, in the middle of the bell curve distribution.
Tom Shuford
Lenoir, N.C.

Pat Schneider:

When the school bell rings this fall, high school freshmen will enter a period when they are most at risk of drifting away from school and the hopes and dreams of their families, statistics on local students show.
That’s why United Way of Dane County joined with the Madison Metropolitan School District on Tuesday in hosting a forum of parents and students to strategize on better ways to help students succeed.
Some 25 parents — and a half-dozen incoming ninth-graders — talked about their hopes for high school. The forum, held at James Wright Middle School, was part of the work of United Way’s Delegation on Disconnected and Violent Youth, which seeks to improve community support for young people and their families so students stay interested in and attending school, and away from drugs and crime.
“Disconnected” youth are not committed to school or work, underachieve and are alienated from adults, said Corey Chambas, co-chairman of the United Way delegation and CEO of First Business Financial Services. “They are really on the wrong path,” he said. United Way estimates there are 3,000 “disconnected” youth in Dane County.

Amy Hetzner:

UW-Waukesha has held individual courses and camps before, aimed at drawing younger students to its campus and feeding their imagination over the summer break. This year, however, was the first time it organized a full week of classes for students 11 to 14 to learn from the same instructors who teach young adults at the two-year campus.
It’s been an eye-opening experience for the instructors teaching the academy courses in science subjects from chemistry and ecology to astronomy and meteorology.
“The middle school is just wonderful to teach because the kids are in that part of their childhoods in which they become very, very curious about the world and are very easy to talk to about many different issues,” said Bob Birmingham, a UW-Waukesha archaeology lecturer and one of the teachers for the academy. “They ask a lot of questions. It seems to be an age where they’re putting a lot of things together.”

Arnold Kling:

“We have been inexorably centralizing control over the schools in this country for 150 years. We’ve gone from one-room schoolhouses overseen directly by the parents of the children who attended them to sprawling bureaucracies that consume half of the operating budgets of their respective states. We’ve gone from 127,000 school districts in 1932 to fewer than 15,000 today — despite a massive increase in the number of students.”
— Andrew J. Coulson

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools:

OK, so the Lieberman/Landrieu/Coleman bill is technically second out of the gate, but [this one] really gets the NCLB reauthorization debate started. Making its debut at a Senate-side shindig featuring Chancellors Klein (NY) and Rhee (DC), the Lieberman-led proposal lays done some important markers, to wit:

• Lets schools move away from input-driven “Highly Qualified Teachers” rules and toward a new standard based on effectiveness in the classroom
• Permits growth measures in Adequate Yearly Progress, and fund the technologies needed to move rapidly toward measuring student-level longitudinal gains
• Morphs NAEP’s governing body into a new commission that would write voluntary standards – – and make states tell parents about the gap between their own state assessments and prevailing national norms

More sunshine is better. Props to Madison Magazine for taking a closer look at our local schools.

Justin Pope:

For most of history, higher education has been reserved for a tiny elite.
For a glimpse of a future where college is open to all, visit California — the place that now comes closest to that ideal.
California’s community college system is the country’s largest, with 109 campuses, 4,600 buildings and a staggering 2.5 million students. It’s also cheap. While it’s no longer free, anyone can take a class, and at about $500 per term full-time, the price is a fraction of any other state’s.
There is no such thing as a typical student. There are high achievers and low ones, taking courses from accounting to welding. There are young and old, degree-seekers and hobbyists — all commingled on some of the most diverse campuses in the country, if not the world.
Many students, for one reason or another, simply missed the onramp to college the first time around — people like 31-year-old Bobbie Burns, juggling work and childcare and gradually collecting credits at San Diego City College in hopes of transferring to a media program at a nearby university.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial Board:

Kindergarten for 3-year-olds has been a smash hit at Bruce Guadalupe Community School on Milwaukee’s near south side, where, bucking what is supposed to be their fate, low-income students perform at a high academic level.
Jill Matusin, who teaches 5-year-olds at the charter school, swears by 3K.
“The difference – it was amazing,” she says of two sisters in her classroom in successive years – one who started in 5K and the other in 3K. The sister with the head start was far more advanced in numbers, colors, language and social skills.
The results so impressed Bruce Guadalupe that it is set to open four more 3K classrooms this fall – setting a splendid example for the state, which must boost preschool education, particularly for needy children. This strategy would narrow, if not close, the gaps in academic achievement between the poor and the middle class, whites and blacks, Anglos and Latinos.
Decades of study have led educators to this consensus: When aimed at kids from lower-income families, quality early childhood education boosts academic attainment, high school graduation rates, college attendance and future wages, and it reduces truancy, crime and teenage pregnancies.

Kathy Goolsby & Karen Ayres:

Nearly 1,000 parents and students packed into Lancaster High School’s auditorium Thursday night to hear district officials pitch a plan for a four-day school week that drew fiery criticism from the crowd.
Many parents at the emotion-charged meeting said the proposal – which would take effect this fall and is being presented as a one-year pilot program – would allow unsupervised students to get into trouble while home alone Fridays and would force parents to spend hundreds of dollars on child care for young children.

Alan Borsuk:

They don’t have that at Marquette University High School anymore.
“I may have been in the last class where you were required to take Latin,” said Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who graduated in 1972. “There was something about the Gallic Wars the second year, that’s about all I remember.”
Some things do change at Marquette High. But look at all the things that haven’t changed over the past 150 years – it’s still in the heart of the city, still all-boys, still Jesuit, still producing a generous portion of the political, judicial, corporate and civic leaders of the city.
The school will celebrate its 150th birthday Saturday; its roots go back nearly to the founding of Milwaukee.
(Latin, by the way, is still offered as an elective, and 103 students are scheduled to take it this fall. Also, not everyone disliked Latin. Milwaukee historian and author John Gurda, a 1965 graduate, said he treasures his four years of Latin and two years of Greek, and they still strengthen his perspective on language and its roots.)

Erin Dillon:

It’s not hard to find news reports about the federal No Child Left Behind Act claiming that the law is requiring teachers to give standardized tests to severely disabled students.1 These stories frequently portray all special education students as having the same severe disabilities and bolster calls for changes to NCLB’s accountability provisions for special education students. But the majority of special education students are not severely handicapped. With special services and accommodations, they are able to perform at grade level.
As part of its accountability requirements, NCLB calls for schools to separate test-score data by student subgroup—categories of students that include major racial groups, low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. This prevents schools, school districts, or states from letting high overall student achievement hide low achievement among certain groups of students. NCLB defines the students-with-disabilities subgroup as all students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As Chart 1 shows, this is a broad definition and includes students with a wide range of disabilities.

Amy Kazmin:

In the dilapidated former canteen of Thailand’s Wat Si Sutharam School, about 20 Burmese children – aged five to 15 – sit on benches, carefully copying the first letter of the Thai alphabet in lined notebooks. Among them is 10-year-old Sai Htaw, a boy from Burma’s ethnic Mon minority, whose mother, San Aye, a worker in the coastal province of Samut Sakorn’s vast seafood-processing factory, hovers nearby.
Sai Htaw has a Thai name (Amporn) and speaks Thai with ease. But he neither reads nor writes it. During what should have been the early years of his education he was barred from Thai schools because he lacked a birth certificate, something issued only to Thai citizens.
Now, toiling in the spartan classroom, supervised by volunteer teachers from a labour rights group, Sai Htaw is on the front line of what is likely to be an arduous struggle: the push to secure formal education for the often Thai-born children of migrant workers from Burma.
With a recent decision by Bangkok to open schools to all, Sai Htaw and his classmates have been promised places in schools alongside Thai children – once they grasp the basics of reading and writing Thai. Ms San Aye is elated: “I want him to study as much as he can.”

Jennifer Mrozowski:

New Detroit Public Schools superintendent Connie Calloway said Thursday that she does not support charter schools, and she intends to present ideas that will help draw students back to the struggling school system.
“Charter schools mean suicide for public schools,” said Calloway during her first board meeting, causing the crowd at Kettering High School to erupt in applause.
Calloway said Detroit Public Schools must get to the root of the persistent enrollment loss plaguing the 116,000-student district.
She identified two immediate reasons: ongoing disputes the district faces and the desire of parents to have safe, clean and orderly schools.
“We have to think about the presence that we put forth to the media, to the state department, to the rest of the United States as a Detroit Public Schools community,” she said. “What is it that we are doing that causes us to drive families away?”

Joanne has more.

Ronald Brownsein:

THE COMPLAINTS are reaching a crescendo as Congress moves closer to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the education reform law that President Bush passed with rare bipartisan support in 2001. Conservatives are wailing about federal intrusion. Teachers unions and some leading Democrats moan that the law relies too much on testing as the measure of student progress. And some parents echo each of those indictments.
There’s no doubt the law has minted enemies. But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for low-income children, has it right when she says the law wasn’t designed “to make people happy.” It was passed because too many students in too many places were not learning enough. It wouldn’t be doing its job if it left in place the practices that produced those unacceptable results. Grumbling, in education as in everything else, is the inevitable price of change.
And the evidence is that change is generating some progress. The Center for Education Policy, an independent research organization, recently found that the share of students demonstrating proficiency in reading and (especially) math is up in most states since the law’s passage. In most places, achievement gaps between white and minority students are narrowing. The problem, on both fronts, is that improvement is coming too slowly. The overall gains remain relatively modest. And the gaps between white and minority students, though narrowed, remain dauntingly wide in many places.
Those numbers — not the whining from teachers, the right or, yes, even parents — ought to be the beacon as Bush and Congress reconsider the law. Washington shouldn’t try to silence the complainers but to sharpen the law’s focus on helping the schools and students most in need. In some cases, such an emphasis may even mute the discontent.