Vivian Roe:

No matter what side of these specific issues you fall on, one thing is undeniable: The Milwaukee Public Schools system is failing. We’ve got such horrible statistics when it comes to the dropout rate, illiteracy, proficiency in math and science, discipline in the schools, etc., that even friends from out of state know of our educational crisis.
We’ve got a nasty reputation, but it’s well-deserved.
So when I read that single-sex schools are “controversial” while teachers in essence “deserve more,” I conclude that in reality it’s exactly the opposite.
To disclose, I am a “St. Mary’s Girl” – all-girls St. Mary’s Academy class of 1987. I got an excellent education there, and I was very disappointed when the school closed in 1991.
With none of the distractions of flirting with boys, dressing up to impress boys, not wanting to be “too smart” in front of the boys, we learned. Which is all teenagers are supposed to do in school anyway.
What I remember the most is that being in a relaxed atmosphere, where the learning style and interests of girls was catered to, made each day bring with it lessons in maturity, responsibility and life discipline.
Mind you, we were hardly cloistered and had a good deal of opportunity to mingle with boys (particularly from all-boys Thomas More and Marquette University High School). And it was clear that our counterparts were experiencing the same on their side of the spectrum.

Michael Mathias adds another perspective.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

“Desegregation in Racine and throughout the nation has failed based upon the mechanism used, which is busing,” said County Supervisor Ken Lumpkin, who publishes a black community newspaper. Lumpkin’s partner in a debate held last week, board member Randy Bangs, argued that ending long bus rides would give students more time for other activities, such as studying, and may help close the achievement gap.
Mattie Booker, who taught in the district before desegregation, argued that busing students was necessary.
“I watched black and brown kids play jacks in classes because their teachers did not have what it took to teach them,” she told the crowd at the debate. Her partner in the debate, Sister Michelle Olley of the Racine Dominicans, was School Board president when the board adopted the desegregation policy in 1977. She said it worked throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Michael Alison Chandler:

To overhaul public education, the No Child Left Behind law required a massive expansion of student testing. But it also called for states to ensure that all teachers in core academic subjects are “highly qualified” to help students succeed — an unprecedented mandate that has delivered less than promised.
The law, which turned five years old this week, has held schools to increasingly higher standards for student achievement. For teachers, however, standards meant to guarantee that they know their subjects are often vague and open to broad interpretation.
Legal loopholes and uneven implementation by states and the U.S. Department of Education have diluted the law’s impact on the teaching workforce, some education experts say. They say that meeting the standards of quality is more about shuffling paper than achieving two vital goals: ensuring that teachers are prepared to help students succeed and reducing the teacher talent gap between rich and poor schools.

WKOW-TV notes that Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater has banked quite a bit of unused sick leave time (and therefore money upon his retirement).
WKOW-TV raises some useful policy questions. However, I do think Art is to be commended for the extraordinary amount of time he spends in the community. I’ve been amazed at how frequently I see his name appear around town.
I certainly have had some disagreements with certain policies that he has pushed such as one size fits all mandatory classroom groupings, but Art is to be commended for his extensive time in the schools and community.

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:

Over 20 years ago Dr. Ron Edmonds, a Harvard researcher, first reported the critical role that a school principal’s instructional leadership plays in creating successful learning opportunities for all students. That fundamental proposition has borne the test of further research and time and is now included in almost all school reform measures.
While there is general acceptance of the critical nature of instructional leadership by the school principal, the demanding nature of that role for a lone individual who bears that responsibility is not often described. The principal of a school, whether a large urban high school or a small rural elementary school, shares the responsibility for the future of every student in his/her building.

Paul Teske, Jody Fitzpatrick, and Gabriel Kaplan [1.1MB PDF Report]:

Starting with the economist Milton Friedman, supporters of school choice have assumed that competition would lead to better schools, and that parents could do a better job of assigning children to schools than could school administrators. The debate on the first assumption is raging. The second assumption has received little attention, except from those who assert that middle-class families can make good choices but impoverished families can’t.
Barriers to parent choice can all be overcome, but it will take planning, organization, and some modest public spending.
Our new research paints a very different picture of how low-income and minority families in big cities choose schools when they get the chance. Like middle-class parents who have always had choices, low-income parents don’t look for alternatives if their children are happy and successful in school. But once they start thinking about school options, low-income families want information about schools and think hard about the choices they have. Poor parents seek to escape problems evident in their children’s current school, and have definite ideas about the differences between one child and another (our studious boy, our distractible girl) that lead them to search for an appropriate match between child and school.
But our results also identify barriers that must be overcome before low-income parents can become the types of savvy consumers that can make school choice work well for them.

Center on Reinventing Public Education
Alan Borsuk has more:

The researchers based their findings on surveys conducted about a year ago with 300 parents in Milwaukee, 300 in Washington, D.C., and 200 in Denver. Milwaukee and Washington are on the cutting edge of school choice in the United States, each with wide arrays of options for parents, including numerous charter schools and private schools that take part in publicly funded voucher programs for low-income families.
“This report’s general finding is that low-income urban parents report feeling more well informed than was anticipated,” the researchers said in the report, being released today. “They are extremely satisfied with their choices, and most do not believe that they lacked any important information when they made their choice.”
The optimistic conclusions about school choice – in the broadest sense of the term – do not include an assessment of whether parents were actually making good choices in terms of schools where academic achievement is strong or where their children specifically would thrive.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

The School Board should proceed down this path, but cautiously. As officials of the Milwaukee Public Schools have noted, private schools have long offered single-sex education. Parents who send their children to public schools deserve that choice, too. But officials should be prepared to abandon this experiment if it is shown to hurt girls, as gender separation did in the past.
The proposal is to open an all-boys school and an all-girls school in September, though that target date may not be met. There should not be a rush to do so. Getting the schools right is more important than getting them open quickly. MPS has yet to specify what grade levels the schools would encompass.
The initial impetus for proposals to separate school kids by sex was to help girls, who lagged behind boys in math and science. The theory was that girls were too reticent around boys and that the sexes had different styles of learning. In an all-female setting, girls wouldn’t be afraid to show how smart they were, and the material could be presented in a feminine style. Also, such a setting would permit girls to take leadership roles they would be too bashful to assume in a co-ed milieu.

Alan Borsuk:

In documents made available in advance of a School Board committee meeting Tuesday, MPS administrators said, “MPS strongly believes that parents should be given the opportunity to choose single-sex schools for their children if they believe that these schools will help their children.”
Specific schools are not spelled out in the resolution to be considered Tuesday – in fact, it doesn’t pinpoint whether the focus should be on high schools, middle schools or even elementary grades.
But the MPS administration, led by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, recommended giving the idea a green light and allowing administrators to seek proposals for two single-sex schools, with the goal of opening them for the coming school year. That plan is expected to be recommended by the board’s Innovation and School Reform Committee on Tuesday and be approved by the full board Jan. 25.

Bruce Schneier:

However, Green MSP Patrick Harvie said the suggestion was troubling.
“We should be preparing young people for the reality of defending their privacy and civil liberties against ever-more intrusive government systems,” he argued.
“We’ve heard proposals for airport-style scanners and random drug testing in schools, fingerprinting is already in place in some schools. There’s a risk of creating environments which feel more like penal institutions than places of learning.
“These ID cards will do absolutely nothing to address the causes of bullying. Instead they will teach the next generation that an ID card culture is ‘normal’, and that they should have to prove their entitlement to services.”

Sarah Carr:

China’s schools have struck fear in the West with their relentless focus on subjects such as physics and math – areas where American students have struggled compared with other nations.
However, visits to dozens of schools in China and hundreds in the United States reveal that both countries love to hate their own schools, and live in awe of others’ strengths. While Americans revere the Chinese mastery of basic subjects such as math and geography, the Chinese extol the American emphasis on creativity and nurturing individual talent.
In the prosperous seaside region of Zhejiang, the situation’s changing, though, as entrepreneurs inject some of the country’s relatively new capitalist fervor into the schools. The result is a panoply of schools that comes close to resembling Milwaukee’s education scene in its diversity – hardly what one would expect to find in a Communist state.
Students attend fancy private schools focused on such non-academic subjects as kung fu martial arts. A fledgling school voucher program aims to give families more choices as well as strengthen alternative and private schools. Educators describe a shift toward more local control and creativity in teaching. And parents like Xu are closely examining their new options.

Amy Hetzner:

In fact, the only indication this is a multiage classroom comes more than an hour into the day’s math lesson, when the students are divided into two groups – first-graders with Weber, second-graders with gifted-specialist Kristin Stein.
Since the beginning of the school year, the Menomonee Falls school has been trying out the multiage classroom as a way to raise student achievement and forge better relationships with parents and students. Riverside Principal Kathy Myles is so encouraged thus far that she hopes to add another class – for third- and fourth-graders – next year.
“My whole thing is about creating options for learners,” said Myles, who also thinks it’s important to keep traditional grade-level classes for students who learn better that way.

Jon Hilsenrath & Rafael Gerena-Morales:

Climbing out of poverty hasn’t been as easy as getting on the bus. She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her struggles traveled with her.
“You really need to have a focus to get out of the ghetto,” says Ms. Grayson, a New York native.
Her experience offers clues to a question society has wrestled with for years: Can a family escape poverty by getting out of the neighborhood where it takes root? It also sheds light on the government’s shifting efforts to use housing policy as a solution to poverty.
A $16 billion federal infrastructure has built up around housing vouchers designed to give poor families more choices about where to live. About two million families currently use “Section 8” vouchers that allow them to move with subsidized rent. Since 1993, the government has been demolishing urban housing projects and forcing families to resettle in other places, sometimes with vouchers.
But results show that may only partially be true. “It would have been wonderful to have discovered the magic bullet,” says Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard economist who has studied the program.
Findings, he says, were more complicated. Among them: boys whose families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, but didn’t do better financially.

Marisue Horton:

As we head into the season for making New Year’s resolutions, here’s my wish list for resolutions relating to education in 2007:

1. Embrace our differences. Education is the ability to provide opportunity and challenges to all students. Each child is a gift and has talent. Families, schools and politicians need to avoid pitting one group of learners against another. All are valuable.
2. Build understanding and avoid condemnation. Parents, learn to advocate for children by defining the problem to be resolved. School staff, encourage family input and work together to find solutions. Community members, visit and offer to volunteer in your public schools. Before criticizing schools, look carefully at what they are doing. Know the issues.
3. Educate the public by researching the issues. Members of the media, do your homework. We are sitting on one of the best research institutions in the world. Don’t fuel the fires of divisiveness on educational issues by quoting sources without researching their assertions.
4. Appreciate school staff. There is no greater career, nor many that are open to as much public criticism, as teachers. Take time to thank a teacher, appreciate their work by attending and participating in school events. Find out what’s going on in your public schools each day.
5. Get involved in solutions to improve public education. Define waste. Rather than criticize local decision-making, share ideas for fiscal responsibility. Help boards of education and administration make districts more effective. Acknowledge that 13 years of revenue caps are stripping our public schools of their ability to effectively educate students. Referendums are NOT the answer. They are little more than panhandling for our kids. Stop asking us to beg for our future.
6. Acknowledge that leadership matters. Support the hiring of the best quality staff. Ask for local progress reports on your schools. Talk to your legislators and other policymakers about the state’s responsibility to keep their commitments on public education. If you believe in two-thirds funding from the state, demand that legislators live up to their promises!

Marisue Horton
Madison schools parent
Verona

John Taylor Gatto’s book:

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don’t have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen?
Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.

All Things Considered:

Karate instructor Louise Rafkin describes the way that she teaches children to hit. Childhood is a violent time, Rafkin says, and her students learn how to control their innate violence.
As Rafkin talks with two of her young students, one describes the power struggles at his school.

Matthew Henry Hall; Insider Higher Ed.

Howard Blume and Joel Rubin:

A Superior Court judge Thursday struck down legislation that gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa substantial authority over the Los Angeles Unified School District, a stunning setback to his plans for assuming direct control of dozens of Los Angeles schools.
Judge Dzintra Janavs said the law, which would have taken effect Jan. 1, violated multiple provisions of the state Constitution and the Los Angeles City Charter. She ordered public officials “to refrain from enforcing or implementing” any part of Assembly Bill 1381, which codified Villaraigosa’s powers.
In a late afternoon news conference, the mayor vowed to seek an expedited appeal.

WORT-FM’s new website includes archived audio. Barbara Golden’s 12/18/2006 appearance can be heard here [mp3 audio.]

Jessica Blanchard:

More parents are supplementing lessons at home by embracing public school partnerships.
Students at the tiny, nondescript public school building in North Seattle have no playground, no formal cafeteria, no sports teams, no bells signaling the end of class.
They come and go as they please, and the nearly 250 who pass through the halls don’t even consider themselves public school students.
They’re among the more than 20,000 children statewide who are thought to opt out of public schools each year. They and their parents are drawn instead to the flexibility and freedom of homeschooling.

Meanwhile, another Wisconsin virtual high school opens.

Channel3000:

On Tuesday’s meeting at the school, some parents in attendance said that there were feelings of confusion, concern and anxiety. The meeting was a listening session and allowed the new principal to introduce himself and then work to quell concerns.
Rathert told the parents about his extensive leadership experience and outlined his plans for moving forward, He also fielded questions from attendees, WISC-TV reported.
“The main thing I’ve done is just come in and tried to listen and get around to as many people and get in front of as many students as possible and learn as much as I can as quickly as I can,” Rathert said.

There’s been a bit of school climate discussion recently regarding safety as well as leadership changes, most recently at LaFollette. I’ve had the opportunity to observe a number of teachers and principals over the past few months and have to say that the level of professionalism and resiliency, in the face of significant challenges, have been impressive. I am thankful for their time and efforts.

Marc Dean Millot:

The abuses revealed in federal investigations of the Reading First program are not, as the normally levelheaded U.S. Rep. George Miller of California asserts, the product of a Republican “culture of corruption.” Nor do they spring from a vast business conspiracy, as opponents of privatization would have us believe; an autocratic bureaucrat ideology, as the Bush administration seems inclined to suggest; or an isolated set of circumstances, as all reasonable people hope. The scandal is part of a pervasive pattern in public education today, and is the predictable result of elected officials’ well-intentioned but incomplete approach to school reform legislation.
Since the early 1990s, federal and state government has rightly moved public education in the direction of standards, accountability, and competition. By any reasonable assessment, the programs that schools purchase, not just teachers and the bureaucracy, bear some responsibility for the conditions that led to legislative change. Capped by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the legislative framework political leaders established aims at compelling public schools to purchase new, innovative programs from the private sector. But in the process, policymakers unwittingly took aim at deeply entrenched purchasing relationships involving school districts, federal and state education agencies, large multinational publishing firms, and an expert class of consultants in academia and the think tanks. Elected officials failed to change the rules of that game. Instead, they left the making of their new market to this syndicate.

WKOW-TV:

The same day principal John Broome resigned, last friday, three fights broke out, leaving many students, staff and parents wondering if they are related.
Mitch weber discovered the fights ended with two students in trouble with the law and one teacher injured.
Since the school year started, we’ve reported on rising violence at La Follette – a student pulling a knife on another student, a fight in the hallway involving girls.
Today, the district denied the principal’s resignation and the fights last week are connected.
As school got out this afternoon at La Follette High School. Many students knew why we were there. Damian Clendening found out today his new principal isn’t coming back.

I have to agree with Phil M that the Administration deserves “some level of credit” for addressing this now, rather than later. Tim had some useful comments on the challenging job that is an urban high school principal.

Michelle York:

Before Sophie Friedman, 15, went to her first high school dance last year, her friends warned her: This would not be like those in middle school with shy, awkward dance moves.
But their advice did not prepare Sophie for what she saw when she showed up. “It was a pretty big shock,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be that crazy.”
Her classmates were bumping, grinding, shaking, arching, teasing and flaunting in a way that made the chaperons gape.

Margery Eagan:

It’s been ridiculed since Monday. Even Jay Leno weighed in with a joke about his PC home state, Massachusetts, where Needham High, in case you missed it, will stop printing the honor roll in the paper lest, as Leno put it, “it might make the kids flunking out feel bad.”
“We protect our children too much. This sends the wrong message,” said one Needham mother, whose son graduated in June. Yet she understands the principal’s good intentions.
Her boy is among those still reeling from four student suicides in three years. One was her son’s friend. She understands too the paradoxes: How the pressure on high schoolers to achieve – from parents, peers, school – is greater than ever. But teenagers have less ability to cope.
That’s because a hallmark of middle-class parenting, 2006, starting in preschool, is to stamp out any situation that teaches children how to deal with, say, getting picked last, over and over, in a schoolyard pick-up game – assuming your kids’ school even allows pick-up games anymore.

Mike Antonucci:

It was a big job, but the National Council on Teacher Quality has put together a database that will allow you to “easily search the contents of collective bargaining agreements and board policies from the nation’s 50 largest public school districts.”
NCTQ will unveil it in DC on January 4. I’m guessing that somewhere in the halls of Harlem Success Charter School, Eva Moskowitz is smiling.

National Center on Education and The Economy:

In a TIME article on How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century , Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe write that the national discussion around education will change “when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy.”

Executive Summary 2.1MB PDF
Andrew Rotherham comments.

Erin Richards:

In a school with more non-Catholics than Catholics, a more universal identifier is average income: More than 80% of the students receive vouchers to attend St. Joan, and almost the same number qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
“Our girls face a huge amount of challenges,” says Teddi Kennedy, the school’s director of advancement. “For some of them, just getting here on the bus and getting a good meal is a concern.”
That meal is served in a tiny lunch line in the corner of the school’s gymnasium. On this day, nearly everything is the same color: a fried chicken patty with a slab of cheese, corn and canned fruit salad.

Shavar Jeffries:

I believe it is time, once again, to consider a new approach to using the law to facilitate meaningful educational opportunities for minority children. I suggest that civil-rights lawyers initiate a new wave of litigation premised on reshaping the governance of public schools and, in so doing, empowering minority parents to assume meaningful decision-making roles concerning the kind of education available to children of color. Litigation efforts to this point have been focused fundamentally on widescale, largely uniform government decision-making about the educational needs of minority children; the voice and needs of individual children and parents have largely been unheeded. And it is usually the case that policymaking focused on across-the-board remedies inevitably ignores the particular needs of minority children. The approach I suggest does not imply, however, an atomistic preoccupation with individual needs in opposition to the civic and social purposes motivating public subsidy of educational services; rather, I suggest a public-private form of governance fundamentally different from the almost exclusively government-centered litigation model used today.

Larry Abramson:

A new study by education researchers concludes that the best way to improve the quality of teaching is to pay teachers more. And to pay good teachers even more. Critics aren’t so sure, notably teacher’s unions. They warn that merit-pay systems are notoriously subjective and unreliable.

Audio.

Sandy Cullen:

Developed in Germany in 1919, soon after the end of World War I, Waldorf education originated as a way to develop people who could bring peace to the world, aiming to develop each child’s sense of truth, beauty, and goodness.
But two years after moving into the building that OakSong’s leaders thought would give the alternative school a permanent place in a natural setting where it could expand, financial struggles could force them to give up the property and search for a new home.
Just raising the $110,000 for the down payment on the property’s $360,000 purchase price was “a big stretch” for the school’s small community of 15 to 20 families, said Susanne Schadde, OakSong’s board president, whose children Alice, 6, and Paul, 4, attend the school.