Jim Zellmer – Page 489 – School Information System

A Study of Core-Plus Students Attending Michigan State University

Janet Mertz recently mentioned (along with UW Placement’s James Wollack recently) this paper by Richard Hill & Thomas Parker [750K PDF]:

The latest, December 2006 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly, an official publication of the Mathematical Association of America, contains an 18-page article entitled “A study of Core-Plus students attending Michigan State University” by Richard Hill and Thomas Parker, professors at MSU who teach pre-service high school math teachers.
They state that, “as the implementation progressed, from 1996 to 1999, Core-Plus students placed into, and enrolled in, increasingly lower level courses; this downward trend is statistically robust (p<.0005). The percentages of students who (eventually) passed a technical calculus course show a statistically significant (p<.005) decline averaging 27 percent a year; this trend is accompanied by an obvious and statistically significant increase in percentages of students who placed into low-level and remedial algebra courses. The grades the Core-Plus students earned in their university mathematics courses are also below average, except for a small group of top students. ACT scores suggest the existence but not the severity of these trends."

Core-Plus is used in some Madison High Schools. Much more on math here.

Don’t like math? UW-O asks ‘why not?’

Ben Perlman & Pamela Buechel:

For many college students, high school math is but a distant memory of derivative functions and playing games on graphing calculators.
When a professor mentions that certain math skills are necessary for his class, it sends the lecture hall into a frenzy of questions and worry. It seems that math, more than any other subject, is lost in the student’s transition from high school to college.
With a $69,000 grant, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh geology professor Jennifer Wenner intends to figure out why.
“There are a couple of hypotheses,” Wenner said. “From my own experience, some people get it in their head that they can’t do math, and they get this block about it.”

DC Area High School Rankings, 2006

Jay Matthews:

The Challenge Index, my system for rating high schools based on college-level test participation, grew from watching a low-income school in East Los Angeles — Garfield High — find ways to challenge average students that most high-income schools never thought of. As The Washington Post unveils its 10th annual Challenge Index rankings of Washington area public schools this week, I want to see how low-income schools in this region are doing.
The Challenge Index rates each school by taking the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests the school gave in 2006 and dividing by the number of seniors who graduated from the school this year. High school educators who have learned, as the teachers at Garfield did, that even average students benefit from AP and IB are more likely to have more students taking those exams and do better on The Post’s list. High school educators who stick with what is still the majority view about AP and IB in America — that the programs are suitable only for top students — do not do so well.
In many cases, the list defies the conventional wisdom that schools with lots of low-income students are bad and schools with few such students are good. That is not to say that most low-income schools do well on the list. Most do not. Many of their teachers and administrators accept the widespread assumption that their students can’t do AP or IB. But the few schools in poor neighborhoods that break out of this mindset are worth studying.

Spring 2007 School Board Election Update

I’ve added 3 additional declared candidates to the election site, via the City Clerk’s office:

Seat 3 (Shwaw Vang’s seat): Pam Cross-Leone vs Beth Moss vs Rick Thomas.
Seat 4: Johnny Winston, Jr. (Incumbent)
Seat 5 (Ruth Robart’s seat): Maya Cole vs Marj Passman.

Links and notes on running for School Board can be found here. It’s great to see these active citizens participating in our democracy.

Wisconsin School Finance; Next Step: Supreme Court?

George Lighbourn [55K PDF]:

Even the most vocal proponents of change understand the reality that big changes are not in the offing. They know that they are up against the most formidable impediment to change, the printout, that age-old tabulation showing how much money each school district will get out of Madison. Any change that shows dozens of school districts will see a decline in state aid has almost no chance of succeeding. Only when there’s enough new money to ensure all districts will see some growth, will the prospeckind of money is nowhere on the horizon.

Math failures – haven’t we heard this before?

Roberta M. Eisenberg:

As controversies rage about the best way to teach math and whether students should be allowed to use calculators — incidentally, the State Education Department on Dec. 1 declared that calculators will now be considered teaching materials, like textbooks, and schools must provide them to students — the real question is why children in this country are not better at learning math. Is it the curriculum? Is it the equipment? Is it the tests? And, haven’t we heard all this before?
In 1957, the Russians sent up Sputnik, stealing a march in the space race, and the United States decided that something had to be done, in a hurry, about math and science instruction in this country. Thus were born National Science Foundation grants to teachers of math and science so that they might get master’s degrees in their subjects rather than in education. A generation of teachers excitedly brought their advanced knowledge back to their classrooms.
Also in the early ’60s, the so-called New Math was influencing curricula across the country. The result was an emphasis on concepts to the detriment of the basics. Naturally, there was an eventual backlash when parents could no longer understand their children’s homework.
By the ’70s, teachers in middle and high schools were noticing that students were getting weaker on their recall of times tables and other basics. This could not then be blamed on calculators because there were no calculators yet in general use.

School Day Goes Into Overtime

Nelson Hernandez:

Starting with the Class of 2009, all Maryland students will be required to pass exams in algebra and data analysis, English, government and biology in order to graduate. All of the students in Guinn’s classroom failed the test in algebra last school year. Her class, part of a new program in Prince George’s County called the Twilight Academy, is meant to give students the extra push they need to pass the tests, known as the High School Assessments, which they will retake in January.
The county’s performance on the tests has improved, and students can take the tests multiple times. But more than half of the 24,000 freshmen and sophomores in Prince George’s are still at risk of failing to graduate. In the last school year, the county’s passing rate in algebra was 46.1 percent; in biology, 42.5 percent; in government, 55.5 percent; and in English, 45.9 percent. The results were well below state averages. The Prince George’s and Baltimore school systems together accounted for 45 percent of the students who did not pass the algebra test.

West / Memorial Cell Tower Lease Hearings

A parent’s email:

To All:
A Spring Harbor parent alerted me to hearings being held by the school board this Wednesday at 6:00 PM at Midvale Elementary [map] on the proposed lease of property at West and Memorial for cell towers. For details, please go to www.madison.k12.wi.us/topics/cell. This should be a somewhat controversial issue, since some people are concerned with the safety of cell towers.
I personally am concerned that, if the school board leases property for cell towers to Cingular or U.S. Cellular, they do so for a fair price and make sure that fair increases are built in over the course of the contract. (I lived in a building in Chicago which had given a wireless company a lease at a fixed rate in perpetuity. That was a very good deal for the lessee and a bad deal for the lessor.)
I hope that one or more of you is familiar with the safety issues and that one or more of you is an expert on real estate leases and would be willing to represent our interests at this hearing on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I am an expert on neither, so I don’t think I can add anything.

FWIW, US Cellular is owned by TDS.

Free tuition for vow to stay?

Scott Williams:

Considering recommending free tuition for all students who agree to remain in the Dairy State after getting their degrees, reversing an exodus of college graduates and potentially transforming the state’s economy.
The commission will gather in Madison on Tuesday to discuss including the idea in a package of recommended reforms geared primarily toward improving the two-year campuses.

Comments on BOE Progress Report for December

Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (thanks!) posted a rather remarkable summary of recent activity today. I thought it would be useful to recall recent Board Majority inaction when reviewing Johnny’s words:
It’s remarkable to consider that just a few short years ago, substantive issues were simply not discussed by the School Board, such as the Superintendent’s rejection of the $2M in Federal Reading First Funds (regardless of the merits, $2M is material and there should have been a public discussion).
Reductions in the District’s annual ($332M+ this year) spending increases were thinly discussed (May, 2004).
Today, we know that the School District has been running a structural deficit for years, something previous Board Majority’s were apparently unaware of or certainly never discussed publicly.

(more…)

Friday Night Luxury?

Russell Adams:

On game days, football fan Tracy French pulls his SUV into a reserved parking spot and rides an elevator to a stadium suite outfitted with plush seats and a big-screen TV.
His team is the Panthers — the Cabot High School Panthers of Cabot, Ark. Mr. French is the president of a local bank that has given about $65,000 to the school’s athletic department over the past five years, and the luxury seats are one of the perks he gets in return. “I would never have thought they’d have these types of facilities,” he says.
Public education may face budget shortfalls across the country, but you wouldn’t know it from the new digs where the high-rollers of high school football are camped on Friday nights. In a development that is changing the way athletics are funded, some public schools are taking a page from the pros’ playbook on VIP seating. Vidalia High School in Georgia spent more than $2 million of public money last year to build a fieldhouse with eight air-conditioned skyboxes. Brookwood High School in Georgia built the Lodge, a facility overlooking the stadium where members of the booster club can lounge on leather couches and have a pregame meal of T-bone steak. Denton, John Guyer and Billy Ryan high schools, which share a new $18.3 million, 12,000-seat stadium in Denton, Texas, added two VIP suites, with tiered seating and cable TV. They rent out one of the suites for $150 a game. At Lucy C. Laney High School, also in Georgia, the principal and county athletic director use the stadium’s two skyboxes in part to entertain boosters, alumni and others over cheese plates and chicken wings.

The Supreme Court & Race in Schools

Adam Liptak:

But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.
During the argument, two sets of justices managed, with equal vehemence, to invoke Brown — while understanding it to require precisely opposite things.
One side relied on the logic of the case: Brown, these justices said, forbids racial classifications by the government, period, even when the goal has changed from segregation to integration.
The other side relied on its music, saying that the real point of Brown was to achieve and maintain integrated public schools, whether through social progress or through government action that takes account of race.

The Economist:

AMERICA’S public schools are unfair. Their quality varies widely and many are lousy, so some unlucky kids get a shoddy education. Rich children live in areas with more property taxes, more education spending and better schools. They also tend to be white. So is it fair to keep some white children out of good schools, and give black children their places?
That incendiary question is among those at the heart of two cases the Supreme Court heard on December 4th. In two districts that deliberately balance each school’s racial mix (Jefferson County, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington) some white children complain that, because of their skin colour, they cannot get a fair shot at admission into the public schools they want. Both sides claim to have on their side the constitution’s 14th amendment, which was ratified after slavery ended, and grants everyone equal protection under the law.

Financial Literacy Project

Dan Greene:

I have the beginnings of an idea for a project to do later in Spring, for the exponential functions unit, in conjunction with our freshman College Readiness classes.
I was thinking about when I was a freshman in college, and how there were always tables set up by credit card companies who would attract crowds of freshmen with such irresistable items as Citibank t-shirts and Bank of America frisbees. They would give a credit card to just about anyone. There have been lots of reports about how so many college students get into incredible credit card debts because they don’t know how to manage a credit card, and they are preyed on by these vultures.

Back to School

Wide Angle:

In 2003 Wide Angle profiled seven children in seven countries-Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya, and Romania-as they started their first year of school. Returning in 2006, we find that some of these children are already struggling, hanging onto their education by a thread. With over 100 million children around the globe out of school, this 90-minute special puts a human face on an issue with profound consequences for global development.

Reyhan Haranci has more.

Why the Achievement Gap Persists

NY Times Editorial:

The No Child Left Behind education act, which requires the states to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students in exchange for federal aid, has been under heavy fire since it was passed five years ago. Critics, some of whom never wanted accountability in the first place, have ratcheted up their attacks in anticipation of Congressional hearings and a reauthorization process that could get under way soon after the new Congress convenes in January.

More here.

New Math Curriculum Draws Complaints

Connected Math textbooks for one year and the equivalent Singapore Math version.
Brandon Lorenz:

A recent meeting at Central Middle School attracted about 50 people to discuss concerns with the district’s Connected Mathematics Project, a new constructivist approach that was introduced in sixth, seventh and eighth grades this year.
Another meeting for parents is scheduled for Dec. 13 at Horning Middle School.
Such new math programs rely on more hands-on activities and problem-solving skills than traditional programs.
Speaking with Zaborowski, Lynn Kucek said she was worried the math program would make it more difficult for her daughter, who does well in other subjects, to get into college.

More on Connected Math and the recent Math Forum.

Systems Struggling to Address Student Health

Valerie Strauss:

Today, a vision-laboratory-in-a-bus assembled by Turkel pulls up to schools in low-income neighborhoods, not only providing vision tests for children but also ensuring that glasses, when needed, are made to specifications and delivered within days — all for free.
The results, school principals say, are remarkable: Many of the kids — and in some schools it can be as much as half of the student population — who wear the glasses show improvement in attendance, focus and achievement. Their behavior often improves, too.

Tax Climate Notes & Links

The arrival of local property tax bills signal the onset of tax season. Accordingly, there has been a number of recent articles on Wisconsin’s tax climate:

Barbara Miner: More than 16,000 private properties in Wisconsin pay no property taxes. As a result, everyone else pays more. Why?

In Milwaukee, for instance, almost 20 percent of the city’s non-governmental property value is exempt from taxes, a big jump from almost 10 percent six years ago. Add in government-owned property such as public schools, fire stations and parks, and the exempt total is more than 33 percent. Figures are similar for many other cities and suburbs in the area.
Todd Berry has been president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance since 1994. Berry’s group has done many studies of Wisconsin’s taxes but has never looked at the impact of nonprofit tax exemptions.
As Berry sheepishly admits, his group is itself exempt and doesn’t pay property taxes on the building it owns in Madison, valued at about $500,000 on its federal tax return. Thus, a group that often does studies exposing high taxes helps add to the tax level for others with its own exemption.
Institute for Wisconsin’s Future:

Contrary to the claims of corporate lobbyists that the state has unreasonably high business taxes, Wisconsin is already a low-tax state for large firms.
And this means the corporate sector is not making a fair contribution to the cost of maintaining public structures of state and local government, from schools to roads to public safety to the environment.
To back up these statements, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future released a mass of data on December 4, 2006, detailing that more than thirty states have higher taxes on corporations and that over 60% of the biggest companies operating in the state paid zero corporate income tax in 2003.
Wistax:

After a drop of 0.5% in December 2005, school taxes this year will rise 5.4% to $3.79 billion. The increase is less than in 2003-04 (7.2%) but over the 1990-2005 median (4.9%) Increased property values helped drop the average tax rate from $8.62 per $1,000 to $8.31. Growth in another state tax credit will help offset the school tax hike.

Inevitably, tax favors are available for certain folks and are often inserted into bills late in the process. The Miller Park exemption is classic:

Restaurants pay taxes but not Friday’s Front Row Sports Grill at Miller Park because everything inside the stadium grounds is exempt.
The exemption for Friday’s particularly galls city officials, not only because another property leaves the tax rolls but because they see it as unfair to other competitors. While the Miller Park restaurant is tax-free, the TGIFriday’s in Greenfield pays property taxes of about $45,000.

Last fall, both Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl voted for a massive, one year large corporate tax giveaway: a 5% tax rate on offshore earnings. What a mess.

State Ed. Leaders Debate National Standards

Jessica Tonn:

“I submit to you that in a system of education that serves such a highly diverse and transitory culture, . . . shared standards aren’t simply an option, but a mandatory conversation,” the Council of Chief State School Officers’ executive director, Gene Wilhoit, said in a speech at the conference’s opening session. He took over the helm at the CCSSO Nov. 1.
Mr. Wilhoit’s appeal followed similar comments made this year by Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and others. Such discussion, which comes as policymakers and educators compare education systems across the states and the world and prepare for the renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act next year, appears to be rekindling a push for national standards.

Council of Chief State School Officers.

School Boundaries, Money and Race

Shauna Grice:

In a process to ease over-crowding, facilitated by Dr. Jack Parish, Superintendent of Schools for Henry County, the proposed boundary lines for the new schools had been drawn to include a small portion of the Fairview community. Others in Fairview would remain at the older schools. Fairview is a modest neighborhood made up of children who are predominately African-American and whose parents are less affluent than those who reside in Union Grove, a fact which has sent Union Grove residents reeling.
As a resident of the Fairview community with a child in middle school, I had my concerns. Our streets aren’t made of gold, and the neighborhood certainly doesn’t boast lavishly decorated Home and Garden-type vacation cottages; but it’s not the ghetto either. Homes are modest and well-kept. Homeowners are comprised mostly of middle-aged baby-boomers, preparing for retirement and saving for their kids’ college funds all at the same time.
Most of the children I know from Fairview come from good homes with loving parents who teach them to be well-behaved. I couldn’t see much difference between families in our neighborhood and those in Union Grove. For days I had debated whether to attend a meeting where parents from both neighborhoods would come together to vent their concerns.

Spring 2007 Madison School Board Election Update

I’ve added two declared candidates to the April 3, 2007 election page:

Marj Passman for Seat 5 (Ruth Robarts is retiring)
Beth Moss for Seat 3 (Shwaw Vang’s seat)

Johnny Winston, Jr., in seat 4 has announced he is running again, but as of this afternoon, had not declared his candidacy according to the City Clerk’s office.
Check out the video interviews and links from the April, 2004 election; the last time these seats were contested.
Learn more about running for school board here. (updated to reflect the correct seats via Marj’s comments below).

Do Math Topics Lead to Better Instruction?

Daniel de Vise:

It says the typical state math curriculum runs a mile wide and an inch deep, resulting in students being introduced to too many concepts but mastering too few, and urges educators to slim down those lessons.
Some scholars say the American approach to math instruction has allowed students to fall behind those in Singapore, Japan and a dozen other nations. In most states, they say, the math curriculum has swelled into a thick catalogue of skills that students are supposed to master to attain “proficiency” under the federal No Child Left Behind mandate.

Math Forum audio / video

Gates Foundation Grants & Expectations

Jacqueline L. Salmon:

Gates grants have flowed to schools and school systems in 42 states and the District, including $126 million to New York, $65 million to Chicago and $38 million to Oakland, Calif. The grants have helped open 1,100 schools and revamp an additional 700. The foundation also has sunk millions into education think tanks and policy and academic groups (including Hechinger). Its agenda is to create high schools with rigorous college-prep curricula, to replicate successful experiments and to convert giant, mostly urban schools into effective, manageable units.
Reviews of the Gates school initiatives have been mixed.
This fall, Denver shut down a high school that had received $1 million in Gates grants; officials cited plunging enrollment after the school was divided into three smaller ones and students fled to other schools.

Bucking School Reform, A Leader Gets Results

David Herszenhorn:

“We are relentless,” Dr. Cashin said in a recent interview. “The secret is clear expectations. Everything is spelled out. Nothing is assumed.” She provides her principals, for instance, with a detailed road map of what should be taught in every subject, in every grade, including specific skills of the week in reading and focus on a genre of literature every month.
Dr. Cashin is obsessed with writing, and in most of her schools, student work lines the walls — not just the final product but layers of drafts. Even first graders have writing posted on the walls.
A feature used in every school is the four-square graphic organizer, a worksheet with four boxes like a window pane and a rectangle at its center that helps children develop a five-paragraph essay. Some progressive educators scorn it as a crutch; Dr. Cashin insists that it works.
While the city’s reading program focuses on story books, Dr. Cashin layers on lots of nonfiction. And, responding to research showing that impoverished children often lack vocabulary and basic facts, she has adopted a curriculum called Core Knowledge, which teaches basics like the principles of constitutional government, events in world history and well-known literature.

Swaying Seattle’s School Assignments (Boundaries)

Daniel Golden:

In 2004, after the district scrapped race as a factor in assignments because of the legal threat, another group of white parents from the same neighborhood got upset when their children were passed over at the same majority-white school, Ballard High. They were left out not because of race, but because they didn’t live near enough.
This time, the school district quietly backed down when the parents started sending their children to private or suburban schools instead of the struggling, majority-black school to which they’d been assigned. Ballard and other supposedly full schools together took about 100 extra students, most of them white.
Even as parents challenge a government action making room for minorities in highly-regarded schools, the later events in Seattle show another side of the picture: the ways that school-assignment practices can work to the benefit of whites. In Seattle as in other parts of the country, schools sometimes accommodate middle-class parents who push to get their children into coveted schools. When these middle-class parents are predominantly white, as in Seattle, the lobbying can tend to sort more white children into the most desirable schools.

A Campaign for the Civics Curriculum

ABC’s This Week:

The teaching of civics presently in the United States is dismal and startling. It used to be, when I was a kid, that there were classes in civics and you learned not only the checks and balances, but hows and whys and wherefores. And you learned what was the reasoning behind the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. …
If you think that running a government like ours is, arguably, more complicated than running a pharmaceutical company or an auto company — and it is — then we should train people to the running of the country. …
We want to … define the necessity of civics: What is it and is it necessary? If it’s necessary, is it urgent? And, if it’s urgent, what do we do? And then [we should start] to proceed to literally design classes.
It is time that we simply revive the notion that we can learn how to run the country — and learn not for Republicans and not for Democrats, but learn how to learn the Constitution. The idea of people having power to pursue a notion of happiness or control of their own lives is a new thing and a miracle. America is a miracle.

Agreed. Howard French’s recent article on history illustrates the need for rigor, critical thinking and the ability to ask questions.

School Integration Back Before Supreme Court

Bob Egelko:

More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, the justices are about to consider whether a school district can voluntarily integrate by considering race in campus assignments.
In cases from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to be argued Monday, the justices will address the question left unanswered by the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954: What can the government do when the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation are erased and schools nevertheless remain racially isolated because of housing patterns, parental choice and perhaps societal discrimination?

Growing Interest in Mandarin Courses

Natasha Degen:

With its booming economy and aspirations to expand its global influence, China may have achieved a victory in American classrooms.
Take the private Chinese-American International School here, which runs from prekindergarten through eighth grade and offers instruction in all subjects — from math to music — half in Mandarin and half in English. The curriculum also includes Chinese history, culture and language studies, and in the 25 years since the school was founded, it has attracted mainly Asian-American children. But in the past few years, it has seen rapid growth in the enrollment of non-Asians.
For example, five years ago, the school was 57 percent Asian-American, but this year it is only 49 percent Asian-American, said Sharline Chiang, its spokeswoman, adding that more non-Asian-Americans have been applying in recent years. Andrew Corcoran, the head of the school, said that in the last three to four years, applications from white and Indian-American families have more than doubled, though he declined to give exact figures.
Ms. Chiang also said that this was the first year in which the prekindergarten class had more white children, 36 percent, than Asian-Americans, 32 percent.

San Francisco’s Chinese-American International School.

Arlene Silveira Seeks Comments on The Madison School District’s Proposed High School Redesign Process

Arlene Silveira:

Good morning –
As you may have heard, the School Board and district are embarking on a major high school redesign initiative [Discussion & Presentation Audio / Video]. The Superintendent made a presentation at the board meeting last week, giving some background information and outlining the process by which we will gather feedback and evaluate future changes for our high schools. The scope is huge – it involves challenging curriculum, relationship development and development of the skills needed to succeed in a challenging world. What will the new design look like? We don’t know. We are starting with a blank slate. The process will be community-oriented. There will be time for more formal input as the process starts after the holidays. In the meantime, I would like to know your thoughts on the following questions:

What do you think MMSD’s high schools are already doing well?
What are the barriers that keep our high schools from meeting your expectations?
What is your vision for the future of our high schools.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Arlene Silveira

One of the interesting questions discussed during Monday evening’s school board discussion on this issue was the need to address curriculum issues in elementary and middle school so that students arrive in high school prepared. In my view, this should be our first priority.
Paul Tough’s recent article on “What it takes to Make a Student” provides a great deal of useful background information for this discussion.

Effect of Ritalin on Preschoolers Examined

National Institute of Mental Health:

The first long-term, large-scale study designed to determine the safety and effectiveness of treating preschoolers who have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with methylphenidate (Ritalin) has found that overall, low doses of this medication are effective and safe. However, the study found that children this age are more sensitive than older children to the medication’s side effects and therefore should be closely monitored. The 70-week, six-site study was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and was described in several articles in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“The Preschool ADHD Treatment Study, or PATS, provides us with the best information to date about treating very young children diagnosed with ADHD,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, MD. “The results show that preschoolers may benefit from low doses of medication when it is closely monitored, but the positive effects are less evident and side-effects are somewhat greater than previous reports in older children.”

California Poll: More Accountability – Post All School Data Online

Robert Sallady:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who says parents should be able to scrutinize schools on the Internet like they are “shopping for a car,” received a political boost Thursday with a new poll showing widespread support for opening the financial books at public schools.
With the Legislature beginning its new session Monday, the survey, sponsored by the nonprofit group Children Now, was designed to give Schwarzenegger and lawmakers ammunition next year as they attempt to put more information about the state’s 9,500 public schools on the Web.
Schwarzenegger wants large amounts of data — from enrollment numbers and school test scores to reports on the quality of textbooks and individual school budgets — to be posted online in a user-friendly way.
“Let the sun shine in on everything,” the governor said recently at a news briefing, describing how the state should “make it easier for parents to shop for the best schools,” as he put it, and shame poor-performing schools so “they’ll be getting their act together.”

Phantom AP Study Lurks

Jay Matthews:

We yearn so much for data on the Advanced Placement program — a powerful influence on high schools today — that one of the most cited pieces of recent AP research actually does not yet exist, at least in any published form.
This is the report on AP and college science courses by Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai. The only publicly available account of what they found is a Harvard News Office press release with the headline: “High school AP courses do not predict college success in science.” They argue that students who took AP science in high school do not do as well in college science courses as AP advocates say they should, and that taking AP science in high school may hurt science education by letting more students avoid college biology, chemistry and physics.
I might have left this issue alone until Sadler and Tai had their work published, but their conclusions are so provocative that the Harvard press release, and the powerpoint slides they used at a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have already been cited in several news articles and at least one book, Alfie Kohn’s “The Homework Myth.” Kohn is one of the most fastidious writers I know, always checking and footnoting his sources. If he thinks it is okay to cite this study before it is published, then it is time to discuss it in this column, which claims to be on top of all things AP. The Sadler-Tai work deserves close attention for many reasons, one of them being I think it is being given more credence than it deserves, at least in its fetal state.

Education and Entrepreneurship: More Differentiation

Arnold Kling:

The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities.
The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest.
…….
While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people.
Some students — probably more than we realize — are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes.
Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today’s economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car.

Kling website and blog.
Interesting timing. I spoke recently with a Madison parent (pre-K child) who agrees with this sentiment (balancing education power with parents via greater local choice).

Milwaukee Police to be Stationed in Schools

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee police officers will be assigned for the first time to full-time duty inside city public schools under an agreement between police and Milwaukee Public Schools leaders.
The effort to improve school safety will begin small – with two pairs of officers in the spring semester, which begins in late January – but all involved hope that it will grow by next fall, provided that money can be found to do that.
In releasing details of the police plan late Tuesday, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos also said he expects to propose in December that MPS spend about $450,000 during the rest of this school year for increased services from a Milwaukee County mental crisis intervention team that deals with children. Andrekopoulos said “more anger and hostility” were showing up among MPS students and that mental problems have been a factor in some recent violence.

Dealing with Bullies

C.K. Gunsalus – Inside Higher Ed:

Some difficult people are merely minor irritants: Others learn to avoid them as much as possible, and the overall working environment is not badly compromised. But a person who targets others, makes threats (direct or indirect), insists on his or her own way all the time, or has such a hair-trigger temper that colleagues walk on eggshells to avoid setting it off, can paralyze a department. In the worst cases, this conduct can create massive dysfunction as the department finds itself unable to hold meetings, make hiring decisions, recruit new members, or retain valued ones. When I first got involved in helping department heads cope with such people, my colleagues and I used concepts and approaches we gleaned from studies of bullies.
The bullies I have encountered in the academic environment come in many forms, from those who present themselves as victims, all the way to classic aggressors who rely on physical intimidation. In academe and other settings populated by “knowledge workers,” one often encounters other kinds of bullies as well, including “memo bullies” (who send regular missives to a long mailing list) and “insult bullies” (destructive verbal aggressors).

Jason Shephard discussed local bullying in last spring’s “The Fate of the Schools“.

Milwaukee Fathers Form Citywide Parent Group

Erin Richards:

Jason Brown doesn’t know what to do if his 14-year-old son doesn’t get into a good high school next year, namely Rufus King or Riverside.
ellow Milwaukee Public Schools parent James West feels equally uneasy about finding that a teacher had given a near-perfect score to what he called a near-incoherent essay by his daughter.
Anthony Drane, who works in a supplemental instruction program at Milwaukee Area Technical College, fears for his children’s futures when he encounters former MPS students who lack basic study skills such as note taking.
The problem, the three fathers have concluded, is not just that Milwaukee’s public schools are in crisis but that there aren’t enough parents like them who are alarmed and trying to do something about it. They hope to change that with the North Milwaukee Parent Association, a citywide group that intends to motivate parents by giving them the knowledge and support to participate in the school system.
The idea, they said, is that empowering Milwaukee’s youths must start with educating their guardians.

Madison School Board: Superintendent’s High School Redesign Presentation & Public Comments [Audio / Video]

	Four citizens spoke at Monday evening’s school board meeting regarding the proposed “high school redesign”. Watch or download this video clip.
	Superintendent Art Rainwater’s powerpoint presentation and followup board discussion. Watch or download the video.

Links:

Susan Troller: MMSD to study high schools before “redesigning” them
Joan Knoebel comments.
East High School Principal Allen Harris’s letter to parents.
On, off and on again School Board High School Redesign discussion.
Marc Eisen: Superintendent Halts High School Redesign.
Laurie Frost: More Than English 10: Let’s REALLY Talk About Our High Schools.
Comments from East High Parents on Proposed Curriculum Changes
Ruth Robarts: On Monday, November 27, the Madison School Board will begin to address rumors about major changes coming to our high schools. There are some realities behind the rumors.
Andy Hall: East High Student Insurrection over Proposed Curriculum Changes?
A timeline of West High School’s March Toward One Size Fits all English 10.
Bruce King’s report on West High School’s English 9 Program.
Carrie Lynch: One big happy classroom?
Superintendent Art Rainwater’s presentation.
Madison United for Educational Excellence hosted a conversation with Art Rainwater Wednesday evening .

Bolstering the School System is Up to Us

Joel Connelly (Seattle):

Three times in the past week, I’ve witnessed parents of young children ponder whether to trust education of their offspring to Seattle Public Schools.
In raising children, however, families cannot afford mistakes. When a young life gets off on the wrong track, its retrofit can get more complicated than putting new rails in a tunnel.
And a city increasingly populated by singles and childless couples badly needs families with children. A disastrous mandatory busing program drove working families from Seattle during the 1970s and ’80s.
Loss of confidence now threatens public schools with an institutional death spiral.
What happens? People use their doubts and subpar average test scores — which shouldn’t mean much to the middle class, given scores’ correlation with poverty — to justify leaving, without really exploring, what is offered by their local school.

The Madison School Board has recently opened a new chapter in it’s governance responsibilities by discussing substantive issues (things that would have never made their agenda two years ago, like rigor, budget details (recently revealed structural deficit) and health care costs, among others). Don’t roll back the clock, run for school board!

New Project to Send Musicians Into Schools

Daniel Wakin:

Two pillars of the classical musical establishment, Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School, have joined forces to give birth to a music academy whose fellows will go forth and propagate musicianship in New York public schools.
The city’s Education Department is opening its arms to the new program, seeing an inexpensive but valuable source of teaching for a system deprived of comprehensive music training. And the leaders of Carnegie and Juilliard see an opportunity to promote their conviction that a musician in 21st-century America should be more than just a person who plays the notes.
Under the new program elite musicians will receive high-level musical training, performance opportunities at Carnegie Hall and guidance from city school teachers in how to teach music. The fellows will each be assigned to a different school and work there one and a half days a week. They will teach their instruments, or music in general, and give their own pointers to school music teachers.

State School Finance Reform Proposal: Eliminate Sales Tax Exemptions

Steven Walters:

Erpenbach argued that closing tax exemption “loopholes” would save every homeowner thousands of dollars a year in property taxes and take a giant step toward eliminating funding disparities between rich and poor school districts.
“It’s not a tax increase,” said Erpenbach, who conceded that his plan would still force consumers to pay more for some goods and services that are now exempt. Nonetheless, he said, “Most everybody, at the end of the day, will have more money in their pocket.”

Escaping “Average”

Jay Matthews:

But Secondary Education Director James VanSciver and other Seaford educators became convinced that with extra help, many more students could be taking algebra in middle school and college-level courses in high school. Four years ago, they began offering special tutoring, summer classes and Saturday classes. The number of Advanced Placement classes at Seaford High swelled from four to 14.
The focus on helping average students also boosted minority enrollment in the most rigorous classes. The district has about 3,400 students, 40 percent black and slightly more than half white. Through the initiative, administrators found more black students doing well and going on to college.
Julius Mullen, who directs a Saturday program for young African American males in Seaford, said the students discovered they could advance if given more time and the assurance that they had their friends with them. “When expectations are raised, I think students will grab for them if they have the support programs in place,” Mullen said. “They have to see their friends achieving success.”

Activist Parent & Contributor Janet Mertz Named AAAS Fellow

Adam Dylewski (UW Madison):

Five University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty members are among the 449 scientists and engineers to be awarded fellowships from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which were announced this week (Nov. 23).
The AAAS grants the distinction to researchers advancing science and engineering in significant ways. New fellows will be recognized at the Fellows Forum, held during the 2007 AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco on Feb. 17.
UW-Madison faculty elected this year include:
Janet E. Mertz, professor of oncology, for the development of recombinant DNA methods and for the co-discovery of introns, messenger RNA transport elements and mechanisms by which viruses regulate their expression.
The AAAS is the largest scientific society in the world. Founded in 1848, the AAAS publishes the journal Science.

Janet’s SIS posts can be found here.

Science a la Joe Camel

A reader forwarded this: Laurie David:

At hundreds of screenings this year of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.
The producers of former vice president Al Gore’s film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.
The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs.
Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film’s theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

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Telling Tales Out of School, on YouTube

Ian Austen:

In the good old days, students simply used technology like cellphones to cheat on tests. Now, they’re posting what happens in their classrooms on YouTube.
Two students who attend the equivalent of Grade 9 at a school in Gatineau, Quebec, a city across the river from Ottawa, were sent home last week after officials learned that they had posted a videotape of a teacher losing his temper on YouTube. The episode was not spontaneous. A girl, who has not been identified, provoked the teacher while a boy secretly taped the encounter with a compact video camera.
YouTube removed the video at the request of the Portages-de-l’Outaouais school board a week ago, the board president Jocelyn Blondin said. But that has left the question of determining what to do with the students and how to prevent similar episodes in the future.

“Still Left Behind”?

Paul Tough:

The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.
Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren’t meeting those goals. The schools’ leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn’t, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on “team building” and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.
Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.
……….
At KIPP’s Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year’s statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located — in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx — it isn’t even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.
………..
Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. …’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.
The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on — and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students.
The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement.

EdWize has more:

But there are still those few schools, mostly charters, that really do seem to have found the right formula: high standards, a structured instructional approach, character education, long hours, great teachers and development of a esprit d’corps.
And while Tough laments the fact that teacher unions have constrained the growth of charter schools, it is clear that there is little, if anything, these schools are doing that could not be done in a unionized school – unless of course we expect that schools that rely on teachers working twice the hours (15 or 16 a day, he says) can be replicated systemwide without increasing teacher salaries proportionally. (In fact, those strategies are precisely what the UFT and Chancellor Crew built into the Extended Time Schools back in the 90s, and many of them are working today in the UFT Charter Schools in East New York.)

Unschooling via Homeschool

Susan Saulny:

On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.
Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.
In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.
“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”

Doc Searls has more.

LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku

Elaheh Farmand:

I come from Tehran and no, there are no camels where I come from. There are cars and honking taxis that pass women in black veils or short, colorful scarves that barely cover their heads. In this beautiful prison of banned dreams, there certainly isn’t a statue of liberty; men and women liberate themselves with cafes, cigars, smuggled drugs and secret relationships. In America, I am a writer. I can imagine, dream, live, breathe as an Iranian, an American. I can add color to anything; if only I could paint the gray streets of Tehran with my words.

Wisconsin Math, reading proficiency are much higher on state exams than on federal

Amy Hetzner:

Wisconsin students continue to fare far better on the state’s standardized tests than they do on those given by the federal government, according to a new analysis that raises questions about what it means to be “proficient.”
About 70% to 85% of Wisconsin students were considered proficient or better on the state’s reading and math tests for the 2005-’06 school year. Yet only 33% to 40% of the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders scored at least proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in those subjects, according to the study by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
The state was one of 16 in the country that had a proficiency gap of 45 to 55 percentage points, the Taxpayers Alliance found. Several states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, had even larger differences between the percentage of students considered proficient by their states as opposed to the federal government.
“It just creates confusion,” said Dale Knapp, research director for the Taxpayers Alliance. “We want a sense of what our students know, where they sort of stand. And we’re really getting two different answers that are very different answers.”
The blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction, which administers the tests annually.
“Math is the same in Madison as it is in Missouri as it is in Mumbai.” – Michael Petrilli,
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a group that has raised the idea of national standards
“What that ought to be is a big signal to the folks in Wisconsin that they really need to evaluate the rigor of their standards and their assessment.” – Daria Hall, Education Trust

More on the Fordham Foundation’s report and EdTrust. Finally, WISTAX offers a free report on testing.

“What the Approved Referendum Means”

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:

November 7 was a great day for our children and for the community. Certainly, the fact that we will have a new school in an area that is experiencing substantial growth is important for our future.
The relief that the community approved from the revenue cap will mean that we will have to reduce our services by less than expected, although we will still have to make cuts of several million dollars. Every staff member whose position is saved to serve children is important and $807,000 of relief will save a number of services.
The most obvious gains aside, it was just as important that the passage of the referendum involved support from the whole community.
The grassroots organization CAST (Community and Schools Together) worked long and hard to be sure that our citizens understood what was at stake and how important their vote was. District staff from the central office, building services and the schools supported this through their hard work and discussion with neighbors and friends.

Oregon School Cafeteria Makes It from Scratch

Jane Greenalgh:

Thanksgiving is a time to savor good food, something you don’t expect to find in a school cafeteria. In fact, most schools across the country serve reheated, premade food that is trucked in from central kitchens. Daily offerings are often uninspiring: chicken sticks, macaroni and cheese, and pizza.
But there is a move in some parts of the country to bring real cooking back to school kitchens. Last year, Abernathy Elementary School in Portland, Ore., bought a second-hand stove and a big mixer and started cooking all its food from scratch.

Thanksgiving

Wikipedia | US Census Bureau
A quick note to thank the Madison School Board (Johnny Winston, Jr., President; Lawrie Kobza, Vice President; Carol Carstensen, Treasurer; Shwaw Vang, Clerk; Lucy Mathiak, Ruth Robarts and Arlene Silveira) for publicly discussing and addressing a number of issues this year:

The Superintendent’s Review (something that was not done for a number of years until a few incumbents lost their seats).
Implementing a substantive review of the District’s Math Program (see also this open letter and the recent Math Forum)
Taking a substantive look at healthcare costs.
Diving deep into the District’s $332M+ budget.

Happy Thanksgiving!

On, Off and On Again 11/27/2006 Madison School Board High School Redesign Discussion

Susan Troller wrote this on Tuesday, 11/21/2006:

A presentation on the redesign of Madison’s high school curriculum scheduled for next week’s School Board meeting has been scrapped for the immediate future, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. confirmed late this morning.
“We’ll hold off on changes until we get a better feel for how the process will work,” Winston said.
Winston, other School Board members and members of the administration met this morning to discuss high school curriculum proposals, including changes in accelerated classes for freshmen and sophomores at East High.

Andy Hall wrote this on 11/22/2006:

Madison School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. said community outcry and confusion over East’s plans to restructure its classes likely will dominate the board’s discussion of reforming operations in the district’s high schools. The meeting is set for 8 p.m. Monday in the auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
“I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot from the community,” Winston said. “Board members want to hear it. They want it now.”
Winston said he expects people riled about potential or recent changes at La Follette and West high schools also will attend.
The board, Winston said, needs to set direction for the district’s schools and needs to be kept informed. He’s opposed to eliminating classes for talented and gifted students. “We need to be enhancing them,” he said.
It’s essential, Winston said, for parents, students, teachers and the community to have a voice in any talks about changing the way schools are run.
“I really hope we can get this thing, whatever it is, in order,” Winston said.

Indeed, a look at the School Board’s calendar for Monday, 11.27.2006 reveals that the High School Redesign discussion is scheduled for 8:00p.m. that evening.
The Board has been criticized over the years for simply not discussing some of the tough issues such as health care, the District’s rejection of $2M in federal Reading First funds (the politics and implementation of Reading First have been controversial. However $2m is $2m and it at least deserved a public conversation) and West High’s full speed ahead on a one size fits all curriculum (See also “the Fate of the Schools“.
I’m glad to see the Board take this up Monday. A recent discussion of the District’s quiet policy change regarding credit for non-madison school district courses appeared, disappeared and now is on a 12/11/2006 Performance and Achievement committee agenda.

New Program in Schools Takes Students From Playwriting to Performance

Campbell Robertson:

There have been programs promoting theater involvement in New York City schools for years, but Fidelity Investments, together with the Viertel/Frankel/Baruch/Routh Group, the Broadway producing team behind “Hairspray” and “Company,” and Leap, a 30-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to arts education, have announced one of the broadest programs yet.
Other organizations, like Theater Development Fund, have programs to involve students in Broadway theater, but this one, which started last month at 10 high schools and junior high schools in the city, aspires to be the most comprehensive. It is a seven-month course involving big-name theater professionals, trips to Broadway shows, playwriting and play producing classes and, for 10 students, a Broadway stage on which their plays will be performed.
“We have never done a program as comprehensive as this,” said Alice Krieger, the associate executive director of Leap.

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater Halts East High Redesign

Marc Eisen:

The uproar over proposed changes in East High School’s curriculum has apparently prompted Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater to announce a halt to any plans to change programming at Madison’s four major high schools.

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A Snapshot of the State of U.S. Education

U.S. Department of Education:

Report on the State of American Schools Shows High School Students Challenged by Math and Science
High school students in the United States are consistently outperformed by those from Asian and some European countries on international assessments of mathematics and science, according to The Condition of Education 2006 report released today by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Fourth-graders, by comparison, score as well or better than most of their international peers, although their counterparts in other countries are gaining ground.
“While our younger students are making progress on national assessments and are ahead on some international measures the same can not be said at the high school level,” said Mark Schneider, NCES Commissioner. “U.S. students do relatively well in reading literacy when compared to their international peers, but they are outperformed in mathematics and science and our 15-year-old students trail many of our competitors in math and science literacy.”
The Condition of Education is a congressionally mandated report that provides an annual statistical portrait of education in the United States. The 50 indicators included in the report cover all aspects of education, from student achievement to school environment and from early childhood through postsecondary education.
The report shows that U. S. public schools have the most diverse student population than at any other time in history. In addition, more individuals are enrolling in postsecondary education, and more bachelor’s degrees have been awarded than in the past.

Local School Tax & Spending Climate Update

Two links on local and state taxes (some have implications on future state tax redistribution for schools):

Wisconsin Faces a $1.6B structural deficit by Steven Walters:

A report made public today [Wisconsin DOA 2007-2009 Budget Reports] identifies a $1.6 billion gap between what state officials say they need to run their agencies over the next two years and what taxes and other revenues will bring in over that period.
Dane County Properties Taxes increase 4.88% by Channel3000:

Without a veto, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk signed the $450 million county budget that she said protects public safety, human services and the environment.
Audio: Falk Signs Budget, Declines Comment On AG Race (MP3 Format)
For the average $240,000 Madison homeowner, the county portion of the property tax will increase by almost $16, which represents a 4.88 percent increase, WISC-TV reported.

Locally, the Madison School District’s property tax assessments will go up less than the County, about 3.2%.

East High Student Insurrection Over Proposed Curriculum Changes?

Andy Hall:

“This is a discussion killer and it’s an education killer because it’s going to make kids feel uncomfortable,” Collin said Monday of the emerging plan, which would take effect in the fall.
This morning, Collin and other students – he says it may involve 100 of the school’s 1,834 students – plan to protest the planned changes by walking out of the school at 2222 E. Washington Ave. Some may try to meet with Superintendent Art Rainwater at his Downtown office.
East Principal Alan Harris said he’s heard talk of a student protest. Students refusing to attend class would be dealt with for insubordination, he said, and could face suspension, particularly if he determines their conduct is unsafe.
Harris said he’s met with parents, staff members and students, and more private and group meetings are planned, to hear their concerns.
However, Harris said he believes he remains on the right track. East, he said, must change.

Read the extensive discussion on the Madison School District Administration’s High School redesign plans here. The Madison School Board will meet to discuss the proposed high school changes on November 27, 2006.
Related Links:

A timeline of West High School’s march toward one size fits all English 10.
Bruce King’s report on West High School’s English 9 program

Black Enrollment in AP Surges in Montgomery; Half Take Some Type of Honors Course

Daniel de Vise:

Montgomery County public schools this year passed a milestone in college preparation: Half of the 9,737 black high school students are enrolled in honors or Advanced Placement courses.
Five years ago, barely one-third of African Americans participated in such classes, despite the county’s reputation as a national leader in college prep. Now, a black student in Montgomery is more likely to take an AP test than a white student elsewhere in the nation.
Kalema took all the honors courses available to her in the ninth grade, then progressed into AP. As a senior, she is taking AP geography, calculus and English literature. She partly credits her counselor, Scott Woo, with her advancement.
“It’s always been Mr. Woo saying, ‘I think you can take this class,’ ” she said.
The county’s achievement is striking because the national surge in Advanced Placement testing has largely left black students behind.
The success of urban schoolteacher Jaime Escalante with a group of minority AP students in East Los Angeles in the 1980s convinced public educators that motivation and hard work might be just as important as standardized test scores in predicting AP success. Over the past few years, that philosophy has become pervasive in the Washington region.
Principals and teachers in Montgomery high schools began looking for reasons to include students in AP courses, rather than reasons to keep them out. The process evolved into a science: All students now take the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT, a strong predictor of AP potential, in the ninth grade. Principals get spreadsheets that allow them to sort students by PSAT score and grade-point average to identify those capable of AP study not enrolled in an AP course.
Kalema was being groomed for AP while still in middle school. She took Algebra I, a high school course, in the eighth grade; the school system has dramatically expanded advanced math study in elementary and middle schools as a pipeline to future AP and IB study.

Montgomery County Public Schools.

One in Four Pass California’s Student Physical Fitness Test

Dana Hull:

Despite growing alarm about childhood obesity and stepped-up efforts to get California’s 6.3 million public school children exercising and eating well, only one in four could stretch, lift, curl and run enough to pass the state’s annual physical fitness test.
Every spring, fifth-, seventh-, and ninth-graders take the test, which includes a mile-long run and push-ups. Results from the spring 2006 tests, made public Friday, highlight a troubling trend. Today’s children are much like the nation’s adults: increasingly inactive and sedentary.
“Three out of four students are not in good physical shape,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said in announcing the results. “Students need to turn off the video games, turn off the television and the computer and get out and walk and play games.”
The 2006 test scores show a slight gain — 1 percent — in overall performance compared to last year’s results.

Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races

Sam Dillon:

Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school.
“The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing,” Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as well as or better than whites.
The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public education.
Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.

NYT Letters: The New New Math: Back to Basics

NYT Letters to the Editor regarding “As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics“:

s a middle school tutor, I’m always amazed at the pride many schools feel because their middle school curriculum includes topics in pre-algebra/algebra. This sounds like good news until it becomes clear that it’s not pre-algebra that students find problematic: it’s basic arithmetic.
Enabling students to have rote facts at their fingertips endows them with great self-confidence and permits them to take risks with subsequent higher-thinking math skills. This self-confidence eliminates that “fear” of math that prevails in our culture.
When I was an elementary school student in the 1950s, what was drilled daily in the classroom was reinforced nightly with numerous homework problems.
This is a technique that not only allows students to master the math basics, it also instills a sense of self-esteem gained through accuracy, precision and academic discipline.
E. S. Goldberg
Miami, Nov. 14, 2006
————
I was an educator in New York City for 31 years, and in my educational lifetime as dean of a Manhattan high school, a teacher in several junior and senior high schools and in summer and afternoon school tutorial programs, and a night adult-school teacher, I was involved in many new teaching programs.
Education is not an activity to promote politically correct reforms. Education is a process by which students are taught fundamentals in a structured environment with the least amount of distractions and political or doctorate-minded invasions.
The outrageous proposals to substitute the basics will always be with us, and the smart thing to do is not to waste the good taxpayer’s patience or money.
John A. Manicone
Port St. Lucie, Fla., Nov. 14, 2006

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On Math Rigor

Teacher Ms. Cornelius:

Well, I teach high school kids, and I’ve sat through about five hundred IEP meetings. I have sat through meetings for kids in middle school and then meetings for the same kids in high school. And there’s one thing I can tell you.
In five years, their goals had not changed one bit. In middle school, they were only expected to do 70% of their homework at 70% accuracy, and in high school, they were still only expected to do 70% of their homework with 70% accuracy. And for those of you who are reaching for your calculators because of the New New Math, that means that they only had to get 49% of their math work correct. Ever. Now if one were to bring this up before an IEP meeting, one will get looked at in much the same way that people avert their eyes at the sight of road kill.
This does not equate to proficiency in a one-size-fits-all world.

Alison Kepner has more.

Over-Scheduled, Over-Protected Children May Need to Break Out on Their Own

Tim Holt:

Madeline Levine is a Marin psychologist who in her private practice sees a steady stream of overprotected suburban teenagers. (They’re the subject of her best-selling book, “The Price Of Privilege.”) Because of parents’ exaggerated fears, the explorations of these suburban teens are often restricted to a short distance from home, according to Levine. Given this narrow experience, these kids tend to adopt their parents’ fearful view of the world outside their home. As a result, she notes, “they are often denied a sense of real pleasure in exploring and enjoying the world around them.”
Not so for the 60 city kids I interviewed for this article. Urban parents seem to take a different approach from those in the suburbs. With very few exceptions, the high-school-age kids I spoke with seemed to enjoy a great deal of freedom to explore their city. As Phil Halperin, the father of one free-roaming teenage boy, put it, “With all its diversity, San Francisco is a wonderful place for kids to learn how the world really works.”

Academic Blend: A Thoreau Fundraiser

Academic Blend: A Thoreau School Fundraiser

Academic Blend, a 100% Fair Trade Coffee. An insurgent fundraising idea from Thoreau Elementary School’s activist parents. 4 flavors (check out the eyes), $10/pound. Email Rosana Ellman (rellmann@charter.net) to order.

Add your interesting fund raising ideas to this post via the comments. The recently revealed Madison School District’s $6M structural deficit (slightly less than 2% of its $332M budget) places a premium on creative fund raising and expense reduction. The 2007/2008 budget will feature larger than normal reductions in the District’s spending increases, due to the structural deficit.

Admissions Board faces Grade Inflation

Justin Pope:

But in the increasingly frenzied world of college admissions, even Zalasky is nervous about his prospects. He doubts he’ll get in to the University of Wisconsin, a top choice. The reason: his grades.
It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that so many of his classmates’ are so good. Zalasky’s GPA is nearly an A minus, and yet he ranks only about in the middle of his senior class of 543 at Edina High School outside Minneapolis.
That means he will have to find other ways to stand out.
. . . The average high school GPA increased from 2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and 2000, according to a federal study. Almost 23 percent of college freshmen in 2005 reported their average grade in high school was an A or better, according to a national survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. In 1975, the percentage was about half that.
GPAs reported by students on surveys when they take the SAT and ACT exams have also risen — and faster than their scores on those tests. That suggests their classroom grades aren’t rising just because students are getting smarter. Not surprisingly, the test-owners say grade inflation shows why testing should be kept: It gives all students an equal chance to shine.
More than 70 percent of schools and districts analyzed by an education audit company called SchoolMatch had average GPAs significantly higher than they should have been based on their standardized test scores — including the school systems in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Denver, San Bernardino, Calif., and Columbus, Ohio.

More on the Kalamazoo Promise: College for Free

The Kalamazoo Promise program has drawn 985 students to their K-12 system. Jamaal Abdul-Alim recently visited the city to learn more:

The program is as much a social experiment aimed at leveling the playing field of access to higher learning as it is an economic development initiative meant to generate school revenue, boost the economy and reverse the effects of a middle-class flight – some say “white flight” – that began in the 1960s and continued after the 1973 court-ordered desegregation of the city’s public schools.
Students and parents in Kalamazoo believe the program has made children’s educational futures so secure that some have scrapped their college-savings plans to buy household items, such as TVs.
Teachers say students and parents are showing more concern about their children’s performance in school.
Home sales are up, and enrollment in the public school system – roughly 11,000, down 40% from four decades ago – is on the upswing. The 985 new students this school year brought an additional $7.5 million in state aid, and the district hired 50 new teachers. No new taxes were levied because of the promise.

15 Wisconsin Fall Referendums Pass

Amy Rinard:

Fifteen school districts around Wisconsin won building project referendums worth $290 million on Nov. 7, and voters in several districts also voted to raise their tax levies a collective $51 million beyond the state spending caps.
Those results pleased a top state school board official, but he said it only shows how desperate times have become for many local districts, and that school advocates will be urging a re-examination of Wisconsin’s school funding formula.
John Ashley, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said the number of districts that succeeded in getting approval of referendums showed voters value education and are willing to invest in future generations.
“I’m very, very happy for these districts because it’s a matter of life and death for many of them,” he said. “But I’m saddened at the number who didn’t get their referendums passed.”

2 West High Students Face Charges In Connection With Bomb Threat

Channel3000:

Two Madison West High School students have been suspended and are facing criminal charges after allegedly creating a bomb scare twice — once on Monday and on Halloween.
A 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl allegedly just wanted to play a practical joke, but the school’s officials said they don’t think it’s a laughing matter and are sending a strong message.
“We can’t have students making those kinds of threats. We will have to take those kinds of threats very seriously. There will be consequences both from the school district and from the criminal justice system,” said Ed Holmes, principal at West High School. “One student not wanting to go to class shouldn’t impact on over 2,000 people in a school community.”

A bit of Sunshine on the Madison School District’s Budget Process: 2006/2007 Madison School District Budget & $6M “Structural Deficit” Discussions

video here

There’s been a fascinating school board discussion over the past few weeks as the 2006/2007 $332M+ Madison schools budget is finalized.

(about 41 minutes into this 61 minute video clip) Lawrie Kobza:

“Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year’s $319M+ budget)?

Answer: “Negative expenditure of $6M in salaries (tuition income was down, special ed high incidence aid was down) $5.9M “structural deficit in place”.”

Art Rainwater:

“The way we have attempted to deal with maintaining the quality of education as long as we could was to budget very, very aggressively, realizing that we had an out of fund balance ($5.9M in 2006/2007). We made the decision 7 years ago or so to budget aggressively and try to manage to that budget believing that we would use less fund equity over time than if we set aside a set amount. So that’s been our approach. That fund equity has now come down to the point that we believe we can’t do that any more and we will not bring you a balanced budget that is aggressive particularly where it gets into aggressive on the revenue side in how much efficiency we believe we can budget. So, what the effect of that is to increase the amount you have to pay.

Lawrie Kobza:

We budgeted under this CFO/COO account, we budgeted that we were going to find $6.1M somewhere without saying where, and we didn’t. We found all but 2.7M of that. In this year’s budget, we have the same type of thing. We have budgeted that we’re going to find $5.9M somewhere. So, while we can look at all of our budget items, oh, we’re doing great we’re right on budget for salaries, transportation, for whatever. We can’t just meet our budget, we have to do $5.9M better than our budget. We’re going to take this up in the Finance committee to see if there is a different way we can present some of this, to be able to track it.

Roger Price mentioned that this was not a new item, but was in place when he arrived in the mid 1990’s.

Ruth Robarts asked about a February 2006 consultant’s forecast of the District’s equity versus Roger Price’s Numbers (52 minutes). Ruth also asked about the financial implications of the District’s retirement buyout commitments through 2009. “I’ve been on the Board a long time and did not see in the documents I’ve seen that kind of structural deficit”.
Watch the video here or listen to the mp3 audio.

Bottom Line: Thanks to Lawrie Kobza’s digging, the public knows about the Madison School District’s $6M “structural deficit”. This also means that next year’s balanced budget will require significantly greater reductions in spending increases, or “cost to continue approach” than we’ve seen in the past. It would also be interesting to see how our District’s “equity” or cash reserves have declined over the years.
The good news regarding the budget’s “Fuzzy Math, or the balanced budget that isn’t” (there must be some)? The discussion happened publicly, on MMSDTV, and the community is now aware of looming larger budget changes than we’ve seen in the past. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no mention of this in the traditional media.
Run for school board!

Discontent Brews Over School Changes

Jason Shephard:

Last year, amid the uproar that followed West High School’s replacement of more than a dozen elective offerings with a core curriculum for 10th-grade English, Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater told the school board that such changes would be a “major direction” in the district’s future.
Some people see signs that this shift is now occurring.
Concerns about eliminating course offerings are being aired at East High School, which has traditionally offered an array of elective courses in core subject areas. Principal Alan Harris is expected to unveil the plan at a parent meeting on Thursday; officials declined to release details before then.
“There are a lot of reasons to be concerned,” says Lucy Mathiak, a school board member whose son attends East. “It does sound a lot like the West model, and that’s not what East parents asked for,” especially those who participated in this spring’s planning group called East 2012.

“Too Little Math in Math?”

Lynn Thompson:

But they strongly believe that their math textbooks should include actual math.
Donald’s “Connected Mathematics” book at Harbour Pointe Middle School in Mukilteo asks him to arrange a list of 20 cities in order of their populations, all in the tens of millions.
Yes, he concedes, he must recognize differences among numbers, but it’s a pretty low-level task for a bright sixth-grader, about as challenging as alphabetizing words.
But check out the next activity: Locate the cities on a map.
“That’s not math,” Donald protests. “That’s geography.”
The Chacon-Taylor children and their parents, Hugh Taylor and Monique Chacon-Taylor, are among Snohomish County families raising questions about the effectiveness of widely used math textbooks that encourage discovery and writing about math, but de-emphasize basics such as multiplication and long division.
They’ve joined other Washington parents in an organization called Where’s the Math? that’s calling on the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to rewrite its K-12 math standards, select more effective textbooks and re-examine the math content of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL)
The calls for rethinking the state’s math education come amid signs that the present system is failing large numbers of students. Just 51 percent of 10th-graders and 59 percent of fourth-graders passed the math section of the WASL in the spring. About 29,000 juniors haven’t passed the WASL math test, which they must do to graduate in spring 2008..

The Madison School District uses Connected Math in middle school. Many links and notes on math, including the recent Math Forum audio/video.

Public Comments Regarding the Madison School District’s Quiet Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses

MP3 Audio | Video

Monday (11/13/2006) Madison School Board Performance and Achievement Committee meeting agenda originally included a discussion of the Administration’s recent quiet policy change regarding students receiving credit (paid for by parents or the District) for non-MMSD courses.

The agenda item mysteriously disappeared, but several parents, including Board Member Lucy Mathiak spoke. The discussion is now scheduled for the 12/11/2006 Performance & Achievement Committee meeting.

Madison School Board High School Redesign Discussion

The Madison School Board will discuss the Administration’s High School Redesign plans on Monday evening, November 27, 2006, according to their calendar [screenshot]. East High School is holding a meeting this evening on their curriculum changes.

2006/2007 Wisconsin General School Aids for All School Districts

Bob Lang, Director, Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau [88K PDF]:

In response to requests from a number of legislators, this office has prepared information on the amount of general school aids to be received by each of the 425 school districts in 2006-07. This memorandum describes the three types of aid funded from the general school aids appropriation and the reductions made to general school aid eligibility related to the Milwaukee and Racine charter school program and the Milwaukee parental choice program. The attachment provides data on each school district’s membership, equalized value, shared costs and general school aids payment, based on the October 15, 2006, equalization aid estimate prepared by the
Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
General School Aids
General school aids include equalization, integration (Chapter 220), and special adjustment aids. In 2006-07, $4,722.7 million from the general fund is appropriated for general school aids. Of the total amount of funding provided, including adjustments, 414 school districts are eligible for $4,620.4 million in equalization aid, 28 districts are eligible for $89.0 million in integration aid and 50 districts are eligible for $13.3 million in special adjustment aid.
Equalization Aid.
A major objective of the equalization aid formula is tax base equalization. The formula operates under the principle of equal tax rate for equal per pupil expenditures. In pure form, this means that a school district’s property tax rate does not depend on the property tax base of the district, but rather on the level of expenditures. The provision of state aid through the formula allows a district to support a given level of per pupil expenditures with a similar local property tax rate as other districts with the same level of per pupil
expenditures, regardless of property tax wealth. There is an inverse relationship between equalization aid and property valuations. Districts with low per pupil property valuations receive a larger share of their costs through the formula than districts with high per pupil property valuations.

Madison, with 24,792 students will receive $56,984,764 (17.16% of the $332M+ budget) from the State (via income, sales taxes and fees).
Related Publications:

State School Finance Spaghetti Blowback

Earlier this year, recently re-elected Governor Jim Doyle creatively used his line item veto power to move funds from transportation and other areas of the state budget to public school funds. Wisconsin citizens may have some “blowback” from that decision in the form of higher vehicle registration fees. This Wisconsin State Journal editorial has more information:

But that’s no excuse for sticking it to the little guy who already pays one of the highest gas taxes in the nation.
The DOT is proposing a 45-percent increase, from $55 to $80, in the annual registration fee for cars.
The governor and Legislature should quickly reject the proposed $25 hike. They also should be wary of even bigger increases proposed for registration fees on light trucks.
The higher vehicle registration fees would bring in an additional $208 million to state coffers over the next two budget years. The DOT says the money is needed to fix roads and to rebuild Interstate 94 south of Milwaukee.
The road work may be justified. But motorists shouldn’t get soaked just because state leaders are mismanaging the state’s money.
State leaders — the governor and the Legislature — have diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from the transportation fund in recent years and spent it on other things such as public schools. To avoid road construction delays, our state leaders then borrowed money to make up the difference.

Patrick Marley has more:

The car registration fee would rise 46%, from $55 to $80. The department also wants to raise the registration fee for light trucks to $80 to $112, depending on their weight.
The changes would raise the cost of a license from $24 to $34 to cover the cost of new federal requirements to make identification cards more secure. Licenses are good for eight years.
The recommendations were due two months ago as part of the agency’s budget request, but the department didn’t submit them until Friday – three days after Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was re-elected. The department noted that for years it had filed its requests about two months later than other agencies.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has more:

At the same time, the governor and the Legislature can help future DOT budgets by not raiding the transportation fund to fill holes elsewhere in the state budget, something that has occurred too often in recent years and is one of the reasons for the transportation department’s structural deficit.
Drivers should not be taxed by the state twice, once on income and once in fees, to meet the education budget, for example. The fees and the gasoline tax should be reserved for transportation.

A useful reminder that increased local (property taxes), state (income, sales taxes and fees) or federal (income, fees) spending on education ends up coming from the same sources.
Dictonary.com: blowback

Most Students in Big Cities Lag Badly in Basic Science

Diana Jean Schemo:

A least half of eighth graders tested in science failed to demonstrate even a basic understanding of it in 9 of 10 major cities, and fourth graders, the only other group tested, fared little better, according to results released here Wednesday.
The outcome of those tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, showed that student performance in urban public schools was not only poor but also far short of science scores in the nation as a whole.
Half or a little more of the eighth-grade students in Charlotte, San Diego and Boston lacked a basic grasp of science. In six of the other cities — New York, Houston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Atlanta — the share of eighth graders without that knowledge was even higher, ranging from about three-fifths in New York to about four-fifths in Atlanta. Only in Austin, Tex., did a majority of eighth graders — and only barely there — have a basic understanding.
By comparison, the number of eighth graders who lacked a basic grasp in the nation as a whole was 43 percent.

Officials Meet to Discuss School Safety

WKOW-TV:

Insubordination, bullying and fighting top the list of problems Madison schools deal with regularly.
Madison police and district officials answered questions and discussed the safety challenges of local schools.
Police handed out an incident report for Memorial High School.
According to the report, there were 32 calls to police for fighting since last January. There were 9 calls for possible sexual assaults and one weapons violation. Police say they’re seeing more calls for weapons violations.
They did not give out reports for the other high schools.

Channel3000:

Madison compares favorably to the rest of the nation on the issue of school violence. A study released in 2005 by the U.S. departments of Justice and Education indicated that nationally there was an average of 24 violent crimes for every 1,000 students on all grade levels.
For Madison’s high schools last year, WISC-TV’s findings revealed 4.4 violent crimes per 1,000 students. And while that’s below the national average, district officials said they know that area parents judge things by a different standard.
“It’s never willing to simply sit back and say we’re good enough, always trying to improve, always looking forward,” Yudice said.
“You have to continually examine what you’re doing. You can’t ever say, ‘Boy we’ve got the answer.’ Because the one thing I promise you is, we don’t,” said Art Rainwater, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent.
For the entire 2005-2006 school year, Madison Memorial topped the list with 286 calls to police. Lafollette had 276 calls; East had 238 and West had 222.
The four-year trend showed a general decline in police calls to the same schools. Of the four, only Madison Memorial has seen a slight increase — 26 percent since 2002.

School Quality and the Achievement Gap

Debra Viadero:

Two new studies shed light on how the achievement gaps between groups of students grow as they move from elementary to middle school.
The studies—one by researchers Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin and the other by the Northwest Evaluation Association—both found that black students start out school trailing behind their white counterparts, learn less over the course of the school year, and fall further behind as they progress through school.
But the studies diverge as they try to pinpoint potential causes for those learning gaps.
Mr. Hanushek and Mr. Rivkin, both university-based economists, suggest that the growth in the size of the learning gaps that occur as children move from kindergarten through 8th grade can be explained by certain differences in the schools that black and white children attend.

Links:

“School Quality and the Black-White Achievement Gap” is posted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Achievement Gaps: An Examination of Differences in Student Achievement and Growth,” is available from the Northwest Evaluation Association.

Gates: U.S. Education System Needs Work

Donna Gordon Blankinship:

Gates said the experience of being a parent of three kids – ages 10, 7 and 4 – has led him to spend more time thinking about schools. Specifically, he said the U.S. education system needs higher standards, clear accountability, flexible personnel practices and innovation.
Gates, whose children are in private schools, said every state should require students to take three or four years of math and science to graduate from high school – 25 states currently have such requirements. He wants states to have the power to intervene at low-performing schools.
“Real accountability means more than having goals; it also means having clear consequences for not meeting the goals,” he said in a speech earlier Monday to Washington state educators who came to hear the results of an education task force.
Gates said schools should also be able to pay the best teachers better and offer incentives to attract people with rare abilities.
“It’s astonishing to me to have a system that doesn’t allow us to pay more for someone with scarce abilities, that doesn’t allow us to pay more to reward strong performance,” he said. “That is tantamount to saying teacher talent and performance don’t matter and that’s basically saying students don’t matter.”

Enough to Do the Job? Critical Questions About California’s Latest Teacher Equity Plan

The Education Trust-West [PDF Report]:

In addition to the concerns raised above, the plan suffers from other important defi ciencies. First, it is extremely long and diffi cult to comprehend, even for those who are familiar with the jargon of education policy and practice. There is also an overall need to clean the document to enhance its clarity: there are tables with contradictory numbers, references to appendices that don’t exist, inconsistent program names, and so forth. The need for a more streamlined, publicly-accessible version was noted at the September 26 SBE meeting, but has yet to materialize. Also, despite giving the public virtually no time to review the completed plan before it was fi nalized and sent to the USDOE, the state has now decided to forego any further revisions to the plan unless changes are requested by the federal government. Furthermore, the September 29 version has not been circulated widely or made easily accessible on the state’s website or USDOE’s website, as of October 31. Moving forward, we recommend that the state clean up its current plan and make a synthesized, more legible version easily available to the general public

“How to Improve Your Grade”

Ms Cornelius:

I was asked by a student today about how he could improve his grade. Beyond the obvious answer:
(Get higher grades on your work. Understand that a zero will NOT raise your average.)
there are these thoughts:

Tax rates don’t tell the whole story

Dan Benson:

The proposed tax rate, however, is $1.83 per $1,000 of equalized value, down from $1.97 this year. That means the owner of a $250,000 house would save about $35 on the tax bill from the previous year.
“(Vrakas) is calling it a tax decrease because the impact on some homeowners is that their tax bill may go down a couple bucks,” said Christine Lufter, president of the Waukesha Taxpayers League.
Focusing on tax rates is “the most deceptive way of selling a budget. It’s not an indicator of government efficiency,” she said.
Instead, she and Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Association, say taxpayers should focus on the entire budget picture.
“Taxpayers should not pay attention to the tax rate. It’s a function of both taxes and (property) values. And in the last 10 to 15 years, when values have been going up at a pretty rapid clip, it becomes almost a no-brainer to drop the tax rate,” Berry said. “Playing games with the tax rate is my No. 1 pet peeve.”

More A’s, More Pay

Karen Springen:

Meet the fourth R: reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic—and a reward. The Department of Education just launched the first federal program that uses bonuses to motivate teachers who raise test scores in at-risk communities, awarding $42 million this month to 16 school systems in places like Chicago, Dallas and South Carolina.

Joanne has more on teacher incentives as does Mike Antonucci.

Methodology Matters

Edward Glaeser:

Today, the Faculty will begin to take on the central and difficult question of what students should know to graduate from Harvard. The Task Force on General Education has produced a serious and thoughtful answer to this question. It has proposed that the College train students for citizenship in a global society and, to that end, require students to take courses in ten diverse areas from reason and faith to analytical reasoning. I fear, however, that the proposal goes too far in rejecting the Core Curriculum’s “approaches to knowledge” in favor of teaching knowledge itself. Methodology, particularly the scientific approach to human society, should play a prominent role in general education.
Like any self-involved faculty member, I could argue that the proposed program gives too little attention to my own field of economics while spending too much time on other less important disciplines. In extreme fits of economo-centrism, I can certainly convince myself that reading, writing, and breathing are pretty irrelevant relative to understanding the laws of supply and demand. I am not, however, writing this column to argue that my discipline deserves more recognition in general education. Indeed, I do not profess to know how much space in the general education curriculum should be allocated to any field, and I do not know what subjects should be focused on in other fields. I do, however, know that with regards to economics, the report focuses too much on social science topics but too little on social science methodology.

Developing the China Connection Through Education Programs

Oregon Representative Dennis Richardson advocates substantially increasing the number of students studying mandarin [PDF]:

The U.S Department of Education in announcing its role in the National Security Language Initiative reported some statistics:

More than 200 million children in China are studying English, a compulsory subject for all Chinese primary school students. By comparison, only about 24,000 of approximately 54 million elementary and secondary school children in the United States are studying Chinese.
According to the Center for Applied Linguistics, only 31% of American elementary schools (and 24% of public elementary schools) report teaching foreign languages, and 79% of those schools focus on giving introductory exposure to a language rather than achieving overall proficiency. Richardson/Porter Proposal 10/31/06 4
Only 44% of American high school students are enrolled in foreign languages classes as reported by the 2002 Digest of Education Statistics. Of those students, 69% are enrolled in Spanish and 18% in French, with less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu
Less than 8% of United States undergraduates take foreign language courses, and less than 2% study abroad in any given year. Foreign language degrees account for only about 1% of undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States.

Although there is no existing report on Chinese language courses in Oregon, some Oregon schools are independently developing their own programs for their students to learn the Chinese language. Portland Public Schools has a Chinese immersion (half day Chinese, half day English) program at Woodstock elementary that started in 1997. In the Fall 2006 semester it doubled in size from one class per grade (25-30 students) to two classes (50-60 students). So far the double class is only kindergarten. One grade will be added each year as the students get older. Some of the students are now in middle school at Hosford Middle School. A high school component will be added at either Cleveland or Franklin High School. The Portland Public Schools may start another Chinese immersion program at another elementary school in the future.

Mandarin is offered at one Madison High School: Memorial. Oregon Business Plan.

As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics

Erin O’Connor:

And parents shouldn’t only be concerned about math instruction. They should be looking hard at the reading and writing parts of their kids’ educations, too. Are they learning grammar? Can they spell? Punctuate? Understand what they are reading? Most of the Ivy League English majors whose writing I grade have trouble in these areas, which suggests to me that most everyone their age does. I tend to assume that the students I see are among the most linguistically competent students of their generation–but there are still a lot of issues with things such as run-on sentences, comma splices, murky phrasing, limited vocabulary, dangling modifiers, spelling, and so on. That’s the legacy of a pedagogical attitude toward literacy that mirrors the one the mother above encountered when she inquired why her son wasn’t being taught basic math skills. When I taught high school English in a boarding school a couple of years ago, I found that a great many students there had abysmal language skills. Some bordered on functional illiteracy. When I asked whether the school taught grammar at any point, the head of school told me that teaching grammar thwarted students’ creativity and stifled their interest in reading. The utter inadequacy of that outlook really hits home when you realize that it amounts to lying to parents and kids about their kids’ abilities, and that it involves sending kids off to college without the skills they will need to succeed there.

Tamar Lewin:

For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.
The changes are being driven by students’ lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians’ warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math — critics call it fuzzy math — has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems.
At the same time, parental unease has prompted ever more families to pay for tutoring, even for young children. Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Where’s the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.
“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.
Grass-roots groups in many cities are agitating for a return to basics. Many point to California’s standards as a good model: the state adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.
“The Seattle level of concern about math may be unusual, but there’s now an enormous amount of discomfort about fuzzy math on the East Coast, in Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and now New Jersey is starting to make noise,” said R. James Milgram, a math professor at Stanford University. “There’s increasing understanding that the math situation in the United States is a complete disaster.”

Notes and links here. More comments. Joanne has more on “word problems“.

Just Whose Idea Was All This Testing?

Jay Matthews:

Critics say standardized testing has robbed schools of the creative clash of intellects that make Plato’s dialogues still absorbing. “There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all,” said educational psychologist Gerald W. Bracey, research columnist for the Phi Delta Kappan education journal.
Historians call the rise of testing an inevitable outgrowth of expanding technology. As goods and services are delivered with greater speed and in higher quantity and quality, education has been forced to pick up the pace.

Leaving the City for the Schools, and Regretting It

Winnie Hu:

Only the suburban bargain the Ophirs thought they were getting turned out to be no bargain at all. They chose the Yorktown school system, a relatively well-off district whose students consistently outscore their peers on state tests. But the Ophirs came to view the schools as uninspiring and unresponsive, and now they pay $51,000 a year for their children, 11-year-old Dylan and 9-year-old Sabrina, to attend the private Hackley School here — on top of $23,000 annually in property taxes.

Civic, Business Leaders and the Milwaukee Public Schools

Alan Borsuk:

The key players involved – a group that you would not have found at the same table often in the past – are the GMC, which is generally composed of business and civic leaders; the Milwaukee School Board; schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos; and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union representing more than 8,000 MPS employees.
Sister Joel Read, the retired president of Alverno College who chairs the Greater Milwaukee Committee’s education committee, said Milwaukee is a risk-averse city and change in MPS would involve risks for everyone, but she was optimistic about what will result from the effort.
“I think there’s a new day here in Milwaukee,” she said.
The effort will begin with more than two dozen meetings beginning this week and running into January with a wide range of people who have stakes in the success of MPS. The meetings will include sessions with teachers, principals, business leaders, parents and philanthropists. There will be a public session in each of the eight school board districts

East High School to Follow West’s One Size Fit’s All 9/10 Curriculum?

From a reader involved in these issues:

The plan for East HS is to have only regular classes (that is, no Advanced (formerly AcaMo) and no TAG classes) and AP classes (which, presumably, only juniors and seniors will be able to take). East currently offers 9 AP classes. This means there will be a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes (except for the special ed and ESL classes) across the boards in 9th and 10th grades. Our source did not specify if this means the end of Paul DuVair’s renowned TAG Biology class. There also is no word on embedded honors options, like West now offers (though we have heard many reports about how profoundly uneven implementation is — aside from the fact that embedded honors options rarely give students the critical opportunity to learn together at a high level).
The only exception to this plan will be math, largely because the kids enter East already ability grouped (i.e., some into Algebra, some into Geometry, etc.).
Additional info —
— the official word is that this plan is coming from Alan Harris himself (yeah, right)
— the other official word is that one of the reasons for this drastic change is that the TAG students were “coasting” (huh?)
So please spread the word — especially to East attendance area parents that you know, including parents of younger kids — and please attend, if you can. And if anyone can videotape …

Is Science Education Failing Students?

Susan Black:

In many classrooms, science textbooks add to children’s misconceptions.
William Beaty, an engineer who designed an electricity exhibit for the Boston Museum of Science, discovered “a morass of misconceptions, mistakes, and misinformation” in grade school science textbooks. In fact, he couldn’t find a single book that explained basic electricity correctly.
North Carolina State University physics professor John Hubisz found similar problems in a two-year study of middle-school science textbooks. All told, he compiled 500 pages of errors in 12 textbooks, including mix-ups between fission and fusion, incorrect definitions of absolute zero, and a map showing the equator running through the southern states.
Reporting on the ways science textbooks are developed and sold to schools, Forbes writer David McClintick says many companies “churn out rubbish” with countless errors. One widely adopted text, for instance, claims the earth rotates around the sun, when it actually revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis.

Txt Speak on Tests

AP:

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as “txt” for “text”, “lol” for “laughing out loud” or “lots of love,” and “CU” for “see you.”
The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.
New Zealand’s Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer “clearly shows the required understanding,” even if it contains text-speak.

Tommy Franks issued battle orders in Iraq via Powerpoint [see also Thomas Ricks “Fiasco“]. One can imagine the techniques a future General will use….

School math books, nonsense, and the National Science Foundation

David Klein:

Problem: Find the slope and y-intercept of the equation 10 = x – 2.5.
Solution: The equation 10 = x – 2.5 is a specific case of the equation y = x – 2.5, which has a slope of 1 and a y-intercept of –2.5.
This problem comes from a 7th grade math quiz that accompanies a widely used textbook series for grades 6 to 8 called Connected Mathematics Program or CMP.[1] The solution appears in the CMP Teacher’s Guide and is supported by a discussion of sample student work.
Richard Askey, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported, “I was told about this problem by a parent whose child took this quiz. The marking was exactly as in the text.”[2] Students instructed and graded in this way learn incorrect mathematics, and teachers who know better may be undermined by their less informed peers, armed with the “solution.” This example is far from the only failing of CMP. Among other shortcomings, there is no instruction on division of fractions in the entire three year CMP series, and the other parts of fraction arithmetic are treated poorly.[3]
Is CMP just an anomaly? Unfortunately not. CMP is only one of more than a dozen defective K-12 math programs funded by the National Science Foundation. More specifically, the NSF programs were created and distributed through grants from the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Division within the NSF. In contrast to the NSF’s admirable and important role in supporting fundamental scientific research, the EHR has caused, and continues to cause, damage to K-12 mathematics education.

Notes and links on math curriculum. Audio / Video from the recent math forum.
Connected Math is widely used within the Madison School District resulting in no small amount of supplementing by teachers, students and parents.

Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians at Elite Schools?

Daniel Golden:

Though Asian-Americans constitute only about 4.5% of the U.S. population, they typically account for anywhere from 10% to 30% of students at many of the nation’s elite colleges.
Even so, based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher — a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.
Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University last spring because of his race and national origin.

Madison School District Virtual Learning

Jason Shephard:

One of the better-kept secrets in Madison is that the school district currently offers more than 100 online courses for city high school students. The program is called the Madison Virtual Campus.
“It turns out Madison is a leader in this technology,” says Johnny Winston Jr., the school board president. “My first question was, ‘Why don’t people know about this?’” He thinks virtual schools could help keep students who might leave for other options.
“As the second-largest school district in the state, we should be leading the way,” Winston says. “And to find out that yeah, we’re already doing this but nobody knows about it, I’m like, c’mon, let’s make this happen.”
But officials have purposely kept the program under wraps as they’ve fine-tuned it. There’s no mention of the program on the district’s Web site, and most parents have never heard of it. The district has spent five years building infrastructure, training staff and convincing stakeholders of the growing demand for virtual learning.
“We’re close to crossing a threshold in this district,” says Kelly Pochop, the district’s online learning facilitator. “Keep your ears open. We’re actively exploring options with our administrative team.”
The big question is how fast the district wants its students to take advantage of the Madison Virtual Campus. Currently, only eight high school students are taking online courses for credit. Another 14 middle school students are taking an online geometry course through the Kiel school district, with a Madison teacher providing support, to meet demands by the local teachers union.

Gates Foundation’s Small Learning Communities Have Yet to Yield Big Results

Linda Shaw:

The experiment — an attempt to downsize the American high school — has proven less successful than hoped.
The changes were often so divisive — and the academic results so mixed — that the Gates Foundation has stopped always pushing small as a first step in improving big high schools. Instead, it’s now also working directly on instruction, giving grants to improve math and science instruction, for example.
Most of the dozen-and-a-half Washington schools with so-called “conversion” grants have ended up only as hybrids — a mix of small-school elements added to big-school features.
Going forward, the foundation is advocating a core curriculum that all high-school students would be expected to take, he said. And it wants to help improve math and science instruction by backing efforts to increase math requirements for high-school students, and to train more math and science teachers and pay them better.

Chartering Change: The push for alternatives underscores the need for school reform

Jason Shephard:

Many parents are actively researching educational options for their young children. Increasingly, they are expecting more from public schools than the one-size-fits-all model schools have traditionally offered. Across the state, school districts are opening more charter schools and boosting their offerings of online and virtual classes to diversify educational approaches.
Some see these alternatives as necessary for the future of public school districts — especially urban ones struggling to eliminate the racial and income achievement gaps while expanding opportunities for both struggling and high-performing students.
“While the system serves many children well, it doesn’t serve all of them well,” says Senn Brown of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. “By recognizing that kids learn differently, and by creating options to serve them, school districts do better for all kids.”

Vince O’Hern has more on Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater:

Take away the glasses, and Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater bears a passing resemblance to Rodney Dangerfield, the late comedian whose tag line was, “I don’t get no respect.”
The Madison Metropolitan School District has compiled an impressive record of student achievement through the years and has shown heartening progress in reducing the racial performance gap — a gap that has been documented in many districts across the land. But despite this, Rainwater has faced an increasingly restive constituency and a growing public perception, justified or not, that Madison schools are in decline

Virtual School Reports

North American Council for Online Learning:

New Research Reports Released on Online Learning:
Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning: A Review of State-level Policy and Practice by John Watson Released November 2006 [PDF]
An International Perspective of K-12 Online Learning: A Summary of the 2006 NACOL International Survey and International Matrix
Virtual Schools and 21st Century Skills, written by NACOL and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (November 2006)
Learning Point/NCREL’s Synthesis of New Research on K-12 Online Learning
Exploring E-Learning Reforms for Michigan: the New Education (R)evolution

Corey Murray has more.

See a Good Idea. See it Run Into Trouble

Paul Beston:

In 1991, a New York State teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he announced his departure from public school teaching after 30 years. He was no longer willing to “hurt kids” in a broken system where political pressure snuffed out worthy efforts for change. By now, he wrote, “even reformers can’t imagine school much different.”
Indeed, the first priority of education reformers is often not success but the preservation of methods with which they are already comfortable. As Harold Henderson writes in “Let’s Kill Dick and Jane,” the American educational establishment possesses “an uncanny ability to transform golden ideas for change — from left, right, or center — into a leaden sludge.” Mr. Henderson, a longtime staff writer for the Chicago Reader, describes the fate of one textbook company — Illinois-based Open Court — as it tried to bring its share of golden ideas to a resistant school system.
The book’s title refers to the basal readers that were once a mainstay in American schools: Dick and Jane, created by advocates of the “Look-Say” theory of reading instruction in which children were taught to memorize the appearance of words at the expense of phonetic understanding. The theory has since been discredited, at least in part by the publication in 1955 of Rudolf Flesch’s best-selling “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which urged a return to phonics instruction.
Blouke Carus and his wife, Marianne, Americans with strong German roots and a familiarity with the exacting standards of the German gymnasium, read Flesch’s book and formed Open Court in 1962. Together with a small band of dedicated educational theorists and consultants, they created innovative materials with the goal of educating the American masses as rigorously as the elites of Europe. Providing both a history of this remarkable company and a withering portrait of the education culture, Mr. Henderson’s book is more compelling than any lay reader could reasonably expect.

Order “Let’s Kill Dick and Jane: How the Open Court Publishing Company Fought the Culture of American Education. More on Paul Beston. Brett posted a few words on the article.

Memorial High School Taser Incident Notes

From a reader:

Address 201 South Gammon Road (Memorial High School)
Arrested person/suspect 1. Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot, 37-year-old female of Madison (Charges –Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
2. 14-year-old female (10th grade Memorial HS Student) of Madison
(Charges – Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
3. 15-year-old female (9th grade Memorial HS Student) of Madison (Charges – Disorderly Conduct 947.01, Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer 946.41)
Victim/Injuries Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot was evaluated at local hospital for treatment related to injuries sustained prior to this incident.
Details On 11/08/06 at approximately 11:29am, Educational Resource Officer (ERO) requested emergency backup at Memorial High School reference a belligerent parent that was out of control.
Upon arrival, it was determined that a 17-year-old male subject, who was not a student of the school, had been taken into custody by the ERO and was being cited/released on a municipal violation of possessing tobacco products.
Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot (parent of the 17-year-old male) was made aware of the arrest scenario and responded to Memorial High School. Lightfoot made her way to the office of the ERO and began to verbally attack the officer for the police action he was involved in concerning the 17-year-old male.
Lightfoot continually escalated her actions towards the officer and was told many times to calm down and cease her physical approach; as she demanded her son be released from custody immediately. The ERO was then surrounded by Lightfoot and her two daughters in a confined area, and deeming Lightfoot the greatest threat, a Taser was utilized by the ERO to deescalate this threat to a manageable level.
It should be noted that the officer verbalized and used a physical separation technique before using the Taser as his last resort.
Jacquelyn L. Lightfoot and her two daughters were all arrested on charges of Disorderly Conduct and Resisting/Obstructing A Police Officer. The situation that occurred was an isolated event that did not place the school in any harm at any time. School officials were quick to act in this scenario, and it was resolved quickly after police arrived on scene.
It is understandable that parents would be concerned about the welfare of their children, but school officials and police would expect that parents would be appropriate in utilizing the correct mode of conflict resolution. This is a case that all involved parties did not envision, but concerns by any interested person must be dealt with in an appropriate manner if the educational environment is to remain conducive to that of learning.

WKOW-TV interviews Lightfoot.