John Engberg and Brian Gill:

Graduation and dropout rates are difficult to calculate. These difficulties arise because of both conceptual ambiguities and imperfect data. In this paper, the authors review some of these challenges, discuss how the challenges have been approached when using cross-sectional data, and describe a method that analyzes longitudinal, student-level data to provide an improved estimate of graduation and dropout rates. They then apply that method to estimate graduation and dropout rates for the Pittsburgh Public Schools district-wide and for each high school in the district.

Joe Smydo and Tim Grant have more:

City school board members angrily denounced a study that estimates 35 percent of high school students — including nearly half of all black male students — drop out of Pittsburgh Public Schools.
“It’s very incendiary to put something like this out there when there’s so much gray area and speculation,” board member Randall Taylor said at a meeting last night. “For us to tell the city we are not graduating this many students, this is devastating to the city.”

Andrew Rotherham notes that “It’s the PR, Stupid“…… “The report also offers a nice walk-through of some of the issues surrounding calculating grad rates.”

Andrew J. Coulson:

Mr. Buffett and the Gateses are not the first to invest over a billion dollars in an ambitious school reform plan. Ambassador and TV Guide mogul Walter Annenberg trod this path during the 1990s, donating $500 million of his own money and another $800 million in matching funds to the “Annenberg Challenge.”
Mr. Annenberg’s goal was to create exemplary schools and districts that would act as models for the nation. He sought not incremental change, but systemwide transformation. He didn’t get it. Though some Annenberg Challenge projects showed promise, at least for a time, their impact on the system as a whole was negligible.
Why? The Wreck of the Annenberg can be attributed to a single fundamental flaw in the ambassador’s approach: he assumed that excellence, once demonstrated, would automatically be imitated.
It is easy to see why people who have amassed riches in the private sector might assume that successful models are always mimicked on a broad scale. That is what happens in competitive markets – including competitive education markets.

More on the Annenberg Challenge.

Shavar Jeffries:

It is well beyond time for people of color to challenge vehemently the educational policies of the Democratic leadership that have failed our children for decades. Too many Democrats would prefer to deny poor folk the opportunity to make educational decisions for themselves – notwithstanding these Democrats wouldn’t permit their own children to be educated in city schools. At the same time, Democrats, by and large, continue to lord over urban school systems that have consigned generation after generation of children of color to an educational genocide that threatens the very survival of the Black community.

Susan Troller:

From the beginning, the independent community organization’s unusual strategy was to raise money for an endowment that will continue to provide increasing funding every year to sustain and enhance programming outside of the regular curriculum.
In addition, each school in the district currently has its own endowment of at least $10,000 that is earmarked for helping fund special events or programs. A foundation goal is to get every individual school’s endowment to $50,000, returning at least $2,500 to that school for grants each year.

More on John Taylor and the FMPS.

Mike Antonucci:

Wisconsin Education Association Council President Stan Johnson agreed to shave off his moustache if his delegates raised a certain level of PAC contributions. They did, and thousands of people watched as he shaved it off. So I owe an apology to education reporters all over the country for my previous criticism of their not covering the NEA convention. With each one you miss, you show better judgment than mine.
* The shave took longer than the debate on Resolution B-10.

Michelle Keller:

Many parents and educators swear by the practice of “academic redshirting” — waiting an extra year before enrolling a child in kindergarten in hopes of giving the kid more confidence, greater size or perhaps an academic edge.
But does it really work?
New research — including a federal study of 21,000 youngsters released in May — suggests that the benefits are a mixed bag, both academically and socially. As often happens with education techniques, redshirting appears to help some, harm others or have no effect at all.

Thomas C. Reeves [PDF]:

In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, teachers and administrators are eager to avoid being branded deficient and suffer potential financial losses. Department of Public Instruction officials in Wisconsin reported recently that the cost of tests taken in late 2005 included a $10 million contract with CTB/McGraw Hill, a well-known testing company that designed new tests exclusively for the state. Almost half a million students took the tests, and the overall results were less than encouraging. This at a time when much money and effort have been employed to hike the quality of instruction and fend off the transfer of students to voucher schools.
Common sense and decades of teaching experience dictate at least two observations: 1) until the home life of many low-income students improves (two parents, a steady income, solid moral teaching, at least some sort of intellectual stimulation higher than MTV, including the reading of books), the young people in question cannot be expected to embrace a life of learning and begin to plan for the future;

Via WisPolitics.

Emily Bazar:

Some traditional childhood games are disappearing from school playgrounds because educators say they’re dangerous.
Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., banned tag at recess this year. Others, including a suburban Charleston, S.C., school, dumped contact sports such as soccer and touch football.
In other cities, including Wichita; San Jose, Calif.; Beaverton, Ore.; and Rancho Santa Fe., Calif., schools took similar actions earlier.
The bans were passed in the name of safety, but some children’s health advocates say limiting exercise and free play can inhibit a child’s development.
Groups such as the National School Boards Association don’t keep statistics on school games.
But several experts, including Donna Thompson of the National Program for Playground Safety, verify the trend. Dodge ball has been out at some schools for years, but banning games such as tag and soccer is a newer development.

Madison’s Thoreau school implemented a controversial mandatory grouping recess plan (no free play) earlier this year.

Peter Wood (Provost of New York City’s Kings College):

By 2036, the forms of teacher preparation that currently prevail in Western nations will have sunk into oblivion. We will have discarded schools of education, the pedagogies they teach, and the certification apparatus that they serve. Such schools, pedagogies, and certifications have clung to life stubbornly for the better part of a century despite ample evidence of their unsuitability. Why predict that in the next 30 years they will finally follow the giant ground sloth into the La Brea tar pit of history?
In an era when jobs that require a high level of trained intelligence flow easily to India and other countries, Western countries are awakening to the awkward reality that we are not very good at basic schooling.
Mediocre teaching isn’t the only reason we aren’t very good at basic schooling. A distressingly large and growing percentage of children grow up semi-parentless; increasingly children are lost in the buzz of electronic distractions; and we preoccupy kids with group grievances at the expense of learning. Every few years our governments launch ambitious new programs of school reform, each of which seems to create a maelstrom of new kinds of educational misfeasance.
But after we have sifted and weighed all these contributory maladies, the main problem remains that we just don’t do a very good job at encouraging talented people to become teachers and equipping them along the way with the right kind of preparation. The single biggest cause of the deficiencies in our schools is the risible system by which we train teachers.

Joanne has more.

Rod Paige:

DUMB liberal ideas in education are a dime a dozen, and during my time as superintendent of Houston’s schools and as the United States secretary of education I battled against all sorts of progressivist lunacy, from whole-language reading to fuzzy math to lifetime teacher tenure. Today, however, one of the worst ideas in education is coming from conservatives: the so-called 65 percent solution.
This movement, bankrolled largely by Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, wants states to mandate that 65 percent of school dollars be spent “in the classroom.” Budget items like teacher salaries would count; librarians, transportation costs and upkeep of buildings would not.
Proponents argue that this will counter wasteful spending and runaway school “overhead,” and they have convinced many voters — a Harris poll last fall put national support at more than 70 percent. Four states — Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana and Texas — have adopted 65 percent mandates and at least six more are seriously considering them.
The only drawback is that such laws won’t actually make schools any better, and could make them worse. Yes, it’s true that education financing is a mess and that billions are wasted every year. But the 65 percent solution won’t help. The most likely outcome is that school officials will learn the art of creative accounting in order to increase the percentage of money that can be deemed “classroom” expenses.

Andrew Rotherham has more:

An op-ed by Rod Paige in today’s NYT kicks off a new round of debate about student finance. Paige makes some good points, criticizes the 65 percent solution, and touts a new ecumenical manifesto about school finance organized by the Fordham Foundation and signed by a wide range of people including former Clinton WH Chief of Staff John Podesta and former NC Governor Jim Hunt. But, because the manifesto is bipartisan, or really non-partisan, it’s a shame Paige’s op-ed doesn’t have a dual byline to better frame the issue. Incidentally, hard to miss that while a few years ago few on the left wanted much to do with Fordham, that’s really changed. Sign of the changing edupolitics. (Disc. I signed.) It’s also hard to miss the enormous impact Commodore Marguerite Roza is having on this debate.

(more…)

Sarah Carr:

When it scales back in size next year, Milwaukee’s Madison High School will lose nearly 15 teaching positions: a guidance counselor, a health teacher, a physical education teacher, two social studies teachers, one art teacher and five positions in science and math, among others.
At the same time, however, Madison will gain an additional special education teacher.
The same trend is playing out in many of the city’s schools. The overall student population keeps shrinking. The administrative staff at the central office keeps shrinking. The teaching corps keeps shrinking – down 14% in four years.

Sam Dillon:

And here in Louisville, the school board uses race as a factor in a student assignment plan to keep enrollments at most schools roughly in line with the district’s overall racial composition, making this one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation.
As different as they are, all these approaches and many more like them could now be in jeopardy, lawyers say, because of the Supreme Court’s decision this month to review cases involving race and school assignment programs here and in Seattle.
“We’ll be watching this very closely, because whichever way the Supreme Court rules, it will certainly have an impact on our district,” said Arthur R. Culver, superintendent of schools in Champaign, Ill., where African-American students make up 36 percent of students. Under a court-supervised plan, the district keeps the proportion of black students in all schools within 15 percentage points of that average by controlling school assignments.

Pauline Vu:

States have two weeks to comply with the latest requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and come up with a solution to what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings calls teaching’s “dirty little secret”:
The disparity in teacher quality between poor, largely minority schools and their more affluent, white counterparts.
The challenge of ensuring that schools have equal numbers of good teachers will involve huge changes in the way schools recruit, train, prepare and compensate teachers, said Scott Emerick, a policy expert for the Center for Teacher Quality, a research organization based in Chapel Hill, N.C. “There’s no silver-bullet solution to do this on the cheap,” he said.
A recent Education Trust report [PDF] revealed large discrepancies in teacher qualifications in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin between poor and rich schools, and between mostly white schools and mostly minority ones.
In Ohio’s poorest elementary schools, for example, one of every eight teachers is not considered highly qualified, but in the state’s richest schools, that number falls to one in 67 teachers. In Wisconsin, schools with the highest minority student populations have more than twice as many novice teachers as schools with the lowest numbers of minority students.

Clint Bolick:

Yet Arizona is not an aberration. Already in 2006, a new Iowa corporate scholarship tax credit bill was signed into law by Gov. Tom Vilsack; and in Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill increasing the Milwaukee voucher program by 50%. Gov. Ed Rendell may expand Pennsylvania’s corporate scholarship tax credit program, as he did last year. Messrs. Vilsack, Doyle and Rendell are all Democrats.
And last year, hell froze over: Sen. Ted Kennedy endorsed the inclusion of private schools in a rescue effort for over 300,000 children displaced from their schools by Hurricane Katrina. As a result, tens of thousands of kids are attending private schools using federal funds, amounting to the largest (albeit temporary) voucher program ever enacted. Before that, a voucher program for the District of Columbia was established with support from Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Joseph Lieberman.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

The federal push for accountability makes some sense. Parents and taxpayers deserve an independent assessment of how well their schools are doing.
Where the federal law fails is in its rigid simplicity and punitive sanctions from on high.
The Madison School District, for example, has a growing population of students who enter school speaking little or no English. And close to 40 percent of all students in Madison public schools are from low-income families.
Those factors undoubtedly contributed to Madison’s four main high schools — as well as some schools in Stoughton, Janesville and Beloit — being flagged for not making “adequate yearly progress.” Ninety-two Wisconsin schools in all were similarly cited, almost twice as many as last year. Milwaukee accounted for more than half.
That information is valuable to the public and can help pressure schools to improve. State and local school officials should redouble their efforts to try to meet more of the standards of No Child Left Behind, despite its flaws.
Instead, too many school officials are grousing about their grades — just as some of their students might do after a difficult algebra quiz.
A bad attitude won’t help improve the scores. And while some of the poor marks can be explained, they shouldn’t be explained away.

EdSource:

What schools do and what resources they have for doing it can make a powerful difference in the achievement of students from low-income backgrounds, according to findings from this two-year EdSource study.
Based on a large-scale survey of principals and teachers in 257 California elementary schools serving many low-income students, the initial findings (October 2005) identified four interrelated practices associated with higher API scores and suggested implications for district and principal leadership. Further analysis (April 2006) examined whether a school’s API performance related to use of particular curriculum program. In addition, study findings shed light on the relationship between district practices and school performance as well as on the pivotal, and changing, role of the principal. Interviews with a subset of superintendents in participating districts helped illuminate specific approaches schools and districts have used to improve achievement.
The study was conducted by EdSource and researchers from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the American Institutes for Research.

20 Page Summary [PDF]

Jim Stingl:

He looked out over the 100 kids in caps and gowns and wondered aloud what happened to everyone else. Their freshman class was nearly 500, school records show. Sure, some had transferred to other schools, but too many just gave up and quit.
Matt cried as he talked about classmate David Franklin. “This kid was one of the most talented, radiant and brilliant kids I ever knew, and he was shot and killed because he wore a T-shirt in the wrong part of town,” he said. “Something needs to change.”
Matt told me he picked Marshall because its international baccalaureate program earned him college credits. He has joined the National Guard and will attend Hawaii Pacific University to study psychology, English and theater.

Joel McNally has more.
Umstot’s myspace blog and the original speech text.

Andrew Rotherham:

As Jane Hannaway and I noted in Collective Bargaining In Education, this increased attention to teachers unions is a consequence of the evolution of education policymaking. Today a rough consensus around standards, accountability, and public school choice options governs education policymaking, and policymakers are now turning their attention to more complicated subsurface education-reform issues such as teacher quality and intra-district school finance. And while the teachers unions surely are not to blame for all of our educational problems, they are the most powerful players in public education policymaking at the state and local level. So it is not surprising that they are the focus of greater attention from analysts across the ideological spectrum.
The teachers unions frequently respond, “Well, what would you have us do differently if you don’t just want us to go away?” It is a fair question. Critics ought to discuss the roles they see for teachers unions in an increasingly pluralistic public education system, where traditional school districts are just one provider of public education. Here are three ideas for new roles for teachers unions in such a system that offer ways they can add real value for students while moving away from today’s adversarial and increasingly outdated model of bargaining.

Rotherham’s article includes a link to an interview with Denver’s Brad Jupp, a union leader who lead the effort to make some substantive changes in that community.

“Helping Children move from Bad Schools to Good Ones”:

the brief summarizes the challenges related to educating students in schools with high concentrations of poverty; reviews local efforts to address these challenges; and offers a guide for specific changes to the No Child Left Behind Act that would provide the opportunity for more children to attend economically integrated middle-class public schools.

The report is available here. Author’s presentation.

WISTAX:

District size and peer test scores appear to be factors in student-family decisions on where to attend school under Wisconsin’s open enrollment program. These are two major findings of a new report from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX). WISTAX is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to public-policy research and citizen education.
Started in 1998-99, Wisconsin’s open enrollment program grew nearly 40% per year from 1999 through 2005. In 2004-05 the program had 18,215 participants, or about 2.1% of all state students.
While many factors can affect open enrollment decisions, WISTAX found the state’s smallest districts (excluding virtual school students) accounted for 46% of open enrollment participants but only 25% of all students. Less than 12% of open enrollment participants were from the largest districts, also representing a quarter of all students.

Thomas Croom:

very parent of a homeschooled child has a set of reasons why they decided to take the plunge and forever subject themselves to funny looks from strangers. I thought at first my reasons were anything but typical, but now I realize mine are the culmination of what would happen to any child not properly excised from public school at an early age.
That being said, there are some atypical aspects to my story. My “child” is actually my wife’s 15-year-old nephew who I will call Jay.
Jay is above average intelligence, having scored high, above average or very good on practice IQ tests and on PSAT’s. This may seem at first glance to merely place him the realm of above average with most kids, but he really has no foundational basis for his intelligence and testing abilities.

Amy Hetzner:

But elsewhere school officials aren’t laughing about such antics. They have started to assert their right to discipline students for information put on the Internet, despite resistance from civil liberties groups and students.
Most of the information posted on the Web has been in connection with athletic code violations or defaming school staff. So far:
• Four students from Lombardi Middle School in Green Bay were disciplined last month for creating and contributing to pages that falsely depicted two staff members. District staff cited a policy allowing students to be suspended or expelled for threats, harassment, hate or violence directed toward school employees.
• Earlier this year, a Waukesha South High School student had to perform community service for creating a fake Web page for a staff member, Principal Mark Hansen said. Although not slanderous, the page was “goofy,” he said.

Alan Borsuk continues his excellent, deep look at Milwaukee’s high schools:

Some students get lost in their first weeks of high school. But in Bryan Edwards’ case, Marshall High School lost him.
The school put Edwards in special education courses – even though he never had been diagnosed with a learning disability. When he went out for football, he said, school officials told him his grade point average was not high enough – even though he had not been enrolled at Marshall long enough to have any grades. And some days he would arrive at school only to be told he was suspended – even when he had done nothing wrong.
About two months into the school year, when Edwards brought home a new ID card, his mother was startled.
“I’m like, ‘Bryan, this is not you – this isn’t how you spell your name and we don’t live at this address,’ ” Brigette Edwards said.

Previous articles.