Nanette Asimov:

At Woodside High in San Mateo County, college-prep classes awaited a 15-year-old boy with learning disabilities and anxiety.
He would blend in with other college-bound students, but also receive daily help from a special education expert. He would get a laptop computer, extra time for tests — and an advocate to smooth any ripples with teachers. If an anxiety attack came on, he could step out of class.
But Woodside High wasn’t what his parents had in mind.
Instead, they enrolled him in a $30,000-a-year prep school in Maine — then sent the bill to their local public school district.

Alan Borsuk & Sarah Carr:

An agreement is likely to be announced Thursday and is expected to include a substantial increase in state funding of the class size reduction program known as SAGE.
Two sources told the Journal Sentinel that the agreement will likely allow an increase in the number of low-income students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools and religious schools in Milwaukee from roughly 15,000 to about 22,500. It also reportedly calls for all schools using vouchers – currently 124 schools – to obtain one of several forms of accreditation within several years. Many have such accreditation now, but some, including some of the weakest schools, do not.

Wisconsin Virtual Academy:

Learn More About WIVA at These Interactive Sessions
At these online sessions, we will review the K12 curriculum, demonstrate our lessons and materials, and answer your questions about the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. For more information on how to join an online virtual information session, please email info@wivcs.org.

Channel3000:

Madison police said that they found a realistic-looking gun in a Memorial High School locker on Tuesday morning.

Inside Higher Ed:

The longitudinal study, which its author calls a “data essay,” explores the high school class of 1992 as it moved from high school to higher education and compares its success, favorably, to the high school class of 1982 tracked in an earlier report, “Answers in the Tool Box.”
Both reports provide support for efforts to improve the quality of high school curriculums and the participation in those curriculums of larger (and more diverse) proportions of students. New data indicate that progress is occurring — the eight and a half year graduation rate for the 1992 cohort rose to 66 percent, from 60 percent for the 1982 cohort.

Ian Shapira:

It’s National School Board Recognition Month, when school officials across the country dutifully heap appreciation upon their board members, who appreciate the appreciation, even if some of them think it can be gratuitous.

Alan Borsuk:

Amid a barrage of television and radio ads, stories in the newspaper almost every day and conflicting claims about Milwaukee’s controversial and precedent-setting program by which almost 15,000 low-income students attend private schools using public money, the basics of what is going on can be lost easily.
Here is a primer on the current, heated episodes in the long running battle over school choice.

Randy Cohen:

The president of our local board of education sends her children to the public elementary schools, but when they get to high school, she moves them to private schools. Isn’t it her ethical obligation either to send her children to the schools she sets policy for and espouses as so wonderful or to step down from the board? JoAnne Manse, Rutherford, N.J.
It is not. It is the obligation of board members to strive mightily to make the public schools so good that even parents with the means to opt out choose to remain. If the public schools are not yet that good, the president may honorably send her kids elsewhere — indeed, her duty as a parent compels her to. Even where a public school is excellent, parents may seek programs it does not offer — religious instruction, for example.

Nick Anderson:

It has been eight years since Maryland told the Prince George’s County school to shape up, or else. It has been four years since the federal government raised the pressure with a law meant to force shake-ups through aid and sanctions.
Yet Charles Carroll Middle School has continued to fall short of state standards, even though the county has switched textbooks, changed principals three times and even assigned a “turnaround specialist.”

Channel3000:

Students at La Follette High School are making sure every student has a voice through the use of their school newspaper, WISC-TV reported.
With the first edition of La Follette Lance in 2006, the newspaper began targeting students who thought they had been forgotten.
For example, Andres Garcia enjoys the entire page of Spanish articles the Lance editors and writers produce for each issue.
Garcia is part of 10 percent of the school that is Latino.
“This is something that was actually overdue,” Garcia said. “That was something we should have had years ago.”
The newspaper staff is involved every step of the process, including getting the paper ready for mailing and distribution.

Mike Ivey:

The largest property owner on Allied Drive has fallen into receivership, further opening the door for the city of Madison to purchase nine buildings in the heart of the low-income neighborhood on the city’s southwest side.
Members of the Allied-Dunn’s Marsh Neighborhood Association have generally been supportive of city purchase of the properties, although there has been some concern that if the units are converted to condos it would price many out of the neighborhood.
Duane Steinhauer, a landlord who also owns rental property in the Allied neighborhood, said he is opposed to city purchase of the property. He said Hauk’s problems began when the city failed to get behind those initial plans for a private-sector redevelopment of the properties.

Pallavi Gogol:

“Clearly, townships are promoting the idea of preventing sprawl, in clear contrast to the past when developers had to battle city hall for zoning changes,” says Roy Higgs, chief executive of Development Design Group, an architecture firm in Baltimore. This comes at a time when developers are under a lot of pressure to maximize use of both land and construction, costs of which have spiraled in the past decade.
Furthermore, many counties and townships find that the sprawl has stretched their own finances. “Communities want to trim their budgets for new roads and schools,” says Terry W. McEwen, president of Memphis-based Poag & McEwen, a developer currently making six master-planned communities, one with condos over retail shops.

Kurt Gutknecht:

Frustrated by continued uncertainty over where their children will attend school, residents of Swan Creek are asking to be transferred to the Oregon School District.
The decision would reverse a 2003 decision that transferred Swan Creek to the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Residents obtained signatures from 188 households on a petition asking the respective school boards to consider the request. Three real estate developers also endorsed the move.
If the school boards refuse the request, residents can ask that an appeals board consider the transfer.
“We know it’s an uphill battle,” said resident Renee Hammond, referring to the previous unsuccessful attempt to reverse the decision of the two school boards.
Several residents said they had been misled about schools when they purchased their homes. Some had been told that they could choose which school district they wanted to attend or that the Madison district planned to construct a school in Swan Creek or elsewhere in Fitchburg.
More upsetting to residents, however, is the uncertainty over whether their children can continue to attend Leopold Elementary School. The Madison school board is weighing plans to alleviate overcrowding at Leopold that could send children from Swan Creek to several different schools.
Organizers of the petition drive said they could easily have obtained more signatures.
Romney Ludgate said there’s no assurance that making space for additional students at Leopold would be more than a short-term solution to overcrowding and that residents might have to continually address the issue.
“Until a school is built in Fitchburg, residents of the southern part of the district in Fitchburg will continue to face extreme instability” in where Swan Creek students would attend school, Hammond said.

(more…)

Interesting article on the leadership dynamics of the New York City Department of Education by David Herszenhorn:

“Parents and parent organizations feel less enfranchised now than they did four years ago, and that is a dangerous trend,” Mr. Sanders said. He added, “Ultimately you cannot have a successful education system if parents and communities of parents don’t feel invested.”
Stephen Morello, Mr. Klein’s communications director, issued a statement saying parent involvement “has been an important priority from the beginning of our reform efforts.”

Paul Soglin & Mary Kay Battaglia:

When I posted Teachers Strike in Madison: Thirty Years Later January 27, 2006, Mary commented:

While failing public schools are linked to the high number of low income students attending them, you may be interested in some MMSD data. If you go to the MMSD web site and look under their data you will find that in 1991 Madison’s elementary schools had a total %low income of 24.6%. In 2005 that number almost doubled to 42.4%. Our schools are in a crisis of becoming just another urban school in trouble. That’s almost double in 14 years.
Why is it that Madison city government is so UNinvolved with the schools? It seems to me for growth and economic stability the two should have a better working relationship. The district is clueless to the growth and the city does not seemed concerned with informing the district or working to help crisis areas of the city to help both the school and neighborhood. Allied is an example where they could work together. Mary Kay Battaglia

And this week Channel 3 WISC is running a series, Experts: New Street Gangs Rising In Dane County.

Mary Kay previously wrote about this here. Lucy Mathiak followed up on that post here.

Sandy Cullen:

The Madison School Board and the Oregon School Board both are scheduled to address the petition at their Feb. 27 meetings.
The land on which the subdivision is located was previously part of the Oregon School District. It was transferred effective July 1, 2003, to the Madison district in exchange for commercial property, said Clarence Sherrod, attorney for the Madison School District.
School boards in both districts also agreed not to allow the land to be transferred back, said Madison School Board President Carol Carstensen.
“I do not want them to leave,” Carstensen said, adding, “I certainly understand their concern over the uncertainty.”
Carstensen said some Swan Creek residents who want to remain in the Madison School District “are not happy at the timing” of the petition, which they thought would used as a “last-ditch” option.

The petition, statutes and more details can be found here.

Ben Feller:

In the poll, for example, less than half of parents say student discipline is a serious concern at school.
Teachers scoff at that. Two in three of them call children’s misbehavior a major problem.
Over 14 years of teaching, Carol-Sue Nix has watched discipline problems trickle down from the fifth grade to pre-kindergarten. A parent-teacher conference usually follows.

Lisa Hendrickson:

Virtual schools – also known as “schools without walls” and cyber-schools – are just one of the many educational options available for families today in Wisconsin. Virtual schools started appearing in the late 1990s and have quickly become a very real alternative for children who may do better – for any number of reasons – outside the traditional classroom.
As a former “bricks and mortar” schoolteacher, I am experiencing the benefits of virtual schooling firsthand in my role as a “virtual schoolteacher.” I am able to work with each of my students and a parent or other adult who serves as the child’s face-to-face “Learning Coach” to develop lesson plans that best meet their individual learning style and ability. Parents enjoy getting involved and the results have been very successful. In fact, WCA has doubled in size since its inception in 2002, dissolving the mystery of virtual learning and replacing it with well-educated young people.

Channel3000:

Concerns about the growth of street gangs in the Madison area are prompting authorities to create a new task force that will target Dane County’s top gang leaders and drug dealers, WISC-TV reported.
Federal, state, and local police will play a key role in the new gang unit.
There’s a great deal being planned on many fronts right now to combat the growing gang problem, and the new gang task force is one component, WISC-TV reported.

Rafael Gomez recently hosted a Forum on Gangs & School Violence: Audio / Video.

Valerie Strauss:

Social studies teacher Leirdre Galloway won’t accept late assignments, strictly enforces classroom rules and demands that her students think for themselves. “I’m going to teach you how to fish,” she likes to tell them. “I’m not going to give you fish.”

Katharine Goodloe:

When Brenda Peterson’s 17-year-old son, Matthew, comes home and asks for more lunch money, she’s able to log into an online system at Hartford Union High School that shows just how many cheese fries, Little Debbie snacks and cookies he’s downed lately.
Looking at that list has prompted Peterson to sit her son down and say, “Hey, you have to make better choices,” she said.
At West Bend’s Badger Middle School, teacher Jessica Gieryn e-mails about 75 parents each Monday, outlining forthcoming assignments and project due dates.
Although West Bend doesn’t expect to have a district-wide system for online grades until next year, Gieryn has been sending her informal list for four years, and the number of parents wanting the information grows steadily, she said.
Not only do the notes cut down on phone calls – most parents e-mail her instead – they also put students on alert. Some complain that parents know details of a big project the moment kids arrive home from school, or that parents have printed out study guides for them to memorize, she said.
“It definitely does change expectations,” Gieryn said.

Pam Belluck:

Attendance at Chelsea High School had hovered at a disappointing 90 percent for years, and school officials were determined to turn things around. So, last fall they decided to give students in this poverty-stung city just north of Boston a little extra motivation: students would get $25 for every quarter they had perfect attendance and another $25 if they managed perfect attendance all year.
“I was at first taken a little aback by the idea: we’re going to pay kids to come to school?” said the principal, Morton Orlov II. “But then I thought perfect attendance is not such a bad behavior to reward. We are sort of putting our money where our mouth is.”

Fitchburg’s Swan Creek subdivision petitioned recently to leave the Madison School District. [Map] A reader emails that Swan Creek currently has 21 students in the MMSD. Links:

• Where have all the Children Gone?
• East / West Attendance Area Task Force Discussions

5 pages from the petition [1.1mb pdf] Wisconsin Statutes: [106K PDF]
UPDATE: A reader wondered recently what the mileage differences might be between Swan Creek and schools in the MMSD or Oregon*.

• High Schools: Madison West 7 miles [map] or Oregon High School 7 miles [map]
• Middle Schools: Cherokee 7.2 miles [map], Oregon’s Rome Corner’s Intermediate 7.7 miles [map] or Oregon Middle School 8.3 miles [map]
• Elementary Schools: Leopold 3.5 miles [map], Lincoln 4 miles [map], Midvale 8.2 miles [map]. Oregon: Prairie View Elementary 6.7 miles [map] Netherwood Elementary 6.7 miles [map] Brooklyn Elementary School 13 miles [map]

* Obviously, the pickup route and traffic conditions determine the actual travel time, given similar distances.