Budget/Financing – Page 28 – School Information System

UK Education standards ‘not good enough’ warns former Tesco boss

Sir Terry, who stepped down from the helm of Britain’s largest private employer earlier this year after 14 years in charge, was addressing an audience of teachers at the Wellington College Festival of Education.
“Standards in schools vary too widely, more widely than you would find in business,” he said.
“The standards in too many schools are simply not good enough.
“The answer is deceptively simple. It is about good leadership in each school, good teachers in each classroom and support in their work by the wider society.”
He said this was often hampered by a “myriad” of well-meaning Government initiatives and a tendency to “micromanage” education, with “too much management, and not enough help or trust”.

Confusion over National Standards

Greg Forster:

I greatly admire both Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, so I have mixed feelings saying that I’m confused about their op-ed this morning.
The article is entitled “The Case for Common Educational Standards.” But the article does not contain any case for common educational standards.
Quite the contrary, the article emphasizes the case against common standards. As in:

And, while education is a national priority, the answer here does not appear to be a new federal program mandating national standards. States have historically had the primary responsibility for public education, and they should continue to take the lead.

So that would be an argument against common standards.

Encouraging Mathematical Thinking in Gifted Kids

Carol Fertig:

Parents, do you want to encourage your young people to think mathematically this summer and beyond? Here are some ways to accomplish that.
Preschoolers
Nurturing Mathematically Talented Preschoolers-In this blog entry, Natasha Chen shares her experience on parenting a mathematically precocious child. The author acknowledges that it can be difficult to find a program for three- to five-year-olds, so she offers some tips that she has found useful. Her suggestions include

New York Governor Cuomo Likely to Veto Bill on School Borrowing

Danny Hakim:

State lawmakers on Friday approved a bill that would allow school districts to borrow as much as $1 billion without voter approval, but a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the measure would most likely be vetoed.
Without advance notice and with little debate, the bill won Senate approval late Thursday night, several days after the legislative session had been scheduled to end. The Assembly passed the measure Friday afternoon, and the governor’s office then took the unusual step of publicly opposing the legislation moments after its passage, effectively dooming it.
Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group that generally favors lower spending, described the bill as one of the worst things the Legislature had done this session.

Mandarin in the Sun Prairie Schools?

sp-eye:

Remember how Culver and a group of his peeps were going to explore the possibility of an elementary charter school/ Mandarin Chinese immersion program and report back to the board?
Well skip the board and just sign up because we’re hearing that incorporating Mandarin Chinese into the district is a done deal that will occur by the start of the 2012-1 school year.
POINT – COUNTERPOINT ON THE MANDARIN CHINESE PLAN
POINT
Mandarin Chinese? Really? Don’t go screamin’ “xenophobia”, now, but one has to wonder: Is Culver thinking that the economy is tanking so badly that we all should be brushing up on the new landlords’ language? Or is he still trying to catch up with his district administrator buddy in Verona? And why are we worrying about what ANYBODY is up to instead of just focusing on our own kids?
And while we’re on the subject. We’re hoping that the rumors we’re hearing are just that…rumors. ‘Cause we’d be wondering how much it would cost John Q. TaxPayer to develop this little Mandarin Chinese program.

Kaleem Caire’s Speech on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School to the Madison Rotary Club

Kaleem Caire, via email:

Based on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.

In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed “college-ready” by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.

Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.

Watch a video of the speech, here.

Civics education and Virginia’s school standards

Henry Borger:

The June 18 editorial “Students of history” outlined steps that should be taken to correct the distressing ignorance of U.S. students about civics. I am sure most education professionals will endorse those recommendations, such as civic-oriented activities, because they follow modern theories of education. Unfortunately, these actions would introduce gross inefficiencies and time-wasting activities into the curriculum. Modern education theories are the main reason students complain of too much work but show themselves to be poorly educated in most subjects.
I took a one-year high school course in civics 60 years ago that was taught by our football-basketball-baseball coach, whose main interest was athletics, not civics. We never took any field trips or did any community service. Yet we learned civics. How? We went through the textbook. It wasn’t sexy or exciting — real learning seldom is — but it worked. To really improve students’ knowledge, schools need only buy good textbooks and tell the teachers to teach the book. It’s that easy.

Major Education Reform Bills Pass the Oregon House & Senate

jmartens:

Both the Oregon House and Senate this week passed 3 groundbreaking education bills that are now on their way to the Governor’s desk to be signed into law. The bills bring more choice to Oregon’s public education system and allow students to learn in schools where they best grow, learn and succeed.
From the standpoint of the state Republican party, who sponsored and supported these bills, they accomplish 3 goals:

allow students to enroll in the school district of their choice
raise the enrollment cap on virtual charter schools
empower community colleges and public universities to create charter schools.

“The Legislature is on track to have its most successful session on education reform in decades,” said House Education Committee Co-Chair Matt Wingard (R-Wilsonville). “Together, these reforms help promote choice, accountability and innovation in our educational system. I’m particularly pleased with the progress we’ve made in expanding choice for parents and their children.”

Promises, Promises

Richard Lee Colvin:

When Gov. Rick Snyder this week announced his big, long-awaited plan to rescue the Detroit Public Schools he also promised to raise money to send all of the district’s graduates to community colleges or training programs. The idea is modeled after the Kalamazoo Promise, a similar but more ambitious plan launched in 2005 that provides full scholarships for that city’s graduates to any Michigan public college or university. Anonymous donors pony up $20 million a year for the program, which has inspired similar programs in 23 communities across the country, including five others in Michigan, according to the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. (Complete list here.)
Not only do such programs increase college attendance, they give families who now reside in those communities an incentive to stay and entice new ones to relocate, spurring economic growth and development. The schools in El Dorado, Ark., for example, have seen a 5 percent enrollment increase since its program began four years ago. Detroit badly needs such a boost. The city lost 25 percent of its population over the past decade and 44 percent of its students since 2003 but did not cut expenses fast enough, which contributed to a $327 million deficit for this year.

The coming teacher-union offensive: Education lobby gathers big money to reconquer lost ground

Don Soifer:

Already, national political fundraising ma- chines are beginning to hum and s putter toward early targets in their quest to break another election cycle’s worth of spending records. The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), was the heaviest contributor to U.S. political campaigns in 2007-08, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Early indications show it is a front-runner to be so again. Along with its state affiliates, the NEA took in $1.5 billion in revenue in 2008-09, the Education Intelligence Agency notes. Nearly all of this revenue came from member dues, and most of the war chest will be spent seeking to increase spending and to block those school reforms deemed most threatening to union clout.
The stakes are high, even by contemporary standards. The nation’s annual taxpayer investment in kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education runs over half a trillion dollars and accounts for more than 4 percent of gross domestic product. Meanwhile, teachers union members are starting their summer under the dark cloud of a trillion dollars in unfunded educator pension-fund liabilities.

Chicago Teachers making house calls?

Kristen Mack and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:

New Chicago schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard expressed support Thursday for the idea of teachers and staff visiting students at home, even in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.
At an event Thursday held by United Neighborhood Organization, a community organization that runs charter schools, Brizard said he liked some of the charter network’s ideas, including home visits.
UNO teachers make two home visits per student during the course of a school year. Brizard said if teachers and administrators at Chicago Public Schools each took on 10 home visits, the public school system with 430,000 students could follow the charter network’s lead in some of the city’s most challenging communities.
‘”Our students go there every day,” Brizard said. “Why can’t we?”

Parent Trigger Court Hearing – A Potential Hanging Chad Moment in the Making

Gloria Romero:

June 9: Notes from Superior Court Hearing on the Compton Parents and the Parent Trigger Petition
Location: Downtown Los Angeles
You’ve probably heard the Compton Parent Trigger story by now: over 200 parents grew tired of seeing their kids drop out and fail to learn to read at one of the chronically, lowest performing schools in California. So they banded together to use the historic new Parent Trigger Law (which I authored), only to face an all-out assault by the Compton Unified School District against their efforts to create a better future for their children.
What these parents are doing invokes the spirit of Mendez, a 1946 federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County schools. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate “Mexican schools” was unconstitutional. Likewise, in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education the United States Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

Letters to the WiSJ on Madison Teachers’ John Matthews

Merle Lebakken:

Following the exploits of Madison Teachers Inc. leader John Matthews in the State Journal makes it obvious that he is a negotiator extraordinaire.
He’s managed to have his people on one side of the “negotiating table” and at least some he helped elect on the other side, so it is not a “bargaining table” but a “collaboration table.”
Maybe, however, he has gone too far in not enthusiastically promoting measuring teacher performance, as encouraged by President Barack Obama. Now it seems Wisconsin’s taxpayers need to take back some of the functions, like measuring employee performance, usually ascribed to management but, through negotiation, given to the employee.

Thomas Kavanagh:

I appreciated the respect for John Matthews’ achievements conveyed by Madison labor mediator Howard Bellman’s comment in Sunday’s article, and his concern about the possible effect of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to destroy the Madison teachers union and public employee unions throughout Wisconsin:
“It would be like somebody watching all their paintings burn up… What he’s accomplished over the years would have been just a memory.”
However, that analogy fails to give consideration to the value of his work beyond creating a robust and effective union. For the artist, the joy of the creation might be lasting, but the product of his efforts would be gone. That would not be the case for what Matthew’s efforts have produced.

Bob Hartwig:

fter encouraging Madison teachers in February to stage an illegal sick-out, which robbed children of educational opportunities and caused disruption for many parents, he now says teachers are “ready to do whatever it takes” to continue the protest of state budget reductions. He was also quoted as saying; “It’s going to get down and dirty.”
Wow! This kind of rhetoric coming from a 71-year-old man who receives about $310,000 in annual income and benefits from union fees. Makes you ask the question: What is his priority?

A growing number of skeptics wonder whether college is worth the time or the cost

Bill Gross:

A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America’s students wasting theirs by going to college? All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing, but at least it used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could pass an SAT test. For those who made it to the good schools, it proved that your parents had enough money to either bribe administrators or hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points. And a degree represented that the graduate could “party hearty” for long stretches of time and establish social networking skills that would prove invaluable later on at office cocktail parties or interactively via Facebook. College was great as long as the jobs were there.
Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it’s worth the time or the cost. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and head of Clarium Capital, a long-standing hedge fund, has actually established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of school and become not just tech entrepreneurs but world-changing visionaries. College, in his and the minds of many others, is stultifying and outdated – overpriced and mismanaged – with very little value created despite the bump in earnings power that universities use as their raison d’être in our modern world of money.
Fact: College tuition has increased at a rate 6% higher than the general rate of inflation for the past 25 years, making it four times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985. Subjective explanation: University administrators have a talent for increasing top line revenues via tuition, but lack the spine necessary to upgrade academic productivity. Professorial tenure and outdated curricula focusing on liberal arts instead of a more practical global agenda focusing on math and science are primary culprits.

Cuts in the Classroom: What’s on the School Chopping Block?

Andrew Rotherham:

The slow pace of America’s economic recovery means many states are still hurting financially. As many as 15 states still can’t agree on a budget, and that’s a problem, because in many states the fiscal year begins next month.
Parents are understandably anxious about what this all means for the upcoming school year. And they should be. An analysis released earlier this month by the National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers found that 16 states are planning cuts for next year, following 18 that made extra cuts midway through last year. And that’s before cuts at the local level. So even though fear about the education budget axe never matches the reality, there will be real sacrifices in some states and communities and, overall, spending remains below what it was just a few years ago. (See if the golden age of education spending is over.)
Unfortunately school districts and states are more tight-fisted about sharing information than they are about spending money. And too often budget cuts are based more on what’s easiest for the adults in charge of the schools rather than the kids in them. So here are 5 things parents should know — or ask — about the spending decisions and how they will impact schools next fall.

Well worth reading.

District rejects community efforts to help Celesta

Laurie Rogers:

[Note from Laurie Rogers: This is part 3 of a series of articles on Celesta, a grade-11 student in Spokane, WA. I interviewed her for a June 4 episode of “Cut to the Chase,” a local radio show hosted by Rob Chase for the ACN Network. Part 1 of the series described Celesta as lacking multiple basic skills in mathematics. Part 2 discussed the district’s response to my queries about how to help Celesta and her classmates.]
I’ve been writing about Celesta, a high school student who was carrying a 3.6 GPA, who passed her math tests, got As in her math classes, was placed into honors pre-calculus, and who – like many of her classmates – suddenly found out she was missing multiple critical skills in elementary math. She was struggling to pass her honors math class. She also has few skills in grammar.
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to help Celesta and her classmates.
The best way to help the students:
Go back in time and teach the students the grammar and the six years of math skills the district refused to give them. I need a time machine to do that, and no one has invented one – not that they’ve told me, anyway.

Idaho school officials knock new data system

Betsy Russell:

Idaho’s new multimillion-dollar student data system is causing giant headaches at school districts around the state and local school officials say it isn’t working.
State Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna said he’s working to address the concerns, and said some aren’t valid. “This is the first year ISEE has been operational,” Luna told the Legislature’s Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which is holding its interim meeting this week. “We are the last state in the nation to deploy a statewide longitudinal data system, but we have made progress quickly. This is the most accurate data we have ever had.”
Tom Taggart, president-elect of the Idaho Association of School Business Officials and director of business and operations for the Lakeland School District, told the lawmakers, “We want to look forward in what we can do to make this work, without being too negative, but I think part of our message is a dose of reality as to what’s going on at the school level. … We’re the nuts and bolts people who are in the business offices in the schools. We like it when things work, and when they don’t work we like to find a way to fix them.”

If teaching is such a sweet deal, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Tom Breuer:

There’s a certain childlike innocence that goes along with the popular modern sport of teacher bashing. I say this because most people get over the idea that teachers are ultra-powerful beings who live unattainable lives of luxury at around the age of 7, when they realize that rumpled, coffee-stained JC Penney office apparel is not haute couture. Many critics of teachers, however, manage to hang on to this silly notion way past the time when their skulls have fully hardened.
Call me a fuzzy-headed liberal, but I just don’t see the point in bashing people who help train our future workforce.
Of course, the tired old canard that teachers are remorseless, mustache-twisting budget-drainers has been resurrected in the past few months – first when the governor’s budget repair bill touched off mass protests among public employees, and most recently when the Wisconsin Supreme Court removed the final barrier to the bill’s enactment.
Some have reacted to teachers’ and other public employees’ reluctance to lie down and simply accept significant cuts in compensation and the stripping of their collective bargaining rights with everything from derision to rancor.
For example, some local wags took to calling Walkerville – the protest village near the Capitol that was inhabited by disgruntled public employees and their supporters – “Entitledtown.”

Peeking Into Private-School Paranoia

Alexandra Cheney:

At a time when it is harder than ever to secure a kindergarten spot in one of New York City’s elite private schools, Delaware transplants Jeffrey and Samantha Jasinski decided to jettison any decorum and lie their 5-year-old daughter, Beatrice, into a top-flight institution. The couple had tried the traditional route, attending open houses and informational interviews, only to be summarily dismissed by more than a half dozen schools. So they hired a consultant and concocted a complex fabrication. Jeffrey, a computer programmer, suddenly became a renowned poet with a forthcoming collection culled from sexually explicit text messages. With that, the Jasinskis were granted a rare interview with the headmistress at Coventry Day School.
At least, that’s how it all happened in the mind of filmmaker Josh Shelov, whose new movie, “The Best and the Brightest,” takes a satirical look at the lengths to which parents often go to get their children into the city’s private schools.
“I was eager to write something deeply uncensored,” said the first-time director, who based the story on his own experiences trying to get his son into kindergarten about five years ago. He succeeded.

Seattle: Why it’s Hard to Take Our District Seriously

Melissa Westbrook:

This is our district and how it operates even during hard times.
Update: I attended the joint Mayor/Superintendent event tonight (separate thread to come) but I asked the Mayor two things. One, how many staff at City Hall got a raise since he has been Mayor because the District had and, if he was hearing from powers that be about taking over the school district. (I pointed out that we RIFed teachers, laid off elementary counselors and maintenance workers with a $500M backlog in maintenance.) On the latter, he said no and that he felt that they were still in the collaboration stage with the district and it was working well. On the former he stated that the unionized city workers had been persuaded to NOT take a 2% raise but take the amount of inflation and that NO other city workers (non-unionized) had a raise. (He said he could not himself take a pay cut under City Charter but had given $10k to charities and that his staff was making less than the previous administration.)
The Superintendent jumped in and said that they gave bumps to people who got promotions. I had specifically said in my question to the Mayor that these were not for people with promotions and/or additional job responsibilities and I said that again. She then said that they had found that they hadn’t been paying people what they should and gave them raises. You can imagine how that went over in the room.
Paying administrative people what they are worth in a poor economy in a district that says it has no money. It is not the fault of those people to ask for the money but it is wrong for the district to pay them more now. There’s no amount of waffling that can change that.

Colorado Board Of Education Being Sued By Three Civil Liberties Unions

Andrea Rael:

Three civil liberties unions plus some Douglas County parents filed a lawsuit this morning against the authorization of funds by the state treasurer to a lottery program created to subsidize scholarships to private schools–many of which are religious schools.
The national Americans Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Colorado, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit in Denver District Court on behalf of plaintiffs who allege that the Douglas County Pilot Voucher Program disrupts the separation between church and state.
The Douglas County school board-approved Pilot Voucher Program is a scholarship lottery for 500 students to attend one of 19 private schools, but 14 of those schools are religious. In charge of implementing the state’s first ever voucher program is Dr. Christian Cutter, assistant superintendent for the Douglas County School District.

Rahm Emanuel defends decision to cancel 4 percent teacher raises

Fran Spielman

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday defended the decision by his handpicked school board to cancel 4 percent pay raises for Chicago teachers, arguing that teachers have gotten two types of pay raises since 2003 while students got “the shaft.”
With a $712 million deficit, Emanuel said the Board of Education could not continue to honor a contract that satisfied everybody’s concerns but the only group that really matters: Chicago Public School students.
“Teachers got two types of pay raises. People in public life got labor peace. Can anybody explain to me what the children got? I know what everybody else got,” Emanuel said.
“Just a little north of 50 percent of our kids graduate. Our [test] scores haven’t moved. Yet, in all that time, not one additional minute of instructional time for the children of Chicago where they can be safe and learning. . . . Our future — which is what this is about, the mission of education — our children got the shaft. . . . I will not accept our children continuing to get the shaft.”

San Francisco losing kids as parents seek schools, homes

Heather Knight:

For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers’ group.
Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes.
The other moms in Higgins’ group have moved on, too – to the East Bay, the Peninsula, Michigan and Texas. Just one of the 11 still lives in San Francisco.
“Everyone was very committed to the city when we were starting, and then they all left,” said Higgins, 36, a stay-at-home mom. “You see tons of strollers in the city and people running around with the little ones, but then the vacuum occurs.”

Tuition at some NYC private schools tops $40,000

Associated Press:

With $40,000 you could buy a new Lexus or a foreclosed house in a depressed community. Or you could pay for a year at one of the city’s top private schools.
The Riverdale Country School will charge $40,450 for high school students in the fall, and other schools aren’t far behind. The Hewitt School will charge $38,000, and Ethical Culture Fieldston will charge $37,825.
Added costs such as transportation, books and supplies will bring the total annual tab at several schools up to $40,000.
The figures were reported in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Independent Schools, the median tuition for a high school senior at the association’s member schools in New York City was $35,475 in the 2010-11 school year. The comparable national figure was $21,695.

Worst of Detroit schools to be moved to new system

Corey Williams:

The worst of Detroit’s schools will be pulled out of the district–which the nation’s top education official calls the “bottom of the barrel”–and placed in a new system that gives principals and staff more control over spending, hiring and improvement efforts, state officials announced Monday.
The overhaul is meant to help address problems in a debt-plagued district where nearly one in five students drops out. While the Detroit Public Schools has had a state-appointed emergency financial manager for two years, the current one said there’s only so much that can be done without more radical change.
“The system is broke and I can’t fix it, and you can’t fix it,” Roy Roberts said at a news conference where he and the governor announced the plan.
As many as 45 schools could be moved to the new system in the fall of 2012. Principals will be in charge of hiring teachers, and they and their staffs will handle day-to-day operations.

Seattle Schools’ report card: faltering progress on academic goals

Dick Lilly:

In an unusually blunt assessment, the board says its academic-performance goals, particularly for disadvantaged students, “are not on track to be met.”
Each year about this time Seattle School Board members evaluate their only employee, the district’s superintendent. With an interim superintendent on the job only a few months, this year had to be a little different.
In fact, you could say the board did the evaluation three months ago when they fired the previous superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, following revelations that an employee had spent money on contracts for which the district received little or nothing in return.
With Goodloe-Johnson gone and no need to attach accomplishments or failures to the superintendent or go through the agony of determining whether or not she got a raise, the board in a report at its regular meeting last week focused on what the district itself had or had not accomplished. The result was surprising and refreshingly candid language about where the district stands.

Charlie Mas has more.

Arkansas takes control of Pulaski County schools

Max Brantley:

Arkansas Education Department Director Tom Kimbrell (above) met reporters this afternoon to talk about the state’s decision to take over two school districts today — Helena-West Helena and the Pulaski County Special School District.
Most of the questions from Little Rock reporters were about Pulaski County, the state’s second-largest district with more than 17,000 students. In the brief YouTube clip below, Kimbrell responds to my question about whether the reorganization period is seen as a time to talk about reconfiguring the three public school districts in Pulaski County. Many Jacksonville residents have wanted to secede from the doughnut shaped district. Others have talked about combinations with Little Rock and North Little Rock to create, for example, two districts on either side of the Arkansas River. In short, said Kimbrell, yes, it should be discussed.
Other high points:

No one factor precipitated the Pulaski takeover. Kimbrell said he certainly gave great weight to wishes of the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee, which recommended the option. But he also referred obliquely to ousted Superintendent Charles Hopson’s seeming statements that he didn’t intend to be guided by Board wishes in some spending decisions. The “tone at the top” is vital, he said, in answer to a question about why the state decided to both oust Hopson and dissolve the school board.
Hopson’s contract is now null, Kimbrell said. The state has no obligation to pay him.

Q & A with Jon Schwartz of Kids Like Blogs

Katherine Vander Ark:

Jon Schwartz is an elementary school teacher and runs the site Kids Like Blogs! He believes that blogs motivate students to write, read, create art, and the use of technology. See the Q & A with Jon and be sure to see the work that his students are producing.
—
Q: There are many ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. What made you decide to have the children begin to blog?
A: There were several factors. One, I always had my students write a lot, whether I am teaching first or fifth grade. What happens is they end up with a huge amount of work, and I was never satisfied with how it just went in a folder at school, a binder, their desk, or got sent home. I wanted to be able to keep an efficient record of their work that could easily be referenced and shared with others. For example, they may not have written a lot in the previous year, and when their prior teachers want to see how much they have grown, with a blog, you send them a url, rather than sending over a bunch of papers (which they already have stacks of). By either having the students type on a blog, or have them write on paper and then scanning their handwritten work and art and posting it on the blog as a jpeg, you basically have an online gallery and portfolio. This can be shared with the principal who can then look it over quickly and give a quick high five to the kid as they pass in the halls.
One of the biggest advantages is that by creating an online portfolio, you are in effect creating virtual office hours. With class sizes in some cases doubling (I had a 4/5 combo class this year with 39 kids nearly equally split between 4th and 5th grade), you can imagine there is very little opportunity for one on one conferences, the time when you can give input to children on their work.

Best American High Schools; Wisconsin: 12 out of 500, None from Dane County

Newsweek:

To compile the 2011 list of the top high schools in America, NEWSWEEK reached out to administrators, principals, guidance counselors, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate coordinators at more than 10,000 public high schools across the country. In order to be considered for our list, each school had to complete a survey requesting specific data from the 2009-2010 academic year. In total, more than 1,100 schools were assessed to produce the final list of the top 500 high schools.
We ranked all respondents based on the following self-reported statistics, listed with their corresponding weight in our final calculation:
Four-year, on-time graduation rate (25%): Based on the standards set forth by the National Governors Association, this is calculated by dividing the number of graduates in 2010 by the number of 9th graders 2006 plus transfers in minus transfers out. Unlike other formulas, this does not count students who took longer than four years to complete high school.
Percent of 2010 graduates who enrolled immediately in college (25%): This metric excludes students who did not enroll due to lack of acceptance or gap year.
AP/IB/AICE tests per graduate (25%): This metric is designed to measure the degree to which each school is challenging its students with college-level examinations. It consists of the total number of AP, IB, and AICE tests given in 2010, divided by the number of graduating seniors in order to normalize by school size. AP exams taken by students who also took an IB exam in the same subject area were subtracted from the total.
Average SAT and/or ACT score (10%)
Average AP/IB/AICE exam score (10%)
AP/IB/AICE courses offered per graduate (5%): This metric assesses the depth of college-level curriculum offered. The number of courses was divided by the number of graduates in order to normalize by school size.

Just 12 Wisconsin high schools made the list, not one from Dane County. It would be interesting to compare per student spending (Madison spends about $14,476 per student) , particularly in light of a significant number of “southern” high schools in the top 50. Much more on United States per student spending, here. Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.

Sometimes, the best we can do for kids’ education is to get out of the way and let them do it themselves.

Steve Rankin, via email:

Mikko Utevsky, 17, of Madison, decided to form a student-led chamber orchestra, so he did. Their premiere was June 17 on the UW-Madison campus, and here’s what Mikko had to say to Jacob Stockinger, a classical music blogger from Madison, at the beginning of a week of intensive rehearsal: http://welltempered.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/classical-music-qa-high-school-conductor-mikko-utevsky-discusses-the-madison-area-youth-chamber-orchestra-which-makes-its-debut-this-friday-night-in-vivaldi-beethoven-and-borodin/
Obviously, these kids did not arrive at their musical talents without adult teaching and guidance. Many of them began in their school bands and orchestras. They continue to study with their own teachers and with adult-run orchestras such as WYSO (http://wyso.music.wisc.edu/) and school-based bands and orchestras. As school funding continues to be in jeopardy, and arts programming is first on the chopping block (the MMSD strings program has been under threat of elimination a number of times and has been cut twice since most of these students began, (https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2007/01/elementary_stri_3.php, https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/speak_up_for_st.php, https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/000241.php, https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/on_wednesday_ma.php, https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/speak_up_for_st_2.php – many more citations available through SIS), the chances for a student-led ensemble such as MAYCO (Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra) to continue to thrive are also in jeopardy.

Equilibration in progress

Steve Hsu:

The US salary figure for MBAs from “leading schools” seems too low to me. Is this apples to apples? Still, it’s incredible what people are earning in China and India. One private equity guy I know told me they are hiring top talent in Beijing/Shanghai for USD $100k+ these days.

NCLB Reauthorization, Waivers, and the Third Variable Problem

Charles Barone:

>Most of the inside-the-beltway chatter this week was around Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement on Monday, via Politico, that if A.: Congress did not act soon to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, he would B.: proceed to “develop a plan that trades regulatory flexibility for reform.” I can’t confirm this, but the rumor is that the plan arrived at OMB last night, and will be finalized in August. At any rate, it doesn’t seem like they’re playing games on this one. All signs suggest that they plan to follow through.

We ran down our concerns when we got a whiff of this back in December (here). Long story short, we don’t like the process and see serious pitfalls ahead on the substance. We recommend you also take a look at takes this week by reform veterans like Margaret Spellings (the first two Vinnie Barbarino paragraphs alone tell you most of what you need to know), Andy Rotherham, and Jeanne Allen.

I know that the current Secretary sincerely thinks states and school districts need relief. And I would agree that in some instances, some flexibility that allows states to revise their current plans makes sense. But the lack of action on the Hill is not why a waiver process is so urgent per se. In fact, both the turbulence around reauthorization and, now, the waiver process, stem from an underlying third variable: the temporary lapse in strong leadership on the part of those who know, can do, and have done, better.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to announce sweeping Detroit Public Schools reforms Monday

David Jesse:

Gov. Rick Snyder will create a new authority to run several failing Detroit Public Schools as part of a sweeping reform package to be announced Monday for the struggling district, sources said.
The plan would restructure the failing school district, which has a $327 million budget deficit, by moving underperforming DPS schools under a new authority to be run by current DPS Emergency Financial Manager Roy Roberts, according to sources.
Roberts would have the authority to make new work rules at those schools, a process sources familiar with the discussions said could take a year. A law passed this year gives emergency managers new powers to control academic and financial matters and to cancel or modify union contracts.

How Illinois education reform passed

Kerry Lester:

Running for re-election in a tight race last fall, state Rep. Keith Farnham received a sizable chunk of his campaign cash — $50,000 of $462,000 — from Stand for Children, an Oregon-based education group seeking sweeping reforms in Illinois.
Shortly after the November election, the group was moving to get changes in place, fast — among them, tougher tenure requirements, limiting teachers’ ability to strike, and lengthening the school day in Chicago.
Stand for Children had, after all, successfully worked to overhaul school policies in other states around the country.
But Illinois was not Colorado or Wisconsin, where the power structure made it easier to push laws that weakened union rights. No, Illinois had a Democratic-controlled, union-backed legislature and governor’s office.

Quick fixes don’t work; Phileadelphia schools need new leaders

Helen Gym:

A decade ago, Philadelphia families were told that a state takeover was necessary to fix a failing, bankrupt school system. As we face the third school financial crisis since then, we have to ask whether this experiment has finally run its course.
Back then, privatization and education-management organizations were promoted as the saviors of failing schools, even though they had limited success elsewhere. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars, there has been little measurable benefit.
Today we chase after other quick fixes – Renaissance Schools and Promise Academies. There is also a strong push in Harrisburg for vouchers.
Yet, what good are these “fixes” when high school science programs face the layoffs of 42 chemistry, biology, and physics teachers? The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers reports pink slips going to 115 English teachers, 121 math teachers, 66 social studies teachers, and 323 special education teachers. We should think about the effect of losing 50 art teachers across the district.

Administrators who want to push harder

Jay Matthews:

We have been discussing the issue of tracking in high school, particularly the standard system of regular (or general), honors (or advanced) and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses. Parents in Fairfax County are resisting the school district’s elimination of honors courses, leaving only a choice between regular or AP classes. I suggested the district get rid of the regular and leave only honors and AP, because research shows that the college skills taught in honors classes are also important for students who want to get a good job or go to trade school right out of high school.
This generated much comment from around the country, including the two responses below from high school administrators who share the belief that they are not giving all of their students the enriched education they need. I think they provide a useful perspective from inside schools. What do you think of what they are saying?
Mike Musick is the principal of Conifer High School in Conifer, Colo. About nine percent of its students are low-income, and its AP test participation rate is high enough to rank well on my annual Challenge Index list. Amy Fineburg, an assistant principal, asked that I identify her high school only as a high-achieving one in Alabama. But I can say that its demographic and academic characteristics are similar to Conifer High’s.

Hardship puts formidable hurdles on the path to scholastic achievement

Alan Borsuk:

“It’s one thing to talk about these issues on high,” says Howard Fuller, who has done that often as one of the nation’s most eloquent and best known education activists.
“But when you get over here on 33rd and Brown . . . ” His sentence trails off. That’s where CEO Leadership Academy is located, and that’s where Fuller has come face to face with how tough it is to achieve high results among exactly the students he most wants to help.
Howard Fuller: Former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent. Leading advocate for Milwaukee’s private school voucher program. Local and national leader in charter school issues.
Howard Fuller: Hands-on chair of the board of a small high school where test scores for 10th-graders last fall were awful and where the record of success has been plainly disappointing.
A couple years ago, Fuller told me that, as much as he thought he knew about how hard it is to achieve educational success in a high-poverty, urban setting, he didn’t know how hard it really was until he got involved at CEO.

Sun Prairie Schools: What The District Would Rather You Not Know

sp-eye:

What’s the projected tax levy?
What they want you to focus on is the % increase over last year…and that is 3.48%.
Yeah?…but what is the actual levy amount?
OK, since they won’t, let’s do the math for you.
It starts with last year’s tax levy, which was $45,503,637. Therefore, if the district’s draft budget represents a 3.5% increase, then the plan is to levy $47,087,164 this year.
The increase in levy is this $1.6M, with $650K of that going to debt and $950K additional for the General Fund.

New Jersey’s Teacher Union Climate

New Jersey Left Behind:

The big news today is that the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee in a 9-4 vote released legislation that would increase public employee contributions to health care premiums from 1.5% to between 3.5%-35% of the premium. Higher-paid employees would contribute more and lower-paid employees would contribute less. Pension contributions would also go up by a percentage point or two, and the increases would be phased in over a few years.
The bill now goes to the Assembly Budget Committee on Monday, and then to the full Senate on Thursday.
It’s unclear whether Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver’s proposal to have the legislation sunset after four years is still a go.
Amidst the Senate deliberations yesterday, public worker unions, including NJEA, held a smaller-than-expected rally; the subsequent news reports and editorials in today’s papers largely express astonishment at the loss of power of collective bargaining units. Here’s a sampling:
Vince Giordano, NJEA Executive Director, sounded both bewildered and threatening in NJ Spotlight:

Chicago Teachers Union Confronts Some Crucial Decisions

Rebecca Vevea:

The newly seated Chicago Board of Education may have won the first battle with Chicago teachers this week when it rescinded a 4 percent pay raise, but it may also have ended a relatively peaceful era in labor relations and created a more pugnacious adversary.
The Chicago Teachers Union has absorbed a number of recent setbacks. On Monday, a sweeping education bill that reformed teacher tenure and limited teachers’ ability to strike was signed into law. And on Wednesday, the board unanimously nullified raises that would have cost nearly $100 million.
Some teachers and observers say that backing the union into a corner on wages and other key issues could be the spark to reinvigorate the membership.
“If you act in a confrontational way, you’re poking your finger in the eye of those teachers, and very typically you generate unintended negative consequences,” said Robert Bruno, director of the labor education program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Seattle School Board Challenger Flags Incumbents’ Past Donors

Josh Feit:

School Board challenger Kate Martin, who’s running against District 2 incumbent Sherry Carr (Carr represents north central Seattle around Green Lake), has been one of the most passionate speakers at the candidate forums the past two nights. At both the 43 District on Tuesday night and at the 36th District last night, she lamented that only four of her son’s friends were graduating, while the rest, more than 40 kids, had dropped out.

And though Martin hasn’t gotten any district Democrats’ endorsements, she has prevented Carr from getting the nod. Last night, she had back up from local celebrity Cliff Mass, the recently ousted KUOW weatherman.

State budget will force most Wisconsin school districts to cut property taxes

Jason Stein and Karen Herzog:

The state budget bill now in Gov. Scott Walker’s hands would leave schools with roughly $900 million less in state aid and property tax authority over the next two years, state figures show.
Going beyond simple cuts in state aid to schools, the budget bill would also end up requiring many districts – perhaps two-thirds of them statewide – to cut their property tax levies, according to one analysis by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
Now that the 2011-’13 budget bill stands on the verge of becoming law and the protests have died down, schools – and taxpayers – can start to digest the changes in store for them. Those range from new savings on teachers’ benefits to expansions of private school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine.
“We’re really entering a new phase in school funding,” said Dan Rossmiller, lobbyist for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. “It suggests huge challenges.”
The cuts to schools are the single biggest item in the Republican budget toward closing a two-year, $3 billion budget deficit without relying on tax increases. The controversy about the cuts is likely to continue, with at least one district saying it’s considering a lawsuit.

Judge Jolts Little Rock Ruling Cuts Money Meant to Desegregate Schools in City at Center of 1957 Fight

Leslie Eaton:

A federal judge has halted longtime state payments intended to help integrate three Arkansas school districts, including Little Rock, site of one of the most bitter desegregation fights in U.S. history.
U.S. District Court Judge Brian S. Miller, who oversees the districts’ federally ordered desegregation efforts, found the payments were “proving to be an impediment to true desegregation” by rewarding school systems that don’t meet their long-standing commitments.
Judge Miller’s recent rulings triggered protests by the school districts. But some lawmakers and state officials hailed the decision to shut off the payments, which totaled roughly $1 billion over the past two decades.
Lawyers for Little Rock and the other districts said the loss of as much as $70 million for the year that begins in August would cause budgetary chaos. The state payments amount to about 10% of the Little Rock budget and about 9% for each of the other two districts. The parties have until Friday to seek a stay of the order.

Saving the NJEA from Itself

Laura Waters:

What’s wrong with this picture?
Last week Democratic heavyweight George Norcross got up on a stage with Gov. Chris Christie to announce that not only does he support the Opportunity Scholarship Act (the voucher bill) but also he’s opening charter schools Camden.
To add to the cognitive dissonance, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) joined forces with the nepotistic Elizabeth school board to campaign against Sen. Ray Lesniak (D-Union), the former chair of the NJ Democratic party — and the chief sponsor of the school voucher bill.
To muddy matters further, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex), a steadfast ally of the teachers union, looks likely to overcome her initial opposition to a health and pension benefits reform bill — despite protestations from NJEA leaders. The legislation would require public employees, including teachers, to contribute substantially more than the current 1.5 percent of base pay toward pension and healthcare premiums. (The Assembly Budget Committee just announced it will hear the bill on Monday.)

Mayor Bloomberg Calls for Immediate Immigration Reform

Mike Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg today highlighted the essential role of immigrants in America’s economic growth and addressed the urgent need for Washington to put aside partisan politics and immediately pass immigration reforms needed to create jobs and fuel economic growth in a keynote speech to the Council on Foreign Relations “The Future of U.S. Immigration Policy” symposium.
View video of Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks here.
The Mayor proposed green cards for graduates with advanced degrees in essential fields; a new visa for entrepreneurs with investors ready to invest capital in their job-creating idea; more temporary and permanent visas for highly skilled workers; guest-worker programs to ensure agriculture and other key sectors can thrive; and a revaluation of visa priorities that places a focus on the nation’s economic needs.
In his remarks, the Mayor also announced the results of a study conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy – a bipartisan group of business leaders and mayors from across the country – that found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants and those companies employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues of $4.2 trillion. The full report is available at www.renewoureconomy.org.

L.A. Becomes First Big School District To Ban Chocolate Milk

Aprl Fulton:

In the battle for nutrition bragging rights, Los Angeles has beat New York — at least when it comes to scratching chocolate milk and other less-healthful items from the school lunch menu.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted 5-2 on a new dairy contract to remove flavored milk from school menus, the Los Angeles Times reports. The district also banned sodas and chicken nuggets recently in its battle against childhood obesity. “By the fall the district will be a national leader,” Matthew Sharp, with California Food Policy Advocates, tells the Times.
But the question is, will kids reach for the plain stuff?

Kids, Get High Off Drugs, Not Debt. It’s More Fun And People Are Nicer To You When It’s Time To Recover.

Elie Mystal:

Let’s say that instead of taking on huge debts while I was in law school, I had taken up a wicked cocaine habit. Let’s say I had done loads and loads of blow from 2000 to 2007 and then went into a 12-step program. If I had been lucky enough to avoid an overdose or jail, you could argue that things would be better for me right now — even if I had a really serious cocaine problem where I spent my all my disposable income on the drug, and even if I put a good job and a good marriage straight up my nose. If I had been through all that and then wrote an essay about the highs and the lows of doing cocaine throughout my legal career, if I was telling kids that they could overcome a wicked cocaine habit even though the consequences were severe, if I was truthfully telling people that even though I’m trying to stay clean and sober now I’m not “ashamed” of my past life, I’d have nearly everybody in my corner.
Instead, I didn’t have a cocaine habit in law school and beyond. I defaulted on my student debts.
Really, the smart thing to do would have been to default on all my loans, then blame it on the cocaine that I was “powerless” to stop. But instead of playing the victim, I marshaled what autonomous power I had and chose not to pay back my loans in a timely manner. I decided to go down on my own terms, not the terms set out for me in a promissory note.

Learning from California: Improving Efficiency of Classroom Time and Instruction

Center on Reinventing Public Education via a Deb Britt email:

John Danner, CEO and Founder of Rocketship Education, presented the Rocketship charter elementary school model and argued that hybrid schools are better for both students and teachers. Rocketship Education currently operates two open enrollment schools and serves a primarily low-income student population. The organization, which aims to have clusters in 50 cities over the next 15 years, works to eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring its low-income students are proficient and college-bound when they graduate from elementary school.
Shantanu Sinha, President and COO of the Khan Academy, described how their online academy began when the founder created math instruction videos to tutor his cousins. In just seven months, the Khan Academy has grown to serve over 2 million unique users per month with close to 60 million lessons delivered. With a mission “to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere,” the Academy is utilized mainly by students at home as a supplement to their regular school instruction. Increasingly, though, Khan lessons are used in public schools to provide self-paced exercises and assessments to students, so as to avoid gaps in learning.
Presentations and ensuing discussion with local leaders pointed to two core components of innovative education that Washington State can learn from: efficient use of teacher time and skill as well as individualized instruction. Each builds on the lessons which Joel Rose, founder of School of One, emphasized at the launch of the Washington Education Innovation Forum.

High-stakes school war

Joe Williams:

As he won control of the city’s public schools nine years ago this week, Mayor Bloomberg boldly promised: “We will not have to tolerate an incapable bureaucracy which does not respond to the needs of the students.”
Sadly, New York City isn’t even close to achieving that bold vision: We learned this week that only one in three city high-school graduates is prepared for college-level work.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s promise is being put to the test like never before.
As the school year winds down, City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers have ratcheted up an intense game of chicken over the future direction of the city’s school system. What schools will look like come the fall is anyone’s guess.

Educators wary of new online education law

Lisa Schencker:

Some education leaders worry a new law intended to give students more opportunities to take online classes will be difficult to implement, might limit students’ educations and could hurt some schools in the long run.
Educators expressed their concerns to lawmakers at an Education Interim Committee meeting Wednesday. The law would allow Utah students, starting in the fall, to take up to two courses online instead of at their regular schools. And whoever provides that online course — either another school district or a charter school — would get part of the money that would normally go to the student’s home school district or charter.
The state school board will hold a special meeting on June 27 to pass an emergency rule outlining how the program should work. But state education leaders told lawmakers Wednesday that while they support online education, certain aspects of the law might be troublesome.
According to the law, online classes would take the place of regular school day classes. Students, however, wouldn’t have to take the online classes during the day, meaning they could potentially have nothing to do at school for up to two periods a day.

Obama May Ease No Child Left Behind Mandates to Avoid School ‘Train Wreck’

John Hechinger:

President Barack Obama’s administration said it would offer states relief from the nation’s main public-education law if Congress fails to enact changes by the start of the school year.
States may avoid requirements of the No Child Left Behind law that, for example, more students pass standardized tests each year if they agree to administration-backed “reforms,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said June 10 in a press briefing. The Education Department has pushed states to adopt national academic standards and merit pay for teachers. The law ties U.S. funding to test results.
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Representative John Kline are among the members of Congress who have criticized the law’s focus on holding schools accountable only through testing proficiency. Almost four years ago, Congress released a draft bill to revamp the law, and in March 2010, the Obama administration issued a blueprint for change. No legislation has been formally introduced, giving Congress less than three months to meet the administration’s deadline.

Wisconsin Senate Democrat Members’ Proposed Budget Amendment: Save Talented & Gifted Funding

JR Ross:

The second Dem amendment includes a whole host of provisions on education.

See it here.

Here are some details, according to a summary from Minority Leader Mark Miller’s office:

-increase funding to K-12 by $356 million.

-repeal expansion of the choice program.

-repeal elimination of funding for gifted and talented programs, AODA grants, and science, technology, engineering and match grants.

-Fund the Wisconsin GI Bill and tie financial aid to increases in tuition.

-Boost funding to tech colleges by $17 million annually.

-repeal a provision JFC put into the budget that would create an individual income tax credit derived from property assessed as manufacturing or agricultural property. The tax credit would kick in Jan. 1, 2013, and when fully phased in for tax year 2016 would be worth $128.7 million annually.

— By JR Ross

Fascinating. I wonder what’s behind this?

Wisconsin Voucher debate reveals deep divisions about public schools

Susan Troller:

As of early afternoon Wednesday the fate of voucher schools in Green Bay is uncertain. Rumors are flying that the proposal to use tax dollars to pay families to send their children to private and religious schools in that city will be pulled from the state budget.
It’s been a hot topic.
The voucher story I posted on Chalkboard last week detailed Green Bay Supt. Greg Maass’ unhappy reaction to both the proposal and the abrupt legislative process that put it in the budget. It definitely struck a nerve, and drew many comments.
Some of the most interesting reactions went well beyond the issue of vouchers and whether public money should be used to fund private schools. They expressed the heart of the debate surrounding public schools, or “government” schools as some folks call them.
Are public schools failing? Who’s to blame? What responsibilities does a civil society owe to children who are not our own? What kind of reforms do parents, and taxpayers, want to see?
Here are some excerpts that are revealing of the divide in the debate:

VHOU812 wrote: …As a consumer of the public (or private) educational institutions, I am demanding more value. If it is not provided, I will push to refuse to purchase and home school. This is not what I want. I want security knowing that I am satisfied with the investment in my children’s education. I don’t get that feeling right now from publc schools, and that is the core of the problem that public schools need to fix. I also see that private institutions, by their nature, can make changes to respond to consumer demands very quickly, and it is clear public schools either can’t, or won’t.

I’m glad Susan posted these comments. Looking at the significant growth in Wisconsin K-12 spending over the past few decades along with declining performance, particularly in reading compels us all: parents, taxpayers, students, teachers, administrators and the ed school community, to think different.
Wolfram’s words are well worth considering: “You have to ask, what’s the point of universities today?” he wonders. “Technology has usurped many of their previous roles, such as access to knowledge, and the social aspects.”

Seattle Schools’ Strategic Plan Update

Melissa Westbrook:

Here is the presentation from today’s Work Session on the Strategic Plan with survey results.

Highlights:

5905 responses – 64% family member, 26% teacher or school staff, 1% principals, 5% community, 4% Central Office

By zip code – looks like a somewhat even distribution with NE – 98115 with 528 responses, SE – 98118 with 221 responses, SW – 98136 with 118 responses, West Seattle – 98116 with 182 responses and NW – 98117 with 433 responses. (There were more zip codes than those.)

page 8 has a breakdown of coaches and costs – overall it costs $6.4M for 65.6 coaches (the salary swings are interesting)

Professional development in math, science and reading helping teachers and students – the big answer was …. no opinion. And, out of the nearly 6,000 responses, only 3443 people answered this question. Effective/somewhat effective (families-27%/teachers-51%). Ineffective/somewhat ineffective (families-22%/teachers-28%)

MAP test results effectiveness. Effective/Somewhat Effective (families-41%/teachers-33%). Somewhat effective/ineffective (families-45%/teachers50%). Out of 6k responses, only 3682 respondents answered.

MAP- how many times a year should it be used? 3x- families-30%, teachers-23%, principals-40%. Hmm, looks like principals like it more than teachers. 2x -families-29%,teachers-30%, principals, 40%. That’s a lot closer. And hey, they ARE reducing MAP to two times a year for 2011-2013 (winter and spring)

NSAP. More efficient/somewhat more – families-42%/teachers 23%/principals 55%. Somewhat less/less efficient – families-27%/teachers-29%/principals-31%.

Download the Seattle Strategic Plan update, here.

Wisconsin Governor Walker’s Read to Lead task force met on May 31st at the State Capitol. Following are observations from WRC.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via email:

Governor Walker’s Read to Lead task force met on May 31st at the State Capitol. Following are observations from WRC.
Note: Peggy Stern, an Oscar-winning filmmaker currently working on a project about dyslexia, had a crew filming the meeting. If we are able to acquire footage, we will make it available. If you would like Wisconsin Eye to record future meetings, please contact them at comments@wiseye.org.
Format: Unlike the first task force meeting, this meeting was guided by two facilitators from AIR, the American Institutes for Research. This was a suggestion of Senator Luther Olsen, and the facilitators were procured by State Superintendent Tony Evers. Evers and Governor Walker expressed appreciation at not having to be concerned with running the meeting, but there were some problems with the round-robin format chosen by the facilitators. Rather than a give-and-take discussion, as happened at the first meeting, this was primarily a series of statements from people at the table. There was very little opportunity to seek clarification or challenge statements. Time was spent encouraging everyone to comment on every question, regardless of whether they had anything of substance to contribute, and the time allotted to individual task force members varied. Some were cut off before finishing, while others were allowed to go on at length. As a direct result of this format, the conversation was considerably less robust than at the first meeting.
Topics: The range of topics proved to be too ambitious for the time allowed. Teacher preparation and professional development took up the bulk of the time, followed by a rather cursory discussion of assessment tools. The discussion of reading interventions was held over for the next meeting.
Guests:
Dawnene Hassett, Asst. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction and new elementary literacy chair, UW-Madison
Tania Mertzman Habeck, Assoc. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction, UW-Milwaukee
Mary Jo Ziegler, Reading Consultant, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Troy Couillard, Special Education Team, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Next Meetings: The Governor’s office will work to set up a schedule of meetings for the next several months. Some of the meetings may be in other parts of the state.
Action: WRC suggests contacting the offices of the Governor, Luther Olsen, Steve Kestell, and Jason Fields and your own legislators to ask for several things:
Arrange for filming the next meeting through Wisconsin Eye
Bring in national experts such as Louisa Moats, Joe Torgesen, and Peggy McCardle to provide Wisconsin with the road map for effective reading instruction, teacher preparation, and professional development . . . top university, DPI, and professional organization leaders at the May 31st meeting asked for a road map and admitted they have not been able to develop one
Arrange the format of the next meeting to allow for more authentic and robust discussion of issues
Summary
Teacher Training and Professional Development
The professors felt that the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) are generally taught in preparation programs, but that instruction varies widely from one institution to another. Reading course work requirements can vary from 12 credits to just one course. They also felt, as did the teachers on the panel, that there needs to be more practical hand-on experience in the undergraduate program. There was a feeling that teachers “forget” their instruction in reading foundations by the time they graduate and get into the classroom. They have better luck teaching masters level students who already have classroom experience. The linguistic knowledge means very little without a practicum, and we may need to resort to professional development to impart that information. Teachers need to be experts in teaching reading, but many currently don’t feel that way. It is important, especially with RTI coming, to be able to meet the needs of individual students.Both professors and teachers, as well as others on the panel, felt a “road map” of critical information for teacher preparation programs and literacy instruction in schools would be a good idea. This was a point of agreement. Hassett felt that pieces of a plan currently exist, but not a complete road map. The professors and some of the teachers felt that teacher prep programs are doing a better job at teaching decoding than comprehension strategies. They were open to more uniformity in syllabi and some top-down mandates.
Marcia Henry mentioned studies by Joshi, et al. that found that 53% of pre-service teachers and 60% of in-service teachers are unable to correctly answer questions about the structure of the English language. Tony Pedriana cited another Joshi study that showed college professors of reading were equally uninformed about the language, and the majority cannot distinguish between phonemic awareness and phonics. He also said it was very difficult to find out what colleges were teaching; one college recently refused his request to see a syllabus for a reading course. Steve Dykstra read from the former Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the current Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contained incorrect definitions and examples of phonemic awareness. He questioned whether teachers were being adequately prepared in decoding skills. Rep. Steve Kestell was concerned with the assessment that most teachers do not feel like experts in teaching reading, and he wondered if updated techniques for training teachers would make a difference.
Sarah Archibald (aide to Luther Olsen) proposed looking at a more rigorous foundations of reading test, as found in other states, as a requirement for teacher licensure. This would be one way to move toward more uniform instruction in teacher prep programs. Steve Dykstra pointed out that a test alone will not necessarily drive changes in teacher preparation, but publishing the passage results linked to individual colleges or professors would help. Evers indicated that DPI has been looking for several months into teacher testing and licensure.
Gov. Walker asked if the ed schools were looking at the latest trends in teacher preparation to become better. The professors indicated that the ed schools confer with local districts in an effort to improve.
Supt. Evers said it was probably not a good idea that teacher prep programs across Wisconsin vary so much.
Hassett indicated that some flexibility needs to be retained so that urban and rural areas can teach differently. There was some disagreement as to whether teachers of upper grades need to be trained in reading, or at least trained the same way.
Linda Pils pointed out that the amount and quality of professional development for Wisconsin teachers is very spotty. Most panel members felt that a coaching model with ongoing training for both teachers and principals was essential to professional development, but the coaches must be adequately trained. There was some discussion of Professional Development Plans, which are required for relicensure, and whether the areas of development should be totally up the individual teacher as they are now. Steve Dykstra felt that much existing professional development is very poor, and that money and time needs to be spent better. Some things should not count for professional development. Michele Erikson felt that it would be good to require that Professional development be linked to the needs of the students as demonstrated by performance data. Mary Read pointed out that coaching should extend to summer programs.
The main consensus here was that we need a road map for good reading instruction and good teacher training and coaching. What is missing is the substance of that road map, and the experts we will listen to in developing it.
Assessment
Mary Jo Ziegler presented a list of formal and informal assessment tools used around Wisconsin. Evers pointed out that assessment is a local district decision. Many former Reading First schools use DIBELS or some formal screener that assesses individual skills. Balanced literacy districts generally use something different. Madison, for example, has its own PLA (Primary Language Assessment), which includes running records, an observational survey, word identification, etc. MAP assessments are widely used, but Evers indicated that have not been shown to be reliable/valid below third grade. Dykstra questioned the reliability of MAP on the individual student level for all ages. PALS was discussed, as was the new wireless handheld DIBELS technology that some states are using statewide. Many members mentioned the importance of having multiple methods of assessment. Kathy Champeau delivered an impassioned plea for running records and Clay’s Observational Survey, which she said have been cornerstones of her teaching. Kestell was surprised that so many different tools are being used, and that the goal should be to make use of the data that is gathered. Dykstra, Henry, and Pedriana mentioned that assessment must guide instruction, and Archibald said that the purpose of an assessment must be considered. Couillard said that the Wis. RTI center is producing a questionnaire by which districts can evaluate assessment tools they hear about, and that they will do trainings on multiple and balanced assessments. Dykstra questioned the three-cue reading philosophy that often underlies miscue analysis and running records. no consensus was reached on what types of assessment should be used, or whether they should be more consistent across the state. Hassett questioned the timed component of DIBELS,and Dykstra explained its purpose. Some serious disagreements remain about the appropriateness of certain assessment tools, and their use by untrained teachers who do not know what warning signs to look for.
Intervention
Evers began the topic of intervention by saying that DPI was still collecting data on districts that score well, and then will look at what intervention techniques they use. Henry suggested deferring discussion of this important topic to the next meeting, as there were only 8 minutes left.

Chicago School Board rejects 4 percent raises for teachers

Rosalind Rossi:

Newly-seated Chicago School Board members ruled Wednesday that the cash-strapped CPS system does not have the $100 million it would cost to cover promised 4 percent raises for teachers and other union workers.
The unanimous decision to stop the raises from going into effect came after board members were told that nearly three-quarters of the system’s teachers will still get other raises based on length of service and educational advancement — at a cost to the district of $35 million.
The decision came during a “special meeting” called to determine if the district had enough money to fund the scheduled 4 percent raises to teachers and seven other bargaining units representing building engineers and other support staff. Under the contract, the board can reject contractual raises if it determines the system does not have the funds to pay for them.
Even without the 4 percent pay hikes, the raises most teachers will receive could range between 3 and 5 percent for those with less than 13 years in the system, and 1 percent for those with more experience, officials said.

Rosalind Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

Pleading poverty, the newly-seated Chicago Board of Education voted Wednesday to rescind a scheduled 4 percent raise for Chicago Public Schools teachers that would have cost almost $100 million.
The board’s unanimous decision came after it revealed that the CPS budget deficit — which it said is now $712 million — includes millions of dollars in previously undisclosed costs.
The yearly raises are part of the Chicago Teachers Union contract, which is in its final year, but they are only enacted if the board agrees the district can afford them. The raises have been approved each year since the current contract began in 2007.
Board president David Vitale said teacher layoffs could still occur despite the vote. The CTU and other unions whose contractual raises were affected have until 11:59 p.m. Monday to ask to re-open part of their contracts in order to negotiate around the raises.

The Chicago Sun-Times:

Facing an estimated $712 million deficit, the new Chicago Board of Education cried uncle on Wednesday, voting for the first time in 20 years not to fund promised raises.
Now it’s time for Chicago teachers to stand up and accept reality.
Chicago teachers and the seven unions representing other school employee unions should accept the wage freeze or, at a minimum, try to negotiate less than the promised 4 percent raise.
Holding on to the pipe dream of getting that 4 percent raise — and risking a summer of uncertainty and a possible strike at the end — does no one, least of all Chicago students, any good.
The Board of Education simply has no more rabbits to pull from its budget hat.
We say that cautiously, knowing that CPS said much the same last year as it tried to persuade teachers to forgo their raise. And then, voila, CPS managed to fill its deficit without increasing class size or scaling back programs significantly.

Why Peter Thiel Is Wrong To Pay Students to Drop Out

Peter Cohan:

Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel, wants to pay college students to drop out. If typical venture capital odds apply, about 22 of the 24 people who took his $100,000 inducement to drop out and spend two years working in a start-up will fail to build a successful company. For their sake, let’s hope the schools will let them back in.
And based on research from the country’s top-ranked school of entrepreneurship, the world will be better off if those whippersnappers stay in school and get 10 years of experience before launching their start-ups.
Peter Thiel has a mixed investment record but has come out ahead. Thiel made $55 million as a co-founder of online payment service PayPal when he sold his 3.7% stake in the company to eBay (EBAY) shortly after graduating from Stanford Law School. He then became the first major investor, putting $500,000 into Facebook.

OK, So Here’s Who’s Running for Seattle School Board 2011

Riya Bhattacharjee:

I have been trying to find the campaign websites for all the candidates running for Seattle School Board this year (candidate filings closed 5 p.m. Friday), and the final list looks something like this. Two things: there’s like a ton of them and only four open seats; not all of them have a website yet.

Most of the new candidates are running because they are tired of the corruption and cronyism in Seattle Public Schools. Some want to focus on closing the achievement gap and raising test scores. Others are just sick of the influence a plethora of foundations have on education these days.

At least one of the candidates is a reluctant one who says he’s running because he is tired of mediocrity in our schools and the “business as usual approach” of our school board. Another lists this thing as his campaign website. This one sued the district against its new high school math textbooks in 2009.

The incumbents say they are fed up of the same things their challengers are (of course, I mean there can only be so many problems in one district, right?).

‘Parent Trigger’ Laws: Shutting Schools, Raising Controversy

Kayla Webley:

In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the “parent trigger” through the New York legislature. It’s a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school.
Campos and her group are working with some 4,000 frustrated parents like Samuel Radford III, who refuses to accept that as African Americans, his three sons in Buffalo public schools have only a 25% chance of graduating. Radford voiced his concerns for years but saw no improvement, so rather than continue to wait for the district to act, he became vice president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and threw his support behind passing parent-trigger legislation. “This is our chance to not just confront the problem but be part of the solution,” Radford says. On June 15, Buffalo ReformED plans to fill a bus of parents like Radford and ride to the state capitol, in Albany, to host an informal hearing on the bill and speak to members of the senate and house education committees.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: States face long slog after recession

Associated Press:

At statehouses around the country, the Great Recession is far from over: It could take years for many states to climb out of the hole and return to pre-downturn spending levels.
An Associated Press examination of 50 balance sheets shows state budgets and bank accounts still ravaged by a drop in tax revenue. Many states are also facing enormous long-term pension and health care obligations. At the same time, the payout of stimulus money from Washington that helped many states in their darkest hours has come to an end.
While some states saw a modest jump in tax collections this spring, the combined revenue projected by the 50 states in the coming fiscal year – $734 billion – is still down by about $34 billion, or 5 percent, from the 2007-08 fiscal year, when the recession began.
Some states are in far worse shape. New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Illinois and Louisiana reported deficits that are more than 20 percent of the state general fund.

Making Sense of the Chicago Public Schools’ Budget Deficit

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

When the Chicago Board of Education meets Wednesday to vote on a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers, one figure will be crucial to the debate: The $724 million deficit the Emanuel administration says Chicago Public Schools is facing for the upcoming year.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard have repeatedly cited the almost $720 million deficit, and Emanuel mentioned it again Monday when he called on the state to give CPS the roughly $300 million it is owed in back payments. But a Chicago News Cooperative review of the district’s funding sources shows that the calculations are inconsistent and CPS’s actual deficit is still unclear.
There is no question CPS is in a large financial hole. The extent of the deficit, however, depends primarily on how much federal stimulus money the district has available and whether late payments from the state are taken into account.
CPS has come to rely on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, which are drying up. In the administration’s most recent budget presentation, in March, officials said CPS will have exhausted $260 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and $104 million from the federal Education Jobs Fund.

Poll: education most important issue facing Texas

Sommer Ingram:

More than one-fifth of Texans say education is the most important issue facing the state, though it is unclear whether Republicans will pay a political price for cutting education funding, according to poll results released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Texas Lyceum group.
The group released preliminary findings from the telephone survey, conducted at the end of last month, as the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature inches closer to passing a state budget that cuts billions from public schools.
When asked an open-ended question about the most important problem facing Texas, 23 percent of 707 respondents named education, as did 33 percent of 303 likely voters in the group surveyed. Lyceum pollsters define likely voters as Texans who are somewhat interested in politics, are registered to vote and have voted in most or all elections.

The ends of education reform

Mike Petrilli:

Diane Ravitch’s New York Times op-ed seems to have stuck in the craw of many a reformer, including Arne Duncan himself. What really burned people up was Ravitch’s “straw man” arguments: that reformers say poverty doesn’t matter, or only care about gains in student achievement. “No serious reformer says accountability should just be based on test scores. We all favor multiple measures,” Jon Schnur* complained to Jonathan Alter last week.

Rather than get defensive at Diane’s defeatism, we reformers should clarify the ends that education reform can achieve.

Please. Remember the old adage, watch what we do, not what we say? The No Child Left Behind act is still the law of the land, and it most definitely rests on the principle that poverty is “no excuse” for low achievement. And it absolutely punishes schools for bad test scores alone. Diane is on firm ground when she writes:

Presidential wannabes mum on schools

Jay Matthews:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney declared his candidacy for president last week. I went to his Web site to read his ideas about education. There weren’t any. The same thing happened when I went to former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign site.
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty’s Web site had a bit more–a piece beating up on teachers unions, a speech saying the federal government should give states more flexibility in fixing schools and an appreciation of former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Business executive Herman Cain’s Web site called for less federal and union interference in education reform, and more rewards for the best teachers. Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) wants to end federal education spending, except for tax credits for parents.
That’s about it for the Republican candidates. I couldn’t find official education positions for potential GOP candidates Jon Huntsman, Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin. Even when the presidential campaign gets hot next year, we won’t hear much about schooling from either party. The government activity that most influences American lives has never inspired much talk by national politicians or much coverage by national media.

Rift between Kansas City school board, superintendent appears to be closing

Joe Robertson:

The chasm that had separated Superintendent John Covington and the Kansas City school board over charter and contract schools appears to be closing.
The board is now considering policy changes that would require the superintendent’s recommendation before it could bring independent schools into the district fold.
Until the change is approved, however, the leaders of a pair of civic groups are standing by letters sent to the board last week warning that they believed it had assumed authority that could return it to its micromanaging habits of old.
Board president Airick Leonard West said he wants the conversation to refocus on the district’s vision of a portfolio of schools that are held accountable for their performance.

Grading Standards in Education Departments at Universities

Cory Koedel, University of Missouri, via a kind reader’s email:

Students who take classes in education departments at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in other academic departments. The higher grades awarded by education departments cannot be explained by differences in student quality or by structural differences across departments (i.e., differences in class sizes). The remaining explanation is that the higher grades are the result of lower grading standards. This paper formally documents the grading-standards problem in education departments using administrative grade data from the 2007-2008 academic year. Because a large fraction of the teachers in K-12 schools receive training in education departments, I briefly discuss several possible consequences of the low grading standards for teacher quality in K-12 schools.
There is a large and growing research literature showing that teacher quality is an important determinant of student success (recent studies include Aaronson et al., 2007; Koedel, 2008; Nye et al., 2004; Rivkin et al., 2005; Rockoff, 2004).
But while there is persistent research into a variety of interventions aimed at improving teacher quality, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the primary training ground for K-12 teachers–education departments at universities.
This paper provides an evaluation of the grading standards in these education departments. I show that education students receive higher grades than do students in every other academic discipline. The grading discrepancies that I document cannot be explained by differences between education and non-education departments in student quality, or by structural differences across departments.
The likely explanation is grade inflation.
The earliest evidence on the grading-standards problem in education departments comes from Weiss and Rasmussen in 1960. They showed that undergraduate students taking classes in education departments were twice as likely to receive an “A” when compared to students taking classes in business or liberal arts departments. The low grading standards in education departments, illustrated by these authors over 50 years ago, are still prevalent today.

News Corp plans education acquisitions

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

Joel Klein, the head of News Corp’s new education division, has drawn up plans for “significant” acquisitions in the school data, assessment and interactive content development areas, but ruled out acquiring a traditional publisher.
Five months after he joined Rupert Murdoch’s media group, the former chancellor of New York City’s public school system said he had started due diligence on possible deals to follow the $360m acquisition last year of 90 per cent of Wireless Generation, a US education software company.
“I’d expect in the next [few] months we’d be making some acquisitions,” he told the Financial Times, a day after appointing two executives to bolster News Corp’s push into education. “There’s the willingness to put in significant capital if the numbers make sense.”
News Corp’s move into education puts it into competition with groups such as Pearson, which owns the Financial Times and McGraw-Hill, which are expanding beyond textbook publishing into digital learning systems, assessment tools and services for schools.
Mr Murdoch had not “put a number on” the amount of capital he was willing to commit, but was making a long-term bet on education, Mr Klein said.

High school education no longer one-size-fits-all

Maureen Magee:

The caps and gowns haven’t changed much. “Pomp and Circumstance” continues to mark the occasion. And many of those valedictorians are bound to quote “The Road Not Taken.”
Commencement ceremonies have remained virtually unchanged over the years. But don’t be fooled. The high school experience leading up to graduation has never looked so different for American teenagers.
Everything from technology to academic innovations to the lagging economy has influenced high schools and the students they serve — locally and nationwide.
No longer a novelty, independent charter schools will issue a record number of diplomas to students who received a new brand of education — often in some unlikely venues, including shopping malls, museums and an old Navy boot camp.
More students than ever will graduate this year after taking some of their courses online.
And tough economic times have created a rising population of homeless students — and programs and schools designed to educate and help them.

Where do all the UK Free Schools go?

Phil Mitchell:

Education Secretary Michael Gove faces many obstacles (and many opponents) to his plan to let parents, charities and educational experts open and manage new Free Schools in their local areas.
There are many hurdles for Free School advocates to overcome too – funding, for example. But even before you get to that stage, how do you know which areas, the government considers appropriate for Free Schools to open?
The Free School Kit, launched by the government agency Partnerships for Schools (PfS), is designed to answer this question.
If you want to launch a Free School, it needs a business case, which depends on whether there’s a need in the area. The Free School Kit enables anyone to see on a map the existing school provision, where the schools are, and what their academic records are.

NJ gov pushes public-private school pilot program

Geoff Mulvihill:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie added a new element Thursday to his efforts to give children in the state’s lowest-performing school districts a better education while keeping the costs to taxpayers down.
He proposed letting local school boards hand control of some so-called “transformation schools” to education management organizations, possibly including for-profit firms.
The proposal is one of several ideas Christie is pushing to try to expand options for students in troubled school districts.
“None of these things are silver bullets,” he said. The governor framed the idea as an experiment that could offer lessons to other schools.
At first, no more than five of the privately run schools across the state would be allowed – and they would go only in places where the local school boards want them.

Company Overseen By Joel Klein Poised To Clean Up With $27M No-Bid State Contract

Celeste Katz:

The money – part of the state’s $700 million in Race to the Top winnings – will go to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., to develop software to track student test scores, among other things.
Klein took a job at News Corp. overseeing their educational technology business after he left the chancellor job in December.
City rules forbid former workers from contacting the agency that employed them for one year, but the rules would not formally bar contact between Klein and the state.
“It raises all kinds of red flags,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York.
“It just smacks of an old-boys club, where large amounts of public money are spent based not on ‘is this the best product?’ but ‘I know this guy and I like him and I want to be sure he makes a lot of money.'”
Klein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Fix the Workforce or Die” Bucyrus Finds Skilled Labor in Texas

John Schmid:

Not long ago, Bucyrus International Inc. stood out in Milwaukee as a veritable poster child for business opportunity and expansion. Mayor Tom Barrett singled out chief executive Tim Sullivan in his 2005 “state of the city” address: “Thank you for believing and investing in our city.”
And so it was awkward last week when Sullivan told a packed auditorium of civic leaders that he needed to make a “confession,” something he’s kept quiet for years. Finding qualified, factory-grade welders in an old-line industrial city such as Milwaukee had become arduous to near impossible. Calling himself a “killjoy,” Sullivan said he quietly phoned a few contacts in Texas to see whether the Lone Star State could provide him enough welders who are qualified to piece together the colossal mining machines that Bucyrus ships to India, China and elsewhere around the world.
A delegation of senior Texas government authorities met Sullivan at the airport, including the mayor of the town of Kilgore. In a one-hour lunch, they matched Bucyrus with a ready-to-occupy factory with every possible amenity.
More important, they asked Sullivan exactly what sort of workers he needed. Sullivan said 80 with specific skill. The state gave Sullivan a guarantee that the workers would be waiting when the doors opened at the expansion site in Kilgore. State officials customized a recruitment, training and certification program. One year later, when the expansion site in Kilgore opened its doors, the 80 welders were waiting.
In the two years since then, the Texas site has more than doubled to 184 total workers and plans to keep hiring. And back in Milwaukee, Sullivan has said next to nothing in public about the Kilgore expansion.
“We have a complete disconnect between jobs and education and training,” Sullivan said. In Milwaukee, “we’re a long way” from replicating the feat in Texas.
“There is no stomach in this state to change the curriculum,” he said. “Who is initiating education reform in the state right now? No one.”
Although taxpayer-funded MATC probably is the institution best suited to address the skills mismatch, the tech school cannot bear all the blame for its inability to deliver customized workforce training, Sullivan said.
Many Milwaukee-trained welders simply are not mentally prepared by metro Milwaukee’s grade schools and high schools, Sullivan said.

Grading For Learning: Grade Inflation Panacea? Or More Dr. FeelGood?

sp-eye:

At tomorrow’s (June 13) school board meeting, an “informational” agenda item will be presented regarding the switch from conventional grading/report card system to the “Grading For Learning” system throughout grades K-7. This switch will be flipped for the 2011-12 school year.
Grading for Learning has been looming on the horizon for several years now. It’s not something new to Sun Prairie. In fact, a number of school districts have implemented it and a number will begin implementation this year. Grading for Learning is a concept introduced by Ken O’Connor.
What is the background and research for Grading for Learning?

Time for year-round school in Madison

Chris Rickert:

But after learning of the Madison School District’s failure to adequately boost test scores under No Child Left Behind, I had to wonder: Heat or no heat, what cause for picnicking is there in the advent of a nearly three-month long break from formal learning for brains that, in their youth, are veritable sponges for knowledge?
I’m less worried about my children, who have a standard pair of educated, middle-class parents. They probably won’t make major academic strides over the summer, but they won’t lose much ground or — worse — fill their free time picking up bad habits.
But here’s the thing about the Madison district: Increasingly, its students aren’t like my kids.
They are like the kids who live in the traditionally lower-income, higher-crime Worthington Park neighborhood. These and the kids from the tonier Schenk-Atwood neighborhood where we live share a school, but they don’t necessarily share the same social, educational and financial advantages.

Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here and “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”. It certainly is long past time for a new academic benchmark… Wisconsin students should participate in global examinations, such as TIMSS, among others.

The argument against double standards in education

Benjamin Todd Jealous:

New York City has become the latest battleground in the national fight for education equality.
In some schools, hallways serve as a stark dividing line. Classrooms with peeling paint and insufficient resources sit on one side, while new computers, smartboards and up-to-date textbooks line the other. One group of students is taught in hallways and cramped basements, while others under the same roof make use of fully functional classrooms.
New York City has increasingly resorted to co-locating charter schools inside existing public school buildings as way to cut costs. When handled improperly, co-location can lead to visible disparities, division and tension among students. In many instances, traditional students are forced into shorter playground periods than their charter school counterparts, or served lunch at 10 am so that charter students can eat at noon. The inequity is glaring, and it is certainly not lost on the students themselves.

Sasse urges Rhode Island Governor Chafee to veto Teacher retiree rehiring bills

Katherine Gregg:

That is the way Gary Sasse, a top-level official in the Carcieri administration — and long-time head of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council — described the front-page news Friday about the Senate’s votes a day earlier for bills allowing retirees to return to return to work with state pensions and paychecks.
“It was not that long ago that many of us spoke out against the practice of allowing retired public employees to a collect retirement check while on the state’s payroll. Now it appears that the practice may be coming back. Situational expediency should not trump sound personnel practices. Based on Rhode Island history this could be a dangerous precedent,” wrote Sasse in an email.
Now the director of the Bryant University’s Institute for Public Leadership, Sasse was commenting on the Senate’s approval of a bill to allow up to 50 retired school teachers and administrators to work as $500-a-day consultants to the Department of Education, without giving up their pensions. The sponsor: state Sen. Hanna Gallo, a speech pathologist in the Cranston school system.

A Conversation on Virtual Classrooms

Bill Tucker:

Richmond Open Source Radio’s Will Snyder talks about the recent approval of virtual classrooms in Virginia with Rob Jones, VEA’s Director of Government Relations and Research and Bill Tucker, Managing Director of the think tank Education Sector. (29 minute mark)

N.A.A.C.P. on Defensive as Suit on Charter Schools Splits Group’s Supporters

Fernanda Santos:

In some ways, it seems like a natural cause for the N.A.A.C.P.: students — many of them poor, most of them black — treated as second-class citizens when the public schools they attended had to share buildings with charter schools. A lawsuit filed last month by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Federation of Teachers described children having to eat lunch so early it might as well be breakfast, and getting less exercise because gym hours were evenly divided between the schools despite big differences in their enrollment sizes.
But black children have been major constituents of charter schools since their creation two decades ago. So when thousands of charter-school parents, students and advocates staged a rally on May 26 in Harlem, it was not so much to denounce the litigation as it was to criticize the involvement of the N.A.A.C.P.
Since then, a war has broken out within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit against the city and the larger questions of how school choice helps or hurts minority students.

A heartbreaking essay on Oakland school break-ins

Katy Murphy:

The district hasn’t yet provided stats on how many times people have broken into Oakland schools this year and how much they’ve taken, but it happens all too often. In fact, the break-in at Burbank followed burglaries at Grass Valley (stolen safe) and Redwood Heights (stolen computers and projectors), according to the school district’s spokesman, Troy Flint.
I don’t know who wrote the essay, posted on the “On Thoughtfulness and Randomness” blog, but you should read it. Here’s an excerpt:

I had to go there later in the day – and steeled myself walking in. District vans were parked outside the school, lots of people inside fixing things. Busy trying to make the break in go away.
Teachers were teaching. Eyes were sad, smiles forced. But children were going to lunch – teachers were helping them celebrate “super hero day” – children looked safe, happy, excited – oblivious to the damage, oblivious to the whispers of the adults. It was their school – and it was a good place to be.
The teachers made it that way – protected the children from what wasn’t right in the world. Kept their routines, listened to their stories about their costumes, worked on their colors and shapes – made the world calm, predictable, and safe. Protected the families too – told them gently, with assurance, with sympathetic smiles, with plans to make it better in the future – plans to keep the world from busting in again, stories of why everything would be OK.

Sun Prairie School Board Plans 2% Administrator Raises

sp-eye:

At Monday’s (June 13th) School Board meeting, the board will consider increases to administrator pay that result in a net 2% increase in salary. Note that 2% is a figure based on the salary pot for 2010-11. Assuming that (A) replacement administrators will not get any increases, that means the average per administrator will amount to MORE than 2%. As usual, some administrators get very healthy increases, while those in Culver’s doghouse will net less than the average.
This recommendation includes administrators with the exception of the District Administrator, who will be determined separately.

A Year of Drama and Hard Feelings in Education

Josh Goodman

“Today marks the beginning of a very dark week at The School District of Philadelphia,” began a press release issued last Monday by the District itself. No doubt many Philadelphia school employees would agree. That day, the District issued layoff notices to 3,024 of its workers, including 1,523 of the District’s approximately 11,000 teachers.
Budget problems are nothing new for Philadelphia’s School District, which was taken over by the state of Pennsylvania a decade ago in part because of its chronic funding problems. Through all those difficulties, though, it has no modern history of teacher layoffs on this scale.
The moves were designed to close a $629 million shortfall in the School District’s $2.7 billion budget–a gap caused by the end of federal stimulus funding and the knowledge that cuts in state funding were on the way.

Introduction to Seattle Public Schools

Charlie Mas:

I recently met with one of the several new employees at Seattle Public Schools and gave a rundown on history and culture of the District.
Here’s the short version:
1. There is a complete disconnect between what is said, done, and decided in the JSCEE and what happens in the schools.
The headquarters folks make bad decisions because they have no idea how those decisions will actually play out in the schools – and they don’t want to know. Their decisions don’t matter because they don’t check to confirm they are being followed and they couldn’t enforce them anyway. The schools know all of this – that the District headquarters is clueless about the realities of schools, that their decisions are horrible, that they will never come around and confirm compliance with the decision, and that they are powerless to enforce those decisions – so they simply ignore the decisions. The schools see the gap between them and the district headquarters as insulation and they work to keep it. They don’t want any district interference because it is always bad. The schools work to go unnoticed by the district headquarters. Ideally, they would like the District headquarters to forget they are there. The tall blade of grass gets cut; the high nail gets hammered down. If you have ever been part of an alternative school or an advanced learning program, you’ve heard people say “Don’t make waves, we don’t want to attract the District’s attention.” There are very, very few examples of district intervention in a school that proved beneficial. I think the District’s decision to put elementary APP in Lowell in 1997 was one. The interventions at Hawthorne and West Seattle Elementary are looking like they could buck the trend. STEM might also. If so, they would be the exceptions rather than the rule.

5 reasons to believe progress is being made to address Wisconsin reading crisis

Alan Borsuk:

What if, despite everything else going on, we were able to put together a strong, multi-faceted campaign that made progress in fighting the reading crisis in our midst?
The optimist in me says it might happen, and I point to five things that are going on to support that. (Don’t worry, the pessimist in me will show up before we’re done.)
One: I attended the second meeting of Gov. Scott Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force recently. Unlike most anything else going on in the Capitol, this was a civil, constructive discussion involving people of diverse opinions. The focus of the afternoon-long session was how to improve the way teachers are trained to teach reading.
Walker and Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, disagree strongly on some major school issues, but they sat next to each other, facing university professors, teachers, reading advocates of varying philosophies, and others. There even seemed to be some emerging agreement that the state Department of Public Instruction and university leaders could and should take steps to ensure that teachers are better trained before they get into classrooms and, once there, get more effective help in continuing to develop their skills.
The broad goal of Walker’s task force is to get almost all kids reading on grade level before they leave third grade – a wonderful goal. But reaching it raises a lot of issues, including how to deal with sharply contending schools of thought on how to best teach reading.
Nonetheless, at least for an afternoon, important people were engaged in a serious discussion on a huge issue, and that seemed encouraging.

Delavan child with disabilities in educational limbo Parents appeal state Department of Public Instruction for transfer to virtual school iQ Academy

Karen Herzog, via a kind reader’s email:

A Delavan couple is appealing a decision by the state Department of Public Instruction to support the Waukesha School District’s placement of their son in a bricks-and-mortar school instead of the virtual school they requested because the boy has cerebral palsy and speech impairments.
“We consider this straight-out discrimination, because he once had an IEP (Individualized Education Plan),” said Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, the attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin who filed a petition for review in Walworth County Circuit Court.
The 12-year-old boy no longer has an IEP for special education services and could attend the online school easier than a bricks-and-mortar school because of his physical disabilities, Spitzer-Resnick said. His mother was interested in the virtual school because it would offer a curriculum and structure; she currently home-schools the boy.
“He does have severe physical disabilities, but he’s quite smart,” Spitzer-Resnick said.

Darryl Enriquez:

The Delavan parents of a 12-year-old who cannot speak or move because of cerebral palsy asked a Walworth County judge this week to reverse decisions that prohibit their son from learning at home by using public school computer courses.
The parents, Daniel and Catherine “Cassie” Hartogh, contend that their son Benjamin was discriminated against because he could not get into a virtual school program.
Representing the family is Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, managing attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin in Madison.
“It’s an awful situation, and my son is suffering from it,” Cassie Hartogh said in a telephone interview.

University Administrators Will Outnumber College Faculty by 2014; It’s Already A Reality at UM-Flint

Mark Perry:

According to Malcom Harris writing in n+1:
“And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.”

Manhattan Borough President calls for freeze on DOE consulting contracts

Micah Landau:

Responding to the latest in a series of consulting scandals that have plagued the Department of Education in recent years, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer — who was joined by UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a press conference at the Manhattan Municipal Building — called for a freeze on all new, nonessential DOE consulting contracts. Declaring consulting “the new political patronage of our time,” the two leaders also called for a “top-to-bottom” probe of all existing DOE contracts.
“There is something wrong here,” Mulgrew said of the DOE’s inability to effectively oversee its contractors and consultants. “The parents in this city, the children in the schools, the teachers are sick and tired of every week hearing about another scandal with outside contractors and consultants making millions of dollars that should be used in the classroom for direct services for students.”
Mulgrew said revelations of the DOE financial scandals were especially disheartening at a time when the mayor is pushing to lay off more than 4,200 teachers on the grounds that the city can no longer afford to pay them.

Cuomo Urges Broad Limits to N.Y. Public Pensions

Danny Hakim:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, joining a parade of officials from across the country who are seeking to rein in spending by limiting public employees’ pensions, proposed Wednesday to broadly limit retirement benefits for new city and state workers in New York.
Mr. Cuomo said New York State and New York City simply could no longer afford to offer new employees the generous benefits their predecessors received.
Among the most significant changes the governor proposes is to raise the minimum retirement age to 65 from 62 for state workers, and to 65 from 57 for teachers.
“The numbers speak for themselves — the pension system as we know it is unsustainable,” the governor said in a statement. “This bill institutes common-sense reforms to bring government benefits more in line with the private sector while still serving our employees and protecting our retirees.”
Mr. Cuomo’s proposal escalates a battle between the first-term Democrat and a major Democratic Party constituency: public-sector labor unions.

Chinese school defies rigid exam-focused education

Rob Schmitz:

In most Chinese high schools, outdated rote learning is the norm. But one school in Beijing is promoting creativity and independent thinking.
TESS VIGELAND: This week, we’ve been looking at China’s higher education system — what it takes to get into college and what happens once students get there. China’s emphasis on taking tests to get ahead in society raises questions about whether those students will be creative enough to thrive in an economy based on innovation. One school in Beijing is trying to get away from the testing culture.
Our China correspondent Rob Schmitz has the final of three reports.

Legislative Update: Our Spending Authority Goes Up; Rewritten Charter School Bill Tiptoes Toward Plausibility

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

There’s been a considerable legislative activity affecting our schools lately, with the Joint Finance Committee completing its work on the Governor’s proposed budget and other legislative committees active as well.
Here’s an update on two developments of particular interest to those of us in Madison – the retention of school districts’ ability to use property tax carryover authority to increase spending above otherwise applicable revenue limits and the most recent iteration of the Republican charter school expansion legislation working its way through committee.
Other legislative developments will have significant impact elsewhere in the state in the short run and could well affect Madison significantly in the longer run – I’m thinking of the expansion of voucher schools into all of Milwaukee County and Racine and perhaps Green Bay – but the two developments that will likely have a more immediate impact are my focus for today.

Self-policing bureaucrats undermine Wisconsin’s open records laws

Ben, via a kind reader’s email:

State employee tries to sic IRS on education reform group
A new controversy related to the Madison protests has emerged. This one involves the taxpayer-funded email account of American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin leader and Department of Workforce Development employee William Franks.
For reasons explained below, the Education Action Group submitted an open records request for communications from Frank’s taxpayer-funded email account that contained specific, strike-related key words.
Upon receipt of the records, EAG discovered that a state attorney allowed Franks to fill the open records request himself. That means he might have been free to turn over the entries he cared to include and delete other entries. Not only that, but the state attorney told Franks that “if you have personal email that contains those specified words in the request, please send copies of those to me, so we can discuss this further.” That sounds like one bureaucrat helping another skirt the law and avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.

Proposal to nix Allied Drive Madison 4K site called short-sighted

Matthew DeFour:

Allied Drive advocates say a Madison School District proposal to abandon plans for a 4-year-old kindergarten site in the South Side neighborhood is short-sighted and potentially harmful to students.
Currently, 66 students are assigned to the Allied Learning Center next fall, including nine students from the Allied Drive neighborhood, one of the city’s poorest. But district officials have asked the school board to consider moving the students to other district sites, saying several parents had asked to send their children to other locations.
Ald. Brian Solomon, 10th District, said that recommendation is a “huge concern” touching on issues of civil rights, racial justice and the city’s efforts to improve a neighborhood once riddled by drugs and violence.
“This will have such an impact on the long-term success of these kids,” Solomon said. “Having every opportunity possible to allow the (Allied) parents to have more involvement will undoubtedly prepare these kids better for future years.”
Superintendent Dan Nerad brought the issue to the board’s attention last month after the parents of 16 students assigned to the Allied Learning Center requested different sites. In addition to the parents’ concerns, Nerad noted the $15,000 cost to add playground equipment and about $150,000 for additional staffing as other reasons not to use the site.

Getting it Right on Layoffs

Marc Korashan:

In a report on WNYC today, Beth Fertig described the plight of a promising young teacher who is waiting to find out if he will be laid off by the mayor. In the report she wrote, “Lee, 26, teaches third grade at PS 124 in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The union contract requires the least experienced teachers to be let go first meaning that elementary teachers with less than four years’ experience are most at risk.”
Unfortunately, this is not true. The UFT contract makes only one reference to layoffs which is to say that if they are necessary they will done in accordance with applicable state law. It is the law and not the contract that creates a seniority based system for layoffs. This is a small error in an otherwise well done report.

Public Employee Unions vs. Democratic Governors – Part 93

Mike Antonucci:

d an on-again, off-again relationship with Gov. John Kitzhaber. The Oregon Education Association endorsed his opponent in the Democratic primary, largely because of Kitzhaber’s “performance-based funding” proposal. When Kitzhaber won the nomination, OEA and other public sector unions bet the ranch on him.

Gov. Kitzhaber’s latest proposal is a merger of the state boards dealing with K-12 and higher education, which has caused OEA some heartburn. “I am surprised and disappointed to hear that OEA has changed course and now opposes Senate Bill 909 and a package of modest education reforms that would deliver better results for students, more resources for teachers and more accountability for taxpayer dollars. For them to cling to the status quo is not in the best interest of Oregonians,” said Kitzhaber in a statement.

Meanwhile in California, David Kieffer, the executive director of the state SEIU affiliate announced his opposition to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for a special election in September to extend and raise taxes. The state’s public sector unions are interested parties because they would be expected to fund the campaign with dues dollars.

Real Grad Rates

Tom Vander Ark:

I love Salt Lake but having grown up in Denver it makes me nervous to have mountains in the east. I’ve also noticed that they may be more conservative here than in my new hometown of Seattle. The newspaper is reporting with some surprise today that a local anthropologist has found evidence that Darwin was on to something with that evolution stuff.

The editorial page explains that the precipitous drop in the Utah high school graduation rate is a result of all those Latino students moving in.

An Interview with Joe Nathan: How Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools Eliminated the High School Graduation Gap between White and African American Students

Michael F. Shaughnessy

1) Joe, there seems to be a lot of good news coming out of Cincinnati in terms of increased high school graduation rates. What’s happening in Cincinnati?
Recently Elizabeth Holtzapple, Cincinnati Public Schools Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing, told me that the district’s public schools increased overall high school graduation rates to 81.9% in 2010. That is up from 51% to 2000. She also reported the district also has maintained something major it first achieved in 2007. While continuing to increase overall high school graduation rates, CPS also has eliminated the high school graduation gap between white and African American students.
2) About how long has this concerted effort been going on?
This work has been going on for the last decade. It has involved a series of coordinated, research-based strategies, along with tremendous, creative and courageous work by people in schools, as well as the broader community. There was no single, “silver bullet.”
3. What were the key strategies?
Cincinnati used several strategies. The most important included
Focusing on just a few goals (increasing overall graduation rates and reducing the high school graduation gap).
Taking educators, parents, community leaders and students to visit some of the nation’s most effective urban district and charter public schools.
Focusing staff development on a few key areas: literacy, numeracy and learning to work more effectively with today’s urban youth.
Increasing youth/community service so students learned they are capable of more than they thought.
Positive ongoing leadership from the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers
Holding principals accountable and replacing some in schools where there was not much progress.

Backlash: Are These End Times for Charter Schools?

Andrew Rotherham:

Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? Four thousand charter-school leaders, teachers, advocates and policymakers will gather in Atlanta this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is larger than what many long-standing traditional-education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state’s supreme court just ruled that the arrangements for charter schools are unconstitutional. Welcome to town! (See what makes a charter school great.)
Charter schools, the first of which was created in 1992, are public schools that are open to all students but run independently of local school districts. There are now more than 5,000 of them educating more than a million students. Charter schools range in quality from among the best public schools in the country to among the worst. That variance is proving to be a political Achilles’ heel for charter schools, fueling a serious backlash. (See “KIPP Schools: A Reform Triumph, or Disappointment?”)
In New York City, the NAACP joined the teachers’ union in a lawsuit that would have the effect of curbing charter-school growth. That sparked a protest by families in Harlem, and the NAACP was roundly criticized for its stance, which apparently owes more to politics than kids.

Peer pressure: Madison La Follette High School youth court program shows potential

Matthew DeFour:

When Madison La Follette High School senior Burnett Reed got into a heated argument with another student during his sophomore year in 2008, he faced a choice.
He could take a disorderly conduct ticket that would stay on his court record. Or he could participate in the school’s new youth court program in which a jury of fellow students would assess the case. He chose youth court and was sentenced to writing an apology letter, tutoring and four hours with a life coach.
He so liked the option he soon became a juror, and now is helping Madison West High School start its own program next year.
“It’s a better way to keep youth out of the system,” Reed said.
The approach has so much potential Madison Municipal Judge Dan Koval wants to start a similar program later this year for adult offenders, particularly those with chronic municipal violations such as retail theft, disorderly conduct, trespassing and other non-criminal offenses.

Time to Make Professors Teach My new study suggests a simple way to cut college tuition in half.

Richard Vedder:

No sooner do parents proudly watch their children graduate high school than they must begin paying for college. As they write checks for upwards of $40,000 a year, they’ll no doubt find themselves complaining loudly about rising college costs–even asking: “Is it worth it?”
It’s a legitimate question. As college costs have risen wildly, the benefits of the degree seem less and less clear. Larger numbers of college graduates are taking relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.
The good news? There are ways to greatly ease the burden and make college more affordable, according to new data from the University of Texas at Austin.
In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions

Dennis Cauchon:

The federal government’s financial condition deteriorated rapidly last year, far beyond the $1.5 trillion in new debt taken on to finance the budget deficit, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The government added $5.3 trillion in new financial obligations in 2010, largely for retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. That brings to a record $61.6 trillion the total of financial promises not paid for.
This gap between spending commitments and revenue last year equals more than one-third of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Medicare alone took on $1.8 trillion in new liabilities, more than the record deficit prompting heated debate between Congress and the White House over lifting the debt ceiling.

Special education advocates press Oakland Schools to hire more experienced teachers

Katy Murphy:

In the last two years, teaching candidates from Oakland Teaching Fellows and Teach for America pretty much had a lock on all open special education positions in the Oakland school district.
All but three of the 70 new hires during that time period were teachers placed in Oakland schools through one of those two programs, according to a report the school district released today.
But district staff say in the report that is about to change: