Budget/Financing – Page 48 – School Information System

Chicago Teacher’s Union: ‘Education on the cheap’ – Online Classes

The Chicago Teachers Union on Tuesday accused Mayor Daley’s handpicked school team of hiring “baby sitters” to provide “education on the cheap” — online, after-school classes in reading and math that will extend one of the nation’s shortest school days for 5,500 students.
“When the kids are tired and they want to go home and they don’t want to do this any more, what happens? I’m a little concerned about how this plays out over an entire year,” said union president Karen Lewis.
At a news conference at Walsh Elementary School, 2015 S. Peoria, Daley acknowledged that “some parents and teachers will not support” his efforts to use computerized learning to extend the school day.
But he argued that an extra 90 minutes a day would add up to 255 more hours a year. That’s a 25 percent increase in a school day that pales by comparison to other major cities, he said.
“This is all about children and not about adults. . . . Education doesn’t end at 2:45” p.m., the mayor said.
Schools CEO Ron Huberman added, “All of our efforts to expand the school day with the traditional work force were, unfortunately, rejected. This has been the mayor’s push to say, ‘Despite constraints, we must find a way to do this.’ “

Virtual learning is an important and desirable part of the K-12 world.

Racing to restore education standards: Arne Duncan on Race to the Top

Anna Fifield; video:

Arne Duncan, US education secretary, tells Anna Fifield, the FT’s US political correspondent, that the “Race to the Top” programme has led to a “quiet revolution” with 36 hard-up states implementing reforms simply in the hope of receiving federal funding. Despite opposition from teachers’ unions, Mr Duncan says the administration will continue to push for change, although it will not raise the proportion of education funding that comes from the federal government.

Which cities are most willing to tackle education reform?

Amanda Paulson:

A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.
Education entrepreneurs – the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools – would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that’s the judgment of “America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents,” a study released Tuesday that’s attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn’t look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank’s annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.

Complete Study: 9.9MB PDF:

Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and–it is to be hoped–better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction’s receptivity to education reform:
Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district’s classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur’s foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.

L.A. Times testing series raises more questions

Jay Matthews:

Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.
The latest story in the series, “L.A.’s leaders in learning,” does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series–that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.

How does a $578 million school get built amid cuts, layoffs in L.A.?

Daniel Wood:

A football-field-sized lawn – lined with walks and trees – stretches from the street to a five-story, glass-front building in this otherwise scruffy neighborhood just west of downtown skyscrapers.
On the site of the Ambassador Hotel, known as the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, now sprawl 23 acres of elementary, middle and high school buildings which will serve the poorest, most congested, and diverse district of America’s second-largest school system.
It’s price tag of $578 million makes it the most expensive public school in American history and an easy target of criticism. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has laid off 3,000 teachers in the past two years and is cutting academic programs this year to close a $640 million budget gap.

Poor economy cuts into college athletics

Alan Scher Zagier:

Count college sports among the sagging economy’s latest victims.
A newly released NCAA report shows that just 14 of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools made money from campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year, down from 25 the year before.
Researchers blame the sagging economy and suggested that next year’s numbers could be even worse.
The research was done by accounting professor Dan Fulks of Transylvania University, a Division III school in Lexington, Ky. It shows the median amount paid by the 120 FBS schools to support campus athletics grew in one year from about $8 million to more than $10 million.

Ambitious School Overhaul Drive Hits Delays

Sam Dillon

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set an ambitious goal last year of overhauling 1,000 schools a year, using billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.
But that effort is off to an uneven start. Schools from Maine to California are starting the fall term with their overhaul plans postponed or in doubt because negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion.
In this sprawling district east of Los Angeles, for example, the authorities announced plans earlier this year to use the program to convert Pacific High, one of California’s worst-performing schools, to a charter school, involving a comprehensive makeover.

Milwaukee layoffs a hard lesson for young teachers

Erin Richards

The insulated cooler sits on the playground bench, untouched.
Beside it, elementary school teacher Alica Magolan waits out her lunch break. She doesn’t have much appetite these days.
On one hand, she’s fortunate: She was recalled after being laid off from her job teaching third-graders at Humboldt Park Elementary School in Bay View. But that uncertainty has been replaced by a new stress: teaching at a north side school with a different culture, to a new grade level, leading a subject in which she has no specialized background.
The learning curve is a hairpin turn. The stomachaches come nightly.
“I know that people are like, ‘Well, you got a call, so you should be happy.’ ” Magolan said. “But I can’t help it that I miss my school.”
At 29, Magolan is one of many young teachers whose lives have changed dramatically since MPS sent layoff notices to 482 educators in June, almost twice the number of positions former superintendent William Andrekopoulos indicated the district would need to cut to balance the budget.
Suddenly jobless, fearing house payments and monthly bills, some on layoff accepted lower-paying educational positions elsewhere. A few landed highly competitive jobs in suburban public schools or other city schools. Some changed careers entirely.

Tracking Federal Tax “Stimulus” K-12 Spending

Susan Troller:

Where is stimulus money for education going, and how much has been spent? Here’s a new website that provides tracking for these significant, multi-billion dollar questions.
Kudos to the Education Writers Association for taking on this huge data gathering project, and to Bill and Melinda Gates who are funding it for the next two years.
When it comes to following the money, the flow of dollars is impressive: For example, Milwaukee has been allocated $202.6 million so far in stimulus money for its approximately 90,000 public school children; 58 percent, or $117.7 million, has been spent. Meanwhile, Madison has gotten $21.8 million in stimulus funds, and has spent around $12 million, or 55 percent for almost 25,000 students. I was also curious about smaller Dane County districts and their information is available too from Edmoney.org. For example: Sun Prairie, celebrating the grand public opening of its gorgeous new high school August 28 (go here for information about the festivities and school tours), has been awarded $6.6 million in stimulus funds and has spent $5.6 million of that. Middleton? $3.5 million awarded; $2.8 million spent. Verona? $4.9 million awarded; $4.3 spent.

Putting New Tools in Students’ Hands

Alice Rawsthorn:

Why would you study design if you weren’t planning to become a designer? Especially if you were a high school student in a depressed rural area of the United States, like Bertie County, one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, where 80 percent of students live in poverty, and your best chance of employment will be a low-skilled job in agriculture or biotechnology.
Why indeed? Yet all 16 teenagers in the 11th grade at the School of Agriscience and Biotechnology at the Bertie Early College High School have committed to attending an experimental design course, Studio H, for three hours every day in the new school year. An abandoned car body shop behind the school has been converted into a classroom, studio and workshop for the course. By the end of it, the students will have designed a community project, a farmers’ market to sell locally gown produce, and will then be paid to build it over the summer.
Because of Bertie County’s poverty, “very few of these kids will become designers,” said Emily Pilloton, founder of the humanitarian design group, Project H, who recently moved to Bertie County from San Francisco to run Studio H with Project H’s project architect, Matthew Miller.

Superintendent Climate Locally and Elsewhere: Collier School Board candidates evaluate how to replace Dennis Thompson; An Update on the 2008 Madison Candidates?

Naples Daily News:

Now that Collier County schools Superintendent Dennis Thompson’s contract isn’t getting renewed, the nine Collier School Board candidates have to think about what the next superintendent will be like.
After all, three of them will be involved in the selection of the next superintendent, which current board members agreed shouldn’t start until after the November election.
The primary election is Tuesday.
While the candidates believe a search should start and include community input, they differ on the approach to that search.
District 5 candidate Mary Ellen Cash was the only candidate to recommend saving the money from a nationwide search by hiring from within the district or area.
“We have a lot of home-grown people with a lot of talent,” she said.

Locally, the Madison School Board has held three meetings during the past two months on the Superintendent’s (Dan Nerad) evaluation:
6/29 Superintendent Evaluation, 7/12 Evaluation of the Superintendent, 8/9 Evaluation of the Superintendent.
The lack of Superintendent oversight was in issue in school board races a few years ago.
Steve Gallon (more) was a candidate for the Madison position in 2008, along with Jim McIntyre.
2008 Madison Superintendent candidate appearances: Steve Gallon, Jim McIntyre and Dan Nerad.

“The Courage” to Spend on Schools

Frederick Hess:

This definition of courage has become something of a theme for Obama’s Education Department — despite its reputation for gritty reform-mindedness. Earlier this summer, Maura Policelli, the department’s senior adviser for external affairs, told state officials to stop worrying about funding and “to see how [stimulus] funds can help alleviate layoffs.” She explained that this “require[s] some courage because it does involve the possible risk of investing in staff that you may not be able to retain in the 2011-12 school year.” When one official asked what would happen if a state had “unspent [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] money after 2011,” Policelli said: “You will be fired.” Looks like courage is not just about spending, but about spending quickly.
All of this might be laughable if the feds weren’t making it harder for states and school districts to prepare for rough seas ahead. When asked by the Associated Press what happens if districts use this money as a short-term fix and stand to get hammered next year, Duncan replied, “Well, we’re focused right now, Donna, on this school year. . . . We’re hopeful we’ll be in a much better spot next year.”
Well, while Duncan can hope to his heart’s content, the reality is that things will get much worse for schools before they get better. Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, notes, “There are so many issues that go way beyond the current downturn. . . . This is an awful time for states fiscally, but they’re even more worried about 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.” Property taxes account for about a third of school spending, but property-tax valuations tend to lag property values by three years — which mean school districts are on the front end of a slide that’s got several years to run. And, as the authors of a recent Rockefeller Institute report note, “Even if overall economic conditions continue to improve throughout 2010, fiscal recovery for the states historically lags behind a national economic turnaround and can be expected to do so in the aftermath of the recent recession.”

More Comments on the Los Angeles Value Added Assessment Report

Melissa Westbrook:

So most of you may have heard that the LA Times is doing a huge multi-part story about teacher evaluation. One of the biggest parts is a listing of every single public school teacher and their classroom test scores (and the teachers are called out by name).
From the article:

Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.

Interestingly, the LA Times apparently had access to more than 50 elementary school classrooms. (Yes, I know it’s public school but man, you can get pushback as a parent to sit in on a class so I’m amazed they got into so many.) And guess what, these journalists, who may or may not have ever attended a public school or have kids, made these observations:

LA unveils $578M school, costliest in the nation

Christina Hoag:

Next month’s opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968. With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.
The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
“There’s no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the ’70s where kids felt, ‘Oh, back to jail,'” said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. “Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.”
Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.

Free education?

Spencer Daily Reporter:

I remember hearing it somewhere.
What’s that term again, oh yes, “free education.”
Anyone can get a public education because it’s free.
Really, because I just spent close to $90 at one of our fine local retailers picking up a few of those last minute mandated items for that free education.
Obviously when you’re talking about parochial or private schools, there is a degree of tuition associated with that choice. But the public school system is supposed to be something that we pay taxes to cover.
And yet each year, I see a rack of flyers for each school within a one-hour radius with lots of small lettering detailing every item the students must have to attend the public schools to acquire their free public education.

A Look at the Madison School District’s Use of Infinite Campus

Susan Troller:

Since Andie was in 6th grade – she’ll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 – the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what’s going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.
“I don’t have to ask to look at her planner anymore,” says Smith. “And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they’ve got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works.”
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.

Much more on Infinite Campus and “Standards Based Report Cards”, here.

Value Added Models& Student Information Systems

147K PDF via a Dan Dempsey email:

The following abstract and conclusion is taken from:
Volume 4, Issue 4 – Fall 2009 – Special Issue: Key Issues in Value-Added Modeling
Would Accountability Based on Teacher Value Added Be Smart Policy? An Examination of the Statistical Properties and Policy Alternatives
Douglas N. Harris of University of Wisconsin Madison
Education Finance and Policy Fall 2009, Vol. 4, No. 4: 319-350.
Available here:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/edfp.2009.4.4.319
Abstract
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these “teacher value added” measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives.
6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the statistical assumptions of VAMs, and many of the most important papers are contained in the present volume. The assumptions about the role of past achievement in affecting current achievement (Assumption No. 2) and the lack of variation in teacher effects across student types (Assumption No. 4) seem least problematic. However, unobserved differences are likely to be important, and it is unclear whether the student fixed effects models, or any other models, really account for them (Assumption No. 3). The test scale is also a problem and will likely remain so because the assumptions underlying the scales are untestable. There is relatively little evidence on how administration and teamwork affect teachers (Assumption No. 1).

Related: Value Added Assessment, Standards Based Report Cards and Los Angeles’s Value Added Teacher Data.
Many notes and links on the Madison School District’s student information system: Infinite Campus are here.

D.C. charter schools face unfunded mandates

Deborah Simmons:

D.C. schools open their doors Monday morning for the start of a new year, and charter parents and advocates say a new problem is compounding an old one.
This school year, the D.C. Healthy Schools Act mandating new feeding and physical-education policies takes effect. But charter schools are scrambling to meet some requirements of the new law, which says schools must feed students locally produced fruits and vegetables and offer students overall healthier meals. The act also raises the bar on physical fitness.
“The majority of charter schools are going in commercial buildings,” said Robert Cane, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. (FOCUS). “We support good food and exercise, but charter schools have scrambled to meet requirements.”
Charter and traditional schools often lack cafeterias, and most charters lack green space for children to play or hold gym classes. Many don’t have a swimming pool, gymnasium, football field, tennis court or a track course.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: New Jersey at the Frontier: A Sovereign Debt Crisis of Our Own

Erik Gerding:

As usual, New Jersey leads the nation. Today, rather than Snooki showing the country a new level of reality t.v. debauchery, we have the Garden State itself becoming the first state of the union ever charged with violating federal securities laws.
According to the SEC release, New Jersey failed to disclose in 79 state bond offerings between 2001 and 2007 (totaling $26 billlion) that two public employee pension funds were underfunded. According to the SEC, the failure to disclose masked
the fact that New Jersey was unable to make contributions to [the pension funds] without raising taxes, cutting other services or otherwise affecting its budget. As a result, investors were not provided adequate information to evaluate the state’s ability to fund the pensions or assess their impact on the state’s financial condition.
Given that this post is about securities law from a securities law professor, I should note that Ma Gerding is a New Jersey state employee.
New Jersey is a special state in many ways, but my gut instincts tell me this SEC action is just the vanguard of a coming wave of state and municipal securities litigation. We have all the ingredients for an epidemic:
Start out with the dire budget situation of states and municipalities squeezed by the financial crisis.

Where newspaper goes in rating teachers, others soon will follow

Alan Borsuk

So you want to know if the teacher your child has for the new school year is the star you’re hoping for. How do you find out?
Well, you can ask around. Often even grade school kids will give you the word. But what you hear informally might be on the mark and might be baloney. Isn’t there some way to get a good answer?
Um, not really. You want a handle on how your kid is doing, there’s plenty of data. You want information on students in the school or the school district, no problem.
But teachers? If they had meaningful evaluation reports, the reports would be confidential. And you can be quite confident they don’t have evaluations like that – across the U.S., and certainly in Wisconsin, the large majority of teachers get superficial and almost always favorable evaluations based on brief visits by an administrator to their classrooms, research shows. The evaluations are of almost no use in actually guiding teachers to improve.
Perhaps you could move to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times began running a project last Sunday on teachers and the progress students made while in their classes. It named a few names and said it will unveil in coming weeks specific data on thousands of teachers.

Related: Value added assessment.

Oregon Board of Education tackles parent choice and virtual schools

Kimberly Melton

Fewer than one percent of Oregon students are enrolled in online public schools. But for nearly five years, the funding, quality and financial management of these virtual schools have been dominating conversation in State Capitol hearing rooms and school district board rooms.
In Oregon, education dollars follow the students. And this issue pits parent choice against school district stability.
Initially, each of six members of the state board suggested slightly different solutions. After nearly three hours of discussion, however, most board members said they would support parent choice but only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district.
“Parents should have the option to transfer,” said board chairwoman Brenda Frank. “I don’t believe the district has all the answers. But I think there just needs to be a gate.”

Georgia’s Per Pupil Spending ($8,908) and a Virtual School Battle ($3,200 per student); Madison Spends $15,241 per student

Georgia Families for Public Virtual Education

It has been said that victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat. Yesterday’s Commission ruling sure felt sweet! Thanks to the energized efforts of Georgia parents, school choice reigns supreme for our 9th grade students. The state school board ruled 8-2 in favor of adding ninth grade to the Georgia Cyber Academy. This decision allowed 660 GCA ninth graders to begin classes on September 7.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Aileen Dodd was there to cover the story live. She writes, “After the outcries of parents and the embarrassment of having two approved cyber schools call off August openings, leaders of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission admitted that they may have low-balled the cost of virtual public education. The board has agreed to rethink its figures.”

What some teachers don’t want you to learn

John Diaz

Knowledge is power, but it is not always welcome. The Los Angeles Times just completed an extensive study of how individual teachers have fared at raising their students’ math and English test scores in the state’s most populous city. The raw data have been available to the L.A. Unified School District for years, but it never bothered to crunch those numbers, let alone share them with parents. The Times has pledged to publish its ratings of 6,000 elementary school instructors.
Reaction of the local teachers union? It has called for a “massive boycott” of the Times.

Too Long Ignored

Bob Herbert:

A tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.
Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas — for example, 28 percent in New York City.
The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking. There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job.

The complete PDF report can viewed here.
Related: They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine.

But how well do they teach red-haired kids?

The Economist

WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague referenced yesterday, Matthew Yglesias points to the NAEP mathematics 8th-grade test rankings of different major-city public-school systems, which shows Los Angeles performing below average for black, hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander students, as well as for low-income students. Los Angeles did okay with middle-class white students. This reminded me of something I learned a couple of months ago: there are other, perhaps better ways of categorising students than race and income, for the purpose of deciding whether they are being well served by their schools. Specifically, parents’ educational attainment. Taking parents’ educational attainment as a baseline is a very effective way to measure whether a “good” school is really doing a standout job of educating its kids, or whether it’s simply benefiting from a student population that has a head start.

This is largely how the Netherlands’ educational inspectorate (Onderwijsinspectie) has been measuring student baselines for the purposes of evaluating schools since 2006. How they got to this measurement is an interesting story, as Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske of Duke University explain in this paper. First, starting 25 years ago the Dutch instituted a system of funding schools based on “weighting” students: students who came from backgrounds presumed to be educationally disadvantaged got more funding, and schools with large populations of “weighted” students ended up with more resources to try and make up the disparities. Initially, the high weights were given to children from immigrant backgrounds, or to children of poor native Dutch parents with very low educational attainment. But as Dutch politics became more right-wing in the 2000s, the idea of giving more funding to children of immigrants than to children of native Dutch parents became unpopular. Hence the idea of weighting children chiefly according to parents’ educational attainment, which was amenable to both right- and left-wing parties: it still tends to weight children from immigrant backgrounds more heavily, unless their parents are wealthy, highly-educated immigrants, in which case they probably didn’t need the extra help anyway. It also directs more resources to children of native Dutch parents from underprivileged backgrounds, and it defuses some of the racial tensions over school funding.

Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education

Jay P. Greene

Enrollment at America’s leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. But unlike almost every other growing industry, higher education has not become more efficient. Instead, universities now have more administrative employees and spend more on administration to educate each student. In short, universities are suffering from “administrative bloat,” expanding the resources devoted to administration significantly faster than spending on instruction, research and service.
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.
A significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. The lion’s share of university resources comes from the federal and state governments, as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs. Reducing government subsidies would do much to make universities more efficient.

New Jersey Charged with Fraud by SEC Over Underfunded Teacher Pensions

Mark Robyn

New Jersey has become the first state to ever be charged with civil fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC on Wednesday charged that in the course of selling municipal bonds to investors “the State misrepresented and failed to disclose material information regarding its under funding of New Jersey’s two largest pension plans, the Teachers’ Pension and Annuity Fund (“TPAF”) and the Public Employees’ Retirement System (“PERS”).”
State governments usually sell bonds as a way to raise money to fund specific projects. They borrow from investors with the promise to repay the debt later, plus interest. As a protection to investors, all bond issuers, state governments included, are required to provide investors with the information necessary for investors to make an informed decision regarding the level of risk associated with the investment.
New Jersey sold over $26 billion in bonds between 2001 and 2007, but the SEC charged that the state failed to inform investors that the state has not been fully funding its pension funds and cannot fully fund them in the future without raising taxes or cutting spending, which could impact the state’s ability to repay these bonds. According to the SEC, New Jersey’s

Union leader says parents should know teachers’ ratings

Mitchell Landsberg:

But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, urges the L.A. Times not to publish a database showing how teachers may have influenced students’ standardized test scores.
The head of the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday that she believed parents have a right to know how well their children’s teachers are rated on employee evaluations, but strongly disagreed with The Times’ decision to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.
Such data should be considered only as part of a well-rounded evaluation of a teacher’s performance, Randi Weingarten said, and then should be available only to the teacher, his or her principal, and individual parents. It is wrong, she said, to make such information widely available to the public.

Math, science teachers get paid less, report says

Donna Gordon Blankinship

UW researchers have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, teachers in math and science earn less than other high-school instructors.
Researchers at the University of Washington have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, math and science teachers earn less than other high-school instructors.
In a report released Wednesday, the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that 19 of the state’s 30 largest school districts pay math or science teachers less than they spend on teachers in other subjects.
The way Washington and many other states pay teachers — with more money going to those with more years of experience and graduate degrees — has led to the uneven salaries.
Jobs that pay better at nearby high-tech companies may also be a contributing factor, because math and science teachers may be recruited away before they have a chance to reach the higher rungs on the pay ladder, said Jim Simpkins, a researcher on the report, with Marguerite Roza and Cristina Sepe.

Jim Simpkins, Marguerite Roza, Cristina Sepe

Washington State recently passed a law (House Bill 2621) intending to accelerate the teaching and learning of math and science. However, in the two subject areas the state seeks to prioritize, this analysis finds that nineteen of the thirty largest districts in the state spend less per math or science teacher than for teachers in other subjects.
Existing salary schedules are part of the problem. By not allowing any differential compensation for math and science teachers, and instead basing compensation only on longevity and graduate credits, the wage system works to create the uneven salaries.
The analysis finds that in twenty-five of the thirty largest districts, math and science teachers had fewer years of teaching experience due to higher turnover–an indication that labor market forces do indeed vary with subject matter expertise. The subject-neutral salary schedule works to ignore these differences.

Everyone Wins in the Postcode Lottery

Tim Harford

Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.
I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the “postcode lottery”. For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren’t serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but “lottery” is not the one I would choose.

Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.

Seattle opens next front in education reform effort

Seattle Public Schools administrators are fighting a battle for schoolchildren across the state.
The district has decided to go to the mat over teacher performance evaluations. District officials want teachers to be judged based in part on their students’ academic growth.
The union says the proposal is a no-go. With the school year fast approaching, a strike could be in the offing.
The Seattle Education Association would rather stick to a previous compromise: an evaluation system that would put teachers who rate “basic” or “unsatisfactory” at risk of dismissal.
What a radical notion – that teacher performance should dictate a teacher’s career prospects. Such is what qualifies as “historic change” – union officials’ words – in public education.
The district’s proposal is also rather modest contrary to the union’s characterizations.

The New Orleans School Voucher Program

Reason TV:

Before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, Orleans Parish public schools were failing miserably. After the storm shut down the public school system completely, there was little reason to be optimistic.
But then something amazing happened.
The state of Louisiana took control over most of the schools in the district and has been chartering those schools ever since. This fall, more than 70 percent of the students in New Orleans will attend charter schools. (Check out reason.tv’s Katrina’s Silver Lining to learn more about the New Orleans charter school revolution.)
And then in 2008, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, a pilot voucher program designed to allow students in failing schools to attend private schools in the area.

Courserank Acquired

Techcrunch:

CourseRank helps students choose classes, and 95% of Stanford students use it, says the company.UC Berkeley, Duke, Cornell and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and Canada now use it as well. The company now has five employees.

Wealthy Seek Special-Ed Cash

Barbara Martinez:

Families in the most affluent New York City school districts, including the Upper East and Upper West sides, file more claims than other parts of the city seeking reimbursement of their children’s private-school tuition, according to Department of Education data.
The department last year spent $116 million in tuition and legal expenses to cover special-education students whose parents sued the DOE alleging that their public-school options were not appropriate. The number is more than double three years ago, and the costs are expected to continue to rise.
Parents have been helped by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that strengthened their legal position to sue school districts. The most recent case was last summer.
“No one begrudges parents the right to send their children to private school,” said Michael Best, general counsel at the DOE. “But this system was not intended as a way for private school parents to get the taxpayers to fund their children’s tuition.”

Teachers, by the numbers A team of Times reporters is giving the public its first glimpse of some surprising findings on teachers and their performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers — which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they’re doing.
For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students’ test scores count for half or more of a teacher’s performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
If it weren’t for the work of a team of Times reporters, this information might have remained uselessly locked away. Now that the paper is reporting on the wide disparities among teachers, the public is getting its first glimpse of some surprising findings.

Marketplace has more as does Daniel Willingham.

Given Money for Rehiring, Schools Wait and See

Motoko Rich:

With the economic outlook weakening, they argue that big deficits are looming for the next academic year and that they need to preserve the funds to prevent future layoffs. Los Angeles, for example, is projecting a $280 million budget shortfall next year that could threaten more jobs.
“You’ve got this herculean task to deal with next year’s deficit,” said Lydia L. Ramos, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest after New York City. “So if there’s a way that you can lessen the blow for next year,” she said, “we feel like it would be responsible to try to do that.”
The district laid off 682 teachers and counselors and about 2,000 support workers this spring and was not sure it would be able to hire any of them back with the stimulus money. The district says it could be forced to cut 4,500 more people next year.

The Value Added by LA Teachers

Elena Silva

There’s already plenty of chatter about Sunday’s LA Times article on the value-added scores of LAUSD teachers, and certainly more to come (comments blowing up here). With access to seven years of math and English scores for hundreds of thousands of 3rd through 5th grade students (under California Public Records Act), the Times hired RAND researcher Richard Buddin to conduct a value-added analysis on LAUSD teachers. Over the next few weeks, and likely beyond that, the Times promises to publish the findings of this analysis in articles and via a full database. For thousands of LAUSD teachers, this means they should expect to see their names and scores in their morning paper. For parents and the rest of the public, it means they will have more information about public school teachers’ performance than ever before.

Seattle’s Dysfunctional School Board

Charlie Mas:

The Board of Directors of Seattle Public Schools has four primary functions… and they fail to fulfill each of them.
The Board, first and foremost, are the elected representatives of the public, but this Board doesn’t represent the public at all. This Board doesn’t raise the public’s concerns, doesn’t relay the public’s wishes, and doesn’t voice the public perspective. I almost never hear the Board members talk about the public or their constituents saying “People are concerned about..” or “People want…” or “People see it this way…”.
The Board doesn’t voice the public perspective and certainly doesn’t advocate for it. Worse, the Board doesn’t advocate for the public to have a voice for themselves. The Board is no champion of community engagement. The Board regularly approves motions with inadequate community engagement and regularly approves motions with NO community engagement. The Board hasn’t demanded improved engagement from anyone and hasn’t even demanded that the staff provide the community engagement that they promised to do. The Board’s own community engagement is just about the worst of any workgroup in the District. Their primary community engagement practice is testimony at Board meetings and they never respond to the people who come and speak to them there.

New Scottish Curriculum for Excellence takes effect

BBC

A controversial overhaul of classroom teaching in Scotland will take effect as secondary pupils begin returning to school after the summer break.
The Curriculum for Excellence, which has been four years in the making, aims to give teachers more freedom and make lessons less prescriptive.
Some teachers, unions and opposition parties have expressed concern the curriculum is not ready.
But Scottish ministers have given assurances it will improve standards.
And Education Secretary Mike Russell said the current system was not being largely re-written.

‘Free’ Iowa preschool will cost some kids

Staci Hupp:

Iowa parents who thought a shift to public preschool meant less money out of their pockets are in for a surprise.
Parents of 4-year-old students in some Iowa school districts will be charged tuition, despite the nearly $65 million Iowa taxpayers will pump this year into a statewide preschool expansion led by Gov. Chet Culver.
The practice could fuel an election-year debate about whether taxpayers should foot the bill for preschool. Terry Branstad, Culver’s Republican opponent, said he will scrap universal preschool if he wins the Nov. 2 election.

On State Standards, National Merit Semifinalists & Local Media

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

I’m not so sure we have all that much to brag about in terms of our statewide educational standards or achievement. The Milwaukee public schools are extremely challenged, to put it mildly. The state has one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation. The WKCE is widely acknowledged as a poor system for statewide assessment of student progress. Just last week our state academic standards were labeled among the worst in the country in a national study.
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if – heaven forbid – MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)

There is generally no small amount of bragging on Madison National Merit Semi-finalists. It would be interesting to compare cut scores around the country.

More university students taking advantage of cheaper community college courses

Daniel de Vise

But Daly returned home from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and headed straight to the local community college for more classes.
Community colleges in the Washington region are doing brisk business this summer with students from four-year universities. The students are taking advantage of increasingly flexible transfer policies to load up on cheap, convenient credits that will help them graduate more quickly and at a lower expense.
Prince George’s Community College enrolled 136 students from four-year colleges this summer, nearly double last year’s number. Tidewater Community College in Virginia has 2,150 four-year college students, up 14 percent. Montgomery College has 3,100 four-year college students, about one-quarter of its summer enrollment. No comparison with last year’s enrollment was available.

Taking Schools Into Their Own Hands: More Mayors Seek Control as Washington Presses for Action on Failing Institutions; Setting an Example in Rochester

Joy Resmovits

During the last weeks of the term, third graders at School 58-World of Inquiry School created an oil spill in a bowl. Under the guidance of teacher Alyson Ricci, they tried to clean it up. Cotton swabs worked.
The school last year won the national Excellence in Urban Education Award, with all students meeting state proficiency rates in science and social studies. It’s an exception, though, in a Rochester system where fewer than half of the 32,000 public-school students graduate on time.
Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy wants to set up more schools that produce results like World of Inquiry’s. But he says the superintendent’s efforts to close failing schools and open new ones have been hobbled by a school board mired in minutia. He is pushing to dissolve the elected board in favor of one appointed by the mayor and city council for a five-year test period. New York’s state legislature is considering the bid.
As cities come under increasing pressure to fix failing schools, more are, like Rochester, trying to take matters into their own hands–or at least those of their mayors.

New Jersey Charter School Faces Hurdle

JOY RESMOVITS

The September opening of New Jersey’s first Hebrew-language charter school is being challenged over claims it hasn’t met enrollment requirements.
The East Brunswick school board this week asked an appeals court to temporarily block Hatikvah International Academy Charter School’s final charter, saying the school’s enrollment doesn’t meet charter-school regulations and that Hatikvah’s failure to provide enrollment information makes it difficult for the district to plan for the school year. The motion follows an earlier complaint by the school board to the state’s education commissioner, Bret Schundler.
State officials declined to comment on the pending case. “The charter school met requirements when its application was approved,” said a Department of Education spokesman, Alan Guenther. Hatikvah received its final charter from the education commissioner on July 6. New Jersey code requires charter schools to verify 90% of enrollment by June 30; in the case of Hatikvah, that would have been 97 of its 108-student capacity.

Scissors, Glue, Pencils? Check. Cleaning Spray?

When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.
“The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,” Emily’s mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.
Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.

Politics steers K-12 stimulus off course

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

President Barack Obama and Congress rescued the nation’s financially-strapped schools last week with a new stimulus bill that includes $10 billion in emergency aid for education.
At least that’s the simple, heroic story the president and fellow Democrats tried to tell.
The truth, however, is far more complex and far less heroic. Consider:
While schools will benefit from the additional money, many school districts, including Madison’s, are concerned about the requirements for how the money can be spent. The bill’s lack of flexibility may penalize schools that made tough budget decisions and reward schools that took the easiest way out of fiscal problems.

Managing education in America

Ray Fisman

In 1983, a presidential commission issued the landmark report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” The report warned that despite an increase in spending, the U.S. public education system was at risk of failure “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,” the report declared, “we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often quotes the commission before discussing how U.S. schools have fared since it issued its report. Despite nearly doubling per capita spending on education over the past few decades, American 15-year olds fared dismally in standardized math tests given in 2000, placing 18th out of 27 member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Six years later, the U.S. had slipped to 25th out of 30. If Americans have been fighting against mediocrity in education since 1983, they are losing the battle.
What could turn things around? At a recent event that I organized at the Columbia Business School, Klein opened with his harsh assessment of the situation, and researchers offered some stark options for getting American education back on track. We could find drastically better ways of training teachers or improve our hiring practices so we’re bringing aboard better teachers in the first place. Barring these improvements, the only option left is firing low-performing teachers–who have traditionally had lifetime tenure–en masse.

Hong Kong pupils head north for a new class system

Elaine Yau

Fion Chan Chui-tung could barely utter a complete sentence in Putonghua or English a year ago.
Now, after 12 months at Utahloy International School, a sprawling and pristine international school in Guangzhou, the Hong Kong teen converses effortlessly with her ethnically diverse schoolmates.
Fion, 18, is one of a growing number of pupils who have upped sticks and headed north to study. Enrollment of Hongkongers in international schools in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is rising by 5 to 10 per cent a year.
Parents who spurn prestigious international schools in Hong Kong in favour of mainland ones cite a list of factors: lower tuition fees, low living costs, a strict teaching regimen and bucolic campuses where not a word of Cantonese is spoken.
Fion’s mother, Luk Yim-fong, a businesswoman, transferred her daughter from Heung To Secondary School in Tseung Kwan O to Utahloy so that she would not be surrounded by Cantonese speakers. “Although Heung To offers Putonghua classes, all the students speak Cantonese after class,” she says. “From my business dealings with multinational corporations like Samsung, even Korean businessmen speak fluent Putonghua. Mandarin is a language my daughter must master in order to thrive in future.”

Why Does College Cost So Much?

Stephen Spruiell

One of the most popular articles on Digg yesterday was titled, “Why Does College Cost So Much?” — I guess it’s that time of year. The article was written by a pair of economics professors who have written a forthcoming book on the subject. The authors argue that the primary factors driving college-tuition inflation are:
1. The labor-hours needed to provide this “artisanal” service have not declined;
2. The cost of employing the highly educated workers needed to provide the service has gone up; and
3. The cost of the technologies employed in higher education has risen faster than the cost of other technologies.
I’m interested to see what kind of evidence the authors provide for this thesis in their book, because I’m not at all persuaded by this article. The authors don’t bother to mention the argument, even for the purpose of dismissing it, that the primary factor driving college-tuition inflation is actually ballooning federal tuition support: Tuition keeps going up because the federal government ensures that students can afford to pay it.

Hundreds of Colleges Fail to Make the Grade on Financial Responsibility

Goldie Blumenstyk, Brian O’Leary, and Alex Richards

A total of 319 degree-granting private institutions have failed the Education Department’s financial-responsibility test at some point in the past three years, receiving a composite score below 1.5.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin Ranks 12th in Per Capita Property Taxes

The Tax Foundation.

Pay raises for new N.J. teachers contracts are smallest in at least 30 years

Lisa Fleisher

As Gov. Chris Christie campaigned against teacher raises during his first six months in office, unions and school districts agreed to the lowest pay hikes in more than three decades, according to a survey released Thursday by the New Jersey School Boards Association.
Teachers in 75 districts who settled contracts in the first half of the year will see an average raise of 2.03 percent for the 2010-11 school year, the association said. That’s the lowest pay increase in the more than 30 years the group has kept track — and doesn’t include an additional 18 districts that broke into contracts to freeze salaries.
Association spokesman Frank Belluscio said the chief factor was the $1.3 billion in state education aid cut since January, leaving many districts faced with a choice: cut pay or see colleagues fired and positions frozen.

N.J. Education Commissioner Bret Schundler to tell Senate panel of his priorities

Tom Hester, Sr.

The state Senate Education Committee will meet on Monday to discuss a measure that would revamp New Jersey’s charter school regulation system.
State Education Commissioner Bret D. Schundler, who supports the expansion of charter schools, is scheduled to attend the hearing to outline the Christie administration’s priorities regarding education in New Jersey.
The meeting will also focus on bill S-2198, a measure sponsored by Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) and Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham (D-Hudson), which would enable Rutgers University to authorize charter schools. The bill is designed to expedite the approval of charter school applications, and permit the authorization of special purpose charter schools.

High school football still feeling effects of economy

Michael Carvell:

If you received a scouting report from high school football coaches on the economy and its impact on their sport, it would read a little like this: It’s about the same as last year, but we seem to be making wiser spending decisions.
Things don’t seem to be as gloomy as months ago, when head coaches were being released because of layoffs. Then again, no one is quite ready to claim victory and predict an economic turnaround.
“It’s too early to see what the impact of all these things is going to be,” said Ralph Swearngin, executive director of the Georgia High School Association.

New Jersey Teacher Salary Settlements Drop

New Jersey Left Behind

New Jersey School Boards Association is reporting that recent teacher contract settlements have dropped sharply since January, with annual salary increases averaging 2.03% since January and 1.58% from April to June.
The latter figure includes, according to the press release,

23 districts where teachers have agreed to a wage freeze for the 2010-2011 school year. Overall, since January, 42 teachers’ groups have agreed to a one-year pay freeze for the 2010-2011 school year, and an additional 43 districts have agreed to other givebacks and concessions.

Group forms to promote Philadelphia charter schools

Martha Woodall

Noting that far more students attend charter schools in Philadelphia than are enrolled in the state’s second-largest school district, a group has formed to represent city charters.
Founders of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence say they want to publicize the successes of charter schools and reassure the public that most of the 74 charters are not being investigated for possible corruption.
The organization requires member schools to meet strict ethical standards and plans to create a website to help parents compare the performance of charter schools.
The nonprofit organization was scheduled to be announced Friday.
“There are 74 of us, and in a typical school district with 74 schools, there would be a public-relations representative,” said Jurate Krokys, chief executive officer of Independence Charter School in Center City and the group’s vice president. “The idea is to be a resource about charter schools in Philadelphia.”
The group’s mission statement calls it “an alliance of high-performing public charter schools committed to creating a path toward academic and personal excellence for all students.”

Proposed Madison Charter School Receives Major Grant

Channel3000, via a kind reader:

Minutes before the Badger Rock Middle School planning team presented its final proposal to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education Thursday, supporters received news that they had been awarded a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction in the amount of $200,000.
The proposed Badger Rock Middle School, which would open in the fall of 2011 on Madison’s south side, would be a year-round charter school and be part of a larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison-based Center for Resilient Cities.
The Resilience Research Center project is designed to be a four-acre campus with a working farm, a neighborhood center, café, adjacent city park and the proposed school.

iHelp for Autism For autistic children, the new iPad is an effective, portable device for teaching communication and social skills. It’s also way cool.

Ashley Harrell:

Three weeks had passed since Shannon Rosa had glanced over the numbers on her tiny blue raffle ticket. Like many other parents, she had agreed to cough up $5 not because she thought she had any real chance of winning, but to support the school.
Now, as she sat in her Honda Odyssey in a Redwood City parking lot, about to pick up some tacos for the family, her cellphone rang. It was the school secretary. Rosa had won the raffle.
Alone in her van, she screamed. Then she drove straight to Clifford School to claim her prize: a glistening new iPad.
Although Rosa already owned an iPod Touch, she had purposely held off on the iPad. She isn’t an early adopter; she likes to wait until the kinks are worked out. But for $5, she didn’t mind taking the iPad home one bit. Maybe Leo would like it.

What Can Parents Expect To See in English Language Arts Classrooms After Common Core’s Standards Begin To Be Implemented? A Worst Case Scenario–But Probably Not Far from Reality

Sandra Stotsky:

In June 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) offered the nation two sets of English language arts standards: one set called “college and career readiness anchor standards,” and the other, grade-level standards that build towards these anchor standards. With few exceptions, both sets of standards consist of content-empty and culture-free generic skills. Why are they so bereft of substantive content? In large part because they reflect a faulty diagnosis of why many American students are unprepared for authentic college-level work. The misdiagnosis comes from CCSSI’s reliance on the results of ACT surveys to guide the development of its standards.
Several years ago, ACT surveyed thousands of post-secondary instructors to find out what they saw as the chief problems in their freshman students. Not surprisingly, the chief complaint was that high school graduates cannot understand the college texts they are assigned to read. Without an explanation for its reasoning, ACT leaped to two conclusions: (1) college students are not expected to read enough complex texts when they are in high school; and (2) they are not given enough instruction in strategies or skills for reading complex texts in high school.

Seattle Public Schools wrong to tie teacher evaluation to high-stakes tests

Patricia Bailey and Robert Femiano

The Seattle Public Schools administration is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores — a bone of contention in current negotiations with the Seattle Education Association. Guest columnists Pat Bailey and Robert Femiano, past union board members, argue that the district’s approach is wrong.
The Seattle school district is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores.
The current teacher evaluation includes student growth as a factor but the district wants an easier path and quicker time frames for teacher dismissals. The district officials’ plan is to use test scores to fire those teachers they claim are responsible for the poverty and racial academic gaps and reward those with high improvements in scores. History shows this carrot-and-stick approach not only fails to reduce the achievement gap but is ultimately unhealthy for good teaching.
One result of high-stakes testing is clear: The inordinate focus on test scores narrows what is taught. Diane Ravitch’s “The death and life of the great American school system” documents this and other unintended consequences. In order to keep their jobs, teachers will teach and re-teach to the test. Lost are the arts, music, PE, civics, science and even recess. Early-childhood experts point to rich school environments as crucial to healthy development, so who wants to cause the opposite?

Clusty search: Robert Femiano and Patricia Bailey.

Education Reform and Civil Rights

New Jersey Left Behind:

Here’s Sandra Alberti, Director of Math and Science Education at the NJ DOE. in NJ Spotlight:

We have this thing called Algebra I that exists in very different forms, even within the same school.

That’s her admirably candid response to the results of pilot tests of Algebra I and Biology, which demonstrates the gap in proficiency between poor and wealthy students. “On the biology test, just a quarter of the students in the poorest districts were proficient, compared with more than 80 percent in the wealthiest.” For Algebra I, “75 percent of students in the poorest districts were deemed “below basic,” while that number was 11 percent in the richest districts.”
In other words, 75% of NJ’s poor students failed both the biology test and the algebra test while only 20% of NJ’s wealthy students failed biology and 11% failed algebra. Odds are high, based on Alberti’s comment, that the vast majority of the poor students passed their coursework in spite of lack of proficiency.

Many Chicago Charter Schools Run Deficits, Data Shows

Sarah Karp

Even as the Obama administration promotes charter schools as a way to help raise the academic performance of the nation’s students, half of Chicago’s charter schools have been running deficits in recent years, an analysis of financial and budget documents shows, calling into question their financial viability.
On Monday, Chicago Public Schools released a bare-bones budget that included a cut of about 6 percent in per-pupil financing for charter schools — to $5,771 from $6,117 per pupil for elementary school students and to $7,213 from $7,647 per pupil for high school students. The cuts are a result of shrinking tax revenue and lagging support from the strapped state government. The city’s 71 charter schools, which enrolled 33,000 students last year and expect to enroll another 10,000 in the 2010-11 school year, stand to lose $15 million under the cuts.
It is difficult to compare the cuts with those that are being made at traditional schools because those schools do not receive money on a per-pupil basis, but district officials said they tried to make the amount of cuts comparable to those being made at traditional schools.

Chicago wants all schools year-round

Wendell Hutson:

On Monday 100,000 students started school as Chicago Public Schools moves toward a year-round schedule for all its schools.
“Ultimately, we want all our schools to become year-round and we welcome more schools to do so,” Ron Huberman, chief executive officer for CPS, told the Defender. “We do not mandate that schools operate year round. It is voluntary and up to the principals, parents and community.”
Year-round public schools are classified as Track E schools and students who attend these schools generally have better attendance and perform better on standardize tests, Huberman added.
“We will continue to push for more Track E schools,” explained Huberman. “Track E schools offer a safer environment and reduces the amount of time teachers have to spend reviewing work with students to get them caught up after the summer break.”

Critics: Teachers’ Jobs Measure Cheats Children

NPR

Congress is showering schools with $10 billion to bring back teachers who’ve been laid off. States are rushing to submit their applications to qualify for this unexpected summer windfall for school districts. The Education Department estimates the measure will save 160,000 jobs. The GOP says it’s a gift to teachers’ unions.

Does spending more money per student make a school better?

Tawnell Hobbs

So do school districts that spend more money per pupil perform better? I checked out the financial figures for the 2007-08* school year in Texas and found that more money per pupil doesn’t necessarily make a school better. Of the top 10 school districts and charter schools that spent more money in operating expenses per student, one held the state’s highest rating, “exemplary;” three were “recognized;” and the remaining six were “academically acceptable.” (Go to the jump for a list of these schools).
Carroll ISD, an exemplary school district, spent $8,301 per student, compared to $9,446 per student in the academically-acceptable Dallas ISD.

AP Eliminates Guessing Penalty

Scott Jaschik:

The College Board is about to announce a change in the Advanced Placement program that will end the penalty for wrong answers.
So after decades in which test takers were warned against random guessing, they may now do so without fear of hurting their scores. The shift is notable because the SAT continues to penalize wrong answers, such that those who cannot eliminate any of the answers are discouraged from guessing. The ACT, which has gained market share against the SAT in recent years, does not have such a penalty. At this point, the College Board is changing its policy only for the AP exams.
Under College Board policy to date, AP scores have been based on the total number of correct answers minus a fraction for every incorrect answer — one-fourth of a point for questions with five possible answers and one-third of a point for questions with four possible answers. The idea is that no one should engage in “random guessing.” The odds shift, of course, if a test taker can eliminate one or more possible answers, and the College Board’s advice to test takers acknowledges this, saying that “if you have SOME knowledge of the question, and can eliminate one or more answer choices, informed guessing from among the remaining choices is usually to your advantage.”

Illegals Estimated to Account for 1 in 12 U.S. Births

Miriam Jordan:

One in 12 babies born in the U.S. in 2008 were offspring of illegal immigrants, according to a new study, an estimate that could inflame the debate over birthright citizenship.
Undocumented immigrants make up slightly more than 4% of the U.S. adult population. However, their babies represented twice that share, or 8%, of all births on U.S. soil in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center’s report.
“Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on Pew’s analysis of the Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, also found that the lion’s share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the country and are therefore citizens.

Is this Education Reform?

Phyllis Tashlik

“The Fight Over Education in Washington” (editorial, July 31) says “teachers unions and other forces of the status quo” are trying to discredit the Obama education initiative, Race to the Top.
There is nothing “retrograde” about objecting to the pernicious effect standardized assessment has had on our children, schools and a generation of teachers. And there is nothing “reform”-minded about a policy — begun under President George W. Bush and adapted by the current administration — that reinforces those negative consequences.

Elia rated ‘above satisfactory’ by Hillsborough, FL school board

Sherri Ackerman:

Hillsborough School Board members rated superintendent MaryEllen Elia’s overall performance this past school year as “above satisfactory.”
In their annual review of the district leader, board members gave Elia high marks for her leadership, policy-making, organization, management, values and ethics.
Her total score was 282, just two points shy of outstanding and the same score as the previous school year.
Board members applauded Elia’s efforts in landing a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Board members also said Elia was “much more open minded to suggestions … ” while adding, “she needs to listen more.”

Outsource the Bad, Focus on the Core

Rafael Corrales

The future of education technology is one where schools continually outsource the activities they’re not as good at to focus on their specialty, educating the leaders of tomorrow. At its core, this is simply the law of comparative advantage: the ability of a party (individual or firm) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party (per Wikipedia). Basically, if someone does something better than you can, you should allow them to do it for you so you can focus on your specialty. This results in “gains from trade”.
The future of education technology will benefit from such gains. The internet enables schools to gain efficiencies by outsourcing what they can’t do as well to dedicated technologists, allowing more innovative education technology to flow into schools at a lower cost.
We’re already seeing this take place. While developing the LearnBoost Gradebook, we spoke to numerous schools (public and charter) about their technology needs. These were the most common situations we found:
Schools are loyal to their current technology provider despite expensive and inadequate software solutions. Legacy systems and entrenched interests generate steep switching costs and make it difficult to reach a consensus among stakeholders.
Schools are spending too much money outsourcing their data management to a Student Information System (SIS) provider.

Arguing the Merits

Greg Forster

Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.
Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers’ unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that “common” standards adopted by the states are really “federal” standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing “guilt by association” by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.
To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn’t insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect – whether intended or not – of advancing the unions’ agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble’s piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.

61 special ed school heads make more than NJ gov

Beth DeFalco

It’s not clear whether salary caps that Gov. Chris Christie wants for New Jersey’s school superintendents would apply to private schools funded with tax dollars.
An analysis by The Record newspaper found more than 60 administrators for the state’s 171 private special education schools earn more than the $175,000 cap.
None of the state’s special education private schools had more than 460 students last year.
Education Department spokesman Alan Guenther said the rules still are being drafted and will be presented in September, but the governor’s spokesman indicated that the cap should be consistent for all state-paid school administrator salaries.
Pay levels at special private schools are controlled by the state because most of the money the schools make is from tuition paid by the public schools that send students.
For the 2009-10 school year, the state Education Department capped compensation for administrators at private special education schools at $215,000 no matter how many students there were.

Student-Loan Debt Surpasses Credit Cards

Mary Pilon:

Consumers now owe more on their student loans than their credit cards.
Americans owe some $826.5 billion in revolving credit, according to June 2010 figures from the Federal Reserve. (Most of revolving credit is credit-card debt.) Student loans outstanding today — both federal and private — total some $829.785 billion, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com.
“The growth in education debt outstanding is like cooking a lobster,” Mr. Kantrowitz says. “The increase in total student debt occurs slowly but steadily, so by the time you notice that the water is boiling, you’re already cooked.”
By his math, there is $605.6 billion in federal student loans outstanding and $167.8 billion in private student loans outstanding. He estimates that $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.

Houston School District Board Agenda

Houston School District PDF:

WHEREAS, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) has worked to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions, will provide a road map for our future, and will transform our district into the top public school system in the nation; and
WHEREAS, the purpose of this long-term Strategic Direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Having an Effective Principal in Every School, Instituting Rigorous Instructional Standards, Ensuring Data-Driven Decisions and Accountability, and a Culture of Trust through Action; and
WHEREAS, the development of our long-term strategic plan, which began in February 2010, included diagnostic research to understand the current state of the district across various critical areas such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness to ensure the best ideas were being considered in the planning process. That process helped define the core initiatives for HISD’s transformation; and
WHEREAS, several months of community stakeholder engagement was included in the research process, including input from parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and the broader community. The feedback derived from the community-engagement process has guided the design of the overall Strategic Direction.
NOW THEREFORE, be it resolved that HISD and the Board of Education believe the key overarching strategies indicated above will help HISD achieve its goals set forth in the long-term Strategic Direction to become the best school district in America.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Property Taxes Emerge as Latest Front in Housing Crisis

Lee Banville:

Foreclosures make headlines. They are a big focus of the media’s attention as the troubled economy continues to dominate the news. But even where banks aren’t taking over properties, the collapse of the real estate market is having profound effects on local politics and county and city policymaking.
Here in Northwestern Montana, one needs only look at the situation happening on the shores of stunning Flathead Lake to see the housing crisis will continue to haunt communities for years to come. Residents along the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi had watched as property values climb throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Fueled by many out-of-staters looking for a second home with views of the glacier-carved Mission Mountains and only miles from Glacier National Park, property reappraisals including land and home soared to as much as $10,000 per foot of shoreline along the lake.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public & Private Sector Employment Changes

Donald J. Boyd and Lucy Dadayan

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released state-by-state employment data for the month of June. While national totals had already been released for June, this is the first look at June data for individual states. The national data had shown a very slight increase in private sector employment, compared with May, and slight continued declines in state and local government employment (see Figure 1). This is broadly consistent with past recessions, in which state and local government employment has been far more stable than private sector employment, and in fact rarely declined at all. As in past recessions, state and local government employment changes tend to lag responses in the private sector.

The Golden State’s War on Itself

Joel Kotkin:

California has long been a destination for those seeking a better place to live. For most of its history, the state enacted sensible policies that created one of the wealthiest and most innovative economies in human history. California realized the American dream but better, fostering a huge middle class that, for the most part, owned their homes, sent their kids to public schools, and found meaningful work connected to the state’s amazingly diverse, innovative economy.
Recently, though, the dream has been evaporating. Between 2003 and 2007, California state and local government spending grew 31 percent, even as the state’s population grew just 5 percent. The overall tax burden as a percentage of state income, once middling among the states, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation, says the Tax Foundation. Since 1990, according to an analysis by California Lutheran University, the state’s share of overall U.S. employment has dropped a remarkable 10 percent. When the state economy has done well, it has usually been the result of asset inflation–first during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and then during the housing boom, which was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created earlier in this decade.

India’s Higher Education Quality Deficit

Philip Altbach:

A constant theme in discussions with Indian academics, government officials, and business people concerns the low quality of the country’s rapidly expanding higher education system. India now ranks third in size, after China and the United States. The current cumbersome, and ineffective accrediting system is being dismantled. The government is proposing a new system — how it may work is as yet unclear.
India’s undergraduates attend more than 20,000 colleges, some quite small and of varying quality. It has been impossible to ensure the quality of these colleges. Private institutions are particularly problematical. They receive no government funding and, as a result, are entirely tuition dependent.
India’s burgeoning high tech and software industries complain that as many as 80 percent of engineering graduates are so poorly trained that they are not qualified for available jobs. Some are hired and then provided with additional training by their employer, while others are simply not hired. At least one of the software giants, Wipro, invests a major amount of money providing remedial training, and is also working with engineering colleges to improve teaching methods and standards.

Fairbanks School report fails to deliver complete picture, but stats help

Dermot Cole:

Twenty of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made “Adequate Yearly Progress” in the past year, while 15 did not.
But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.
Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.
As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.

Children of Illegal Immigrants Caught in Education Politics Crossfire

Peggy Orchowski:

The DREAM Act is back in the news. President Obama referred to it in his immigration speech at the American University on July 1. Groups of high school and college students have been marching and getting arrested for it all summer. Sen. Dick Durbin supported a Capitol Hill demonstration on it on July 20. Pollster Celinda Lake said at a Brookings Institute immigration panel in May: “How can anyone be against it?” [See who supports Durbin.]
So do you know what the DREAM Act is exactly?
Durbin describes it as “a narrowly tailored, bipartisan bill that would provide immigration relief to a select group of students who grew up in the United States but are prevented from pursuing their dreams by current immigration law”.
President Obama said he supports it because it would “stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents by denying them the chance to stay here and earn an education and contribute their talents to build the country where they’ve grown up.”

Notes on Teacher Merit Pay

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Susan Troller had a typically good and very substantive article in the Capital Times this week about merit pay for teachers and other dimensions of teacher evaluations.
Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let’s figure out what’s the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it’s the quality of the teacher. Well then, let’s evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let’s put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let’s have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.

Classes on the go: Distance education becoming more popularClasses on the go: Distance education becoming more popular

Todd Finkelmeyer

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Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison’s summer session, Peter Owen hasn’t spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.

Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he’s knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.

“I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed,” Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.

Welcome to the modern world of “distance education,” a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren’t sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it’s generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered — at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.

Houston’s New Math Tutoring Program: Seeking Math Fellows

Houston School District:

The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is a one-year Urban Education Fellowship Program located in Houston, Texas.
The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is looking for dynamic college graduates to commit one year to improving the academic achievement of inner-city students. You will tutor five pairs of middle- or high-school students in math, every day, for the whole school year. You will have the opportunity to build close relationships with each of your students, and the chance to make a significant impact on their lives. This program is unique in that it is the first large-scale tutoring program integrated into the students’ school day that has ever been launched in an urban public school district. With your help, Houston can become a leading innovator in the urban education field.

Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

MG Siegler:

Bill Gates thinks something is going to die too.
No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.
“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

Andrew Coulson wonders why Gatest distinguished between College and K-12? That’s a good question. There are many, many online resources that provide an excellent learning experience.

A Look at Wisconsin Teacher Compensation Increases

Matthew DeFour:

Statewide increases in teacher compensation contracts are on track to be the lowest in more than a decade following last year’s changes in state school district financing.
Based on 160 settled contracts out of 425 school districts, the average increase in compensation packages — including salary and benefits — is 3.75 percent, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Annual increases last dipped below 4 percent in 1999 and have averaged 4.13 percent since 1993, when the state first imposed revenue limits and introduced the so-called qualified economic offer (QEO) provision, which allowed districts to offer a 3.8 percent package increase instead of going to arbitration. The QEO was repealed in the state biennial budget approved last year, though revenue limits remain in place to keep property tax increases in check.
By another measure, the Wisconsin Educators Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, reported teacher salaries are on pace to increase about 2 percent. That doesn’t include benefits and certain assumptions about longevity raises. The increase is slightly less than the 2.3 percent annual average since 1993 and would be the lowest since 2003.

Education is key difference in Iowa gov race

Mike Glover:

As the Iowa governor’s race takes shape, some of the sharpest differences have been about the state’s education system, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of Iowa’s $5.3 billion budget.
Both Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and Republican Terry Branstad said education will be a priority, but they have made it clear that they favor different approaches for the state’s elementary and secondary schools. In fact, a key difference relates to children who haven’t even started kindergarten.
Culver speaks repeatedly about his success in making state-paid preschool available to nearly every 4-year-old in the state.

Schools Learn to Survive Those That Play Stabilizing Roles in Communities Escape Detroit Budget Cuts

Alex Kellog:

Based on the numbers, Carstens Elementary School on Detroit’s East Side should have closed by now. The building is 95 years old, and its enrollment last year fell to 234 from 719 a decade earlier, making it one of the fastest-shrinking schools in district history.
In the spring, Carstens was on a preliminary list of 45 schools targeted for closure by Robert C. Bobb, the state-appointed executive in charge of stabilizing the finances of Detroit Public Schools, and his team of accountants, planners and demographers.
But a deeper dive into the neighborhood changed their minds. Carstens, they discovered, was one of the few public institutions within miles. It also served as a health clinic, a seven-day-a-week recreation center and a food pantry. Closing Carstens, they concluded, would effectively turn off the lights on the whole neighborhood.

Lesson Plan in Boston Schools: Don’t Go It Alone

Mike Winerip:

Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around — the teachers — and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don’t know the old staff. “We had several good teachers asked to leave,” said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. “Including my sister who’s been a special-ed teacher 22 years.”

Teachers unions improve schools

Karen Aronowitz:

It is with dismay that I listen to the relentless attacks against public school teachers and their unions. Let’s set the record straight. Teachers’ unions lead the way in educational reform initiatives, fighting for our teachers to have the resources, materials and support necessary to deliver high quality instruction to America’s students.
I am proud of the work United Teachers of Dade has done to mobilize the public to vote for and support Florida’s Class Size Amendment. Charter and private schools brag about their small class sizes because of the individualized attention their students receive. We are forced to fight for appropriate class sizes for the students in our public schools.
I am proud of our members who organized with parents to insist that our schools maintain physical education, the arts, music, world languages and bilingual education. I am proud that our School Board took a position opposing Senate Bill 6 after the members of United Teachers of Dade made them aware of the destructive measures of this piece of legislation, an assault against the teachers and students in our public schools.

St. Cloud school board elections feature Somali candidates

Ambar Espinoza:

St. Cloud residents will vote in two elections Tuesday to narrow down candidates for school board seats.
For the first time in St. Cloud history, two of the candidates are Somali. One is running in a primary election that will narrow down the candidates from seven to six to get in the general election in November, while the other is running in a special election (that will narrow the candidates from three to two to replace a resigning school board member.
Hassan Yussuf has been living in St. Cloud since 2001. He has been closely following the problems that the St. Cloud school district has faced in recent months. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating allegations that school administrators ignored complaints of racial harassment. And in June, the superintendent resigned with one year remaining on his contract. The superintendent said he couldn’t deal with the school district politics anymore. Yussuf said he’s concerned about what he sees in the district.

Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds

Sam Dillon:

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school turnaround experts as they compete for the money.
A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.
Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither federal nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Badger Rock Middle School Proposal

Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee 1.8mb PDF:

Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,
Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we’ve got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
Thanks for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee

Madison Metropolitan School District Annual Equity Report 2010

Madison School District 4.8MB PDF:

The Board of Education adopted Equity Policy 9001 on June 2, 2008 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001). The policy incorporates recommendations from the Equity Task Force and charges MMSD administration with developing an annual report of the extent to which progress is being made towards eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement for all students. The Equity Task Force recommendations also requested annual data on the distribution of resources (budget, staff, programs, and facilities) by school.
On September 29, 2009, the Board of Education adopted a new strategic plan which established strategic priorities and objectives for the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Equity Task Force report and resulting Equity Policy 9001 were considered in the development of the strategic plan. This Annual Equity Report aligns the equity policy with priorities established in the strategic plan and reports equity progress using the same benchmarks as those used in the strategic plan.

Schools paying for tutors with mixed track record

Ericka Mellon:

School districts across Texas are paying tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for private tutoring that has a mixed track record of improving student test scores.

Even districts that want to stop footing the bill to ineffective providers are not allowed. The No Child Left Behind law guarantees free tutoring to low-income students who attend schools that repeatedly miss federal academic targets. Parents get to pick the tutoring provider from a state-approved list that has grown to more than 200 for-profit and nonprofit entities.

Since the law went into effect in 2002, Texas has never removed a provider from its list despite complaints from school districts and the state’s own evaluation that found seven of the eight tutoring companies studied had no significant impact on student achievement.

With the latest federal school ratings released last week, districts are preparing to send letters to parents from about 140 under-performing schools about the tutoring options. At the same time, officials with some of the state’s largest urban districts, including Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, are calling for tougher standards for the tutoring providers.

Obama to Tout Education Efforts

Janet Adamy:

The White House, concerned about the country’s lagging college-graduation rates, is pushing a plan aimed at helping an additional eight million young adults earn college degrees in the next decade.
In a speech at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday, President Barack Obama will tout a series of measures, many implemented over the past year, designed to put more Americans through college, according to White House officials.

More choices alter college textbook landscape

Eric Gorski:

On Friday afternoons between work and rugby practice, Brittany Wolfe would rush to the campus library hoping copies of her advanced algebra textbook had not all been checked out by like-minded classmates.
It was part of the math major’s routine last quarter at the University of California, Los Angeles: Stand in line at the reserve desk in the library’s closing hours with the goal of borrowing a copy for the weekend.
The alternative was to buy a $120 book and sell it back for far less. If she could sell it back at all.
“It’s like this terrible game of catch your books when you can,” said Wolfe, a new graduate who estimates she saved $800 a year using books on reserve and who now shares textbook tips as a counselor to incoming UCLA students. “It’s frustrating when you’re already stressed about school. Being stressed about textbooks doesn’t seem right.”

Separate but equal: More schools are dividing classes by gender

Karen Houppert:

On a Tuesday morning in February, Soheila Ahmad’s first-grade class at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School has just finished language arts. The 12 children — all boys, all African American — are tidying up their desks.
There are no windows in this basement room, but one wall, the backdrop for posters, is painted sky blue.
“I need the cleanup crew here,” shouts Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
“Let’s practice counting by 10s to 100,” Ahmad says.

Gates’s Millions: Can Big Bucks Turn Students Into Graduates?

Elyse Ashburn:

In the last year, advocacy groups have churned out reports on how all kinds of students–those who work, are minorities, attend less-selective colleges, or come from low-income families–struggle in higher education. They have talked about the needs of the modern work force, and how the United States is falling behind.
All together, the groups’ findings have been picked up by USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and so

Report: Unions favored in Ohio school construction

Julie Carr Smyth:

An official who oversees school building projects in Ohio abused his authority in handing out construction contracts, the state watchdog said in a Thursday report.
Ohio School Facilities Commission chief Richard Murray gave unions favored status and joined labor representatives in “arm-twisting sessions” with local school districts, according to the report by Inspector General Tom Charles.
The report also says Murray backed a union-friendly project-labor agreement worth $37 million that would result in payments to a union to which Murray still belongs and to his former union employer, Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust, known as LECET. The work would take place at the Ohio Schools for the Deaf and Blind, which are under the direct control of Murray’s commission.

Putting Our Brains on Hold

Bob Herbert, via a kind reader:

The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.
We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens’ lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.