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College Essay Contest

NY Times Magazine:

“College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.”
In the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s, college campuses played a major role in the culture and politics of the era. Today, according to author and historian Rick Perlstein, colleges have lost their central place in the broader society and in the lives of undergraduates.
We invite all college students to read “What’s the Matter with College,” Perlstein’s full article on the subject, and submit an essay of no more than 1,200 words in response.
Is the college experience less critical to the nation than it was a generation ago? We invite you to join the debate.

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College Board Tries to Police Use of ‘Advanced Placement’ Label

Tamar Lewin:

When Bruce Poch, the dean of admissions at Pomona College, sees a high school transcript listing courses in AP Philosophy or AP Middle Eastern History, he knows something is wrong. There is no such thing. Neither subject is among the 37 in the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.
“Schools just slap AP on courses to tag them as high-level, even when there’s no Advanced Placement exam in the subject,” Mr. Poch said. “It was getting to be like Kleenex or Xerox.”
But now, for the first time, the College Board is creating a list of classes each school is authorized to call AP and reviewing the syllabuses for those classes. The list, expected in November, is both an effort to protect the College Board brand and an attempt to ensure that Advanced Placement classes cover what college freshmen learn, so colleges can safely award credit to students who do well on AP exams.
“We’ve heard of schools that offered AP Botany, AP Astronomy, AP Ceramics, and one Wyoming school with AP Military History,” said Trevor Packer, director of the board’s Advanced Placement program. “We don’t have those subjects. One of the reasons colleges called for the audit was that they wanted to know better what it means when they see an AP on a transcript.”

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Abolish the SAT

Charles Murray:

The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.
For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for math, and now one for writing, with a possible 800 on each—is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after.
So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous. I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

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Too Many California Students Not Ready for College

Pamela Burdman and Marshall S. Smith

California’s vibrant economy is in jeopardy because we aren’t producing enough educated workers to meet the state’s future needs, according to a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California. The authors see only one solution: improving college attendance and graduation rates of Californians.
High-profile attempts by top universities to serve more low-income and minority students are important, but they won’t solve this problem. Only a limited number of students can attend these schools. Substantially increasing graduation rates will require lifting achievement levels for students who are not admitted to public universities.
If approved by lawmakers, a $33 million investment tucked inside the state budget represents a rare attempt to work toward that goal. The funds would ensure continuation of an audacious initiative that is shining a spotlight on a problem that has historically seemed intractable: the large number of students who don’t succeed in college because they don’t complete remedial English or math.
This effort represents the best chance in years to reverse that trend. It is being coordinated by instructors at the state’s community colleges, and no one is better positioned to tackle the problem. But the plan will not work without the serious engagement of colleges and sustained state support.

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ABSENT FROM CLASS

There are many important variables to consider in evaluating the causes for academic failure or success in the high school classroom. The training of the teacher, the quality of the curriculum, school safety, availability of books, etc., etc., are extensively studied, and all these have a part to play.
But I would argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, including classroom work. Why do so many of our high school students do so little academic work? Because they can get away with it.
A close study of the academic demands on students in the vast majority of our high school classrooms would disclose, I feel certain, that one of the principal reasons for their boredom is that they really have nothing to do but sit still and wait for the bell.
In most classrooms the chances of a student being called on are slight, and of being called on twice are almost nonexistent. If a student is called on and has not done the reading or other class preparation, most probably the teacher will just call on someone else. There are no real consequences for being unprepared, and as a result many, if not most, students are unprepared, and that also contributes to their boredom.

(more…)

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Preparing STEM Teachers: The Key to Global Competitiveness

Sean Cavanaugh 884K PDF:

The document, produced by the Washington-based American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, provides descriptions of 50 teacher-education programs around the country. Although the report does not identify any single program or approach as most effective in swelling the ranks of math and science teachers, it says that more institutions are establishing stronger ties between colleges of education, which focus on teacher preparation, and academic programs, which are devoted to training undergraduates in specific academic subjects.
Barriers between those academic departments sometimes prevent talented math and science undergraduates from considering teaching careers, advocates for improved teaching have argued. Those intrauniversity divides also make it more difficult for aspiring teachers to obtain vital content knowl-edge in math and science before entering the classroom, some say.

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Hoping to Retain Graduates, Maine Helps With Loan Costs

Katie Zezima:

Seeking to discourage Maine college graduates from leaving the state, Gov. John Baldacci signed a bill Monday giving tax credits to lower the cost of student loans for those who stay in the state.
The program, called Opportunity Maine, starts in January and will apply only to new loans. The tax credit will last 10 years, or until the recipient moves out of state.
“This is about our generation helping the next one,” Mr. Baldacci, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We’re telling our students, If you live, work and pay taxes in Maine, you’re not going to have this student debt hanging around your neck.”
The tax credits will be capped at $2,100 a year, about the cost of taking 10 credits at the Orono campus of the University of Maine, not including fees.

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Ten Ways to Reduce College Application Stress

Jay Matthews:

Three of America’s smartest and most experienced college admissions officers, Sarah D. Donahue, William R. Fitzsimmons and Marlyn McGrath Lewis of Harvard, had a piece in the Harvard Crimson recently saying, among other things, that they planned to “work with secondary schools in a renewed effort to make applying to college less complicated and stressful than it is today.”
I am not certain how that is going to happen in their case. They rejected a record 91.03 percent of applicants to Harvard this year. It seems to me the only way to reduce stress in their process is to franchise the brand name so we can have McHarvards in Beltsville, Md., Kankakee, Ill., Pismo Beach, Calif., and other deserving locales.

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College seems out of reach to most Latinos

Tyche Hendricks:

San Leandro High School senior Veronica Santana strode across the stage in a scarlet cap and gown to receive her high school diploma at a graduation ceremony earlier this month on the hillside campus of Cal State East Bay.
Come September, Veronica, 17, will join her older sister Erika at the Hayward campus overlooking San Francisco Bay and become part of the first generation of college students in her family. It’s a point of pride for the girls’ parents, a retired factory worker and a hair stylist, both Mexican immigrants who studied no further than middle school.
Attending college sets Veronica and her 20-year-old sister apart from most of the state’s Latinos, who are expected to become a majority of California’s population in another generation, according to state estimates, but who currently have the lowest levels of education of any racial or ethnic group in California.

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Montgomery, MD Superintendent Says NCLB is Lowering Standards: “Shooting Way too Low”

Daniel de Vise:

Thanks, Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said yesterday that the federal No Child Left Behind law has created a culture that has education leaders nationwide “shooting way too low” and that it has spawned a generation of statewide tests that are too easy to pass.
In a meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters, Weast said the federal mandate, with its push for 100 percent proficiency on state tests, has driven states toward lower standards that don’t prepare most students for college or careers.
“I think we’ve got to adjust up,” he said. “Or at least give some flexibility for those who would like to adjust up.”
Although some states, including Maryland, have been praised for holding children to comparatively high standards, Weast said the state curriculum, the statewide Maryland School Assessment and the High School Assessment all measure a minimal level of academic proficiency. The reason, he said, is that Maryland and most other states have leaders who want their kids “to look good” on such assessments.

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Blacks in Fairfax, Montgomery Outdo U.S. Peers in AP

Daniel de Vise:

Black students in Montgomery and Fairfax high schools are far more successful in Advanced Placement testing than their peers in nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Participation in the AP program has more than doubled in 10 years. But this surge in college-preparatory testing has not reached most African American students, according to a review of 2006 exam results in 30 school systems with about 5,000 or more black high school students.
Still, black students in both Montgomery and Fairfax counties passed AP tests in spring 2006 at the rate of more than eight tests for every 100 black students enrolled in the high school grades, the analysis found.
That is far greater than the success rate of African Americans nationwide, who produced about one passing AP test for every 100 students. None of the other school systems studied produced successful AP tests at even half the rate of Maryland’s and Virginia’s largest school systems.

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Prepare for the SAT Test, or Play With Your iPod? Have It Both Ways

Maria Aspan:

Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.
The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.
“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”

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Governor’s Graduation Speeches

Pauline Vu:

Most Popular: Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D), who — with eight commencement speeches — far out-orated his fellow governors.
Most Unique: Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), who delivered an address to a graduating class of one.
Class Clown: Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R), who drew laughs from Southern Utah University students for his frank talk about the bottom line: “Cost of tuition for a semester at SUU: $1,800. Cost of textbooks for that semester: $400. The looks on your family members’ faces when you’ve finally reached today: priceless.”
This year at least 22 governors — 15 Democrats and seven Republicans — made the commencement rounds to laud graduates.

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More on WKCE scores – Missing Students

Chan Stroman posted a valuable and in-depth examination of the District’s WKCE scores, and is it in the spirit of that posting that I would like to share my own little examination of our most recent test results. Rather than focusing on the scores of our students, this is an investigation of the numbers of MMSD students who took the WKCE exams. My intention is to simply present the data and let the reader draw their own conclusions.
This journey began with a question: How did students at West High School do on the WKCE exams now that the school has completed their three year Small Learning Communities grant. A relatively straightforward question that can be addressed by a visit to the DPI web site. However, in the process of looking at West High School’s test data from the Fall of 2006, it was surprising to see that only 39 African American students had been tested. Certainly there had to be more than 39 African American 10th graders at West this year, and if we want WKCE scores to provide an accurate assessment of the
“success” of a school, it is important that there isn’t any bias in which groups of students provide the assessment data.
The District makes available a number of breakdowns of student enrollment data by grade, by school, by ethnicity, by income status, and combinations thereof. However, there is not a breakdown that provides enrollment numbers by school by grade by ethnicity. Thus, if we want to know the number of African American 10th graders at a particular school we have to make an educated guess. We can do that by taking the percentage of African American students enrolled in the school and multiplying that by the number of students in the 10th grade. This gives us a rough estimate of the number of students enrolled. We can then compare that to the number of students who took the WKCE test to estimate the percentage of missing students.
West High School had 517 10th graders enrolled this past year, and 14% of the student body was African American. This suggests that there should be approximately 73 African American 10th graders at West which means that 34 students or 46.6% were not tested. This is very different from the overall proportion of West 10th graders not tested: 14.5% (DPI data show that 442 of the 517 students in the 10th grade were tested this past year). However, this is only one year’s data at one of our high schools. We need to put this data in context if we are to draw any conclusions. So here is the data for the four high schools for the past five years.

High School Year MMSD Enrollment Proportion African American Enrolled Predicted AA 10th Graders African American Tested Total 10th Grade Tested % AA Missing % Total Missing Discrepancy (AA% – Total %)
West 2002/03
624
14%
85.86
73
529
14.99%
15.22%
-0.24%
  2003/04
591
14%
79.45
54
484
32.04%
18.10%
13.93%
  2004/05
523
15%
77.09
68
457
11.78%
12.62%
-0.83%
  2005/06
563
14%
77.91
75
489
3.74%
13.14%
-9.41%
  2006/07
517
14%
72.98
39
442
46.56%
14.51%
32.05%
East 2002/03
598
21%
125.91
85
481
32.49%
19.57%
12.93%
  2003/04
538
22%
116.39
91
437
21.81%
18.77%
3.04%
  2004/05
538
21%
113.54
94
444
17.21%
17.47%
-0.26%
  2005/06
501
23%
114.15
93
443
18.53%
11.58%
6.95%
  2006/07
472
22%
105.64
81
385
23.32%
18.43%
4.90%
La Follette 2002/03
416
12%
50.23
42
373
16.38%
10.34%
6.05%
  2003/04
464
14%
63.72
41
385
35.66%
17.03%
18.63%
  2004/05
427
16%
67.40
50
355
25.81%
16.86%
8.95%
  2005/06
456
17%
79.57
53
389
33.39%
14.69%
18.69%
  2006/07
466
21%
96.88
76
413
21.55%
11.37%
10.18%
Memorial 2002/03
577
14%
80.75
74
502
8.36%
13.00%
-4.64%
  2003/04
612
13%
87.55
74
528
15.47%
13.73%
1.75%
  2004/05
592
15%
92.74
59
491
36.38%
17.06%
19.32%
  2005/06
552
14%
96.48
77
471
20.19%
14.67%
5.52%
  2006/07
542
14%
94.01
94
488
0.01%
9.96%
-9.95%

What about other ways to look at the number of high school students who took the WKCE’s?

(more…)

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A Graduate of Stanford by Way of a Transfer

Samuel Freedman:

The bridge between past and present, the ligament connecting her five years as an undergraduate, was a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, one specifically intended for students like Ms. Alcazar who make the leap from a community college to an elite university. In its seven years of operation, the foundation has given $10 million to 249 such recipients.
These students are often immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the first in their families to attend college. Most have gone to community college not because they lack the academic talent for a four-year institution, but because they lack the money. And by the time they would enter a college or university, generally as a junior, much of the available financial-aid money would have been spent enticing incoming freshman to enroll.

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“Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning”

Charlie Munger’s commencement speech at the USC Law School:

Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
…so if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.

Munger is Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Clusty search on Charlie.

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Giving Proper Credit To Home-Schooled

Michael Alison Chandler:

In the pursuit of a homemade high school education, Jay Voris played drums in Guinea, Colin Roof restored a 134-year-old sailboat in Ireland, and Rebecca Goldstein wrote a 600-page fantasy novel and took calculus at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
The independent-minded Maryland students and two dozen others gathered at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Annapolis one afternoon this month for an alternative graduation ceremony that is becoming more common across the country as home schooling expands. Now the movement is gaining ground in a crucial arena: college admissions.

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Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still

I have a friend who is fond of saying “never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence.” These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS — and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town — have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.

(more…)

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Memorial High Junior Scores Perfect on the ACT

Kristin Czubkowski:

Alex Trevino had a good feeling when he walked out of the ACT testing room on a cold, winter morning this past February.
“I felt good,” he said. “I didn’t know how good at the time, but I knew I did well.”
That confidence, however, did not prevent the jolt that went through the Madison Memorial junior when he opened a letter from CEO Richard Ferguson of the ACT Board eight weeks ago congratulating him on being one of 30 students in the country — and the only one in the state — to have earned a perfect composite score on the test.
“He has a look on his face when he’s really, really excited, and he could not wipe that grin off his face,” Alex’s mother Jackie D’Aoust-Trevino said. “He just said, I got a 36.'”

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Multiplying Benefits of College for Everyone

Jay Matthews:

Many intelligent people don’t think going to college is so important. They send me emails whenever I vent about the need to prepare more low-income students for higher education. They ask a simple, excellent question: Why should college be for everybody?
They say some kids are not capable of succeeding in college. They say some kids don’t want to go to college. They say if everyone went to college, who would do the important non-college jobs, like plumbing and carpentry and auto repair? They say if everyone went to college, we would have a lot of unemployed college graduates–as has happened in some underdeveloped countries–with neither the skills nor the desire to work with their hands.

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Elite Colleges Open New Door to Low-Income Youths

Sara Rimer:

o Mr. Jack, unlike many of his classmates, food stamps are not an abstraction. His family has had to use them in emergencies. His mother raised three children as a single parent and earns $26,000 a year as a school security guard. That is just a little more than half the cost of a year’s tuition, room and board, fees and other expenses at Amherst, which for Mr. Jack’s class was close to $48,000.
So when Mr. Jack, now 22 and a senior, graduates with honors on May 27, he will not just be the first in his family to earn a college degree, but a success story in the effort by Amherst and a growing number of elite colleges to open their doors to talented low-income students.
Concerned that the barriers to elite institutions are being increasingly drawn along class lines, and wanting to maintain some role as engines of social mobility, about two dozen schools–Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Virginia, Williams and the University of North Carolina, among them–have pushed in the past few years to diversify economically.

Erin O’Connor has more.

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2007 Challenge Index: Ranking America’s High Schools

Memorial is the only Madison High School in the top 1200 (1084), while Verona ranked 738th.
Washington Post:

The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.

Milwaukee’s Rufus King is Ranked 259th. Marshfield High is ranked 348th. Whitefish Bay is ranked 514th, Shorewood 520th. New Berlin West 604th. Brookfield Central is 616th. Hartland Arrowhead is 706th. Nicolet is 723rd. Verona is 738th. Grafton 810th. Nathan Hale (West Allis) is 854th. Brookfield East is 865th. Greendale is 959th. Riverside University School (Milwaukee) is 959th. Madison Memorial is ranked 1084th. Salem’s Westosha Central is 1113rd. West Bend West is 1172nd while West Bend East is 1184th.
Jay Matthews:

The Challenge Index list of America’s best high schools, this year with a record 1,258 names, began as a tale of just two schools. They were Garfield High School, full of children of Hispanic immigrants in East Los Angeles, and Mamaroneck High School, a much smaller campus serving very affluent families in Westchester County, N.Y. I had written a book about Garfield, and the success of its teachers like Jaime Escalante in giving low-income students the encouragement and extra time they needed to master college-level Advanced Placement courses and tests.
I was finishing a book about Mamaroneck, and was stunned to find it was barring from AP many middle-class students who were much better prepared for those classes than the impoverished students who were welcomed into AP at Garfield. That turns out to be the rule in most U.S. schools — average students are considered not ready for, or not deserving of, AP, even though many studies show that they need the challenge and that success in AP can lead to success in college.
Nearly everyone I met in New York thought Mamaroneck was a terrific school because its parents were rich and its state scores high, even though its building was in bad shape and its policy of reserving AP only for students with top grades made no sense. Nearly everyone I met in Los Angeles thought Garfield was a terrible school because its parents were poor and its state scores low, even though it was doing much more to prepare average and below-average students for college than any other school I knew. It was like rating restaurants not by the quality of their food, but by the bank accounts of their customers.
I was covering Wall Street for The Washington Post at that time, and not liking the job much. My life was ruled by indexes¿the Dow Jones, the Standard & Poor’s. I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important –which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, in a town of mansions and country clubs.

Matthews participated in an online chat regarding the Challenge Index. A transcript is available here.
Related: MMSD High School Redesign Committee and West’s English 10 and Bruce King’s Report on West’s SLC (Small Learning Community) Project. Joanne Jacobs on Palo Alto High School’s non-participation.

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A dangerous promise to Wisconsin’s little 8th graders

Jo Egelhoff:

The Wisconsin Covenant. Kind of a spiritual sound to it, don’t you think? Come to the mountaintop, do a couple of thou shalt not’s, hit the books, and you’re set.
It’s great stuff. So Governor Doyle travels all over creation, parts the Red Sea and declares education for all.
Normally, I would hardly notice this showmanship and posturing by the governor. But this Covenant business is upsetting. And here’s why.
First of all, this program of post-secondary education for everybody is by NO means a done deal. It’s one piece of a huge budget proposal that would once again end in deficit, despite extraordinary proposed tax and fee increases. It hasn’t hardly been discussed in Joint Finance, except long enough for the Committee to say “your plan is pretty sparse – please come back when you have more details.”
So come back they did. Last Friday, JFC co-chairs Rhoades and Decker received a letter from Secretary of Administration Morgan. Here are just some of the details.

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Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education

Tyler Cowen:

The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.
The extent of outsourcing, for instance, is not yet high enough to have much effect on American wages. Even if a call center is set up in India, this helps American business expand at home. Most generally, the net flow of investment is into the United States, not away from it. It appears that more American jobs are “in-sourced” than outsourced.
Nor should we be distracted by the gains of the top 1 percent. The goal should be to elevate the poor, not knock down the tall poppies. Microsoft has created cheap software and many jobs, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, is giving away most of his fortune.

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Microsoft Unveils Math 3.0 and Latest ACT Report: Rigor at Risk….

PRNewswire:

According to an independent survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp., 77 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents claim math and science are the most difficult homework subjects for students, yet only 36 percent of parents feel capable to help their children. While parents and teachers struggle to find the time or knowledge to provide their kids with adequate assistance in math and science, students can grow frustrated by the lack of resources and the amount time it may take to find relevant guidance in these difficult subjects. To address these issues, Microsoft has developed a low-cost, comprehensive resource for middle school, high school and entry-level college students.
Today Microsoft releases Microsoft® Math 3.0, a new software solution designed to help students complete their math and science homework more quickly and easily while teaching important fundamental concepts. Microsoft Math 3.0 features an extensive collection of capabilities to help students tackle complicated problems in pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, physics and chemistry, and puts them all in one convenient place on the home PC. Similar to a hired tutor, Microsoft Math 3.0 is designed to help deepen students’ overall understanding of these subjects by invoking a full-featured graphing calculator and step-by-step instructions on how to solve difficult problems.

Related, maybe? Karen Arenson:

Only one-quarter of high school students who take a full set of college-preparatory courses — four years of English and three each of mathematics, science and social studies — are well prepared for college, according to a new study of last year’s high school graduates released today by ACT, the Iowa testing organization.
The report analyzed approximately 1.2 million students who took the ACT college admissions test and graduated from high school last June. The study predicted whether the students had a good chance of scoring C or better in introductory college courses, based on their test scores and the success rates of past test takers.
The study concluded that only 26 percent were ready for college-level work in all four core areas, while 19 percent were not adequately prepared in any of them.

ACT Report: Rigor at Risk: 350K PDF

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College program lacking price tag

Megan Twohey:

On Thursday, Wisconsin’s 75,000 eighth-graders will get their first opportunity to participate in the Wisconsin Covenant, a program that Gov. Jim Doyle hopes will lead to dramatic progress in college participation in the state.
Students who sign the pledge form are promising to maintain a B average through high school graduation, stay out of trouble, perform community service, meet college entrance requirements and apply for financial aid.
Doyle says students who fulfill the pledge will be guaranteed a spot after graduation in one of the state’s colleges or universities, along with a financial aid package based on need. If students from low-income families cannot afford college with existing financial aid, he says, the state will provide more assistance to close the gap.
But with enrollment in the program about to begin, the Democratic governor so far has provided few details to the Legislature, in which Democrats control the Senate and Republicans control the Assembly. Some lawmakers, frustrated by lingering questions and the absence of a price tag, are vowing to kill the Wisconsin Covenant.

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Community Colleges

John Merrow:

Community colleges today do far more than offer a ladder to the final years. They train the people who repair your furnace, install your plumbing, take your pulse. They prepare retiring baby boomers for second or third careers, and provide opportunities for a growing number of college-age students turning away from the high cost and competition at universities. And charged with doing the heavy remedial lifting, community colleges are now as much 10th and 11th grade as 13th and 14th.
It’s a long to-do list on a tightening public purse. Two-year colleges receive less than 30 percent of state and local financing for higher education, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. Yet they are growing much faster than four-year colleges and universities, enrolling nearly half of all undergraduates. That’s 6.6 million students. Add those taking just a course or two, and the total reaches some 12 million.

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Why It Is NOT Harder to Get Into Top Colleges

Jay Matthews:

“From a student’s perspective, the odds of getting into college are a function of two things: the number of qualified students who apply, and the number of slots that colleges make available. It’s true that the number of prospective college students is growing, as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all noted in nearly identical articles published recently. Driven by the baby-boom echo, the number of high school graduates jumped from 2.9 million in 2002 to 3.1 million in 2006, an increase of 8.4 percent.
“But the number of spaces in elite colleges is increasing too, at a nearly identical rate. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the 60-odd colleges and universities rated ‘Most Competitive” by Barron’s Guide to Colleges sent out 199,821 acceptance letters in 2002. In 2006, the number of ‘fat envelopes’ had increased to 215,738, an 8.0 percent jump. As the nation has grown, its elite colleges have grown along with it.
“Why, then, the high anxiety? Because college admissions scare stories aren’t based on the overall ratio of admissions to applicants. They’re based on the ratio of admissions to applications, as reported by individual colleges. And the number of applications to elite schools is skyrocketing, increasing 18.9 percent from 2002 to 2006.”

Kevin Carey:

Every spring, the media send a bolt of fear into the heart of the upper middle class. The message is clear: “Your children are never getting into a good college.”
As Ivy League universities report — once again — that admissions rates have fallen to record lows, newspapers rush to publish stories documenting the increasingly “frenzied” (variants: “frantic,” “brutal”) competition among students vying for a coveted slot in an elite school. The stock characters include the tearful student — dreams crushed under an avalanche of rejection letters — the angry parent, the frenzied guidance counselor, and the college admissions official or other expert who notes with grateful wonder, “If I had to apply to my alma mater today, I couldn’t get in.”
There’s just one problem: it’s not true. The declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications.

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Seven Ways Not to Pick a Study Abroad Program

Jay Matthews:

I did not give much thought to my college daughter’s plans to spend her spring semester last year in Chile. I did not study the brochures. I did not ask the study abroad office any questions. Neither my wife nor I had ever studied overseas. We had no stories to tell and no expertise to share. We figured this was one area where we would not be our usual overbearing, interfering selves, and let Katie take care of everything.
She did a fine job. But then she was robbed in Santiago. It was at a Starbucks where she liked to study. A young man approached and asked her what was in an espresso coffee. She thought this was an odd question, but he was good-looking and wasn’t until she finished her answer that she realized he had gotten a hand on the strap of her book bag — with wallet, passport, laptop and lots of other good stuff. In another second he was out the door. She never saw him, or her belongings, again.
I got the call that afternoon sitting where I am sitting now, at my computer at work. Katie was upset, but had already contacted the Santiago office of her study abroad program. They were helping her deal with the police and start the frustrating process of replacing everything she had lost.

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College Freshman Not Ready

Sherry Saavedra:

What students learn in high school doesn’t match with what they need to know as college freshmen, according to a national study released yesterday.
Professors believe high school teachers should cover fewer topics with more depth to prepare students for college. That is one of the findings of the survey by ACT, a nonprofit educational and testing organization.
“A really common complaint from (college) faculty is students not being able to put together a complete sentence properly,” said Erin Goldin, director of the Writing Center, which provides tutoring at Cal State San Marcos.
“When students come in here, . . . I try to explain the rules, but they don’t seem to have learned the structure of a sentence.”

ACT Report.
More here and here

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The American Freshman – Forty Year Trends

UCLA – Graduation School of Education:

The nation’s college freshmen are more financially advantaged today than they have been at any point in the last 35 years and come from families with a median income 60 percent higher than the national average, according to a new UCLA report that examined 40 years of data from UCLA’s national survey of entering undergraduates at four-year colleges and universities.
The report, “American Freshmen: Forty-Year Trends 1966–2006,”documents the values and characteristics of college freshmen nationwide and is part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
“As colleges and universities continue their financial policies of increasing tuition and fees, we are seeing direct effects on students that come from poorer families,” said José Luis Santos, UCLA assistant professor of education and an author of the report. “Poorer students alter their choices of whether or not to go to college at all, or choose a college based on financial costs and packages. Students from wealthier families can endure greater fluctuations in ‘sticker price’ than poorer students, and as a result, more students entering college come from homes that are increasingly wealthier than the national median income.”
In 2005, entering freshmen came from households with a parental median income of $74,000, 60 percent higher than the national average of $46,326. This represents a 14 percent increase from 1971, whenstudents’ median family income was $13,200, 46 percent higher than the national average of $9,028.

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Fooling the College Board

Scott Jaschik:

In the 1930’s, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting “the only thing we need to fear is itself,” which desdained competition as an alternative to cooperation for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression and succeeded communism.
Does that paragraph read like an excerpt of an essay with “reasonably consistent mastery” and that “effectively develops a point of view” and “demonstrates strong critical thinking, generally using appropriate examples”? Those are the College Board’s descriptions of the kinds of qualities that earn an essay a score of 5 (the second highest possible) on the essay portion of the SAT, a new and controversial part of the exam. And that is the score an essay with that paragraph (all punctuation, spelling, FDR’s new middle name and other “facts” verbatim) received from two readers when a student submitted it in October, having been coached on how to do so by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Science, math deficit holds back state

Shirley Dang
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Amid the whir of an overhead projector, Concord High School biology teacher Ellen Fasman sketched out the long, chubby legs of an X-shaped chromosome with her erasable marker.
“What do you remember from seventh grade about mitosis?” she asked the class.
Her question on cell division met with blank stares. From underneath his baseball cap in the back of the room, sophomore Vincent Thomas muttered in confusion.
“Wait, I don’t get this,” Thomas said. “We learned this in seventh grade?”
Even in her college prep biology class, students come less and less prepared each year, Fasman said.
“They’re every bit as bright as they’ve ever been,” said Fasman, who has taught for 16 years. However, they increasingly come hampered by smaller vocabularies, lacking knowledge of basic cell biology and unable to deal with fractions, she said.
“Their math skills are rather poor,” Fasman said. “When we do the metric system at the beginning of the year, it’s a killer for them. When we get into genetics, sometimes it’s hard for them, understanding ratios.”
American students — particularly those in California — come up short in math and science.

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Home Schoolers and College Applications

Ana Beatriz Cholo:

“For home-schoolers, it was basically a shut door for us because of the restrictions,” Sample said.
Last fall, however, UC Riverside joined a growing number of colleges around the country that are revamping application policies to accommodate home-schooled students.
The change came just in time for the 18-year-old Sample to apply and get accepted with a substantial scholarship.
Under UC Riverside’s new policy, home-schoolers can apply by submitting a lengthy portfolio detailing their studies and other educational experiences.
Sample’s package showed he had studied chemistry, U.S. history and geometry, rewired a house and helped rebuild a medical clinic in Nicaragua.

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Better Serving Gifted Students of Poverty

The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has just published the proceedings of their recent conference on high potential learners of poverty. The book is called “Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Learners” and includes chapters by Donna Ford, Alexinia Baldwin and Paula Olszewski-Kibilius.
To download or order a free copy of “Overlooked Gems,” go to www.nagc.org and click on “New at NAGC: Conference Proceedings.”
Also on the NAGC website, a brief article by Paul Slocumb and Ruby Payne entitled “Identifying and Nurturing the Gifted Poor”. Slocumb and Payne are the authors of “Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty.”
Previous post on academically talented MMSD students of color and poverty: https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/01/theyre_all_rich.php
Article on the negative effects of detracking, especially for high achieving students of color and poverty (cited by U.W. Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies Adam Gamoran, Ph.D., in his chapter “Classroom Organization and Instructional Quality“): “If Tracking is Bad, Is Detracking Better?” by J. E. Rosenbaum (American Educator, 1999).

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Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap since the Rock & Roll

Emily Nussbaum:

As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
After a few minutes of this, I turn to Gasaway and ask if he has a Web page. He seems baffled by the question. “I don’t know why I would,” he says, speaking slowly. “I like my privacy.” He’s never seen Hannah’s Facebook profile. “I haven’t gone on it. I don’t know how to get into it!” I ask him if he takes pictures when he attends parties, and he looks at me like I have three heads. “There are a lot of weirdos out there,” he emphasizes. “There are a lot of strangers out there.”
There is plenty of variation among this younger cohort, including a set of Luddite dissenters: “If I want to contact someone, I’ll write them a letter!” grouses Katherine Gillespie, a student at Hunter College. (Although when I look her up online, I find that she too has a profile.) But these variations blur when you widen your view. One 2006 government study—framed, as such studies are, around the stranger-danger issue—showed that 61 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds have a profile online, half with photos. A recent pew Internet Project study put it at 55 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds. These numbers are rising rapidly.

Virginia Postrel has more, including Greg Lukianoff and Will Creeley’s “Facing off over Facebook“:

tudents, be warned: the college of your choice may be watching you, and will more than likely be keeping an eye on you once you enter the hallowed campus gates. America’s institutions of higher education are increasingly monitoring students’ activity online and scrutinizing profiles, not only for illegal behavior, but also for what they deem to be inappropriate speech.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, the speech codes, censorship, and double standards of the culture-wars heyday of the ’80s and ’90s are alive and kicking, and they are now colliding with the latest explosion of communication technology. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the largest battleground yet for student free speech. Whatever campus administrators’ intentions (and they are often mixed), students need to know that online jokes, photos, and comments can get them in hot water, no matter how effusively their schools claim to respect free speech. The long arm of campus officialdom is reaching far beyond the bounds of its buildings and grounds and into the shadowy realm of cyberspace.

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Minnesota Governor Proposes $75M for Additional College Prep

Megan Boldt:

In his State of the State speech last month, Pawlenty argued that too many Minnesota students coast through high school with no plan for what they are going to do after graduation.
To combat that, the Republican governor wants lawmakers to give $75 million over the next two years to high schools so they can teach tough courses that clearly relate to future careers or majors and to require every student to earn one year of college credit before they graduate.
He also wants all high school students to take four years of a foreign language and to get workplace training and internships so they can be qualified for jobs at companies that will have to compete in a global economy.

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Studies Find Benefits to Advanced Placement Courses

Jay Matthews:

In the midst of a national debate over whether Advanced Placement courses place too much pressure on U.S. high school students, a team of Texas researchers has concluded that the difficult courses and three-hour exams are worth it.
In the largest study ever of the impact of AP on college success, which looked at 222,289 students from all backgrounds attending a wide range of Texas universities, the researchers said they found “strong evidence of benefits to students who participate in both AP courses and exams in terms of higher GPAs, credit hours earned and four-year graduation rates.”
A separate University of Texas study of 24,941 students said those who used their AP credits to take more advanced courses in college had better grades in those courses than similar students who first took college introductory courses instead of AP in 10 subjects.

Madison United for Acadmic Excellence has a useful comparison of AP and other “advanced” course offerings across the four traditional Madison high schools. Much more on local AP classes here.
Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Learning Consortium.
Verona High School Course Prospectus, including AP.
Middleton High School Course List.
Monona Grove High School Course Catalog [320K PDF]
Sun Prairie High School Courses.
Waunakee High School Course Index.
McFarland High School Course Guide.
Edgewood High School.
Jay Matthews has more in a later article.

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Madison School Board Discusses an Independent Math Curriculum Review

The Madison School Board’s 2006/2007 Goals for Superintendent Art Rainwater included the “Initiatiation and completion of a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum”. Watch the discussion [Video] and read a memo [240K PDF] from the Superintendent regarding his plans for this goal. Much more here and here.
Barbara Lehman kindly emailed the Board’s conclusion Monday evening:

It was moved by Lawrie Kobza and seconded by Ruth Robarts to approve the revised plan for implementation of the Superintendent’s 2006-07 goal to initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent, and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum as presented at this meeting, including extension for completion of the evaluation to the 2007-08 school year. The Board of Education shall receive a report in 2006-07 with analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-test scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools in addition to reports in subsequent years. Student representative advisory vote * aye. Motion carried 6-1 with Lucy Mathiak voting no.

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WI – MI College Tuition Pact in Jeopardy

Megan Twehey:

The University of Minnesota is threatening to pull out of a tuition reciprocity agreement between Minnesota and Wisconsin unless its students from Wisconsin start paying between $1,200 and $2,700 more a year.
Wisconsin has rejected the proposal, but the University of Minnesota is pushing back.
“We would like to reach agreement within the existing agreement,” said Craig Swan, vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota. “That’s the preferable outcome. But I don’t want to rule other things out.”

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Learning the Three R’s – In College

Heather LeRoi:

Should he have learned about such math concepts well before getting to college? Probably.
But the reality is, he hadn’t. And remedial education classes – or developmental coursework, as many colleges prefer to call it these days – offer Lythjohan, who’s considering a career in nursing or business, that second chance.
Lythjohan is far from alone.
According to a 2004 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, 28 percent of incoming freshmen nationwide enrolled in at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course at postsecondary institutions in 2000. At public two-year colleges, the figure jumps to 42 percent.

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Schools Turn Down the Heat on Homework

Nancy Keates:

Some of the nation’s most competitive schools are changing their homework policies, limiting the amount of work assigned by teachers or eliminating it altogether in lower grades. There also is an effort by some schools to change the type of homework being assigned and curtail highly repetitive drudge work.
The moves are largely at elite schools in affluent areas, including the lower school at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Calif., Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles and Riverdale Country Day School in New York City. The effort is by no means universal, and in fact some national statistics show that the amount of homework is continuing to grow.
Still, the new policies at such schools are significant because moves by institutions of this caliber are closely watched by educators and often followed.
Seventeen-year-old Jacob Simon endorses the new approach. When he gets home from school, he usually watches sports on TV. But the senior at Gunn High School isn’t slacking off: He’s taking five Advanced Placement courses this year, including calculus and physics. What’s changed is his school’s efforts to — in the words of one of its teachers — “make the homework assignments worthy of our students’ time.” Mr. Simon says, “It’s nice to be able to relax a little.”

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Education & Intelligence Series

Charles Murray posted three articles this week on Education and Intelligence, a series that generated some conversation around the net:

  • Intelligence in the Classroom:

    Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
    We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

  • What’s Wrong with Vocational School?

    Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
    These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
    In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one’s inability to recognize one’s own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

  • Aztecs vs. Greeks:

    How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.
    But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children’s talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.
    We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

Joanne has notes [more], along with Nicholas Lehmann, who comments on Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Technorati search. Clusty Search on Charles Murray. Brad DeLong posts his thoughts as well.

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Why You Should Learn Algebra

David Eggenschwiler:

EVERY YEAR, as many California high school seniors struggle with basic algebra, which is required for graduation, Times readers complain, “Who needs it? How many students will ever use it?” Well, I use it every day; I’m using it now, even though I haven’t worked an algebraic equation since my son was in the seventh grade several years ago.
Mathematics and science are unnatural practices. As physics professor Alan Cromer has brutally and elegantly written, “the human mind wasn’t designed to study physics,” and of course mathematics is the language of physics. “Design” here does not indicate an intelligent designer, which would suggest a creator with a math phobia. Rather it indicates evolutionary processes by which the human brain and mind have come to be what they are.
During the approximately 2 million years that it took for our Homo forebears to progress from habilis to sapiens, they had little use for mathematical reasoning abilities. Their sapientia seems to have been more suited in a good Darwinian sense to the immediate demands of their survival, such as eating, mating and avoiding premature death. Whether for good or ill, as time may tell, our situations have changed much in the last few thousand years, and so have demands on our poor, lagging minds. I don’t mean only the obvious and oft-repeated claim that technical jobs require greater skills. That is clear enough in auto mechanics and computer programming. I mean the need to think abstractly, systematically and rationally in various ways.

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Trying to Find Solutions in Chaotic Middle Schools

Elissa Gootman:

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.
The difficulty of educating this age group is felt even in many wealthy suburban school districts. But it is particularly intense in cities, where the problems that are compounded in middle school are more acute to begin with and where the search for solutions is most urgent.
In Los Angeles, the new superintendent, David L. Brewer III, has vowed to transform middle schools as a top priority, and low-performing schools are experimenting with intensive counseling.
In Philadelphia and Baltimore, school systems are trying to make the middle school problem literally disappear, by folding grades six through eight into K-8 schools. In one Columbia, S.C., school district, all five middle schools have begun offering some form of single-sex classes, on the theory that they promote self-esteem and reduce distractions.

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Schools Seek and Find Gifted Students

Daniel de Vise:

Not every student at Bannockburn is above average. But 70 percent of the third-grade class has been identified as gifted, based on tests and other academic indicators. The school serves one of the largest concentrations in the region of students capable of working beyond their assigned grade, sometimes well beyond.
“We’re constantly trying to find things to pique their interest,” said Peterson, whose students have lately practiced dividing numbers into 32nds in their heads.
The bumper crop of gifted children at Bannockburn is a result not of some exclusive magnet program but of Montgomery County’s aggressive policy on identifying academic talent. The county screens every second-grader for extraordinary ability. In most other school systems, it’s left to parents or teachers to initiate the process. Also, Montgomery’s criteria for “giftedness” are unusually broad, covering not just intelligence data but also classroom performance and the impressions of teachers and parents.
That approach drives up the numbers — 40 percent of Montgomery’s 139,000 students carry the label — and creates a gifted majority at schools such as Bannockburn, which serves an affluent, highly educated neighborhood.

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NCLB and the Stress Between “Bringing up the Bottom and Supporting High End Kids”

A reader involved in these issues emailed this article by Andrew Rotherham:

Second, the story highlights my colleague Tom Toch’s criticism that a lot of tests states are using under NCLB are pretty basic. That’s exactly right. I’m all for better tests, but isn’t that, you know, an indictment of schools that can’t even get kids over a pretty low bar rather than an indictment of the law? In other words, excepting some fine-grained issues around special populations, NCLB can’t be wildly unrealistic in what it demands of schools and really basic at the same time, can it? The story doesn’t sift through that in detail but would be nice if some journo would.* The reality is that we don’t deliver a very powerful instructional program in a lot of schools, and that’s not the fault of NCLB.
……
*Related, there is a tension between high-performing students and low-performing ones in terms of where to put resources and attention. Not completely binary, and plenty of students falling behind today could be high performers in better schools. But still there and mostly talked about in code words rather than forthrightly: Are we as a nation better off really focusing on the millions of kids at the wrong end of the achievement gap even if its suboptimal for kids on the high end? And spare me the rhetoric about how you can easily do both. You can to some extent but constrained resources, carrots and sticks in policy, and time constraints all make tradeoffs a reality.

A few other readers have mentioned that this is a conversation Madison needs to have.

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Educators, Parents Eager for an Edge Opt for IB Classes in Grade Schools

Ian Shapira:

Hunting for the best education for her three young children, Traci Pietra fretted about low test scores at her Arlington neighborhood school. Then the principal told her about Randolph Elementary’s affiliation with one of the most prestigious and rapidly growing brands in education: IB.
International Baccalaureate is best known for a high school diploma program geared to the university-bound academic elite. But Pietra and her husband, Peter, were sold on the lesser-known elementary version of IB. Both were attracted to the IB emphasis on global understanding, Pietra said, and added: “He was like, ‘Our kids are going to an Ivy League school, and we need an education that’s going to get them on the right track.’ “

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Cardozo High School AP English Teacher Video

olearydcap.jpg
John Poole 5:21 video:

Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, is a national pioneer in introducing Advanced Placement courses to disadvantaged students. It has found ways to build student skills so that they can begin to get passing grades on the AP exams. One of its star AP teachers, Frazier O’Leary, taught the school’s first AP class 10 years ago and, since then, has become a frequent speaker and adviser to school districts around the nation.

Well worth watching.

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Madison United for Academic Excellence, 12-December-2006 Presentation

The Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) meeting of 12-December-2006 offered a Question and Answer session with Madison Director of Teaching and Learning, Lisa Wachtel, and Brian Sniff, District K-12 Math Coordinator.
A list of questions was prepared and given to the speakers in advance so they could address the specific concerns of parents.

The video

QT Video
 of the meeting is 130MB, and 1 hour and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video.
The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.

The topics covered during remarks and the question and answer sessions were accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation (here in PDF format), highlights of which are

  • Changing demographics in the school district
  • Listing of Superintendent’s Goals for comprehensive review, as set by the Board of Education
  • K-5 Math Standards, Resources, and role of Teaching and Learning
  • Professional development for K-5 teachers
  • 5th Grade Math Assessment Pilot project for advanced students
  • Middle school math, 6th to 8th grade
  • Math certification of middle school math teachers, with an extended discussion of the statistic that only 5% of middle school math teachers are math certified,
    comparing Wisconsin to bordering states
  • WKCE tests and testing in general
  • Discussion by audience of recent studies and trends in math preparation for college
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A Study of Core-Plus Students Attending Michigan State University

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

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

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

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Don’t like math? UW-O asks ‘why not?’

Ben Perlman & Pamela Buechel:

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

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School Day Goes Into Overtime

Nelson Hernandez:

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

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Free tuition for vow to stay?

Scott Williams:

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

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Financial Literacy Project

Dan Greene:

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

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Important new information about credit for non-MMSD courses issue.

“In preparation for the December 11, 2006 meeting of the BOE’s Performance and Achievement Committee, Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash prepared a memo dated December 5, 2006 along with 10 “exhibit” appendices for distribution to the BOE. “Exhibit 10” is a copy of the “Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the District” that she wrote in October, 2006, and I previously posted on SIS. In her memo she states “All the other nine procedures described herein, except this one, are governed by law or Board Policy. This process (her new Guidelines) was created by the MMSD to expand the opportunities for students to take courses outside the MMSD without increasing the costs to the MMSD and without undermining the integrity of the diploma a student receives from the MMSD. The “Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the MMSD” is the process and procedure currently used when, for example, a student who wants to take outside courses, but does not have any other option available to him/her. The cost for taking courses under this procedure is the responsibility of the student/parents. The procedure requires pre-approval by the principal and if the student wants credit for taking the course, he/she will receive elective credit if the District does not offer a comparable course. If the District offers a comparable course, the student will not receive credit. The student’s transcript will only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, if any, and the pass/fail grade.”
As I had stated previously on SIS I believe this is a new policy. It is definitely different from the one used in the recent past at Madison West HS in several crucial respects. It has never previously been brought before the BOE for formal approval. At the November 13, 2006 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, I presented Superintendent Rainwater and members of the BOE with a copy of these “Guidelines”. Superintendent Rainwater responded by stating that these Guidelines only apply to “Independent Study” and do not represent a change in policy. I interpreted his comments to mean they are simply a restatement of Board Policy 3545 – Independent Study. However, Nash’s December 5th memo to the BOE quoted above seems to indicate that her “Guidelines” are to be interpreted as a catchall, meant to apply not just to independent study, but to ALL course work not specifically governed by State law or existing MMSD Board Policies, i.e., her exhibits 1-9. In other words, it is to apply as well to UW courses taken outside of the YOP, WCATY courses, online courses such as Stanford’s EPGY taken outside of the InSTEP Program, UW-Extension courses where the District claims to offer a comparable course (even though in a very different format), etc., i.e., a variety of different types of formal course work offered through certified, non-MMSD programs. If so, shouldn’t these “Guidelines” need formal BOE approval as a new Board Policy since, as Nash states in her memo, they are not currently covered under any existing Board Policies?

(more…)

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Credit for Non-MMSD Courses: Performance & Achievement Committee Discussion

Please take note that the MMSD BOE’s Performance and Achievement Committee
will be meeting at 5:45 pm on Monday, December 11th. [map]
One of their two agenda items scheduled for that meeting is “Credit for Non-MMSD Courses.”
This is a very important issue for academically gifted students who would like to be able to substitute higher-level, faster-paced, or more-readily-accessible-to-them (e.g., because of transportation problems) courses taken via WCATY, EPGY, APEX, UW, etc. for ones offered by their local middle or high school. It is an important issue for other types of alternative learners (e.g., special ed students, temporarily ill or disabled students) as well. It has taken years to get this topic placed on the BOE’s agenda. This coming Monday may well be our best opportunity to influence MMSD policy relating to this matter.
Thus, I urge ALL of you who are concerned about this issue either (i) to attend this BOE meeting prepared to give a 3-minute speech during the Public Comments period, or (ii) to send an email this week to Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and all BOE members (via their comments email address) describing why it is important for their students to be permitted to receive credit toward fulfilling graduation requirements for qualified high school- and college-level courses taken at UW, MATC, TAG summer programs, online, or via correspondence.”

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High School Redesign Notes

As Arlene has reached out to the community for suggestions about the Redesign of the high schools, let me share a couple of thoughts:

  1. It’s too late. The students that are behind in 5th grade rarely catch up. The 2/3 combinations are by far the worst academic combination for elementary students, yet we continue this practice to save money, and to save SAGE. I understand the pull out combination system is a great way to deal with cost and transient students….but does it really help? Can’t we negotiate with the Union to allow 4 year kindergarten? This is really annoying that we have to bow to the Union for the sacrifice of the lower income students.
  2. The middle school years has a great resource of teachers. My children have had teachers that felt students are undergoing hormonal warfare and felt they should teach less so as not to upset the students. As I quote a teacher my child had in a “Charlie Brown teachers voice”, “Less is more and as long as they learn a couple of concepts during the year I feel I have done my job”. This fortunately is not the normal approach my children have received. Most of the Jr. High teachers have been focused on preparing the students for Memorial. I wonder if this is the model for most of the Jr. High Schools throughout the district?
  3. The district currently has the highest number of National Merit Scholar graduates in the state, I would assume we send hundred of students to college each year and those that are from higher income families do well. I wonder if the problem is less racial gap and not more economic gap. Please follow the link to the following Newsweek article released by the North Carolina Democratic Party….http://ncdp.org/node/1081. This is an article about how North Carolina kept their struggling students, drop out prone students and low income students engaged in high school by offering them an option to attend a local community college (MATC) and receive not only their HS diploma upon graduation but also an associate degree in an area of interest so that staying in school had meaning….and graduating means getting a real job. Currently all we can offer students that graduate from high school is they will have a diploma and they can essentially get the same jobs in this area with or without that diploma….with an associates degree they can make more than their teachers in computer repair, Xerox repair, IT, health associate degrees and others. Please think about raising the standards and the options for the struggling students, not lowering the standards for the top tier students. This IDEA and a proven method could benefit the entire community and raise the standard of living for lower income families. Please read this article.
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New Math Curriculum Draws Complaints


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

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

More on Connected Math and the recent Math Forum.

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One Small Step in the Right Direction at West HS …

In light of recent events regarding curriculum and other issues in our high schools, there has been a small step in the right direction at West HS. Superintendent Rainwater announced at our 11/29 MUAE meeting that he has been in discussion with West HS Principal Ed Holmes about providing West 9th and 10th graders who are advanced in language arts the opportunity to skip over English 9 and/or English 10. Advanced placement decisions will be based on grades, teacher recommendation, writing samples, WKCE scores, and ACT/SAT scores. Details will be worked out by Mr. Holmes, the West English Department and District TAG staff.
This small — but important — change brings West more in line with Memorial, the only other high school that has a core English 9 curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes. Every year, four or five academically advanced Memorial freshmen are allowed to go into English 10 — specifically, English 10 Honors. (FYI: Unlike West, Memorial has honors classes in 10th grade; as well, 10th graders can take some of Memorial’s 17 AP classes.) East and LaFollette, of course, have two or three levels of ability/interest-grouped classes for freshman (and sophomore) English — called regular, advanced and TAG at East and regular and advanced at LaFollette — and will continue to have them for at least the next two years.
If you are the parent of a West area 8th or 9th grader who is advanced and highly motivated in English, you might want to consider having your student take either the ACT or SAT through the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) in order to support a request for single subject acceleration. There is still time to register for the MATS online: http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/mats/index.html
IMPORTANT NOTE: As I see it, this development does not in any way mean we should slow down our lobbying efforts vis a vis the BOE and Administration to get them to make West more like the other high schools — in terms of course offerings and other oportunities for academically advanced students — during the two years of the high school redesign study introduced by Superintendent Rainwater at the 11/27 BOE meeting.

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Phantom AP Study Lurks

Jay Matthews:

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

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Education and Entrepreneurship: More Differentiation

Arnold Kling:

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

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

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11/27/2006 High School Redesign Presentation Materials

Here is a copy of Monday night’s presentation. I amended it to include the listening sessions with the individual schools as the first step in the process. [354K PDF Version] Video here.

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Escaping “Average”

Jay Matthews:

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

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

Amy Hetzner:

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

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

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More Than English 10: Let’s REALLY Talk About Our High Schools

First, I want to say BRAVO, RUTH, for putting it all together and bringing it on home to us. Thanks, too, to the BOE members who overrode BOE President Johnny Winston Jr’s decision to table this important discussion. Finally, deepest thanks to all of the East parents, students and teachers who are speaking out … and to the many West parents, students and teachers who have also spoken out over the past few years.
As we begin what will hopefully be a thoughtful and thoroughgoing community-wide conversation about what’s going on in our high schools, I’d like to clear up some muddiness about what’s happened at West in the past few years. I think it’s important to have our facts straight and complete. In doing so — and in comparing what’s happened at West to what’s now going on at East — I’d like to draw on the image of an animal experiment (that apparently never happened). In one condition, a frog is put into a bath of cool water, the temperature is gradually raised to boiling, and the frog dies without a struggle. In another condition, a frog is put into a bath of boiling water, immediately jumps out, and lives to tell the tale. As I see it, West was put in the first condition. The administration implemented small changes over the course of several years, with the ultimate goal of turning 9th and 10th grades into two more years of middle school. Students and parents were lulled into thinking that everything was O.K. because, hey, what’s one small change? East, in contrast, has been put in the second condition. There, the administration seems to have the same goal of turning 9th and 10th grade into two more years of middle school, but has introduced all of the changes at once. Like the frog placed in the boiling water, East has been shocked into strong reaction.

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Board of Education meeting of 30-Oct-2006

The October 30, 2006 Board of Education met to discuss a series of resolutions, and approve the final 2006-07 MMSD Budget, and approve the AFSCME Local 60 contract.

QT Video
 The video of the meeting is 210MB, and 2 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.
Public Appearances
There was a public appearance by Barbara Lewis who expressed concern over the apparent change in policy of MMSD in granting high school credit for courses taken at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Superintendent Art Rainwater and Director of Alternative Programs Steve Hartley discussed the issues with the Board and clarified that the policy statement which Ms. Lewis had received, and which apparently was being misinterpreted by some high school staff referred only to Independent Study. The Board, noting confusion of parents, school staff and themselves, requested that these issues be placed on the Board agenda as soon as possible.
Agenda Item #4
Resolution supporting expenditures for school security be placed outside the revenue caps.
Agenda Item #5
Resolution supporting language by the Superintendent and other superintendents that the State adopt the Adequacy Model for school funding.
Agenda Item #6 – Discussion and Approval of 2006-2007 Budget
This portion of the meeting begins at approximately 20 minutes into the meeting and continues until the Board votes to approve the tax levy amount at 2 hours into the meeting. Final approval of the full budget is rescheduled for a later meeting. The discussions included issues of fund equity, the fund reserve, the unexpected decrease of State support, liquidation of earnings on Chavez building funds, changes in the budget necessary to offset decrease in State support, and the minimum decisions the Board needed to make to meet budget deadline.
Agenda Item #7
Approval of the AFSCME Local 60 contract, in which the District and Union agree to a health care package containing only HMOs, saving the District significant healthcare costs, in exchange for a generous wage increase.

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

Daniel de Vise:

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

Montgomery County Public Schools.

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Admissions Board faces Grade Inflation

Justin Pope:

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

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Methodology Matters

Edward Glaeser:

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

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Just Whose Idea Was All This Testing?

Jay Matthews:

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

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School math books, nonsense, and the National Science Foundation

David Klein:

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

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

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Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians at Elite Schools?

Daniel Golden:

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

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See a Good Idea. See it Run Into Trouble

Paul Beston:

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

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

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A Discussion of AP/IB High School Classes

Jay Matthews:

I am collecting the Challenge Index data now. The early returns indicate our local schools will set a record for the number of AP and IB tests being given. In fact, there appears to be no other region in the country that has as high a level of participation in college-level courses and tests.
That, I think, is a good thing. The Washington area is going to look good on most educational measures because it has some of the highest levels of parental income and education. All the research shows that students who come from affluent families with parents who went to college do better in school than students without those factors. But most of our school districts have done something most other U.S. districts have not done. Our districts have opened these challenging courses to all students, not just to those with affluent, well-educated parents. And they have prepared many students from disadvantaged homes so well that they are passing these college-level tests and not only earning college credit but also getting a useful sense of how to handle the heavy reading lists and long final exams that make college, for many students, such a difficult adjustment.
Two large studies in California and Texas have shown that good grades on the three-hour AP tests correlate with higher graduation rates in college. I have interviewed hundreds of AP and IB teachers and students over the past 20 years. They almost all say that the courses and tests are the best academic experiences their high schools have to offer, and they recommend that more high schools use them.

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Should Scarsdale Drop AP?

Jay Matthews:

But at Scarsdale High, my son was told he could not get into the course unless he did well on an entrance test given to every prospective AP U.S. history student. He passed the test, got into the course and did well, as I expected. That was not my problem. What bothered me was the assumption, deeply imbedded in that school and that community, that AP courses should not be used as great learning experiences for all students headed for college, as they were at Garfield, but instead should be used as rewards for good grades and test scores. At Scarsdale High, only the students with the highest entrance test scores, or highest grade-point averages and strongest teacher recommendations, were considered worthy of admission to an AP course. Not surprisingly, this approach reflected the Ivy League college admission system that is such an obsession in Scarsdale and places like it.
I have always been grateful to Scarsdale High’s educators for exposing me to this dysfunctional view of AP because I soon learned that they were not the exception, but the rule. Most U.S. schools, then and now, felt as Scarsdale did that AP should be used as a sorting exercise, not a teaching tool. Eventually, in reaction to what I learned at Scardale, I created the Challenge Index, a way of rating high schools by AP and IB test participation. The index is used by Newsweek for its “America’s Best High Schools” list. Many Scarsdale people don’t like it because it penalizes them for restricting AP admittance. They think the school deserves to be much higher than number 176 on that list.

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Grading a School’s Grades

Alan Finder:

Mr. Hartranft, a nuclear engineer who had been forced to retire early because of Parkinson’s disease, came up with what he thinks is a rigorous mathematical model to compare the school’s demanding grading system with more lenient grading in other schools. The model, he and some local school administrators say, is a bold new way to think about grades.
“I’m giving you a G.P.S. navigation system, as opposed to scraps of maps,” Mr. Hartranft said. “If all you have are scraps of maps, which is all that admissions offices get in the existing protocol, then this gives you an overall orientation.”
Mr. Hartranft created an analytical method he calls the g.p.a. plot; it uses national data on grade-point averages and SAT scores to compare national grading norms with those at the local high school. The purpose, he said, is to reduce the variability and subjectivity of grades — and to make it absolutely clear to college admissions offices that a B or B-plus at Simsbury may be the equivalent of an A at most high schools.
Simsbury has included his statistical comparison in its admissions submissions for the last four years. In the suburb just to the north, Granby Memorial High School is using the g.p.a. plot for the first time this fall.
Here in Simsbury, administrators and parents appear satisfied with the results of the model, even though it is unclear whether it has helped increase the number of Simsbury students admitted to elite colleges. Neil Sullivan, the high school’s principal, said the proportion of students admitted by the most selective universities had increased somewhat over the last four years, after dipping slightly when the number of A’s dropped sharply between 1998 and 2001. But the number of A’s given out by Simsbury teachers has also increased in recent years.
He took the scores of 1.5 million students and graphed them against the students’ grade-point averages, as reported by the students on their SAT exams. In a given year, for instance, the analysis might show that on average nationally, students with an A average had a combined SAT score of 1,150, under the old two-part aptitude test. Then he would perform the same comparison for students at Simsbury, where, on average, a student with an A average might have a combined score of 1,220.

Details at hartranft.org.

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Most Young People Entering the U.S. Workforce Lack Critical Skills Essential For Success

Partnership for 21st Century Skills, The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families and the Society for Human Resource Management:

As the baby boom generation slowly exits the U.S. workplace, a new survey of leaders from a consortium of business research organizations finds the incoming generation sorely lacking in much needed workplace skills — both basic academic and more advanced “applied” skills, according to a report released today.
The report is based on a detailed survey of 431 human resource officials that was conducted in April and May 2006 by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management. Its objective was to examine employers’ views on the readiness of new entrants to the U.S. workforce — recently hired graduates from high schools, two-year colleges or technical schools, and four-year colleges.
“The future workforce is here, and it is ill-prepared,” concludes the report.
The findings reflect employers’ growing frustrations over the preparedness of new entrants to the workforce. Employers expect young people to arrive with a core set of basic knowledge and the ability to apply their skills in the workplace – and the reality is not matching the expectation.

Complete 3.5MB PDF report | PDF Workforce Readiness Report Card

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For Math Students, Self-Esteem Might Not Equal High Scores

Jay Matthews:

It is difficult to get through a day in an American school without hearing maxims such as these: “To succeed, you must believe in yourself,” and “To teach, you must relate the subject to the lives of students.”
But the Brookings Institution is reporting today that countries such as the United States that embrace self-esteem, joy and real-world relevance in learning mathematics are lagging behind others that don’t promote all that self-regard.
onsider Korea and Japan.
According to the Washington think tank’s annual Brown Center report on education, 6 percent of Korean eighth-graders surveyed expressed confidence in their math skills, compared with 39 percent of U.S. eighth-graders. But a respected international math assessment showed Koreans scoring far ahead of their peers in the United States, raising questions about the importance of self-esteem.

1.3mb PDF Full Brookings/Brown Report

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Ten Ways to Get A’s in College

Jay Matthews:

Getting A’s was not high on my to-do list. To this day I don’t believe getting good grades in college is as important as getting good grades in high school. High school, for most people these days, is about getting ready for college. You cannot do that if you do not apply yourself to your studies. College, on the other hand, is about getting ready for life. Unless you have your heart set on med school or law school or some other form of grad-school trauma, your extracurricular activities in college are often more important than your courses.
But getting A’s is better than getting B’s, B’s are better than C’s, and so on. For those who want to get the best grades they can in the time they have allotted for study, a new book, “Professors’ Guide to Getting Good Grades in College,” provides wonderfully useful and easily digestible wisdom.

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Reality Check 2006: How Principals and Superintendents See Public Education Today

Jean Johnson, Ana Maria Arumi and Amber Ott [350K PDF]:

It’s probably natural for leaders of organizations to be upbeat about their institutions, and the nation’s school children might not be well-served by superintendents and principals who see public schools as places of disappointment, failure and ineptitude. Even so, the positive, almost buoyant outlook of school leaders nationwide captured in this fourth installment of Reality Check 2006 may come as something of a surprise to reformers and critics, including regulators enforcing No Child Left Behind. In many respects, local school leaders seem to operate on a very different wavelength from many of those aiming to reform public schools. The two groups have different assumptions about how much change today’s public schools really need. Even when they see the same problems, they often seem to strive for different solutions.
To most public school superintendents – and principals to a lesser extent – local schools are already in pretty good shape. In fact, more than half of the nation’s superintendents consider local schools to be “excellent.” Most superintendents (77 percent) and principals (79 percent) say low academic standards are not a serious problem where they work. Superintendents are substantially less likely than classroom teachers to believe that too many students get passed through the system without learning. While 62 percent of teachers say this is a “very” or “somewhat serious” problem in local schools, just 27 percent of superintendents say the same.

Some highlights:

  • 93% of superintendents, and 80% of principals, think public schools offer a better education than in the past, and most (86% and 82%) think the material is harder.
  • Despite the call from the business community for a great focus on science/math, 59% of superintendents and 66% say that the statement “kids are not taught enough science and math” is not a serious problem in their schools.
  • 77% of superintendents and 79% of principals say that the statement “academic standards are too low, and kids are not expected to learn enough” is not a serious problem in their schools.
  • 51% of superintendents say that local schools are excellent; 43% say they are good.
  • Only 27% of superintendents, compared with 62% of teachers, say it’s a serious problem that too many students get passed through the system without learning.
  • 76% of superintendents and 59% of principals, compared with 33% of high school teachers, say that students graduating from middle school have the reading, writing, and math skills needed to succeed in high school.

Via Brett.

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So Many Grading Scales, What’s an Admissions Director to Do?

Valerie Strauss:

Admissions director Richard Martinez faces a mishmash of grading systems every time he sits down to review freshman applications at Ohio’s College of Wooster.
He sees transcripts with grade-point averages based on a scale where an A is worth 4 points and others where an A is 4.3 points or 7 — or more — depending on the supposed difficulty of a course. One high school has five grading scales.
“We have found that it is incredibly difficult to find out what a GPA really means,” said Martinez, a former high school teacher. “That’s one reason that we travel to high schools to learn the differences in what an A means at each. We have to know.”

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What Role Colleges Play in Career Success Stirs Debate

Carol Hymowitz:

ven some educators who have headed small schools concede the Ivies, with their large endowments, have an edge. Dr. William Hamm, president of the Foundation for Independent Higher Education in Washington, D.C., and former president of Waldorf College in Iowa, writes, “If a student asked me whether to enroll at Wisconsin, Waldorf or Harvard, I’d tell him or her they’d be foolish to pass up the opportunity for Harvard.”
But Scott Albert, a New Jersey educational consultant, says that after 20 years as an educator, he has “long believed that the college admission process is one of the great lies perpetuated by educators. It dangles a motivational worm in front of young people as a way to get them to work harder, but not necessarily learn more.” In the end, he says, “it breeds fear and rejection into a majority of young people while offering a false sense of security to the few who are accepted.”
David Curran believes in another key to success altogether. “In my own experience with several Fortune 500 companies,” he writes, “I have found the best leaders (versus managers) are individuals who have had to deal with some form of adversity (no money, single parent situations, etc.) and have developed mechanisms to transform those challenges into opportunities — regardless of what school they attended.”

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6 city students get perfect ACT score

Andy Hall:

They began by seeking balance, and wound up finding perfection.
An unprecedented six Madison School District students attained a perfect score on recent ACT college entrance exams, district officials said Friday.
Just 11 Wisconsin students received a score of 36, the top possible mark, out of 45,500 tested in April and June.
During that period, 178 of 837,000 students nationwide received a perfect composite score in the assessment of English, mathematics, reading and science skills.
“I want to start by saying, ‘Wow!’ ” Pam Nash, the assistant superintendent overseeing Madison’s middle and high schools, told the students, their parents and educators Friday at a celebration at West High School.

More on the ACT scores here and here.
The Badger Herald has more:

Though Nash argued the quality of Madison’s public high schools contributed to the scores, she added natural talent, intelligence and hard work from the six students was also crucial to their success.
“Reading is important, and Madison emphasizes that,” Nash said. “But the kids themselves … chose the academic route.”
But Poppe, a Madison West senior surprised with the outcome of the test, attributes his perfect score to a healthy breakfast and a little practice.
“I did one of the practice tests and made sure to get a good breakfast,” he said. “I think a lot of the classes I took earlier in high school helped, but I think some people are more comfortable in a testing environment.”

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“In Many Classrooms, Honors in Name Only”

Jay Matthews:

During a visit in March to an honors sophomore English class in an impoverished area of Connecticut, Robyn R. Jackson heard the teacher declare proudly that her students were reading difficult texts. But Jackson noticed that their only review of those books was a set of work sheets that required little thought or analysis.
Jackson, an educational consultant and former Gaithersburg High School English teacher, sought an explanation from a school district official. He sighed and told her, “We have a lot of work to do to help teachers understand what true rigor is.”
In an American education system full of plans for better high schools, more and more courses have impressive labels, such as “honors,” “advanced,” “college prep” and “Advanced Placement.” But many researchers and educators say the teaching often does not match the title.

Brett has more:

One of the biggest misperceptions among the public is that NCLB sets high academic standards for students and schools, and punishes those who do not meet them. In reality, NCLB does not set any standards, nor does it specify which tests are used to measure student outcomes against those standards. Rather, it only tells the states that they must set their own academic standards, and that they must select the tests used to measure student achievement. (See here for a good overview of the law.)

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Miracle Math

Typical of many math textbooks in the U.S., this one is thick, multicolored,and full of games,puzzles,and activities,to help teachers pass the time, but rarely challenge students. Singapore Math’s textbook is thin, and contains only mathematics — no games. Students are given briefexplanations, then confronted with problems which become more complex as the unit progresses.

ednext20064_38b.jpg


Barry Garelick [232K PDF]:

It was another body blow to education. In December of 2004, media outlets across the country were abuzz with news ofthe just-released results of the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. Once again despite highly publicized efforts to reform American math education (some might say because of the reform efforts) over the past two decades, the United States did little better than average (see Figure 1). Headquartered at the International Study Center at Boston College and taken by tens of thousands of students in more than three dozen countries, TIMSS has become a respected standard of international academic achievement. And in three consecutive TIMSS test rounds (in 1995, 1999,and 2003), 4th- and 8th-grade students in the former British trading colony of Singapore beat all contenders, including math powerhouses Japan and Taiwan. United States 8th graders did not even make the top ten in the 2003 round; they ranked 16th. Worse, scores for American students were, as one Department of Education study put it,”among the lowest of all industrialized countries.”

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MIT dean takes aim at admissions anxiety

Justin Pope
AP Education Writer
Though just teenagers, the applicants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are a scarily accomplished lot. They have started businesses and published academic research. One built a working nuclear reactor in his garage. In their high schools, they have led every extracurricular club and mastered the SAT.
But surprisingly few have done what Marilee Jones, the woman who actually decides which one in seven MIT applicants gets in, thinks 18-year-olds ought to be doing.
Not many sleep eight hours a night, or eat three meals a day. Few spend time each day just staring into space.
And Jones is blunt about the consequences.
The quest for perfection “is making our children sick,” the MIT dean of admissions told a recent gathering of college admissions professionals in Boston. She means it literally, snapping off statistics on the increase in ulcers, anxiety disorders and control disorders such as cutting and anorexia.
“Kids aren’t supposed to be finished,” she said. “They’re partial. They’re raw. That’s why we’re in the business.”
For years, high school teachers and counselors have been complaining about the emotional and physical toll of the competition for slots in selective colleges. SAT prep classes and an arms race of extracurricular resume-building, they say, are draining the fun out of life for their students.

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UW System Campus Admission Advice

Megan Twohey:

Tuesday’s meeting also included campus-specific admissions advice:

  • Madison: For the second year, applicants must take and submit the writing portion of the ACT. Postponed applicants – those who are neither admitted nor denied admission in the initial review process – should submit the supplemental application. The university expects to use its waiting list more often because it is finding it increasingly difficult to predict whether accepted students will enroll.
  • Eau Claire: Space is tight in the nursing program, so students should make sure to apply on time. Decisions aren’t made on a case-by-case basis. Students in the nursing program must meet or exceed the minimum requirements, including having taken high school chemistry and biology.

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Local Students in the Admissions Pressure Cooker

DEBORAH ZIFF
Wisconsin State Journal
Sunday, September 17, 2006
dziff@madison.com
Madison West High School senior Eliza Zimmerer is a teaching assistant in a bio- technology class.
She mentors younger students and leads freshmen through orientation. She’s involved in student government. Captain of the varsity tennis team. Honor roll. French honor society.
Her resume goes on and on, but she still wonders if it’s enough to get her into some of her preferred schools. And she’s not alone.
“It’s really apparent here, as it is in almost any high school,” said Becky Bebber-Wells, a guidance counselor at West. “Now, more and more kids are trying to apply to these select colleges. They feel if they don’t get in, that’s the end.
“They’re taking a full load of courses, doing a sport or two, they might be working a part- time job,” she said. “And of course, homework. They’re also going to bed really late and getting up really early.”
Bebber-Wells recalls a recent day in her office when a sophomore came in crying because she couldn’t get into one class for a “perfect schedule.”
“She about had a nervous breakdown,” she said.
The agonizing and hand- wringing over getting into a top-tier college isn’t just something that happens with students aiming for the Ivy League.
Zimmerer, who’s looking at Rice University, Carleton College, UW-Madison and a handful of other schools, said she chooses her activities based on what she values, rather than what will look good on a college resume. But she admits the nonstop schedule is demanding.
“It’s pretty exhausting,” she said. “The classes I’m taking really require a lot of work. On top of that pressure, not only do I have to write an essay for English class, I also have to write a personal statement for Madison.”
To ease the waiting-game grief, UW-Madison uses a rolling admissions process, letting students know whether they’ve been accepted within four to six weeks of application rather than waiting until April•1.
“Who do you think has a better senior year, someone applying to Harvard or Wisconsin?” UW-Madison Dean of Admissions Robert Seltzer asked rhetorically.
On a recent evening at Memorial High School, parents of seniors sat in the auditorium to learn about what their children need to do to prepare for college.
“It’s so different these days,” Tina Moses, whose daughter Lisa is a senior, said after the session. Both she and her husband went to UW-Madison, one of the schools Lisa is considering.
“It’s much more competitive. I never questioned I’d be accepted at Madison,” she said. “Now you’re lucky if you get in.”
Moses said she looks at the personal-statement section on college applications and thinks, “You know they are saying the exact same thing as everyone else.”
She recalled seeing a newspaper article about a high- school-age girl who spent her summer break volunteering in Africa.
“I feel like, oh God, does my child have to go to Africa to stand out?”
Copyright © 2006 Wisconsin State Journal

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Opting Out of Private School

Nancy Keates:

It’s the lurking fear of every private-school parent: The kid next door is getting just as good an education at the public school — free of charge.
Ben and Courtney Nields of Norwalk, Conn., agonized over the issue last year when they moved their daughter Annie from the New Canaan Country School, set on a 72-acre campus, to a public school for first grade. The move was primarily economic — they have twins entering kindergarten this year and faced tuition bills of $22,500 per child.
“It was like taking your child out of the Garden of Eden,” says Mrs. Nields. But Annie thrived at the school. Her confidence grew and the teacher, say the Nieldses, was phenomenal.
Across the country, some schools and education professionals report a growing movement from private to public. Among the possible reasons: Private-school tuition has grown sharply, while some colleges are boosting the number of students they take from public schools. New studies have suggested that public-school students often tested as well or better than their private school peers. And increasingly, public schools are enriching their programs by holding the same kinds of fund-raisers often associated with private schools, such as auctions and capital campaigns.
“But lately there’s strong anecdotal evidence of frequent movement from private schools to public schools. There are more choices for parents now.”
Some public schools are actively recruiting private-school students. At Torrey Pines Elementary in La Jolla, Calif., Principal Jim Solo began holding monthly tours and meetings for private-school families four years ago. Many students had left for private or charter schools. While he says it was not a main motivator, having students return to the school increased state funding, as the district is paid on a per-pupil basis.

Locally, I’ve seen movement both ways. A number of parents have left over curriculum and climate issues while others have jumped back in because the public schools offer services or curriculum not available in the private school world. Homeschooling is another growing factor.

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North Carolina & Math Standards

Todd Silberman:

Despite North Carolina students’ steady improvement in reading and math, their performance on state end-of-grade tests has been far better than on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In fact, North Carolina stands out because of the wide gap between results on the state and national tests.
In 2005, about 84 percent of North Carolina eighth-graders earned proficient or better scores on state math tests; 32 percent were proficient or advanced on the national math test. Only West Virginia showed a sharper difference.
“When you see the huge disparity that you do between proficiency levels [on state and national tests], at least part of it is about rigor,” said Ross Weiner, policy director for the Education Trust, a Washington group that advocates for poor and minority students. “North Carolina has a bigger difference than most other states. That raises questions about expectations and whether North Carolina’s standards are high enough to demonstrate that students are learning what they need to know.”

More on “how states inflate their progress under No Child Left Behind“.

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The Midwest Academic Talent Search

Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) is hosting an informational session about the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) program run by the Center for Talent Development (CTD) at Northwestern University.
The MATS provides an opportunity for academically advanced students in grades three through nine to take an out-of-grade-level standardized test. Students in grades three through six may take the Explore test (essentially an ACT designed for eighth graders); students in grades six through eight may take the SAT test; and students in grades six through nine may take the ACT test. For students who routinely hit the ceiling of their district and state level tests, an out-of-grade-level test may be the only way to truly know what they know. Test results may be used for advocacy purposes, as well as to access a wide array of advanced educational experiences across the country.
Our guest speaker for the evening will be Carole Nobiensky, longtime staff member and Director of Programs at the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY).
Please join us on Wednesday, September 27, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street.

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Math Wars Earthquake

Tamar Lewin:

In a major shift from its influential recommendations 17 years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics yesterday issued a report urging that math teaching in kindergarten through eighth grade focus on a few basic skills.
If the report, “Curriculum Focal Points,” has anywhere near the impact of the council’s 1989 report, it could signal a profound change in the teaching of math in American schools. It could also help end the math curriculum struggles that for the last two decades have set progressive educators and their liberal supporters against conservatives and many mathematicians.
At a time when most states call for dozens of math topics to be addressed in each grade, the new report sets forth just three basic skills for each level. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that the curriculum should center on the “quick recall” of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals. It stopped short of a call for memorization of basic math facts.
The 1989 report is widely seen as an important factor nudging the nation away from rote learning and toward a constructivist approach playing down memorization in favor of having children find their own approaches to problems, and write about their reasoning.
“It was incredibly influential,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a Department of Education official in the Reagan administration. “More than half the states explicitly acknowledged it in devising their own standards. This report is a major turnaround.”

Lewin’s article references a 2005 document: “10 myths of NCTM (Fuzzy) Math“.
NCTM source materials and related links here.

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How Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper

Daniel Golden:

Twice a year, after reviewing applicants to Duke University, Jean Scott lugged a cardboard box to the office of President Terry Sanford. Together, Ms. Scott, director of undergraduate admissions from 1980 to 1986, and Mr. Sanford pored over its contents: applications from candidates she wanted to reject but who were on his list for consideration because their parents might bolster the university’s endowment. Ms. Scott won some battles, lost others and occasionally they compromised; an applicant might be required to go elsewhere before being taken as a transfer.
“There was more of this input at Duke than at any other institution I ever worked for,” says Ms. Scott, now president of Marietta College in Ohio. “I would have been very pleased to have the best class as determined by the admissions office, but the world isn’t like that.”
Over more than 20 years, Duke transformed itself from a Southern school to a premier national institution with the help of a winning strategy: targeting rich students whose families could help build up its endowment. At the same time, and in a similar way, Brown University, eager to shed its label as one of the weakest schools in the Ivy League, bolstered its reputation by recruiting kids with famous parents. While celebrities don’t often contribute financially, they generate invaluable publicity.

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Madison Teen Gets Perfect SAT Score

Doug Erickson:

e represented Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee. Now Robert Marsland III has another claim to fame.
The Madison high school senior earned a perfect score on the SAT college entrance exam, a feat all the more impressive because the test was revamped and expanded this year, with a writing essay added.
Last year, 1,050 students got a perfect 1600 score, according to the College Board, which administers the test. This year, just 238 students earned the new perfect score of 2400.

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Reality Doesn’t Meet the Ambitions Of Many Teens

Elizabeth Agnvall:

As parents and guidance counselors encourage high school students beginning the new school year to pursue their dreams, a new study suggests that many of them are setting their sights too high.
Researchers at Florida State University (FSU) studied teens’ educational and occupational plans between 1976 and 2000 and found a widening gap between what teens believe they will do after graduation and their actual achievements, a problem that the study’s authors say can lead to wasted resources, anxiety and distress.
“High school students’ plans for what they will achieve are increasingly distant from what’s likely,” said lead author John Reynolds. The FSU sociology professor said other studies have shown a disconnect between students’ goals and their achievements, but this one shows that the gap has grown in the past 30 years.

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Student Math & Writing Skills

I have a friend that teaches at MATC–she tells me that she is shocked at the lack of math and writing ability of the Madison high school students coming to MATC’s two year technical programs. MATC is very important to Wisconsin’s future. What is happening at the high school level that these students are not prepared properly? Anyone have any thoughts?

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At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready

Diana Schemo:

At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?
Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton’s anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.
“I flipped out big time,’’ Mr. Walton said.
Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.
Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.
According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.
For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.
“It’s the math that’s killing us,’’ Dr. McKusik said.
The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide. Not all those students come directly from high school. Many have taken off a few years and may have forgotten what they learned, Dr. McKusik said.

Notes and links on math curriculum.

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On Grade Inflation

Erin O’Connor:

As part of University of Colorado president Hank Brown’s decision to tackle the tough issue of grade inflation, CU regent Tom Lucero is inviting members of the public to contribute their thoughts on the subject:

Even cum laude graduates sometimes lack the skills needed to succeed in today’s workplace. This can prove to be an expensive and frustrating problem for new employers who must allocate the time and resources to adequately train new-hires.

I would like to invite you to participate in a discussion about grade inflation and its impact on the quality of our college graduates.

–What influence does grade inflation have on individuals, society and the economy?

–What are your experiences with the caliber of work from recent college graduates?

–What measures can be taken to better prepare students for life in the real world?

We are beginning a debate at the University of Colorado about the important issue of grade inflation. Please send your comments and thoughts to tom.lucero@colorado.edu.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni took up grade inflation in its 2003 report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation. It’s a good starting point for anyone interested in thinking about the issue.

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Are out-of-state students crowding out in-staters?

Mary Beth Marklein:

For Virginia native Max Wilson, getting into the University of Vermont, his top choice, practically was easier than driving up to start his freshman year. Not only was he accepted early, he was admitted into the honors college, which landed him in a brand-new dorm — “an awesome perk,” he says.
Compare that with Steve Connor, whose family lives just 45 miles or so from campus, in East Montpelier. With his solid grades and extracurriculars, everyone thought he was a shoo-in. Yet Connor was one of 92 Vermont applicants placed on a waiting list, a first for the university. Only after weeks of uncertainty did he finally learn he was admitted for the fall.
Sparsely populated states and those with tight higher education budgets always have relied on non-residents and the higher tuition payments they bring to help sustain their public universities. Tiny Vermont falls into both categories.

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