Community Partners – Page 14 – School Information System

Philadelphia Free School aims for democratic education model

Maddy Winters knows what she wants. Yes to ballet, no to soccer, yes to astronomy, and definitely yes to hanging out with the older crowd of third and fourth graders on her block.
Just 3 years old, she begged to go to school, but the local public school just won’t do for her parents, Mark Filippone and Marie Winters. In September, Maddy will be enrolled at the Philadelphia Free School, where she will continue to decide what she wants to do all day long.
The Free School, which plans to launch a pilot program in January in South Philadelphia for students ages 4 to 18, follows a democratic model of education, meaning no tests, no curriculum, no bells every 45 minutes, no separation into grades, and no teachers. The adults at the school will be called “staff” and be elected by the students each year. The students will also vote on the school’s budget and serve on a judicial committee that deliberates on misbehaving peers.

Pursue more Madison school alternatives

Wisconsin State Journal:

We sure hope the Madison School District is serious about pursuing more charter and specialty schools.
Superintendent Dan Nerad told the State Journal editorial board on Tuesday he plans to appoint a committee next month to study alternatives to traditional schools.
Giving parents and students more options and innovations will help keep more middle class families in the Madison district. At the same time, charter schools and their spin-offs in Madison have catered to a higher percentage of low-income and minority students. So they’re not elitist.
Teaching students in new ways can boost student interest and effort while getting more parents involved in their children’s educations — a key ingredient for success. And if new approaches don’t work, they can be shut down.

Letter to Madison West High School Families, Staff and Students

Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad, Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash and West High Principal Ed Holmes, via a kind reader’s email:

October 14, 2010
West Families, West Students, and West Staff;
We are writing today to clarify the proposal for high school course offerings in the Madison Metropolitan School District. While discussion and questioning should be part of any change process, the discussion needs to center on factual information.
We have proposed that Advanced Placement offerings be increased in all of our high schools. We have also focused on making an embedded honors option available in 9th and 10th grade English and Social Studies next year and Math and Science the following year at all four high schools. We have also proposed increasing support to students who may not traditionally have participated in an honors or AP course so that rigorous opportunities can become part of every high school student’s transcript.
What we have NOT proposed is the elimination of any electives at any of the high schools. Our current high school offerings vary quite widely across the district and we are striving to make good things available across all attendance areas. Nothing in the proposal prohibits a dynamite elective course from being shared and adopted across the city, in fact, some consistency of elective offerings would be welcomed.
The two pathways are groupings of courses. They are NOT a way to group students. Student and family choice is wide open. We are also proposing a set of assessments that will start in middle school to help inform families, students, and teachers about skills that students have that are strong and skills that need to be supported and improved. Those assessments will be given every year and are meant to be used to inform students and families about student progress and growth and to allow students and families to make informed decisions about future courses.
Please understand that students will still have choices. If they chose not to take an Advanced Placement course and wish to take an elective instead, that option remains.
We regret that incomplete information was used to make students and families upset. The proposal had, and still has the word “draft” on it. We look forward to productive conversations with all of you about ways in which we can now move forward.

The Mess with Madison West (Updated)

TJ Mertz, via email:

[Update: I just got emailed this letter as West parent. Crisis communication is happening. Not much new here, but some clarity}

The first steps with the “High School Curricular Reform, Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success” are a mess, a big mess of the administration’s own making.

Before I delve into the mess and the proposal, I think it is important to say that despite huge and inexcusable problems with the process, many unanswered questions and some real things of concern; there are some good things in the proposal. One part near the heart of the plan in particular is something I’ve been pushing for years: open access to advanced classes and programs with supports. In the language of the proposal:

Pathways open to all students. Students are originally identified by Advanced Placement requirements and other suggested guidelines such as EXPLORE /PLAN scores, GPA, past MS/HS performance and MS/HS Recommendation. however, all students would be able to enroll. Students not meeting suggested guidelines but wanting to enroll would receive additional supports (tutoring, skill development classes, AVID, etc.) to ensure success. (emphasis added and I would like to see it added in the implementation).

Right now there are great and at times irrational barriers in place. These need to go. I hope this does not get lost as the mess is cleaned up.

This is in four sections: The Mess; What Next?; The Plan: Unanswered Questions and Causes for Concern; and Final Thought.

Lots of related links:

What’s a 4-Year-Old Doing in Kindergarten?

Tamara Fisher

arent of an early-entrance child: We live in a town where many parents, school board members, and teachers hold their kids back a grade in school so they can excel in sports. When such a choice appears to be an accepted norm, accelerating a young boy into school goes against the local culture. Some parents and teachers have tried to politely ask me if I’ve considered the implications of my son “always being the youngest.” At first, I felt like I had to defend my son and our decision to them. Now, I simply state that “parents try to do what they feel is best for their child. We looked at the research and our child’s readiness and made the decision. He’s thriving in school and sports, too.” If the well-meaning continue to inquire, I share my unique sports perspective: I went to college on a sports scholarship. Were sports important to me? Yes. However, being challenged in school to be a whole person was – and is – more important.
Early entrance to Kindergarten is one excellent option for some highly advanced children. It is the process by which a child enters Kindergarten earlier than he or she otherwise would have according to school or state decreed “cut-off dates.” In Montana, our magical date is September 10th. If the child is five years old on or before September 10th of that year, he gets to go to Kindergarten. If he turns five on September 11th or later, he goes the next year.
To some degree, yes, this system creates a tidy little package whereby decisions are made without, frankly, much thought put into them. It’s cut and dried and easy – and it works for the majority of kids. But readers of this blog know that when one was born does not necessarily determine what one is ready and able to learn. Enter Early Entrance.

West: TAG Complaint and Proposed High School Redesign Create Perfect Storm

The parent complaint to DPI over MMSD’s failure to comply with WI laws on Talented and Gifted education have combined with administration’s recent proposal to create more consistency across the four major high schools, to create a perfect storm of controversy at Madison West. Within the past 24 hours, allegations that the proposal eliminates all electives have spawned a number of calls and e-mails to the Board of Education, a FB page (Walk-out Against MMSD School Reform) promoting a student walk out on Friday, and a YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zgjee-GmGI created to protest the elimination of electives.
As a board member, I have a somewhat different take largely because I know that allegations that the proposal to standardize core high school curriculum is not a product of the DPI complaint. Anyone who has watched MMSD operate, would probably agree that nothing is put together that quickly (the complaint is less than a month old), especially when it involves a proposal.
I also just received the proposal a day or so ago. In full disclosure, I did not take advantage of the briefings conducted for board members who met with the superintendent and assistant superintendent individually or in pairs. I’m a certifiable pain in the neck and thought that any presentations should be made to the board as a whole in an open board or committee meeting, but that is just my issue.) I am just beginning to read and think through what is being proposed, so have no firm opinion yet.
More at http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/2010/10/west-two-issues-in-perfect-storm.html

Uproar at West High over Madison School District’s Curricular Reform Proposal

Lorie Raihala:

There’s been a great deal of misinformation and angry speculation flying around West High regarding the District’s High School Curricular Reform proposal.
On Tuesday, District administrators unveiled their plan for high school curricular reform at meeting with nearly 200 educators from all four high schools. Several parents attended the subsequent TAG Advisory Committee meeting, during which they also revealed an overview of the plan to this group.
I attended the TAG Advisory meeting. As I understand it, this plan involves increasing the number of accelerated and AP courses and expanding access to these options.
When teachers at West got news of this plan, many were enraged at not being included in its development. Further, many concluded that the District plans to replace West’s electives with AP courses. They’ve expressed their concerns to students in their classes, and kids are riled up. Students plan to stage a walk-out on Friday, during which they will walk down to the Doyle Building and deliver a petition to Superintendent Nerad protesting the proposed reforms.

Lots of related links:

$12 an Hour for Teachers, $1.7 Million a Year for the Teachers’ Boss: Your Property Tax Dollars at Work in McFarland

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes

We received the Open Enrollment numbers for this year and they provide much grist for thought. My first reaction is prompted by the fact that 158 MMSD students have open enrolled in the McFarland School District. Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we’ll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District.
Since last year, McFarland has operated a virtual school. This year, according to Gayle Worland’s article in last Sunday’s State Journal, the virtual school has enrolled 813 students, and a grand total of 5 of them live in McFarland.
Actually, it is overly generous to say that McFarland “operates” the virtual school, known as Wisconsin Virtual Academy. More accurately, McFarland has contracted with a publicly-traded corporation, K12, Inc., to operate the charter school, through another organization called Four Lakes Education.

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems

Sharon Otterman

President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.

$16,000 per student is close to Madison’s roughly $15K / student annual spending.

Farm to School Week will promote N.J. agriculture

New Jersey Sunbeam

Legislation co-sponsored by Deputy Assembly Speaker John Burzichelli would declare the last week of September as “Jersey Fresh Farm to School Week” to promote the importance of supporting New Jersey’s agricultural business and the value of healthy eating for children.
“Our state is bursting with locally grown produce, from blueberries, cranberries, peaches, to tomatoes, New Jersey grows it,” said Burzichelli, D-3rd Dist.
“Teaching children about the importance of Jersey Fresh produce can help them understand what farming is about and that fresh vegetables are good for them and their health.”
The legislation calls on the New Jersey Department of Agriculture to design a bidding guide that allows for school purchases of locally-grown food and would establish a website to provide information for farmers, distributors, and schools to create purchasing networks.

Ohio Online Charter Schools Draw More Students

The Associated Press

As more students choose web-based learning for reasons that can include bullying or health issues, enrollment at the state’s publicly funded online charter schools has risen by nearly half within five years, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.
Department figures show that the state’s 27 free e-schools had more than 29,000 students taking classes by computer during the last school year, up from about 20,000 in 2005. The enrollment numbers were first reported Monday by The Columbus Dispatch, which also noted that the increase came during a period when no new online charters opened in Ohio. The state imposed a moratorium before the 2005-06 school year.
The e-charters are drawing more students because they fill a need and provide families with options, school officials and parents said.
Online schools can be attractive to students who feel they’re being bullied at a traditional school and need a refuge, said Nick Wilson, a spokesman for the Columbus-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. ECOT is the state’s oldest and largest Internet charter school.

Why is atheist Nick Clegg considering sending his son to the same exclusive Catholic school as the Blairs?

Ian Gallagher

Nick Clegg is considering sending his eldest son to one of Britain’s leading Catholic state schools – despite both his atheism and his party’s opposition to faith schools.
The Deputy Prime Minister faces accusations of hypocrisy after he and his Catholic wife Miriam were given a private tour of the London Oratory, where Tony Blair controversially sent his sons.
Headmaster David McFadden told The Mail on Sunday that he believed his school would be a ‘natural choice’ for the couple, who were ‘happy with what they saw’ during their tour last week.

Charter schools deserve even playing field

New Jersey Star Ledger:

Gov. Chris Christie has said he strongly supports charter schools and recently spoke of his plans to ease the way for their expansion. That’s great, but what’s still missing is the money.
And it’s all about the money. Without their fair share of state funding, charter schools will continue to struggle. They’re public schools, but only get a portion of what a local district spends per student — and, even worse, no public funding for facilities at all.
Charter schools allow for innovation and give parents a choice. Some are failing and should be shut down. But many are succeeding wildly and drawing huge waiting lists.
Money is their biggest handicap. Charter schools end up with less because they get none of the so-called “adjustment aid” the state gives out to districts. The disparity is greatest in places like Camden, Paterson or Jersey City, where district schools get the most adjustment aid.

Few study power of school boards

James Salzer and Nancy Badertscher 

A small group of people you’ve probably never heard of spend $8 billion of your tax money each year, employ more than 90,000 people and set policies that affect 800,000 area schoolchildren.
Dr. Ricky A. Welkis is one of the few audience members at the sparsely attended Cobb county school board meeting in Marietta recently. Welkis is a school board candidate for post-6 in the upcoming election.
They are elected, but in some cases with fewer than 20 percent of voters casting ballots.
They are your school board members.
Metro Atlanta has some of the best and some of the worst.
There are patterns discernible in their bios: Most have college degrees; most get annual training; but a surprising 40 percent have had financial problems — bankruptcies or liens — even as they control multimillion-dollar and even billion-dollar budgets.
Recently, several metro Atlanta boards have presided over school systems in crisis. Often, those that do are accused of meddling at the schoolhouse.

School Board governance vs. administrative intransigence is a topic worth exploring, per Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak’s recent blog post. It appears, to this observer, that some board members prefer to go along with the status quo while a few others are trying to drive change.

Milwaukee Public Schools tries to find long-term change among the fads

Alan Borsuk

I thought the hula hoop was a fad when I was a kid, which is to say, I thought it would be gone in about a month. A half century later, hula hoops are still around.
I thought decentralization of decision making and budgeting for Milwaukee Public Schools a decade ago was a trend, which is to say, it was an important, lasting change in the educational landscape. Now, it’s effectively gone. Just a fad.
Education history is filled with hot subjects of the moment – new ways to teach reading, new ways to handle misbehaving students, new ways to organize the school day. Teachers should stand in the front of the room. Teachers should stand in the back of the room. Teachers should wander around the room.
Most of these ideas leave the stage after a little while. You can make a lot of teachers roll their eyes just by mentioning some of them. Come back next year and we’ll be doing things differently, they say.
I was once at a seminar for reporters and editors on fads, trends, and how to tell the difference. Everyone agreed fads go away quickly, trends stay, and you usually can’t tell which is which until you wait them out. (I’m beginning to think this Internet thing is a trend, for example.)
So what about Michelle Rhee? The new Milwaukee Public Schools’ reading program? The increasing and potent role of the federal government in shaping local education? “Waiting for Superman”? Response to Intervention?

Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)

2010-2011 Madison School District Outbound Open Enrollment

136K PDF

A few numbers:
Total District Enrollment 24,796 (The Wisconsin DPI enrollment number for Madison is 25,395).
Open Enrollment Leavers: 772
Open Enrollment Enterers: 175
Much more on outbound open enrollment here.
Tax & spending authority are largely based on enrollment.
The most recent 2010-2011 budget document indicates total planned spending of $373,157,148, which yields $15049.08 per student.

Charter Education Expanding In Chicago

From a windowless basement office on Chicago’s West Side, Greg White is trying to answer public education’s $2 million-dollar question: What is the top priority for a school in Chicago’s cash-strapped district?
The answer for Mr. White, chief executive of the LEARN Charter School Network — which received two $1 million grants from Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network and the United States Department of Education last month — is to open a fifth charter school in the network next fall. It is one of 10 charter schools in Chicago that Mr. White said he wanted to open in as many years, which would allow him to hire dozens of out-of-work teachers.
A month ago, those ambitious plans were in jeopardy. Chicago Public Schools approved a budget that cut district financing to charter schools by 6 percent, which could remove more than $400,000 from the network’s budget this year. The two grants will cover the cost of opening the fifth school, Mr. White said.

Lessons from SEED, a National Demonstration of Child Development Accounts

CFED

A nationwide system of Child Development Accounts (CDAs) established as early as birth can lead to lifelong savings, raise college expectations and affordability, and serve as a basis for more stable and productive financial lives for American families, according to a new report.
The report, “Lessons from SEED, a National Demonstration of Child Development Accounts,” is based on the experience of more than 1,171 children of all ages and their families who participated in pioneering CDA pilot programs in 12 states and communities. This pilot demonstration showed that, given the opportunity, families in some of the poorest communities in our country, would save for their child’s college education and future. The programs tested CDAs, savings or investing accounts that begin as early as birth and allow parents and children to accumulate savings for college, homeownership or business initiatives.
The Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment Initiative, or SEED, is a 10-year, multi-million dollar national policy, practice and research endeavor to develop, test and promote matched savings accounts and financial education for children and youth. SEED was designed to set the stage for universal, progressive American policy for asset building among children, youth and families. It was funded by 12 national foundations, including the Ford and Citi Foundations.

Philadelphia School Partnership Launches

Associated Press

Today marks the official launch of the Philadelphia School Partnership– a collaboration of business leaders, foundations, city leaders and educators from the School District of Philadelphia, public charter and parochial schools. The goal of the Philadelphia School Partnership is to make Philadelphia the highest performing city in the country in terms of educational achievement by 2015. The Philadelphia School Partnership will do this by increasing the pace of education reform in Philadelphia and by financially supporting great schools that can serve additional students within the charter, District and parochial school systems.
The Philadelphia School Partnership has established a five-year goal to raise $100 million and to strategically invest the funds in initiatives that will directly increase student performance across Philadelphia. To date, the Philadelphia School Partnership board and anonymous donors have seeded this fund with $16 million.
“The Philadelphia School Partnership speaks, acts and stands for quality education for the children of Philadelphia, wherever they attend school,” said Mike O’Neill, Chair of the Philadelphia School Partnership Board of Directors. “This organization is a public recognition that we share more educational goals than differences and that now, more than ever, Philadelphia has to pull together to support this common agenda.”

An Update on Madison Preparatory Academy: A Proposed International Baccalaureate Charter School

Kaleem Caire, via email:

October 8, 2010
Greetings Madison Prep.
It was so wonderful to have those of you who were able to join us for the information session Tuesday night (Oct 5) here at the Urban League. We appreciate you dedicating part of your evening to learning about Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and we look forward to working with you on this very important project. You are receiving this email because you volunteered to join the team that is going to put Madison Prep on the map!
There are a few things we want to accomplish with this email:
1. Share information about the project management website that we’ve established to organize our communications and planning with regard to developing the school
2. Secure dates and times that you’re are available to attend the first of your selected Design Team meeting(s)
3. Provide, as promised, background information on Madison Prep along with hyperlinks that will help you educate yourself on charter schools and components of the Madison Prep school design
Please SAVE this email as it contains a number of information resources that you will want to refer back to as we engage in planning Madison Prep. There is a lot of information here and we DO NOT expect you to read everything or learn it all at once. Take your time and enjoy the reading and learning. We will guide you through the process. J
PROJECT MANAGEMENT WEBSITE
Today, you will receive an email with a subject line that reads, “You’re invited to join our project management and collaboration system.” Please open this email. It will contain the information you need to sign up to access the Madison Prep Project Management Site. You will need to select a username and password. FYI, Basecamp is used by millions of people and companies to manage projects. You can learn more about basecamp by clicking here. Once in the site, you can click on the “help” button at the top, if necessary, to get a tutorial on how to use the site. It is fairly easy to figure out without the tutorial. If you have spam controls on your computer, please be sure to check your spam or junk mail box to look for emails and posting that we might make through Basecamp. Occasionally, postings will end up there. Please approve us as an email “sender” to you.
We have already posted the business plan for the original school (NextGen Prep) that is the same model as Madison Prep. We’ve also posted other important documents and have set a deadline of Friday, October 15, 2010 for you to review certain documents that have been posted. The calendar shown in Basecamp will include these assignments. Please email me or Ed Lee (elee@ulgm.org) if you have questions about using this site.
DATES FOR DESIGN TEAM MEETINGS
At the Interest Meeting we held on Tuesday (or in other conversation with us), you indicated a preference for getting involved in one of the following design teams. Please click on the name of the team below. You will be taken to www.doodle.com to identify your availability for these meetings. Please share your availability by Monday, October 11 at 12pm so that we can send out meeting notices that afternoon. We will address the dates and times of future meetings at the first meeting of each team. Please note, you do not need to be a “charter school” expert to be involved with this. You will have a lot of fun working towards developing a “high quality public charter school” and will learn in the process.
· Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. At least for the first meeting of this design team, Instructional strategies will be addressed as well. The Instruction team will develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL). Additional details will be shared at the first meeting.
· Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school’s operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School. The Head of School will be the instructional leader and therefore, there will be some overlapping conversations that need to occur with the team that addresses instruction and quality teaching.
· Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
· Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep’s budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school’s operation.”
· Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
BACKGROUND ON MADISON PREPARATORY ACADEMY AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
There is a lot of good support and buzz growing around Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (charter school). To ensure you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with charter schools and single gendered school models, we have listed internet resources below that you can visit and review. Just click on the hyperlinks.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be an all-male charter school that we intend to open in the Madison area in the fall of 2012. It will serve as a high quality school option for parents as well as a demonstration school for secondary education reform and improvement in Dane County. We want local teachers and schools to learn from Madison Prep, and will take steps
We have attached the two page executive summary again for your review along with a business plan for the school (that will be modified to fit Madison). Madison Prep was originally to be launched as a charter school in Washington, DC and Prince Georges County, Maryland in 2011 and 2013 under Next Generation, an organization I founded in Maryland with my wife and other partners in 2006.
ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
In 2009, there were 5,043 charter schools in the United States compared to 33,740 private schools and 98,916 traditional public schools. Nationally, charter schools enrolled 1,536,079 students in 2009. According to the Wisconsin Charter School Association, there are more than 223 charter schools in Wisconsin serving more than 37,432 students. There are presently just two charter schools in Madison: James C. Wright Middle School on Madison’s South side, founded in 1997 (originally as Madison Middle School 2000).
Until recently, other school districts in Wisconsin have been more open to charter schools. Appleton (14), Janesville (5), Kenosha (6), LaCrosse (4) and Milwaukee (66), Oshkosh (6), Sheboygan (7), Sparta (4), Stevens Point (7), and Waukesha (6) have authorized a significant number of public charter schools when considering the size of their total school district enrollments. However, recent enthusiasm around the formation of Badger Rock School is a sign that Madison area school districts could be more receptive to innovative charter school models that serve a specific community need and purpose. With your support and that of many others, we intend to make a very strong case for Madison Prep and why it’s so desperately needed in our community.
DESIGNING MADISON PREP
In Maryland, our team spent three years researching and designing the school and the curriculum. Members of the founding team were involved in the establishment and/or leadership of Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys , Septima Clark Public Charter School , The SEED Foundation and Public Charter Schools, Sidwell Friends School (where President Obama’s children attend), and Hyde Leadership Public Charter School . We had an expert on international baccalaureate education lead our curriculum design. We also worked closely with the leadership and faculty of other private and charter schools as we developed the business plan, curriculum and education program, including Washington Jesuit Academy , the St. Paul’s School in Baltimore, and Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The school will utilize the highly regarded college-preparatory International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum and the teaching methodology will be rooted in Harkness instruction. St. Paul’s also has a school for girls – the St. Paul School for Girls.
Prior to being hired as President & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM), I shared with our ULGM board that I would look to establish charter schools as a strategy to address the persistent underperformance and failure of our children attending Madison area schools. As we have engaged our community, listened to leaders, researched the issues, and evaluated the data, it is clear that Madison Prep is not only needed, but absolutely necessary.
SINGLE GENDERED PUBLIC SCHOOLS
As of June 2010, there were 540 public schools in the U.S. offering a single-gendered option, with 92 schools having an all-male or all-female enrollment and the rest operating single gendered classes or programs. There were 12 public schools in Wisconsin offering single gendered classes or classrooms (6 middle schools, 5 high schools, and one elementary school).
There are several single gendered charter schools for young men that have garnered a lot of attention of late, including Urban Prep Academies in Chicago – which sent 100% of its first graduating class to college, The Eagle Academy Foundation in New York City, Boys Latin of Philadelphia, and Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys and Green Tech High School in
Albany, NY, Bluford Drew Jemison Academy in Baltimore.
MORE ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
To learn more about charter schools, visit the following websites:
US Charter Schools
Information Website
Starting a Charter School
National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, Washington, DC
National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Chicago, IL
District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, Washington, DC (one of the best authorizers of charter schools; the local school board will authorize our school)
Center for Education Reform, Washington,
Wisconsin Charter School Association
Madison, WI
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (Charter Schools), Madison ,WI
Green Charter Schools Network, Madison, WI
National Council of LaRaza Charter School Development, Phoenix, AZ
Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBC), Lynn, MA
National Association for Single Sex Public Education Exton, PA
The Gurian Institute,
Colorado Springs, CO
Some of the more highly recognized and notable “networks” of charter
schools:
Green Dot Public Schools, Los Angeles, California
KIPP Schools, San Francisco, CA
Aspire Public Schools, Oakland, CA
Achievement First Schools, New Haven, CT
Uncommon Schools, New York, NY
Other Programs of interest:
America’s Top Charter Schools, U.S. News & World Report (2009)
New Leaders for New Schools, New York,
NY
Teach for America, New
York, NY
Teacher U, New York, NY
Early College High Schools
Charter School Financing (excluding banks):
State of Wisconsin Charter School Planning and Implementation Grants (planning, start-up, and implementation)
Walton Family Foundation, Bentonville, AR (planning, start-up, and implementation; however, only focus in Milwaukee right now but we can talk with them)
Partners for Developing Futures, Los Angeles, CA (planning, start-up, and implementation)
IFF, Chicago, IL (facilities)
Building Hope, Washington, DC (facilities)
Charter School Development Center, Hanover, MD (facilities)
Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York, NY (facilities)
NCB Capital Impact, Arlington, VA (facilities)
Raza Development Fund, Phoenix, AZ (facilities)
We look forward to getting Madison Prep off the ground with you! WE CAN DO THIS!!
Whatever it Takes.
Onward!
_____________________________________________
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Mobile: 202-997-3198
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: kcaire@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Facebook: Click Here

Next Generation Preparatory Academy for Young Men Empowering Young Men for Life 1.5MB PDF and Madison Preparatory Academy Overview 150K PDF.
Related: Kaleem Caire video interview.

Mesa school board candidates face questions about district’s finances, future

Michelle Reese:

With school closings, declining enrollment and financial struggles putting Mesa Unified School District at a crossroads, parents packed a meeting this week to hear from the four candidates running for two seats on the governing board.
Close to 90 people attended the first Mesa Parent Advocates for Quality Schools (MPAQS) meeting of the school year on Tuesday. The two incumbents and two newcomers seeking seats on the board in the Nov. 2 election presented brief statements and answered audience questions.
Based on September enrollment figures, the district saw a 2,400-student decline from last school year. Five years ago, the start of the 2005 school year, there were 74,000 students in the district. Today, there are 64,817.
In January the current board voted to close a junior high school and moved smaller programs to that campus to free up other buildings for lease or sale.

Pa. Auditor General Calls For Moratorium On New Charter Schools

Stephanie Esposito

Pennsylvania’s auditor general said the state’s charter school funding formula is seriously flawed.
Jack Wagner is now calling for a moratorium on new charter schools until the Rendell administration makes some changes.
It may cost $15,000 a year to educate each student in one public school and $10,000 in another, depending on taxes.
But any child from any district can go to a charter school. And that’s where the charter school funding formula gets a little tricky.
“It becomes an equal playing field in terms of what the child can get,” said Diane LaBelle, executive director, Lehigh Valley Charter High School for Performing Arts.
It may be an equal playing field for the kids, but…

Who’s attending CA’s elite public schools?

Katy Murphy:

I finally got around to sorting state-level test score data, something I’ve been meaning to do since the Academic Performance Index release last month. (Boy, is it harder than it should be. Those mismatched column headers…)
Five of Oakland’s schools are up in the top 100 — roughly 1 percent of all public schools in California — when sorted by API: the three American Indian Model charter schools, Montclair and Hillcrest.
The American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland’s Laurel District was the highest-performing middle school in the state, with an API of 988. (Not including schools with K-8 or 6-12 grade configurations, whose middle school scores aren’t broken out here.)

Dump the Wake County assignment plan, start over

T. Keung Hui & Thomas Goldmsith

The Wake County school board has just thrown out its controversial, community-based assignment plan on a motion by vice chairwoman Debra Goldman.
A directive passed out by Keith Sutton, a member of the former board minority, calls for the following action:
“Any and all efforts to create a zone-based assignment model will cease effective immediately.”
The motion underwent brief discussion by the board in a meeting that has already lasted for nearly five hours.
Goldman made the motion and Sutton, formerly part of an opposing faction on the board, seconded it.
It passed on a 5-3 vote, with Goldman joining her four former opponents on the board.

Waiting Long Enough for Superman

Virginia Walden Ford

Watching Waiting for Superman last week left me exhausted. For too many years, education reformers have fought hard against the very injustices in the education system portrayed in the film. The good news, however, is that this newest declaration against the intolerable conditions of a broken public education system could finally call enough attention to the persistent problems to change things for the children whom we care so deeply about.
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, is interviewed throughout the film. Canada talks about his childhood and how disappointed he was to learn that there was no real Superman who would save him from the hardships of his own difficult childhood. His anecdote inspired the title of the movie.
The movie shows over and over again why ineffective teachers should be replaced with successful ones and how important that is to children’s academic progress. Fighting against such commonsense ideas are the teachers unions, which oppose the teacher evaluation, merit pay, and firing of poor teachers.

Kaleem Caire Interview

Kaleem Caire Interview October, 2010

Kaleem Caire SIS Interview

Kaleem recently returned to Madison as President and CEO of the Urban League. One of Kaleem’s signature initiatives is the launch of Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed International Baccalaureate Charter school.

I spoke with Kaleem about Madison Prep, the local school climate and his goals.

What brand is your Madison High School?

Susan Troller:

I inadvertently kicked up a firestorm earlier this year in a profile I wrote about Judd Schemmel, Edgewood High School’s energetic new president. The story’s focus was the venerable Catholic institution’s increased enrollment, its growing reputation for academic excellence and its improving finances.
Sounds like a positive take on this 130-year-old Madison institution, right?
Many Edgewood partisans didn’t see it that way. In an offhand way, I mentioned that Edgewood had not, traditionally, had a reputation as an “academic powerhouse.” I was not only thinking of the perceptions surrounding Edgewood when I attended high school in Madison in the late 1960s, but also the formidable reputations of public high schools West and Memorial when it comes to producing National Merit Scholar semifinalists, as well as perfect scores on the ACT and SAT college entrance examinations. And, I confess, I was also influenced by the aura surrounding Edgewood cast by its most famous graduate, the late “Saturday Night Live” comedian/wild man Chris Farley. Brilliant, yes. Academic? Not so much.
It turns out I had uttered fighting words, subject to heated interpretation in the story’s comment section regarding just what was necessary to be known as an “academic powerhouse.”
Some readers loyal to West High were angry, too. They were skeptical (to put it politely) about claims that Edgewood seniors were being accepted at elite universities, including Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford.
Clearly, the facts were beside the point. When I walked into the “academic powerhouse” buzz saw, it was all about the reputations — the brands — of Madison’s high schools.
Yes, high schools have brands, just like cars or beer or blue jeans. High school brands are based not on advertising, but on their histories, demographics (specifically, class, race and money), curricula and cultures. Their brands contain stereotypes, of course, but they also include nuggets of truth. Analyzing perceptions of school culture this way can reveal an institution’s real strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the emotional truth underneath the brand can help encourage and guide growth in a positive way, while mitigating some of the problems.
It’s also fun — but first you need to understand what the brand actually is.

No MBA Left Behind: Kravis Pledges $100M To Columbia Business School

Laura Kreutzer:

Henry Kravis has become the latest private equity titan to show support for his alma mater in the form of a hefty check with a $100 million donation to the Columbia Business School.
The donation, the largest in the business school’s history, will go to support the construction of new facilities as part of Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus, according to a press release issued by the school. Kravis graduated from Columbia Business School in 1969.
Although no strangers to philanthropy, private equity professionals have become increasingly visible with their charitable activities in recent years, both as their wealth increased and as the industry’s public image suffered.
Kravis is one of a string of private equity professionals that have written hefty checks to their alma maters in recent years. In the past 12 months, David Rubenstein, co-founder of Carlyle Group, has announced a $10 million pledge to the University of Chicago Law School and a $5.75 million donation to Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Meanwhile, Mark Yukso, founder of Morgan Creek Capital Management, and his wife, Stacey Miller Yusko, pledged $35 million to their alma mater, the University of Notre Dame.

Play-Doh? Calculus? At the Manhattan Free School, Anything Goes

Susan Dominus

The Manhattan Free School in East Harlem is not free, but the principal there practically is. Now in her third year, Pat Werner, a 57-year-old former literacy coach who logged 18 years in New York City public schools, accepted all of $3,000 in salary last year.
Few go into education for the money, but Ms. Werner’s dedication to opening young people’s minds might better be described as utopian than idealistic — which is only appropriate at a private school where students do not receive grades, take tests or have to do anything, really, that they do not feel like doing.
For parents exhausted by New York’s numbers-oriented, lottery-driven public school system or its hierarchical, hypercompetitive private schools, the Manhattan Free School represents another way to go: equally wacky, but at the opposite extreme.
A school like this, where a comic-book-making class is now offered but calculus is not, is not likely to drain applicants from Dalton. Operating on a $100,000 budget, the school, at Good Neighbor Presbyterian Church on East 106th Street, now has 23 students ages 5 to 18.

Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools

greatmadisonschools.org, via a kind reader’s email:

News Release, Complaint attached

Fifty Madison School District parents filed a formal complaint on September 20, 2010, with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (“DPI”) against the Madison School District for violating State statutes for gifted education. The complaint targets Madison West High School‘s refusal to provide appropriate programs for students identified as academically gifted.

State statutes mandate that “each school board shall provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted and talented.” The DPI stipulates that this programming must be systematic and continuous, from kindergarten through grade 12. Madison schools have been out of compliance with these standards since 1990, the last time the DPI formally audited the District’s gifted educational services.

“Despair over the lack of TAG services has driven Madison families out of the district,” said Lorie Raihala, a parent in the group. “Hundreds have left through open enrollment, and many have cited the desire for better opportunities for gifted students as the reason for moving their children.”

Recognizing this concern, Superintendent Dan Nerad has stated that “while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district.”

“At the secondary level, the inconsistencies are glaring,” said Raihala. “There are broad disparities among Madison’s public high schools with regard to the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. Also, each school imposes different requirements and restrictions on students seeking advanced courses. Surprisingly, Madison’s much touted West High School offers the fewest advanced course options for ninth and tenth graders. While the other schools offer various levels of English, science, and social science, Madison West requires all students to follow a standardized program of academic courses, regardless of their ability. This means that students with SAT/ACT scores already exceeding those of most West seniors (obtained via participation in the Northwestern University Midwest Area Talent Search program) must sit through the same courses as students working at basic and emerging proficiency levels.”

Outbound Open Enrollment
English 10
Small Learning Communities
“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!
Google News Search
Are Honors Classes Racist?
Bruce King’s evaluation of the Small Learning Community Project at Madison West High School
Examining the data from Small Learning Community Grants, more here and here.
Madison School Board member Marj Passman, briefly discusses curriculum, perception and school climate on WTDY radio yesterday (mp3 audio): “We must keep our talented and gifted in the District”. The interviewer mentions “the tripling in transfers out of the district, even as the District posts higher college placement scores than other districts in the area”. Marj responds: “and that’s why I don’t understand the perception people have that their children are not being challenged in the Madison schools”. I will post the rest of the interview if someone finds it.

Gayle Worland:Parents file complaint over ‘talented and gifted’ school programming.

Atlanta school board minority fires back: “Join us in saying yes to the rule of law and no to an illegal coup d’état.”

Maureen Downey

he 5-4 split on the Atlanta Board of Education is getting wider with this letter to the community by the four-member faction opposed to the change in leadership:
Dear Concerned Atlanta Citizen:
Atlanta’s native son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nobel Peace Prize Winner and graduate of tlanta Public School’s Booker T. Washington High School) said, “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”
We four stand united in our opposition to the September 13 purported election of Khaatim Sheerer El as Chair and Yolanda Johnson as Vice Chair of the Atlanta School Board, not because we are interested in power for power’s sake, but because we believe the election violated the law and is detrimental to the well-being of Atlanta’s students. Moreover, we believe that this election and the behaviors linked with it, place student achievement secondary to personal agendas. We are concerned that this action will trigger an investigation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) of its accreditation of the Atlanta Public School System. Finally, we believe that even the perception of a dysfunctional Board will hinder the system’s ability to attract and retain a quality Superintendent. That should be of utmost concern to all those who value the welfare of this city and its students.

June Jordan high school: success or failure?

Jill Tucker:

June Jordan School for Equity has been touted as a shining star of San Francisco public high schools and a national example of how limiting enrollment and tailoring instruction to the needs of individuals can push struggling students into college.
The school, which opened seven years ago, boasts small class sizes and an adviser for every 16 students, plus a college counselor. June Jordan’s funding of more than $11,000 for each of the 241 students, which comes from public and private sources, exceeds what most other district students get.
The school board loves it. So do many parents and students.

Mandarin Immersion gives Verona kids an ear for Chinese

Seth Jovaag:

Before kids arrived for their first day at Verona’s newest charter school two weeks ago, their parents got a couple warnings.
First, your kids will be tired after school. And second, they can’t learn Chinese in a day.
The Verona Area International School, located within a single classroom at Stoner Prairie Elementary School, is the first public school in Wisconsin to teach kids in both English and Chinese. Twenty-two students in grades K-1 spend the first half of each day together hearing nothing but Mandarin before switching back to English for afternoon lessons.
The prospect of getting 5- and 6-year-olds to listen to a foreign language for hours at a time might sound daunting, but the school’s part-time director, Sally Parks, said Monday that so far, kids don’t seem discouraged.
“They are so adaptable,” Parks said. “They seem to pick it up so quickly.

One way to fix U.S. schools

Laurene Powell Jobs & Carlos Watson:

Anyone who thinks America has academic talent to spare isn’t paying attention.
We used to lead the world in the percentage of our population with college degrees. Now we’re No. 14. Global competition is getting tougher, and having an educated work force is vital to our long-term prospects. To keep up, we’re importing highly skilled immigrants from around the world. At the same time, however, we make it difficult for thousands of young people who grow up here to attend college and illegal for them to get jobs.
This status quo appears designed to create a permanent underclass and set back our nation’s competitiveness.
Congress can fix this problem — and enrich America’s human capital — by passing the DREAM Act. This legislation, which the Senate is due to consider Tuesday, would provide temporary residence for many undocumented kids brought to the United States as small children who have completed high school. It then offers a path to legal permanent status if they attend college or serve in the military.

An Even More Inconvenient Truth Al Gore’s movie director takes on the public schools.

William McGurn

In 111 piercing minutes of film, Davis Guggenheim offers something that reams of foundation reports, endless pieces of bipartisan legislation and oceans of newspaper ink never have: a stunning liberal exposé of a system that consigns American children who most need a decent education to our most destructive public schools.
Nor does he exempt himself from this corrupt bargain. The man who produced both the Barack Obama short for the 2008 Democratic Convention and Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary about global warming offers an inconvenient truth of his own. Each morning, Mr. Guggenheim shows, he drives by three public schools until he gets to the nice private school where he deposits his own children. In so doing, he accuses himself of “betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.”
His new film, “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” is his own attempt to right that balance with a focus on those he calls “other people’s children.” At the Washington, D.C., premiere last Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it “a Rosa Parks moment.” New York Magazine suggests it might be “the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.”

What Americans really think about public schools

Valerie Strauss

Though it has become something of a sport to bash public education, a new poll shows that most Americans actually think highly of their neighborhood public schools and have trust in teachers.
The Obama administration’s education agenda gets mixed reviews in the 2010 poll by the Gallup organization and Phi Delta Kappa, a global association of education professionals. The PDK/Gallup poll has been conducted with Gallup annually since 1969.
Here are highlights of the poll, published by Kappan Magazine and available here:

Americans believe the most important national education program should be improving the quality of teaching. Developing demanding standards, creating better tests, and improving the nation’s lowest-performing schools were rated significantly lower.
Seventy-one percent of Americans say they have trust and confidence in teachers, with a greater percentage (78 percent) of public school parents registering confidence. Two out of three Americans would support their child’s decision to teach in the public schools for a career.

Urban League of Greater Madison CEO invited to Oprah Winfrey Show

Kaleem Caire, via email:

September 21, 2010
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
Today, our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, was invited to participate in a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show as a member of the studio audience for a town hall discussion Ms. Winfrey is having on education reform as a follow-up to her show yesterday on the critically acclaimed documentary, “Waiting for Superman.” The film is directed by award winning filmmaker, David Guggenheim, the creative genius behind AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Ms. Winfrey has invited leaders in education, along with parents, community, business leaders, and students to discuss what needs to be done to fix America’s public schools. The full format has not yet been shared but guests have also been invited to view a showing of Waiting for Superman Thursday evening at her studio. The show will air this Friday afternoon. If anything should change, we will let you know.
Considering just 7 percent of Madison’s African American graduating seniors in the class of 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam were considered “college ready” by the test-maker (93 percent were deemed “not ready”), it is more important now than ever that the Urban League, our local school districts, local leaders, and other organizations move swiftly and deliberately to implement solutions that can move our children from low performance to high performance. It is even more important that we provide our children with schools that will prepare them to succeed in the economy of the future . With the right approaches, we believe our education community can get the job done!
We look forward to working with our partners at the United Way of Dane County, Madison Metropolitan School District, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, YMCA of Dane County, Madison Community Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education, and many others to get our youth on the right track.
Madison Prep 2012
Whatever it Takes!

Much more on the proposed Charter IB Madison Preparatory Academy here.

‘I Hate School’ Extreme Edition What ‘School Refusal’ Means and How to Fix It

Andrea Petersen:

What child hasn’t dreaded September, the end of summer and the return to school. But for some kids, the prospect of school produces a level of fear so intense that it is immobilizing, resulting in what’s known as school-refusal behavior.
These are the kids who may be absent for weeks or months. Some may cry or scream for hours every morning in an effort to resist leaving home. Others may hide out in the nurse’s office. Some kids who miss school are simply truant–they’d just rather be doing something else. But in about two-thirds of cases, a psychiatric problem, most commonly an anxiety disorder, is the cause, according to research led by Christopher A. Kearney, professor and director of clinical training at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Anywhere from 5% to 28% of children will exhibit some degree of school-refusal behavior at some point, including truancy, according to Dr. Kearney, a leading authority on the behavior, and other experts. For kids with anxiety-fueled school refusal, the fear is real and can take time to overcome. Families may struggle for months to help a child get back into the classroom. Ignoring the problem, or failing to deal with it completely, can lead to more-serious problems later on.

Can Big City Superintendents Fix Troubled Schools?

Jim Stergios:

When Adrian Fenty was elected as the mayor of Washington DC, he worked relentlessly to gain control of the DC school board. After all, the DC public schools cost so much more than your average public school and they were among the nation’s worst performers. In 2007 he appointed Michelle Rhee as the Public School Chancellor, who immediately took some of the toughest actions one could imagine to turn around the schools, including mass principal and teacher firings, numerous school closures, strict accountability measures, and strong outreach to recruit new energetic teachers and lots more foundation funding for her school (and really district) “turnaround” efforts.
Above are just some of the magazine cover and lead article pictures of Michelle Rhee. These images speak volumes about attitudes on education reform, and perhaps some of the motivations of education reformers. Not all of it is pretty. They speak to the excitement about the possibilities for change–that’s good. They say something about the urgency for reform–that is, too. But they also point to the view that kids are waiting for a “Superman” (as Geoffrey Canada has put). Some people are motivated by the need to be a warrior or savior of kids, and specially of kids who are disadvantaged. That can be good, but it can also be really self-righteous, easily pigeon-holed and needlessly divisive. It can also lead to a fawning view among fellow-travelers (see this Charlie Rose interview from 2008 and note Rose’s questions and attitude).

A Private Matter: Am I hurting my local public schools – and hurting America–by sending my kids to expensive private schools?

Patty & Standy Stonesifer:

My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one’s own child in service to the greater good?
In our desire to protect our children physically and academically, we send them to very expensive schools that are inherently segregated ethnically and economically. We, being white, educated, and comparatively affluent, are the agenda-setters in society. The agenda does not include fierce protection of the public school system we value in general terms but abandon in our own specific cases.

Three years after landmark court decision, Louisville still struggles with school desegregation

Robert Barnes:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made it sound so simple that day in 2007, when he and four other members of the Supreme Court declared that this city’s efforts to desegregate its schools violated the Constitution.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But life has been anything but simple for school officials here. They have steadfastly – or stubbornly, depending on the point of view – tried to maintain integrated classrooms despite the court’s command that officials not consider race when assigning children to schools.
Consultants were hired, lawyers retained, census data scrubbed, boundaries redrawn, more buses bought, more routes proposed, new school choices offered and more lawsuits defended.

Memo to the Media on Open Enrollment: When We (The Madison School Board) Unanimously Reject a Proposal, That Means We Don’t Support It

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

The Board discussed the issue. Individual members expressed concern about the 3% cap, suggesting that this wasn’t the way for us to deal with the open enrollment issue. I was one of those who spoke against the proposal. The Board voted unanimously to support the other two proposed changes to WASB policy, but not the 3% cap. This amounted to a unanimous rejection of the 3% limit. (A video of the Board meeting can be found here. The WASB discussion begins about 48 minutes in.)
From the Board’s perspective, the endorsement of the proposal regarding financial stability wasn’t seen as one that had much bearing on our district. But we’d like support from other districts on our push for a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars, and so we were willing to support proposals important to other districts, like this one, as a way of building a coalition for fresh consideration of open enrollment issues by the WASB.
The “financial stability” proposal certainly wasn’t intended by us as a dagger to the heart of the open enrollment policy; I don’t suppose that it was ever the intent of the legislators who supported the open enrollment statute that the policy could render school districts financially unstable.
The State Journal never reported that the Board rejected the 3% cap proposal. It ran letters to the editor on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that all seemed premised on the assumption that we had in fact supported such a cap. The Wednesday letter said in part, “[T]he Madison School District’s answer to its shortcomings is to build a Berlin wall, preventing students from leaving.” From the Thursday letter, “Unfortunately, instead of looking inward to address the problems and issues causing flight from Madison schools, the School Board would rather maintain the status quo and use the coercive force of government to prevent its customers from fleeing for what they think is a better value.” From Friday’s letter: “So the way you stem the tide of students wanting to leave the Madison School District is to change the rules so that not so many can leave? That makes perfect Madison School Board logic.” (The State Journal also ran a letter to the editor on Friday that was more supportive of the district.)

Much more on outbound open enrollment and the Madison School Board here.
I’m glad Ed continues to write online. I continue to have reservations about the “financial stability” angle since it can be interpreted (assuming it becomes law…. what are the odds?) any way the Board deems necessary. Further, I agree with Ed that there are certainly more pressing matters at hand.

To combat poverty, get Africa’s children to school

Gordon Brown:

As developed countries strive for post-crisis growth, Africa is on the verge of an economic leap forward. A $1,500bn economy, the continent is ready to leave the third world. Its resources, both natural and human, are untapped. Foreign investment is at last beginning to flow. Its leading nations are even competing to join the fast-developing “Bric” countries. But as will be clear at today’s millennium development goals summit in New York, while Africa is close to a breakthrough it has not happened yet.
Any African advance will depend on three crucial factors. First, a wider opening to trade, given that 80 per cent of current exports remains in oil and agriculture. Second, a new African common market is needed. Only regional integration can overcome the fact that only a 10th of Africa’s trade is within Africa itself. Finally, better infrastructure: African road capacity is half that of Latin America and less than a third of Asia’s.

Furious father confronts daughter’s school bus bullies

Erin Migdol:

The father of an 11-year-old bullying victim threatened to kill his daughter’s tormenters after joining her on her Florida school bus.
James Jones took his daughter, who has cerebral palsy, onto her school bus and told her to point out the bullies. Then, he said he would kill them.
“I’m gonna (expletive) you up — this is my daughter, and I will kill the (expletive) who fought her,” Jones said.

Madison School Board’s vote (to limit Outbound Open Enrollment) hurts kids — and the city

Chris Rickert:

Open enrollment allows students to go to schools outside their district. If “school choice” and “vouchers” are the buzz words popping into your head right now, you’re probably not alone. When the legislation passed in 1997, it was in the same ballpark as those two old Republican saws. Open enrollment supposedly introduces choice to the public education “marketplace,” forcing districts to compete and get better.
Democrats typically see such policies as the first step toward balkanizing the public schools into the haves and have-nots, when they should be a hallmark of a society in which any kid can become president.
Open enrollment has not shown a particularly good light on Madison in recent years. More kids have been transferring out than in, with the net loss last year 435 students. The resolution the school board passed Monday calls on the state to allow districts to limit the students that could leave under open enrollment “if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened.”
Clearly, district leaders feel open enrollment is a fiscal threat; their analysis shows it created about a $2.7 million hole in the district budget last school year.

Much more on the Madison School District’s attempt to limit outbound open enrollment here.

Philadelphia’s District and charter high schools: How are they doing?

The Notebook:

The Notebook gathered data including enrollment, student demographics, attendance, and test scores. You can sort through the information in an Excel sheet or view a PDF of the center spread of data from the print edition.
Key to data for District schools
SAT, PSSA scores: for 2009 from Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Graduation rates: Rates are as determined in 2009 for entering 9th graders from fall 2005, from School District of Philadelphia. Students are attributed to their 9th grade school.
All other data are reported by the School District of Philadelphia for the 2009-10 school year.

Useful.

John Legend surprises class with lesson on race, education

Mary Beth Marklein

Students enrolled this semester in “Education in Black America” at Howard University got their reward Thursday morning for slogging to campus instead of sleeping in: About 10 minutes into class, singer-songwriter John Legend strode in. No introduction needed.
“Surprise, surprise,” Legend said, as cellphones came out and cameras flashed. “I’m glad you didn’t skip class today.”
Legend, 31, was guest professor as part of an mtvU program called Stand In, in which big names such as Bill Gates and Madonna show up unannounced and teach a class on a subject they care about.
For Legend, a Grammy Award winner who grew up in poverty, that subject is education reform — a key theme of the just-released Waiting for Superman documentary, for which he wrote a song. So it made sense to arrange with professor Greg Carr to appear in Carr’s class, which was discussing the education of ex-slaves when the knock at the door came.

The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped

Paul Barton & Richard Coley, via a Richard Askey email:

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself.
This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement.
That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation’s top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that
could be repeated.
Next, there are the decades since the late 1980s, in which there has been no clear trend in the gap, or sustained period of change in the gap, one way or another. While there has been considerable investigation of the gap that remained, little advance in knowledge has occurred as attention was directed to alternating small declines and small gains, interspersed with periods of no change.
Paul Barton and Richard Coley drop back in time to the beginning of the 20th century when the gap in educational attainment started to narrow, and bring us to the startling and ironic conclusion that progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination. Had those things that were helping to close the gap stopped, or had they been overshadowed by new adversities that were not remedied by gaining equality before the law? Unfortunately, no comprehensive modeling by researchers is available that might identify and quantify the culprits, nor is it likely that there will ever be. The authors draw on the knowledge base that is available, from whatever schools of scholarship that have made relevant investigations, whether they be historians, or sociologists, or economists, or practitioners. Barton and Coley explore topics that remain sensitive in public discussion in their search for answers.
A lot of suspects are rounded up, and their pictures are posted for public view. Ultimately, readers will have to turn to their own good judgment. The report informs the judgments that have to be made, for there is no escaping the fact that failure to re-start progress is an unacceptable and dangerous prospect for the nation.
Michael T. Nettles.
Senior Vice President .
Policy Evaluation and Research Center
The nation’s attention has been — and remains — riveted on the persistent Black-White gap in the achievement of our elementary and secondary school students. Each year when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) releases “the nation’s report card,” the front-page news focuses on whether scores are rising or falling and whether the achievement gap is changing. Speculation is rife as to whether any change is some indication of either the success or failure of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and other efforts in our local-state-federal education system.
The nation’s efforts to address the achievement gap have a long history. Expectations increased with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954 and with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which focused on the inequality of school resources. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spiked optimism for progress in education and in society at large. And most recently, NCLB was purposeful in its requirement to “disaggregate” the average achievement scores of state accountability programs to expose the inequality that had to be addressed.
This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. We try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap.

The report can also be downloaded here.

Serious ideas from State of Education speech. Seriously.

Susan Troller:

For instance, he’s the only state elected official to actually and seriously float a proposal to repair the broken state funding system for schools. He promises the proposal for his “Funding for Our Future” will be ready to introduce to lawmakers this fall and will include details on its impact on the state’s 424 school districts.
Evers also is interested in the potential of charter schools. Let’s be open and supportive about education alternatives, he says, but mindful of what’s already working well in public schools.
And he says qualified 11th and 12th graders should be allowed to move directly on to post-secondary education or training if they wish. Dual enrollment opportunites for high school age students attending college and technical schools will require a shift in thinking that shares turf and breaks down barriers, making seamless education — pre-K through post-secondary — a reality instead of some distant dream, according to Evers.
As to Evers’ comments on teacher testing, he joins a national conversation that has been sparked, in part, by the Obama administration as well as research that shows the single universal element in improved student performance is teacher quality. We recently featured a story about concerns over teacher evaluation based on student performance and test scores, and the issue has been a potent topic elsewhere, as well.

The proof, as always, is in the pudding, or substance.
Melissa Westbrook wrote a very useful and timely article on education reform:

I think many ed reformers rightly say, “Kids can’t wait.” I agree.
There is nothing more depressing than realizing that any change that might be good will likely come AFTER your child ages out of elementary, middle or high school. Not to say that we don’t do things for the greater good or the future greater good but as a parent, you want for your child now. Of course, we are told that change needs to happen now but the reality is what it might or might not produce in results is years off. (Which matters not to Bill Gates or President Obama because their children are in private schools.)
All this leads to wonder about our teachers and what this change will mean. A reader, Lendlees, passed on a link to a story that appeared in the LA Times about their teacher ratings. (You may recall that the LA Times got the classroom test scores for every single teacher in Los Angeles and published them in ranked order.)

Susan Troller notes that Wisconsin’s oft criticized WKCE (on which Madison’s value added assessment program is based) will be replaced – by 2014:

Evers also promised that the much maligned Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, used to test student proficiency in 3rd through 6th, 8th and 10th grades, is on its way out. By 2014, there will be a much better assessment of student proficiency to take its place, Evers says, and he should know. He’s become a leading figure in the push for national core education standards, and for effective means for measuring student progress.

Missouri auditor affirms KC district’s drastic steps

Joe Robertson:

After two dozen school closings and more than 1,000 job cuts in the Kansas City School District, Missouri Auditor Susan Montee issued a reassuring message Thursday night.
Drastic measures were indeed necessary.
Without them, the district would have been in a “financially distressed position,” Montee said.
In a prelude to a full audit report, the state retraced the old ground of poor financial decisions.
Many people, aware of the ongoing audit, had been asking the auditor’s office if the wholesale cuts were necessary, Montee said.
She jumped out early with a partial report, she said, “because it might help people’s confidence in the district.”

Complete auditor’s report; 223K PDF.

Harsh lesson for charter school supporters

Erik Engquist & Jeremy Smerd:

Tuesday’s primary was a disaster for charter school proponents and their hedge fund backers. They funded three insurgent state Senate candidates, only to see them lose by huge margins to incumbents viewed as hostile to charter schools: Sen. Bill Perkins in Manhattan, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in Brooklyn and Sen. Shirley Huntley in Queens.
“If you’re going to make a statement, you have to either win or be competitive, because if you get crushed it sends the opposite message,” one legislator says. “People are going to believe that this is a paper tiger.”
Wall Street and the financial services industry made a similar gamble by investing in insurgent Reshma Saujani against Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who supported the sweeping financial regulation bill and won passage of credit card reforms that will curb banks’ profits. Saujani raised more than $1.3 million but won only 19% of the vote in an Upper East Side district where support for Wall Street is thought to be greater than elsewhere.

Wisconsin School Finance Reform Climate: 16% Health Care Spending Growth & Local Lobbying

Jason Stein & Patrick Marley:

The state health department is requesting $675 million more from state taxpayers in the next two-year budget to maintain services such as Wisconsin’s health care programs for the poor, elderly and disabled, according to budget estimates released Thursday.
That figure, included in a budget request by the state Department of Health Services, shows how difficult it will be for the next governor to balance a budget that already faces a $2.7 billion projected shortfall over two years.
One of the chief reasons the state faces the steep increase in costs is because federal economic stimulus money for health care programs will dry up before the 2011-’13 budget starts July 1.
That scheduled decrease in funding would come even as high unemployment lingers, driving many families into poverty and keeping enrollment in the programs relatively high. State Health Services Secretary Karen Timberlake said the state needs to find a way to keep health care for those who need it.
“People need this program in a way many of them never expected to,” she said.
But maintaining health programs at existing levels could cost even more than the $675 million increase over two years – a 16% jump – now projected in the budget request, which will be handled by the next governor and Legislature.

Dane County Board Urges State Action on School Reform 194K PDF via a TJ Mertz email:

This evening the Dane County Board of Supervisors enthusiastically approved a resolution urging the Wisconsin Legislature to make comprehensive changes in the way schools are funded. The Board encouraged the Legislature to consider revenue sources other than the local property tax to support the diverse needs of students and school districts.

“I hear over and over again from Dane County residents that investing in education is a priority, said County Board Supervisor Melissa Sargent, District 18, the primary sponsor of the resolution. “However, people tell me they do not like the overreliance on property taxes to fund education – pitting homeowners against children,” she added.

For the last 17 years, the state funding formula has produced annual shortfalls resulting in program cuts to schools. In 2009-2010, cuts in state aid resulted in a net loss of over $14 million in state support for students in Dane County, shifting the cost of education increasingly to property taxpayers. More and more districts are forced to rely on either program cuts or sometimes divisive referenda. In fact, voters rejected school referendums in five districts Tuesday, while just two were approved.

“The future of our children and our community is dependent on the development of an equitable system for funding public education; a system the recognizes the diverse needs of our children and does not put the funding burden on the backs of our taxpayers, said Madison Metropolitan School
Board member Arlene Silvera. “I appreciate the leadership of the County Board in raising awareness of this critical need and in lobbying our state legislators to make this happen,” she said.

Jeffery Ziegler a Member of the Marshall Public School District Board of Education and Jim Cavanaugh, President of the South Central Federation of Labor, both emphasized the need to get the attention of state officials in statements supporting the resolution. Ziegler described how state inaction has forced Board Members to make decisions that harm education.

State legislators can apparently decide to just not make the tough decisions that need to be made. School boards have a responsibility to keep our schools functioning and delivering the best education they can under the circumstances, knowing full well that those decisions will have a negative effect on the education of the children in their community.

Cavanaugh observed that the consensus that reform is needed has not led to action and pointed to the important role local governmental bodies can play in changing this by following the lead of the Dane County Board

“Legislators of all political stripes acknowledge that Wisconsin’s system for funding public schools is broken. Yet, there doesn’t appear to be the political will to address this very complicated issue. Perhaps they need a nudge from the various local units of government.”

In passing this resolution, Dane County is taking the lead on a critical statewide issue. Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) board member Thomas J. Mertz said that WAES thanked the Dane County Board and said that WAES will seek similar resolutions from communities around the state in the coming months.

“All around Wisconsin districts are hurting and we’ve been working hard to bring the need for reform to the attention of state officials,” said WAES board member Thomas J. Mertz. “Hearing from local officials might do the trick,” he concluded.

Gubernertorial candidates Tom Barrett (Clusty) and Scott Walker (Clusty) on education.
The current economic climate certainly requires that choices be made.
Perhaps this is part of the problem.
Finally, The Economist on taxes.

Helena-West Helena (Arkansas) School District deemed financially distressed

John Lyon:

The state Board of Education voted unanimously today to add the Helena-West Helena School District to the state’s list of fiscally distressed districts.
The board took the action because of declining fund balances and internal control problems that were identified in an audit. Declining enrollment has reduced the state funding the district receives, but expenditures have not been reduced accordingly, state education officials said.
“From 2007 to 2010 they’ve lost about 564 students,” said Bill Goff, the state Education Department’s assistant commissioner fiscal and administrative services. “A $6,000 per student, that’s about $3.4 million.”
The state Department of Education notified the district in July that it would be recommended for fiscal distress status. The district did not appeal.
Superintendent Willie Williams told the board the district is working with a financial consultant to reorganize personnel and make other changes to reduce expenditures. He said the district also is addressing the audit findings, which included reimbursement to school board members for non-business-related travel, restaurant bills and alcoholic beverages.

Cheating Charter Schools Some teachers are apparently more deserving than others

The Wall Street Journal:

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.
The Administration’s initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
“A charter school,” says the department, “may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school.” Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.

A Mixed Welcome For Chinese-Americans, a long road to acceptance–even to public schooling.

Melanie Kirkpatrick:

In the 1960s, when she was in her 90s, Mamie Tape Lowe liked to tell her great-grandchildren the story of her first day of school in San Francisco in 1884. On a warm day in September, Mamie’s mother dressed her in a checkered pinafore, tied a ribbon in her hair and took her to the Spring Valley Primary School on Union Street. When they arrived, the principal, Jennie Hurley, refused to let her in. In Mamie’s telling, “they said all the ‘pigtails’ would be coming” if they admitted Mamie. But her father “fought like heck” and sued the board of education. Mamie’s great-grandchildren, who were fifth- generation Americans, marveled that there was a time when Chinese-American children were denied an education or had to attend a separate school for “Orientals.”
The lawsuit filed by her father on Mamie’s behalf–eventually decided by the California Supreme Court a year later–is a little-known landmark in the history of Chinese in America, but it is at the center of the most interesting chapter in “The Lucky Ones” by Columbia University historian Mae Ngai. “The Lucky Ones” follows three generations of the Tape family, from the 1860s, when Mamie’s parents arrived in San Francisco from China, to 1943, when the exclusion laws were lifted and Chinese in America achieved full democratic rights. Ms. Ngai uses the Tape family’s history as a vehicle to describe the emergence of a Chinese-American middle class in an era when the vast majority of Chinese immigrants were illiterate male “coolies.”

Mitch Henck Discusses Madison’s Attempts to Restrict Open Enrollment

15.8MB mp3 audio file, via a kind reader.
Related:

Battle Over Class Room As a $578 Million City School Opens in Los Angeles, Charters Press For More Space

Tamara Audi:

The scruffy rooftop basketball court of the Larchmont School, a small charter school packed into one floor of an 83-year-old building, offers a breathtaking view of the city’s priciest new gem: the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Larchmont’s executive director Brian Johnson, gazing at the gleaming green rectangular structure surrounded by pristine athletic fields and rows of stately palm trees.
The new public-school complex has drawn criticism for its cost at a time when Los Angeles city schools have laid off thousands of teachers to help plug its $640 million budget gap.

Oscar Winner Guggenheim Fights Malaise in “Superman”

Brian Brooks:

Guggenheim at moments became emotional, choking up as he spoke about one of the girls, Daisy, he profiles in his latest film, “Waiting for Superman,” which exposes the breakdown in American education.
“I’ve watched this movie 40 times and I watch Daisy in East Los Angeles and she’s motivated, smart and her father works as a truck driver, while her mother cleans hospital rooms. She wants to be a doctor and her parents have hope. They believe that if they do their part that America will do its part.”
At the core of “Superman” is whether America has the will and courage to face up to its spiraling public education system. While it has been generally accepted that education in America has faced a frightening decline, with statistics to back up that fear, Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) hopes that the film will motivate people to believe that a crisis that may appear intractable can be reformed and improved despite the perception that it is a system stymied by entrenched paralysis.

“They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”

ibmadison.com interviews Kaleem Caire about the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, via a kind reader:

In Caire’s mind, kids can’t wait. Consider the data he cites from the ACT District Profile Report for the Madison Metropolitan School District’s 2010 graduating class:

Of students taking the ACT, average test scores differed significantly between African Americans and white students:

English Math Reading Science Composite

African Americans 16.3 18.0 17.1 18.4 17.6

Caucasian/White 25.1 25.6 25.8 24.8 25.4

The percent of students meeting ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores, broken out by ethnicity, for the 2010 graduating class seems more alarming:

Total Tested English (18) Math (22) Reading (21) Science (24)

All Students 1,122 81% 68% 71% 51%

African Americans 76 38% 24% 25% 9%

Caucasian/White 733 90% 77% 79% 60%

Hispanic 71 59% 39% 45% 18%

Asian/Pacific Isl. 119 67% 65% 61% 45%

Numbers like these fuel Caire’s fire, and his vision for The Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. “I’m amazed that [the primarily white leadership in the city] hasn’t looked at this data and said, ‘wow!’ They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”

Caire understands the challenges that lie ahead. By November, he needs to formally propose the idea to the School Board, after which he will seek a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction. He anticipates other hurdles along the way. Among them, a misconstrued conception. “Madison believes it’s creative, but the reality is, it’s not innovative.” Will the community accept this idea, or sit back and wait, he wonders.
Second: The resources to do it. “We can survive largely on what the school system can give us [once we’re up and running], but there’s seed money you need to get to that point.”
Third: The teacher’s union response. “No one knows what that will be,” Caire said. “The school board and district are so influenced by the teacher’s union, which represents teachers. We represent kids. To me, it’s not, ‘teachers at all costs,’ it’s ‘kids first.’ We’ll see where our philosophies line up.” He added that the Urban League and those behind the Charter School idea are not at all opposed to the teacher’s union, but the Prep School’s design includes, for example, a school day longer than the teacher’s contract allows. “This isn’t about compensation,” he said of the contract, “it’s about commitment. We don’t want red tape caught up in this, and we want to guarantee long-term success.”

Model preschool program emphasizes inclusion for children with disabilities

Shawn Doherty:

It is 8:30 on a crisp September morning, the start of a busy day for preschoolers at the Waisman Center’s Early Childhood Program, a nationally renowned laboratory school.
At a piano in the gym, a teacher holds a 4-year-old named Michael in her lap and helps him tap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She speaks to him using both sign language and a singsong voice. Several other boys driving toy cars swerve around another teacher doing duty as traffic cop. A student teacher is coloring at a table with students. In a corner of the gym, two girls are playing house. “This is your bed, Baby Kitty. Go to sleep right NOW!” one of them says. A tiny child with big brown eyes, named Caroline, curls up on a mat and pretends to sleep.
Michael, distracted by the noisy traffic behind him, wriggles out of Kerri Lynch’s lap and runs up to the boys in cars, making guttural sounds. The boys ignore him and continue to whiz past. Lynch waves down an especially energetic driver in a red T-shirt who has snagged the school’s popular police car. “Michael is talking to you,” she says, holding Michael, who is clearly becoming frustrated. She puts Michael’s face between her hands gently so that he makes eye contact with the other child and encourages him to try to speak again. The other boy listens carefully as the teacher translates: “Michael is wondering when he can have a turn?”

City schools’ trust problem

Jack Stollsteimer:

The recent news that the Philadelphia School District has seen its number of “persistently dangerous” schools drop by 20 percent should be cause for optimism. Disciplinary policy changes that I advocated while I was the state safe schools advocate, which were implemented with the strong support of Mayor Nutter and Superintendent Arlene Ackerman in 2008, may be having the hoped-for effect.
With most matters in the school district, however, every step forward is accompanied by at least one step backward. While the superintendent once stood up to members of the School Reform Commission who had long abetted the violence, she has since failed to back up her antiviolence policies with concrete action.
Ackerman’s ham-handed reaction to the victimization of Asian students at South Philadelphia High School is only the most obvious example. Continued cuts in alternative education programs for disruptive students are equally disappointing, as was the elimination of order-enforcing “climate managers” in neighborhood schools that need more capable adults, not fewer.
It’s hard for longtime observers of the district to believe the data and trust that it’s turned the corner on violence, partly because we’ve been lied to before. The district has supposedly had a “zero tolerance” policy on violence since 2002, but it failed to expel anyone for any offense between 2005 and 2009. The district reported school violence was on the decline from 2001 to 2006, but The Inquirer found that it had vastly underreported the data.

Black Male Grad Rates: Despair, And A Ray Of Hope

NPR:

In the past few weeks, more than 400,000 young black men entered American high schools as freshmen. Four years from now, fewer than half of them will get diplomas.
That’s according to a new study from the Schott Foundation for Public Education. It found that only 47 percent of black male students entering high school in 2003 graduated in 2008. For white males, the graduation rate was 78 percent.
Dr. John Jackson, the foundation’s president and CEO, tells NPR’s Guy Raz that those numbers are dismal largely because of the lack of resources in schools with high black populations. He says that when young black men are given opportunities to learn in schools with more resources, they perform well.
Not Necessarily Black And White

9/14/2010 City of Madison + Madison School Board Committee Meeting

City of Madison PDF, via a kind reader’s email:

Update: Gang-Related Issues
Update: Safe Routes to School Discussion:
Easement Around Chavez Elementary School

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Urban Plight: Vanishing Upward Mobility

Joel Kotkin:

Boosters still maintain that big cities remain unique centers for social uplift, but evidence suggests this is increasingly no longer the case.
Since the beginnings of civilization, cities have been crucibles of progress both for societies and individuals. A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, represented “an inventory of the possible,” a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families.
What characterized great cities such as Amsterdam–and, later, places such as London, New York , Chicago, and Tokyo–was the size of their property-owning middle class. This was a class whose roots, for the most part, lay in the peasantry or artisan class, and later among industrial workers. Their ascension into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, petit or haute, epitomized the opportunities for social advancement created uniquely by cities.
In the twenty-first century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility is under threat. Urban boosters still maintain that big cities remain unique centers for social uplift, but evidence suggests this is increasingly no longer the case.

Yikes! Kids to judge healthy food options

Susan Troller

The REAP Food Group will stage what sounds like a pretty daunting culinary challenge that should be fun to watch at its Food for Thought Festival at the end of September. On Saturday, Sept. 24, three local chefs will join three local school principals as kitchen collaborators, working together to plan and prepare a healthy, nutritious, child-friendly meal that will be judged by the harshest critics around: school age kids themselves.
And that’s not all. The intrepid cooks must do it all on a budget, under a deadline and in front of an audience. School cooks would say it’s almost as hard as what they face daily in the lunchroom.
“I know they will be hard on us,” chef Steve Eriksen says of the young judges. Eriksen is one of the contestants and associate team leader for the kitchen at Madison’s Whole Foods grocery store. “What you get out of children’s mouths is brutal honesty.”
But Eriksen says he has a secret weapon as he prepares for the competition: his 3-year-old daughter, Ella, who is a picky eater. “If we can make something that I think Ella will eat, any kid will like it,” he says with a grin.

Wisconsin State Journal Removes This Story

The Madison School District’s Ken Syke via email:

Jim,
I’ve been made aware of the entry on the School Info Systems site about La Follette student taking gun to school. That story has been retracted by madison.com and thus the story excerpt on the the SIS site is not supported any longer. It’s our understanding that this madison.com story will remain retracted.
Thus we request that the story excerpt be pulled from the School Info Systems site.
Thank you.

I phoned (608) 252-6120 the Wisconsin State Journal (part of Capital Newspapers, which owns madison.com) and spoke with Jason (I did not ask his last name) today at about 2:20p.m. I asked about the status of this story [Dane County Case Number: 2010CF001460, Police call data via Crime Reports COMMUNITY POLICING 03 Sep 2010 1 BLOCK ASH ST Distance: 0 miles Identifier: 201000252977 Suspicious Vehicle Agency: City of Madison]. He spoke with another person, returned to the phone and said that a police officer phoned the reporter, Sandy Cullen and said the report she mentioned was incorrect. They then took the article down. I asked him to email me this summary, which I will post upon receipt.
Links from the original post:
Related:

La Follette student charged in gang-related gun incident.
Madison West High gang incident raises specter of retaliation.
Much more on gangs & school violence; forum audio / video.
Dane County Case #2010CF001460 Count #2: “Possess Firearm in School Zone”.
Wisconsin State Journal Twitter link: http://twitter.com/WiStateJournal/status/24158645996

New Program Provides Basic Health Care For Madison School District Students

channel3000:

The year-round program covers annual physical exams, primary care office visits at the assigned clinic, including visits when the child is sick, as well as some prescription medicines.
“It’s a new program so I think I signed up 12 families probably in a couple weeks time at the end of school last year,” she said.
The program starts with the school nurse in every school in the district. The nurse identifies students based on two main criteria: they don’t have any health insurance and do not qualify for any state programs like Badger Care.
The nurse then forwards an application for the program to the health care provider that has been paired up with the school. The health care provider then contacts the student’s parents.
The program is available to undocumented students. MMSD Superintendent Dan Nerad defends this decision by citing the U.S. Supreme Court case that requires schools to educate all children regardless of immigration status.
“These are children that have needs and we have an obligation to educate them both legally and ethically and morally but underscoring it’s a legal obligation first and foremost for us,” he said. “And when kids aren’t well they need to be taken care of.”

Gates Foundation Acknowledges Flaws in Report

Associated Press:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken another step toward increased transparency, acknowledging in its annual report that the world’s largest charitable foundation is too secretive and hard to work with.
The report, posted online Tuesday, includes the usual financial information and a look at the foundation’s plans. But it also offers a glimpse of the organization’s attempts to be more open.
CEO Jeff Raikes draws attention in the report to a grantee survey that gave the foundation poor marks for communicating its goals and strategies, and for confusing people with its complicated grant-making process.
Mr. Raikes originally released the survey results in June–a day before Bill Gates made headlines for launching a campaign with investor Warren Buffett to get other American billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity.

Madison West High gang incident raises specter of retaliation

Sandy Cullen:

An armed altercation Friday outside West High School involving known and suspected members of two street gangs involved in an April homicide heightened concerns of possible retaliation, police and school officials said Tuesday.
Sgt. Amy Schwartz, who leads the Madison Police Department’s Crime Prevention Gang Unit, said it is not known if members of the South Side Carnales gang went to the high school looking for members of the rival Clanton 14, or C-14 gang.
But staff at West and the city’s three other main high schools and two middle schools were told Tuesday to determine if safety plans are needed for any students who might be at risk, said Luis Yudice, security coordinator for the Madison School District.
Police have not notified the School District of a specific threat against any student, Yudice said.
But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student. Five people, who police say are associated with the South Side Carnales and MS-13 gangs, are charged in Perez’s slaying. Two of them remain at large.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio / video.
A kind reader noted this quote from the article:

“But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student.”

Much more here.

Newark public schools need revolutionary reform

Shavar Jeffries:

Yet in Newark’s public schools, as in many other urban districts, our children’s endless talent meets headfirst with a stultifying bureaucracy that too often extinguishes rather than ignites their genius. It is beset with rules that ignore the individual talents of school leaders and teachers.
Its primary features — tenure, lockstep pay, and seniority — deny the complexity and creativity of effective teaching and learning, implying that teachers and principals are little more than interchangeable assemblyline workers. These practices instill performance-blindness into the fabric of our schools, dishonoring the talent, commitment and effort of our many good teachers and principals, whose excellence is systematically unrecognized and thus underappreciated. This both disrespects the notion of education as a sophisticated profession and produces a system in which student achievement is peripheral to the day-to-day operations of schools.
Simply put, our children have no limits; our schools have too many.
The future for our children depends on revolutionary school reform, executed relentlessly. Our children can no longer afford tinkering around the edges. This reform must include at least four elements:
•Reform of tenure and collective bargaining, including eliminating tenure for principals and significantly restricting it for teachers.

Clusty Search: Shavar Jeffries.

Thinking about Seattle School Board Elections

Melissa Westbrook

I’ve been giving thought to the School Board elections next year. I might run. I say that not for anyone to comment on but because I’m musing out loud on it. There are many reasons NOT to run but I have one main reason TO run.
Accountability.
To this day, I am mystified over the number of people who run for office that don’t believe they have to explain anything to voters AFTER they are elected. And I’m talking here about people whose work is not done with a vote (like the Mayor) but people who have to work in a group (City Council, School Board).
I truly doubt that these people get challenged on every single vote but I’m sure people ask on some. Why would they not respond? If asked, what data or information did you use to make this decision, why can’t they answer in specific? Why wouldn’t you be accountable to explain how you came to your decision?

Locally, the April, 2011 school board election features two seats, currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman.

Where are the activists outraged over city’s failing schools?

Shirley Stancato

When the Michigan Department of Education classified 41 schools in the Detroit Public Schools system as “failing” last month, I braced myself for a thunderous public outcry.
After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a very energized group descended on the Detroit City Council to loudly and angrily express themselves about education in Detroit. Surely these concerned citizens, having just voiced such a strong concern about education, would leap to action to demand that something be done to fix these “failing” schools now.
But that hasn’t happened. The silence, as the old cliché goes, has been deafening.
Why would people who were so passionate and loud so recently remain silent about a report that shows our children are being severely shortchanged? Why would members of the school board who fought to preserve the status quo remain equally silent about such a devastating report?
After all, nothing is as important to our children’s future as education. And nothing is more important to our future as a city than our young people.

Private vs Public Education

Linda Thomas:

The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”

The New Black Migration: The Suburbs or Bust

Steven Snead, via a kind reader

Recall now the biblical phrase, “from whence comes my help?” It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.
They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother’s prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.

Clusty Search: Steven Snead.
Related: Madison Preparatory Academy.

Camp trains students in classical theater acting

Pamela Cotant

A group of high school thespians sharpened their skills this summer at a camp where they worked with professional actors by day and then watched them perform at American Players Theatre at night.
The 27 students ages 13 to 17 attended Acting for Classical Theatre, an American Players Theatre residential camp. The annual six-day camp was based at Bethel Horizons Camp and Retreat Center in Dodgeville where the campers received their training and lodging.
On four nights, they traveled to the nearby American Players Theatre in Spring Green to watch Shakespearean plays. On another night, they received a backstage tour. When they got back to camp, they played theater games — despite the late hour.
On the last day, parents and American Players Theatre employees were invited to watch the youth perform a shortened, 60-minute version of Hamlet on the American Players Theatre stage.

Schools: The Disaster Movie A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.

John Heilemann:

The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children’s Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America’s schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted “Call my office,” which translated to “Buzz off.”
Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he’d made–An Inconvenient Truth–and Canada snapped to attention. “I had absolutely seen it,” Canada recalls, “and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something.” Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. “I honestly didn’t think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk.”
Two years later, Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.

Related: An increased emphasis on adult employment – Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s recent speech to the Madison Rotary Club and growing expenditures on adult to adult “professional development“.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison’s new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
Caire is driving the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy International Baccalaureate charter school initiative.

Back to Basics: Get the Feds Out

Susan Ohanian:

Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:
“It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school “reform,” with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom’s after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture.
Borderland blog, June 16, 2010
When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Chairman Henry Waxman said the Committee reviewed 30,000 documents related to the oil disaster and found “no evidence that you (Hayward) paid any attention to the tremendous risks BP was taking.” Likewise no one at the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, or the House and Senate education committees etc. is paying any attention to the tremendous risks the U. S. Department of Education is taking with its money bribes to the states.

Excellent schools tend to choose their pupils. Is there another way?

The Economist

PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.
In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008.
Mr Blair’s successors have lacked his zeal, but religious schools continue to flourish. One reason is that their pupils tend to do better than others in exams. In 2009, 57% of them at around age 16 passed national exams (GCSEs) with acceptable grades, including those in maths and English, compared with 51% at non-religious state schools.

Too often, students’ parents get lost in the equation

Alan Borsuk

Vernita Otukoya said her son, Babatunde, was struggling in third grade last year. So she met with his teacher at Milwaukee’s 53rd St. School.
“We made a plan, we stuck with it, we checked with each other on a regular basis,” Otukoya said. The literacy coach at the school gave her books that her son could read. The teamwork and the focus on how to help Babatunde paid off.
“He actually made the honor roll” by the end of the school year, Otukoya said proudly as her son began his first day of fourth grade Wednesday.
Would that all stories of parent-teacher interaction were that positive. For that matter, would that there were a lot more stories of parent-teacher interaction at all.
There is no getting around the fact that the low level of parent involvement in helping children succeed in school is a huge impediment to educational success, especially in low-income communities.
That’s true nationwide. It’s true in Milwaukee. The teacher who has 30 kids and maybe five parents show up for conferences is a common and discouraging story.

Advice for kids on the first day of school

Brian Brehmer

I wrote a column in June that offered advice to the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. With the new school year beginning, I thought I would offer some advice to MPS students on their first day of class.
Good morning, students. On your first day of school, there are a million things going through your minds. I hate to do this to you, but I am going to add a few more things for you to think about.
First and foremost, take a look around. Do you see where you are? Make it a habit. Attend all of your classes each and every day. That is the only way you are going to get an education.
Second, do your homework. Don’t just bring it home and back to school – actually do it. The only way you can get anything out of it is by actually doing your best to complete each and every assignment.

We all must take part in education

Caryl Davis

I had the pleasure of teaching a group of Milwaukee Public Schools students this summer. And, yes, it was a pleasure. Classes were small – 15 students maximum – there was team-teaching and students and faculty had access to technology.
Many of the students were those who had not met math and literacy requirements during the 2009-’10 academic year. Some had let their behavior get in the way of their learning, so we were eager to provide some structure that would help them move forward.
By the end of the summer session, our data revealed that our students made gains in math and vocabulary acquisition. According to MPS standards, a 7% to 9% gain in math or literacy is acceptable. Many of our students had 10% to 60% gains.
I don’t believe this progress would be possible with 40 students in a classroom, without access to technology or without extra adults in the classroom. We were able to give our students the individualized attention that they would not get in an overcrowded and understaffed classroom.
It is crucial that our educational leaders go back to the basics during the 2010-’11 school year. Education is a contact activity, and more contact is better.

My Reasons for Optimism on Education: Across the country, new institutions like charter schools are disproving the old assumption that economic circumstances determine outcomes.

Wendy Kopp

Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the latest winners of Race to the Top, the initiative he devised to leverage federal dollars to drive education reform at the state level. While no grant process is perfect, the competition drove a remarkable volume of new plans and even new laws designed to advance educational opportunity. Many states showed boldness–and I’m particularly excited that all 12 winning states mentioned Teach For America in their applications.
This fall marks Teach For America’s 20th anniversary, and I have spent much of the summer reflecting on the sea change that has taken place in public education over the last two decades.
When we set out to recruit our first corps of teachers in 1990, it would be fair to say that there was no organized movement to ensure educational opportunity for all children in our nation. The prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. Thus, it was unrealistic to expect teachers or schools to overcome the effects of poverty.
When Jaime Escalante led a class of East Los Angeles students to pass the AP calculus exam in 1982, the Educational Testing Service questioned the results, and Hollywood went on to make the hit movie “Stand and Deliver” about his success. Escalante was lionized as an outlier–not as someone whose example could be widely replicated.

Ms. Kopp is the founder and CEO of Teach For America. She is the author of the forthcoming book “A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All” (PublicAffairs).

Black parents must advocate for their children

Fabu:

All through the community, I have been hearing families express varying emotions about the beginning of a new school year this week. Some are glad for the relief from costly summer programs. Others are anxious about changes for their children who are moving from elementary to middle or middle to high school. One parent even shared how her daughter wakes up in the middle of the night asking questions about kindergarten.
At a recent United Way Days of Caring event in Middleton for more than 100 students from Madison-area Urban Ministry, Packers and Northport, lots of children expressed excitement over starting school again and appreciated the fun as well as the backpacks filled with school supplies that Middleton partners provided.
The schools where we send our children to learn and the people we ask to respect and teach them stir up a lot of emotions, just like an article about Wisconsin ACT scores stirred up a lot of emotions in me. ACT stands for American College Testing and the scores test are used to gain entrance into college, which translates for most Americans into an ability to live well economically or to become the institutionalized poor. Certainly the good news is that Wisconsin scored third in the nation and that Madison schools’ scores went up slightly.
The bad news is when your look at the scores based on racial groups, once again in Madison, in Wisconsin and in the U.S., the scores of African-American students are the lowest.

Wisconsin’s Mind is on Education

Kenneth M. Goldstein and William G. Howell

Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren’t strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.
Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms–in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay–than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.

How to Reform the Failing Schools

Letters to the Editor

In “Steal This Movie, Too” (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.
I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows — the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students’ theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.

As the Madison school year starts, a pair of predicaments

Paul Fanlund, via a kind reader:

In fact, the changing face of Madison’s school population comes up consistently in other interviews with public officials.
Police Chief Noble Wray commented recently that gang influences touch even some elementary schools, and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz expressed serious concern last week that the young families essential to the health and vitality of Madison are too often choosing to live outside the city based on perceptions of the city’s schools.
Nerad says he saw the mayor’s remarks, and agrees the challenge is real. While numbers for this fall will not be available for weeks, the number of students who live in Madison but leave the district for some alternative through “open enrollment” will likely continue to grow.
“For every one child that comes in there are two or three going out,” Nerad says, a pattern he says he sees in other urban districts. “That is the challenge of quality urban districts touched geographically by quality suburban districts.”
The number of “leavers” grew from 90 students as recently as 2000-01 to 613 last year, though the increase might be at least partly attributed to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greatly curtailed the ability of school districts to use race when deciding where students will go to school. In February 2008, the Madison School Board ended its long-standing practice of denying open enrollment requests if they would create a racial imbalance.
Two key reasons parents cited in a survey last year for moving children were the desire for better opportunities for gifted students and concerns about bullying and school safety. School Board member Lucy Mathiak told me last week that board members continue to hear those two concerns most often.
Nerad hears them too, and he says that while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district. On safety, he points to a recent district policy on bullying as evidence of focus on the problem, including emphasis on what he calls the “bystander” issue, in which witnesses need to report bullying in a way that has not happened often enough.
For all the vexing issues, though, Nerad says much is good about city schools and that perceptions are important. “Let’s be careful not to stereotype the urban school district,” he says. “There is a lot at stake here.”

Related: the growth in outbound open enrollment from the Madison School District and ongoing budget issues, including a 10% hike in property taxes this year and questions over 2005 maintenance referendum spending.
The significant property tax hike and ongoing budget issues may be fodder for the upcoming April, 2011 school board election, where seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot.
Superintendent Nerad’s statement on “ensuring that we have a stable middle class” is an important factor when considering K-12 tax and spending initiatives, particularly in the current “Great Recession” where housing values are flat or declining and the property tax appetite is increasing (The Tax Foundation, via TaxProf:

The Case-Shiller index, a popular measure of residential home values, shows a drop of almost 16% in home values across the country between 2007 and 2008. As property values fell, one might expect property tax collections to have fallen commensurately, but in most cases they did not.
Data on state and local taxes from the U.S. Census Bureau show that most states’ property owners paid more in FY 2008 (July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008) than they had the year before (see Table 1). Nationwide, property tax collections increased by more than 4%. In only four states were FY 2008’s collections lower than in FY 2007: Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Vermont. And in three states–Florida, Indiana and New Mexico–property tax collections rose more than 10%.

It will be interesting to see what the Madison school District’s final 2010-2011 budget looks like. Spending and receipts generally increase throughout the year. This year, in particular, with additional borrowed federal tax dollars on the way, the District will have funds to grow spending, address the property tax increase or perhaps as is now increasingly common, spend more on adult to adult professional development.
Madison’s K-12 environment is ripe for change. Perhaps the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy charter school will ignite the community.

More on the Proposed IB Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men Charter School

522K PDF via a Kaleem Caire email:

Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding – and in some cases fear – of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison – the “founders” of Madison Prep – also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.

More here.

After the Deluge, A New Education System Today close to 70% of New Orleans children attend charter schools.

Leslie Jacobs:

Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces and many of our institutions–including our failing public education system.
But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.
Citywide, the number of fourth-grade students who pass the state’s standardized tests has jumped by almost a third–to 65% in 2010 from 49% in 2007. The passage rate among eighth-graders during the same period has improved at a similar clip, to 58% from 44%.
In high school, the transformation has been even more impressive. Since 2007, the percentage of students meeting the state’s proficiency goals is up 44% for English and 45% for math. Schools have achieved this dramatic improvement despite serving a higher percentage of low-income students–84%–than they did before the storm. Many of these students missed months or even a whole year of school.

School Spotlight: K-Ready program preps children for kindergarten

Pamela Cotant

More than a fifth of the incoming kindergarteners registered in the Madison School District will be more ready for school this fall after attending a six-week summer program.
The full-day K-Ready program helps children prepare for kindergarten by working on academic readiness skills such as letter recognition, name writing and counting. They also have the opportunity to learn what school is like, how to get along with others, and how to listen to a teacher.
This summer, the program grew to a new high of 460 students – about 22 percent of projected kindergarteners.
Fakeith Hopson enrolled his daughter, Aniyah, who will attend Leopold Elementary School, in the K-Ready program at Huegel Elementary School and was impressed by the strides she made in counting and saying her ABCs. She also learned how to tie her shoes.

Urban League president proposes Madison International Baccalaureate charter school geared toward minority boys

Susan Troller:

“In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys,” says Caire, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. He is blunt about the problems of many black students in Madison.
“We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I’m not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education. Well, here’s a plan that’s innovative, and that has elements that have been very successful elsewhere. I’d like to see it have a chance to change kids’ lives here,” says Caire, who is African-American and has extensive experience working on alternative educational models, particularly in Washington, D.C.
One of the most vexing problems in American education is the difference in how well minority students, especially African-American children, perform academically in comparison to their white peers. With standardized test scores for black children in Wisconsin trailing those from almost every other state in the nation, addressing the achievement gap is a top priority for educators in the Badger State. Although black students in Madison do slightly better academically than their counterparts in, say, Milwaukee, the comparison to their white peers locally creates a Madison achievement gap that is, as Caire points out, at the bottom of national rankings.
He’s become a fan of same-sex education because it “eliminates a lot of distractions” and he says a supportive environment of high expectations has proven to be especially helpful for improving the academic performance of African-American boys.
Caire intends to bring the proposal for the boys-only charter prep school before the Madison School Board in October or November, then will seek a planning grant for the school from the state Department of Public Instruction in April, and if all goes according to the ambitious business plan, Madison Prep would open its doors in 2012 with 80 boys in grades 6 and 7.
Forty more sixth-graders would be accepted at the school in each subsequent year until all grades through senior high school are filled, with a total proposed enrollment of 280 students. A similar, same-sex school for girls would promptly follow, Caire says, opening in 2013.
Five things would make Madison Prep unique, Caire says, and he believes these options will intrigue parents and motivate students.

Fabulous.
It will be interesting to see how independent (from a governance and staffing perspective) this proposal is from the current Madison charter models. The more the better.
Clusty Search: Madison Preparatory Academy.

Madison School Board Priorities: Ethics, Achievement, or ?

TJ Mertz makes a great point here:

Last up, is “Next Steps for Future Board Development Meetings and Topics.’ Board development is good and important, but with only 2/3 of the term left I hate to see too much time and energy devoted to Board Development.
I keep coming back to this. Every year about 1/3 of the time and energy is devoted to budget matters, that leaves 2/3 to try to make things better. Put it another way; it is September, budget season starts in January. Past time to get to work.
This just leaves the closed meeting on the Superintendent evaluation. Not much to add to what I wrote here. My big point is that almost all of this process should be public. I will repost the links to things that are public:

Charlie Mas continues to chronicle, in a similar manner to TJ, the Seattle School Board’s activities.
In my view, the Madison School Board might spend time on:

Public Superintendent Review, including oversight of the principal and teacher review process. Done properly, this should improve teaching effectiveness over time. This process should include full implementation of Infinite Campus. Infinite Campus is a potentially powerful tool to evaluate many activities within the District.
Implement a 5 year budget.
Evaluate ongoing MMSD Programs for their effectiveness, particularly from a spending and staffing perspective.

Voters will have another chance to weigh in on the Madison School Board during the spring, 2011 election, when seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot. Those interested in running should contact the City of Madison Clerk’s office.
Update: I received the draft Madison School Board ethics documents via a Barbara Lehman email (thanks):

Board Member Ed Hughes 241K PDF

Presently we do not have a policy that describes expectations regarding the performance of School Board members. The Committee developed this list on the basis of similar policies adopted by other Boards as well as our own discussion of what our expectations are for each other. The Committee members were able to reach consensus on these expectations fairly quickly.
Expectation No.4 refers to information requests. We realize that current MMSD Policy 1515 also refers to information requests, but our thinking was that the existing policy addresses the obligation of the superintendent to respond to information requests. We do not currently have a policy that addresses a Board member’s obligation to exercise judgment in submitting information requests.
Expectation No. 10 is meant to convey that School Board members hold their positions 24-hours a day and have a responsibility to the Board always to avoid behavior that would cast the Board or the District in a poor light.

How might Number 10 affect an elected Board member’s ability to disagree with District policies or activities?
Outgoing Madison School District Counsel Dan Mallin 700K PDF.:

These paragraphs are a modification from existing language. Although the overall intent appears to remain similar to existing policy, I recommend the existing language because I think it does a better job of expressly recognizing the competing interests between the “beliefstatements” and a Board Member’s likely right, as an individual citizen (and perhaps as a candidate for office while simultaneously serving on the Board) to accept PAC contributions and or to make a statement regarding a candidate. Perhaps the langnage could make clear that no Board Member may purport to, or attempt to imply, that they are speaking for the School Board when making a statement in regard to a candidate for office. That is, they should be express that they are speaking in the individual capacity.
Draft ethics policy 500K PDF:

The Board functions most effectively when individual Board Members adhere to acceptable professional behavior. To promote acceptable conduct of the Board, Board Members should:
Outgoing Counsel Dan Mallin’s 7/15/2010 recommendations.

No gold stars for successful L.A. teachers

Jason Felch

It’s a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in “Monster Math.”
That’s Tan’s name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two — just to show them it’s not so different.
On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board — 7,850,437,826 x 56 — with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.
The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: “Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million….”
Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That’s Spanish for “with gusto,” a phrase she picked up from watching “Stand and Deliver,” a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

10 Shifts that Change Everything

Tom Vander Ark

Change forces and market drivers (described in 3×5 revolution) are finally bringing the digital revolution to education. Online learning is creating new options for students. Blending online and onsite learning has the potential to improve learning and operating productivity. The digital learning revolution is creating 10 shifts int he way we learn (first explored in a 7/3 post)
1.Responsibility. Families are taking back responsibility for learning and choices in learning are exploding. In America, most states grant charters to nonprofit groups to operate independent schools. New York City closed 90 failing schools and invited community organization to assist in developing 400 new schools. Independently run government funded education is common in Europe, Scandinavia, and Chile. Low cost private schools provide educational options in India and Africa.
Higher learning choices are expanding; and while traditional college costs spiral higher, some new options like Open University are free, and some are very low cost. Competency-based programs like Western Governor’s University give credit for demonstrated expertise. Straighter Line allows students to earn college credits on an accelerated basis for $99 per month.
2.Expectations. The standards movement, culminating in the Common Core,[iii] reflects American political consensus that all students should be eligible and prepared for higher learning–a monumental step for equity but with the unintended consequence of standardizing a 19th century version of schooling based on age cohorts, credit hours and bubble sheet tests.

Praise for the Indiana Schools Superintendent

Indianapolis Business Journal:

Tony Bennett, the state’s superintendent of public instruction for nearly two years, deserves accolades for shoving education reform toward the top of Indiana’s agenda.
Unlike his predecessor, Suellen Reed, who seemed little more than a cheerleader for schools, Bennett is pushing hard-nosed reforms.
And while at times he’s unfairly cast the state’s powerful teachers’ union–the Indiana State Teachers Association–as a villain, Bennett wisely struck a more productive, collaborative tone during his State of Education address Aug. 23. The New Albany Republican avoided the rhetoric that scores political points but does little to actually improve schools.

San Francisco public schools a good choice

Jan Goben:

C.W. Nevius’ columns about parents’ distress over San Francisco schools rang a bell with me, and I was prompted to weigh in about my delight with the public schools my daughter has attended in San Francisco.
When my daughter was starting kindergarten, friends said: “You can’t stay in San Francisco; you have to move!” I heard this often enough that I worried. Did my husband and I have to leave the city we loved?
Well, we did decide to stay, and we entered our daughter in our neighborhood school, Fairmount Elementary. “You can’t send her there – she won’t learn anything at a Spanish immersion school,” friends protested. I worried anew.

DFER Milwaukee Reception for Wisconsin Legislative Candidates 8/30/2010

via a Katy Venskus email

JOE WILLIAMS
Executive Director
Invites you to a reception honoring three emerging education reform leaders:
State Senator Lena Taylor
4th Senate District
Angel Sanchez
Candidate for the 8th Assembly District

Stephanie Findley
Candidate for the 10th Assembly District
These candidates have committed to support all children in all Milwaukee schools. Please help us show them that education reform supporters in Milwaukee recognize their efforts. With your help we can elect and re-elect committed leaders who will fight for real reform and support more quality options for children and their parents.
Please join us whether you can give $5, $50 or $500 to each candidate!
When: Monday August 30th, 2010
Where: The Capital Grille
310 West Wisconsin Avenue
Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Refreshments will be served.
Free Valet Parking Provided.
RSVP: Ptosha Davis, DFER WI, 414-630-6637 or dferwisconsin@gmail.com

Related: John Nichols notes that Madison Teachers, Inc. endorsed Ben Manski in the 77th District Wisconsin Assembly ~~primary~~ (via a reader’s comment) election (Nichols is President of the foundation that employs Ben Manski, via David Blaska). 77th candidates Brett Hulsey and Doug Zwank kindly spent a bit of time talking about education recently.

Ann Cooper’s latest tool in the Food Revolution

TED

Food Revolution hero Ann Cooper recently re-launched her new and improved website for The Lunch Box — a collection of scalable recipes, resources and general information to turn any school lunch system into a healthy, balanced diet for kids. One of the most exciting initiatives of this revamp is the Great American Salad Project (GASP) which, in partnership with Whole Foods, will create salad bars in over 300 schools across America. The new salad bars will give young students daily access to the fresh fruits and vegetables they need, and will be funded by donations from Whole Foods shoppers and visitors to the website. To donate, click here.
Schools can begin grant applications on September 1. If you’d like to see a fresh salad bar in your cafeteria, click here to review the process and get your app ready.

Commentary on “Waiting for Superman”; a Look at the Tortured Path Toward School Choice in New York City

Tom Friedman

Canada’s point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it’s with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.
“One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist,” Canada says in the film. “I read comic books and I just loved ’em …’cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, ‘He’s coming, I just don’t know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.’ ”
Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, “Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?” She told him the truth: ” ‘Superman is not real.’ I was like: ‘He’s not? What do you mean he’s not?’ ‘No, he’s not real.’ And she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one … coming with enough power to save us.”
“Waiting for Superman” follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.
Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until “it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn’t matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I’m lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there’s a great public school there aren’t enough spaces, and so we do what’s fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck.”
It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid’s educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film’s core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.

Every parent and taxpayer should see this film.

Virtual schooling a good fit for this family

Katey Luckey

I am a mother of four children, two of whom are enrolled in Wisconsin Connections Academy, the state’s public K-8 virtual school. My decision to do this was based on a number of factors. My oldest son, 6, is very bright and thoughtful, but has always had difficulty in social situations. He is easily overwhelmed by crowds and tends to withdraw, and I knew he would need help and extra attention to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. My daughter, 11, had been in the public school system from the beginning and was struggling as well. I knew that she was not getting the help she needed to keep up in math, for example. Also, the social stresses at school were affecting her self-esteem, and she was losing her desire to challenge herself. I began looking into virtual schools.
I have been a long-time supporter of public schools and a fierce advocate for involving parents as partners in education. Yet I also came to realize that bricks-and-mortar schools could only go so far toward individualized education. Virtual schools, like WCA, provide the perfect opportunity for children to receive personalized education. WCA provides a public school education using state-certified teachers who work directly with learning coaches to bring personalized instruction.
It is schooling at home, not home-schooling. While they sound similar, there is a huge difference. With WCA, I am the learning coach for my children, but they learn a state-certified curriculum, just like kids in bricks-and-mortar schools. They have desks, books and computers. We even have a Smart Board in our basement that we use on a regular basis. We go on field trips and have opportunities to meet other families who have similar stories about how they came to WCA.

	English	Math	Reading	Science	Composite
African Americans	16.3	18.0	17.1	18.4	17.6
Caucasian/White	25.1	25.6	25.8	24.8	25.4

	Total Tested	English (18)	Math (22)	Reading (21)	Science (24)
All Students	1,122	81%	68%	71%	51%
African Americans	76	38%	24%	25%	9%
Caucasian/White	733	90%	77%	79%	60%
Hispanic	71	59%	39%	45%	18%
Asian/Pacific Isl.	119	67%	65%	61%	45%