Community Partners – Page 38 – School Information System

Democrats for School Choice

When Florida passed a law in 2001 creating the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program for underprivileged students, all but one Democrat in the state legislature voted against it. Earlier this month, lawmakers extended the program – this time with the help of a full third of Democrats in the Legislature, including 13 of 25 members of the state’s black caucus and every member of the Hispanic caucus. What changed?
Our guess is that low-income parents in Florida have gotten a taste of the same school choice privileges that middle- and upper-income families have always enjoyed. And they’ve found they like this new educational freedom. Under the scholarship program, which is means-tested, companies get a 100% tax credit for donations to state-approved nonprofits that provide private-school vouchers for low-income families

Obesity Threatens a Generation

Susan Levine & Rob Stein:

In ways only beginning to be understood, being overweight at a young age appears to be far more destructive to well-being than adding excess pounds later in life. Virtually every major organ is at risk. The greater damage is probably irreversible.
Doctors are seeing confirmation of this daily: boys and girls in elementary school suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol and painful joint conditions; a soaring incidence of type 2 diabetes, once a rarity in pediatricians’ offices; even a spike in child gallstones, also once a singularly adult affliction. Minority youth are most severely affected, because so many are pushing the scales into the most dangerous territory.
With one in three children in this country overweight or worse, the future health and productivity of an entire generation — and a nation — could be in jeopardy.

Teacher questions Muslim practices at charter school

Katherine Kersten:

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.
Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.
TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is “establishing Islam in Minnesota.” The building also houses a mosque. TIZA’s executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.

The Netherlands – A Proper Emphasis on Vocational Education

Open Education:

Today we wrap up our four-part series on education in the Netherlands with a final look at the vocational training track available to students. Whereas in America we continue to try and force feed students of all abilities and interests through a high school program that is almost entirely academic-based, the Dutch school system has created an extremely viable option for students who prefer hands on learning and a career in the skilled trades.
Though we have used the term track to refer to this option, particularly since students are assigned to one of the secondary school options based on test results and performance at the primary level, it should be noted that the model does not mirror American school tracking. Instead of students essentially taking the same classes as they progress through school but being placed in those classes based on ability (the American tracking system), the Dutch offer both different programming and outcome expectations for the various tracks.
There is an understanding that students may not be able to (or for that matter, want to) pursue academics at a university. More importantly, there is an understanding that students who do not attend such a post-secondary option must develop specific labor skills to have some form of work option available to them. Yet, even within that component of studies there is additional delineation between those who will become laborers and those who will become designers, administrators and even company owners.

Latin, prayers, chilly dorms at school in France

Lisa Essex:

Learning Latin, attending Catechism and hurrying along draughty corridors to prayer, two dozen boys are experiencing old-fashioned British boarding school life — deep in the French countryside.
Boxing, folk-dancing and Gregorian chant also figure on the curriculum at Chavagnes International College, a traditional Catholic English boys’ boarding school in the Vendee wine-growing region on France’s Atlantic coast.
Housed in a 200-year-old former seminary in a region marked by France’s wars of religion in the mid-16th century, it says it attracts parents who are disillusioned by the British state school system or the values of modern life.
The fees are also significantly cheaper than in Britain, at 15,000 euros (11,800 pounds) for boarders per year compared with an average of about 22,000 sterling in Britain, according to figures from the Independent Schools Council.

Parents, kids pin their hopes on one white orb in boarding school lottery

Tanika White:

The lucky ones heard their numbers called early.
Not only could those first-announced winners beam with pride about being one of the first 80 students who will attend the SEED School of Maryland, but they also did not have to agonize in their chairs any longer, watching the white lottery balls tumble in gilded cages – the numbered balls representing dreams for all and disappointment for many.
Yesterday morning, the founders of the nation’s first public boarding school, which opened 10 years ago in Washington, D.C., held the inaugural lottery to fill the slots for the Baltimore-based second location, which will open its doors in August to disadvantaged youths from all over the state.
More than 300 students applied from the city, the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, the Eastern Shore, and Western and Southern Maryland. Families traveled to the College of Notre Dame of Maryland to see if their child’s number would be called.

High School Challenge Index, 2008

Newsweek & Washington Post:

The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 — the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school’s students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.

Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
Related: Dane County, WI AP High School Course offerings.
Jay Matthews has more:

This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year’s Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index — it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn’t anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy — not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
— Terry Adirim Montgomery County

Previous SIS Challenge Index links and notes. Clusty search on the Challenge Index.

Great education debate: Reforming the grade system

Steve Friess:

When principal Debbie Brockett announced a policy last fall of not allowing teachers to issue any score less than 50 to failing students, she thought she was adopting a means of leveling out an unfair grading curve.
To many outraged teachers at Las Vegas High, however, Brockett’s plan amounted to fuzzy new math designed to offer unfair assistance to low-achieving students.
They protested, and she backed down. But in the process, both sides stepped into one of the hottest grading debates within academic circles today. Across the USA, education experts and school administrators are trying to determine how and whether to reform grading systems to give failing students a better chance to catch up.
“I made a bad call at the time, going with past experience, and I didn’t expect it to become controversial,” says Brockett, who had just been promoted from a middle school where her minimum-F policy was in place. “Now it’s an ongoing conversation we’re having.”

Proposed report cards changes have generated some controversy in Madison.

Urban-education scholar Charles Payne sets out to measure the University’s efforts at school improvement.

University of Chicago Magazine, via a kind reader’s email:

Charles M. Payne has been a scholar of urban education long enough to see many fashions of public-school reform come and go. The School of Social Service Administration’s Frank P. Hixon professor, Payne first developed an interest in education in 1969, while a Syracuse University undergraduate. Administrators there, Payne recalls, had brought an inner-city school to campus with a bold, if naive and unfocused, purpose: “to change this.” The program failed to establish a model for effective school reform, Payne says, because “none of us understood how hard this was going to be.”
With a sociology PhD from Northwestern University and 40 years of research and advocacy under his belt, Payne believes that the same core problem—a misunderstanding of the difficulties involved—continues to hinder school-reform efforts. His years as founding director of an education nonprofit in Orange, New Jersey, and studying schools in Chicago and around the world have taught him that the solution to school failure is deep and fundamental. Initiatives that focus on particular grade levels or types of students don’t work, Payne says. In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), he argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the “culture of failure” that perpetuates dismal school performance.

High School Ranks Have Been Infiltrated by Agents

Pete Thamel:

The only real surprise, coaches and others said, was that Mayo had been accused of taking money from a person described as a “runner” for an agent. Mayo has denied the accusations.
“This has been happening over the past few years that agents and runners have been able to get into the high school ranks,” Illinois Coach Bruce Weber said.
In the report, ESPN described how Rodney Guillory, an event promoter with a history of breaking N.C.A.A. rules, started giving gifts to Mayo when he played for Huntington High School in West Virginia. The report said that Guillory did so with money from Bill Duffy Associates, the agency Mayo ultimately signed with in declaring for next month’s N.B.A. draft. Duffy has denied giving money to Guillory for Mayo.

Germantown Referendum Climate Notes

Mike Nichols:

The people who live in Germantown said on April 1 that they do not think they need a new elementary school, at least not one that costs as much as the Germantown School Board says.
By a margin of 55% to 45%, the residents of Germantown voted no, and probably thought it meant something.
It doesn’t. The school board now says that shouldn’t count.
The board has now directed staff to prepare another, identical referendum and put it on the ballot again this coming November.
Prodoehl, who is the president of the Germantown Citizens Action Coalition, a group that really wasn’t very active the first time around but just might be now, calls this a “slap in the face.”

Public school, church plant seeds of learning

Tom Heinen:

As part of nearby Trinity Presbyterian Church’s adopt-a-school partnership with Townsend Street School, about 50 fifth-grade students from the public school are growing flowers and vegetables in eight raised planting beds and learning about science and nature from church volunteers in the garden and in their classrooms. Last fall, the class “put the garden to bed” by pulling vegetation and laying straw.
“A lot of these kids don’t have experience in tending anything, in watching something grow,” said Trudy Holyst, a church member and research chemist at the Blood Center of Wisconsin who goes into the two fifth-grade classrooms about twice a month to teach basic botany and scientific observation. “They’ve done a really good job. Almost all the seeds we started in the classroom have germinated.”

Despite Funding Issues, Public Schools Row On

Matt McFarland:

This afternoon, at the oldest and largest high school regatta in the country, a Fairfax County public school boys’ rowing team, in its 19th year, will attempt to win the Stotesbury Cup for the fourth time in five years. It will duel with private schools such as St. Joseph’s Prep of Philadelphia, a perennial national power that recently built a $3 million boathouse.
Jefferson doesn’t have its own million-dollar boathouse. The Fairfax team will row down Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River in a boat in which the naming rights of each seat had to be sold to raise $6,100 for the team.
The Jefferson boys’ team, one of the most successful high school sports teams in the Washington area, receives no financial funding from Fairfax County. Jefferson’s recent success exceeds other area teams, but like all their area public competition, the Colonials must hold fundraisers.

America’s High School

Bob Herbert:

At a time when the nation is faced with tough economic challenges at home and ever-increasing competition from abroad, it’s incredible that more is not being done about the poor performance of so many American high schools.
We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.
Mr. Wise is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a policy and advocacy group committed to improving the high schools. The following lamentable passage is from his book, “Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation“:

We’ve tipped over, fellas

Gail Perry-Daniels:

Like many in Madison’s Black community, I waited anxiously last week to get my hands on the report titled, The State of Black Madison 2008: Before the Tipping Point. Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical even before reading the report, because I believe we’ve tipped over and are now fighting to get back on our feet.
The report, which had been kept secret until its release last week, documents a number of issues which have for decades contributed to the economic and social digression of Madison’s Black community. The major issues examined in the report were criminal justice, economic well-being, education, health care, housing, and political influence.
I had hoped that the report, produced by six noted Black male leaders in Madison, would offer some solutions to this crisis or trumpet a call to action. But all I found were recommendations. For me, recommendations are like ideas: If they are never acted on, they just fade away or are brought up in conversations beginning with, “Remember when?”
Well, I’ve got a great starting point, and it’s spelled JOBS. One of the major problems facing ex-offenders is the inability to find a JOB. The road to economic well-being begins with a JOB. Affordable housing requires a well-paying JOB just to enter the housing market. Having a JOB lessens or corrects many of the issues cited in the report.

Waukesha Schools May End Junior Kindergarden

Amy Hetzner:

Gov. Jim Doyle on Friday let stand a provision in the state budget-repair bill that would force school systems by 2013 to expand their limited 4-year-old kindergarten programs to all eligible students or – as could be the case in Waukesha – end the programs.
The budget amendment is seen as a reprieve from state school Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster’s stricter interpretation this year.
Burmaster had told school systems in January that junior-kindergarten programs that were not offered to all 4-year-olds in a district would not be funded in 2008-’09.
Spokesman Patrick Gasper said the Department of Public Instruction knew of five districts other than Waukesha with programs that the change would affect, including large systems such as Kenosha Unified and Beloit.
The other districts are Monona Grove, Beaver Dam and Two Rivers.
Kenosha has been thinking of expanding its 4-K program, which was started about seven years ago in a fourth of its elementary schools through a special state-financed program, said Kathleen Barca, the district’s executive director of school leadership.
But Waukesha Superintendent David Schmidt said that even with the five-year phase-in, the new requirement made it unlikely that his district would be able to maintain a decades-old kindergarten-readiness offering for students identified as needing extra help.
The district educates about 100 students a year in its 4-K program.

Waukesha’s Executive Director of Business Services, Erik Kass, will assume a similar position in Madison this summer.

Odyssey Project Celebrates its Latest Graduates

Maria Bibbs:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Odyssey Project held its fifth annual graduation ceremony for its 2007-2008 graduates on May 7. Family, friends, and loved ones gathered at the UW Memorial Union to celebrate the students’ accomplishments and the exciting journey that lies ahead of them.
“This is the beginning of a journey: for some, a journey to college, while others are returning to college,” said Odyssey Project Director Professor Emily Auerbach.
The Odyssey Project offers members of the Madison community an opportunity to begin a college education through an intensive, two-semester course. The program’s goal is to provide wider access to college for nontraditional and low-income students by offering a challenging classroom experience, individual support in writing, and assistance in applying for admission to college and for financial aid.
Auerbach said that the Langston Hughes poem “Still Here” embodies this remarkable class’s collective sentiment, after they had spent a year engaged in rigorous study while handling financial and family responsibilities that had previously made a college education seem little more than a dream deferred. “Sometimes you can make a way out of no way. If you open the door to education, you can change lives,” Auerbach said.

Dot McDonald – A Rising Star

A. David Dahmer:

The sky is the limit for the Madison area senior who will be graduating from Madison West in June. Dot has been involved in just about everything possible at her school, and people have noticed. She was recently recognized by the Madison Metropolitan Links Inc. at the annual Student Recognition Program as a 2008 Links Scholarship recipient. She won the Project Excel Award at West High and the Jewel of the Community Award from the Ladies of Distinction for making a difference in the community. She’s involved with the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth where she received a leadership award and also recently won the Joe Thomas Community Service Award for her extensive community involvement. “I do like to stay active,” Dot laughs.

Educational Romanticism: On Requiring Every Child to Be Above Average

Charles Murray:

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools — its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise.
Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways.
Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

Clusty Search on Charles Murray.

Pennsylvania Charter Schools Growth

Eleanor Chute:

More than a decade after charter schools became legal in Pennsylvania, it is safe to say the schools, once considered experimental and still sometimes controversial, are here to stay.
About 64,000 students are enrolled in 126 charter schools statewide, and about 20,000 are on charter school waiting lists, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools.
Nearly half of the schools are in Philadelphia. But parents of Western Pennsylvania students — including 2,355 children living in Pittsburgh — also have chosen charter schools, which can be bricks-and-mortar buildings or cyber schools.
Their staying power will be in evident this week as the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools, a statewide advocacy and support organization, conducts its state convention at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center, Uptown. The meeting, which began yesterday, runs through tomorrow and is expected to attract more than 1,000 people.

Prince William Schools Join to Design Regional Science/Technology Magnet

Ian Shapira:

Prince William County, after years of longing, may finally get a selective magnet school to serve as a mini-rival to Fairfax County’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
The Prince William, Manassas and Manassas Park school systems recently won a $100,000 state grant to design a regional “governor’s school” that would open by fall 2010 and specialize in math, science and technology.
The yet-unnamed school, which would have rigorous admissions requirements, would differ in key respects from Thomas Jefferson, a full-day governor’s school in the Alexandria section of Fairfax that draws students from across Northern Virginia. Students would still attend neighborhood schools, traveling to the new magnet campus only for high-level classes.

Madison West Rocketry Club Travels to the Team America Rocketry Challenge

TARC website:

The scores are in, and all the hard work has paid off for the 100 finalists for the Team America Rocketry Challenge. Those teams will face one another during the exciting final fly-off on Saturday, May 17 in The Plains, Va. for the title of national TARC champion. After a full day of launches, held at the Great Meadows facility, the winners will be crowned and $60,000 in scholarships will be divided up among the top finishers.

West Rocketry website.

11 Madison-area students win at National History Day

Wisconsin Historical Society:

We are proud to announce the national finalists and alternates for the 2008 Wisconsin History Day State Event held on May 3, 2008. The national finalists represented Wisconsin at the national contest June 15-19, 2008 at the University of Maryland – College Park.
The first and second alternate in each category are offered the opportunity to attend the national contest in the event that the finalist entry is unable to attend.
Each finalist designs their entry to reflect the annual theme. The entries below reflect the annual theme for 2008: Conflict and Compromise in History.
This year’s local winners: Amanda Snodgrass (Mount Horeb High School), Joanna Weng (Velma Hamilton Middle School), and Alexandra Cohn and David Aeschlimann (Madison West High School). The following students from Eagle School were also winners: Hannah O’Dea, Carolyn Raihala, Sophie Gerdes, Sonia Urquidi, Nate Smith, Jeffrey Zhao and Eli Fessler.

Via the Capital Times.

The Haskins Literacy Initiative

Michael F. Shaughnessy:

First of all, what exactly is this Haskins Literacy Initiative?
Haskins Literacy Initiative promotes the science of teaching reading in three main ways.First, we provide comprehensive professional development, coaching and classroom support to make teachers masters of effective literacy practices. Teachers, not programs, teach children to read.By becoming informed consumers about the myths and realities of teaching reading, teachers can become “method-proof,” knowing what to teach which child when.
Second, we conduct field research about how knowledge and practice impacts student reading achievement.
Our parent, Haskins Laboratories, has conducted more basic reading research for over 40 years.Finally, we engage in advocacy to inform public policy to improve reading achievement for every child.

Waukesha begins looking at an operating referendum

Amy Hetzner:

District officials blame the financial troubles on the discrepancy between what they can raise under revenue caps, which increase roughly 2% a year, and expenditures that grow about 4% a year.
A $4.9 million annual addition to the district’s operating revenue that was approved by voters in an April 2001 referendum gave the district only a few years free from cutting programs and services. Another referendum attempt in April 2005 that would have raised taxes to help avoid further staff reductions failed by a substantial margin.
Board member Patrick McCaffery warned that the board risked another referendum setback if it proceeds without searching for additional efficiencies, including closing a school and realigning attendance boundaries

Waukesha’s Executive Director of Business Services, Erik Kass will soon join the Madison School District in a similar capacity. K-12 Tax & Spending Climate.

YES, A New Approach for the Inner City

Nidya Baez, Douglas Cruickshank:

Reinventing our schools with a greater emphasis on student needs and community engagement is, I believe, one of the most broadly beneficial ways to apply the “think globally, act locally” philosophy. Indeed, many students, parents, teachers, administrators and education experts would probably agree that our education system must be radically retooled to increase its relevance and effectiveness in ways that enable all individuals to prosper in what’s already shaping up to be an extremely challenging century.
That was what I and some of my fellow high school students were thinking in 2002, even if we didn’t express it in quite those words. Nonetheless, by 2003 we’d helped develop an Oakland high school called YES (Youth Empowerment School), part of the city’s Small Schools Initiative. Last year, I graduated from UC Berkeley. I’m now working as a substitute teacher and language tutor, and I’ve recently interviewed for a fall 2008 faculty position at YES.
In 2002, and today, Oakland’s students and its schools were coping with problems endemic to education in big cities across the United States.

Foundation for Madison Public Schools Celebrates Carol Carstensen’s School Board Tenure

Samara Kalk Derby:

More than 100 friends, colleagues, family members and parents showed up at a farewell party Wednesday at Olbrich Gardens to say goodbye and thank you to Carol Carstensen, who served six terms on the Madison School Board and stepped down after the spring elections.
“There will never be another Carol Carstensen. I will predict that,” said School Board member Johnny Winston Jr. “There will never be another School Board member in this community that will serve 18 years. I miss her already.”
Winston called it a wonderful experience to work with Carstensen.
“She really not only knew the material and had a grasp of the issues going on, but she also had her pulse on the community as well,” he said.
Former board member Nan Brien, who served with Carstensen in the early 1990s, said that for 18 years Carstensen was the spokesperson on the board for all the kids in the district.
“She was particularly adamant that all kids, no matter their background, have an opportunity for the best education. That is the heart and soul of who Carol Carstensen is,” Brien said.

Carol reflects on her tenure, including three accomplishments she takes personal pride in: Wright Middle School, renaming 5 middle schools to reflect the diversity of our community and establishment of the Joe Thomas award.
Much more on Carol Carstensen here. Watch a brief video interview with Carol during her most recent campaign.
More on the Foundation for Madison Public Schools here. John Taylor’s 2003 challenge grants energized the formation of FMPS.

Teach For America’s Growth

Sam Dillon:

Teach for America, the program that recruits top college graduates to teach for two years in public schools that are difficult to staff, has experienced a year of prodigious growth and will place 3,700 new teachers this fall, up from 2,900 last year, a 28 percent increase.
That growth was outpaced, however, by a surge in applications from college seniors. About 24,700 applied this spring to be teachers, up from 18,000 last year, a 37 percent increase, according to figures released by the organization on Wednesday.
The nonprofit program sent its first 500 recruits into American public school classrooms in 1990. It has a large recruiting staff that visits campuses, contacting top prospects and recruiting aggressively. Founded by a Princeton graduate, it has always carefully sifted through applicants’ grade-point averages and other data in recruiting. But with the numbers of applicants increasing faster than the number of teachers placed, it was even more selective this year than before, the organization said.

Assistant LA Superintendent Sounds Off

Mitchell Landsberg interviews Ramon Cortines:

“I’ve tackled some of the sacred cows in my recommendations, such as the issues of contracts, how much money we could receive from that. Such as the issue of health benefits, and how much money we could receive by capping that. And increasing the co-pay.”
Cortines was at times unsparing of LAUSD’s failures, saying that the district is organized for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the children they are hired to serve. He said the school board passes too many resolutions that “aren’t worth the paper [they’re] printed on.” And he said the district had “abdicated our responsibility” for Locke High School, which is about to be turned over to Green Dot Public Schools, the big charter operator. Students didn’t get a pass, though: He said the district needs to enforce “a code of behavior” based on the idea that they don’t just have rights — they also have responsibilities.

Clusty Search: Ramon Cortines.

Hawaii lawmakers push keiki education

Loren Moreno:

With milestone legislation poised for passage, Hawai’i is expected to join a growing list of states that have established some form of an early childhood education system.
State lawmakers said last week they are likely to pass the “Keiki First Steps” legislation — Senate Bill 2878 — which would set aside at least $250,000 to establish a state council on early learning. The council is intended to be the governing body of what is likely to become Hawai’i’s public-private early education system.
The system would be a private-public partnership, with services offered by existing and new childcare or preschool facilities.
The state eventually would make money available to the private schools to use for kids age 3 to 4. As a condition of taking the money, a school would have to agree to meet state standards.

Who will teach our children?

Daniel Meier:

I teach people who want to become public school teachers. Although the needs of our children and schools have never been greater, the number of people going into teaching has dropped by 23 percent between fiscal 2001-02 and 2004-05, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. California has about 300,000 teachers, half of whom are over 45 years of age. We need approximately 10,000 new teachers each year. But as our teachers age and get closer to retirement, and younger teachers enter the profession in increasingly smaller numbers, who will teach our children?
I have been a teacher educator for 11 years, and I teach in a high-quality program, but there are at least four critical reasons why we are not attracting enough teachers to California’s public schools.

Moms team up to battle influence of gangs: ‘We didn’t raise our kids this way’

Annie Sweeney:

It’s what everyone wants to know after a gang member terrorizes a neighborhood: Where are the parents?
For the last several months, at least some of them have been meeting in a South Side church basement to pray and cry and face a deep shame: They are mothers of the gang-bangers on the corners. Or they fear their child is about to join a gang.
Many are also single parents, struggling to pay bills. They work 16 hours a day, and every time they hear a gunshot, they worry their child has been shot or has shot someone else’s child. Some chase after their kids at 2 a.m.; others have stood in defiance when they won’t leave a corner.
And yes, they wonder what they did wrong.

Push Continues for the Wisconsin Covenant

John Burton:

Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor is traveling the state, urging eighth graders to sign up for the Wisconsin Covenant. The program seeks to get kids into higher education.
In Rhinelander, Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton told students education is necessary to have good job prospects. She says every student should have some form of post-high school education if they want to have a family supporting job.

Wisconsin Covenant Website:

Enrollment for current 8th graders is now open!
Students who want to sign the Wisconsin Covenant Pledge must do so by September 30th of their freshman year.
To join online, click here.

Pair Break Barriers for Charter Schools

Jay Matthews:

They won a legal battle to force Maryland to increase public funding for charter schools more than 60 percent. They opened two charter schools in Prince George’s County and befriended the superintendent there even though the county had a reputation as hostile to the charter movement. They run one of the largest charter school networks in the country.
Yet Dennis and Eileen Bakke remain relatively unknown in local education circles.
Dennis, 62, and Eileen, 55, live in Arlington County. He knows business; she is into education. Few people guess, and the Bakkes never volunteer, what an impact they have had on education in the region and beyond. Their Imagine Schools organization, based in Arlington, oversees 51 schools (four in the Washington area) with 25,000 students. By fall, it plans to have 75 schools with 38,000 students.
Jason Botel, who directs KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, is one educator who knows what the Bakkes have accomplished. “Their funding of advocacy efforts has helped make sure that . . . charter schools like ours can provide a great education for children in Maryland,” he said.

Imagine Schools’ report card.

Start school early and we can help poor kids

Andy Fleckenstein:

In Milwaukee, one out of three school-aged children lives in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Milwaukee ranks sixth highest in the nation. Many of these children do not have access to quality education at an early age, which gives them a disadvantage when entering school. It also affects their academic achievement, odds of graduating and potential for earning a family-sustaining wage as adults.
In other words, early childhood literacy is crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty.
Research shows that successful programs don’t teach just children. Academic performance improves when parents are involved. This might seem obvious, or even easy. But, for the single mother of three working two jobs, it’s anything but easy. It’s much harder to help with homework when you’re focused on getting food on the table.
For the past four years, the Fleck Foundation has supported United Way’s early childhood education initiative because the programs it funds require parents to be involved. We know that this key component leads to success. As a result, each year we challenge the community to support the initiative by matching donations dollar-for-dollar that are designated to address early childhood literacy. Our hope is to stimulate growth in donations and increase attention to this important issue.
One program in particular, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters or HIPPY, conducted by COA Youth and Family Centers, sends “coaches” to the homes of low-income families. The coaches show parents how to teach their children through reading.
The results speak for themselves.

Gang Activity in Suburbs Acknowledged

Christina Sanchez:

Two weeks before the fatal shooting of a Franklin teenager in what appears to be a gang-related fight, Nashville police gave gang awareness training to Williamson County school faculty.
The school officials’ request in March for the training suggests a willingness to acknowledge, although not yet publicly, what they and local law enforcement had long been reluctant to admit:
Gangs exist in suburbia.
“Gangs have always been here, probably much longer than the Police Department was aware or recognized,” said Sgt. Charles Warner, a detective with the Franklin Police Department. “We’ve started to see a slow increase. By no means is there an epidemic.”
Several smaller communities outside of Nashville have seen an increase over the past few years in gang presence and gang-related crime. Local police departments attribute gangs’ migration to growth — and to Metro’s aggressive police crackdown on street gangs in Nashville, which pushes criminal activity to outlying cities.

Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison.

Check the Facts: Few States Set World-Class Standards
Summer 2008 (vol. 8, no. 3) Table of Contents CHECK THE FACTS: Few States Set World-Class Standards
In fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless

Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess:

As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014, states disagree on the level of accomplishment in math and reading a proficient child should possess. A few states have been setting world-class standards, but most are well off that mark—in some cases to a laughable degree.
In this report, we use 2007 test-score information to evaluate the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards against the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an achievement measure that is recognized nationally and has international credibility as well. The analysis extends previous work (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005, and “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006) that used 2003 and 2005 test-score data and finds in the new data a noticeable decline, especially at the 8th-grade level. In Figure 1, we rank the rigor of state proficiency standards using the same A to F scale teachers use to grade students. Those that receive an A have the toughest definitions of student proficiency, while those with an F have the least rigorous.
Measuring Standards
That states vary widely in their definitions of student proficiency seems little short of bizarre. Agreement on what constitutes “proficiency” would seem the essential starting point: if students are to know what is expected of them, teachers are to know what to teach, and parents are to have a measuring stick for their schools. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to determine how student achievement stacks up across states and countries.
One national metric for performance does exist, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP is a series of tests administered under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP tests measure proficiency in reading and math among 4th and 8th graders nationwide as well as in every state. The NAEP sets its proficiency standard through a well-established, if complex, technical process. Basically, it asks informed experts to judge the difficulty of each of the items in its test bank. The experts’ handiwork received a pat on the back recently when the American Institutes for Research (AIR) showed that NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” was very similar to the standard used by designers of international tests of student achievement. Proficiency has acquired roughly the same meaning in Europe and Asia, and in the United States—as long as the NAEP standard is employed.

New BadgerLink training videos

Wisconsin DPI:

Four new programs on the BadgerLink website make it easy to learn how to make the most of the BadgerLink databases. BadgerLink is a free service for Wisconsin residents which provides access to articles from thousands of newspaper and periodical titles, image files, and other specialized reference materials and websites. BadgerLink is a project of the Department of Public Instruction, in cooperation with the state’s public, school, academic, and special libraries and Internet service providers.
The new videos cover how to use databases such as EBSCO, Kids Search, Searchasaurus, TeachingBooks, ProQuest, Newspaper ARCHIVE, the African American Biographical Database, and LitFinder

No Small Plan: Public Boarding Schools for Chicago

Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:

Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.

(more…)

A Look at LA’s Small Learning Communities

Jason Song:

Like many large districts throughout the nation, L.A. Unified has been trying to increase the number of smaller learning communities, hoping that personalized instruction would boost student achievement and offer an alternative to charter schools, including the five Green Dot campuses near Jefferson.
The academy, one of four Los Angeles Unified campuses that opened almost two years ago, is partially funded through the New Tech Foundation, a Napa, Calif.-based nonprofit that supports 35 schools throughout the country. Two of the others, Arleta High School of Science, Math and Related Technologies and the Los Angeles High School for Global Studies, have increased their test scores dramatically. However, at Jordan New Tech High School, the API score was 25 points lower than that on the regular Jordan High campus.
Unlike charters, which are publicly funded but are not regulated by L.A. Unified, New Tech schools are run by district administrators. “We’re under a lot of pressure: pressure from parents, pressure from the public, to find results that work,” said Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, adding that New Tech “clearly works.”

Raikes to Take the Gates Foundation’s Reigns

AP:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says Microsoft Corp. executive Jeff Raikes will be its next CEO.
The world’s largest charitable foundation has been looking for a new leader since chief executive Patty Stonesifer announced in February that she would be stepping down.
Raikes has been the top executive in Microsoft’s business software division, responsible for such things as the Office software suite, Microsoft’s server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.

Clusty Search: Jeff Raikes.
The Gates Foundation initially supported the Small Learning Community High School approach. Clusty on Small Learning Communities.
The Economist:

CONGRATULATIONS, Jeff Raikes, on your great new job as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And good luck: you will certainly need it.
Unlike most other foundation CEO jobs, this is unlikely to be a comfortable pre-retirement sinecure. The Gates Foundation is by far the biggest charitable organisation in the world, and growing quickly. Next year, it is expected give away at least $3 billion, up from barely $1 billion a couple of years ago. Some insiders expect that number to rise as high as $6 billion in the near future.

Philadelphia safe-schools advocate say the lack of discipline violates the law

Kristen Graham:

Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is “dysfunctional and unjust,” according to a report by the district’s safe-schools advocate.
In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.
Prompted by questions from The Inquirer and two months after receiving Stollsteimer’s report – which he is required by law to complete – the state blasted the safe-schools advocate’s document and said it would release its own version next week.
“The draft report has serious problems – some of the data analysis is inaccurate, the legal analysis is flawed. We are releasing the official report on Monday,” said Sheila Ballen, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Proximity & Power
Why do the headquarters of state teachers’ unions tend to be so close to state capitol buildings?

Jay Greene & Jonathan Butcher:

If you stand on the steps of a state capitol building and throw a rock (with a really strong arm), the first building you can hit has a good chance of being the headquarters of the state teachers’ union. For interest groups, proximity to the capitol is a way of displaying power and influence. The teachers’ union strives to be the closest. It wants to remind everyone that it is the most powerful interest group of all.
To see who has the most powerful digs, we actually bothered to measure just how close interest group offices are to state capitol buildings. We started with a list of the 25 most influential interest groups, as compiled by Fortune magazine. We then used Google Maps to plot the location of the state offices of those 25 interest groups and measured the distance to the capitol building.
The results are illuminating. Of the 25 most influential interest groups, the teachers’ union is the closest in 14 of the 50 states. By comparison, the AFL-CIO is the closest in seven states. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the National Federation of Independent Business are the closest in five states, each. The American Association for Justice (AAJ)—the leading organization of U.S. trial lawyers, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, or ATLA—is the closest in four states.

General Vang Pao’s Last War

Early in 2007, the Madison School Board decided to name a new far west side elementary school after Vang Pao. This decision became ingreasingly controversial after Pao was arrested as part of a plot to overthrow the Laos Government (the school has since been named Olson Elementary). Tim Weiner Interviews Vang Pao Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes digs into this latest chapter in the Hmong / US Government relationship:

The case against Vang Pao grew out of a sting operation, a crime created in part by the government itself. What evidence there is rests largely on secretly recorded conversations led by an undercover federal agent, and while the transcripts implicating some of the co-defendants in the case seem damning, the agent barely met Vang Pao. The talk between them was brief; though Vang Pao may have dreamed aloud of a glorious revolution in Laos in years gone by, his role in the conspiracy charged by the government may be hard to prove. The government presents the case as a clear-cut gunrunning conspiracy in violation of the Neutrality Act, which outlaws military expeditions against nations with which the United States is at peace. But the old general’s defenders contend that the case against him is the consequence of a misguided post-9/11 zeal. If convicted in a trial, the former American ally could face the rest of his life in prison. And already his indictment has apparently emboldened Laotian and Thai authorities to crack down on the beleaguered Hmong who remain in refugee camps or in hiding in the jungles of Laos.
The government has a checkered record of late in its sting operations against people subsequently charged with planning acts of political terror. In 2006, to take one example, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that a joint terrorism task force had broken up a plot to “levy war” and to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago. In that case, as two trials have shown, an F.B.I. informant known to the defendants as Brother Mohammed created some of the key evidence — leading the group in an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda, for instance. He provided them with plans and plots and gave them military gear like combat boots. The defendants never had contact with actual terrorists, never obtained weapons or explosives. Two juries have failed to see the logic of the case; a federal judge has had to declare two mistrials. (The government plans to try the case a third time.)
The sting operation against Vang Pao exhibits some similar traits. It has also dismayed a number of American intelligence officers who worked with the Hmong against the army of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. “We taught him how to do these things — to fight political warfare, to try to defeat the enemy,” I was told by Larry Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief who worked with the general in Laos. “We helped Vang Pao learn to do some of the things that he and his troops are now charged with.”

Britannica on the Hmong.

Charter Schools are Great, but Not Why You Think

Kevin Carey:

Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation’s first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on.
Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel. They’ve just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that’s all they did, that’s way more than enough.

Carey is spot on. Cracking the legacy public school governance monolith is essential to progress. “Progress requires conflict”.

Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year

AP:

Carleen Gulstad, who teaches 8th and 9th grade language arts at Hopkins North Junior High School, was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year on Sunday.
Gulstad said in an interview that she tries to see each student as an individual.
“Every kid counts. Every kid has a story. And every kid has value,” she said.
The Teacher of the Year honor is awarded annually by the teachers union Education Minnesota, which cited her commitment to teaching students good communication skills as well as how to interact positively in a diverse and changing world.

Bad Rap on the Schools

Jay Matthews:

Oh, look. There’s a new film that portrays American teenagers as distracted slackers who don’t stand a chance against the zealous young strivers in China and India. It must be an election year, when American politicians, egged on by corporate leaders, suddenly become indignant about the state of America’s public schools. If we don’t do something, they thunder, our children will wind up working as bellhops in resorts owned by those Asian go- getters.
The one-hour documentary, conceived and financed by Robert A. Compton, a high-tech entrepreneur, follows two teenagers in Carmel, Indiana, as they sporadically apply themselves to their studies in their spare time between after school jobs and sports. The film, called Two Million Minutes, cuts to similar pairs of high schoolers in India and China who do little but attend classes, labor over homework, and work with their tutors. Two Million Minutes has become a key part of the ED in ’08 campaign, a $60 million effort by Bill Gates and other wealthy worriers to convince the presidential candidates to get serious about fixing our schools.
Most of the time, I cheer such well-intentioned and powerful promoters of academic achievement. I have been writing about the lack of challenge in American high schools for 25 years. It astonishes me that we treat many high schoolers as if they were intellectual infants, actively discouraging them from taking the college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses that would prepare them for higher education and add some challenge to their bland high school curricula. I share what I imagine is Bill Gates’s distress at seeing Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching Grey’s Anatomy on television with her friends while they make half hearted stabs at their math homework.

Via Flypaper.

“No Surprises in School Budget, but Referendum Looms”

Tamira Madsen:

Facing a possible referendum and $9.2 million hole for the 2009-10 school year, no major alterations are anticipated to the school 2008-09 budget that will be finalized Monday by Madison School Board members.
When new superintendent Dan Nerad starts in July, referendum discussion will come to the forefront for the Madison Metropolitan School District. If Board members decide to propose a referendum, which could occur as early as November, they will request taxpayers consider overriding state-imposed revenue gaps so that services and programs won’t have to be severely slashed from the district’s budget.
In the meantime, only one administrative amendment and two Board amendments are on the agenda and approval is expected at the School Board meeting as superintendent Art Rainwater presents plans for the final budget of his tenure. Rainwater, who has worked with the district for 14 years — including the last 10 as superintendent — will retire this summer. Nerad will take over on July 1.
School Board members are well aware of the multi-million budget cuts looming for the 2009-10 school year, and Rainwater said he wasn’t surprised with short list of amendments.
“I think the overall intention for the Board from day one was really and truly to work to preserve exactly what we have,” Rainwater said during a telephone interview Friday.

Notes and links on the proposed $367,806,712 2008/2009 budget.
Three proposed budget amendments:

Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [19K PDF]
Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [19K PDF]
Increase technology purchases by $100,000 and reduced the reserve for contingency
Limit Fund 80 spending to a 4% increase [9K PDF]
Increase the Fund 80 tax levy by $60,000 for the Madison Family Literacy / Even Start Literacy Program [9K PDF]

Much more on Fund 80 here.

On Madison’s Lack of a 4K Program

Andy Hall:

In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially “the next best tool” for raising students’ performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
“It’s one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do,” said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
“We’ve never been able to get around the money,” said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state’s limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he’s “always believed that those things could have been resolved” if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state’s school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts’ startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
“I am excited about it,” said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district’s Web site. “He’s gone out and he’s made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison’s inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin’s approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state’s largest district, long has offered 4K.
“It’s been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
“The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way.”

Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
MMSD Budget History: Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).

Art Project at Winnequah

Peter Sobol:

Kristin is spearheading an effort to bring artists Jeanne and David Aurelius to the district next fall for an artist-in-residence program with the goal of rendering a large tile mural in the Winnequah cafeteria. The project is meant to enhance the environment at Winnequah and mark the transition to an elementary school.
The project involves the artists working with the elementary students to select a theme, create the artistic elements and merge them into the overall design, manufacture the individual tiles (one per student) and then install them as a mural. The result is a unique and permanent creation that is an expression of the students and the school community.
More details of the process can be found on the Clay Bay Pottery website.

Student Tests and Teacher Grades

John Merrow:

Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he’d taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?
Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?
These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.
However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don’t have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?
Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That’s because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.

Clusty search: John Merrow.

Red ties and boys’ pride: Sowing the seeds of good schools in the Midwest

The Economist:

EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago’s South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago’s business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.

Schools of Hope teachers recognized for narrowing racial achievement gap among Madison students

Sandy Cullen:

Madison teachers who participate in the Schools of Hope tutoring program were recognized Tuesday for their role in narrowing the racial achievement gap among students over the last 10 years.
“That’s what school districts around the country are trying to do, and Madison is accomplishing it,” First Lady Jessica Doyle told more than 50 elementary school teachers treated to the first outdoor reception of the season at the governor’s residence overlooking Lake Mendota on National Teacher Appreciation Day.
“Because of you and that extra energy you put in,” Doyle said, “more students can succeed and this whole community can be living with hope.”

Student Representatives on the Madison School Board

MMSD: The Student Liaison to the Madison Board of Education next year will be Sarah Maslin, while the Alternate Student Liaison and the Student Senate President will be Chelli Riddiough.
Both were elected last week by high school students in the Madison School District and will take their one year positions in July.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success

Samuel Freedman:

Set just a few subway stops apart in blue-collar Brooklyn, drawing from a similar pool of new immigrants and American-born blacks, two high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.
Since the late 1990s, Lafayette High School in the Bath Beach neighborhood graduated fewer than half its students, posted dismal scores on standardized tests and, in the view of federal civil rights officials, “deliberately ignored” a series of bias attacks against Chinese-American students, including a valedictorian.
The principal appointed in 2005 to improve the school shut down its program for gifted students and, in front of the assembled faculty, likened Lafayette to a Nazi death camp. Finally, at the end of 2006, the Department of Education announced that it would close Lafayette and transform it into five mini-schools.

National Science Bowl for High School Students

US Department of Energy:

The National Science Bowl® is a highly visible educational event and academic competition among teams of high school students who attend science seminars and compete in a verbal forum to solve technical problems and answer questions in all branches of science and math. The regional and national events encourage student involvement in math and science activities, improve awareness of career options in science and technology, and provide an avenue of enrichment and reward for academic science achievement.

Six Books a Week: Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet

The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th’s Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.
The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

Changes at New Orleans Schools Bring Gains in Test Scores

Adam Nossiter:

A broad education overhaul under way here has produced improvement in test scores, results released Tuesday showed, though many students are still struggling.
The number of fourth graders who passed a state promotional exam increased by 12 percentage points over the previous year, and eighth graders improved by four percentage points.
School officials also noted significant increases in the numbers of students with passing scores in the test’s various components — English, math, science, social studies and reading.
Nonetheless, more than half the students who took the test in those grades did not pass, and 60 percent of high school students got an unsatisfactory ranking in standardized English and math tests, a figure three to four times higher than the percentage throughout Louisiana.

Exploring KIPP

Roy Romer:

Part of the reason KIPP charters have seen success is because of their rigorous standards and extended learning day. These are both concepts that the campaign has been advocating since its beginning — we believe that charter schools, when coupled with high standards, effective teachers, and time and support for learning, hold bold promise for academic excellence.

Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison

Rose Johnson-Brown:

Many times people hide their heads in the sand when there is an accusation of behavior in Madison that might put the community at risk. “Not in my neighborhood” seems to be the response from many citizens in denial when the community is tainted with the reality of the growth of gang activity in Madison.
On this note, a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison social work students wanted to raise awareness in Madison of the prevalent increase in gang activity in Dane County communities. As a group project, they have researched the existence of gangs, their history, their trends and movement that could put children at risk.
On April 23 at Leopold Elementary School, Erin Wearing, Corrina Flannery, Amanda Galaviz, Teresa Rhiel, and Yer Lee, students of Professor Sandy Magana’s Advanced Macro Practice Social Work class, coordinated a community outreach event and informational session. It was presented for parents and educators in the Madison and surrounding communities by the Dane County Youth Gang Prevention Task Force.
Madison Police Detective George Chavez and Officer Lester Moore, along with Frank Rodriquez of the DARK Progam shed some light on the growing activity surrounding gang involvement in this area.

Gangs & School Violence Forum audio and video.

Madison La Follette Principal Joe Gothard helped turn around his alma mater

Tamira Madsen:

John Broome lasted just four months as principal of La Follette High School.
Under pressure due to escalating fighting at the 1,710-student east side school and hearing far-reaching complaints from parents and staff over his management style, Broome resigned in December 2006. Veteran district administrator Loren Rathert came out of retirement to finish the school year as interim principal.
So when Joe Gothard took over as principal last September, it was no secret that he was entering a difficult situation.
“Actually it was really bad,” says Jamison Vacek, a member of a Lancer senior class that has had four principals in four years. “There were fights almost every day at the school when we had those other principals.”
But ask students, staff and observers about La Follette now, and there seems a consensus that Gothard has helped put the school on the right path.

Much more on La Follette here.

Fatal Accidents Erode Perk of Off-Campus Lunches

Winnie Hu:

The students used to overflow the wooden booths and green tables at Don Jono’s Pizzeria, racing through pepperoni slices and large sodas before driving the quarter-mile back to Smithtown High School West in time for their next class.
But now the pizzas pile up behind the counter. Pete Crescimanno, a compact man with a neat black mustache who co-owns the place, estimates that he has lost more than $500 a week in sales since the school district ended its longstanding policy of allowing seniors to go off-campus for lunch. One recent morning, Mr. Crescimanno and an assistant pounded and tossed dough in a nearly empty storefront, with only the radio to break the silence.
“It’s not the same, and you miss that because you used to prepare for the kids and now you don’t see them,” he said. “Of course, you miss the business, but you also miss the fact that they’re not here anymore.”

Vouchers & Achievement

Jeb Bush:

Unfortunately, in a recent editorial regarding the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, the St. Petersburg Times employs worn-out diversionary tactics to obfuscate the issues and conceal its true position — the paper’s editorial board despises the concept of providing school choice options to low-income students. Let’s end the theatrics and address the real questions going before the Florida people on November’s ballot. This debate is on keeping the promise of a quality education for all of Florida’s students.
Florida students are no longer just competing with students in Georgia, California, New York and Texas for coveted high-wage jobs. They are competing with their peers around the world. Countries like China, Sweden and Singapore are focusing on tomorrow’s economy and placing a premium on education and innovation to ensure they can keep pace with their rivals. For decades, America set that pace, and now we are falling behind.
We need all schools — here and in the 49 other states — to get better for our country’s future. The only way to improve student performance is through continual and perpetual reform of education. Florida needs a 21st century education system for a 21st century world, and school choice can be an important catalyst to make this vision a reality.

“Commencement Advice You’re Unlikely to Hear Elsewhere”

PJ O’Rourke:

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you’re thinking: “Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!” But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.
Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.
My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth’s resources of the weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.
So now, it’s my job to give you advice. But I’m thinking: You’re finishing 16 years of education, and you’ve heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:

50 State Charter School Law Comparison (Wisconsin Ranks “B”)

The Center for Education Reform (1.1MB PDF):

In their recent report analyzing the politics of charter school laws, Christiana Stoddard and Sean P. Corcoran of Education Nextrelied upon The Center for Education Reform’s (CER) Charter School Law Rankings and Profiles to study the success of the charter school movement.
As they recognized, the strength of a law could impact the way in which healthy charter schools grow and how they serve students. Having laws with certain components is critical.
CER welcomes this scrutiny and the dozens of other research reports, which utilize its rankings as a guide for assessing policy. We also recognize that not all researchers find the work we have done for ten years on law strength compelling. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder find our data and conclusions a bit hard to swallow. They argue that what CER considers strong components of a law – flexibility, autonomy, equitable funding – are actually weaknesses. Despite their claims that the weakest are actually the strongest, the data do not lie. States with strong laws by our standards (and those shared almost universally by the research community whether friend or foe) create strong schools.
Put another way, strong laws matter.

I Know What You Did Last Math Class

Jan Hoffman:

ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

Exploravision Competition: For Four Waldorf Fourth-Graders, The Future Is Now

Jenna Johnson:

The four Malcolm Elementary School fourth-graders have their sales pitch polished, just in case the Federal Emergency Management Agency is interested.
Forget trailers and temporary shelters in sporting arenas. The next time a natural disaster strikes, these video-game-playing, Harry-Potter-reading preteens want the government to hand out backpacks that expand into four-room houses.
“It’s called THE Shelter,” said C.J. Atkinson, 9. “The T stands for temporary. H is housing. E is emergency.”
The team designed the shelter-providing gadget for the national ExploraVision competition, which challenges students to dream up technology that will help humanity in the future. The Charles County team’s idea was one of 24 chosen as regional winners, beating more than 4,500 other entries. The program is sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association and Toshiba.
“They want us to take technology from the future and make it real,” said Timothy “Timmy” Olsen, 9.

18 Area Students Receive Meriter Scholarships

The Capital Times:

The winners, eight of whom have a parent who works at Meriter, will be recognized at an awards luncheon on Friday.
They are Kylie Severson, Columbus; Kristen VanderMolen, DeForest; Amadou Fofana, Junfeng Hou and Dolma Namgyal, Madison East; Marissa Wacker and Sabena Khan, Madison Edgewood; Carolyn Sleeth, Madison Memorial; Jamie Klump and Jennifer Werner, Middleton; Mathew Becker, Aubrey Lauersdorf, Brittany Sellers and Chie Yang, Monona Grove; Leah Smith, Portage; Emily Welch, Verona; Laura Purdy, Waunakee; and Megan Wood, Madison West.

Making Teacher Hiring Less Comfortable

Jay Matthews:

For those who still think helping children learn is everybody’s top priority in our schools, let me cite a disturbing dispute over where to send several hundred teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are about to be closed for inadequate enrollment.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee wants the principals of her remaining schools to decide which of those excess teachers they will hire, within the limits of a contract that guarantees them jobs somewhere in the system. Urban schools don’t work if all adults in each building don’t agree on what must be done to make them work. There is no chance of that shared vision if each principal is not allowed to pick the players on his or her team.
Unfortunately, many kind and well-intentioned teachers and parents in the District and other cities have a different view. Their first priority is not so much that children learn, but that they feel secure and comfortable. They want those excess teachers to accompany the students they know at their current school to whichever school the children are transferred to. That way, they say, the kids will have an easier and more comfortable transition.
Some members of the Washington Teachers’ Union, which is in the midst of a leadership fight, also say they fear Rhee is resisting this more genial approach because she wants to get rid of any teachers who can’t find principals who want them.

Empty Nest Cure: Texas Mother Finds Meaning as a Mentor

Sue Shellenbarger:

After children leave home, many parents with empty nests must search hard for new pursuits to give their lives meaning. After Pat Rosenberg’s two daughters left for college, Ms. Rosenberg, 61, a longtime volunteer in the Houston public schools, found new purpose in mentoring a student — a poor teenager who, by his own account, was drifting toward a life of crime in his tough inner-city neighborhood.
In his unusual relationship with Ms. Rosenberg and other adult mentors, Tristan Love, now 18, says he found the strength to turn his life around, becoming a sought-after public speaker committed to attending college and pursuing a career in law. Ms. Rosenberg tells the story:
The Challenge: “We moved to Houston in 1986 for my husband David’s career, before our two daughters entered school. I got deeply involved in the schools right away and stayed involved as our daughters’ grew up. I was a room mother and headed the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in both middle school and high school. When they were at school, I was often at school, too.
“After our second daughter left for college 2-1/2 years ago, our house became incredibly quiet. It was a real period of adjustment. All of a sudden, this person who has been sitting at your dinner table with you, and going out and coming home late, and keeping you worried all the time, is gone.

Milwaukee Lawyer Created School as a Pathway to College

Dani McClain:

At 27, Deanna Singh is determined to change the dismal statistic that only 5% of African-American adults in Milwaukee have a four-year college degree.
So determined that she has launched her own charter school, where her inaugural sixth-grade students already identify their class by the year they will graduate from college.
She aims to build a culture that refuses to accept what she witnessed years ago as a volunteer in Washington, D.C., schools – 11th- and 12th-graders who could barely read or write.
Both students and staff at her Milwaukee Renaissance Academy, 2212 N. 12th St., follow the succinct dictum of a mural in the school’s stairwell: “No excuses!”
High expectations propelled Singh from her father’s north side gas station – where she spent much of the first five years of her life – through Elmbrook Schools and on to the top-notch East Coast universities where she received her college and law degrees.

Firing Back on “When Policy Trumps Results”

TJ Mertz:

Marc Eisen of the Isthmus has checked in again on the Madison Schools with a column titled “When Policy Trumps Results.” This time the target of his ill informed scribblings is the equity work of the district, particularly the Equity Task Force, of which I was a member. It is a hatchet job.
Mr. Eisen gets his facts wrong, misreads or misrepresents task force documents and at no point engages with the content of the task force’s work. We offered the Board ideas for policies and practices that we thought would help produce and assess results. You would never know that reading Mr. Eisen’s column. Despite the title, all he seems to care about is style.
In return, I’m going to wield the axe. I’m going to go paragraph by paragraph to highlight the low level of knowledge and effort Eisen displays and the ultimate emptiness of his critique, hitting some other things along the way (quotes from Mr. Eisen in italics). Mr. Eisen’s column probably does not deserve this much attention. However the power of the press is such that often when uncorrected, “the legend becomes fact.” I believe equity work in our school district is too important to allow that to happen. Let’s get started.

Comments on “When Policy Trumps Results”.

Is Urban Violence a Virus?

Alex Kotlowitz:

THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.

From High School to the Future

Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab:

With loads of financial support from both CPS (Arnie Duncan) and the Gates Foundation (among others) CCSR and the school system built a tracking system that allows them to follow kids out of high school and into college & work, to see how they do– and even more importantly, to figure out how to help them do better.
It’s so unusual for a school district, especially one as large as Chicago’s (130+ high schools!) to have the data capacity to do this. The vast majority of high schools in the U.S. rely on a student exit questionnaire administered in the spring of senior year, which asks kids “What are your plans for the fall” (choices include 4 yr college, 2yr college, work, etc) and their responses are used as a proxy for the real destination. In other words, the college-going rate for a high school or district is based on a student’s self-report in May of senior year. This is a highly inaccurate measure, as several different data sources have proven– plenty of kids who say they are going to college do not (or do not go to the kind of school they said they were going to, even if they were admitted and accepted) because they realize they cannot afford it, or get side-tracked during the summer, and many who say they aren’t going, do decide to show up at a community college. Clearly districts need a much more reliable source of information if they are to learn about their high school graduates, and use that information to inform and change their educational practices.

Useful.

Americans Vastly Underestimate Spending on Schools and Teacher Salaries, Survey Finds

William G. Howell & Martin R. West:

Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education? Not according to a recent analysis of national survey results by University of Chicago’s William Howell and Brown University’s Martin R. West published in the summer issue of Education Next. The average respondent surveyed in 2007 thought per pupil spending in their district was just $4,231 dollars, even though the actual average spending per pupil among districts was $10,377 in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).
Howell and West also found Americans think that teachers earn far less than is actually the case. On average, the public underestimated average teacher salaries in their own state by $14,370. The average estimate among survey respondents was $33,054, while average teacher salary nationally in 2005 was actually $47,602.
Almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.
Howell and West also looked at whether some citizens are better informed about education spending than others. In general, they found that the responses of men were closer to the truth than those of women, and that parents of school-aged children gave more accurate responses about teacher salaries. Homeowners also appeared to be much more responsive than other Americans to higher spending levels in their districts. In districts spending more than $10,000 per pupil, for example, the responses of homeowners were closer to actual spending levels than those of individuals who rented or lived with other families. Homeowners appeared better informed about teacher salaries too, offering responses that were $7,502 higher than non-homeowners’ responses.

Complete Report – PDF.

L.A.’s Cathedral Chapel is a power in the Catholic Academic Decathlon

Carla Rivera:

When the state Catholic Schools Junior High Academic Decathlon begins today in Chula Vista, a small mid-city school will be representing the Los Angeles Archdiocese for the third time, having beaten more than 100 other parochial schools to get there.
Cathedral Chapel School represented the archdiocese in the state competition in 2002 and 2005, winning the state title in 2002 and earning a reputation as the tough little school that nobody had heard of.
Though the Catholic competition may not have the name recognition of its public high school counterpart, the members of Cathedral’s Academic Decathlon team are about the biggest guns on campus and the pride of the neighborhood.
At a pep rally this week, the elementary school’s 285 students whooped and hollered for two hours in a frenzied buildup to the team’s departure.
The Cathedral decathletes, mostly the sons and daughters of working-class immigrants, are more than just academic heroes. Scores of families are attracted to the school because they view the decathlon team’s success as a reflection of the campus’ overall academic excellence.
As other parochial schools face severe financial strains and even closure because of declining enrollment, Cathedral is financially stable and its enrollment has increased.

In Praise of Milwaukee’s High School Anti-Violence Program

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

An anti-violence program at six Milwaukee high schools continues to show progress, and that is good news for Milwaukee Public Schools and especially for students in those schools.
Suspensions and both violent and nonviolent incidents continue to decline since Violence-Free Zones were implemented at South Division, Marshall, Bay View, Custer, North Division and Washington high schools, according to organizers for the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a Washington, D.C.-based group that is working with MPS. If the program continues to show progress, MPS should consider expanding it beyond those schools.

5 Milwaukee Schools Envision Arts Campus

Alan Borsuk:

In a sign that the climate around arts offerings in Milwaukee Public Schools has taken a definite turn for the better, leaders of five arts specialty schools said Thursday that they are banding together to create a kindergarten through 12th grade “arts campus” aimed at strengthening their programs.
For now, the campus is a matter of the schools cooperating and coordinating actively, but the goal is to create a physical campus that could include moving the Milwaukee High School of the Arts from 2300 W. Highland Ave. to the area around N. 8th and W. Walnut streets, near where Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts and Elm Creative Arts School are located.
That would mean students could go to arts specialty programs from start to finish of their K-12 years in the same area, which is within walking distance of the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, a nonprofit organization offering programs and facilities to students from throughout the metropolitan area.

When Policy Trumps Results

Marc Eisen makes sense:

Much to its credit, the Madison school board has mostly ignored the March 2007 recommendations of the district’s Equity Task Force. This earnest but unhelpful committee delved into the abstractions of what distinguishes “equity” from “equality,” how the board might commit to equity and what esoteric guidelines could measure that commitment.
………….
This point needs to be emphasized. Madisonians aren’t afraid to tax themselves. They just want good services in return and know that their money isn’t being wasted.
But I can’t for the life of me see them rallying around a pompous and abstruse equity policy, especially one that reads like it was formulated by the UW Department of Leftwing Social Engineering. (Example: “Equity will come about when we raise a generation of children tolerant of differences and engaged in their democracy to stop the processes leading to inequity.”)
The school board, after a suitable 14-month delay, should politely shelve the task force’s recommendations when it finally gets around to voting on them in May.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron provides a timely read after Marc’s article.

America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree

Marty Nemko:

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: “I wasn’t a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I’d be the first one in my family to do it. But it’s been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go.”
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Rebuilding New Orleans Schools

Adam Nossiter:

Citizen-run boards have suddenly been thrust into managing individual schools all over the city. Neophyte teachers barely out of college instruct students sometimes older than they are. A wide range of teaching styles has been employed, from the rotelike call-and-response methods of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation school to more traditional textbook-based approaches. For the first time, parents are being asked to choose schools for their children (though in many cases the parents are absent, and the student is being raised by relatives).
Success will be a tall order in a school district where 85 percent of some 32,000 students are a year and a half to two years below their grade level. In a typical district, the figure would be around 15 percent, said Paul G. Vallas, the new superintendent here.
Worse, a third of the students here are some four years below grade level, a challenge that Mr. Vallas, a veteran of the Chicago and Philadelphia schools, calls “extreme.”
Yet nearly a year into the job, Mr. Vallas professes to be unfazed. With no politics in his way — he answers neither to the neutered parish school board nor to the mayor, but to the state — he is far freer to plan grand schemes than in the much larger cities where he made his mark.

The Spending Side of the Higher Education Equation

Scott Jaschik:

Across sectors of higher education, only a minority of spending by colleges supports direct instructional costs, according to a report being released today as part of an effort to reframe the debate over college costs.
“The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance,” is the result of an unusual attempt to change the way colleges and policy makers analyze higher education. The report — issued for the first time today and now to be an annual project — examines not only revenues, but how colleges actually spend their money.
After years in which people have read about tuition going up, and about state support covering smaller shares of public higher education budgets, the idea is to focus on what results from these and other trends. Some of the findings challenge conventional wisdom — such as the widely quoted belief that the top expense for higher education is the personnel costs associated with professors and other employees.
The report was produced by the Delta Cost Project, part of the Lumina Foundation for Education’s Making Opportunity Affordable program. The overarching thesis of the work is that higher education will do a better job of serving students if everyone is aware of where the money goes — not just how much college costs. By examining the different spending patterns at different types of institutions, the report notes growing gaps among sectors and among items receiving financial support. For example, spending per student at private research universities is almost twice that of public research universities.

Black Kids on Milwaukee Buses May Slip into School Lore

Eugene Kane:

It could be the end of an era.
Black children and yellow school buses long have been inextricably linked in the history of education in America. It started with the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that allowed for school desegregation in cities like Milwaukee. That led to widespread busing movements that allowed black students to attend classes outside their neighborhoods at predominantly white schools.
A decision by the Milwaukee School Board last week to drastically reduce the amount of busing in the district will alter a fundamental relationship that has existed in this city for generations of students.
But what the Milwaukee School Board did was not a statement about the racial makeup of the city’s public schools, many of which are predominantly African-American. School Board member Michael Bonds, the architect of the plan, says busing isn’t about desegregation anymore.
“When the district is 88% minority, it’s not about race,” Bonds told me. “It’s about the fact we’ve spent $57 million on a failed policy.”

Related by Alan Borsuk: Busing Change Won’t Be Easy. Madison Mayor Dave’s proposed low income housing expansion throughout Dane County may require more busing.

Counting High School Graduates

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

A proposal to standardize the way states calculate high school graduation rates makes sense.
A report earlier this month examining America’s 50 largest school districts found that Milwaukee Public Schools had a graduation rate of only 46.1%. The report by America’s Promise Alliance, an advocacy group, reported that Detroit was at the bottom of that list with a graduation rate of 24.9%.
Wait a minute, MPS officials countered. Our graduation rate is 66%.
Who’s right?
Both probably are. That’s the problem U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings hopes to solve by changing some of the rules under the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress is considering reauthorizing.
Under the proposal, states would be required to use a uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates by the 2012-’13 school year. As it stands now, comparing graduation rates is difficult. Under the proposal, only students who complete school on time with a regular degree can be counted as graduates. Students who take longer than four years or who earn an alternative diploma, such as a GED certificate, would not be counted.

Dane County Boasts 18 National Merit Scholars

National Merit Scholarship Corporation:

The National Merit® Scholarship Program is an academic competition for recognition and scholarships that began in 1955. High school students enter the National Merit Program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®)–a test which serves as an initial screen of approximately 1.4 million entrants each year–and by meeting published program entry/participation requirements.
Student Entry Requirements
To participate in the National Merit® Scholarship Program, a student must:

take the PSAT/NMSQT® in the specified year of the high school program and no later than the third year in grades 9 through 12, regardless of grade classification or educational pattern;
be enrolled full time as a high school student, progressing normally toward graduation or completion of high school, and planning to enroll full time in college no later than the fall following completion of high school; and
be a citizen of the United States; or be a U.S. lawful permanent resident (or have applied for permanent residence, the application for which has not been denied) and intend to become a U.S. citizen at the earliest opportunity allowed by law.

Press Release PDF:

This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began in October 2006 when more than 1.4 million juniors in over 21,000 high schools took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, the highest-scoring participants in each state, representing less than one percent of the state’s seniors, were named Semifinalists on a state representational basis.
Only the 16,000 Semifinalists had an opportunity to continue in the competition. Approximately 15,000 Semifinalists met the very high academic standards and other requirements to advance to the Finalist level of the competition. By the conclusion of the 2008 program, about 8,200 Finalists will earn the “Merit Scholar” title and receive a total of more than $36 million in college scholarships. NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was founded in 1955 specifically to conduct the annual National Merit Scholarship Program. The majority of scholarships offered each year are underwritten by approximately 500 independent corporate and college sponsors that share NMSC’s goals of honoring scholastically talented youth and enhancing their educational opportunities.
CAUTION: Any attempt to compare high schools on the basis of numbers of Merit Scholarship winners will lead to erroneous and unsound conclusions. The National Merit Scholarship Program honors individual students who show exceptional academic ability and potential for success in rigorous college studies. The program does not measure the quality or effectiveness of education within a school, system, or state.

The Capital Times:

Local scholarship winners are:
Seth B. Mulhall, Deerfield High School, Deerfield; Meredith L. Kremer, DeForest Area High School, DeForest; Aaron L. Owen, DeForest Area High School, DeForest.
Joseph K. Carlsmith, West High School, Madison; Sara C. Crocker, West High School, Madison; Erika A. Egner, James Madison Memorial High School, Madison; Reuben F. Henriques, West High School, Madison; Kelsey E. Johnson, Memorial High School, Madison.
Lucas Manuelli, West High School, Madison; Daniel T. Neuser, East High School, Madison; Richard K. Pang, West High School, Madison; Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, La Follette High School, Madison; Alexandro E. Trevino, Memorial High School, Madison.
Benjamin H. Witkovsky, West High School, Madison; Eleanor M. Wroblewski, West High School, Madison; Mary Q. Zhang, West High School, Madison.
Aubrey E. Lauersdorf, Monona Grove High School, Monona; Michael Bethencourt, home school, Mount Horeb.

Congratulations to the students and their families.

Seattle’s Special Education Reform

Emily Heffter:

As a task force begins this spring to revamp Seattle Public Schools’ approach to special education, it’s likely many classrooms around the district will begin to look more like Eckstein’s. The details haven’t been worked out, but in general, the district will try to deliver services to the students instead of bringing the students to the services.
A consultant recommended Seattle try to include more students in general-education classes and educate more special-education students at their neighborhood schools.
As the diagnosis of disabilities becomes more refined, school districts nationwide are faced with students whose needs are more complicated. At the same time, districts face federal requirements to meet individual students’ educational needs in the least restrictive environment possible.
Balancing those two realities can be difficult, said Doug Gill, the director of special education for the Washington state Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction.
“What I see is districts serving kids, sometimes with more complex needs, and as you see kids served with more complex needs, you need, really, a more specialized environment,” he said.

Seattle Special Education Review – Full Document (PDF). Seattle Special Education PTSA.

Single Sex Education

Alan Borsuk & Amy Hetzner:

Reduce it to a yes or no answer – was it a good idea for you to be in a class that was all girls this year? Who says yes?
Twenty-six hands shoot into the air. A 27th joins with hesitation.
And that is every student present in this eighth-grade classroom at the Milwaukee Education Center, known as MEC, a Milwaukee Public Schools middle school in an old Schlitz Brewery building north of downtown.
Note the word public in the previous sentence.
Single-sex education has long been part of the private school scene in Milwaukee and nationwide. But single-sex classes in public schools are relatively new.
Still few in number, they are on the rise in much of the country, spurred by parent interest and rulings from the U.S. Department of Education in 2006 that, with limitations, gave the practice a green light. As of November, 366 public schools in the United States offered some or all of their classes separated by gender, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
The idea is controversial. Research is nowhere near a consensus on the results, and many people, including experts, have strong opinions on issues such as whether boys and girls learn in different ways and to what degree children behave differently without members of the other gender present.

Coalition Releases State Of Black Madison Report

Channel3000:

New group the State of Black Madison Coalition said it is out to “change the plight of African Americans in the community,” and members warned if that doesn’t happen, Madison could see the major problems that plague Beloit and Milwaukee.
The new coalition of African American focused groups, armed with a new report called “The State of Black Madison 2008: Before the Tipping Point,” issued a call to action Tuesday to the entire Madison community.
It said Madison is on the precipice of change and if problems of disparity between whites and blacks are not addressed, the city might, as the one coalition member put it, “plunge into intractable problems that plague most major urban cities.”
The reports details the state of African Americans in Madison, saying if trends from 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the Dane County community to disappear.
“A city should be measured by how close the weakest link is to the strongest link. My friends, in Madison we are football fields apart,” said Scott Gray, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison

WKOW-TV:

African-American city leaders say the black community is in trouble and hope a new report called the State of Black Madison will be a catalyst for change.
The summary report, Before the Tipping Point, was released today by the State of Black Madison Coalition. They based their findings on information from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and other recent research. Among the discoveries: racial disparity is most prevalent in the areas of criminal justice, education, health care and housing. 37-percent of African Americans in Dane County live in poverty today, as compared to just 11-percent of the community as a whole. And if trends that turned up between 1990-2005 continue, it will take 265 years for the income gap between blacks and the rest of the county to disappear.

Complete report (pdf).

Nearness Learning: The Death of Distance

The Economist:

“Nearness learning” is a more appropriate term for what the Open University’s business school offers, according to its dean in an interview for Which MBA, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit
When the Open University (OU) was founded in 1969, it represented one of the most important educational innovations of the 20th century, not just in Britain, but across the world.
Established by Britain’s then prime minister, Harold Wilson, it is considered by many to be the first university to offer genuinely high-quality degrees through distance learning. It was originally to be called the “University of Air”, because most of its lectures took the form of late-night broadcasts on the BBC. Indeed, for many Britons of a certain age the Open University will be a formative memory. Long before Britain had transformed itself into a 24-hour society, most will remember the sinking feeling of finding out that, come midnight, the only thing on their television was a hirsute OU professor, dryly working his way through the laws of thermodynamics.

Something to consider with respect to the clash between District and Student interests.

Milwaukee’s High School Violence Free Zones

Dani McClain:

he first step is for youth advisers assigned to any school – there are 53 district-wide charged with being mentors and disciplinarians – to seek out and build relationships with the 10% of the student body that’s most consistently causing trouble.
“The number one thing is follow-through,” Robinson said. “These students feel like, ‘Everybody has let me down.’ ”
Being accessible is important, as is giving that student time to trust the youth adviser with whatever might be going on at home – no money for food, the weight of responsibility for younger siblings, abuse or any number of problems related to or augmented by poverty.
According to 2005 U.S. Census data, a third of school-age children in Milwaukee lived with a family in poverty.

More on Milwaukee’s suspension rates here.

A Nation at a Loss

Edward Fiske:

TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a remarkable document that became a milestone in the history of American education — albeit in ways that its creators neither planned, anticipated or even wanted.
In August 1981, Education Secretary T. H. Bell created a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine, in the report’s words, “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Secretary Bell’s expectation, he later said, was that the report would paint a rosy picture of American education and correct all those widespread negative perceptions.
Instead, on April 26, 1983, the commission released a sweeping 65-page indictment of the quality of teaching and learning in American primary and secondary schools couched in a style of apocalyptic rhetoric rarely found in blue-ribbon commission reports.
“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it warned. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Madison School Board Discusses Discipline, Safety, Cell Phones and Code of Conduct

Watch the discussion via this video

Channel3000:

The Madison School Board met on Monday night to discuss a new positive behavior support plan as well as a new code of conduct for students who attend Madison public schools.
The code of conduct has been under review for months by a committee who made recommendations to the board in a special meeting on Monday.
The meeting is especially timely after the highly publicized recordings of students fighting at Toki Middle School came to light last week.
Committee members will recommend making a few major revisions or additions to the code, including specifically banning voice or image recording.
Board members discussed safety, discipline and cell phones, which were all topics of importance that applied to the Toki situation, reported WISC-TV.
Madison’s new student code of conduct targets cell phones. Secret or hidden recordings are a serious offense that could get a student suspended or expelled.
“Cell phones and video cameras are being used in very wrong ways, to take pictures of tests, to film fighting, to record kids in the locker room, that’s just not acceptable,” said school board president Arlene Silviera. “I think we have to be very specific in the use of these types of devices — what can and what cannot be done.”

Tamira Madsen:

In an effort to give principals and administrators a chance to exercise discretion to expel a student who brings a weapon besides a gun to school, Madison school district officials are considering alterations to the language in the student codes of conduct.
Recommended revisions were discussed at Monday night’s School Board meeting.
The current rule for a first offense states that a student who has a weapon on school grounds besides a firearm, pellet gun or BB gun and isn’t carrying the weapon with an “intent to cause harm to another” will receive a five-day suspension. After a second offense, a student could face an expulsion recommendation.
The rule revision would give principals and administrators the option to expel the student for a first-time offense.
Dan Mallin, who works in legal services with the Madison Metropolitan School District and is a member of the committee drafting changes to the codes of conduct, said the rule change is meant to take into account a variety of circumstances.

The Mayor & Madison Schools

Jason Joyce publishes a useful summary of Madison Mayor Dave’s weekly schedule. Tomorrow, Cieslewicz meets with retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater, after recently meeting with incoming super Dan Nerad.
I don’t recall such frequent meetings (if any) in my years observing Joyce’s weekly posts.
Related: Madison Mayor Proposes Expansion of Low Income Housing Throughout Dane County in an Effort to Reduce the MMSD’s Low Income Population.

Madison’s Two New School Board Members

Andy Hall:

Marj Passman is so excited she ‘s having trouble sleeping.
Ed Hughes is sleeping just fine — so far, he adds with a chuckle.
Monday evening, Passman and Hughes will be sworn in as members of the Madison School Board. It will mark the first time either has held public office.
Their path to the board was easier than expected — both ran unopposed — and their arrival comes at an unusually quiet moment in Madison ‘s public school system. Thanks to a one-time windfall from special city of Madison taxing districts, the schools are averting budget cuts for the first time in 14 years.
But Passman, 66, a retired teacher, and Hughes, 55, a lawyer, know that by summer ‘s end the board will be deep into discussions about asking voters to approve millions of dollars in extra taxes to avoid budget cuts for coming years.
They ‘ve been doing their homework to join the board — an act that will become official with a ceremony at the board ‘s 5 p.m. meeting at the district ‘s headquarters, 545 W. Dayton St.
Passman and Hughes fill the seats held by retiring board members Carol Carstensen, the board ‘s senior member who gained detailed knowledge of issues while serving since 1990, and Lawrie Kobza, who developed a reputation for carefully scrutinizing the district ‘s operations during her single three-year term.

Few jobs are as difficult and thankless as serving on a local school board.
Just ask Lawrie Kobza and Carol Carstensen.
The two Madison School Board members chose not to seek re-election this spring after years of honorable and energetic service.
Their replacements — Ed Hughes and Marj Passman — were sworn in Monday evening.
The fact that no one in Madison, a city steeped in political activism, chose to challenge Hughes or Passman for the two open board seats suggests increasing wariness toward the rigors of the task.
The job comes with token pay, a slew of long meetings, frequent controversy and angry calls at home. On top of that, the state has put public schools into a vise of mandates and caps that virtually require unpopular board decisions.

2008 MMSD Joe Thomas Community Service Awards

On April 14, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education honored eight students with the Joe Thomas Community Service Award. The award was initiated in 1995 to honor the memory of a highly respected minority services coordinator at West High School.
The award recognizes high school seniors who have made a measurable impact through community service, demonstrate commitment to high academic standards and go above and beyond expectations.
The 2008 Joe Thomas Community Service Award winners are: Marcus Thomas Chavous, Tony Freiberg, Allison Freid, Amadou Fofana, Tiffany Jones, Dorothea McDonald, Namratta Sehgal and Darnell Small.
Read more at at The Capital City Hues.
Congratulations to each of these outstanding young people!

L.A. Unified may rethink offers to charter schools

Howard Blume:

Seeking to calm a backlash at traditional Los Angeles schools, a top district official promised this week to reconsider offers of classroom space on those campuses to charter schools.
The idea of privately operated charter schools sharing space with regular schools was met with fury at many affected campuses, including Taft High in Woodland Hills and Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles. Teachers and parents have complained that their own reforms and programs would be harmed.
Charter operators aren’t too happy either: Many still await offers, while others are considering whether proposed deals are affordable or adequate.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines stepped into the fray with unscheduled remarks at a “town hall” this week before a standing-room-only audience of more than 800 in Taft’s auditorium.
“I want to review each issue,” Cortines said. “We had to pause, take a breath and look at . . . what we must do for charter schools but also how it affects . . . the regular school.”
Under state law as well as a recent settlement of litigation, the Los Angeles Unified School District must share facilities “fairly” with charter schools. Charters are independently run public schools that operate with less state regulation in exchange for boosting student achievement.

Obama on Teacher Merit Pay

Mike Antonucci:

I think that on issues of education, I have been very clear about the fact, and sometimes I have gotten in trouble with the teachers union on this, that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers. That –
WALLACE: You mean merit pay?
OBAMA: Well, merit pay, the way it has been designed I think that is based on just single standardized test I think is a big mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not the kids are coming in the school already three years or four years behind.
But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, you know what, teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing themselves professionally, that we should pay excellence more. I think that’s a good idea. So –

“In Education, Parents Deserve to Have a Choice”

Jim Wooten:

The nagging question since Republicans took full control under the Gold Dome is this: What difference does it make?
In many areas, the difference is hard to see. Not so with education. Bit by bit, Georgia is catching up with other states in giving parents control over the education our children receive.
That is one of the major differences that surfaces repeatedly in legislative debate about education, about health care and, in general, about the role of government in our lives. It’s become especially noticeable in the past year. Democrats and Republicans are beginning to divide philosophically here, as they do nationally.
The debate generally breaks down as to whether we as citizens are responsible enough to choose what’s best for us — or whether wiser, better-informed and more compassionate bureaucrats should exercise that authority.
It’s the transcendent conflict of our time, made all the more urgent by the fact that the national tax base is shrinking while lifestyle choices grow dependence. In 2004, according to the Washington-based Tax Foundation, 42.5 million Americans filed returns and had zero tax liability, up from 32 million four years earlier. Non-payers have increased 160 percent since 1985, the foundation reports. Meanwhile, out-of-wedlock births make government a second parent.

“Facebook Taunts”

Daniel de Vise:

Twice this month, students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda have used their fists to settle disputes that arose on Facebook.
So Alan Goodwin, the principal, took the unusual step of asking parents to monitor their children’s postings on the social networking site. He did this in a posting to the school’s e-mail list, which is a forum as addictive to some Whitman parents as Facebook has become to their children.
“I am becoming increasingly frustrated by negative incidents at school that arise from students harassing other students on Facebook,” Goodwin wrote April 18.
Teens are conducting an increasing share of their social lives electronically, via text-messaging, e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook. Threats, harassment and bullying all have followed them online. Although such behavior is not new, research suggests that it is expanding rapidly, and educators and lawmakers seem resolved to pay closer attention to the words students exchange online while off campus

I find it remarkable that many are so cavalier about exposing their social networks, detailed activities and …… anything else on sites that mine all of this data for economic purposes. The recent discussion on “Technology & Madison Schools” is worth considering with respect to the issues our children need to understand today, and tomorrow.

Report: More Governors Prioritizing Pre-K

Pew:

Pre-K Now today released Leadership Matters: Governors’ Pre-K Proposals Fiscal Year 2007, a comprehensive analysis of governors’ leadership and budgetary commitments to expanding access to pre-kindergarten. If legislatures across the country approve these proposals, for the third straight year more children than ever before will have access to pre-k. Every governor who proposed pre-k increases last year received state legislative approval for increased funds. “Two years ago just 11of the nation’s governors had pre-k on their policy and budgetary agendas,” said Libby Doggett, Ph.D., executive director of Pre-K Now. “Our report shows that number has more than doubled with proposals by 24 governors to increase funding for pre-k. We expect these commitments to guide state legislatures and improve our schools. High-quality pre-k is critical to helping states meet the standards and mandates of No Child Left Behind and is the first step to improving K-12 education.”
Gubernatorial increases to pre-k were bolstered for 2007 by favorable state revenue forecasts. Twenty-two states are likely to enjoy increased income in fiscal year 2007 while 26 others anticipate fiscal stability. Governors who once felt hamstrung by budget shortfalls are emerging with plans to improve educational opportunities in their states by advancing pre-k.