Community Partners – Page 7 – School Information System

Will de-funding unravel the academic integrity of universities?

Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2007, Deutsche Bank entered into an agreement with two German universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, to fund a mathematical laboratory. The problematic parts were the ‘secret’ terms: according to the article, the Deutsche Bank could not only influence the hiring process, but bank employees could serve as adjunct professors. Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of the agreement were that the bank had veto power over the laboratory’s research agenda and, more importantly, “was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years.”

Iowa’s Pre-K Program Continues for 2 More Years

Mike Wiser:

Gov. Terry Branstad will not seek changes to the state’s universal preschool program for at least the next two years as the state moves forward with its education reform package.
The commitment is a change from Tuesday when Branstad sidestepped several questions about the future of the state’s preschool program during a news conference immediately following the Iowa Education Summit.
Pre-K education found wide support among the summit’s speakers and audience members, who frequently applauded when a panelist or presenter indicated their support for such programs.
Earlier this year, Branstad pushed a proposal that would have every parent pay something – based on a sliding income scale – for their child to attend a preschool program. The plan didn’t make it through the Legislature, and the governor ultimately backed off, although he indicated he issue wasn’t settled.

Charters Are Not Taking Over Public Education

Richard Lee Colvin:

If you monitor education topics on Twitter you will quickly get the impression that huge numbers of American public schools are being replaced with charter schools. And you will also pick up lot of antipathy toward the schools from some of the most visible promoters of this week’s SOS Marches.
But the numbers show that, in most places, charter schools are insignificant.
Charters are not allowed in nine states (Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) and they make up fewer than 3 percent of all schools in 12 other states. More than 10 percent of schools are charters in only three states–Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Charters in Washington, D.C. get a lot of attention, as they should, because they constitute 45 percent of the schools. New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charters, is another hot spot. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a handy map that profiles the charter school situation in each state, going back to 1999.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Popping the Public-Pension Bubble

Ed Ring:

With the day of reckoning approaching for California’s lavish but disastrously underfunded public-employee pensions, union partisans have tried to persuade the public that reformers are engaged in “pension busting.” But to believe that reformers are waging a partisan vendetta against state workers’ pensions would require ignoring a mountain of data. The fact is, only by skewing the averages can the unions maintain that they’re victims of a campaign against their “modest” pensions.
The union arguments are deceptively straightforward, rehearsed constantly by their talking heads and, unfortunately, repeated by a sympathetic and innumerate media. A master practitioner is Art Pulaski, chief officer of the AFL-CIO’s California Labor Federation. In an online debate at the Sacramento Bee in March (which also included City Journal associate editor Ben Boychuk and frequent City Journal contributor Steven Greenhut), Pulaski claimed that the average pension that California’s retired state workers collect is not much more than what they would receive under Social Security. “The average state worker gets a pension of $24,000 and often without Social Security,” Pulaski said. “Not lavish by any means.” More recently, the Bee published a column by Martha Penry headlined PENSION ‘REFORMERS’ DISTORT FACTS ON BENEFITS. The paper identified Penry as “a special education teacher’s assistant in the Twin Rivers school district,” but it didn’t disclose that she’s also a high-ranking union official who serves on the board of directors of the California School Employees Association. Penry accused “pension busters” of overstating the cost of pensions and the amount of the average pension. “Three quarters of CalPERS retirees collect yearly pensions of $36,000 or less,” she claimed.

Teen Fights To Succeed In Rural S.C. Community

Claudio Sanchez:

A fifth of the nation’s public school students attend rural schools, but nearly a third of those kids don’t graduate. In fact, many schools that researchers have labeled “dropout factories” are in rural communities. No state has more than South Carolina, which has 50. In this state, lots of teenagers just don’t think they need a high school diploma.
Oconee County, S.C., sits on the far west fringes of the state, just a few miles from the Georgia border. This is where Nick Dunn was born, and where his father died in a car accident a day before Christmas. Nick was 11.

At least $1.5M paid out secretly by Elizabeth schools, a fraction of workers’ settlements

Ted Sherman:

When Luis Mario Rojas was fired from the Elizabeth Board of Education in 2006, he claimed he had been the victim of a political purge.
In a federal lawsuit, Rojas said that while district officials cited a poor work record and budget cutbacks, the real reason for his termination after nearly 20 years on the job was that he became viewed as a disloyal soldier. His sister, former board member Oneida Duran, had a falling out with those in control of the school district.
Earlier this year, board members agreed to resolve the matter. They gave Rojas $68,997 to settle his complaint. In addition, they paid out another $24,652 to settle a separate workers’ compensation case. Then they put him back on the payroll — paying him $60,064 annually until he becomes eligible for retirement in two years.
As part of the agreement, he promised never to say a word about it.

WEAC wrong to pass on panel

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

It’s hard to frame the decision by the state’s largest teachers union to not participate in a unique task force to improve our schools as anything other than disappointing.
Sure, leaders of the Wisconsin Education Association Council are angry and frustrated to the extreme with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers for requiring more financial contributions from all public sector employees – including teachers – while strictly limiting collective bargaining.
Go ahead – be angry and frustrated. But don’t just withdraw from a great opportunity to improve our schools

Chicago needs school vouchers. And Rahm needs to meditate.

John Kass:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel certainly made news over his angry, finger-wagging scolding of NBC Chicago TV reporter Mary Ann Ahern the other day.
Ahern dared ask the Rahmfather whether he’d send his kids to the public schools he controls. He reportedly became indignant, took off his microphone and ended the interview.
Later, and with great courtesy, Emanuel revisited the topic with a rival station — which then reported the big exclusive that the mayor was sending his children to a private school.
Emanuel runs Chicago Public Schools. He’s shown grit to stand publicly and admonish the teachers union to improve the product. But he decided his children will not attend the public schools.

Where private foundations award education cash

Valerie Strauss:

Public school systems around the country may have spent the past several years starving for cash in this financially troubled era, but a new report shows that philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.
The analysis, the first comprehensive examination of philanthropy activity in this area, showed that the biggest chunk of the money — 38 percent — went to teacher recruitment, while 22 percent was spent on professional development, 14 percent on teacher preparation and less than 10 percent for everything else.
One organization was the big winner in the money giveaway, according to the University of Georgia researchers who did the analysis, and given all the attention it has received from school reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, it should come as no surprise.

7/28 Madison Conference to examine Wisconsin educational accountability

La Follette School of Public Affairs, via a kind Chan Stroman email:

The La Follette School of Public Affairs outreach office is helping to organize a conference on educational accountability. The conference, Moving Beyond NCLB to College and Career Readiness: Building a New School Accountability System for Wisconsin, will be Thursday, July 28, from 1 to 5 p.m. in the Pyle Center.
Professor Douglas N. Harris of the La Follette School will speak on building a new accountability system for Wisconsin. “The conference is intended to set the stage for Gov. Walker’s attempts to establish clear, plentiful and sophisticated information for judging the quality of almost every school in Wisconsin,” says La Follette School outreach director Terry Shelton.

Julie Underwood: Starving Public Schools; a look at School Spending

UW-Madison School of Education Dean Julie Underwood, via a kind reader’s email:

Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”– and vouchers “scholarships”–but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”
ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state.

Locally, via a kind reader’s email, the Madison School District’s preliminary budget plans to spend about $362,000,000 for 25,000 students, about $14,480 per student.. The District’s budget has been largely flat for several years, after growing at 5.25% annually for some time.
Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters–and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?; the article mentions that we spend about $600,000,000,000 annually on public education.
How does Wisconsin compare?
Several Wisconsin Senate recall elections occur in a few weeks. (WEAC has many links along with Madison Teachers, Inc, AFT-Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association.
Chris Wilson: Two “simple” graphs reveal US Federal Government cash and debt positions.
Wisconsin Ranks #4 in tax burden, Minnesota 7 and Massachusetts 11.

Iowa’s Education Summit

Mike Wiser:

Iowa school reform legislation doesn’t need consensus as much as it needs follow-through and buy-in from the top.
Teachers need to be evaluated by their peers and paid according to how well they perform in the classroom and on the test.
Principals need more training, and school districts need to be more selective in whom they hire for a building’s top job. Tenure has to be earned, not once, but several times during an educator’s career.
Those were just a few of the opinions aired at the Iowa Education Summit during the first day of the two-day Iowa Education Summit that brought teachers, principals, business leaders, college professors, politicians, nonprofit representatives and the nation’s top educational authority, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to Des Moines. The summit is expected to be the catalyst for a wide-reaching education reform package Gov. Terry Branstad will introduce next legislative session.

New Study: RI’s Suburban Schools Trail Nation In Advanced Programs

Dan McGowan:

A new analysis of the nation’s schools found that Rhode Island falls below the national average for offering high-level curriculum such as Advanced Placement or talented and gifted programs, particularly in the more suburban districts in the state.
The report, which seeks to showcase what is known as the “opportunity gap” between wealthy and high-poverty school districts, actually suggests that Rhode Island offers similar chances to be involved in specialty programs in urban schools as it does in suburban schools. In fact, in some cases, the high-level programs are more available in cities like Providence than they are in Barrington.
But the reality is the state offers very little advance programming overall, meaning that while there may not be a significant gap between the city schools and the ones from more rural areas, Rhode Island schools are still being outpaced by the rest of New England and most cases, the country.
The Numbers
The study, which was conducted by ProPublica, found that Rhode Island falls well-behind the rest of the country when it comes to offering AP tests, advanced mathematics courses and talented and gifted programming.
More students, however, are taking chemistry and physics than in other parts of the country.

Compare Wisconsin’s results, here.

Iowa’s task: Bet on right school reforms

As Iowa political and education leaders prepare to make sweeping changes in the state’s schools, experts monitoring similar efforts across the country caution that much of what is being tried is still controversial and uncharted territory.
For example:
– A growing body of anecdotal evidence and research supports the push toward longer school days and years to benefit students’ academic achievement, especially among low-income or disadvantaged children. But the cost-benefit ratio of such moves remains fiercely debated and some experiments have had mixed results.

Caring for the Me Generation

Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab

During the past semester, a time where I constantly felt split between my academic life and my civic life, I became acutely aware of an attitude among undergraduates that perplexed me. I tried writing about it , describing what readers pointed out (in a far more articulate manner than I’d managed) was a notable lack of empathy among some students.
Since I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to make convince higher education institutions to prioritize their students’ needs and desires, these realizations about who some of the students seemed to be and especially what they seemed to believe, made me pretty depressed. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I expect students to speak and act in one voice–far from it, given how much I value the democratic process. I don’t want them to share my opinions or perspectives, but rather simply want them to formulate opinions and perspectives after asking good questions and gathering and evaluating information. But what I hope for, most of all, is their recognition that they are part of a worldwide community of students, and their strength lies in that community. I hope that such a larger sense of the world will guide them to think of more than themselves, and to act for the greater good.

Debunking myths about teacher education curricula

Dr. Terry Simpson:

Recently, the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) announced a redesign of all education programs within its six universities and 13 community colleges called “Ready2Teach.” The TBR is initiating change in the process of preparing new teachers for public school classrooms.
Although as a private college, Maryville College is not governed by the TBR, our goal in the teacher education program is to equip our teacher licensure students with research-based knowledge and skills that will facilitate the learning for all children. My concern about the June 13 Associated Press story about Ready2Teach that ran in the News Sentinel, and across the state, was the inaccuracies about how we currently prepare new public school teachers. Here are a few misconceptions:
n Education majors spend most of their time in college listening to lectures about teaching methods or education theory.

When teachers weren’t maligned

Craig Barbian:

When I was growing up, there was a special mystique about teachers. They were looked up to and respected. No matter if you liked a teacher or not, you appreciated his or her efforts to educate children and prepare them for their future, no matter what that future would be.
Today, teachers are being portrayed as self-centered union lackeys who feel entitled to extraordinary benefits provided by taxpayers. Teachers appear to have suddenly morphed from members of a noble profession to members of the world’s oldest profession. What a turnaround.
My teachers over the years left an indelible mark on me and the person I became. They helped shape me, gave me encouragement and taught me to think for myself and question the status quo.
My first-grade teacher was Miss Darling (honestly). She was a sweet lady who I remember for her kindness and her patience as I struggled to master the simple act of tying my shoes. It has been almost 50 years since then, but I remember her clearly, drying my tears of frustration and embarrassment and helping me practice until I could finally tie my shoes.

Trenton Schools & Teacher Tenure

New Jersey Left Behind:

There’s lots of discussion regarding the pros and cons of tenure. The Trenton Times describes an instance that highlights the difficulties school districts face in dismissing tenured employees. Rayshaun Davis, a member of one of the Trenton Public Schools unions, the Business-Technical Employees Association, was assigned as a Youth Development Liaison at Trenton Central High in a program designed to “help students avoid teen pregnancy, substance abuse and other pitfalls of at-risk youth.”
Here’s the current contract for the union.

Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters–and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?

Jason Riley:

One of the foundation’s main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to–and did–promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
“But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about–whether you go to college–it didn’t move the needle much,” he says. “Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t dramatic. . . . We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.” Still, he adds, “we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them.”
The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.
In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education “equity” lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to “startle” educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.
Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: “I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn’t led to significant improvements.” He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. “It’s worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that’s ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it’s truly a rounding error.”

Much more on Small Learning Communities, here.

The life and death of a Washington teenager in state care

Linda Thomas:

A new report from the Department of Social and Health Services summarizes a teenager’s life and death in eight pages. After bouncing him through 22 foster homes, it concludes that caseworkers and foster parents should have had more information about the boy’s history so they could have helped him.
Roger Eugene Benson was in state care when he left a group home in January, walked to a freeway overpass, jumped to I-5 below and died after being struck by a van. People who witnessed the suicide were horrified. People who didn’t know what was going were angry by the traffic delays caused when the Interstate was shut down during the afternoon commute.
In calling the State Patrol that day, I found out the victim was 15 years old. That struck me because I have a 15-year-old daughter. This kid, the boy who killed himself on I-5 , was somebody’s son.
What went wrong in his life?
Benson was born in December of 1995. His history with the state began when he was a toddler. His mother was investigated for abuse or neglect of her children, including Benson, six times. The last time CPS was called, in May of 1998, Benson was placed in protective custody. The boy and his siblings were placed in four foster homes within three years. The longest he was in any one home was two years.

Iowa: Schools slip to “mediocrity”

Joe Dejka:

Iowa has slid from a national leader in elementary and secondary education to an average performer over the past 20 years as other states accelerated past it, according to a state report released today.
The Iowa report card — the first released under Republican Gov. Terry Branstad — provides an unvarnished assessment of the state’s academic performance and sounds a clarion call to improve. The report, “Rising to Greatness: An Imperative for Improving Iowa’s Schools,” says performance on various national and state tests show “an alarming slide toward mediocrity.”
In some ways, Iowa public schools have improved over years past, but other states have surged ahead, said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, which produced the report.
Restoring the greatness of Iowa schools will require more than “tinkering around the edges,” he said.

Wisconsin has slid, as well.

Why I’m Marching Forward (It’s The Only Direction)

José Luis Vilson:

You’ve got to be wondering what a teacher like me is doing marching against the “reform” trends. For those of you unfamiliar with my background, I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University. A year later, after 6-8 months of unemployment and a stint as a data entry person at an educational database firm, I went into the NYC Teaching Fellows program, an offshoot of Michelle Rhee’s New Teacher Project. On the surface, I’m a perfect candidate to follow the corporatist thinking about education, and should be easily molded into the dominant thinking from elites who ostensibly believe they’re going into education for the common good. All it takes is the right amount of fear, the right amount of frustration, the right amount of ignorance, and the right amount of failure to tip people into the hands of those who wish to rotate our profession backwards.
Fortunately for me, I lucked out. And if you’re reading this, I’m thinking the same goes for you.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chooses private school for kids

Valerie Strauss:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strongly supports school reform that centers on standardized test-based accountability for students, schools and teachers, has decided to send his children to a private school that doesn’t obsess on standardized tests.
Emanuel, who served in the White House as President Obama’s chief of staff for a few years, and his wife have chosen, according to a local radio station CBS News 2 in Chicago, to send their three children to the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park.
It’s the same school that President Obama’s daughters attended when they lived in Chicago. Sasha and Malia Obama now attend the private Sidwell Friends School.

Glasgow-Edinburgh divide on school qualifications

BBC

More than a third of people in Glasgow North East have no school qualifications.
A table published by the University and College Union (UCU) showed 35.3% of those of working age left school without passing a single examination.
The result gives the area the lowest rating in the UK.
Every Edinburgh constituency was placed in the top third for educational achievement. Every constituency in Glasgow was below the British average.
The best result in Scotland was for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, where only 4.4% of people had no qualifications.

How Texas Betrayed Its Schools

John Harvey:

As promised, this is my follow-up post based on our trip to the Save Texas Schools conference in Austin this past weekend. It was a sobering experience. The long and the short of it is this: Texas has abandoned its children. The Governor and the Legislators in Austin have set the stage for a protracted crisis not only in education but in the State economy. With respect to the former, we can look forward to larger class sizes, the elimination of many important programs, and the placing of even more responsibility of the backs of overworked (and fewer) teachers. Texas already ranked an embarrassing 44th in education and these developments do not bode well for future of the Lone Star State. As far as the economy is concerned, every public education layoff means less income not only for those individuals, but for local businesses where they would have shopped. Indeed, the Legislative Budget Board forecast that almost 45% of job losses would actually be in the private sector (Center for Public Policy Priorities: CPPP Urges Rejection of HB1). Furthermore, the lack of a decent education will greatly reduce the future earning power of Texans. The only firms willing to relocate here will be those hoping to find a source of cheap, low-skilled laborers. Texas will become the alternative to outsourcing to an impoverished, third-world country. The stars at night no longer look so big and bright.

A-plus for Rhode Island mayoral academy

Providence Journal:

Congratulations to the students, teachers and administrators of the Blackstone Valley Mayoral Academy, in Cumberland, who have achieved something extraordinary. All 152 of the kindergarten and first-grade students in the school who took the state Developmental Reading Assessment this year scored proficient, or better.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time in Rhode Island that every student at a school scored proficient or better on this early-grade assessment!” wrote Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist in a congratulatory letter.
Literacy in the early grades is obviously a crucial foundation for learning throughout one’s school years, so this unprecedented achievement is one to celebrate.

Erroll Davis takes reins of scandal-plagued Atlanta Public Schools

Susan Troller:

Former local business executive Erroll Davis, 66, who was chairman and CEO at Alliant Energy and then led the University System of Georgia, has now been tapped to lead the embattled Atlanta Public Schools.
The largest district in Georgia, with about 50,000 students, is reeling from a scathing, 800-page report released July 5 that showed nearly 180 teachers and school administrators were involved in systematically changing students’ test answers at 44 of 56 of Atlanta’s elementary and middle schools accused of cheating. The adults provided answers to students or erased and corrected tests so students appeared to be performing at or above local and national performance benchmarks.

Kentucky National Guard Program for At-Risk Youth

Associated Press:

A National Guard school program for at-risk teenagers is scheduled to open in 2012 in eastern Kentucky.
The Appalachian Youth ChalleNGe Academy, to be housed in a renovated former elementary school, will be the second ChalleNGE school in Kentucky. Bluegrass ChalleNGe Academy at Fort Knox opened in 1999.
“Here in Harlan, we found a county with a school system that was willing to help make a program,” said Col. John Wayne Smith, director of the Fort Knox program. “We believe that with an academy here, we will be able to get kids to come who wouldn’t come to Fort Knox.”
The primary recruiting area for the new program is 23 counties in eastern Kentucky, with any remaining openings being offered to teens in the Appalachian region of neighboring states, Smith said last week in the Harlan Daily Enterprise.
“I was looking at the numbers in our target population. I found that Appalachia has a higher rate of these kids, but we also found that because of positive family connections in the area, youth are hesitant to leave and come to Fort Knox. We have had a few come to us, but nothing like the numbers we should be getting,” he said at a community meeting.

1998 Study Assesses the Illinois Teacher Union’s Future

Mike Antonucci:

Teachers’ Unions: Back to the Future. Back in 1998, the Illinois Education Association commissioned the Global Business Network to assess the union’s direction for the next 10-15 years and help devise options for dealing with possible scenarios. The result, a report titled The Future of the Illinois Education Association [3.1MB PDF], is a fascinating read not just for its insights into the union’s strategic thinking, but for which “predictions” it got right and wrong.
I put the scare quotes around “predictions” because GBN was explicit in stating that the possible scenarios it outlined were not predictions, but merely various possibilities for which the union should plan. As the authors put it, “After imaginatively dwelling in each scenario, participants can develop strategic options that are appropriate to managing in just that scenario.”
GBN developed a matrix of four scenarios, based on the variables of strong vs. weak political environments, and strong vs. weak membership connection with the union. Each of the four contains at least some relevance to current events, although other aspects read like one of those “flying car, food pills” science fiction stories written in the 1930s about life in the 1970s.

Fascinating.

States Test NCLB: Officials Frustrated With No Child Left Behind Try to Substitute Their Own Plans

Stephanie Banchero

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been at odds with state schools chief Tony Evers over budget cuts, vouchers and teachers’ collective-bargaining rights. But they have found common ground in their aggravation with No Child Left Behind.
Messrs. Walker and Evers formed a joint committee this month that will write a new state policy to replace the federal law requiring schools to ensure all students are passing state math and reading exams by 2014. No Child Left Behind is “broken,” they have said.
“We are not trying to get around accountability,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a phone interview. “But instead of using the blanket approach that defines a lot of schools as failures, we will use a more strategic approach so we can replicate success and address failure.”
Wisconsin and other states say No Child Left Behind unfairly penalizes schools that don’t meet rigid requirements. Tired of waiting for Congress to overhaul the law, some states have taken matters into their own hands.

Parents Promote Disruptive Innovation

Tom Vander Ark:

Michael Horn spoke to the National Coalition Public School Options today in Washington DC. NCPSO is an extraordinary network of parents that advocate for educational options for families particularly online learning.

Horn is a coauthor of Disrupting Class and a leading advocate for online learning. He gave the roomful of discerning parents a little history of disruption.

In 1989, Clay Christensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School and began studying why successful organization fail. He found that the factors that had promoted success were often cause of the demise. These organizations would add sustaining innovations–think computers and cars–that made models a little better and a little more expensive every year. This cycle of product improvement leaves room for new competitors to fulfill similar needs for substantially less.

These “disruptive innovations” often replace non-consumption for under served consumers. In education non-consumption includes credit recovery, dropout recovery, and home education.

Virtually Irrelevant: How certification rules impede the growth of virtual schools

Dr. Terry Stoops:

Teacher-certification requirements are among the most onerous rules enforced by state education agencies and have the potential seriously to limit the scope, quality, and accessibility of virtual schooling for years to come.
By design, certification requirements prohibit unlicensed individuals who reside within a state — such as higher education faculty, private-sector professionals, private school faculty, and independent scholars — from teaching virtual courses.
States should allow their virtual schools to have the flexibility to focus on hiring candidates who possess the requisite skills and relevant knowledge and experience, rather than those who possess mandated credentials.

Charter School Battle Shifts to Affluent Suburbs

Winnie Hu:

Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools. Just not in his schoolyard.
Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools, argues that the schools would siphon money from its children’s education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
“I’m in favor of a quality education for everyone,” Mr. Stewart said. “In suburban areas like Millburn, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what’s the rationale for a charter school?”

http://www.hanyuschool.org/. Locally, the Verona School District offers a Mandarin immersion charter school. More, here.

Teacher Evaluation and the Triumph of Empiricism

Kevin Carey:

A year ago, Adrian Fenty was the mayor of Washington, DC and Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of DC Public Schools. Rhee had made overhauling the DC system of teacher evaluation the centerpiece of her controversial and widely noted reforms. Instead of the standard system of seniority-based raises and nobody ever being fired for bad teaching, Rhee wanted to give the best teachers big raises and show the worst teachers the door.
The American Federation of Teachers was so alarmed by the prospect of the DC teachers union acceding to this plan that AFT President Randi Weingarten shoved aside local leadership and forced Rhee into a protracted series of negotiations. But because teacher evaluation is legally excluded from collective bargaining in DC, Rhee was able to put her system in place unilaterally. After a year of evaluations under the new IMPACT evaluation system, she made good on her promise: big raises for the highest performers in a time when teacher salaries were being cut and frozen in other cities, pink slips for the lowest performers, and a one-year grace period for hundreds more “minimally effective” teachers who would be fired if they didn’t improve. Unable to stop the plan through negotiations, the AFT turned to raw politics, pouring $1 million into Vincent Gray’s campaign to unseat Fenty. Gray won, and Rhee’s divisive tenure soon came to an end.

Wisconsin Governor Walker instructs us on future of schools; Notes on Teacher Content Knowledge Requirements

Alan Borsuk:

Scott Walker, the governor who set the stage for a burst of educational excellence? The guy who helped teachers make their work more successful and more rewarding (at least intangibly)?
Goodness, turning those question marks into periods is going to be a project. It’s hard to imagine how Walker’s standing among teachers could be lower.
But Walker thinks that will be the verdict several years from now.
By winning (as of now) the epic battle to cut school spending and erase almost all collective bargaining powers for teachers, as well as other educational battles, Walker has changed the realities of life in just about every school in the state, including many private schools.
The focus through our tumultuous spring was on money, power and politics. Now the focus is shifting to ideas for changing education itself.
So what are Walker’s ideas on those scores?
In a 40-minute telephone interview a few days ago, Walker talked about a range of education questions. There will be strong criticism of a lot of what he stands for. Let’s deal with that in upcoming columns. For the moment, I’m going to give Walker the floor, since, so far this year, the tune he calls has been the tune that the state ends up playing. Here are some excerpts:

Much like our exploding federalism, history will certainly reveal how Walker’s big changes played out versus the mostly status quo K-12 world of the past few decades. One thing is certain: the next 10 years will be different, regardless of how the present politics play out.
I found the interview comments on the teacher climate interesting. Watching events locally for some time, it seems that there is a good deal more top down curricular (more) and pedagogy (teaching methods) dogma from administrators, ed school grants/research and others.
Other states, such as Minnesota and Massachusetts have raised the bar with respect to teacher content knowledge in certain subjects.
Wisconsin teacher license information.
Related: 2 Big Goals for Wisconsin.

N.J. Board of Ed votes to open superintendent positions to non-educators

Jessica Calefati:

It just got easier to become superintendent of a troubled New Jersey school district.
The state Board of Education Wednesday relaxed the requirements for hiring superintendents in more than 50 districts with failing schools, opening the positions for the first time to non-educators.
Backed by the Christie administration, the new regulations take effect immediately as part of a pilot program for districts with schools that fail to meet federal standards for student achievement based on test scores.

This is a good idea.

Unanimous Support for New Charter and Innovation Schools in Denver Public Schools

Moira Cullen:

On June 30th, the Denver Public School Board voted unanimously on nine separate proposals for new charter and innovation schools. That’s right, the DPS Board that is notorious for its contentious 4-3 split on nearly every major policy (turnarounds, innovation schools and charters) voted 7-0 in favor of these promising new schools. Here’s hoping that this is a sign of the Board’s commitment to putting kids first with our new reform minded mayor-elect, Michael Hancock.
The new charter schools, which will be located in all quadrants of the city, include: an all-boys K-12 charter modeled after a school in New Orleans and backed by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, two additional West Denver Prep middle school campuses and a new West Denver Prep high school, a new KIPP elementary school, two new Denver School of Science and Technology campuses, a K-5 performance school being started by a current DPS principal and district educators, and a new preschool-8 charter school started by a Get Smart Schools fellow.

Tom Vander Ark’s New York-Area Charter Schools Falter

Anna Phillips:

After years spent directing the distribution of more than $1 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into hundreds of schools across the nation, Tom Vander Ark set his sights on the New York area, with a plan to create a network of charter schools of his own.
Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation’s former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building — a precious and controversial commodity — hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.
But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors’ money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.

Grading New Mexico schools? Proceed with caution

The New Mexican:

As part of Gov. Susana Martínez’s education-reform effort, she persuaded the New Mexico Legislature to pass a bill by which our public schools will be given grades.
It’s an exercise in teacher/administrator accountability, and pretty clearly the public needs more accountability from those folks; our state for years has been at the bottom of national rankings in education, and toward the top when it comes to dropouts.
Education and jobs tend to be a chicken-and-egg proposition — so, figure the governor and her choice as education secretary, Hanna Skandera, let’s begin where we have the chance, and the challenge, of improving the poultry.
But the new school year and the school-grading process are fast approaching. Some superintendents question the state’s readiness to apply A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s — especially considering the damage those last two letters might do.

Oregon education reform bills aim to create more flexible, individualized public schools with proficiency grouping

Bill Graves:

In the typical Oregon public school classroom, students of the same age work at achievement levels that often vary by two or three grades, sometimes more.
That didn’t make sense to Mary Folberg. When she launched Northwest Academy, a private college preparatory school for grades 6-12 in downtown Portland, she grouped students the way she did as a dance instructor at Jefferson High, by proficiency rather than age.
That’s the seismic shift Gov. John Kitzhaber wants to make in the state’s public school system through a package of education bills passed by the Legislature last month.
At the heart of the package is one bill pushed by Kitzhaber to create paths from pre-school through college on which students advance at their own paces. The bill creates a 15-member Oregon Education Investment Board, chaired by the governor, to control the purse strings on all levels of education from preschool through college — about $7.4 billion or half of the state general fund.

While other districts cut back, Madison offers summer ‘enrichment’ courses

Matthew DeFour:

On Friday morning, while her friends were at the pool or sleeping in, Jovana Aguilar was in school building a molecule out of marshmallows and toothpicks.
Over the past three weeks, Aguilar learned science through “cool experiments,” such as building paper airplanes to demonstrate Bernoulli’s principle and popping a balloon with a plastic bottle, baking soda and vinegar.
Aguilar, who just finished fifth grade at Hawthorne Elementary, is participating in the Madison School District’s summer school program for the third year in a row to boost her reading skills.
But unlike last year, when half of her morning was devoted to reading and the other half was spent playing dodgeball or board games in a recreational class, she had the opportunity this summer to take “enrichment” courses in science and world cultures.

Tough Calculus as Technical Schools Face Deep Cuts

Motoko Rich:

Despite a competitive economy in which success increasingly depends on obtaining a college degree, one in four students in this country does not even finish high school in the usual four years.
Matthew Kelly was in danger of becoming one of them.
Tests showed he had a high intellect, but Mr. Kelly regularly skipped homework and was barely passing some of his classes in his early years of high school. He was living in a motel part of the time and both his parents were out of work. His mother, a former nurse, feared that Matthew had so little interest he would drop out without graduating.
Then his guidance counselor suggested he take some courses at a nearby vocational academy for his junior year. For the first time, the sloe-eyed teenager excelled, earning A’s and B’s in subjects like auto repair, electronics and metals technology. “When it comes to practicality, I can do stuff really well,” said Mr. Kelly, now 19.

Related Madison College (MATC) links:

MATC pay raises to be bigger than officials anticipated
MATC full-time faculty earn more on average than faculty at most UW campuses
MATC’s successful $133,800,000 November, 2010 building referendum
Former Madison School District Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Roger Price is now MATC’s Vice President for Infrastructure.

Point/Counterpoint: Message From a Charter School: Thrive or Transfer

In 2008, when Katherine Sprowal’s son, Matthew, was selected in a lottery to attend the Harlem Success Academy 3 charter school, she was thrilled. “I felt like we were getting the best private school, and we didn’t have to pay for it,” she recalled.
And so, when Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who operates seven Success charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, asked Ms. Sprowal to be in a promotional video, she was happy to be included.
Matthew is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted. It was not a natural fit for the Success charters, which are known for discipline and long school days. From Day 1 of kindergarten, Ms. Sprowal said, he was punished for acting out.
“They kept him after school to practice walking in the hallway,” she said.
Several times, she was called to pick him up early, she said, and in his third week he was suspended three days for bothering other children.

Eva Moskowitz responds, via Whitney Tilson:

The facts clearly show that Success Academies’ educators are incredibly committed to serving children with special needs, we serve a high percentage, and do not push out children who don’t “thrive.” The Success Academies’ special education population is equal to the citywide average of 12.5%. Our ELL population is 9.6%, and when you factor in children who we have successfully taught English (and are no longer ELL), we clearly educate the same children. As Winerip points out, our student attrition rate is significantly lower than our co-located schools and the citywide average.
As the paper trail examined by Winerip clearly indicates, no one pressured Ms. Sprowal to leave the school. Her son did not have an IEP until 3 years after he left the school. When the family left the school in 2008, Ms. Sprowal wrote effusive emails about how happy she was with how the school handled her situation. Three years later, after coaching from the United Federation of Teachers, his mother is now unhappy. The UFT spent five years hovering over our schools to find hordes of students who were unfairly “pushed” out, and the best they could find was a single story with a happy ending.
Most educators would agree that children are different and don’t all excel in the same settings. That’s why having choices is so important. Different schools are different in their approaches. Some are strict, some less strict, some have bigger class sizes, some smaller etc.. It is our obligation to advise a parent that there might be a better setting for their child.
Our schools are a work in progress, every day we try to do better for the largest number of children. While I don’t believe that the school mishandled the situation, we are always working to improve how we serve children with all types of needs. For next year, we have added a 12:1:1 program at two of our schools and a Director of Special Education at the network-level who comes from the city’s District 75.
What is most troubling about several of Winerip’s recent columns is the suggestion that low-performing schools can’t be expected to do any better. Winerip recently wrote that it wasn’t Jamaica High School’s fault that only 38% of its kids graduate with regents diplomas, because it gets more of the tough-to-serve kids (2% more homeless children, 6% more children with special needs). What school could possibly do better under those circumstances?
The theme is repeated in this story. 33% of 4th graders passed the state ELA test at PS 75, but public schools like PS 75 get more tough-to-serve children. (PS 75 does not, but schools like it do, he argues) When schools like ours have 86% of 4th graders passing the same test, it must be because we don’t have the same kids, because schools can’t possibly be expected to do that well.
Winerip also makes the argument that schools like PS 75 care about children and thus have low test scores while schools like Harlem Success Academy don’t care about children and thus have high test scores.
Those are both false arguments that we must dispel if we’re to improve the quality of public education. Schools with tough-to-serve children can do better and it’s possible to care about children AND want them to perform well on tests.
At Success Academies, we want children to achieve at high levels AND we care deeply about their social and emotional development. We aim to create schools that are nurturing, joyful, and compelling AND that prepare children to excel in whatever their chosen field. I tell our principals, our true measure of success is whether children race through the door each morning and are disappointed to leave each day because school is just that compelling. Do we also want our children to score well on tests? Yes. High performance and joy are not mutually exclusive.
Warmly,
Eva Moskowitz
CEO and Founder

NAACP complaint claims racial bias in student discipline at Anne Arundel schools

Chris Walker:

Anne Arundel County schools have not made sufficient progress in eliminating racial bias from its student disciplinary practices, according to a civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP.
The complaint, filed with the civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Education on Friday, alleges that the numbers of African-American students referred for discipline and suspended have hardly changed since a similar complaint in 2004. That complaint led to an improvement plan agreed to in 2005 by the NAACP and the school system.
“Six years later, however, there has been no marked improvement in the disparate treatment of African-American students in disciplinary actions, which continues a pattern of denial and limitation of their educational opportunities and thus their future sustainability,” the new complaint reads

After Christie-Sweeney dustup, New Jersey education reform’s fate lies with the bosses

Tom Moran:

The Rev. Reginald Jackson watched in horror last week as the political romance between Gov. Chris Christie and state Senate President Steve Sweeney exploded in flames.
It started when the governor pruned the budget of nearly everything Democrats wanted, after refusing to talk to Sweeney. And it ended with Sweeney’s obscene tirade.
All that’s left now is the smoldering wreckage of a relationship that’s been at the core of every major reform since Christie took office. A week after the governor called to discuss the meltdown, Sweeney still had not returned his calls.

The days before teachers were labeled

Gary Nosacek:

When I was in grade school, teachers came in two varieties: the “easy and nice ones” and the “mean and strict ones.” We didn’t even have to decide which was which. The older kids filled us in on the playground, so we always knew what we were in for next year.
Now that I’m much older – and, I hope, wiser – I see how silly it was to lump all those teachers into such categories. I see how each one brought a special gift into the classroom and into my life. I wish I would have known that then and shown them the respect and appreciation they deserved.
Unfortunately, teacher labeling has returned. Not by older kids on the playground but by activists and politicians in Madison. Depending on whom you talk to, teachers are either “underpaid and upset that the government is going back on promises” or “unreasonable civil servants who won’t pay their fair share.”

Wisconsin Governor Walker, education leaders seek new school evaluation system System would replace federally imposed system viewed as a failure

Alan Borsuk:

A system for providing clear, plentiful and sophisticated information for judging the quality of almost every school in Wisconsin, replacing a system that leaves a lot desired on all of those fronts – that is the goal of an eye-catching collaboration that includes Gov. Scott Walker, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, and leaders of eight statewide education organizations.
Walker and Evers said Friday that they will seek approval from the U.S. Department of Education to allow the new school accountability system to replace the decade-old, federally imposed one they labeled as broken.
They want at least a first version of the new system to be ready by spring, and to apply it to outcomes for schools in the 2011-’12 school year.
The new accountability program would include every school that accepts publicly funded students, which means that private schools taking part in the state-funded voucher program would, for the first time, be subject to the same rules as public schools for making a wealth of data available to the public. Charter schools and virtual schools would also participate.

Programs try to save students from ‘summer slide’ in academics

Teresa Watanabe

In a corner of the San Fernando Valley, amid auto body shops and Salvadoran pupusa restaurants, a Hawaiian summer is in full swing.
At Camp Akela, located at Noble Avenue Elementary School in North Hills, kindergartners read about rainbow fish and draw them. Other students study volcanoes, create travel journals, dance the hula and even play in a portable pool.
But the students, most of them low-income English learners, are also learning literacy, math facts and science and are honing writing skills with “coaches” dressed in leis, tropical shirts and grass skirts.

Seattle & Teach for America

Melissa Westbrook:

A couple of key actions have to happen this week for Teach for America to come to Seattle Schools.
One is at the Board meeting on Wednesday night. There is a state entity called the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) that grants educational entities the right to create conditional certificate programs. They require School Board approval has to happen prior to “applying for a conditional certficiate for a teacher candidate. Therefore, Board action is required to hire any TFA candidate if any are selected for hire by a school-based hiring team.”
The second action that needs to happen is on Thursday, at the PESB meeting where the UW’s College of Education will present their proposal for their teaching certificate program for TFA recruits (and only TFA recruits; no one else can apply to this program).
If you would like to let the PESB know what you think of the plan, e-mail them at pesb@k12.wa.us before Thursday.

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Evers emerges as fierce advocate of schools in face of massive cuts, privatization efforts

Susan Troller:

About a dozen members of a bipartisan, mostly volunteer organization called Common Ground file into Superintendent Tony Evers’ utilitarian conference room in downtown Milwaukee. The group is exploring how to help Milwaukee’s beleaguered schools, and it has scheduled a meeting with the head of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as part of its research.
Tall, thin and gray haired, Evers has a boyish smile and a welcoming manner. He’s now in a white shirt and tie, sans the suit coat he wore to an earlier meeting with suburban school officials in Pewaukee.
Common Ground, a nonpartisan coalition that includes churches, nonprofits and labor unions, has come to Evers’ office today looking for advice on how best to direct its considerable resources toward helping Milwaukee students, whose performance in both traditional public schools and in taxpayer-funded voucher schools ranks at the bottom of major American cities.
After initial pleasantries and introductions are exchanged, Keisha Krumm, lead organizer for Common Ground, asks Evers a question. “At this stage we’re still researching what issue we will be focusing on. But we do want to know what you can do. What’s your power and influence?”

How does Wisconsin compare to other states and the world? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org.

Questions linger for Indiana school vouchers

Mikel Livingston:

Public schools aren’t the only ones divided over the state’s new private school voucher program that became law Friday and is supposed to be in place by the time classes start in August.
Greater Lafayette private schools are split over the new system — one that some say will expand educational opportunities but others fear could drag state regulations into the mix and restrict freedoms their classrooms currently enjoy.
A handful of Lafayette area schools will be taking advantage of the program. But with such a short time before the new school year starts, the most basic information about how to use the voucher program created by the General Assembly in April still is not available — not even the online application form.
The process likely will face even greater delays in light of a lawsuit filed Friday in Marion County Superior Court by the Indiana State Teacher’s Association. The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction to prevent the disbursement of funds under the new program, will continue to stall the process as it winds its way through the court system. All the while, private schools hoping to participate wait for answers.

The Gist-Ravitch smackdown

The Providence Journal:

A few weeks back, Governor Chafee invited Deborah Gist, Rhode Island’s commissioner of public schools, to sit in on his meeting, arranged by the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, with noted education historian Diane Ravitch.
The two energetic foes on school reform reportedly did not get along. Ms. Gist says that Ms. Ravitch kept making points irrelevant to Rhode Island. Ms. Ravitch says Ms. Gist interrupted her discourse repeatedly, and that in encounters with the powerful in America since 1958 (such as Sen. John F. Kennedy [D-Mass.]), she had “never encountered such behavior.”
She demanded an apology from Ms. Gist. They later made peace. Mr. Chafee said he saw nothing inappropriate in Ms. Gist’s behavior.
Both women have egos large enough to encompass their educational ambitions — in fact, Ms. Ravitch has two pedagogical histories under her belt. She was once on Ms. Gist’s “side” on school reform. That changed, says Ms. Ravitch, after she lost confidence in testing and charter schools as the prime strategies for success, and started pushing for more respect (pay) for teachers, less reliance on tests, less hope in charter schools and more trust in — well, so far as we can tell — in the status quo.

National Education Assocation 2011 Chicago Convention Notes & Links

Brian Slodysko and Tara Malone:

Vice President Joe Biden lambasted what he called an increasingly union-hostile “new” Republican party, during remarks delivered to National Education Association representatives today, raising the specter of high profile labor fights picked by Republican governors with public workers unions across the country.
“There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history,” Biden said during a speech laden with political red meat, smoothing over past disagreements between teachers unions and the Obama Administration.
“The new Republican party has undertaken the most direct assault on labor, not just in my lifetime … but literally since the 1920s,” he said. “This is not your father’s Republican party. This is a different breed of cat.”
Biden’s remarks to one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, a speech that lasted about 30 minutes, came a day before its members are expected to decide whether to cast their support behind the administration in the 2012 presidential election.

Mike Antonucci

The National Education Association Representative Assembly opened this morning in Chicago with 7,321 delegates attending, which is by far the lowest number since I began covering the convention in 1998.
The atmosphere still resembles a political party convention, with speeches, confetti and deafening music, including the new NEA theme song, “Standing Strong”:
“Standing strong, standing tall. Standing up for what is right and true, NEA is standing up for me and you!”
Coming soon to a Chevy truck commercial near you.
It is customary for the mayor of the host city to welcome the delegates, but since the mayor is Rahm Emanuel, NEA prudently got hold of Illinois Gov. Quinn instead. After the delegates adopted the standing rules for the assembly, it was time for NEA president Dennis Van Roekel’s keynote speech.

Mike Antonucci:

There were two new business items (NBIs) of note debated this afternoon. The first was NBI C, submitted by the NEA Board of Directors, which directs the NEA president to “communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan’s practice of…” and then lists 13 of Duncan’s most heinous crimes, like “Focusing so heavily on charter schools that viable and proven innovative school models (such as magnet schools) have been overlooked, and simultaneously failing to highlight with the same enthusiasm the innovation in our non-charter public schools.”

Stephanie Banchero:

Widespread unhappiness among teachers about President Barack Obama’s education policies is threatening to derail a National Education Association proposal to give him an early endorsement for re-election.
The political action committee of the NEA, the nation’s largest union, adopted a resolution in May to endorse Mr. Obama. The proposal will come before the NEA’s 9,000-member representative assembly on Monday at the union’s annual convention here.
The union has never endorsed a presidential candidate this early in the campaign cycle, instead waiting to make the decision during the election year. But union leaders, anticipating a tough re-election campaign, wanted to bolster support for the president early on, a move that has run into opposition from union members.

Associated Press:

Vice President Joe Biden says the “new Republican Party” fundamentally doesn’t believe in public education the way Democrats do.
“There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history,” he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.

Much more, here.

School Braces for Hard Truth

Barbara Martinez:

In a ceremony this week, Harlem Day Charter School celebrated its 13 fifth-graders who are moving on to middle school. They represent roughly one-third of the class.
The other two-thirds will have to repeat fifth grade.
That hard truth is one of many that the teachers, students and parents of Harlem Day have been confronting in recent months as the school prepares to become the city’s first attempt at a takeover of a failing charter school.
Only five of 32 teachers will be returning in September. About 100 of all 247 students in the elementary school are being held back. And administrators are having tough conversations with parents about the true state of their children’s academic progress. Parents are being told that students, who for years were passed from grade to grade, lack basic skills.
At Harlem Day, no students were held back last year, despite recent state tests that showed only 20% of students were on grade level in English and 25% were in math.

Seattle School Board Candidates At Metro Dems Event

Melissa Westbrook:

I attended last week’s Metropolitan Democrats meeting. It wasn’t an endorsement event but rather, one for their members to get a first look (and listen) to candidates ranging from King County Council to School Board Directors. It was a good chance to hear from the School Board candidates (although not all were present).
I saw a few other education activists in the crowd – Carol Simmons, Joanna Cullen and former SEA President, Wendy Kimble.
They went by district and District 1 – Peter Maier’s district – was first. Like the other incumbents present, Peter spoke well and smoothly. This is something to be expected from a nearly 4-year incumbent. He pointed out that he had visited every school in his district, every year, over the course of his term. This is very commendable and a great idea for directors. He spoke of his background and that the NSAP had come into being during his term and that he had lead the school district ballot measures that had passed.

WEAC & Teacher Union Dues

Steve Gunn, via a kind reader’s email:

No wonder bullying remains a persistent problem in public schools.
When teachers engage in such behavior, kids can be expected to follow their example.
It’s become apparent that bullying may be necessary to guarantee the survival of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union.
That’s because state law will no longer bully on behalf of the union.
Until now, anyone who secured a teaching job at a Wisconsin public school automatically became a de facto member of the teachers union. Teachers had the option of avoiding official membership, but dues were still deducted from their paychecks and they were still represented by the union.

Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber’s school reforms mark a decline in teachers’ union influence

Nigel Jaquiss:

The state’s most powerful political force got rolled in the 2011 Legislature.
Last week, Gov. John Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.
A coalition of Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the teachers’ union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.
“There is a strong desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing to break a few eggs to get there,” says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted “yes” on HB 2301, a controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.
To be sure, OEA successfully pushed for a $175 million increase in the K-12 budget over Kitzhaber’s opening proposal, and the union helped forestall any significant changes to the Public Employees Retirement System this session. But in terms of educational politics, this session saw substantive bills that have been stymied for many sessions zip through.

Third Circuit, Landmark Victories for Student Speech Limit Schools’ Ability To Censor Students Online

Erica Goldberg:

Yesterday, the full court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued two simultaneous opinions to resolve how much control grade schools and high schools may exercise over their students’ off-campus, online speech. In Layshock v. Hermitage School District and J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the 14-judge court delivered two landmark victories for free speech, holding that school officials cannot “reach into a child’s home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities.” In the cases, two students had been disciplined for creating parody MySpace profiles mocking their respective principals. The Third Circuit held that schools cannot punish students’ online speech simply because it is vulgar, lewd, or offensive. In addition to their impact in the grade school and high school settings, these decisions further solidify the robust free speech rights that must be afforded to college students engaging in online speech.
We previously blogged about Layshock and J.S. last year, when separate three-judge panels of the Third Circuit issued contrary decisions despite the very similar facts in the two cases. In Layshock, the Third Circuit had held that a then-senior in high school could not be suspended, placed in a special education class, and banned from extracurricular activities for a parody MySpace profile which described his principal as being a “big steroid freak” and belittled the size of the principal’s penis, among other insults. In J.S., a different panel of the Third Circuit had held that a then-middle school honor student could be suspended, without violating the First Amendment, for her MySpace profile. J.S.’s profile parodied her principal as stating, “I love children, sex (any kind), dogs, long walks on the beach, tv, being a dick head, and last but not least my darling wife [a guidance counselor at the school] who looks like a man.”

Detroit Public Schools’ Roberts faces public at forum on school budget

CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

In less than 10 minutes, Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts tonight reviewed an 11-page summary of the district’s $1.2-billion budget for next school year that projects cutting $200 million from the deficit and reducing all wages by 10%.
Roberts’ first public hearing on the budget since taking over in May as the state appointee in charge of DPS began tonight at 6 p.m.
The budget projects that the $327-million deficit will be reduced to $127 million as DPS sells $200 million in bonds, he said.
“We treasure your input, we’re going to take it to heart,” Roberts said to the audience.

Operations bring smiles back to cleft-palate tots

Lana Lam:

Moments after Mao Dongmei gave birth to her first son, doctors in her hometown of Qidong Lusi in Jiangsu province gave her one piece of advice: get rid of your baby because he is deformed.
“After I gave birth, the doctors suggested I abandon my son because he would not be able to suck on the breast,” 26-year-old Mao said.
Her son, Gu Yanhu, who is now 15 months old, was born with a cleft lip and palate, a congenital deformity that affects one in 600 children born on the mainland.
“But I felt confident that I could look after my baby. I could never abandon him. It was the right choice,” Mao said, as she stroked the dozing toddler after his operation at a charity hospital in Hangzhou run by Operation Smile.

Pro-reform member of state education board will not seek another term

Andrew Vanacore:

One of the more reliable backers of the reform movement that has radically altered public schools in New Orleans is planning to retire from the state board of education.
Glenny Lee Buquet, from Houma, said Monday that she will not run for another term on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, when elections come up this fall. Buquet has served on BESE since 1992 and is one of the six-member majority on the 11-member board that has helped push through the controversial reforms championed by former State Superintendent Paul Pastorek.
Nowhere in the state have those reforms been more far-reaching than in New Orleans. The state took over most schools in the city following Hurricane Katrina, and under the state’s Recovery School District, most of those have been transformed into independent charter schools.

Katy Venskus:

Well, the budget battle royale in Wisconsin has come and gone. The tent city of protestors has packed up and moved on. Our state electeds are no longer front and center on Fox News, MSNBC, Colbert or the Daily Show. The guy blowing the vuvuzela outside Governor Walker’s East Wing Capitol office is probably still there, but the tidal wave of fervor and insanity that engulfed us seems to have finally receded.
And for all my bright shiny optimism early in this legislative session, some of which persisted well into the spring, I am disappointed with the outcome. There have been some good public policy changes, but on the whole the political losses and missed opportunities far outweigh the gains.
Good News First…
We found middle ground on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program…more or less. The program will remain means tested, but more working class families will be eligible. The private schools that participate will continue to administer the state assessment to choice students so an accurate picture of student performance is available in all publicly funded schools. Unfortunately, many solid choice schools are still being slowly strangled by the discrepancy in funding between kids in the public schools and kids enrolled in choice and charter schools, and we have still done little to get lousy schools out of the education pipeline in Milwaukee once and for all.

Group works on alternatives for troubled schools

Associated Press:The Indiana Department of Education is spending nearly $700,000 to develop strategies for overseeing troubled schools that don’t involve a traditional school board.
The work by The MindTrust is being done as the state prepares to recommend which of 18 failing public schools should be removed from district control and given to private school operators to attempt a turnaround.
All 18 schools have scored in the lowest category on the state ISTEP+ exam for five straight years. A 1999 state law allows the state to take over schools if test scores are in the lowest category for a sixth consecutive year.
The education department has paid more than $680,000 to The MindTrust in an effort to make sure none of the failing schools — seven of which are in the Indianapolis Public Schools system — return to the hands of a school board that will lead it back to failure.
“The fact that we have as many failed schools in IPS as we do reflects a larger issue in the overall system,” David Harris, chief executive officer of The MindTrust, told the Indianapolis Business Journal. “The state doesn’t want to return schools to a governance structure that isn’t going to produce conditions that are optimal for success.”

‘That’s Racist!’ How A Serious Accusation Became A Commonplace Quip

Neda Ulaby:

My editor proposed this story about “that’s racist” after hearing her young son’s friends using it as a joke. Just the night before, it had been a punchline on one of my favorite sitcoms, Parks And Recreation. (Someone calls sorting laundry into whites and darks racist.)
Our sense that “that’s racist” was evolving into a commonplace catchphrase that only occasionally had to do with racism and race was confirmed by conversations with parents, teachers and a website that tracked how it started as an online meme. A video clip from the cult TV show Wonder Showzen showed an African-American kid with the words “that’s racist” underneath. It became a virtual retort on online message boards. People started dropping it into Internet arguments, to quench or inflame them.

Charter school bill passes Delaware House

J L Miller:

Legislation to reform Delaware’s charter school system by requiring background checks for charter founders and board members and placing the schools under tighter financial oversight got a unanimous passing grade in the House Thursday.
House Bill 205, sponsored by Rep. Terry Schooley, D-Newark, was prompted by a News Journal investigation that found the state Department of Education failed to check the credentials or criminal background of the founder of Reach Academy. Reach Academy is facing closure amid serious financial problems and a fight over control of the board.
The legislation, which now moves to the Senate for consideration, would require yearly mandatory external audits for charter schools and allow the Office of Management and Budget to analyze the financial status of a struggling school and manage some of the school’s finances. It also would require that decisions to close a school be made no later than January so parents can enter their children in the school-choice program and meet deadlines to get into charter schools.

On status quo apologists

Joel Klein:

Aaron Pallas, an ed school professor at Teachers College, appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that our public schools are failing to effectively educate huge numbers of our kids, or that there’s much we can do about it. He struggles to debunk existing examples of demonstrable success perhaps fearing that we might otherwise ask why do we keep doing so poorly when we have proof that we can do so much better.
To that end, last week Pallas penned a piece in this column challenging my assertion in a Washington Post op ed that our “schools can get much better results with th[e] same kids than they’re now generally getting.” Employing a locution that I never used, and that cannot fairly be inferred from what I said, he tries to portray my view as placing “the emphasis on what schools can extract from kids.” (His italics.)
No, Professor Pallas, I don’t think knowledge resides in kids and, like iron ore, all we need to do is carefully extract it. What I do think is that our schools, and especially our teachers, need to do a much better job of educating our kids – that is, teaching them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful in the 21st century. As I put it in my piece, “teachers matter, big time.”

Teacher Appreciation

Susan O’Doherty:

I was a little shell-shocked after reading the comments on Aeron’s June 15 post. I hadn’t looked at them when I wrote last week about my enjoyment of her column, and I was amazed at the vitriol. I have taught only a few brief seminars myself, and each has taken a gazillion hours of preparation, as well as intense, sustained focus and concentration during the actual teaching hours. I am in awe of real teachers’ dedication and stamina.
So I want to use this week’s post to express appreciation for a great teacher I am in the process of taking leave of.
Three years ago, when I registered for my first singing class in over 20 years, I had to walk around the block several times to get up the courage to walk in the door. I had been traumatized by a voice teacher, until my singing voice got so small and weak it almost disappeared. I hadn’t tried to sing in front of others for years, until Ben started asking me to sing with him. The thought made me so anxious I knew I needed professional help.
A friend walked me to the first class, to be sure I didn’t succumb to the urge to hightail it home at the last minute. When Martha, the teacher, asked each of us to articulate what it was that we wanted from the class, all I could think to say was, “I want to be able to get through a song without passing out.”

Judge Milwaukee educational outcomes on the facts

Larry Miller:

School voucher advocates have had two recent op-eds in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “The story behind school choice study” by John Witte and Patrick Wolf on May 28 and “Special needs students benefit from many choices” by Susan Mitchell on June 19. Both are at best misinformed and at worst deceptive. The facts should matter.
State law says voucher schools must accept special education students. Then why are so few special education students (the number hovers near 1%) attending voucher schools? I put this question to a voucher school principal, who said her school has no special education services or students.
I asked her how that was possible. She stated that she simply tells parents of special education students that she cannot provide the services that their children need. Parents then choose another school, she said – most likely in Milwaukee Public Schools.
MPS does receive more money per student than voucher schools receive. But Mitchell claims MPS receives $15,000 per student while voucher students receive $6,442. She somehow arrived at these numbers without doing her homework. One needs to subtract from the total the amount transferred to voucher schools for a variety of programs.

SP-EYE on Sun Prairie Schools: Are Those The Winds of Change Blowing in Sun Prairie?

sp-eye:

It’s not just rhetoric, people, these are truly unprecedented times. The economy seems to choke and sputter like an engine with a fouled spark plug. Consider all that has transpired of late, and it all begs the question: is it time for new leadership within the Sun Prairie School District? We offer 5 solid indicators.
1. District Administrator Tim Culver’s Unofficial Approval Rating is at an all-time low.
Years ago Culver could toss it aside as just a few malcontents. He’s referred to them as “Nitters and Pickers” and “Wreckers”. SheeeeAH…as if name calling is really going to solve the problem. But these folks didn’t go away. Rather, they have brought the dirty laundry out into the bright of day. And they multiplied like rabbits on the farm.
For a school district to function effectively and move forward, its leader must have the support of both the public and the district staff. Frankly we don’t hear much other than outright contempt for Culver from any of the schools. Ask any of your friends and neighbors and the story is the same…the staff just no longer support Culver. OK…he may have the support of a few of his inner circle administrators…you know…his “pets”. And let’s not think for one minute that Culver doesn’t have his pets. It’s as plain as day for anyone who takes the time to see which administrators are getting the 7% raises, and which ones are getting a pittance. It’s also clear which administrators are getting revised job descriptions to give them whatever they want.

Diane Ravitch: Teachers’ Hero or Education Hypocrite?

Adam Ozimek:

Diane Ravitch, the historian and leading education reform critic, can be hard to understand. Not that her writing is difficult. Quite the opposite actually, it’s incredibly lucid and lively, and my favorite thing about her in fact. Rather it’s difficult to understand who exactly the person is that could contain both the Diane Ravitch who once wrote so passionately and doggedly in favor of school choice and accountability from the halls of the Hoover Institute, and the Diane Ravitch who now writes reform criticisms with the hyperbole and one-sidedness of a teacher’s union spokesperson. But in a new City Paper piece, Dana Goldstein tries to reconcile the two and find the intellectual continuities that have stayed with her on such a seemingly bipolar intellectual journey. As much of a Ravitch critic as I may be, like Goldstein, I believe that there are some coherent ties that bind old and young Diane, and perhaps surprisingly, one of them is Friedrich Hayek.

Recovery School District to lay off more than 70 employees

Andrew Vanacore:

The Recovery School District, a state body that oversees the majority of New Orleans public schools, is laying off more than 70 employees at its central office, part of a sweeping organizational overhaul initiated by the district’s new leader.
RSD officials have been saying for weeks that the district will need to downsize as it turns over more of the schools it manages to independent charter operators and closes others. That’s been the RSD’s strategy since it took over schools in the city following Hurricane Katrina.
But in an interview Friday, RSD Superintendent John White said the district has now begun to notify employees who will lose their jobs as a result of cutbacks, which will take the central office head count down by 35 percent, from 220 people to 144.

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

Kaleem Caire, via email:

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

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

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

Watch a video of the speech, here.

Major Education Reform Bills Pass the Oregon House & Senate

jmartens:

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

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

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

Chicago Teachers making house calls?

Kristen Mack and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:

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

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

Gloria Romero:

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

Letters to the WiSJ on Madison Teachers’ John Matthews

Merle Lebakken:

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

Thomas Kavanagh:

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

Bob Hartwig:

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

District rejects community efforts to help Celesta

Laurie Rogers:

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

Hispanic, white achievement gap as wide as in 90s

Associated Press:

The achievement gap between Hispanic and white students is the same as it was in the early 1990s, despite two decades of accountability reforms, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday.
Performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows the gap narrowed by three points in fourth- and eighth-grade reading since 2003, a reduction researchers said was statistically significant. But the overall difference between them remains more than 20 points, or roughly two grade levels.
“Hispanic students are the largest minority group in our nation’s schools. But they face grave educational challenges that are hindering their ability to pursue the American dream,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

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

Tom Breuer:

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

A Rough But Intriguing Metric for School Assessing a School Principal

Bob Sutton:

Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss. The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation. Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular. I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.

Peeking Into Private-School Paranoia

Alexandra Cheney:

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

Colorado Board Of Education Being Sued By Three Civil Liberties Unions

Andrea Rael:

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

San Francisco losing kids as parents seek schools, homes

Heather Knight:

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

Tuition at some NYC private schools tops $40,000

Associated Press:

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

At High School in Queens, R.O.T.C.’s Enduring Influence

Michael Winerip:

In 1994, when retired First Sgt. Richard Gogarty arrived at Francis Lewis High School in Queens to start an Army Junior R.O.T.C. program, only two staff members, one of them a custodian, would talk to him. The sergeant sat by himself in the teachers’ cafeteria, hoping someone would say something, even if it was just “please pass the salt.”
The union representative, Arthur Goldstein, did not want him there. “I said, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to have kids marching in circles doing stupid stuff,’ ” recalled Mr. Goldstein, who teaches English to immigrant students and describes himself as “politically to the left.”
But Sergeant Gogarty, using his military training, disarmed Mr. Goldstein, volunteering to come in an hour early each day to tutor a Hispanic girl who was failing. “She was completely lost,” Mr. Goldstein said. “But something clicked. She started passing tests — it was Richard reading with her in the morning.”

Rotary Club Speech: Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men: Innovative Solution & First All-Male Public Charter School in Wisconsin

Madison Rotary Club:

Join us next week,
Wednesday, June 22, at the Alliant Energy Center’s Exhibition Hall as we welcome fellow Rotarian Kaleem Caire to the podium for a presentation on the features of the Madison Preparatory Academy, its timeline for implementation and a status report on where it is in the school development and approval process.
Attendees will learn why and how the Urban League hopes to lead a renaissance in K-12 education in Greater Madison, tying its charter school effort to local school improvement
initiatives, economic development projects and advancements and innovations in higher education and workforce development in Greater Madison.

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

Steve Rankin, via email:

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

Who cares about American history?

Jeff Jacoby

WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress — “the Nation’s Report Card” — the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation’s history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP — math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn’t know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries — the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam — was North Korea’s ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans’ ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn’t say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn’t identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don’t know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch’s Lives and Charles Horne’s four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. “When Truman talked of presidents past — Jackson, Polk, Lincoln — it was as if he had known them personally,” the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.

Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
While the most promising high school athletes in this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships, there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few “influential admirers” along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls “Varsity Academics®” amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to “read, write, discuss, and enjoy history” outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
“Our goal,” says Robert Nasson, the club’s young executive director, “is to create kids who are life-long students of history.” He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
— ## —
———————–
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

School Spotlight: Oregon Middle School greenhouse will supply students with veggies

Pamela Cotant:

The locally grown movement has reached Oregon Middle School where vegetables grown over the summer in its new hoop-style greenhouse will be served to students when classes resume.
“We wanted to get some things cranked up so in the fall we can pull off our first salad in the cafeteria,” said Nate Mahr, eighth-grade science teacher.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, watermelon and pumpkins have been started. Salad greens will be grown right when students come back and raspberries also will be planted in the fall.
“(We’re) trying to have some of the food locally produced,” said Darren Hartberg, eighth grade health teacher. “That’s what will be happening under this piece of plastic.”

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

David Jesse:

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

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

Helen Gym:

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

Hardship puts formidable hurdles on the path to scholastic achievement

Alan Borsuk:

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

Seattle School Board Challenger Flags Incumbents’ Past Donors

Josh Feit:

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

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

Saving the NJEA from Itself

Laura Waters:

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

Mayor Bloomberg Calls for Immediate Immigration Reform

Mike Bloomberg

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

Wisconsin Voucher debate reveals deep divisions about public schools

Susan Troller:

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

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

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

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

Riya Bhattacharjee:

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

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

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

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

The ends of education reform

Mike Petrilli:

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

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

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

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

Joe Robertson:

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

Where do all the UK Free Schools go?

Phil Mitchell:

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