Events – Page 14 – School Information System

National Standards

The Concord Review & The National Writing Board
8 September 2009
Specific, detailed, universally-accepted national standards in education are so vital that we have now had them for many decades–in high school sports. Athletics are so important in our systems of secondary education that it is no surprise that we have never settled for the kind of vague general-ability standards that have prevailed for so long in high school academic aptitude tests. If athletic standards were evaluated in the way the SAT measures general academic ability, for example, there would be tests of “general physical fitness” rather than the impressive suite of detailed measures we now use in high school sports.
The tests that we require in football, basketball, track and other sports are not called assessments, but rather games and meets, but they test the participants’ ability to “do” sports in great detail–detail which can be duly communicated to college coaches interested in whether the athletes can perform in a particular sport.
These two different worlds of standards and assessment–athletics and academics–live comfortably side-by-side in our schools, usually without anyone questioning their very different sets of expectations, measures, and rewards.
The things our students have to know when they participate in various athletic activities are universally known and accepted. The things they have to do to be successful in various sports are also universally known and accepted across the country.
The fact that this is not the case for our academic expectations, standards, and rewards for students is the reason there has been so much attention drawn to the problem, at least since the Nation at Risk Report of 1983.
At the moment there are large efforts and expenditures being brought to bear, by the Department of Education, the Education Commission of the States, the Council of Chief State School Officers, many state governments, and others, for the development of academic National Standards for the United States.
There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of controversy over what novels students of English should read, what names, dates and issues history students should be familiar with, what languages, if any, our students should know, and what levels of math and science we can expect of our high school graduates.
The Diploma to Nowhere Report, released by the Strong American Schools Project in the summer of 2008, pointed out that more than one million of our high school graduates are enrolled in remedial courses each year when they get to the colleges which have accepted them. It seems reasonable to assume that the colleges that accepted them had some way of assessing whether those students were ready for the academic work at college, but perhaps the tools for such assessment were not up to the universal standards available for measuring athletic competence.
One area in which academic assessment is especially weak, in my view, is in determining high school students’ readiness for college research papers. The Concord Review did a national study of the assignment of research papers in U.S. public high schools which found that, while 95% of teachers surveyed said research papers were important, or very important, 81% did not assign the kind that would help students get ready for college work. Most of the teachers said they just didn’t have the time to spend on that with students.
Imagine the shock if we discovered that our student football players were not able to block or tackle, in spite of general agreement on their importance, or that our basketball players could not dribble, pass, or shoot baskets with any degree of competence, and, if, when surveyed, our high school coaches said that they were sorry that they just didn’t have time to work on that with their athletes.
Whatever is decided about National Standards for the particular knowledge which all our students should have when they leave school, I hope that there is some realization that learning to do one research paper, of the kind required for every International Baccalaureate Diploma now, should be an essential part of the new standards.
If so, then we come to the problem of assessing, not just the ability of students to write a 500-word “personal essay” for college admissions officers, or to perform the 25-minute display of “writing-on-demand” featured in the SAT writing test and the NAEP assessment of writing, but their work on an actual term paper.
As with our serious assessments in sports, there are no easy shortcuts to an independent assessment of the research papers of our secondary students. Since 1998, the National Writing Board, on a small scale, has produced three-page reports on research papers by high school students from 31 states and two Canadian provinces. Each report has two Readers, and each Reader spends, on average, one hour to read and write their evaluation of each paper. Contrast this with the 30 papers-an-hour assessments of the SAT writing test. The National Writing Board process is time-consuming, but it is, in my biased view, one serious way to assess performance on this basic task that every student will encounter in college.

L.A. Schools Chief Sees Woes as Catalyst

Lauren Schuker:

This city’s school district is the second largest in the nation, with nearly 700,000 students. But it has far fewer dollars per student than other major urban districts. Overcrowding and teacher turnover are among the worst in the country.
As new city schools Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines prepares on Wednesday to start his first full year at the helm, his strategy for a turnaround is to emphasize those very points.
By shining a spotlight on some of the most egregious failings of the city’s schools, Mr. Cortines said he hopes to create enough transparency, embarrassment and even outrage to break a logjam among the school board, city leadership and local teachers union that has stymied past attempts at change.
Mr. Cortines also wants to break a taboo against evaluating teachers’ performance and has threatened to reorganize the city’s worst schools. “I want this district to be data-driven and transparent about everything,” he said. “That means that sometimes we’re not going to look so good. But let me tell you, if we’re going to improve, we need to know where we are.”

New campaign questions reliance on testing

Greg Toppo:

If public schools were baseball teams, says Sam Chaltain, Americans wouldn’t have a clue who should be in the playoffs.
That’s because our current rating system relies heavily on a single set of test scores for nearly 50 million students, showing how a sample of them perform on a one-day math or reading test each spring.
To Chaltain, director of the Washington-based think tank Forum for Education & Democracy, that’s like picking playoff teams based on one game’s box score.
As Congress gears up to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 law that spells out how federal, state and local governments rate schools and spend billions of dollars, Chaltain is leading a new and unlikely campaign to shift the USA’s education conversation away from one-day tests and toward a larger one, focused on “powerful learning and highly effective teaching.”

Obama Speech Good for Wakefield, But I Haven’t Changed My Mind

Jay Matthews:

The president’s speech at Wakefield High was a wonderful experience for those hard-working students and the school’s exceptional staff. I was particularly taken with the president’s generosity in answering questions from students before the speech. They will remember this day forever.
But as I said in my much-maligned blog post on Friday, I don’t think it was nearly as big a thrill for students who weren’t there, but watched it on TV at their own schools. It was a great speech, saying all the right stuff. The president knows exactly what is wrong with our schools, and talks about the solutions more clearly and vividly than I do. But most kids have heard versions of his speech before, and without his physical presence, moment loses a lot of its electricity.

Image is Everything

Sara Goldrick Rab:

Sunday’s New York Times features a Style section article that quite frankly turned my stomach (at least, I’m pretty sure it was the article and not the 6 month old fetus I’m carrying!). It describes a debate over Harvard’s decision to sign on to a new, expensive preppy clothing line– one that charges more than $150 for a shirt, and up to $500 for a sports coat. A variety of opinions are represented, from that of the director of admissions and financial aid ( a former aid recipient himself) to an undergraduate who said, “I think it’s good that it’s [Harvard’s] doing something to make money.”
These deals apparently generate about $500,000 per year for the university, which (poor baby) saw its endowment decline by 30% last year. And that money goes to financial aid, so we’re not supposed to worry that Harvard’s being greedy.
And that’s the main issue the reporter tackles–whether the decision to say yes to a clothing line that portrays an elite undergraduate student body conflicts with Harvard’s stated goals of expanding diversity. Whether the money raised is enough to cover the additional costs associated with outreach. The “damage” done.
Well, of course it’s not! Image, we all know, is everything– especially when it comes to those families who rely on media for information in the absence of more informed sources. Harvard’s biggest obstacles to bringing in more students from disadvantaged backgrounds are: (1) image; (2) cost of attendance; and (3) admissions requirements. The school is trying to conquer the second one with financial aid, by promising to cover all demonstrated need. That sounds great, but the fact is that the number of admitted students with tremendous financial need isn’t very substantial– if it were, the amount of money required to fulfill that promise would be much more forboding.

Reluctant students of the classics, lend me your earbuds!

Greg Toppo:

Kids, remember this name: Jenny Sawyer.
She may soon be American education’s next “It” girl. Actually, make that its first and only “It” girl.
Only 24 and barely out of college, Sawyer has undertaken an audacious task: writing and shooting, with the help of a small band of filmmakers, more than 1,000 free, one-minute videos that help students understand and enjoy commonly assigned classic works of literature.
It’ll take two years, thousands of hours on a Boston soundstage and countless outfit changes for Sawyer, the only person appearing on camera.
Her website, 60secondrecap.com, is scheduled to go live Tuesday with the first of 100 or so videos covering 10 universally loved (read: hated) works that teenagers have struggled to appreciate since English teachers first walked the Earth. Titles include: The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Great Expectations, Hamlet and To Kill a Mockingbird.

GeoQUEST teaches history and geology to kids and parents

Pamela Cotant:

As young girls, Kristi Gelsomino and Tia Srachta toured the Cave of the Mounds with their Girl Scout troops from Illinois.
Now, years later, they journeyed back to the site with another mom, Jennifer Carroll, and their daughters who visited the cave with Girl Scout Troop 376 out of St Charles, Ill.
This time, the scouts were participating in a program called the GeoQUEST Walk and Talk for Families, which was started this year
The free program, run by the cave, explores the history of the area and geological features outside the cave itself.
“The GeoQUEST is designed to give back a bit of the history and story of this place without charging them a fee,” said Kim Anderson, education coordinator at Cave of the Mounds.

Deja vu: Report of the 1965 Madison School District Math 9 Textbook Committee

1.7MB PDF by Robert D. Gilberts, Superintendent Madison School District, Ted Losby and the Math 9 Textbook Committee:

The mathematics committee of the junior high schools of Madison has been meeting regularly for four rears with one intention in mind — to improve the mathematics program of the junior high school. After experimenting with three programs in the 7th grade, the Seeing Through Mathematics series, Books 1 and 2, were recommended for adoption and approved in May of 1963.
The committee continued its leadership role in implementing the new program and began evaluation of the 9th grade textbooks available. The committee recommended the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, published by Scott, Foresman and Company, and Algebra: Its Element and Structure, Book 1, published by Webster Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, and the Board of Education adopted them on May 3, 1965.
A number of objections to the Seeing Through Mathematics textbooks were made by various University of Wisconsin professors. Dr. R. C. Buck, chairman of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department strongly criticized the series. A public objection to the adoption was made at the Board of Education meeting by Dr. Richard Askey of the University Mathematics Department. Later, a formal petition of protest against the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, was sent to committee members. [related: 2006 Open Letter from 35 UW-Madison Math Professors about the Madison School District’s Math Coordinator position]
The sincerity of the eminently qualified professional mathematicians under Dr. Buck’s chairmanship was recognized by both the administration and the committee as calling for reconsideration of the committee’s decisions over the past three years relative to the choice of Seeing Through Mathematics 1, 2 and 3.
Conversely, the support of the Scott, Foresman and. Company mathematics program and its instruction philosophy, as evidenced by numerous adoptions throughout the country and the pilot studies carried out in the Madison Public Schoolsvindicated that equitable treatment of those holding diametric viewpoints should be given. It was decided that the interests of the students to be taught would be best served through a hearing of both sides before reconsideration.
A special meeting of the Junior High School. Mathematics committee was held on June 10, 1965.
Meeting 1. Presentations were made by Dr. R. C. Buck, Dr. Richard Askey, and Dr. Walter Rudin of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department, and Dr. J. B. Rosen, chairman-elect of the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department.
The presentations emphasized the speakers’ major criticism of the Seeing Through Mathematics series — “that these books completely distort the ideas and spirit of modern mathematics, and do not give students a good preparation for future mathematics courses. Examples were used to show that from the speakers’ points of view the emphasis in Seeing Through Mathematics is wrong. They indicated they felt the language overly pedantic, and the mathematics of the textbooks was described as pseudo-mathematics. However, it was pointed out that the choice of topics was good the content was acceptable (except for individual instances), and the treatment was consistent. A question and answer session tollowed the presentations.
……….
After careful consideration of all points of view, the committee unanimously recommended:

that the University of Wisconsin Mathematics and Education Departments be invited to participate with our Curriculum Department in developing end carrying out a program to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seeing Through Mathematics series and, if possible, other “modern” mathematics series in Madison and other school districts in Wisconsin;
that the committee reaffirm its decision to recommend the use of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, and Algebra: Its Elements and structure, Book 1, in grade nine with Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 1 and 2 in grades seven and eight, and that the Department of Curriculum Developnent of the Madison Public Schools continue its study, its evaluation, and its revision of the mathematics curriculum; and
that en in-service program be requested for all junior high school mathematics teachers. (Details to follow in a later bulletin).

Related: The recent Madison School District Math Task Force.
Britannica on deja vu.

Milwaukee teachers union has old hand in charge

Alan Borsuk:

Mike Langyel says he wasn’t banging on the piano, like some people say, that night several years ago when a few hundred Milwaukee Public Schools teachers filled the auditorium while the School Board was trying to meet.
“I know I was in the key of C,” he said. “I didn’t have to touch any black keys.” Nothing he played was discordant, he said.
The teachers, unhappy about the state of contract negotiations, disrupted the meeting with boos, noisemakers and catcalls before leaving en masse.
Langyel’s contribution was the piano accompaniment. For some reason, an upright piano used to be kept in the auditorium, right at the foot of the stage, just a few feet from where Superintendent William Andrekopoulos sat. Langyel used it, particularly when Andrekopoulos spoke.
“Business as usual sometimes has to stop when you’re really trying to fight for kids,” Langyel said in an interview recently.
Was what he did that night a good idea? “At the time,” he said.
The piano disappeared after that. But Langyel didn’t.

Loudon residents, school board comfortable with camera at meetings

Hugh Willett:

A Tennessee School Board Association recommendation that would allow school boards to restrict the use of cameras and video recorders from board meetings found little support from the members of the Loudon County School Board on Thursday night.
During a review of TSBA’s proposed policy changes, board members and residents expressed their concerns about the policy. Some were concerned that the Nashville-based TSBA’s suggested policy was unconstitutional.
“I can’t believe you’re getting such bad legal advice,” said Loudon resident Shirley Harrison.
Pat Hunter, a Loudon County activist who has recently posted video clips of school board members and other county officials on her Web site, said she was concerned about taxpayer money being used to fund TSBA.

Power to the people, as it were!

Will California Use Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers?

Raymond Barglow:

In decades past, education in California was a top priority for government, and the state’s schools were “the cutting edge of the American Dream.” Today, spending per pupil in the state has fallen to 47th in the country. Due to deep budget cuts, California school districts have been laying off teachers, expanding class sizes, closing some schools, and canceling bus service and summer school programs.
As for future funding of public education–the state of California is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The current dilemma stems from a provision in California’s Education Code that can be interpreted as ruling out the use by state officials of test scores to evaluate teacher performance and compensation. On the one hand, the Obama administration has informed state officials that this provision represents an unacceptable “firewall between students and teacher data” and must be removed if California is to be eligible to receive an educational grant from the administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top stimulus fund. On the other hand, California teachers are making it clear through their unions that the use by state government of student test scores to evaluate teachers would be detrimental to education and is an idea that must be rejected.
Taking up this issue has been the Senate Committee on Education, which held a hearing on Aug. 26 chaired by Senator Gloria Romero. The Committee is considering amending California law to ensure that the state qualifies for federal funding. “It is my goal,” Romero says, “to do everything possible to ensure that the Golden State has access to precious federal dollars that can help provide our students the best possible education.”

26-School D.C. Cheating Probe ‘Inconclusive’

Bill Turque:

District officials revealed Thursday that they commissioned an investigation last summer into possible cheating at 26 public and public charter schools where reading and math proficiency on 2008 standardized tests increased markedly.
The probe, an analysis of incorrect student answers that were erased and changed to correct answers, found “anomalies” at some of the schools that administered the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) test. But officials called the investigation, conducted by the test’s publisher, CTB McGraw-Hill, “ultimately inconclusive.”
District officials did not name the schools that were investigated, and they did not release a copy of the CTB McGraw-Hill report, which was requested by The Washington Post on May 29 under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials also offered no explanation for the interval between the conclusion of the investigation in March and their decision to disclose it at a news conference called by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on Thursday.

School speech backlash builds

Nia-Malika Henderson:

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation’s classrooms.
The White House says Obama’s address is a sort of pep talk for the nation’s schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to “indoctrinate” students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.
“The gist is, ‘I want to see what the president has to say before you expose it to my child.’ Another said, ‘This is Marxist propaganda.’ They are very hostile,” said Patricia O’Neill, a Democrat who is vice president of the Montgomery County School Board, in a district that borders Washington, D.C. “I think it’s disturbing that people don’t want to hear the president, but we live in a diverse society.”
The White House moved Thursday to quell the controversy. First it revised an Education Department lesson plan that drew the ire of conservatives because it called for students to write letters about how they can help the president.

Tim Padgett:

When Barack Obama won Florida last November — the first Democrat to take the Sunshine State since FDR — many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP Governor Charlie Crist’s moderating influence. But lately, Florida’s disgruntled Republicans aren’t looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula’s GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican Chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use “our children to spread liberal propaganda” and “President Obama’s socialist ideology.”
Thanks in large part to the Administration’s ham-handed advance work, the strident conservative anger that erupted this summer over health-care reform has shifted from town halls to school halls. On the surface, Obama’s intentions for Tuesday seem nothing more threatening than a presidential pep talk about taking education seriously. But some ill-advised prep material from the Education Department — like suggestions that teachers have students write letters on “how to help the President” and recommendations that those pupils read his books — has left the door ajar (and that’s all it seems to take these days) for Republican charges that Obama “wants to indoctrinate our kids,” as Clara Dean, GOP chairwoman of Florida’s Collier County, puts it. (Read Joe Klein on Barack Obama’s August to forget.)

Madison Marquette Elementary teacher named one of two Wisconsin elementary school teachers of the year

Patricia Simms:

A veteran fourth-grade teacher at Marquette Elementary School was named one of two Wisconsin elementary school teachers of the year today.
State officials surprised Maureen McGilligan-Bentin, who has been teaching 37 years, with the award in a cafeteria full of cheering and clapping students and colleagues.
She will receive $3,000 from U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s education foundation and will be competing for a national teaching award throughout the year.
McGilligan-Bentin, 60, lives in Madison, holds an education degree from UW-Madison and was a former professional dancer.

Congratulations!

The Politics of President Obama’s “Back to School Speech” Beamed to Classrooms

Foon Rhee:

Here’s the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.
He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is “absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology” and “liberal propaganda.”
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”

Eric Kleefeld:

The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama’s upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education — eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.
In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, “Extension of the Speech,” one of the points used to say: “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”

Alyson Klein:

om Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.
Here’s a snippet from his statement:

The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have ‘notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),’ and for the students to discuss ‘how will he inspire us,’ among other things. …In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.

Eduwonk:

Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven’t heard (don’t get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a – gasp – study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We’re getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let’s take the two “issues” in turn.

Michael Alison Chandler & Michael Shear:

The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message “entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.
But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.

I think Max Blumenthal provides the right perspective on this political matter:

Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the “military-industrial complex,” his letter offers an equally important — and relevant — warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the “mental stress and burden” of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he “felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty.” He added, “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs’s note or sent a canned response. But he didn’t. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
“I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed,” Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. “Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”

Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine “How will history view our exploding federalism?”. A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama’s use of “Czar’s” (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter’s elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:

President Obama’s plan to speak to America’s schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. “As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, in a press release. “President Obama has turned to American’s children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.” Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department’s Web site, Mr. Obama “will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning”–hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America’s children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech–especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use “notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama’s speeches about education” and to “brainstorm” with students about the question “How will he inspire us?” Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech?” and “What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”

Nearly 1 in 10 in California’s class of 2009 did not pass high school exit exam

Seema Mehta:

Nearly one in 10 students in the class of 2009 did not pass the state’s high school exit exam, which is required to receive a diploma. The results, released Wednesday, were nearly stagnant compared with the previous year.
By the end of their senior year, 90.6% of students in the graduating class had passed the two-part exam, compared with 90.4% in the class of 2008.
“These gains are incremental, but they are in fact significant and they are a true testimony to the tremendous work being done by our professional educators . . . as well as our students,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, whose office released the data.
Beginning in their sophomore year, students have several chances to take the exit exam. A score of at least 55% on the math portion, which is geared to an eighth-grade level, and 60% on the English portion, which is ninth- or 10th-grade level, is required.
The achievement gap between white and Asian students and their Latino and black classmates persisted. More than 95% of Asian students and nearly 96% of white students passed the exam by the end of their senior year, compared with nearly 87% of Latino students and more than 81% of black students. But the data did show the size of the gap narrowing. English-language learners and lower-income students also lagged but have made notable gains since the exam was first required.

An Interesting Presentation (Race, Income) on Madison’s Public Schools to the City’s Housing Diversity Committee

Former Madison Alder Brenda Konkel summarized the meeting:

The Madison School District shared their data with the group and they decided when their next two meetings would be. Compton made some interesting/borderline comments and they have an interesting discussion about race and how housing patterns affect the schools. There was a powerpoint presentation with lots of information, without a handout, so I tried to capture it the best I could.
GETTING STARTED
The meeting was moved from the Mayor’s office to Room 260 across the street. The meeting started 5 minutes late with Brian Munson, Marj Passman, Mark Clear, Judy Compton, Dave Porterfield, Brian Solomon and Marsha Rummel were the quorum. Judy Olson absent, but joined them later. City staff of Bill Clingan, Mark Olinger, Ray Harmon and Helen Dietzler. Kurt Keifer from the School District was here to present. (Bill Clingan is a former Madison School Board member. He was defeated a few years ago by Lawrie Kobza.

A few interesting notes:

Clear asks if this reflects white flight, or if this just reflects the communities changing demographics. He wants to know how much is in and out migration. Kiefer says they look more at private and parochial school attendance as portion of Dane County and MMSD. Our enrollment hasn’t changed as a percentage. There has been an increased activity in open enrollment – and those numbers have gone up from 200 to 400 kids in the last 8 – 10 years. He says the bigger factor is that they manage their enrollment to their capacities in the private and parochial schools. Even with virtual schools, not much changes. The bigger factor is the housing transition in Metropolitan area. Prime development is happening in other districts
……
Kiefer says smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative – there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program. Compton asks about minority and Caucasian level in free lunch. She would like to see that.
…….
Kiefer says that Midvale population is not going up despite the fact that they have the highest proportion of single detached units in Midvale – they are small houses and affordable, but also highest proportion of kids going to private and parochial schools. He says it was because of access because to parochial schools are located there. Kiefer says they think the area is changing, that the Hilldale area has been an attractor for families as well as Sequoya Commons. Family and school friendly areas and he tells the city to “Keep doing that”. He is hopeful that Hill Farms changes will be good as well.

Fascinating. I wonder how all of this, particularly the high school “small learning community initiatives” fit with the District’s strategic plan and recently passed Talented and Gifted initiative?

NEA Internal Survey on Health Care Reveals “Huge Divide Between NEA Executives and Presidents and Rank and File

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association has appeared front and center in the debate over reform of the health care and insurance system, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying and media buys. But a 2008 internal survey of NEA members and officers on health care issues indicates varying levels of enthusiasm for proposed reforms.
Though the survey itself was not made available to EIA, the union’s collective bargaining and member advocacy department has been briefing union activists on its findings throughout 2009. I have posted a link to the relevant information on EIA’s Declassified page. The report included statistics such as the average health insurance premium paid in 2007 by NEA members was $603 for employee-only coverage – about 12.6% of the total cost. Eight affiliates reported members paid nothing.
NEA commissioned the polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to learn member and officer attitudes about health care reform. Most of those surveyed were concerned about the system, but satisfied with their own health care. NEA members were also more favorably disposed towards government health care programs than the average American.
Still, the survey found that NEA members were “split on whether government or employers should provide health care” and that a “Massachusetts-style proposal [is] susceptible to arguments against it.”

The Rubber Room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers.

Steven Brill:

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day–which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school–typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved–the process is often endless–they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
“You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it,” says Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. “Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence,” Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room’s “Handle with Care” poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she “loves children.”
“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” Scheiner said. “There was no need to push anyone out.” Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.

The Overhaul of Wisconsin’s Assessment System (WKCE) Begins

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [52K PDF]:

Wisconsin will transform its statewide testing program to a new system that combines state, district, and classroom assessments and is more responsive to students, teachers, and parents needs while also offering public accountability for education.
“We will be phasing out the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE),” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “We must begin now to make needed changes to our state’s assessment system.” He also explained that the WKCE will still be an important part of the educational landscape for two to three years during test development. “At minimum, students will be taking the WKCEs this fall and again during the 2010-11 school year. Results from these tests will be used for federal accountability purposes,” he said.
“A common sense approach to assessment combines a variety of assessments to give a fuller picture of educational progress for our students and schools,” Evers explained. “Using a balanced approach to assessment, recommended by the Next Generation Assessment Task Force, will be the guiding principle for our work.”
The Next Generation Assessment Task Force, convened in fall 2008, was made up of 42 individuals representing a wide range of backgrounds in education and business. Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, and Joan Wade, administrator for Cooperative Educational Service Agency 6 in Oshkosh, were co-chairs. The task force reviewed the history of assessment in Wisconsin; explored the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches; and heard presentations on assessment systems from a number of other states.
It recommended that Wisconsin move to a balanced assessment system that would go beyond annual, large-scale testing like the WKCE.

Jason Stein:

The state’s top schools official said Thursday that he will blow up the system used to test state students, rousing cheers from local education leaders.
The statewide test used to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law will be replaced with a broader, more timely approach to judging how well Wisconsin students are performing.
“I’m extremely pleased with this announcement,” said Madison schools Superintendent Dan Nerad. “This is signaling Wisconsin is going to have a healthier assessment tool.”

Amy Hetzner:

Task force member Deb Lindsey, director of research and assessment for Milwaukee Public Schools, said she was especially impressed by Oregon’s computerized testing system. The program gives students several opportunities to take state assessments, with their highest scores used for statewide accountability purposes and other scores used for teachers and schools to measure their performance during the school year, she said.
“I like that students in schools have multiple opportunities to take the test, that there is emphasis on progress rather than a single test score,” she said. “I like that the tests are administered online.”
Computerized tests give schools and states an opportunity to develop more meaningful tests because they can assess a wider range of skills by modifying questions based on student answers, Lindsey said. Such tests are more likely to pick up on differences between students who are far above or below grade level than pencil-and-paper tests, which generate good information only for students who are around grade level, she said.
For testing at the high school level, task force member and Oconomowoc High School Principal Joseph Moylan also has a preference.
“I’m hoping it’s the ACT and I’m hoping it’s (given in) the 11th grade,” he said. “That’s what I believe would be the best thing for Wisconsin.”
By administering the ACT college admissions test to all students, as is done in Michigan, Moylan said the state would have a good gauge of students’ college readiness as well as a test that’s important to students. High school officials have lamented that the low-stakes nature of the 10th-grade WKCE distorts results.

(more…)

Charter School Struggles To Find Students

NPR:

In continuation of the program’s focus on education issues, guest host Jennifer Ludden checks in with Kavitha Cardoza, a reporter for NPR member station WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., about enrollment problems at the National Preparatory Public Charter School, which is opening next month. More than a third of students in the nation’s capitol are enrolled in charter schools — the largest percentage in the country. But National Prep is having trouble meeting its enrollment figures.

SAT scores dip for high school class of 2009

Justin Pope:

Average scores on the SAT college entrance exam dipped slightly for the high school class of 2009, while gender, race and income gaps widened, according to figures released Tuesday by the College Board.
The average SAT score dipped from 502 last year to 501 on the critical reading section of the test. Math scores held steady at 515, and writing fell from 494 to 493. Each section has a maximum score of 800.
More than 1.5 million members of the class of 2009 took the exam, which remains the most widely used college entrance exam despite recent gains by another test, the ACT. The SAT tries to measure basic college-readiness skills, while the ACT is more focused on what students have learned in the classroom.
Average SAT scores were stable or rising most years from 1994 to 2004, but have been trending downward since. That’s likely due in part to the widening pool of test-takers. That’s a positive sign more students are aspiring to college, but it also tends to weigh down average scores.
Forty percent of students in this year’s pool were minorities and more than one-third reported their parents had never attended college. More than a quarter reported English was not their first language at home.

John Hechinger has more:

High-school students’ performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.
Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.
Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.”

Kewaskum High school offer much longer orientation to incoming freshmen

Amy Hetzner:

The hallways of Kewaskum High School were hushed, with only the odd staff member quietly shuffling down its corridors, while the school’s field house rang with the sound of more than 130 student voices.
“V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, that’s our freshman battle cry!” groups of ninth-graders chanted from the bleachers.
With almost a week to go before the start of the school year, nearly three-quarters of Kewaskum High’s freshman class has chosen to spend the next few days learning about its new school. Freshmen will look for their lockers, track down classroom teachers and meet or reacquaint themselves with their classmates.
And, hopefully, they will get a head start on what educators consider the most important year of high school.
“If you talk to any high school principal, what they’re going to tell you is that when a kid is most likely to fail is in that freshman year,” Kewaskum High School Principal Christine Horbas said. “So to get them off on the right foot, I think, is very, very important.”
Many schools hold orientation nights or freshman-only times on the first day of school. Kewaskum tried some of those ideas, too, before launching a full warm-up week this year.
The extra time means Kewaskum can hold more fun activities for the ninth-graders – such as teaching them school cheers or playing four-way tug-of-war – as well as refresh skills such as writing exam answers and making measurements.

Meanwhile, TJ Mertz wonders what is happening with the Madison School District’s “Ready, Set, Go” conferences.

9th Graders in a Separate School

Wendy Hundley:

In 1997, the Lewisville school district moved its ninth-graders into a separate school as a short-term solution to overcrowding at Lewisville High School.
But the temporary move turned permanent when officials discovered some unexpected benefits from giving freshmen a school of their own: test scores and attendance improved while disciplinary problems and even teen pregnancy rates dropped – from 40 in 1996 to zero the next year.
Today, Killough Lewisville High School North – the district’s ninth-grade center that opened in 2005 – is one of LISD’s crowning jewels. It achieved an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency and was named the No. 1 public high school in the state three years ago by Texas Monthly magazine.
It’s been so successful, in fact, that Lewisville school officials are now making plans to create ninth-grade centers for Hebron, Flower Mound and Marcus high schools.
But at the same time they’re replicating the ninth-grade model throughout the district, school officials plan to add sophomores to the mix at Killough – a move that has upset parents who feel that the school should remain a freshman haven.
“The ninth-grade center has been great for Lewisville. It’s been such a success,” said Susan Arthur, whose daughter will attend Killough this year. “We don’t understand why they’ve taken it away.”

A Partial Look (School Climate) at the Outbound Madison School District Parent Survey

Samara Kalk Derby:

Madison school district parents dissatisfied with local schools got a boost after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which trumped state law and made it easier for students living in the district to attend schools in other districts, a practice known as open enrollment.
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution’s right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.
Last year it became easier in Madison, and in school districts across the country, for white students to transfer even if it meant increasing the district’s racial imbalance.
After a flood of local students left the district last year, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad decided to investigate why.
“We had an interest in knowing ideas from people that had made the decision for open enrollment,” Nerad says. “We are attempting to learn from those experiences to see if there are some things as a school district that we can constructively do to address those concerns.”
To that end, the district surveyed households of district residents who left Madison schools and transferred to another district for the 2008-09 school year to find out why the families left. The majority of parents who took their kids out of the Madison school district last year under open enrollment said they did so for what the district classifies as “environmental reasons”: violence, gangs, drugs and negative peer pressure. Other reasons were all over the map. Many cited crowded classrooms and curriculum that wasn’t challenging enough.
Only a few responses pointed directly to white flight.

The Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Survey, including School Board discussion, can be found here. David Blask comments.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Madison Firefighter’s Union New 2 Year Contract

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

Yesterday a two year contract agreement with city firefighters was ratified by the union membership. It’s a good deal for both the union and the city and its taxpayers. The agreement, which still needs to be approved by the City Council, calls for what is essentially a two year pay freeze with a modest 3% increase at the end of the contract period in 2011.
Other levels of government are using furloughs (which are essentially pay cuts) and layoffs to cut their budgets, but I think the city should take a different approach. After all, the city provides many basic direct services that will have a very noticeable impact for our customers if they are cut back. We can’t shut down the fire department or the police department for one day a month. We can’t just not pick up the garbage for a week. It’s far better for our residents if we can manage our way through these tough budget years while keeping our city staff intact to the greatest extent that we can. But if we’re going to do that, then we’ll need cooperation from our unions on wage and benefit settlements.
That kind of cooperation is exactly what we got from Local 311. The firefighters gave us a responsible start to negotiations with the other dozen unions that represent city employees. I said from the start of this recession that we need to approach our challenges with the understanding that we’re all in this together. This settlement is a very strong indication that we’re moving in that direction.

The Madison School District (Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. is a firefighter) and Madison Teachers Union are still working on a new contract. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
There are at least two interesting challenges to an agreement this year:

The elimination of “revenue limits and economic conditions” from collective bargaining arbitration by Wisconsin’s Democratically controlled Assembly and Senate along with Democratic Governer Jim Doyle:

To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to
revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.
The same elected officials eliminated the QEO, a 3.8% cap (in practice, a floor) on teacher salaries and wages in addition to “step” increases based on years of experience among other factors:

As the dust settles around the new state budget, partisan disagreement continues over the boost that unions – particularly education unions – got by making it easier for them to sign up thousands of new members and by repealing the 3.8% annual limit on teachers’ pay raises.
The provisions passed because Democrats, who got control of the Legislature for the first time in 14 years, partnered with Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle to advance changes the governor and unions had been pushing for years.
Unions traditionally help elect Democratic politicians. The largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, spent about $2.1 million before last November’s elections, with much of that backing Democrats.
Most of the labor-related provisions in the budget were added to provide people with “good, family-supporting jobs,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), co-chairman of the Legislature’s Finance Committee.
“The idea that we’re shifting back to the worker, rather than just big business and management, that’s part of what Democrats are about,” Pocan said.
It also helped that the two top Democratic legislators, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan of Janesville and Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker of Weston, are veteran labor leaders.

Wisconsin Ranks 3rd in ACT Testing

Amy Hetzner & Erin Richards:

Wisconsin maintained its third-place ranking on the ACT college admissions test, with this year’s graduating high school seniors posting an average composite score of 22.3 for the third year in a row, according to data scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That average placed Wisconsin behind only Minnesota and Iowa among states where the ACT was taken by a majority of the Class of 2009.
But within the state’s scores were causes for concern. The average composite score – the combined performance on the ACT’s English, math, reading and science tests – for African-American students fell from 17 to 16.8. With the average composite score for Wisconsin’s white students at 22.9, the state had one of the largest gaps between the two racial groups in the nation.
According to a report from ACT Inc., such scores indicate only 3% of the state’s African-American test-takers are ready for college in all four tested areas, compared with 33% of white students. In Milwaukee Public Schools, spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said 6% of district test-takers were deemed college-ready in all four areas.
“Overall, Wisconsin students did well on this national test,” state schools Superintendent Tony Evers said in a news release. “However, the results show areas for improvement.”
Average composite scores on the ACT, the most popular of the two main college admissions tests in Wisconsin, varied from district to district in the Milwaukee area.
Because the ACT is a voluntary test, schools’ average scores can vary based on the number of students who take it from one year to the next. An increase in test-taking usually leads to a score drop.

College-Entrance Test Scores Flagging

Robert Tomsho:

Only about a quarter of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed in college, according to a report on the exam that shows little improvement over results from the 2008 graduating class.
The Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT said 23% of this year’s high school graduates had scores that indicated they were ready for college in all four ACT subject areas, or had at least a 75% chance of earning a grade of C or better in entry-level courses. Last year, a similar ACT analysis found that 22% of the class of 2008 was college-ready.
“We’re not making the progress we need to be making,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on boosting high-school graduation rates. “The only way you improve these numbers and get them higher is by improving your secondary schools.”
About 1.48 million of the 3.3 million members of the high school class of 2009 took the ACT, typically in their junior year. ACT said its report was based on comparing students’ ACT test scores in English, reading, math and science with the grades they earned in related courses during their first year in college.

Much more on the 2009 ACT here.

New Madison Principals

Channel3000:

The Madison Metropolitan School District is gearing up for the start of school with some new faces in the principal’s office.
The district named Mary Kelley the interim principal at Madison East High School. Kelly will hold the position for the 2009-2010 school year. She has previously worked as a middle school principal for eight years in the district, and the last four at Black Hawk Middle School.
She succeeds Alan Harris, who recently resigned for a position in Racine.
Elsewhere, Carlettra Stanford was appointed interim principal at Gompers Elementary and Black Hawk Middle Schools. Stanford has worked in the district for 13 years — the last two as a principal at Gompers. She’s also held an elementary teaching position and Title 1 facilitator.
As the K-8 principal at both Gompers and Black Hawk, she will oversee adjoining schools, according to a district release.

The Adolescent Politics of Virtual Education

Tom Vander Ark:

In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition — and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.
Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft’s Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation’s first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state’s seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington’s virtual space to itself.

Cap on Virtual Schools Jeopardizes Wisconsin’s Eligibility for Federal Education Funds

Brian Fraley:

Online public charter schools (or virtual schools) are charter schools under contract with a school board in which all or a portion of the instruction is provided through means of the Internet, and the pupils enrolled in and instructional staff employed by the school are geographically remote from each other.
Virtual schools have become an incredibly popular option throughout the country. In Wisconsin, thousands of families from Green Bay to Lancaster, from Racine to Rhinelander and other communities in every county in the state, have chosen to enroll their children in these unique and innovative public schools. School districts across Wisconsin (including those in Grantsburg, Appleton, Monroe, Fredonia, Waukesha and McFarland) currently offer or are exploring this option.
But in Wisconsin, even though online public charter schools are successful and embraced by parents, teachers and administrators alike, access to this innovation is rationed.

Special-Education Stigmatization
School vouchers may be the best way to curb abuse of public funds.

Marcus Winters & Jay Greene:

Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.
Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don’t worry–it’s not “something in the water.”
Better means of identification explain part of special education’s expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.

Grand Rapids Teacher Union Ratifies Contract

Kym Reinstadler:

The Grand Rapids Education Association has ratified a four-year tentative labor agreement with the Grand Rapids school district.
The contract was approved 727-236, with one ballot thrown out.
The Grand Rapids Board of Education has a special meeting to consider the contract at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the district’s administration building, 1331 Franklin St. SE.
After informational meetings last week, several teachers said they were frustrated the pact includes no retroactive salary increase for the two years they worked without a contract and a modest 2 percent salary raise for the coming school year.
Many are also dismayed the contract does not cap class sizes, language they say claim they sought to include.

Dangling Money, Obama Pushes Education Shift

Sam Dillon:

Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.
That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is provoking heated debates over the uses of standardized testing and the proper federal role in education, issues that flared frequently during President George W. Bush’s enforcement of his signature education law, called No Child Left Behind.
A recent case is California, where legislative leaders are vowing to do anything necessary, including rewriting a law that prohibits the use of student scores in teacher evaluations, to ensure that the state is eligible for a chunk of the $4.3 billion the federal Education Department will soon award to a dozen or so states. The law had strong backing from the state teachers union.
Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states have moved to bring their laws or policies into line with President Obama’s school improvement agenda.

Kevin Carey has more.

Washington, DC School Choice Advocates Step Up Campaign

Tim Craig:

School choice advocates are gearing up for a final push this week to try to get U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to reverse his decision to rescind scholarships for 216 low-income District students.
The advocates, led by D.C. Parents for School Choice and DC Children First, are planning radio, newspaper and Internet ads. The advocates, who have formed www.savethe216.com, are also holding a vigil at noon Thursday outside the U.S. Department of Education.
The campaign, billed as a major escalation of their efforts, is designed to get Duncan to reinstate the scholarships before the school year begins.
“Time is truly running out for Secretary Duncan to reverse his disastrous decision and to save these 216 children,” said former Ward 7 D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous, a Democrat who is heading up efforts to save the students’ scholarships. “Scholarship money is already available for the 216 students and there is no law or regulation preventing them from accessing these scholarships. Secretary Duncan needs to show the nation that this administration is serious about reforming education.”

Hard-Hit Schools Try Public-Relations Push

Stephanie Simon:

Public schools in the U.S. have added professional marketing to their back-to-school shopping lists.
Financially struggling urban districts are trying to win back students fleeing to charter schools, private schools and suburban districts that offer open enrollment. Administrators say they are working hard to improve academics — but it can’t hurt to burnish their image as well.
A bus in Washington, D.C., carries an ad for the city’s public schools, which have seen enrollment plunge from nearly 150,000 students in 1970 to less than 50,000 last year. The district spent $100,000 this spring on a campaign that also included radio spots in an effort to win back students who have left public schools. The ads include quotes from students who say they are glad they stayed in public school.
So they are recording radio ads, filming TV infomercials and buying address lists for direct-mail campaigns. Other efforts, by both districts and individual schools, call for catering Mexican dinners for potential students, making sales pitches at churches and hiring branding experts to redesign logos.
“Schools are really getting that they can’t just expect students to show up any more,” said Lisa Relou, who directs marketing efforts for the Denver Public Schools. “They have to go out and recruit.”
Administrators working on the public-relations push say the potential returns are high. State funding for public schools is based on attendance, so each new student brings more money, typically $5,000 to $8,000 per head. In addition, schools with small enrollments are at constant risk of being shuttered in this recession, and full classrooms help.
Some districts also hope a better image will entice more local business sponsorship and persuade voters to support school levies and bond issues

Substance, such as a rigorous curriculum, strong school leadership, extensive education options (languages, arts, science and math, among others) will always be better than simple pr/marketing/advertising efforts. General Motors tried re-brand their business repeatedly over the past few decades.

Newt Gingrich, Al Sharpton won’t hold back on education tour

Mark Silva:

Reporting from Washington – Here’s an unlikely trio for a road tour:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to take the Obama administration’s vision of educational improvements, innovation and the “challenges facing America’s school systems” on a multi-city tour. And he’s taking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) as well as the Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights leader and onetime Democratic presidential candidate.
Duncan, who met with Gingrich and Sharpton earlier this year, called them “two of the most candid people I have ever known.”
“They are willing to challenge conventional thinking, and I can absolutely promise some provocative conversations on education reform.”
The tour starts Sept. 29 in Philadelphia, heads to New Orleans Nov. 3, then Baltimore on Nov. 13 — cities selected for what they can teach others about school reform. The Department of Education plans to add other stops, including a rural venue.

More on the Madison School District’s Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan

Gayle Worland:

The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.
Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school — but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
“We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we’re very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work,” Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren’t being met in the classroom.”
So Raihala’s children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan notes & links.
MP3 audio: School Board discussion of the plan.
Madison United for Academic Excellence links and notes (well worth reading).

Tulsa Public Schools Proposal to the Gates Foundation

Tulsa Public Schools:

America is at a crossroads. After leading the way in universal primary and secondary education, the academic achievements of American students have fallen behind those in many other countries. Over half of these deficiencies come as a result of the wide achievement gaps that exist along racial/ethnic and socio-economic lines. Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) represents just one of many American school districts combating the challenges of deficient academic performance.
Tulsa Public Schools believes that the best weapon in the battle to bring about greater academic success and college-readiness in the American student is an effective teacher. It is eager to seize the opportunity to become a model and catalyst for change for the rest of the nation.
TPS will swiftly implement its Teacher Effectiveness initiative with the support of a Gates’ partnership but is determined to execute this initiative in the absence of a Gates’ partnership if necessary. The plan outlined below was developed out of the painstaking work of dozens of teachers, principals, and central office employees. Three Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association officers were intimately involved in every step of the development process. The TPS Board of Education is enthusiastically supportive and will make all necessary changes to local regulations to enable the full implementation. Likewise, Oklahoma legislative leadership and senior executives at the Oklahoma State Department of Education have committed to promoting changes in state law and practice necessary to make these strategies possible. Moreover, local business leaders and philanthropists have pledged to generate local funding support.

View the complete Tulsa proposal here (7MB PDF).

Hong Kong School drug tests will go ahead, Henry Tang says

Martin Wong:

The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.
Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community’s different opinions about the plan.
“Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year,” he said. “We still have plenty of time … when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it.”
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers’ Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups – the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! – have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: “We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully.”
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday’s seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.

Detroit School Woes Deepen

Alex Kellogg:

Five employees of the Detroit public school system were charged Wednesday with multiple felonies as part of an investigation into alleged corruption and the loss of tens of millions of dollars in school funds.
The charges come as the Detroit Public Schools is struggling with an estimated budget deficit of $259 million and weighing a potential bankruptcy filing.
Zuma Press
Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, shown last week, is expected to decide this month whether to make a bankruptcy filing.
Kym Worthy, the prosecutor for Wayne County, announced the charges Wednesday. If convicted, the accused could face decades of jail time because Michigan law allows harsh penalties for public officials found guilty of wrongdoing.
The allegations include eight felony embezzlement charges against a district administrative staffer and a high-school teacher’s aide who together allegedly embezzled more than $50,000. Another clerical worker at an elementary school was charged with writing checks and withdrawing roughly $25,000 of the district’s money. The smallest alleged crime was related to a food-services employee accused of stealing more than $400 of lunch money at another elementary school.

Pittsburgh schools polish final pitch for big Gates grant

Joe Smydo:

Invited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to compete for half a billion dollars in teacher-effectiveness grants, Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma put about 80 people to work on a proposal.
Pittsburgh Public Schools, also invited to apply, invested hundreds of employee hours on its plan and worked so closely with outside technical advisers, McKinsey and Co., that it gave them office space at district headquarters in Oakland.
Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida assembled focus groups of teachers, administrators and community members to gather input for a proposal, which has been through nine or 10 drafts.
The proposals had to be turned in by Friday, but the unusually rigorous application process isn’t over yet.
In all, 10 invitees — most of them urban districts in various stages of broad improvement campaigns — will meet Wednesday in Seattle to make presentations to Gates officials. Then they’ll wait to see who is selected for prestigious Gates funding — and wonder whether Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife will have a hand in the decision-making.

Three Peas in a Pod

Aaron Pallas:

Mike Bloomberg’s comments at Monday’s press conference announcing plans to extend a test-based promotion policy to grades four and six were eerily reminiscent of Arne Duncan’s and Joel Klein’s reactions to two reports on social promotion released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research in 2004. The Chicago Consortium, an independent research group studying Chicago schools, examined the effects of promotional gates at the third-, sixth- and eighth-grade levels. (I reviewed one of the draft reports at the request of the Consortium.) The findings were unequivocal: Test-based retention did not alter the achievement trajectories of third-graders, and sixth-graders who were retained had lower achievement growth than similar low-achieving students who were promoted. Implementing the eighth-grade promotional gate reduced overall dropout rates slightly, but clearly lowered the likelihood of high school graduation for very low achievers and students who were already overage for grade at the time they reached the gate.
David Herszenhorn, writing in the New York Times at the time, described a Chicago press conference releasing the reports. He quoted Arne Duncan, then the chief executive of the Chicago public schools, as saying, “Common sense tells you that ending social promotion has contributed to higher test scores and lower dropout rates over the last eight years … I am absolutely convinced in my heart, it’s the right thing to do.” Herszenhorn delicately noted that Duncan made claims about the promotional policies that were not supported by the two reports. “While the report drew no such conclusion,” he wrote, “[Duncan] credited the tough promotion rules for improvements in the system as a whole, including better overall test scores, higher graduation and attendance rates and a lower overall dropout rate.”
In the same article, Herszenhorn suggested that NYC Chancellor Joel Klein had “seemed to push aside the findings.” He cited a statement by Klein that, “The Chicago study strongly supports our view that effective early grade interventions are key to ending social promotion and preparing students for the hard work they will encounter in later grades.” Klein’s statement was patently false: the Chicago studies didn’t examine early grade interventions. Rather, authors Jenny Nagaoka and Melissa Roderick pointed out that a great many students in Chicago were struggling well before the third-grade promotional gate, suggesting the desirability of early intervention with struggling students.

Pay Wisconsin teachers for performance

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

“You’re finally going to begin to see some innovation in teacher compensation.”
— Gov. Jim Doyle
It’s about time.
For too long, Wisconsin public school teachers have earned their pay based on years of service and advanced degrees.
Their performance wasn’t a factor.
Finally, it appears, that’s going to change, thanks to pressure from President Barack Obama and his reform-minded Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Obama recently announced $4.35 billion in competitive grants for states that propose innovative ways to improve student achievement, especially among disadvantaged students. But to qualify for Obama’s “Race to the Top” grants, states must allow local school districts to use student test scores in evaluating teachers — something Wisconsin law now bans.
Duncan recently called Wisconsin’s law “simply ridiculous.” And Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, and Sen. Randy Hopper, R-Fond du Lac, introduced legislation Tuesday to repeal the state’s silly ban on pay for performance.
No one is suggesting that testing be the only factor in evaluating teachers. Moreover, the focus should be on student progress over time — not a single test. School districts should compare student performance at the beginning of a school year with their performance at the end to help gauge the effectiveness of teachers and teaching techniques.

A Hard Lesson for Teachers

Dana Mattioli:

Widespread layoffs caused by tight school budgets are forcing thousands of teachers out of the classroom, in some cases, permanently. Many are taking other jobs or considering changing careers, even as they anxiously hope to be recalled.
When school begins this month, as many as 100,000 of last year’s teachers won’t have jobs, resulting in an overall drop in education jobs in the U.S., estimates Carmen Quesada, director of field operations for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.
That’s a jolt to people drawn to teaching in part for its recession-proof reputation. The number of people working in local education has increased every year since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That streak is now in jeopardy: Local schools employed fewer people overall, including nonteachers, in July, the latest month available, than in July 2008. The majority of the layoffs have involved nontenure teaching positions, with cuts determined by seniority.
Judith Franco is among those affected. She taught typing and business technology at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Fla., for two years before being laid off in June–one of 394 teachers laid off by the Broward County Public Schools.

Pilot math project involves SRI, USF and Helios Education Foundation

Tampa Bay Business Journal:

SunBay Digital Mathematics, a math education pilot project, began this week in Pinellas County.
The Helios Education Foundation and the Pinellas County School District are partnering with SRI International and the University of South Florida’s College of Education in a project to set the direction for middle school mathematics, a release said.
The one-year project involves 15 seventh-grade teachers in seven Pinellas schools. They will attend workshops and monthly meetings focused on using technology-based curriculum based on advanced math concepts.
The Pinellas Education Foundation is the fiscal agent for funding the project.

$11,654,078 Additional Madison School District Spending Via the Federal Taxes & US Treasury Borrowing (“Stimulus”)

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad [838K PDF]:

As part of Federal Stimulus funding iliat will be made available the district will receive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds to be used over a two year period.
These funds are in IDEA, IDEA EC and Title 1.
Program Costs/FundingiConsultation Service Employment Contract
The district has prepared a two year funding proposal along with a budget analysis for 2009-10 and 2010-11 for each of the sources for your review. The proposal amounts are as follows:
IDEA – $6,199,552
IDEA EC – $293,082
Title I – $5,161,444
Salary Savings
The funding proposals would increase FTE’s and include funding sources during the two year period of the ARRA funds

The proposal includes quite a bit of professional development, such as $400,000 for dual language immersion, $1.48M for 4K staff and $456,000 for 4K furniture and $100,000 for talented & gifted assessment.
Plan B, without 4K spending, includes $1,150,000 for professional development in the following areas: Topics include universal design, differentiation, mental health,
inclusive practices, autism, and quality IEPs.

KIPP 15th Anniversary Gala Photos, Videos, Notes & Links and The Case for School Reform

Knowledge is Power Program

Video, second video
Whitney Tilson photos.
Tilson’s slide presentation on the “Critical Need for School Reform – PDF

A middle school for the artist

Jessica Jordan:

An educational dream pitched by three Hall County teachers takes flight Monday when 120 students and six teachers come together for the first day of school at the da Vinci Academy.
The pilot program provides innovative learning opportunities for gifted students with a penchant for the arts and sciences. But that’s only half of the reason it’s making a splash with educators across the Southeast. The program also will operate at about 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost per student compared to a traditional middle school, Hall County school Superintendent Will Schofield said.
Though states have made unprecedented cuts to public school funds, educators are trying to make the most of every penny while pushing programs that engage students and get results.
Schofield said the da Vinci Academy is a great example of how schools can do more with less.
“I think it truly is some Renaissance thinking is these difficult times,” he said. “It’s the exciting side of chaotic and difficult times.
That’s when you see the best in people and that’s when you see the worst in people, and I think what we’re seeing is the best in terms of innovative thinking, new ways of doing something that we’ve done the same way for a long time.

Madison Public Schools’ Arts education gets needed support

Anne Katz & Barbara Schrank, co-chairwomen, MMSD Arts Task Force, via a kind reader’s email:

Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.
The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison’s public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students’ talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.

1 Year Summary of Madison’s Implementation of “Standards Based Report Cards”

28K PDF Cover Memo from Teaching & Learning Director Lisa Wachtel and Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools
Teachers’ interpretations of standards-based grading and reporting: Learning a new language and culture – 511K PDF by Sara Hagen. Hagen will speak at the District’s upcoming leadership conference [100K PDF]:

[She] recently completed a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her Master’s thesis project, she interviewed and surveyed MMSD middle school teachers about the first semester of implementation of standards-based grading. Ms. Hagen is a National Board Certified Teacher of Spanish, which she taught at the high school and middle school levels in Bloomington, Indiana, and Chantilly, Virginia, for eight years.
First Year Implementation Issues and Continual Improvement Efforts [300K PDF] by Teaching & Learning Director Lisa Wachtel.
Survey responses & comments [1.4MB PDF] by Melissa Sherfinski, who is working on her PhD. at the University of Wisconsin School of Education

Notes and links on “Standards Based Report Cards” here.

Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad’s memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:

Background
Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:

Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;

The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;

An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;

Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and

A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.

Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD’s commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.
MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:

(more…)

Charter Schools Eschew Teacher Tenure

Danielle Williamson:

The agreement between teachers and management at the North Central Charter Essential School is similar to one that may be found at almost any traditional public school. There is a salary scale with lanes and steps, and stipends for extra duties. Some teachers serve as representatives for the larger group in a “collaborative bargaining process.”
Absent from the school’s teachers’ employee handbook, however, is a clause that gives veteran teachers job protection. “Professional status,” more commonly known as tenure, doesn’t exist there. Everyone is an employee at will, and a teacher of 10 years can be dismissed as easily as a first-year educator.
“If a teacher is not a fit, we have to be honest about that,” said Patricia May, principal of the Fitchburg school. “That’s not working for anybody.”
Having no union affiliations appears to be working for the area’s charter schools. Despite a full-court press from the state’s second largest teachers union, charter schools in Central Massachusetts haven’t hopped onto the union bandwagon. Statewide, only one charter school has signed up with the American Federation of Teachers in the two years the organization has been approaching charters, which are publicly financed but operate outside of school districts.

Federal Tax Receipts Decline 18%, Dane County (WI) Tax Delinquencies Grow

Stephen Ohlemacher:

The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
“Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Channel3000.com recently spoke with Dane County Treasurer Dave Worzala on the growing property tax delinquencies:

While there aren’t any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.
Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
“It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren’t here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable,” said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
“I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they’re going to have a harder time paying their taxes,” said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. “But I’m retired, so we budget as we go.”
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.

Resolution of the Madison School District – Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District’s $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).

A Chance to Say Yes The GOP and Obama Can Agree on School Reform

Richard Bond, Bill McInturff & Alex Bratty:

Many issues have created a “politics as usual” atmosphere on Capitol Hill recently, but when it comes to educating our children, it appears President Obama and the Republican Party share some views. This commonality of interest provides the president and the GOP a rare opportunity to cooperate on a major issue.
In a March address on education, the president proposed several reforms, three of which the Republican Party has been championing for years.
First, he called for merit pay for teachers:
“Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools.”
Next, he called for removing ineffective teachers:
“Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance . . . but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
Finally, he called for the expansion of public charter schools:

Time for Oregon schools to stretch

John Tapogna:

Will Oregon be among the recipients of the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion in stimulus package money that the Obama administration has set aside to encourage new ways of teaching?
Lost in the clatter of the health-care debate, President Obama quietly launched his plan to transform America’s schools in late July. Fed up with sluggish learning gains and stubborn gaps in achievement between rich and poor kids, the administration has leveraged the stimulus package to create several well-endowed venture funds aimed at entrepreneurial states, school districts and nonprofits eager to test new ways of teaching.
The grand prize is the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion being dangled in front of perhaps as few as a dozen states. The prospect of being among this elite group of innovators has unleashed a cascade of legislation across the country as lawmakers scrambled to align state laws with the Obama vision. Already the fund has altered the K-12 landscape before it’s awarded a single dollar.

The Tradeoff Between Teacher Wages and Layoffs to Meet Budget Cuts

Marguerite Roza via a Deb Britt email:

School districts faced with large budget gaps could avoid some or all teacher layoffs by rolling back salaries. While this option may not work for all districts, a new analysis shows that district officials–and teachers unions–could both serve students and teachers by trimming classroom pay.
Marguerite Roza based her analysis on the fact that 93 percent of school districts in the U.S. negotiate and structure teacher-pay according to a fixed salary schedule, consisting of annual as well as step increases. Step increases average 3.16 percent a year. The annual increase for the salary schedules she calculated at the average Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 1997–2007 period at 2.87 percent. The total for the two, at 6.03 percent, may not make sense this year, says Roza.
In a simple chart, she provides five possible decision-options showing how, if salaries are rolled back, fewer teachers get laid off and class sizes increase by fewer students.

Three-Minute Fiction: Our Winner Is…

NPR:

In June, we appealed to your inner author, asking you to send us original works of fiction that could be read in three minutes or less. And, man, did your inner authors respond! We received more than 5,000 submissions to our Three-Minute Fiction writing contest.
Now, series guide and literary critic James Wood of The New Yorker has picked our first winner: Molly Reid of Fort Collins, Colo. Reid is waiting tables this summer, but during the school year, she teaches freshman composition and literature at Colorado State University.
Wood says that Reid was an early entrant whose work held strong against the hundreds of stories that followed. The narrator of her piece, “Not That I Care,” observes a neighbor repeatedly snatching ducks from the street. The missing ducks become part of the narrator’s own reflections on loss.

Wisconsin Governor Doyle going after student performance, federal money

Mark Pitsch:

Gov. Jim Doyle is planning a series of education reforms designed to boost student achievement and help the state compete for billions of dollars in federal school improvement grants.
The changes include better tracking of student performance, using test data to help evaluate teachers and raising high school graduation requirements.
“We’re going to be working very hard in my administration with the Legislature, with educators in the state, to put together really, I think, a transformational application that will help Wisconsin education for years to come,” Doyle said in a recent interview.
But it’s unclear whether the state would even qualify for the federal money — part of a $4.35 billion program dubbed “Race to the Top” — because of a state law that bars using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Draft rules for the program prohibit states that have such laws in place from receiving the money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week called Wisconsin’s law “ridiculous.”

Wisconsin Representative Mike Huebsch:

Cut education funding by 3 percent. Check.
Make sure teachers’ raises aren’t jeopardized by the cuts. Check.
Pretend property taxes won’t go up. Check.
Begin dismantling Wisconsin’s School Choice Program. Check.
Jeopardize Wisconsin’s eligibility for new federal education funding. Check.
This is the state of public education in Wisconsin under the leadership of self-proclaimed education governor Jim Doyle and Democrat majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
Governor Doyle and Democrat lawmakers wrote a state budget that cuts school funding $294 million, raises property taxes $1.5 billion, repeals the Qualified Economic Offer, says local school boards can’t consider the recession, job loss rates, and property values when negotiating teacher compensation and makes politically-motivated changes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (School Choice).
Now the governor shrugs off reports that Wisconsin won’t be eligible to participate in the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top grant program, while Democrat lawmakers remain predictably silent. Approximately $4.35 billion will be doled out to states with plans for reforming public education. Under the proposed application guidelines released by the United States Department of Education last week, only Wisconsin, New York and California would be barred from receiving federal funds.

School spotlight: Summer program combines science and black history

Pamela Cotant:

For the last 14 years, a summer program has found a way to make learning about a particular area of science fun while also exposing elementary and middle school students to blacks who have made a difference in that field.
This year, flight was the theme for the program, called a Celebration of Life. In general, about two-thirds of those in attendance are returning participants like Synovia Knox, who also had four siblings who attended.
“Each year I would leave wanting to be someone else,” said Knox, who has attended since third grade. “They just make everyone seem so interesting.”
The annual event is one of the programs put on by the African American Ethnic Academy of Madison. The site of the program and its co-sponsor is the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute, the non-profit affiliate of Promega, which offers the use of its Fitchburg facilities.
The program, which is held during the morning for two weeks, is divided into two sessions — one for students entering grades three through five and another for students going into grades six through eight. A total of 28 students attended this year and the organizers hope the numbers will grow, said Barbara Bielec, who helps run the Celebration of Life as the K-12 program coordinator for the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute.

Promega offered the Madison School District free land in the mid-1990’s for a tech oriented Middle School. The offer was turned down and the proposed school eventually became Wright Middle School.

Washington Steps Up on Schools

New York Times Editorial, via a kind reader’s email:

The federal government talks tough about requiring the states to improve schools in exchange for education aid. Then it caves in to political pressure and rewards mediocrity when it’s time to enforce the bargain. As a result, the country has yet to achieve many of the desperately needed reforms laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and other laws dating back to the 1990’s.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is ready to break with that tradition as he prepares to distribute the $4.3 billion discretionary pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. States that have dragged their feet or actively resisted school reform in the past are screaming about the rigorous but as yet preliminary criteria by which their grant applications will be judged.
President Obama gave fair notice of this shift in a speech earlier this year, when he talked about pressuring the states to do better by the country’s 50 million schoolchildren. But Mr. Duncan will need cover from the White House to weather the storm.
The long and detailed list of criteria just released by the administration includes a fine-grained evaluation process under which states get points for reforms they have made and points for changes they promise to make — and conditional funding that can be revoked if they don’t make them. The process finally allows the federal government to reward states that have made progress and to bypass slackers.

True democracy is not just about taking part

John Kay:

Like most people, I want to eat rich desserts, but do not want to get fat. I want to enjoy a secure retirement, but I do not want to save towards it. I want lower taxes, and I also want better public services. Of course I do. It would be odd if I did not. Irrationality does not lie in wanting inconsistent things. Irrationality is being unwilling to make choices between inconsistent things.
There was a time when crowds would wait for hours for a once in a lifetime opportunity to see and hear William Gladstone. But technology has steadily increased possibilities for the public to participate in the political process. It has not, however, created a corresponding increase in the time the public wants to devote to the political process. If anything, the opposite: by offering so many other ways to spend leisure time and by spreading prosperity, the modern age has reduced the intensity of public commitment to politics.
Many people take the view that more avenues for participation make democracy more real. They are excited by the opportunities offered by the internet: Barack Obama was elected after a campaign that made extensive use of computers and mobile phones. Our leaders blog and twitter, receive online petitions and e-mails, consult focus groups and monitor opinion polls. If the measure of democracy is the frequency of communication between politicians and their voters, then society is steadily becoming more democratic.
But these developments do not make society better governed. If these methods of participation are extensive, they are also superficial. If democracy is about delivering what the electorate wants, it is not clear that policies that respond to every angry headline in the Daily Mail achieve that result. Popular esteem for politicians and public approval of political decisions have declined, not increased. When Winston Churchill was advised to keep his ear to the ground, he commented that the public would not have much respect for leaders observed in that position. Politicians planning appearances on YouTube might reflect on his advice.

Ineligible Players on Madison High School’s Basketball Teams, Madison West High’s Coach and Athletic Director is Out

Rob Schultz:

Last March, the Regents forfeited a WIAA tournament upset victory over Baraboo for using a player who had an unexcused absence prior to the game.
Hodge, 46, who was the boys basketball coach, athletic director and minority service coordinator at his alma mater, claimed West principal Ed Holmes and school district administrators used that instance to railroad him out of West. He said it was a retaliatory move for rebutting the district’s stance during a controversial arbitration hearing in 2008.
“It had nothing to do with my coaching,” said Hodge, who took the Regents to the WIAA state tournament twice, won six WIAA regional titles and two Big Eight Conference titles during his tenure. He had a 121-149 overall record.
“It was all about the theory of retaliating against me because I went public about how the district treats its employees if they have an issue.”
Data provided to The Capital Times and Hodge from an anonymous source showed there were 82 unexcused absences logged by players from his team that went unpunished.
Madison East had 117 unexcused absences that would have forced the Purgolders to relinquish 15 victories and a regional title, while Madison La Follette had 73 unexcused absences and Madison Memorial 12, according to the source’s data.
According to the data, Memorial — which won the WIAA Division 1 state title — had only one case of an ineligible player scoring in a game.
The source also has data that claimed that some of East’s unexcused absences were changed to excused absences after Hodge lodged a complaint about all the schools’ unexcused absences with the WIAA March 9.
Hodge gave the data he received before and after he lodged the complaint with the WIAA to John Matthews, the executive director of Madison Teachers, Inc. He said Matthews brought the data to the attention of MMSD superintendent Dan Nerad.
The district then investigated Hodge’s assertions and recently sent its conclusions to the WIAA, according to the WIAA’s Dave Anderson, “Their findings did not reveal substance to the allegations that were made,” said Anderson, who will begin duties as the WIAA’s executive director Monday.

Special Education Vouchers

Jay Greene:

In 1975, Congress passed legislation giving students with disabilities the right to an appropriate education at public expense. But having a right is only as good as your ability to enforce it. In New York City and elsewhere, public schools regularly delay and frustrate disabled students seeking appropriate services–everything from tutoring to speech therapy to treatment of severe disabilities–making their federally protected right all but meaningless. Rather than compelling families with disabled children to contend with obstinate public school systems, we should give them the option of purchasing the services they need for their children from a private provider. That is, we should give them special-ed vouchers–good for the same amount of money that we already spend on them in the public school system–that they could then use to pay for private school. Not only would this bring better services to disabled New York students; it could also save the public money.
Many parents of disabled students have a lot of trouble ensuring that public schools give their kids an appropriate education. The parents have to know what they’re entitled to, and most do not. They must negotiate services from the local schools–but the schools are experienced in these negotiations, while the parents generally aren’t, so the schools often get away with minimizing their responsibilities. And even if parents win at the negotiating table, getting the schools actually to deliver on their promises is enormously difficult.

Education in Chicago: Why School Reform Won’t Happen

Bill Sweetland:

At the end of my last blog, I said that in my next post I would show why so-called “school reform” has become another empty abstraction, a slogan for politicians. I said I would demonstrate why there is no chance that real school reform will ever happen in Chicago. Here are half a dozen reasons:
(1) For 50 years we — the public, the critics of education, the education establishment itself — have known that schooling is in deep trouble, and not just public instruction in ghetto schools. Yet no substantive reforms have been carried out.
Everything has been proposed, everything tried — several times. The latest cure-all promises tough, real action and painless, revolutionary, unprecedented, serendipitous, timely benefits. Its results have proven to be mixed — and puny.
The more we talk, the greater the uncertainty about what to do grows. The more ideas put forward, the more difficult practical action becomes. The more we “innovate,” the more resistant and hardened the problems of removing ignorance become.

More on Wisconsin, California and New York’s Law Against Tying Teacher Pay to Class Performance

PBS NewsHour:

“If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments, if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom, if you turn around failing schools, your state can win a ‘Race to the Top’ grant that will not only help students out-compete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said.
Some reforms are controversial.
The reforms touted by the Obama administration have supporters and detractors.
California, New York and Wisconsin have laws against tying teacher pay to how their students perform in class. Teacher unions, which are organizations with teacher members that use collective bargaining to get better pay and benefits, are also wary of teacher pay reform.
“The devil really is in the details. On the issues where you have differences, you try to work those out,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Washington Post.
As head of schools in Chicago, Secretary Duncan started a program that paid some teachers according to how their students performed to see if it worked.

Join me at the REACH Awards Day next Wed 8/5; Education Reform’s Moon Shot; A $4B Push for Better Schools; Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms; President Obama Discusses New ‘Race to the Top’ Program

1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I’m delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Here’s an excerpt from Arne Duncan’s Op Ed in the Washington Post from Friday (full text below — well worth reading):

Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.
— To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
— To close the data gap — which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction — states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
— To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals — and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren’t up to the job.
— Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.

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Should Higher Education Be Free?

Max Page:

Andrew Delbanco effectively describes the tragedy that is unfolding at American universities: after a generation of expanding of opportunity, both private and public colleges are increasingly out of reach of the lower classes [“The Universities in Trouble,” NYR, May 14]. Unfortunately, Delbanco avoids the solution that is sitting right before him: free higher education. That’s the way most of the civilized world deals with the cost of higher education. And we have past and present examples in our own nation of providing free higher education–the GI Bill, CUNY, California’s community colleges, Georgia’s HOPE scholarships. My father went from immigrant to soldier to Ph.D. in the space of a decade, thanks to the GI Bill.
Would this be insanely expensive? The total cost of sending every single public university undergraduate to college for a year (that group makes up 75 percent of the total college enrollment) was $39.36 billion in 2006-2007. That’s not chicken feed, but it’s less than the bailout amount for two large banks, or the cost of three or four months in Iraq.

Nearly 75% of DC Residents Want Vouchers: Where Does Washington, DC Go in K-12 Education?

Paul DePerna & Dan Lips:

Historically, the District of Columbia has struggled to improve the educational opportunities available to students living in the nation’s capital. Over the past decade, District residents have witnessed signifi cant changes in the D.C. education system. New reforms have included the creation of nearly sixty public charter schools on approximately ninety campuses; Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s overhaul of the traditional public school system; and the creation of the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
As policymakers in District government and on Capitol Hill consider the future of these and other education reform initiatives, attention should be paid to the views of D.C. citizens. In July 2009, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice commissioned Braun Research, Inc. to conduct a statistically representative survey of 1,001 registered voters in the District of Columbia.
Why conduct a survey on education issues in the District of Columbia? Why now?
This is a critical moment for the District and its residents. With so many proposals being suggested in the public domain – to initiate, expand, scale back, or eliminate programs and policies – it can be dizzying to policy wonks and casual observers alike. We hope that this survey can bring a pause for perspective. Each of the organizations endorsing this survey’s fi eldwork felt it was important to take a step back and refl ect on the wishes of
D.C. citizens regarding their city’s education system.

Joanne has more.

Don Severson & Vicki McKenna Discuss the Madison School District’s $12M Budget Deficit

26MB mp3 audio file.

Madison School District Strategic Planning Update, with Links

Madison Board of Education President Arlene Silveira, via email:

TO: MMSD Strategic Planning Committee
Good afternoon,
I am writing to provide you with a Board update on the MMSD strategic plan. Before getting into details, I again want to thank you for all of the time and effort you put into development of the plan. It is appreciated.
On July 21, the Board of Education held our second meeting to review the strategic planning document that you, our community-based strategic planning committee, submitted. The Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan. The mission, beliefs and parameters were approved with no changes to the plan you submitted. Some language in the strategic objectives was modified for clarity and completeness.

Mission (see below)
Beliefs (http://drupal.madison.k12.wi.us/files/strategic%20plan%20complete%20doc%20REV%20june%209.pdf Page 4)
Parameters (http://drupal.madison.k12.wi.us/files/strategic%20plan%20complete%20doc%20REV%20june%209.pdfPage 4)
Strategic Objectives (see below)

We have not yet approved any of the action plans.

Much more on the Strategic Planning Process here.

A story from the trenches — send me more!; DAVID STEINER ELECTED COMMISSIONER OF EDUC FOR NY; As Charter Schools Unionize; Must unions always block innovation in public schools?; NEA Discovers It Is a Labor Union; So You Want to Be a Teacher for America?

1) If you read anything I send out this year, let this be it. One of my friends responded to the survey I sent around a couple of weeks ago by emailing me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he’s no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read — and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what REALLY goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized, so please share yours with me:

Whitney,
Thanks so much for putting this survey together. It brought back some memories well beyond the few questions about what it was like to teach in the South Bronx with TFA back in the late nineties. I want to emphasize here that I no longer teach in the Bronx, so I have little idea how things have changed and have seen the current Administration take a number of important steps that may be making a great impact. I’m not close enough to the ground to know, but my guess is that there are still plenty of schools in the Bronx and in every other low-income community in the country that reflect some of the miserable stuff I saw in my school. You should really start collecting a book of stories like these. Among all the people I know who’ve done TFA, these stories are just a few among many sad ones.
As I filled out the survey, I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. “Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?” This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher’s screams, the administration’s ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like “these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.”) once told me “I call them God’s stupidest people” referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran’s Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). “Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans.”
Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that “as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don’t care what else you do.” This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever. And I was a new teacher with nothing but TFA’s Summer Institute under my belt. The Principal proceeded to get a law degree while sitting in his office ignoring the school. When we went to the Assistant Superintendent to report that the school was systematically cheating on the 3rd grade test (i.e., the third grade team met with the principal and APs, planned the cheating carefully, locked their doors and covered their windows and gave answers) she told the principal to watch his back. A few months later, inspectors came from the state. After observing our mostly horrible classes for a full day, they told us how wonderful we were doing and that they had just come down to see what they could replicate in other schools to produce scores like ours. And the list goes on and on.
Like when I asked the principal to bring in one of the district’s special education specialists to assess two of my lowest readers, both of whom had fewer than 25 sight-words (words they could recognize on paper) in the 3rd grade, he did. She proceeded to hand one of the students a list of words that the child couldn’t read and tell her to write them over again. Then she went to gossip with the Principal. After explaining to him in gory detail, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENT, that she had just been “dealing with a case where a father had jumped off a roof nearby and committed double-suicide with his 8 year old daughter in his arms”, she collected the sheet with no words on it, patted the child on the head and left. No IEP was filed nor was I allowed to pursue further action through official channels (I lobbied the mother extensively on my own). I never asked for her to come back to assess the other student.
Our Union Rep was said to have tried to push another teacher down a flight of stairs. The same Union Rep, while I was tutoring a child, cursed out a fellow teacher in the room next door at the top of her lungs so the child I was tutoring could hear every word. When I went to address her about it, the other teacher had to restrain the Rep as she threatened to physically attack me. And when the cheating allegations were finally take up by city investigators, the same Union Rep was sent to a cushy desk job in the district offices. I hear that most of the people I’m referencing here are long gone now, and some of them actually got pushed out of the system, but how rare can this story really be given the pitiful results we see from so many of our nation’s poorest schools and how far the system goes to protect horrible teachers and administrators like the ones I worked with?
At the same time as all of this was happening, by the way, the few good teachers in the building often became beaten down and disillusioned. One of the best in my building was consistenly punished for trying to make her corner of the school a better place for learning. They put her in a basement corner with no ventilation, no windows and nothing but a 6-foot-high cubicle-style partition separating her from the other 5 classrooms in the basement. After fighting the good fight she went to teach in the suburbs. When I got a financial firm to donate 20 computers, the principal said he didn’t have the resources to get them setup for use and refused to allow them into the school. When I had my students stage a writing campaign to get the vacant lot behind the building turned into a playground, the principal wanted me silenced.
The saddest thing about the whole damn mess was that our K-3 kids still REALLY WANTED TO LEARN. Every day they came eager for knowledge. And every day this cabal of cynicism, racism and laziness did everything within their powers to drain it out of them. It was unreal. Don’t get me wrong. There were some good teachers there. And some well meaning, but poor teachers. But in many classrooms, the main lesson learned was that school became something to dread, many adults thought you were capable of very little, and some adults couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger.
I hope if any of the good, hard-working teachers who fought so hard to rid the school of this mess read this, they’ll know I’m not lumping them in with the rest. But the problem was, when I addressed the worst practices in the school at a staff meeting, the bad teachers laughed and the good teachers took it the hardest and thought I was criticizing them.
Thanks again for the survey. Let’s make these stories known.

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WIBA’s Mitch Henck Discusses the Madison School District’s Budget with Don Severson

24MB mp3 audio file. Mitch and Don discuss the Madison School District’s $12M budget deficit, caused by a decline in redistributed tax dollars from the State of Wisconsin and generally flat enrollment. Topics include: Fund 80, health care costs, four year old kindergarten, staffing, property taxes (which may increase to make up for the reduced state tax dollar funding).
Madison School District Board President Arlene Silveira sent this message to local Alders Saturday:

Good afternoon,
Below is an update of the MMSD budget situation.
As you know, the biennial budget was signed into law at the end of June. The budget had numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:

Repeal of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO)
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $14720million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits

The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state creates the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services for the next 2 years at a minimum.
EFFECT OF STATE BUDGET ON MMSD

Decrease in state aid: $9.2 million
Reduction in revenue: $2.8 million (decrease in the per pupil increase from $275 to $200/pupil)

Total decrease: projected to to be $12 million
Last May, the Madison Board of Education passed a preliminary 2009-10 budget that maintained programs and services with a modest property tax increase. The groundwork for our budget was laid last fall when the Board pledged our commitment to community partnership and the community responded by supporting a referendum that allowed us to exceed revenue caps to stabilize funding for our schools. Two months later, with programs and staff in place for next year, we find ourselves faced with State funding cuts far exceeding our worst fears.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
We are in this position in part because Wisconsin’s school funding formulas are so complicated that the legislature and supporting agencies did not accurately predict the budget’s impact on school districts. State aid to Madison and many other districts was cut by 15%. In practical terms, coupled with additional State cuts of $2.8 million, MMSD is saddled with State budget reductions of $12 million this year.
This grim situation is a result of a poor economy, outdated information used by the legislature, and a Department of Public Instruction policy that penalizes the district for receiving one-time income (TIF closing in Madison). Federal stimulus funds will, at best, delay cuts for one year. We are left with a gaping budget deficit when many fiscal decisions for the upcoming school year cannot be reversed.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
We are working on strategies and options and are looking carefully at the numbers to ensure our solutions do not create new problems. We will evaluate options for dealing with the budget in early August.
To repair our budget, we are working with legislators and the DPI to appeal decisions that have placed us in this position. We continue to look for changes in resource management to find additional cost reductions. We are seeking ways to offset the impact of school property tax increases if we need to increase our levy.
At the same time, we pledge that we will not pass the full cost of the cuts along as increased property taxes. We will not resort to massive layoffs of teachers and support staff, t he deadline having passed to legally reduce our staff under union contracts.
I will be back in touch after our August meeting when we have made decisions on our path forward.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Arlene Silveira
Madison Board of Education
608-516-8981

The Dad Who Holds Schools to the Rules

Emily Alpert:

David Page says the problem is that parents are on their own. Teachers have a union. So do principals. School board members get to vote plans up or down and top administrators make decisions in the salmon-pink offices of San Diego Unified.
But parents are often too intimidated to speak up or too star-struck with school staffers to question them, Page said. Education is a world loaded with its own numbing lingo — categorical funding, supplement not supplant, program improvement — and it seems overwhelming to understand it, let alone to fight it.
“They think, ‘They make six figures and they’re educated. Who am I to second guess them?'” Page said.
Yet Page has done just that. If parents at the poorer schools in San Diego Unified did have a union, he might be their leader, with all the fans and foes that entails. Seventeen years after the father of six first walked into a parents’ meeting at Ross Elementary in Kearny Mesa, unsure of his rights and unfamiliar with the jargon, Page has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.
He is one of the few parents across the state that jets to Sacramento for meetings of the state Board of Education, pores over complex regulations on education spending, and explains it all to befuddled parents at the school district committee that oversees funds for children in poverty, which he has led for six years. Page also leads the nonprofit California Association of Compensatory Education and sits on the board of the Family Area Network, which advises the state on parent involvement.

As More Charter Schools Unionize, Educators Debate the Effect

Sam Dillon:

Dissatisfied with long hours, churning turnover and, in some cases, lower pay than instructors at other public schools, an increasing number of teachers at charter schools are unionizing.
Labor organizing that began two years ago at seven charter schools in Florida has proliferated over the last year to at least a dozen more charters from Massachusetts and New York to California and Oregon.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation’s 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools.
“Charter schools have been too successful for the unions to ignore,” said Elizabeth D. Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School, where teachers voted last month to unionize 3 of its 12 campuses.
President Obama has been especially assertive in championing charter schools. On Friday, he and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced a competition for $4.35 billion in federal financing for states that ease restrictions on charter schools and adopt some charter-like standards for other schools — like linking teacher pay to student achievement.

Can Wisconsin go from ‘ridiculous’ to ‘impressive’ in education?

Alan Borsuk:

Simply ridiculous.
If you wanted to gain good standing with some guy giving away a mountain of money, you would probably be alarmed if you heard him use that language publicly about you.
You’d have choices at that point. You could get upset and tell him to keep his stupid money. You could try to convince him that you weren’t ridiculous without really changing your ways. Or you could change your ways.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that guy right now. Wisconsin is who he’s talking about. And it’s certainly clear that only the third option is going to please him. He wants change.
The immediate subject is $4.35 billion that Duncan and the education department will be awarding to states this year and next. Called the Race to the Top program, the goal is to help states that are leading the way in innovation and commitment to improving achievement, particularly among low-income and minority students.
President Barack Obama and Duncan on Friday unveiled proposed rules on how the money will be awarded. One of the firmest: “To be eligible under this program, a state must not have any legal, statutory or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”
Wisconsin is one of the few states that have such a rule, right there in state law.
Or, as Duncan put it in a New York Times interview: “Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that’s simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why.”

So You Want to Be a Teacher for America?

Cecilia Capuzzi Simon:

At 50, Paula Lopez Crespin doesn’t fit the Teach for America demographic of high-achieving college senior. The program rarely draws adults eligible for AARP membership. In fact, just 2 percent of recruits are over 30.
But what Ms. Crespin lacks in youth, she makes up for in optimism, idealism and what those in Teach for America call “relentless pursuit of results.” Ms. Crespin beat out tens of thousands of applicants to get where she is: fresh off her first year teaching math and science at Cole Arts and Science Academy in a gang-riddled section of Denver.
Many friends thought she was crazy to give up a career in banking for a $32,000 pay cut teaching in an urban elementary school. But the real insanity, Ms. Crespin insists, would have been remaining in a job she “just couldn’t stomach anymore,” and surrendering a dream of doing “something meaningful with my life.”
These days, crazy never looked so normal. Teaching has always been a top choice for a second career. Of the 60,000 new teachers hired last year, more than half came from another line of work, according to the National Center for Education Information. Most bypassed traditional teacher education (for career changers, a two-year master’s degree) for fast-track programs like Teach for America. But unemployment, actual or feared, is now causing professionals who dismissed teaching early on to think better of its security, flexibility (summers off, the chance to be home with children) and pension. Four of Ms. Crespin’s colleagues at Cole are career changers, ages 46 to 54, including a former information technology executive and a psychologist.

Teach for America, the teacher-training program that has evolved into a Peace Corps alternative for a generation bred on public service, is highly competitive and becoming more so: this year, a record 35,178 applied — a 42 percent increase over 2008 — to fill 4,100 slots. Eleven percent of all new Ivy League graduates applied.

GAO Sees Progress, Problems After D.C. Schools Takeove

Bill Turque:

The District’s struggling public school system has made significant progress during two years of mayoral control, but lack of planning and transparency has hindered some reforms, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported Thursday.
The report, requested by the Senate subcommittee that oversees District affairs, praised Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee for “bold steps” taken to close under-enrolled schools, improve test scores and develop teachers’ skills and methods of monitoring their performance.
But Cornelia M. Ashby, director of education and workforce issues for GAO, told the Senate subcommittee that “some false steps” had hampered efforts to transform the system, which serves 45,000 students in 128 schools.

Charter schools need a shout-out in Madison action plans

Scott Milfred:

Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District’s new strategic plan and you’ll feel like you’re reading a “Where’s Waldo?” book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words “charter school” are completely absent from the strategic plan’s lengthy and important calls for action.
It’s more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin’s public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don’t produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning “Our World” in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo’s popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a “Studio School” emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district’s action plans in at least two places: under a call for more “innovative school structures,” and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to “diverse learning styles.”

I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely “one size fits all” governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.

Politically Correct Speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Education

Jay Matthews:

Michele Kerr (she tells me it is pronounced “cur”) is a hard-working educator and Web surfer who is often mean to me. This is probably a good thing. When I post something stupid, Kerr–using her nom de Internet, “Cal Lanier“–is on me like my cat chasing a vole in the backyard.
Her acidic humor is so entertaining, however, and her command of the facts so complete, that I have come to look forward to her critiques. She tends to eviscerate me whenever I embrace anti-tracking or other progressive gospel preached in education schools these days, but I learn something each time.
I wish the supervisors of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at that university’s School of Education had checked with me before they decided Kerr’s views and her blogging were inappropriate for a student in their program. They appeared to have decided her anti-progressive views were disrupting their classes, alienating other students and proving that she and Stanford were a bad fit. Kerr says they tried to stifle both her opinions and her blog, and threatened to withhold the Masters in Education she was working toward, based on their expressed fear that she was “unsuited for the practice of teaching.”
Kerr’s eventual triumph over such embarrassingly wrong-headed political correctness is a complicated story, but worth telling. In her struggle with STEP, she exposed serious problems in the way Stanford and, I suspect, other education schools, treat independent thinkers, particularly those who blog.
STEP retains the right to decide if a student is suited to teaching, and can deny even someone as smart and dedicated as Kerr, who has a splendid record as a tutor, a chance to work in the public schools.

Making the Grade: Madison West High School Rocket Club

MMSDTV:

Beating out 100 teams from across the country, one of the four West High Rocket Club teams won first place in the Team America Rocketry Challenge earning them a trip to the Paris Air Show.

Fabulous!

Private Schools as Charities: The war against fee-paying schools takes on new life

The Economist:

EVEN among left-wingers, few talk about banning independent schools nowadays. There are craftier ways of overhauling the education system to fight privilege. One of them hit the headlines this week when the Charity Commission published its first “public-benefit” assessment, including five private schools among its chosen charitable specimens. Two–Highfield Priory in Lancashire and S. Anselm’s in Derbyshire–failed the tough new requirement to show that they are helping the general public. The schools have a year to come up with a plan to get on track, or risk being taken over or closed down.
For centuries education has been considered a charitable activity, with no questions asked. In 2006 the rules were changed. Under the Charities Act of that year, schools are no longer entitled to the tax breaks that charitable status confers simply because they provide teaching. Instead, they have to demonstrate that they are actively benefiting the public. It has fallen to the regulator to interpret and apply the law: the commission says charities that charge fees, such as private schools, must ensure that “people in poverty” can use their services. The two schools that the commission flunked did not provide those who cannot afford the fees “sufficient opportunity to benefit”.

California threatened with loss of funds if it doesn’t use test scores in evaluating teachers

Jason Felch & Jason Song:

U.S. education secretary is expected to withhold millions of dollars in education stimulus money if the state doesn’t comply with his demand.
California could lose out on millions of federal education dollars unless legislators change a law that prevents it from using student test scores to measure teachers’ performance, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to announce in a speech today.
California has among the worst records of any state in collecting and using data to evaluate teachers and schools.
Moreover, a 2006 law that created a teacher database explicitly prohibited the use of student test scores to hold teachers accountable on a statewide basis, although it did not mention local districts.
Only a few of the state’s nearly 1,000 districts evaluate teachers by using their students’ scores, though a dozen more are considering such moves, according to state officials. Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest, does not grade teachers based on student performance.
Data-driven school reform is a major focus of the Obama administration’s education policies.

Obama to unveil $4 billion school improvement plan

Reuters:

President Barack Obama is set to announce on Friday a competition for $4 billion in federal grants to improve academic achievement in U.S. schools, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Obama wants states to use funds from the competition, dubbed the “Race to the Top,” to ease limits on so-called charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and move toward common U.S. academic standards, the Post said.
Charter schools receive public funding but generally are exempt from some state or local rules and regulations. They are operated as an alternative to traditional public schools.
“What we’re saying here is, if you can’t decide to change these practices, we’re not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we’re not going to send those dollars there,” Obama told the Post in an interview.

Michael Shear and Nick Anderson have more.

Proposed “Common Core Standards”

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a joint effort by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in partnership with Achieve, ACT and the College Board [10MB PDF]:

Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country committed to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills. The NGA Center and CCSSO are coordinating the process to develop these standards and have created an expert validation committee to provide an independent review of the common core state standards, as well as the grade-by-grade standards. The college and career ready standards are expected to be completed in July 2009. The grade-by-grade standards work is expected to be completed in December 2009.

“>10MB Proposed standards pdf document.

Madison School District Strategic Planning Update

On July 21, the Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan.

Mission
Beliefs
Parameters
Strategic Objectives

We have not yet approved any of the action plans.
New Mission: Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Strategic Objectives:

Student
We will ensure that all students reach their highest potential and we will eliminate achievement gaps where they exist. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, raise the bar for all students, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates.
Curriculum
To improve academic outcomes for all students and to ensure student engagement and student support, we will strengthen comprehensive curriculum, instruction and assessment systems in the District.
Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage and support our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retention of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
Resource/Capacity
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and rigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
Organization/Systems
We will promote, encourage, and maintain systems of practice that will create safe and productive learning and work environments that will unify and strengthen our schools, programs, departments and services as well as the District as a whole.

Next steps:
We did not approve any action plans. We went around the table and listed our priority areas and the Administration will develop action plans to support those areas and bring them back to the Board in August. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion around the action plans brought forward. We have structured our process this way to ensure we keep moving forward as the plan is Important for setting the future direction of the District.
Arlene

OP hopefuls meet for first time, critique Jim Doyle’s tenure, make their cases to be governor.

Marc Eisen & Charlie Sykes via a kind reader’s email:

Sykes: The Milwaukee Public Schools have been an educational and fiscal disaster for a long time. Is it time to blow up MPS? Is it time to consider a state takeover?
Walker: It’s time to do something dramatic. Whether or not it’s a state takeover–Tommy Thompson talked about that a decade ago. An alternative would be to break it up into smaller districts. When you start talking about anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 kids, it becomes very difficult for anybody to get their hands around it.
I would lift the lid entirely on school choice. I would allow schools throughout the county to [participate]. Take Thomas Moore, which has a very successful program, but can’t currently operate [as a choice school] because part of its property is in St. Francis. I would allow for expansion, and I would lift some of the limits on charter schools,
Neumann: There is dramatic change needed in education. What’s going on in policy in Madison right now is that more rules, regulations and red tape are being thrown at our choice and charter schools so that less and less dollars get to the classroom. They’re tying the hands of the innovative people in education. We need to expand the opportunity in choice and charter schools.

Madison School Proposed Board Strategic Plan Discussion – Audio

The Madison School Board discussed the proposed Strategic Plan [PDF] last evening. Listen to this discussion via this 85MB mp3 audio file. Much more on the proposed Strategic Plan here. Some recent written questions from the Board to the Administration can be found here.

India makes education compulsory and free under landmark law

Dean Nelson:

The Indian parliament has passed a bill to provide universal, free and compulsory education for all children aged between six and 14.
The law, passed more than 60 years after India won independence, has been hailed by children’s rights campaigners and educationalists as a landmark in the country’s history.
India’s failure to fund universal education until now, and its focus on higher education, have been cited as factors in its low literacy rates. More than 35 per cent of Indians are illiterate, and more than 50 per cent of its female population cannot read.
Official figures record that 50 per cent of Indian children do not go to school, and that more than 50 per cent of those who do drop out before reaching class five at the age of 11 or 12.
Campaigners say children from poor families are often discouraged by parents who need them to work, while financial obstacles are put in the way of families who would like their children to be educated. Families are often deterred by the cost of school books and uniforms.
The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill will now guarantee 25 per cent of places in private schools are reserved for poor children, establish a three-year neighbourhood school-building programme, and end civil servants’ discretion in deciding which children will be given places.

Just 3 new Milwaukee voucher schools approved

Alan Borsuk:

A board authorized by the state Legislature to control the entry of schools into Milwaukee’s controversial private school voucher program is beginning its life with a powerful statement that it will stop any school it doesn’t think is prepared to provide a quality education from getting off the ground.
The New Schools Approval Board, part of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, voted last week to give a green light to only three new voucher schools for this fall. Each of them involves an existing education program that has not received public voucher payments previously.
The board stopped 16 schools from opening, generally start-up operations that were on track to meet the requirements for opening that existed prior to this year.
Leaders of some of those organizations were angered by the decisions and say they will meet soon to consider further action, such as a lawsuit. The new state law provides no appeals process for decisions by the New Schools Approval Board.
Three schools will be the smallest number of new voucher participants in years. In the past five years, there have been between eight and 15 new schools in the voucher program each September. Combined with the closing of other schools, the total number of participating schools has stayed in the range of 120 to 125.

Singapore Math Workbook Only Purchase Discussion (No textbooks or teacher guides) at the Madison School Board

26MB mp3 audio file. Marj Passman, Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole raised a number of questions regarding the purchase of $69K worth of Singapore Math Workbooks (using Federal tax dollars via “Title 1“) without textbooks or teacher’s guides at Monday evening’s Board Meeting. The purchase proceeded, via a 5-2 vote. Ed Hughes and Beth Moss supported the Administration’s request, along with three other board members.
Related Links:

Math Task Force notes and links
Math Forum audio / video
West High School Teachers Letter to Isthmus on the Madison School District’s Math Curriculum

The Madison Math Task Force Report [3.9MB PDF] found that local elementary school teachers used the following curricular materials (page 166):

What, if anything has the Math Task Force report addressed?

Wisconsin K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Democrat State Senator Mark Miller on the recent Budget

Christian Schneider @ WPRI:

Over the weekend, Democrat State Senator Mark Miller took to the airwaves to explain what happened. Here is Miller’s (albeit clumsy) explanation of why Madison area districts are taking a big hit in this budget, from the “Here and Now” show:
Now, the pages of this blog have not been very friendly to Miller and his cohorts during the budget process. But on this one, I think he’s getting a bad rap – and explaining why helps illustrate the constant struggle the state has with the school finance formula.
(CAUTION: What follows is an attempt at explaining school aids, and may be dreadfully boring. If it gets too bad, feel free to go over and read the Dogs With Mustaches blog and come back in 15 minutes.)
Let’s look at the purpose of the school aid equalization formula. As its name suggests, it exists to “equalize” the relative wealth of districts. The theory behind the formula is that kids in property poor districts should have access to the same resources as kids in property rich districts (like Madison), even if the local district doesn’t have the same property values on which to draw. Thus (and this is a substantial generalization), the state grants more money to property poor districts and less money to property rich districts.
(For a full explanation of the complexities of the school aid formula, take about four caffeine pills and read this.)
For example, take a school district like Peshtigo, with per pupil property values of $275,466. Peshtigo receives about 81.6% of their budget from the state. On the other end of the scale, the Madison Metropolitan School District boasts property values of $844,000 per student, and thus receive about 41.25% of their budget in state aid. (Since you were wondering, the Geneva J4 school district, with per pupil property values of $3.3 million, receive the lowest in state aid, at 16.9%. Beloit gets 85.1% of their budget paid for by the state, since apparently nobody there has discovered indoor plumbing.)

Pay bump for teachers with master’s degrees could be put to better use

The Center on Reinventing Public Education via a Debra Britt email:

Seattle, WA, July 20, 2009 — In this recessionary climate of depressed revenues and budget cuts for education, school districts across the U.S. “would be foolhardy” not to rethink paying teachers for master’s degrees, according to a new report out today.
“On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement,” say education researchers Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller in their short paper, Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees.
The brief was produced jointly by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Center for American Progress.
“During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates such large sums of the average per-pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement,” say the authors.
In hard dollars, this means New York state spends an extra $416 per student (for a total of $1.121 billion a year) just because 78 percent of its teachers hold master’s degrees. In Washington state, the analogous numbers are $319 per pupil (or $330 million a year total) for the 56 percent of its teachers with a master’s. These expenditures, respectively, represent 2.78 percent and 3.30 percent of the total federal, state, and local money devoted to education in each state.
Roza and Miller chart these numbers for each state and suggest that the money now committed to the master’s bump in pay could be better spent, writing that: “Teaching candidates with salient and meaningful master’s degrees should be given preferential attention when competing for jobs, all else being equal. A master’s degree in engineering, for example, should be construed as evidence that a candidate possesses a deep understanding of a subject matter that is relevant to teaching mathematics or science.”

(more…)

How states like Illinois rig school tests to hype phony achievement

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan’s success as head of Chicago’s public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren’t what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.
Mr. Obama noted in December that “in just seven years, Arne’s boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%” and that “the dropout rate has gone down every year he’s been in charge.” But according to “Still Left Behind,” a report [158K PDF] by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, “recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning.”
Our point here isn’t to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.
The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. “State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state — and throughout Chicago — to obtain higher marks,” says the report.

Madison School District Budget Update: Wisconsin K-12 State Budget Changes

Superintendent Dan Nerad [184K PDF]:

Every two years the State of Wisconsin goes through a process to finalize a two year budget for all governmental programs. This biennial budget process is the source of the State’s commitment to public education here in Wisconsin, historically driven by legislative guidance to adhere to two-thirds funding.
The two-thirds funding has changed over recent years, but for the most part the State of Wisconsin was able to continue annual increases to public education in an attempt to keep up with rising costs within this sector.
The biennial budget was sigued into law near the end of June by Governor Jim Doyle after various proposals and with relatively few vetoes. This budget has numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:

Repeal of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO)
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $147 million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits

Each of these provisions can and Will have a very unique impact on :MMSD over the years to come. The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salaries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state is projected to create the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services fur the next two years at a minimum.
Many public and private organizations are dealing with this issue. It is perhaps a time to make lemonade out of lemons. In the MMSD’s case, getting out of the curriculum creation business (teaching & learning) and placing a renewed focus on hiring the most qualified teachers and letting them run.

D.C. Chancellor Gains Ground With Aggressive Agenda

NPR Audio:

Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is pushing forward with her efforts to turn around the local school system. Those efforts have thrust Rhee’s agenda onto a national stage, as educators across the country grapple with struggling school districts. Rhee discusses her work, which includes recently narrowing an achievement gap between white and minority students.

Connected Kids At Elite High Schools

Alexander Russo:

‘ve been ignoring the UofI clout story for weeks now, feeling like it was more of a higher ed thing than something about local high schools, but this latest story from the Tribune really caught my eye:
Half of the 616 Illinois students who received preferential treatment from 2005 to 2009 graduated from just 22 high schools, all but one in the metro area. Highland Park High had the most kids on the list, with Loyola Academy coming in second. There were only 25 kids on the clout list from CPS schools.

A Degree, At Long Last

Stephanie Lee:

Aiko (Grace) Obata Amemiya, 88, started working at a hospital in the mid-1940s, fulfilling her dream of becoming a nurse. As of Thursday, she’s on her way to fulfilling another lifelong dream: obtaining a degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
That dream was destroyed after Pearl Harbor, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, sending 110,000 Japanese-American citizens to internment camps to protect the nation “against espionage and against sabotage.” Born in the United States to parents from Akita, Japan, Amemiya was one of roughly 700 University of California students who spent those “stolen years,” as some call them, in wooden barracks with no running water or air conditioning, far away from their relatives, homes and colleges.
Now, nearly 70 years after Pearl Harbor, she and many others will get degrees from the university. The Board of Regents voted Thursday to award honorary degrees to the students who were interned, following in the footsteps of universities in Washington State and Oregon. “I’m elated for all the students that were here at Cal at that time,” said Amemiya in a phone interview. “I think it’s such an honor for all of us to be considered for an honorary degree.”
Mark Yudof, the university system president, said in a statement: “This action is long overdue and addresses an historical tragedy. To the surviving students themselves, and to their families, I want to say, ‘This is one way to apologize to you. It will never be possible to erase what happened, but we hope we can provide you a small measure of justice.’

School safety ‘insult’ to Pullman

BBC:

Several high-profile authors are to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters.
Philip Pullman, author of fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, said the idea was “ludicrous and insulting”.
Former children’s laureates Anne Fine and Michael Morpurgo have hit out at the scheme which costs £64 per person.
Officials say the checks have been misunderstood and authors will only need them if they go to schools often.
The Home Office says the change from October will help protect children.
The measure was drafted in response to recommendations made by the inquiry into the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, by school caretaker Ian Huntley.

Charter Schools Gain in Stimulus Scramble
Cash-Strapped States, Districts Signal Expansion of Public-Education Alternative Despite Some Teachers’ Strong Opposition

Rob Tomsho:

Some cash-strapped states and school districts are signaling a major expansion of charter schools to tap $5 billion in federal stimulus funds, despite strong opposition from some teachers unions.
Charter schools are typically non-unionized, publicly funded alternative schools that have been widely promoted by conservatives as a needed dose of competition in public education.
Last month, the Louisiana legislature voted to eliminate that state’s cap on new charter schools. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill expanding charter schools after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan personally lobbied Democrats who had been blocking it. And the Rhode Island legislature reversed a plan to eliminate funding for new charters after Mr. Duncan warned such a move could hurt the state’s chances for grant money.
The most striking example may be in Massachusetts. Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino — both Democrats with histories of strong labor support — are proposing new state laws that would give them broader power to overhaul troubled schools, open more charter schools and revamp collective-bargaining agreements.
Mr. Menino, who oversees the Boston schools, wants Massachusetts communities to be able to transform traditional public schools into district-controlled charter schools and link teachers’ pay to performance.
Formerly a charter-school critic, Mr. Menino said he is fed up with opposition from the Boston Teachers Union. “I’m just tired of it,” he said. “We’re losing kids.”