Events – Page 6 – School Information System

Lesson Plan in Boston Schools: Don’t Go It Alone

Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around — the teachers — and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don’t know the old staff. “We had several good teachers asked to leave,” said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. “Including my sister who’s been a special-ed teacher 22 years.”

Obama to Tout Education Efforts

Janet Adamy:

The White House, concerned about the country’s lagging college-graduation rates, is pushing a plan aimed at helping an additional eight million young adults earn college degrees in the next decade.
In a speech at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday, President Barack Obama will tout a series of measures, many implemented over the past year, designed to put more Americans through college, according to White House officials.

Senate Passes Child Nutrition Act

Andrew Martin:

The Senate on Thursday approved a long-awaited child nutrition act that intends to feed more hungry kids and make school food more nutritious, and it provides for $4.5 billion over the next decade to make that happen.
Called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, it passed the Senate unanimously and now moves on to the House, where passage is also expected. National child nutrition programs are set to expire Sept. 30.
The legislation will expand the number of low-income children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, largely by streamlining the paperwork required to receive the meals. And it will expand a program to provide after-school meals to at-risk children.

Report: Unions favored in Ohio school construction

Julie Carr Smyth:

An official who oversees school building projects in Ohio abused his authority in handing out construction contracts, the state watchdog said in a Thursday report.
Ohio School Facilities Commission chief Richard Murray gave unions favored status and joined labor representatives in “arm-twisting sessions” with local school districts, according to the report by Inspector General Tom Charles.
The report also says Murray backed a union-friendly project-labor agreement worth $37 million that would result in payments to a union to which Murray still belongs and to his former union employer, Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust, known as LECET. The work would take place at the Ohio Schools for the Deaf and Blind, which are under the direct control of Murray’s commission.

Wisconsin 77th Assembly Candidate Interviews: K-12 Tax, Spending and Governance from a State Perspective

I asked the candidates about their views on the role of state government in K-12 public school districts, local control, the current legislature’s vote to eliminate the consideration of economic conditions in school district/teacher union arbitration proceedings and their views on state tax & spending priorities.

Video Link, including iPhone, iPad and iPod users mp3 audio; Doug Zwank’s website, financial disclosure filing; www search: Bing, Clusty, Google, Yahoo.
View a transcript here.

Video link, including iPhone, iPad and iPod users, mp3 audio Brett Hulsey’s website, financial disclosure filing; www search: Bing, Clusty, Google, Yahoo

Thanks to Ed Blume for arranging these interviews and the candidates for making the time to share their views. We will post more candidate interviews as they become available. More information on the September 14, 2010 primary election can be found here.
Candidate financial disclosures.

View a transcript here.

Racine’s Mitchell Middle School

Dustin Block, via email:

Greetings from Racine! I’m writing because I need your help. A public school in Racine is in the running for $500,000 through a “Kohl’s Care” contest on Facebook. Kohls is giving away a half-million dollars to the 20 schools who collect the most votes by Sept. 4. Right now Mitchell Middle School in Racine is in 20th place and could really use your votes to move up the standings and secure the money.
Here’s the link: http://apps.facebook.com/KohlsCares/school/1017351/mitchell-middle?src=SchoolBitly
It’d really mean a lot to Racine and the Mitchell Middle-schoolers if you could take the five minutes to vote. Mitchell was built in 1937 and has only had one renovation in 73 years. Racine Unified doesn’t have much money for repairs, so this is a great way you can help out a poor school system in desperate need of money.
You really can make a difference! Just follow the link above and vote!
Thanks much!
-Dustin

Tension grows over Seattle teacher evaluations

Amy Rolph:

Seattle Public Schools wants teacher evaluations and student performance joined at the hip, but the teachers’ union is taking issue with how the district plans to fuse those two factors.
A proposal that would tie teacher evaluations to student growth prompted a 2,000-word refutation e-mail from the Seattle Education Association earlier this week, a sign of friction in ongoing contract negotiations.
“Their mechanized system is one of minimal rewards and automated punishments,” union leaders wrote to members Wednesday.
That statement was sent in response to an e-mail teachers received this week from public schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. She detailed how the school plans to roll out parts of its bargaining proposal — specifically factors related to how teachers’ performances are evaluated.
The district is proposing an four-tier evaluation system that would roll out over two years. Teachers who chose to be evaluated base on to “student growth outcomes and peer and student feedback” would be eligible for perks, including an immediate 1 percent pay increase, eligibility for stipends and other forms of “targeted support.”

I was impressed with Susan Troller’s recent article on Teacher Accountability and the Madison School District, particularly her inquiry to Lisa Wachtel:

The district’s recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn’t any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
“Anecdotally we’re hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it’s still pretty early to see many specific changes,” she says. “It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It’s not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort.”

This is certainly not the only example of such spending initiatives. Jeff Henriques has thoughtfully posted a number of very useful articles over the years, including: Where does MMSD get its numbers from? and District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3. It appears that these spending items simply reflect growing adult to adult programs within the K-12 world, or a way to channel more funds into the system.
I believe it is inevitable that we will see more “teacher evaluation” programs. What they actually do and whether they are used is of course, another question.
Ideally, every school’s website should include a teacher’s profile page, with their CV, blog and social network links, course syllabus and curriculum notes. Active use of a student information system such as PowerSchool, or Infinite Campus, among others, including all assignments, feedback, periodic communication, syllabus, tests and notes would further provide useful information to parents and students.

Congress Set to Boost Federal Tax Dollar Aid to States

Naftali Bendavid:

Congress took a decisive step Wednesday toward finalizing a $26 billion bill offering aid to states, a surprise win for Democrats keen to demonstrate they’re taking action on an economy showing signs of weakness.
The bill, designed to prevent teacher layoffs and help states with their Medicaid payments, comes after months of foot dragging by Congress. Lawmakers have proven reluctant to spend money on everything from stimulus projects to additional unemployment insurance, amid increasing voter concern about the size of the U.S. budget deficit.
But Wednesday’s action, which won the support of two Republicans, suggests members of Congress are sufficiently concerned about the mixed signals from the economy that they’re willing to approve narrow spending bills, particularly those with political resonance ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Wednesday’s 61-38 vote in the Senate overcame a filibuster and made final passage in the Senate likely as soon as Thursday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) responded by taking the rare move of calling House members back from their summer recess next week to pass the bill and send it to the desk of President Barack Obama.

A Madison Look at Teacher Accountability, Testing and the Education Reform Climate

Susan Troller:

The district’s recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn’t any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
“Anecdotally we’re hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it’s still pretty early to see many specific changes,” she says. “It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It’s not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort.”

Susan did a nice job digging into the many issues around the “education reform” movement, as it were. Related topics: adult to adult spending and Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s recent speech on the adult employment emphasis of school districts.

Venture Philanthropy gives $5.5 million for expansion of KIPP DC charter schools

Susan Kinzie:

It’s another sign of private money shaking up public education in the District: A $5.5 million gift will dramatically help expand a network of high-performing charter schools in the city, with a goal of more than doubling the number of students enrolled by 2015.
The grant by Venture Philanthropy Partners, a nonprofit organization using the principles of venture-capital investment to help children from low-income families in the Washington region, will fund Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The grant is to be announced Monday.
“VPP recognized our ability to impact not just the students we have, but the students throughout D.C.,” said Allison Fansler, president and chief operating officer of KIPP DC. “We want to set a high bar for what’s possible.”

Appeals court rules in favor of Marshall School District in case of special-needs student

Doug Erickson:

Educators in the Marshall School District properly determined that a student with a genetic disease was no longer eligible for special education and related services, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, released Monday, reversed a lower court’s ruling that relied heavily on a doctor’s opinion and discounted the testimony of the student’s special education gym teacher.
Barbara Sramek, Marshall superintendent, said the ruling’s implications extend far beyond one school district.
“This was not about money, it was about principle,” she said. “Ultimately, it reinforces the value of educators and professional development.”

Obama Defends Teacher Policy

Laura Meckler:

President Barack Obama on Thursday delivered a fresh call to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, defending his administration against complaints from unions, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers.
These groups, usually backers of the president, have objected to the administration’s Race to the Top program, which seeks to drive change at the local level through a competition for $4.3 billion in federal grants.
To qualify for funding, states are encouraged to promote charter schools and tie teacher pay to performance. Unions have questioned both goals.
Mr. Obama, defending his administration’s approach in a speech before the National Urban League, said teachers should be well paid, supported and treated like professionals but those who fail should be replaced.

How a national standard will affect the education industry

Kai Ryssdal:

Kai Ryssdal: State education officials around the country are having a busy day. Today’s a key deadline in the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top. That’s the $4 billion pot of federal money that states can get — get, if they agree to certain policy changes. One of those changes — and this is today’s deadline — is to sign on to a national set of common curriculum standards. That could bring the education marketplace from widely fractured and segmented with dozens of different standardsinto something resembling coherent.
Christopher Swanson is the vice president for research and development at Education Week. Welcome to the program.
Christopher Swanson: Glad to be here.
Ryssdal: It’s a mistake to talk about a national education market, I suppose, but this drive to get some uniform core curriculum standards does kind of change the market dynamic for things like testing and textbooks, doesn’t it?

School boards need to hear all voices

Tina Hone:

I read with great interest Laura V. Berthiaume’s July 25 Local Opinions commentary, “Who really controls the Montgomery schools,” about the Montgomery County Board of Education’s relationship with its superintendent and staff. While there are many differences between our systems, Ms. Berthiaume succinctly captured a core shared tension when she wrote: “In the balance of power between the board of education and the bureaucracy, the superintendent and his staff hold all the cards. They outwit, outlast and outplay.”

Veterans of the math wars

Debra Saunders:

I am a veteran of the math wars. I was there in 1995 when the shiny new California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test told graders to award a higher score to a student who incorrectly answered a math problem about planting trees – but wrote an enthusiastic essay – than to a student who got the answer right, but with no essay.
The genius responsible for that math question explained that her goal was to present eighth-graders with “an intentionally ambiguous problem in which no one pattern can be considered the absolute answer.” Gov. Pete Wilson’s education czar, Maureen DiMarco, promptly dubbed new-new math “fuzzy crap.”
I was there in 1997, when a trendy second-grade math textbook featured a lesson called “fantasy lunch,” which instructed students to draw their fantasy lunch on paper, cut out the food and place their drawings into a bag.

Much more on poor Math curriculum, here.

US school reform report awaits grades

Edward Luce:

In a recent poll a majority of Americans said they thought Barack Obama, president, was a socialist. It is safe to say that America’s teachers were not among them. At the annual convention earlier this month of the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers’ union, the body’s president accused Mr Obama and Arne Duncan, his high-profile education secretary, of spearheading the most “anti-educator, anti-union and anti-student” administration he could recall.
To a degree that almost nobody anticipated 19 months ago, Mr Obama, who will on Thursday give a set piece address in Washington on education reform, has alienated the largest single historical provider of cash and volunteers to the Democratic party – namely the teachers’ unions.
Yet Mr Obama’s reforms, which have been taking place at the state level and often in the teeth of union opposition, have brought about what even critics concede is the most rapid school reforms America has seen in a generation.

Lessons from the 2010 New York State Tests

Maisie McAdoo:

It’s true, in a sense, that all that happened Wednesday was the state reported test scores using a higher cut-score. It was just like they’d moved the goalpost further down the field, one Buffalo educator (and apparent football fan) explained. More kids failed because they graded the tests harder.
But a lot more happened than that.
As State Education Commissioner David Steiner explained at the state’s press conference, the state tests have not simply become too easy. They have become bad tests.
They have been assessing only a very narrow band of state standards and virtually ignoring the rest of the state curriculum. They have repeated questions from year to year, making it easy to game the tests. And they do not reflect what students need to succeed in college and careers.
That is going to change. Over the next three years, the tests will become longer. They will test more material, have more open-ended questions and require more writing. They will aim to assess not whether students learned “test-taking tricks,” in Steiner’s words, but whether they can apply knowledge and explain their answers. By 2014-15 the goal is that our state tests will be able to tell students honestly if they are on track to succeed in college and beyond.

‘Hard Truth’ on Education New, Higher Standards for Proficiency Alter View of Years of Perceived Gains

Barbara Martinez:

Erasing years of academic progress, state education officials on Wednesday acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of children had been misled into believing they were proficient in English and math, when in fact they were not.
The bar for what it means to be “proficient” has now been set substantially higher. For instance, last year more than 77% of New York state students in grades three through eight reached proficiency in state English exams. Under the new standards, only 53% were considered proficient this year. The difference amounts to nearly 300,000 students across the state.
“We are facing the hard truth that the gains in the past were simply not as advertised,” said Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the state Board of Regents, during a news conference announcing the new standards.
In New York City, the number of students scoring proficient in English fell to 42% this year from 69% in 2009. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
The huge drops across the state raised questions about how much of the academic gains touted in the past several years were an illusion.

Related: The WKCE .

Education czar pushes Detroit school ballot proposal

Darren A. Nichols and Francis X. Donnelly:

The nation’s education czar joined a growing chorus of public officials who believe residents should decide whether Detroit Public Schools is placed under the mayor’s control.
For that to happen, however, the City Council has to place the question on the November ballot. The council will weigh the matter during its meeting today.
On the eve of the meeting, and a week after Gov. Jennifer Granholm supported such a move, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he also favored the ballot initiative, said a spokesman.
“We don’t see it for every city,” said spokesman Peter Cunningham. “But Detroit has struggled for a long time.”

Career educator Freda Williams takes helm of Memphis school board

Jane Roberts:

As the new city school board president, Freda Williams is the keel on a boat that is suddenly in new water.
The $90 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $68.5 million in federal Race to the Top stimulus funds have focused national attention on Memphis schools.
At the same time, the school district awaits a state Supreme Court ruling on city funding of schools, and may face a possible referendum on who will pay for schools.
If the funding issue goes to the voters this fall, expect a campaign for funding led by the school board, Williams said.
“I think most people understand in order to reduce crime, we are going to have to invest in education,” she said. “You can pay now or pay later. It’s a lot less expensive to educate a child than to pay a year for a person in the criminal justice system.”

Video Message for You – Community Engagement & Public Service Opportunities

Kaleem Caire, via email:

Greetings Home Team,
Before you read any further, please view our video message to you by clicking here (or cutting and pasting this into your web browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFpEFFWljR4). Also, join the Urban League of Greater Madison on Facebook, show your support, and stay up-to-date on our activities by clicking here.
Our Community Engagement Initiative is well underway! We began training volunteers and canvassing the Burr Oaks and Bram’s Addition Neighborhoods last week. We will soon visit the Capital View and Leopold Neighborhoods, and then make our way to the Village of Shorewood, Glenn Oaks, and Hill Farms Neighborhoods. We are continuing to recruit volunteers and organizational partners to get out on the streets with us and talk with residents and business owners about their vision for the future of our city and region.
If you want to know what the community thinks first hand and want to develop connections with members of our extended family of 500,000+ who reside in greater Madison, come join us. Our next Community Outreach training will be held Tuesday, August 3, 2010 from 5:30pm – 7:00pm at our new Urban League Center for Economic Development and Workforce Training headquarters located at 2222 South Park Street, Madison, 53713. Participation in a training session is required in order to participate in our campaign, so if at all possible, please plan on joining us for this session. If you can’t make it, there will be additional sessions held in the future.
We will conclude our campaign on October 15, 2010, and soon thereafter will share the outcomes of our 3-month community engagement effort with all organizations and individuals who get involved. Please contact Andrew Schilcher at aschilcher@ulgm.org or (608) 729-1225. We’re already learning a lot about the dynamics and make-up of our neighborhoods that can only be learned by putting boots on the ground!
In August 2010, the CEOs of the Boys & Girls Club and YMCA of Dane County will join me on a community walk with Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz through South Madison to talk with residents and business owners, and discuss community development needs and interests. We will also host a public hearing on the City Budget at the Urban League and a seminar for individuals interested in serving on City of Madison Commissions and Boards. We are particularly interested in increasing diversity on these Boards and Commissions and look forward to working with County leaders to accomplish the same.
All events listed below are located at our Urban League headquarters in Madison at 2222 South Park Street, 53713 in our first floor Evjue Conference Room. To RSVP for either of the activities below, please contact Ms. Isheena Murphy at imurphy@ulgm.org or 608-729-1200.
We are working with the Dane County leadership to provide similar forums as well.
Last night, we completed the first of two Leadership Summits with young professionals ages 25 – 45 that we are hosting aboard the Betty Lou Cruises on Madison’s local treasurer, Lake Monona. What a great group of professionals we had join us – 32 leaders who are making a positive difference in our community and who have committed themselves to do more to establish greater Madison as the BEST place to live in the Midwest for EVERYONE. We would like to give special thanks to our Corporate Sponsor for tonight’s Cruise, Edgewood College. We also want to thank Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor for giving an inspiring and motivational talk, and for challenging us to get more deeply involved with local and state affairs. We sincerely thank everyone who participated and look forward to our 2nd cruise next week, August 3rd!
Stay tuned for information regarding our plans for a 46 and older “Mentors and Coaches” event, which we are planning for early 2011.
A book recommended to me by
Neil Heinen, Editorial Director, Channel 3000 (Madison, WI)
Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalization
By Richard C. Longworth
Book Description: The Midwest has always been the heart of America – both its economic bellwether and the repository of its national identity. Now, in a new, globalized age, the Midwest faces dire challenges to its economic vitality, having suffered greatly before and as a result of the recent market collapse. In Caught in the Middle, veteran journalist Richard C. Longworth explores how globalization has battered the region and how some communities are confronting new realities. From vanished manufacturing jobs to the biofuels revolution, and from the school districts struggling with new immigrants to the Iowa meatpacking town that can’t survive without them, Longworth surveys what’s right and wrong in the heartland, and offers a tough prescription for survival.

New Orleans Superintendent Leaving Legacy of Charter School Expansion

PBS NewsHour:

As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the superintendent brought in to revive New Orleans’ troubled public schools is bidding farewell after turning many of the schools into charters. Before his departure, Paul Vallas speaks with John Merrow about where things stand with the city’s school reform efforts.
JOHN MERROW: For Paul Vallas, the veteran superintendent Louisiana hired in 2007 to do the job, the pressure was on.
PAUL VALLAS, superintendent, Recovery School District of Louisiana: We need to move now. We need to start building buildings now. We need to modernize those classrooms now.
JOHN MERROW: Almost from the time he arrived in New Orleans, Paul Vallas began making promises, talking publicly about all the big changes he intended to make in the schools. Well, it’s been three years. Time for Paul Vallas’ report card.
PAUL PASTOREK, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education: I give Paul very high marks.
JOHN MERROW: State Superintendent Paul Pastorek hired Paul Vallas.
PAUL PASTOREK: If you would tell people five years ago what is happening today, no one would have believed it was possible.

An Update on Seattle Schools Teacher Bargaining

Michael Rice:

mention on what was going on in the contract talks between SPS and SEA. I received this e-mail from the SEA. I post without comment.
SEA Bargaining Update July 23, 2010
SEA and District Far Apart in Negotiations
Dear Michael,
Your SEA Negotiations Team met with the District team on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. We continue to be far apart on issues that you have told us matter most to you. The district is holding fast to their major proposals on:
• tying student growth based on MAP scores, MSP scores, and end-of-course assessments to certificated employees evaluations;
• use of evaluations as the lead factor in reduction in force, as opposed to strict seniority.
There has been very little to no movement on what you have told us are your two most important issues:

Failures Prompt a New Jersey Schools Battle

Barbara Martinez:

A tussle over the Jersey City schools superintendent’s $280,000-a-year contract is headed for a showdown involving New Jersey’s education commissioner, putting a spotlight on one of the state’s most troubled school districts.
Charles Epps has been superintendent for the past 10 years. Twenty-six of his 37 schools failed last year to make “adequate yearly progress,” according to federal standards, and one middle school—where only 32% of children are proficient in English and 25% proficient in math–has fallen short of the federal goal nine years straight.
Late last month, the local school board voted to forgo an outside search for a new superintendent and to begin negotiating a new three-year contract with Mr. Epps. That enraged some local activists, who have filed a petition with the state to overturn the board’s vote.
“There’s a window of opportunity to stop rewarding failure,” said Steven Fulop, a Jersey City council member who is helping to spearhead the opposition. “Nobody in their right mind would rehire someone who has failing performance without even a cursory look at who else is out there.” The petition accuses the school board of failing to give 30 days’ notice and opportunity for the public to voice their opinions before the vote.

Ambitious New Model for 7 Newark Schools

Winnie Hu:

New Jersey’s largest school district will create a special enterprise zone for education in September, bringing together seven low-performing schools for an ambitious program of education and social services provided through a coalition of colleges and community groups led by New York University.
The Newark schools — Central High School and six elementary and middle schools — will be part of a Global Village School Zone stretching across a poor, crime-ridden swath of the city known as the Central Ward. The zone is modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, a successful network of charter schools and social service programs, and represents the latest in a growing number of partnerships between urban school districts and colleges.
While the Newark zone will remain part of the city’s long-troubled school system, which has been under state control since 1995, its schools will be largely freed from district regulations and will be allowed to operate like independent charter schools. Decisions about daily operations and policies will be turned over to committees of principals, teachers, parents, college educators and community leaders, and the schools will be allowed to modify their curriculum to address the needs of students.

Madison schools will seek proof of age for some new students

Gena Kittner:

The Madison School District will ask for proof of age when registering students who live with people other than their parents or guardians or those who are 18 years or older and are enrolling themselves for school.
The district disclosed the new procedure — which goes into effect next month for the 2010-11 school year — in a statement to the State Journal dated July 23 and received Monday.
The announcement comes three months after the revelation that a 21-year-old gang member charged in a fatal April shooting had enrolled in Madison’s West High School and later transferred to Middleton High School under a fake name and age.
Ivan Mateo-Lozenzo, 21, was enrolled at Middleton High School as 18-year-old junior Arain Gutierrez at the time of the shooting. Middleton officials have said Mateo-Lozenzo, who police have identified as an illegal immigrant from Veracruz, Mexico, had transferred from Madison’s West High School.

How will Portland schools fare when gifted education funding is cut?

Kristin Carle:

Few U.S. citizens would agree to cutting special education funds. After all, students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) obviously learn differently and need increased time and attention from educators in order to ensure they are attending to and learning the academic standards. However, another group of students who learn differently and need time and attention to guide their learning of the academic standards are being denied this year. These are the gifted students.
According to the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Policy Insider, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee met to draft the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget for the Department of Education. Although the budget has increased 3.2% since FY 2010, the budget completely eliminates the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Student program. “The 20 year-old Javits program is the only federal program that supports the unique learning needs of America’s three million students with gifts and talents.”
Portland schools may not feel an immediate impact from the loss of the Javits Program. However, this program provides scholarships to the disadvantaged gifted student and research support in the area of effective instructional practices for these students who learn differently than their peers.

Seattle School District Citizen Lawsuit Update: New Student Assignment Plan

via a Dan Dempsey email, 7/25/2010 483K PDF

The first finding of the Audit Report is “The Seattle School District did not comply with state law on recording meeting minutes and making them available to the public”. Id., p. 6. The auditor found: “We determined the Board did not record minutes at retreats and workshops in the 2008 – 2009 school year. Id. These retreats and workshops were held to discuss the budget, student assignment boundaries, school closures and strategic planning”. [Emphasis Supplied] Id., p. 6. The school board’s decisions regarding student assignment boundaries and school closures are the subject of the Commissioner’s ruling denying review in the Briggs and Ovalles discretionary review proceedings and in this original action.
The Auditor described the effect of these violations to be: “When minutes of special meetings are not promptly recorded, information on Board discussions is not made available to the public”. Id., p. 6. The Auditor recommended “the District establish procedures to ensure that meeting minutes are promptly recorded and made available to the public.” Id., p. 6. The District’s response was: “The District concurs with the finding and the requirement under OPMA that any meeting of the quorum of the board members to discuss district business is to be treated as a special or regular meeting of the OPMA.” Id. p. 6. Thus, the school board admits the Transcripts of Evidence in the Ovalles and Briggs appeals contains no minutes of the discussions relating to student assignments and school closures, even though the law required otherwise. Additionally, there is no indication of what evidence the school board actually considered with regard to the school closures and the new student assignment plan at retreats and workshops devoted to these specific decisions.
The fifth finding of the Auditor’s Report was: “5. The School Board and District Management have not implemented sufficient policies and controls to ensure the District complies with state laws, its own policies, or addresses concerns raised in prior audits”. Id., p. 25. In a section entitled “description of the condition” the report states: “In all the
areas we examined we found lax or non-existent controls in District operations. …” Id., p. 25. With regard to the Open Meetings Act the Auditor noted continuing violations of state law and that “the District did not develop policies and procedures to adequately address prior audit recommendations.” Id, at p. 27.

Recall Drive for 5 of 7 Seattle School Board Members

Retired Teacher Dan Dempsey:

On Thursday at 10:30 AM an appeal of the Superintendent’s one-year contract extension to June 30, 2013 will be filed at the King County Courthouse.
At 1:30 PM filings initiating the recall and discharge of each of five Seattle School Directors will be filed at the King County Elections Office. Directors Sundquist, Maier, Martin-Morris, Carr, and DeBell are the subjects of these five recalls. Directors Smith-Blum and Patu are not subjects of recall.
Each of these filings rely heavily on the Washington State Auditor’s Audit issued on July 6, 2010 for evidence. See Seattle Weekly’s coverage of the audit here.
If you wish to volunteer to collect signatures…
please contact: .. dempsey_dan@yahoo.com
using the subject line “RECALL”.
We expect to receive authorization to begin collecting signatures within 30 days of initial filing. Signatures will be gathered from voters registered in the City of Seattle. We hope that most voters will choose to sign all 5 petitions. Approximately 32,000 valid signatures will be needed for each director to bring about a recall election. A 180 day maximum for signature gathering is allowed and the election is scheduled 45 to 60 days after the required number of signatures has been submitted and verified.

New Jersey Governor’s Proposal Would Allow Boards of Education to Impose Contract Terms on Teachers

John Celock:

A proposal from Gov. Chris Christie to overhaul teacher contract negotiations has gained support from management while further angering the state teachers union.
As part of his proposed toolkit to reduce property taxes statewide, Christie is calling for the move back to allowing “last offer/best offer” in negotiations. The system would allow Boards of Education to unilaterally impose a contract on a local union in the event negotiations broke down. The system was allowed in New Jersey until banned by law in 2003.
Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said the proposal would provide assistance to school boards by allowing them to impose final offers when negotiations drag on. Current policy allows boards and teachers unions to go to a binding arbitration, which Christie and municipal leaders have said resulted in larger compensation awards to unions.

More here:

Associations representing state teachers and school boards have expressed opposition to a proposal in Gov. Chris Christie’s property tax toolkit to increase state oversight to contracts negotiated between school districts and local unions.
The proposal would set a four point criteria for county executive superintendents of schools to review local contracts, with the governor’s goal to keep property taxes below the two percent cap Christie signed into law earlier this month.
The criteria, as outlined in a preliminary proposal to the New Jersey School Boards Association from the governor’s office earlier this month, would include county executive superintendents reviewing all contracts that have the total compensation and benefits exceeding the cap, did not allow subcontracting of such services as food and maintenance, did not allow employee contributions to health benefits and did not set a minimum number of instructional hours and days. The proposal was drafted when the cap was the two and a half percent constitutional amendment and not the two percent statutory cap, Christie negotiated with the legislature.

American students win rocketry contest

Aubrey Cohen:

A team from Penn Manor High School, in Millersville, Pa., beat out student rocketeers from France and the United Kingdom to win the Third Annual Transatlantic Rocketry Challenge Friday in Farnborough, England.
Horsforth School, in Leeds, England, placed second, while technical problems grounded the French rocket.
“We are so excited that we won,” team member Brendan Stoeckl said in a news release from the Aerospace Industries Association, which sponsors the contest. “We succeeded because of practice, good data analysis and teamwork.

Teacher: Oakland kids could be squeezed out of Alameda schools

Katy Murphy:

Brian Rodriguez, a history teacher at Alameda’s Encinal High School, once taught at the old Elmhurst Middle School in East Oakland. Though he left the Oakland school district, he’s still teaching lots of Oakland kids. He worries that a “witch hunt” for out-of-district transfers is about to happen. -Katy
I have taught at Encinal High School in Alameda since the 1996-97 school year, when I left Oakland following the teacher strike. I left reluctantly, because I loved teaching at Elmhurst Middle School, but like many union reps, I was the subject of illegal disciplinary action following the month-long teacher’s strike and left in disgust.
To my delight, I still was able to teach many Oakland students who also left OUSD following the strike, and to work with fine educators who left then, too. It’s estimated that 400 out-of-district students attend Alameda schools.

State switch to U.S. school standards debated

Jill Tucker:

California typically lands at or near the bottom in virtually every measure of public school performance nationally, but the academic content taught to the state’s schoolchildren is second to none, according to a study released Tuesday. That status has left the Golden State with a conundrum. To be more competitive for federal Race to the Top funds, the state must adopt common standards in English, math and other subjects to be in sync with most other states.
But that would mean replacing the academic standards that were recognized in the study conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank based in Ohio.
Critics are concerned the national standards could dumb down California classrooms, discarding the state’s superior academic framework adopted 13 years ago for students from kindergarten through high school.

Hawaii Schools’ goals get ‘C’ grade

Mary Vorsino:

Reading and math learning goals for Hawaii public schools are “mediocre” and “often vague,” says a new national report that gives the state a “C” for its educational standards.
But the report points out that when Hawaii adopts common national standards in the 2011 school year, its standards will improve. The report gives the national standards a B-plus for English and an A-minus for math.
“Hawaii has raised the bar by adopting the common core,” said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which was scheduled to release its standards report today. “There are going to be much higher expectations.”
The state Department of Education said yesterday it agreed with the report’s findings.

Study: California Classroom spending dips as ed funding rises; A Look at Per Student Spending vs. Madison

Don Thompson:

Spending in California classrooms declined as a percentage of total education spending over a recent five-year period, even as total school funding increased, according to a Pepperdine University study released Wednesday.
More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
Spending on teacher salaries and benefits dropped from 50 percent of statewide spending to 48 percent over the same period. Spending on administrators and supervisors, staff travel and conferences all increased faster than teachers’ pay.

Complete study: 1.1MB PDF.
This is not a big surprise, given the increasing emphasis on, ironically, in the K-12 world, adult to adult spending, often referred to as “Professional Development“. Yippy Search: “Professional Development“.
The report mentions that California’s average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison’s 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).

Charter Backers Flex Political Muscles

Jacob Gershman:

The charter-school movement appears to be catching up to the teachers union in political giving to Albany.
With the help of hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street financiers, charter-school advocates gave more than $600,000 to Albany political candidates and party committees since January, according to the latest campaign filings. That’s more than twice as much as in prior reporting periods, according to allies of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
Pro-charter donations appear to have surpassed the $500,000 or so that candidates raised from teachers unions during the six-month period.

AP Annual Conference Coverage

The College Board, via email:.

Wake School Board Prepares For Packed House Regarding Neighborhood Schools At Tuesday Meeting

Lauren Hills:

The decision to switch to neighborhood schools has been a divisive one in Wake County, and although the school board has already voted to shift to the new model, groups like “Great Schools In Wake” said they will still plan to have a presence and a voice at the meetings as the board hashes out the specifics of the new policy.
“Give our input and have some influence,” said Yevonne Brannon with the Great Schools in Wake Coaltion. “I still hope, think, there’s room for negotiation and still hope there’s room for reconsideration.”
That’s the hope for many who oppose neighborhood schools. It’s also why the NAACP will hold a protest before the meeting in down town Raleigh Tuesday morning. The organization will call school board leaders to stop what they say is segregation and promote diversity.

On national standards, the Gates Foundation gets what it pays for

Jim Stergios:

This week, State House News broke a story on the “cozy relationship” between Health Care for All and the Patrick Administration. HCFA is an effective organization, but when an HCFA official writes to the state’s Insurance Commissioner: “If you expect to do anything ‘newsworthy’ [on insurance premium caps], can we be helpful with our blog or media at all?” well, then you have to take their positions with a brimming cup of salt.
Surrogate relationships are very much a fact of life in a state where one party is dominant, like Massachusetts. Next up to bat in this age-old game, Education Commissioner Mitch Chester and Secretary Paul Reville. In anticipation of the important debate over whether to adopt weaker K-12 national standards, they have to all appearances lined up their surrogates.
Via two trade organizations, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Obama Administration and the Gates Foundation have decided to get all states to “voluntarily” adopt national standards. They are working closely with longtime national standards advocates, such as Achieve, Inc., and are funded with tens of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. As Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution notes in an article by Nick Anderson of the Washington Post:

School’s Out for Summer but Education Reform Talk is In

Alberta Darling:

School may be out for the summer, but the topic of education reform has certainly not gone on vacation. Both nationwide and right here at home there are several different ideas on the table that, if implemented, could go a long way tdsoward improving educational outcomes for our students.
Under the guidance of Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was once a nationwide leader in educational innovation. Unfortunately, bold, reform-minded leadership has been absent from the Governor’s office for the last eight years. The most recent failures of Governor Jim Doyle and legislative Democrats were their unsuccessful efforts to grab federal Race to the Top dollars and their blundering attempt at a mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Usually we look to our nation’s capital for examples of how not to do business, but the new collective bargaining agreement Washington D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee struck with her teachers’ union is just the sort of thing we need here in Milwaukee. The contract includes teacher pay for performance, lessens the weight of seniority if layoffs become necessary and ends “job for life” tenure for ineffective teachers.
Another reform MPS sorely needs is the elimination of the teacher residency requirement, a completely arbitrary barrier that discourages quality educators from teaching at MPS. Only two of the nation’s fifty largest school systems, Milwaukee and Chicago, still require its teachers to live within the city limits. No other school district in Wisconsin has a residency requirement.
As always, there will be some who maintain the cure for all that ails K-12 public education is just to keep throwing more money at it. There are some holes in that logic. First, one need look no further than MPS for an example of high spending and low results. Second, aid to public schools is already the biggest chunk of the state budget by far and spending per pupil is over $11,000. Even if simply putting a lot more money into the system were the answer, the state doesn’t have it and taxpayers are already stretched to the limit.

Clusty search: Alberta Darling.

Teacher Fired, School Disciplined For Student’s Drowning

Jen Chung:

A Department of Education investigation into the drowning of sixth grader Nicole Suriel during a class trip to Long Beach slammed Columbia Secondary School for poor planning that led to the tragedy. The beach had numerous signs noting there were no lifeguards on duty; there were three adults supervising the 24 students. The DOE fired first-year teacher Erin Bailey and disciplined assistant principal Andrew Stillman and Principal Jose Maldonado-Rivera.
The Daily News runs down some of the findings, including how “Assistant Principal Andrew Stillman decided at the last minute not to go, staying behind to do administrative work. Bailey’s boyfriend – former teacher Joseph Garnevicus, 28 – went in Stillman’s place, but couldn’t swim.” Also, “There weren’t specific permission slips, just ‘blanket’ slips from the start of the year that didn’t include swimming.” The “blanket slips” were only for trips in Manhattan; instead of issuing a permission slip to parents, Stillman simply emailed them, “We’re headed to the beach tomorrow.”

U.S. education secretary calls on NAACP to focus on schools

Mara Rose Williams:

Calling education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.
“The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom,” Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group’s annual convention.
“This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative,” he said. “Everyone has a responsibility. Every one can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope.”
He said community leaders “must be at the table when decisions are made about how to improve struggling schools.”
The Obama administration is making $4 billion available to improve the 5 percent worst-performing schools in the country, Duncan said.

Obama’s School Reforms Are a Priority

JOEL I. KLEIN, MICHAEL LOMAX AND JANET MURGUÍA:

In the days following his inauguration, President Obama included a package of educational reforms in his stimulus bill that offered states financial incentives to make dramatic improvements in their education systems. About 10% of the $100 billion allocated for education was used to create competitive grants. States could only win them by drafting comprehensive and aggressive plans to, for example, adopt higher academic standards, turn around chronically low-performing schools, and redesign teacher evaluation and compensation systems.
Although it has received much less attention than health care and financial regulatory reform, this measure may ultimately be one of Mr. Obama’s most profound and lasting achievements. In just one year, we’ve already seen more reforms proposed and enacted around the country than in the preceding decade.
Yet on July 1, with little warning, the House of Representatives watered down these reform efforts by approving an amendment to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, proposed by Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.). It takes away $800 million that has already been committed to three critical parts of the president’s education reform package–Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the Charter Schools Program. This breaks a promise to the states, districts and schools that are doing the most important work in America. The funds are to be redirected to a $10 billion “Edujobs” bill to prevent teacher layoffs.

What is the Education Revolution really all about?

Charlie Mas:

The League of Education Voters is trying to co-opt dissent by creating a campaign called Education Revolution and using a lot of incendiary language and images, but not taking any action.
It got me thinking about what the Revolution really is or should be. Help me clarify my thinking on this.
I think that the Revolution is about re-defining and re-purposing the District’s central functions and responsibilities. The change will come when the role of the central administration is defined. What do we want the District’s central administration to do? And what DON’T we want them to do?
Ideally, the District’s headquarters will take responsibility for everything that isn’t better decided at the school building level. They should relieve the school staff of those duties. They should:
1) Provide centralized services when those services are commodities and can achieve economies of scale. For example, HR functions, facilities maintenance, data warehousing, contracting, food service, procurement, accounting, and transportation.

Well worth reading.

Helena school board gets earful on sex ed proposal

Matt Gouras:

A proposed sex education program that teaches fifth graders the different ways people have intercourse and first graders about gay love has infuriated parents and forced the school board to take a closer look at the issue.
Helena school trustees were swamped Tuesday night at a hearing that left many of the hundreds of parents in attendance standing outside a packed board room. They urged the school board in this city nestled in the Rocky Mountains to take the sex education program back to the drawing board.
The proposed 62-page document covers a broad health and nutrition education program and took two years to draft. But it is the small portion dealing with sexual education that has drawn the ire of many in the community who feel it is being pushed forward despite its obvious controversial nature.

Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K-12 Schooling

Paul Hill & Marguerite Roza, via a Deb Britt email:

Public schools in most areas of the U.S. are caught in the vise of declining revenues and rising costs.
Policymakers talk about innovating to do more with less, but to date no one knows what that looks like in education. The truth is that dramatically more productive schooling models simply have not emerged in the last two decades, even amidst cost pressures that drove spending up faster than inflation or GDP.
While education differs in important ways from other service sectors, improvement in productivity in other economic sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system can become more efficient and effective.
This paper first explores the past and future outlook for education absent productivity gains. The authors then discuss several areas in which labor-intensive businesses have improved productivity: information technology, deregulation, redefinition of the product, increased efficiency in the supply chain, investments by key beneficiaries, production process innovations, carefully defined workforce policies, and organizational change. They conclude with a five-step agenda for finding the cure for Baumol’s* disease in public education.
*In the 1960s, economist William Baumol observed that productivity (defined as the quantity of product per dollar expended) in the labor-intensive services sector lagged behind manufacturing. Because labor-intensive services must compete with other parts of the economy for workers, yet cannot cut staffing without reducing output, costs rise constantly. This phenomenon, of rising costs without commensurate increases in output, has been labeled Baumol’s cost disease.

420K PDF Report.

No More Cuts To Public Education – The Case for The Parcel Tax

Doug Porter:

The San Diego Unified District Board of Education will be voting Tuesday, July 13th, at 5pm in the evening to place a temporary parcel tax up for voter approval on the November ballot. While this move on the surface is a response to the “funding cliff” that public education systems state-wide are facing as Federal stimulus dollars expire next year, the reality is that much larger stakes are in play here.
The school district is facing the prospect of $127 million in projected cuts for the school year beginning in September 2011 after cutting more than $370 million from its budget over the last four years. They have tentatively proposed a long list of budget reductions, from eliminating librarians and counselors to halving the school day for kindergartners. More than 1,400 employees – ten per cent of school district employees – will be facing layoffs if those cuts become reality.

Sixteen Madison Area students garner National Merit Scholarships

The Wisconsin State Journal:

The National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced 16 more local recipients of its college-sponsored Merit Scholarships on Monday.
This announcement revealed the second half of this year’s college-sponsored scholarship recipient group, with the first wave being released in late May. These winners will receive between $500 and $2,000 per year for up to four years to study at the university or college granting the scholarship.
Approximately 4,900 high school students nationwide received the college-sponsored scholarships from 201 higher education institutions this year.
Winners from Memorial High School in Madison are Brendan Caldwell (University of Minnesota), Yang Liu (Northwestern University), Sarah Percival (Rice University) and Andrea Rummel (University of Chicago).
From Madison West High School, Anya Vanecek (Grinnell College) and Aileen Lee (Northwestern) are scholarship recipients, as are Eric Anderson (New York University) and Amy Oetzel (Wheaton College) of Middleton High School.
Monona Grove’s two recipients are Olivia Finster (Grinnell College) and Madeline Stebbins (University of Oklahoma).
Other area winners are Emily Busam (Lawrence University) of Beloit Memorial High School, Nicolas Heisig (University of Houston) of Madison Country Day High School, and David Bacsik (New College of Florida) of Cambridge High School.
Jesse Vogeler-Wunsch (Marquette University) of Oregon High School, Eric Biggers (Macalester College) of Verona Area High School and Kari Edington(Michigan State) of Sun Prairie are also scholarship winners.

Congratulations!

Governance, or Potted Plant? Seattle School Board To Become More Involved In District Operations and a view from Madison

Phyllis Fletcher:

The Washington State Auditor told the district this week it has problems managing its money. They’re the same problems he’s told them about before. The school board oversees the district. And auditors for the state say it’s time for board members to get more involved.
Carr: “To the State Auditors’ point, we have work to do. And they’re right: we do.”
Sherry Carr chairs the audit and finance committee of the Seattle School Board. She says the board needs to do more to make sure problems that are found in audits don’t pop up again.
Carr: “We haven’t always had the check in prior to the start of the next audit. So, I think that’s the key.”

Washington State Auditor’s Office:

The Washington State Auditor’s Office released an audit report this week about the Seattle School District’s accountability with public resources, laws and regulations.
We found the School Board and the District’s executive management:
* Must improve oversight of District operations.
* Are not as familiar with state and federal law as the public would expect.
We identified instances of misappropriation and areas that are susceptible to misappropriation. We also found the School Board delegated authority to the Superintendent to create specific procedures to govern day-to-day District operations.
The Board does not evaluate these procedures to determine if they are effective and appropriate. Consequently, we identified 12 findings in this report and in our federal single audit and financial statement report.

Documents:

Complete Report: 700K PDF
Complete Report: 700K PDF
Washington State Auditor’s Office Accountability Audit Report 190K PDF
The Seattle School District’s response 37K PDF:

Seattle Public Schools establishes rigorous process for addressing financial year 2008-09 audit findings.
As part of the Washington State Auditor’s Office annual audit process, an Accountability Audit of Seattle Public Schools was issued on July 6, 2010. The audit’s emphasis on the need for continued improvement of internal controls and District policies for accountability is consistent with multi-year efforts under way at Seattle Public Schools to strengthen financial management.
“Because we are deeply committed to being good stewards of the public’s resources, we take the information in this audit very seriously,” said Superintendent Maria L. Goodloe-Johnson, Ph.D. “We acknowledge the need to take specific corrective actions noted in the report. It is a key priority to implement appropriate control and accountability measures, with specific consequences, for situations in which policies are not followed.”
The School Board will work closely with the Superintendent to ensure corrections are made. “We understand and accept the State Auditor’s findings,” said School Board Director Sherry Carr, chair of the Board’s Audit and Finance Committee. “We accept responsibility to ensure needed internal controls are established to improve accountability in Seattle Public Schools, and we will hold ourselves accountable to the public as the work progresses.”

Much more on the Seattle School Board.
After reading this item, I sent this email to Madison Board of Education members a few days ago:

I hope this message finds you well.
The Seattle School Board is going to become more involved in District operations due to “problems managing its money”.
http://kuow.org/program.php?id=20741
I’m going to post something on this in the next few days.
I recall a BOE discussion where Ed argued that there are things that should be left to the Administration (inferring limits on the BOE’s oversight and ability to ask questions). I am writing to obtain your thoughts on this, particularly in light of:
a) ongoing budget and accounting issues (how many years has this been discussed?), and
b) the lack of substantive program review to date (is 6 years really appropriate, given reading and math requirements of many Madison students?).
I’d like to post your responses, particularly in light of the proposed Administrative re-org and how that may or may not address these and other matters.

I received the following from Lucy Mathiak:

A GENERAL NOTE: There is a cottage industry ginning up books and articles on board “best practices.” The current wisdom, mostly generated by retired superintendents, is that boards should not trouble themselves with little things like financial management, human resources, or operations. Rather, they should focus on “student achievement.” But what that means, and the assumption that financial, HR, and other decisions have NO impact on achievement, remain highly problematical.
At the end of the day, much of the “best practices” looks a lot like the role proposed for the Milwaukee School Board when the state proposed mayoral control last year. Under that scenario, the board would focus on public relations and, a distant second, expulsions. But that would be a violation of state statute on the roles and responsibilities of boards of education.
There are some resources that have interesting info on national trends in school board training here:
http://www.asbj.com/MainMenuCategory/Archive/2010/July/The-Importance-of-School-Board-Training.aspx
I tend to take my guidance from board policy, which refers back to state statute without providing details; I am a detail person so went back to the full text. When we are sworn into office, we swear to uphold these policies and statutes:
Board policy:
“The BOARD shall have the possession, care, control, and management of the property and affairs of the school district with the responsibilities and duties as detailed in Wisconsin Statutes 118.001, 120.12, 120.13, 120.14, 120.15, 120.16, 120.17, 120.18, 120.21, 120.40, 120.41, 120.42, 120.43, and 120.44.”
Because board policy does not elaborate what is IN those statutes, the details can be lost unless one takes a look at “the rules.” Here are some of the more interesting (to me) sections from WI Statute 120:
120.12 School board duties.
The school board of a common or union high school district shall:
(1)MANAGEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICT.
Subject to the authority vested in the annual meeting and to the authority and possession specifically given to other school district officers, have thepossession, care, control and management of the property andaffairs of the school district, except for property of the school dis-trict used for public library purposes under s. 43.52.
(2)GENERAL SUPERVISION. Visit and examine the schools ofthe school district, advise the school teachers and administrative staff regarding the instruction, government and progress of the pupils and exercise general supervision over such schools.
(3)TAX FOR OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE.
(a) On or before November 1, determine the amount necessary to be raised to operate and maintain the schools of the school district and public library facilities operated by the school district under s. 43.52, if the annual meeting has not voted a tax sufficient for such purposes for the school year.
(5)REPAIR OF SCHOOL BUILDINGS.
Keep the school buildings and grounds in good repair, suitably equipped and in safe and sanitary condition at all times. The school board shall establish an annual building maintenance schedule.
(14)COURSE OF STUDY.
Determine the school course of study.
(17)UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM TUITION.
Pay the tuition of any pupil enrolled in the school district and attending an institution within the University of Wisconsin System if the pupil is not participating in the program under s. 118.55, the course the pupil is attending at the university is not offered in the school district and the pupil will receive high school credit for the course.

Ed Hughes:

Thanks for contacting us. Can you be a bit more specific about what you are looking for? A general statement about the appropriate line between administration and Board responsibilities? Something more specific about budgeting and accounting, or specific program reviews? And if so, what? I confess that I haven’t followed whatever is going on with the Seatte school board.

My followup:

I am looking for your views on BOE responsibilities vis a vis the Administration, staff and the community.
Two timely specifics, certainly are:
a) ongoing budget problems, such as the maintenance referendum spending, and
b) curricular matters such as reading programs, which, despite decades of annual multi-million dollar expenditures have failed to “move the needle”.
The Seattle District’s “problems managing its money” matter apparently prompted more Board involvement.
Finally, I do recall a BOE discussion where you argued in favor of limits on Administrative oversight. Does my memory serve?
Best wishes,
Jim

Marj Passman:

Here is the answer to your question on Evaluation which also touches on the Board’s ultimate role as the final arbiter on District Policy.
Part of the Strategic Plan, and, one of the Superintendants goals that he gave the Board last year, was the need to develop a “District Evaluation Protocol”. The Board actually initiated this by asking for a Study of our Reading Program last February. This protocol was sent to the Board this week and seems to be a timely and much needed document.
Each curricular area would rotate through a seven year cycle of examination. In addition, the Board of Education would review annually a list of proposed evaluations. There will be routine reports and updates to the Board while the process continues and, of course, a final report. At any time the Board can make suggestions as to what should be evaluated and can make changes in the process as they see fit. In other words, the Board will certainly be working within its powers as Overseer of MMSD.
This Protocol should be on the MMSD web site and I recommend reading it in
depth.
I am particularly pleased with the inclusion of “perception” – interviews, surveys with parents and teachers. I have been leery of just masses of data analysis predetermining the success or failure of children. Our children must not be reduced to dots on a chart. Tests must be given but many of our students are succeeding in spite of their test scores.
I have a problem with a 7 year cycle and would prefer a shorter one. We need to know sooner rather than later if a program is working or failing. I will bring this up at Monday’s Board meeting.
I will be voting for this Protocol but will spend more time this weekend studying it before my final vote.
Marj

Evaluation of the Madison School District Superintendent

Madison School Board. The Board of Education will evaluate Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday evening, during a closed session according to the online agenda.
Dan was hired in 2008, after a long tenure as Superintendent of the Green Bay public schools.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: LeBron’s Tax Holiday

The Wall Street Journal:

We come not to praise or bury LeBron James, but only to note that by moving to Miami he’s going to save a bundle on taxes. We’ll take the King of ESPN’s word that he’s jumping to the Miami Heat from the Cleveland Cavaliers mainly for basketball reasons, but it is also true that Florida has no income tax. The rate in Akron, Ohio is a little over 7%
Mr. James figures to earn close to $100 million in salary over five seasons in Miami. According to an analysis by Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, Mr. James’s net present value tax savings on his salary are between $6 million and $8 million by living in Miami versus his home town of Akron. Professional athletes do have to pay other state taxes for the dates they play in visiting team arenas, but most of Mr. James’s considerable endorsement income would be taxed at Florida rates.
The tax comparisons looked even worse for two other teams in the LeBron bidding, the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets. The New York Post estimated that New York City and state taxes of 12.85% on high income earners would have taken more than $12 million from Mr. James. New Jersey’s rate is nearly 9%. Both of those teams are lousy, but it can’t help their free-agent sales pitch to start out $9 billion to $12 billion in the after-tax hole.

Madison School District Fund 80 Community Organization Spending Report

Superintendent Dan Nerad 1.9MB PDF:

Attached is the report summarizing progress after the first year from the community organizations receiving funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District. Also attached are the full end-of-year status reports from each organization, except the Urban League; their report will be provided in August. MMSD funding is now ended for . / African-American Ethnic Academy, Inc. . / Kajsiab House ./ Urban League of Greater Madison: Project Bootstrap 21st Century Careers Program
Funding, at this point, will continue for one more year for the other nine community organizations.

“Fund 80” taxes (and spending) may increase beyond State of Wisconsin school district limits. Fund 80 spending growth has long been a source of controversy.

Katrina’s Silver Lining: The School Choice Revolution in New Orleans

ReasonTV:

Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Katrina forced nearly a million people to leave their homes and caused almost $100 billion in damages. To an already failing public school system, the storm seemed to provide the final deathblow. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, education reformers decided to seize the opportunity and start fresh with a system based on choice.

‘Truth’ Oscar winner takes on public schools

Jill Tucker:

The last time documentary film director Davis Guggenheim was in the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton, he was asking Al Gore to be in his new movie about global warming.
“An Inconvenient Truth” won Guggenheim an Academy Award and put Gore on the fast track for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Guggenheim, 46, now had the Hollywood clout to pursue any project he wanted. He chose to take on the country’s public school system.
Back at the Ritz-Carlton, the director was just starting the promotional tour of his new film, “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary that follows five families who reject the assigned path into an inferior public school and embark on a quest to gain admission into quality public schools – all public charter schools, including Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City.
Guggenheim, who sends his own children to private school, takes on the teachers unions, bureaucracy and a status quo that denies children the opportunity a public education is supposed to give them.

Watch the trailer here.

What the Seattle Superintendent wants to talk about

Charlie Mas:

In a recent Seattle Times interview, Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson said:

“We don’t have charter schools. So let’s put that over there, and let’s talk about something else. How about kids being successful, how about kids being challenged? How about providing interventions to close the achievement gap?”

Okay. Let’s talk about those things.
How about kids being successful and challenged? Under Dr. Goodloe-Johnson’s administration, what changes have we seen? On the good side we have seen more AP classes in the high schools that didn’t have many before. We have certainly seen more students taking AP classes. That’s in the high schools. What have we seen in K-8? More schools have been designated as ALOs, but there is no quality assurance so we don’t know if there is anything there beyond the official designation. That’s particularly true with Spectrum programs.

Frustration fuels march to charter schools

Delaware Online:

However, a new study of what parents from the nation’s sixth largest metropolitan area want for their children’s education tilts favorably to a growing national preference for private and charter schools.
And charter schools win the horse race for school choice, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative.
“This trend has developed in the face of evidence that many charters perform no better than district schools and of a constant drumbeat of news reports and investigations regarding alleged and proven improprieties in the way charters operate,” the report’s authors say.
So why are an estimated 420 million students on waiting lists for charter schools?
Frustration with the struggling direction and results of traditional public schools is a leading cause.

Pew Trusts:

A comprehensive new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative finds that K-12 education in Philadelphia is undergoing a sweeping transformation that has given parents a new array of choices about where to send their children to school but has left families thinking they still do not have enough quality options.
The study, “Philadelphia’s Changing Schools and What Parents Want from Them,” finds that the three largest educational systems in the city–traditional public schools, charter schools and Catholic schools–have changed dramatically in size and composition during the past decade. Only one of them, the charter schools, has been growing. Indeed, charters, which have been in existence for only 13 years, now have more students than the Catholic school system.

Dane County African American Community Forum on Thursday, July 8

via a Kaleem Caire email:

Greetings.
We want to remind you that the Urban League of Greater Madison is hosting a forum with members of Dane County’s African American community on Thursday, July 8, 2010 from 5:30pm – 7:30pm CST at our new headquarters (2222 South Park Street, Madison 53713) to discuss ways the Urban League can support the education and employment needs and aspirations of African American children, youth, and adults in greater Madison. We would like to hear the African American community’s opinions and ideas about strategies the Urban League can pursue to dramatically:
· Increase the academic achievement, high school graduation, and college goings rates of African American children and youth;
· decrease poverty rates and increase the number of African American adults who are employed and moving into the middle class; and
· increase the number of African Americans who are serving and employed in leadership roles in Dane County’s public and private sector.
If you have not already RSVP’d, please contact Ms. Isheena Murphy of the Urban League at 608-729-1200 or via email at imurphy@ulgm.org. We will serve light refreshments and begin promptly at 5:30pm CST.
We look forward to listening, learning, and helping to manifest opportunity for all in Dane County.
________________________________________
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: kcaire@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Facebook:

Related: Poverty and Education Forum.

NEA Convention 2010: Up for Debate

Mike Antonucci:

NBI 6 – “NEA shall seek a cease and desist agreement from AFT instructing its local Affiliates in Alabama to stop their attempted raids each year.”
NBI 20 – “NEA requests Arne Duncan and the Department of Education to immediately implement the decade old recommendation that the ‘achievement levels’ of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) not be published this year.

Fascinating….
Related, by Sam Dillon: Teachers’ Union Shuns Obama Aides at Convention

In Blow to Bloomberg, City Must Keep 19 Failing Schools Open

Jennifer Medina:

A state appellate court ruled unanimously on Thursday that New York City must keep open 19 schools it wanted to close for poor performance, blocking one of the Bloomberg administration’s signature efforts to improve the educational system.
The ruling, by the Appellate Division, First Department, in Manhattan, upheld a lower court finding that the city’s Education Department did not comply with the 2009 state law on mayoral control of the city schools because it failed to adequately notify the public about the ramifications of the closings.
Because many eighth graders assumed the schools would be closed and the Education Department discouraged them from attending the schools, few applied. Some of the schools could begin September with just a few dozen freshmen. School officials said they expected enrollment to grow with students who move into the city, but the number will still likely be far smaller than in past years.

Leading the charge: Kaleem Caire returns to south side to head Urban League

Kaleem Caire & Maya Cole 2010 by Jim Zellmer at the Madison Screening of the Lottery

Pat Schneider:

Things have changed since Caire was raised by an aunt across the street from Penn Park at a time when adults didn’t hesitate to scold neighborhood kids who got out of line, and parents took on second jobs to make ends meet. Today, there is more “hard core” poverty, more crime, and much less sense of place, says Caire, who still can recite which families lived up Fisher Street and down Taft.
The supportive community of his boyhood began disappearing in the 1980s, as young parents moved in from Chicago to escape poverty and could not find the training and jobs they needed, Caire says. People started to lose their way. In a speech this month to the Madison Downtown Rotary, Caire said he has counted 56 black males he knew growing up that ended up incarcerated. “Most of ’em, you would never have seen it coming.”
Caire, once a consultant on minority education for the state and advocate for voucher schools, left Madison a decade ago and worked with such national nonprofit organizations as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Fight for Children. Later he worked for discount retailer Target Corp., where he was a fast-rising executive, he says, until he realized his heart wasn’t in capitalism, despite the excellent managerial mentoring he received.
The sense of community that nurtured his youth has disappeared in cities across the country, Caire remarks. So he’s not trying to recreate the South Madison of the past, but rather to build connections that will ground people from throughout Madison in the community and inform the Urban League’s programs.

Caire recently attended the Madison Premiere of “The Lottery“, a film which highlights the battle between bureaucratic school districts, teacher unions and students (and parents).

Is 2010 the year of the education documentary?

Greg Toppo:

In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth shined a light on global warming, bringing images of collapsing ice sheets and drowning polar bears to multiplexes nationwide.
Could 2010 be the year moviegoers get the angry urban parent with a hand-drawn placard, demanding more high-quality charter schools and an end to teacher tenure?
This summer, no fewer than four new documentaries, most of them independently produced, tackle essentially the same question: Why do so many urban public schools do such a bad job — and what can be done to help kids trapped in them?
Among the new films:

Mandatory School Board “Professional Development”? Yes, in New Jersey. “They Need to be Educated”

Tom Mooney:

School committee members across the state will now also have to attend six hours of training each year on how to perform their community responsibilities.
Bill sponsor Sen. Hanna M. Gallo, D-Cranston, said the legislation’s genesis came from “a lot of people expressing concern that not all school committee members are aware of all the [educational] issues they should.”
Issues, such as how schools are financed, labor relations, teacher-performance evaluations, strategic planning and opening meetings laws that require members do their business in public, will be addressed.
“They need to be educated,” said Gallo. “It’s a big responsibility being on the school committee. It’s our children, our students and our future, and we have to make sure we do the job to the best of our ability.”
The school committee members will attend a program at Rhode Island College offered by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary education in cooperation with the Rhode Island Association of School Committees.

An obvious next step, given the growing “adult to adult” expenditures of our K-12 public schools, while, simultaneously, reducing “adult to child” time. Wow.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Seattle Discovery Math Lawsuit Update

Martha McLaren:

On Monday, June 21st, we filed our “Brief of Respondent” in the School District appeal of Judge Spector’s decision. (Sorry to be late in posting it to this blog; our attorney left town after sending me hard copy, but neglected to email an electronic version of the document we filed.) A link to the brief can be found in the left-hand column, below, under “Legal Documents in Textbook Appeal.”
There’s no new information, either in the District’s brief or our response. You might notice that, rather than acknowledge the catalog of unrelated miscellany in the Seattle Public School District’s brief, our attorney, Keith Scully, chose to essentially restate our original case, upon which Judge Spector ruled favorably. He did emphasize certain statements which pertained to claims in the District’s brief.
I think Keith has, once again, done a masterful job.

5.4MB PDF file.

Bill Gates touts charter schools, accountability

Caryn Rousseau:

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Tuesday that charter schools can revolutionize education, but that the charter school movement also must hold itself accountable for low-performing schools.
“We need breakthroughs,” Gates said at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago. “And your charters are showing that breakthroughs are possible.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a big player in the school reform movement, spending about $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education. Gates said charter schools and their ability to innovate are a key part of the foundation’s education strategy.
“I really think that charters have the potential to revolutionize the way students are educated,” Gates said.
Charter schools receive taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools to map out how they’ll meet federal education benchmarks.

Tribute to High School Musicals

Marshall Heyman:

There are jimmies and Jimmy Choos, and as of last year, Jimmy Awards. Monday night, the National High School Musical Theater Awards hosted its second annual Jimmy Awards at the Marquis Theatre. Don’t let your mind take you anywhere funny: The Jimmy (which is trademarked, by the way) is named after producer James M. Nederlander.
After five coaching and master classes at NYU’s Tisch, 44 competitors, representing 22 regional award programs, competed for The Jimmy. Monday night they each performed brief vocal selections as the character that won them their regional awards.
“It’s more Miss America than ‘American Idol’,” said Nick Scandalios, Executive Vice President of The Nederlander Organization, who was one of the judges. “The public isn’t voting.”

Madison Teachers’ Harlem trip’s aim is to aid ‘culturally relevant’ teaching

Susan Troller:

Lanyon, Grams, and fellow Hawthorne teachers Julie Olsen and Abby Miller received a grant from the national nonprofit Fund for Teachers that allowed them to travel to Harlem to learn about the art, music, poetry, literary history and drama of this hub of African-American life. They all agree that they now have a new appreciation for the richness of black culture and its profound impact on American life and culture as a whole.
For these four, plus a dozen more local educators whose travel was covered by a couple of additional grants, the experience was part of a wider effort to help them better teach in what’s known as a culturally relevant way.
“Culturally relevant practice” is a relatively new movement in education that recognizes that learning, for all of us, is related to our cultural background and what we know from our daily living. Research shows that effectively bridging the gaps between a teacher’s background and student’s experience can improve academic performance.
Andreal Davis is one of two district administrators in charge of helping to create culturally relevant practices in local classrooms. A former elementary school teacher at Lincoln, Davis, who is black, now helps colleagues recognize that different groups of children bring their different backgrounds, expectations and even communication styles to the classroom.
She says teachers sometimes need help learning to translate different ways their students learn, or what kind of interactions make sense to different groups of children.
“Communication styles for all of us can vary a great deal. It can be like the difference between listening to conventional music, or listening to jazz, where the narrative doesn’t just go in a straight line,” she explains. “If that flow is what you’re used to, it’s what you know how to follow in a conversation, or in a class.”
Given Hawthorne’s demographics — 70 percent of the students are poor, with a diverse population that includes 18 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, 32 percent black and 28 percent white — the school has respectable, rising test scores.

People who saw the recent Madison screening of The Lottery saw another part of the Harlem world: the battle between the traditional public school system and charters, specifically the Harlem Success Academy.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan Gets Unwelcomed at Foothill College

E. Wentworth:

Union buster and privatizer Arne Duncan is the US Secretary Of Education. He has supported the mass firing of teachers and is working with privateers to destroy public education. Demonstrators protested at Foothill Community College where Duncan was the keynote speaker yesterday. Duncan is scheduled to speak again at DeAnza College graduation ceremony in Cupertino this morning.
United Public Workers for Action (UPWA) called for a demonstration when it was announced that US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would be the keynote speaker at Foothill Community College’s graduation ceremony on June 25. After receiving permission from the college administration early this week to stage a peaceful protest, Skyline Community College instructor George Wright received calls from Foothill College president Judy Miner asking that he cancel the planned demonstration. He also received calls from Arne Duncan’s counsel trying to convince George that Duncan should not be the target of protesters.

School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause

Sam Dillon:

As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation’s worst failing schools, and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out.
Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke’s central plaza have helped transform the school’s concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework.
“It’s changed a lot,” said Leslie Maya, a senior. “Before, kids were ditching school, you’d see constant fights, the lunches were nasty, the garden looked disgusting. Now there’s security, the garden looks prettier, the teachers help us more.”

Milwaukee Teacher’s Union Eats Its Young

Bruce Murphy:

In the last couple weeks, we’ve seen the dispiriting spectacle of layoff notices going to nearly 500 Milwaukee Public Schools teachers. This includes some excellent ones let go simply because they have less seniority. This will mean even bigger average class sizes – and further declines in quality – for a district already struggling badly. And a clear culprit is the teachers union.
The union has always been more concerned about its veteran teachers, more worried about pensions than starting salaries for new teachers. Union officials have argued that this “career ladder” will attract new teachers, but that’s nonsense: What twentysomething teacher is thinking about a retirement that is at least 30 years away? Milwaukee teachers were already part of the excellent state pension system, yet back in the late 1990s, the union successfully pushed for an unneeded, supplementary plan that used local tax dollars to sweeten the pension for a select group of long-term teachers.
MPS officials argue that none of the recent layoffs would have been necessary if the union would agree to switch from its Aetna insurance plan to a lower-cost plan offered through United Healthcare. This could save the district some $48 million, enough to prevent any job layoffs for teachers, school board president Michael Bonds claims. “I’m not aware of any place in the nation that pays 100 percent of teachers’ health care benefits and doesn’t require a contribution from those who choose to take a more expensive plan,” Bonds told the press.

MILWAUKEE AT IT’S WORSE PT. IV – WHERE ARE THE TEACHERS?

The Milwaukee Drum:

Look at this video and tell me where the hell are the teachers? WHOEVER the principal is at this school (video is from ’07) needs to be fired. The teacher should be fired as well. Look closely at the 2:26 mark of this video clip and see the teacher (or some adult) sitting up against some counter watching this ish. Is this man getting thrills watching these adolescent, Black Kids grind on each other? No excuse MPS, this is why WE cannot read, write or do math with any competency at many of the public schools.

Vicki McKenna on Reduced Class Time for Madison’s Grade 6-12

25mb mp3 audio file. Much more on the increased adult to adult expenditures and staff time in the Madison School District here.

ACI inmates receive degrees and recognition / Photo

Jennifer Jordan:

In this graduation season, Rhode Island’s two top education officials made it a point Monday morning to attend a recognition ceremony held in an unlikely place — the state prison.
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist and Higher Education Commissioner Ray Di Pasquale went to the John J. Moran Medium Security Facility to congratulate more than 100 inmates who were enrolled in General Equivalency Degree or college-level classes, and to shake hands with the two dozen men who received degrees of completion.
“The fact that you are here means you have made mistakes along the way and you have had difficulties,” Gist said. “But the fact that you are here means you are lifting yourself above those circumstances. We’ve all made mistakes. You’ve decided to better your education. You’ve made a very important decision.”
It was the first time in memory that prison officials could recall both education officials attending the ceremony. Di Pasquale, who also serves as president of the Community College of Rhode Island, has attended in recent years to confer associates degrees from CCRI.
Monday, he handed out two associates’ degrees and praised the recipients for their persistence. He encouraged the inmates to continue their education to “change your lives for the future.”

Reduced Grade 6-12 Class Time in the Madison School District?

Susan Troller:

What’s one sure-fire way to stress out parents? Shorten the school day.
And that’s exactly what the Madison school district is proposing, starting next year, for grades six to 12. According to a letter recently sent to middle school staff by Pam Nash, the district’s assistant superintendent of secondary schools, ending school early on Wednesdays would allow time for teachers to meet to discuss professional practices and share ideas for helping students succeed in school.
“I am pleased to announce that as a result of your hard work, investment and commitment, as well as the support of central administration and Metro busing, together we will implement Professional Collaboration Time for the 10-11 school year!” Nash wrote enthusiastically.
Despite Nash’s letter, district administrators appeared to backpedal on Monday on whether the plan is actually a done deal. Thus far there has not been public discussion of the proposal, and some teachers are expressing reservations.
Some middle school teachers, however, who also happen to be parents in the district, say they have some serious concerns about shortening the day for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Not only will there be less time spent on academics each week, they say, but the additional unsupervised hours will pose a problem for parents already struggling to keep tabs on their adolescent kids.

This expenditure appears to continue the trend of increased adult to adult expenditures, which, in this case, is at the expense of classroom (adult to student) time.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Detroit school board head quits after complaint alleging inappropriate behavior

Valerie Strauss:

In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category:
Otis Mathis, the president of the Detroit Board of Education, was accused of fondling himself for 20 minutes in a meeting with the system’s superintendent and quit right after the incident, but now is seeking to take back his resignation, the Detroit Free Press reports.
In this article, the newspaper says that board Vice President Anthony Adams plans to move ahead and post the vacancy.
Superintendent Teresa N. Gueyser filed a detailed complaint addressed to Adams about Mathis, saying he used a handkerchief while masturbating in front of her the entire time she was speaking.
Her complaint says that she has witnessed other unacceptable acts by Mathis and that she had informed him some time ago to have no physical contact with her, including handshaking.

Mistreated as a Student, an Alum Establishes Cash Prizes for Nice Professors at Israel’s Technion

Matthew Kalman:

What’s an alumnus to do when the university that was the gateway to his entrepreneurial millions was a place of “suffering” where professors “didn’t give a damn about the students”? Moshe Yanai’s answer: Give it millions of dollars to encourage faculty members to be more pleasant.
IBM minces few words when describing the work of Mr. Yanai, who holds one of the computer maker’s prestigious fellowships: “One of the most influential contributors in the history of the data-storage industry. His 30 years of technical expertise and design innovation are legendary.”
Mr. Yanai attributes his success in no small part to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, from which he graduated in 1975. Now a multimillionaire, he has given quietly to charities for many years, including to the Technion, the academic incubator of Israel’s high-tech revolution. But memories of his bitter experience there discouraged him from doing anything high profile.

A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California

Steven Camarota & Karen Jensen:

etween 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent.1 This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
Among the changes in California:

In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a)
Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b)
The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.
There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.
In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b)
California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b)
While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4)
The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.

Brookfield, CT School Board Plans to Adopt Strategic Plan

Scott Benjamin:

The Brookfield Board of Education plans to adopt an updated strategic plan this summer that, according to its chairman, Mike Fenton, will be, among other things, “paying closer attention to technology” and “changes in the world.”
Assistant Superintendent of Schools Genie Slone told the school board at its regular meeting Wednesday night that longtime school district consultant Jack Devine, an instructor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, has been coordinating discussions with a committee that is updating the strategic plan for the next five years.
The committee includes staff members, local residents, students, as well as two school board members, Jane Miller and Mr. Fenton.
Mr. Fenton said in an interview after the meeting that the plan is updated every five years and is a valuable document that provides direction in how the school board makes decisions.
“It is part of how we formulate the budget every year,” he said.

Brookfield, CT Strategic Plan 2 page pdf brochure.

Minnesota School District School district ponders whether to get rid of class rank

Tom Weber:

School officials in Mounds View will decide next week whether to get rid of class rank for graduating seniors. If they do, they’ll join a handful of other public school districts who have made the switch in recent years, and who say it might help some students get into college.
More than 400 seniors from Mounds View High School got their diplomas last week during commencement ceremonies. The school doesn’t list a valedictorian — but rather reconizes the top 10 ranking graduates during the ceremony.
That part of commencement might be gone next year, if the Mounds View School Board votes next Tuesday to ditch class rank. Class rank compares one student’s grade point average with that of his or her classmates.
Principal Julie Wikelius says the top of each class at Mounds View is compacted. Plenty of students earn good grades in honors and advanced classes, which creates a tight battle for the top-ranking GPA.

Strategy Roundtable: Online Education Startups

Sramana Mitra:

oday’s roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.
Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

Houston School District’s Strategic Plan, an Update

Houston School District's Strategic Plan

Houston Board of Education:

HISD is working to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions and provide a road map for our future. The purpose of this strategic direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Supporting the Principal as the CEO, Developing Central Standards, Ensuring Accountability, and Cultivating Stakeholder Commitment. We believe these key, overarching strategies will help HISD achieve its goals and become the best school district in America.

To develop our long-term Strategic Direction, we are working with a in a six-month effort that started in February, 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of the final plan. The first step involved a diagnostic research effort to understand the current state of the district across a number of critical dimensions such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness. It also included analyzing other transformation efforts within HISD and across the country to ensure that the best ideas are being considered in our planning process. We have also started to gather input from members of Team HISD and we will continue to do so over the next several months. Click here to view the preliminary findings (.pdf)

True transformation does not happen overnight and cannot happen without the participation of every member of Team HISD. For this process to be authentic and meaningful, HISD needs all of you -parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and broader community members- to be fully engaged.

312K PDF
Ericka Mellon: Only 15 percent of HISD freshmen graduate college.
Related: Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process. More here.

California and the “Common Core”: Will There Be a New Debate About K-12 Standards?

EdSource:

A growing chorus of state and federal policymakers, large foundations, and business leaders across the country are calling for states to adopt a common, rigorous body of college- and career-ready skills and knowledge in English and mathematics that all K-12 students will be expected to master by the time they graduate.
This report looks at the history of efforts to create common education standards, in particular the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It also describes factors California may consider when deciding whether to adopt them.
Highlights:
The Common Core is the latest effort to create rigorous, common academic standards among states
California is supporting the concept of common standards, but state law calls for further review and leaves the adoption decision to the State Board of Education
Issues surrounding the adoption include the quality of the Common Core standards and their relationship to the state’s current standards as well as costs and other implementation concerns
Common Core or not, California might decide to review its current standards and expectations for students

On January 7, 2010, the Governor signed into law Senate Bill X5 1 (Steinberg). The bill calls for California’s academic content standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics to be examined against the Common Core Standards that were released in final form on June 2, 2010. The bill also calls for the establishment of the California Academic Content Standards Commission. The Governor and Legislature have made the required appointments to the commission.

KINDERREADY GRADS CHEERED\ PROGRAM THAT GETS CHILDREN READY FOR KINDERGARTEN CELEBRATES ITS FIRST GRADUATES.

Andy Hall, via a kind reader:

Two dozen children donned homemade mortarboards Wednesday for a commencement ceremony marking their graduation from a program designed to help them be ready for kindergarten this fall.
As many of their parents snapped photos, the children received certificates and were cheered by a crowd that included the graduates’ siblings and officials from government and nonprofit agencies.
The ceremony and a picnic at Madison’s Vilas Park celebrated the end of the first year of the KinderReady program, which served 320 children ages 3 to 5, far exceeding its goal of 200.
The surge was largely credited to a weekly call-in program, “Families Together,” on La Movida, 1480-AM, a Spanish-language station, that includes learning activities for children, said Andy Benedetto, who is directing KinderReady for the nonprofit Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin.
Although data measuring KinderReady’s effects won’t be available until next year, interviews with parents and officials suggest the program is helping prepare children for kindergarten.

District Graduation Rate Map Tool

Education Week, via a kind reader:

EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable, readily accessible data on graduation rates and other indicators for every school district and high school in the country.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to present this powerful online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the nation’s graduation crisis. EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable data on graduation rates for every school district and high school in the country.
This Web-based application allows users to easily map out graduation rates by zooming in on any of the nation’s individual school districts. Users can then access detailed information for that district or any of its high schools.

Hysteria in Egypt’s streets over English exam failures

Matt Bradley:

On Monday, amidst the car horns and chatter, the sound of broken dreams echoed through Egypt’s streets.
Young girls fainted in the arms of their sobbing mothers. Fathers screamed with rage, their faces contorted into grotesque expressions of indignation. In some areas, ambulances were called in to treat victims of shock.
The source of all this madness: the English test in the thanawaya aama, Egypt’s annual nation-wide high school examination.
“They were suffering. The girls were crying, they were screaming. It was so difficult. All of them were suffering,” said Ahmed Ghoneim, a high school English teacher at Imbaba Secondary School outside Cairo, whose telling of the sorrowful scene inside the examination room might have recalled a motorway accident or a vicious murder.

Madison district got $23M from taxpayers for aging schools; where did it go?

Susan Troller:

A maintenance referendum may well be a tougher sell this time around than it was when back-to-back, five-year maintenance referendums were approved in 1999 and 2005. Not only do voters feel pinched by the ongoing recession, but taxpayers are facing a likely $225 hike in property taxes this year as part of the effort to balance the Madison schools budget, which took a heavy hit in reduced state aid.
Community support could also be compromised because a growing number of Madison School Board members have become frustrated by what they say is the district’s reluctance to adequately account for how maintenance dollars have been spent.
As chair of the School Board’s finance and operations committee, Lucy Mathiak has persistently asked for a complete accounting of maintenance jobs funded through the 2005 referendum. The minutes from a March 2009 committee meeting confirm that district administrators said they were working on such a report but Mathiak says the information she’s received so far has been less than clear.
“Trying to get this information through two administrations, and then trying to figure it out, is exhausting. The whole thing is a mess. I’m not, by any means, the first board member to ask these kind of questions regarding accountability,” Mathiak says. “You ask for straightforward documentation and you don’t get it, or when it comes it’s a data dump that’s almost impossible to understand.”
That lack of transparency might make it more difficult for other School Board members to get on board with another referendum.
“We have a responsibility to provide an accurate record of what happened with the funding,” says board member Arlene Silveira, who has supported all other school referendums. “I think people understand that other projects may come up and there may be changes from the original plan, but you do need to tell them what was done and what wasn’t done and why. It affects (the district’s) credibility in the community.”

Much more on the 2005 referendum and the District’s 2010-2011 budget (including what appears to be a 10% property tax increase here.
Related: “Accountability is important, now more than ever“.

Abolishing Department of Education isn’t extreme

Mona Charen:

Newly minted Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle is a kook. That’s what Sen. Harry Reid’s people are telling reporters. ABC, CNN, and other outlets seem to agree, noting that Mrs. Angle wants to shutter the federal Department of Education, get the U.S. out of the U.N., phase out Social Security, and eliminate the IRS.
We haven’t yet heard her explanations of these positions — many of which can be justified in the proper context. It’s certainly possible that she is a little eccentric (that prison massage program doesn’t pass the smell test). But this much is certain: It is not kooky to favor the elimination of the Department of Education. That this proposal is routinely labeled “extremist” is a reminder of the one-way ratchet that operates in government. Enshrine something in a federal agency and it becomes sacrosanct. Democrats cheerlead for federal programs because they are the party of government, and Republicans quietly go along because they’re afraid.
But if Republicans know how to argue for smaller government — as Gov. Chris Christie is demonstrating in New Jersey — they need not be intimidated. There are hundreds of federal programs that could be eliminated tomorrow with only the happiest consequences for the nation. And yes, the whole Department of Education could be scrapped. It vacuums up money and produces … what exactly?

I’m not an optimist with respect to our exploding Federalism and the related money printing approach to spending.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Pennsylvania‟s Taxpayer Relief Act: Big Gamble Pays Off for Some, But Most Lose Their Shirt

Jaime Bumbarger:

There is perhaps no greater debate in America than the one surrounding taxes, whether it is at the national, state, or local level. While taxes serve the important purpose of funding government programs, they also bear quite a burden on taxpayers. For example, property taxes account for the majority of revenue for local governments across the country.1 Pennsylvania is no different. In 2000, property taxes accounted for nearly $10 billion of revenue in Pennsylvania, which was 30 percent of total local government revenues and 70 percent of all local government tax revenues.2
Property taxes accounted for an even larger piece of the pie when it came to school districts: approximately 85 percent of the total tax revenues for Pennsylvania school districts in 2000.3 Nearly half of all school district revenue came from the collection of property taxes.4 Only counties relied more heavily on property taxes as a source of revenue.5
The state‟s heavy reliance on property taxes by school districts hit the wallets of Pennsylvania taxpayers and led to several attempts by legislators to harness the spending.6 The most recent attempt was Act 1 of 2006.7 Act 1 attempts to do what other legislation failed to do: provide property tax relief to all Pennsylvanians, but it, too, falls short of its mark.8
Although it was enacted more than three years ago, the Act still plays a prominent role today. Less than two years ago, homeowners started reaping the benefits of Act 1 when the first reduction in property tax bills occurred.9 Last fall, taxpayers could have faced another referendum on their ballots, asking whether they favor increasing the local income tax to offset a decrease in property tax.10 Officials faulted public confusion for the last referendum overwhelmingly failing across the Commonwealth.11 Also, last year‟s budget impasse resulted in new legislation that could significantly alter property tax relief in the future.12

School Spotlight: Lodi teacher, an icon at the middle school, retires after 48 years

Pamela Cotant:

While Lodi Area Middle School teacher Jerry Hilliker stands out for the astonishing length of his career — he just retired after 48 years — just as remarkable is how he did it.
Seventh grader Sam Sagers said Hilliker told good jokes. He also gave them nicknames, said seventh grader Faith Hatch who became known as “Faith, Hope and Charity.”
Another Hilliker trademark was the coffee cup that was often in his hands. Seventh grader Tabitha Miller said she will always remember the way his classroom smelled like coffee in the morning.
“He teaches in a fun way,” Tabitha said.
His last day was June 9.

It’s the Public’s Data: Democratizing School Board Records

J. H. Snider, via a kind reader:

Consider just a few of the questions whose answers might help a community’s leaders and citizens make better decisions about how to improve their schools:

What has been said and written about school start times in districts with comparable demographics and financial resources, but better student test scores?
What is the relationship between student test scores and systems for electing school board members in comparable school districts?
How do superintendent contracts vary in comparable districts?

Parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers have legitimate reasons to ask questions like these. But it has been incredibly hard for them to do so. One reason is that much public information remains locked in the file cabinets of America’s more than 14,000 school districts. Another is that even if the information is posted to school websites, it may be posted in ways, such as a scanned document, that Internet search engines cannot read. Public information that should be available instantaneously and at no cost, like so much other information now available via search engines, instead takes hundreds of work-lifetimes and a fortune to gather–if it can be gathered at all.

Well worth reading.

New Wisconsin teacher rules hitting classrooms

Amy Hetzner:

Ten years after Wisconsin overhauled its licensure system for public school educators, the first big wave of teachers is set to advance under the rules – and reports are mixed on whether the change has made a difference.
Expectations for the new licensure regulations were high when they were first approved in 2000. In addition to requiring that teachers pass basic knowledge and skills tests and receive mentors for their first year in the profession, the rules also provided that teachers would have to demonstrate they had grown enough in their careers to attain a “professional” license.
For some beginning teachers, the new rules have been stressful additions to the start of an unfamiliar career with many bugs still left to be worked out. Others say they appreciate that they could set their own teaching goals and pursue related professional development activities while also reflecting on their experiences.
“I think teachers who really take the process seriously and do it with fidelity – they choose a goal that they really believe in and they want to achieve – that’s fine, that’s good, it serves its purpose,” said Judy Gundry, a citywide mentor for educators with initial teaching licenses in Milwaukee Public Schools.

In bold move, Colorado alters teacher tenure rules

Colleen Slevin:

Colorado is changing the rules for how teachers earn and keep the sweeping job protections known as tenure, long considered a political sacred cow around the country.
Many education reform advocates consider tenure to be one of the biggest obstacles to improving America’s schools because it makes removing mediocre or even incompetent teachers difficult. Teacher unions, meanwhile, have steadfastly defended tenure for decades.
Colorado’s legislature changed tenure rules despite opposition from the state’s largest teacher’s union, a longtime ally of majority Democrats. Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, signed the bill into law last month.
After the bill survived a filibuster attempt and passed a key House vote, Democratic Rep. Nancy Todd, a 25-year teacher who opposed the measure, broke into tears.
“I don’t question your motives,” an emotional Todd said to the bill’s proponents. “But I do want you to hear my heart because my heart is speaking for over 40,000 teachers in the state of Colorado who have been given the message that it is all up to them.”
While other states have tried to modify tenure, Colorado’s law was the boldest education reform in recent memory, according to Kate Walsh, the president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which promotes changing the way teachers are recruited and retained, including holding tenured teachers accountable with annual reviews.

Evaluating Curricular Programs in the Madison School District

Madison School District Administration 2.8MB PDF:

I. Introduction
A. Title or topic – District Evaluation Protocol – The presentation is in response to the need to provide timely and prioritized information to the Board of Education around programs and interventions used within the District. The report describes a recommended approach to formalizing the program evaluation process within the District.
B. Presenters
Kurt Kiefer – Chief Information Office/Director of Research and Evaluation
Lisa Wachtel– Executive Director of Teaching & Learning
Steve Hartley – Chief of Staff
C. Background information – As part of the strategic plan it was determined that priority must be given to systematically collect data around programs and services provided within the district. The purposes for such information vary from determining program and intervention effectiveness for specific student outcomes, to customer satisfaction, to cost effectiveness analyses. In addition, at the December 2009 Board meeting the issue of conducting program evaluation in specific curricular areas was discussed. This report provides specific recommendations on how to coordinate such investigations and studies.
D. Action requested – The administration is requesting that the Board approve this protocol such that it becomes the model by which priority is established for conducting curricular, program, and intervention evaluations into the future.
II. Summary of Current Information
A. Synthesis of the topic· School districts are expected to continuously improve student achievement and ensure the effective use of resources. Evaluation is the means by which school systems determine the degree to which schools, programs, departments, and staff meet their goals as defined by their roles and responsibilities. It involves the collection of data that is then transformed into useful results to inform decisions. In particular, program evaluation is commonly defined as the systematic assessment of the operation and/or outcomes of a program, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program.
Program evaluation is a process. The first step to evaluating a program is to have a clear understanding of why the evaluation is being conducted in the first place. Focusing the evaluation helps an evaluator identify the most crucial questions and how those questions can be realistically answered given the context of the program and resources available. With a firm understanding of programs and/or activities that might be evaluated, evaluators consider who is affected by the program (stakeholders) and who might receive and or use information resulting from the evaluation (audiences). It is critical that the administration work with the

Evaluating the effectiveness of Madison School District expenditures on curriculum (such as math and reading recovery) along with professional development (adult to adult programs) has long been discussed by some Board and community members.

Kids need to be corrected: School

Times of India:

After remaining incommunicado for nearly a month, La Martiniere for Boys issued a press release on Friday, denying responsibility for Rouvanjit Rawla’s death.
“As a school, we deeply regret the loss of young life. Attempts being made to hold the school entirely responsible are certainly misplaced. There are times when children need to be corrected and helped. The idea has always been to inculcate a sense of values amongst them. It is also important for the school to ensure that there is an environment conducive to learning and often corrective measures have to be taken to ensure this environment is not vitiated in the interest of the larger student community of the school,” read the statement, signed by governing board secretary Supriyo Dhar.
“The constant attack against the school has damaged the confidence of teachers and students who are totally innocent and are being unnecessarily drawn into unseemly public scrutiny.”
Five teachers of La Marts for Boys, including principal Sunirmal Chakravarthy, are facing charges of abetment to suicide after Rouvanjit’s father Ajay Rawla filed an FIR.

New controversy at Rhode Island school

Valerie Strauss:

Just when it looked like things were quieting down at troubled Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, the place that became famous when all of the teachers were fired and then rehired, there’s a new controversy.
One of the two newly named co-principals was approved by the Central Falls Board of Trustees this week even though his resumé said that math scores at his former school were much higher than they really were, according to the Providence Journal.
Let’s review: In March, all of the teachers and other educators at the only high school in Central Falls, Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city, were fired so that the school could be restructured with a new staff.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo for firing all of the educators in the building, and President Obama said it showed “a sense of accountability.”

Monona Grove School District Governance: Teacher Union Contract Bargaining

Sunny Schubert:

Monona Grove School Superintendent Craig Gerlach is not a happy camper these days, and the source of his displeasure is the ongoing job action by the Monona Grove Education Association.
As previously reported, the teachers are “working the contract,” meaning they refuse to take part in school-related activities that are not specifically required.
It is a tactic the union has employed successfully in the past when contract negotiations have stalled, as they are as of this writing.
“It’s extremely frustrating,” Gerlach said. “Also, it’s embarrassing.”
How so? Gerlach gave an example: At the Fine Arts Awards ceremony at the high school, teachers refused to come, so the kids wound up passing out the awards to each other.
“I’ve been getting a number of phone calls from parents,” he said, “and I don’t know what to say. This is all relatively new to me.”

Board member Peter Sobol responds.

Must-read new report on high school dropouts

Jay Matthews:

I have long considered high school drop-outs not only the least soluble of our education problems but the least clear. School districts have traditionally fudged the numbers, reporting their drop-out rates as only 5 or 6 percent, a grossly deceptive one-year rate.
The National Governors Association and other policymakers, ashamed of this charade, have put an end to it. Everyone is switching to a four-year drop-out rate, the percentage of ninth-graders (about 31 percent nationally) who do not receive diplomas four years later. The improved data has not only raised the level of the debate but also made possible a new report with some unnerving revelations about graduation rates.
My wife made the mistake of letting me go with her to her office last Sunday to catch up on work. While there I read the new Education Week report, “Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success,” and kept squealing at one statistical surprise after another. I insisted on reading each one to her, delaying her efforts to get back outside on a nice weekend day.

Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success.
Related: “They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!.

Education minister sets deadline for balanced Vancouver School Budget

John Bermingham:

B.C. Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid is laying down the law to the Vancouver School Board — ordering trustees to send her a draft budget by June 18.
She also wants trustees to consider a number of cost-cutting options from last week’s comptroller-general’s report on the district’s finances.
The board currently faces a $17-million budget deficit, and has to submit a final and balanced budget to MacDiarmid by June 30.
Last week’s report recommended almost $12 million in other cost saving schemes.
They include closing schools, winning contract concessions from workers and charging higher rent to childcare centres.

Incomplete Standards

The new national standards are too timid to recommend that high school students read complete history (or other nonfiction) books, or that high school students should write serious research papers, like the Extended Essays required for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
Even the College Board, when it put together “101 books for the college-bound student” included only four or five nonfiction books, and none was a history book like Battle Cry of Freedom, or Washington’s Crossing.
For several reasons it has become taboo to discuss asking our students to read complete nonfiction books and write substantial term papers. Not sure why…
In fact, since the early days of Achieve’s efforts on standards, no one has taken a stand in recommending serious history research papers for high school students, and nonfiction books have never made the cut either.
Since 1987 or so it has seemed just sensible to me that, as long as colleges do assign history and other nonfiction books on their reading lists, and they also assign research papers, perhaps high school students should read a nonfiction book and write a term paper each year, to get in academic shape, as it were.
After all, in helping students prepare for college math, many high schools offer calculus. For college science, high school students can get ready with biology, chemistry and physics courses. To get ready for college literature courses, students read good novels and Shakespeare plays. Students can study languages and government and even engineering and statistics in their high schools, but they aren’t reading nonfiction books and they aren’t writing research papers.
The English departments, who are in charge of reading and writing in the high schools, tend to assign novels, poetry, and plays rather than nonfiction books, and they have little interest in asking for serious research papers either.
For 23 years, I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students from near and far [39 countries so far], and it gradually became clearer to me that perhaps most high school students were not being asked to write them.
In 2002, with a grant from the Shanker Institute, I was able to commission (the only) study of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and we found that most students were not being asked to do them. This helped to explain why, even though The Concord Review is the only journal in the world to publish such academic papers, more than 19,000 of the 20,000 U.S. public high schools never submitted one.
The nonfiction readings suggested in the new national standards, such as The Declaration of Independence, Letter From Birmingham Jail, and one chapter from The Federalist Papers, would not tax high school students for more than an hour, much less time than they now spend on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and the like. What would the equivalent be for college preparation in math: long division? decimals?
High school graduates who arrive at college without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious term paper, even if they are not in remedial courses (and more than one million are each year, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report), start way behind their IB and private school peers academically, when it comes to reading and writing at the college level.
Having national standards which would send our high school graduates off to higher education with no experience of real term papers and no complete nonfiction books doesn’t seem the right way to make it likely that they will ever get through to graduation.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
http://www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores

Trip Gabriel:

The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850.
But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.
The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test by “tubing” it — squeezing a test booklet, without breaking its paper seal, to form an open tube so that questions inside could be seen and used in the guide. The district invalidated students’ scores.
Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as educators tampering with children’s standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher — including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews.

Verona Superintendent Explains Gang Warning

Channel3000:

Verona school leaders are standing by their warning of potential retaliatory gang violence at the high school or Hometown Days this weekend.
The warning the Verona Area School District issued Wednesday night comes about six weeks after the fatal shooting of Antonio Perez on Madison’s East Side. Madison police have said they believe the slaying was gang-related.
Police in Madison, Middleton and Verona have been on alert for potential gang retaliation since Perez was killed in April 28. Authorities said the threat of violence between the Clanton 14 gang and the Carnales gang has been on their radar.
Verona Area School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell explained Thursday that it was his decision, and not by direction of law enforcement, that a warning on the threat of violence was announced Wednesday night.