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RSS Newsletter·2024 Referendum·Gell-Man Amnesia Effect

Teacher turnover: New class of educators entering the classroom

Matthew DeFour:

The Madison School District is on pace to add 300 new teachers this year — the most in at least 19 years.
Already this year, the district has hired 260 new classroom leaders, largely a response to a wave of teacher retirements prompted by a new law curtailing collective bargaining by public employees. Another 40 or so could be added throughout September.
For the thousands of students heading back to school Thursday, the turnover means both the loss of institutional memory and the potential for fresh ideas to reshape the classroom experience, Madison principals say.
“You lose a lot of knowledge around education that’s critical to helping kids be successful,” said Bruce Dahmen, principal at Memorial High School, which hired about 30 new teachers, including 12 first-timers. “With that change comes new opportunities. (New teachers) sometimes bring a different energy.”

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Are Texas’ Schools Really that Bad?

National Center for Policy Analysis:

The Obama administration recently attempted a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry by unleashing Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas’ record on education. Duncan’s arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, throws some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.
If you look at Texas’ simple average test scores in reading and math for fourth and eighth grade students, they’re about average. But Texas’ schools serve a population with several challenges, in particular many low-income and Spanish speaking children.

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DOJ group to discuss Madison’s academic disparities among racial minorities

Matthew DeFour:

An arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that mediates racial tension in communities is intervening in the debate over the achievement of racial minorities in the Madison School District.
The Justice Department’s Community Relations Service won’t discuss its role.
But in an email announcement this week, the Urban League of Greater Madison said DOJ this summer “raised concerns about academic achievement disparities among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) to the District’s administration.”
DOJ officials will participate in a meeting Wednesday called by the Urban League to discuss minority achievement, graduation rates and expulsion rates in the Madison district, according to Urban League President Kaleem Caire.

Related: the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.

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Public high school grads struggle at college

Diane Rado, Jodi S. Cohen and Joe Germuska, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

Ariana Taylor thought she was ready for college after taking Advanced Placement physics and English at her Chicago public high school and graduating with a 3.2 GPA.
Instead, at Illinois State University, she was overwhelmed by her course load and the demands of college. Her GPA freshman year dropped to 2.7 — and that was significantly better than other graduates from Morgan Park High School, who averaged a 1.75 at Illinois State.
“It was really a big culture shock,” said Taylor, 20, now a junior who has started a mentorship program for incoming freshmen. “I had no idea what it would be like.”
A Tribune analysis of data available to Illinois citizens for the first time raises fundamental questions about how well the state’s public high schools are preparing their students for college. The data show these students struggle to get a B average as freshmen at the state’s universities and community colleges, even after leaving top-performing high schools with good grades. In fact, public school graduates at 10 of the state’s 11 four-year universities averaged less than a 3.0 GPA their freshman year.

First-year performance at Illinois public universities and colleges

First-year performance at Illinois public universities and colleges

The newly-released High School-to-College Success Report shows how Illinois public school graduates fared when they became freshmen at the state’s universities and community colleges. The ACT company tracked more than 90,000 students who graduated from public high schools between 2006 and 2008, and then enrolled full-time at an Illinois university or community college that fall. The data do not include students who went to a private college or out-of-state. For each high school, families can look up average high school GPAs and grade point averages earned at each public university and community college that students attended.

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Wisconsin Read to Lead Task Force 8.25.2011 Meeting Summary

Wisconsin Reading Coaltion, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

Summary of the August 25, 2011 Read to Lead Task Force Meeting
Green Bay, WI
The fifth meeting of the Read to Lead task force was held on August 25, 2011, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Governor Walker was delayed, so State Superintendent Tony Evers opened the meeting. The main topic of discussion was accountability for reading outcomes, including the strategy of mandatory grade retention. Troy Couillard from DPI also presented an overview of reading reform in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Accountability
Superintendent Evers said that Wisconsin will seek a waiver from the No Child Left Behind proficiency requirements by instituting a new system of accountability. His Educator Effectiveness and Accountability Design teams are working on this, with the goal of a new accountability system being in place by late 2011.
Accountability at the educator level:
The concept of using student achievement or growth data in teacher and principal evaluations is not without controversy, but Wisconsin is including student data in its evaluation model, keeping in mind fairness and validity. The current thought is to base 50% of the educator evaluation on qualitative considerations, using the Danielson Framework http://www.danielsongroup.org (“promoting professional learning through self assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversations”), and 50% on student data, including multiple measures of performance. 10% of the student data portion of the evaluation (5% of the total evaluation) would be based on whole-school performance. This 5% would be based on a proficiency standard as opposed to a value-added measurement. The 5% is thought to be small enough that it will not affect an individual teacher adversely, but large enough to send a message that all teachers need to work together to raise achievement in a school. The task force was asked if it could endorse whole-school performance as part of teacher evaluation. The task force members seemed to have some support for that notion, especially at the principal level, but had some reservations at the level of the individual teacher.
Kathy Champeau was concerned that some schools do not have the resources to serve some children. She also felt it might not be fair to teachers, as they have no control over other teachers in the school or the principal.
Steve Dykstra said it is important to make sure any value-added system is designed to be fair.
Rachel Lander felt it would be better to use value-added data for whole-school performance rather than a proficiency standard, but supported the importance of schoolwide standards.
Rep. Steve Kestell supported the 5% requirement, and questioned what the qualitative half of the evaluation would be based on. He felt perhaps there could be some schoolwide standards to be met in that part of the evaluation, also.
Tony Evers responded that the Danielson Framework was research-based observations, and that the evaluators would need to be highly trained and consistent in their evaluations.
Tony Pedriana had questions about the type of research on which the Danielson Framework is based.
Evers said he would provide further information to the task force.
Mara Brown said she cannot control what the teacher down the hall does, and that the 5% should apply only to principals.
Linda Pils agreed with the 5%, but felt principals need to be watching and guiding new teachers. She agreed with Dykstra’s comments on measuring growth.
Sen. Luther Olsen was concerned that the 5% portion of a teacher’s evaluation may be the part that tips the balance on job retention for an individual, yet that individual has no control over whole-school performance. He understood the principle of getting everyone involved and committed to a goal, but was concerned with possible consequences.
Mandatory Retention:
The task force was asked to consider whether Wisconsin should implement a mandatory retention policy. If so, what would it look like, and if not, what can be done to make sure students are reading at grade level?
After a guest presentation and discussion, the consensus of the task force was that Wisconsin should not have mandatory retention. Reasons cited were negative effects on later achievement, graduation, self esteem, and psychological well-being. Third grade was felt to be far too late to start intervention, and there needs to be more emphasis on developing teacher expertise and focusing on the responsibility of teachers, principals, and higher education as opposed to threatening the students with retention. Retention without changing the curriculum for the student the following year is pointless.
Dr. Elaine Allensworth, a director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, joined the task force by telephone to summarize the outcomes of a mandatory retention project in Chicago. Students more than 1 year below the cut-off level on certain tested skills were retained unless they passed the test after a summer bridge program. Students identified as at-risk were given after-school tutoring during the year. Retention was thought to have three primary mechanisms that would affect student performance: motivation for students, families, and teachers to work harder, supplemental instruction after school and during the summer, and an additional year in the grade for failing students. All students in the school could be affected by the motivation and the supplemental instruction, but only the retained students by the extra year of instruction. The study found that the threat of retention worked as a positive motivator for teachers, parents, and some older students. However, there were also negatives in terms of higher-achieving students receiving less attention, more time on test preparation, and an instructional shift to focus on tested skills. The supplemental instruction, especially the summer bridge program, was the biggest positive of the retention project. There was high participation, increased personal attention, and higher-quality instruction. Retention itself had more negative effects than positive. Academic gains were either non-existent or rapidly-disappearing. Multiple year retentions resulted in a problematic mix of ages in classrooms, students unable to finish high school by age 18, and a negative overall attitude toward school.
Dykstra said it appeared that the impetus to do things differently because of the threat of retention had some benefit, but the actual retention had either no effect or a negative effect. He wondered if there was some way to provide the motivation without retention.
Allensworth agreed that the challenge was to provide a motivation without having a threat.
Pils asked if third graders could even understand the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that they understood if teachers helped them. She also said that some schools with low-quality instruction had no way to improve student learning even with the threat of retention.
Rep. Jason Fields asked how you could avoid teaching to the test.
Allensworth replied that teaching the skills on the test was productive, but not the excessive time that was spent on test-taking strategies. She also said the tendency to teach more narrowly could cause problems later in high school where students needed to be able to participate in broader learning.
Marcia Henry inquired about students who returned to their old rate of learning when they returned to the regular classroom after successfully completing the summer bridge.
Allensworth replied that the summer program used higher quality curriculum and teachers, there was more time provided with students, and the students were more highly motivated.
Dykstra asked if it was possible to determine how much of the summer gain was due to student motivation, and how much due to teachers or parents.
Allensworth said those factors could not be pulled apart.
Champeau questioned whether the summer bridge program taught to the test.
Allensworth replied that it taught in a good way to the skills that the test assessed.
Brown asked if intervention was provided for the first time in third grade.
Allensworth replied that some schools began providing intervention and retaining in first or second grade.
Dykstra asked if the project created a situation where a majority of the school’s resources were concentrated in third grade, leaving other grades short.
Allensworth said they didn’t look at that, though some schools appeared to put their better teachers at certain grades.
Dykstra thought it was the wrong approach to tie services and supports to a specific grade rather than a specific student.
Are some types of consequences necessary to achieve the urgency and intensity necessary for performance improvement? Should there be mandatory summer school or other motivators? The task force did not seem to arrive at a consensus on this.
Lander said schools need the resources to do early intervention, plus information on what should be done in early intervention, and this is not currently the case in Wisconsin.
Pils questioned where teachers would find the time to provide intervention. She liked the idea of after-school and summer programs as well as reading the classics to kids. Providing a model of best instruction is important for teachers who don’t have that background.
Mary Read commented on Bill Gates’ experience with spending a lot of money for minimal results, and the conclusion that money needs to go into teacher training and proven programs such as the Kipp schools or into a national core curriculum.
Dykstra noted that everyone agrees that teacher training is essential, but there is disagreement as to curriculum and training content. His experience is that teachers are generally unable to pinpoint what is going wrong with a student’s reading. We must understand how poor and widespread current teacher training is, apologize to teachers, and then fix the problem, but not at teachers’ expense.
The facilitators asked what the policy should be. Is there an alternative to using retention? Should teacher re-training be mandatory for those who need the support?
Evers said that a school-by-school response does not work. The reforms in Milwaukee may have some relevance.
Olsen suggested that there are some reading programs that have been proven successful. If a school is not successful, perhaps they should be required to choose from a list of approved instructional methods and assessment tools, show their results, and monitor program fidelity. He feels we have a great resource in successful teachers in Wisconsin and other states, and the biggest issue is agreeing on programs that work for intervention and doing it right the first time.
Kestell said some major problems are teachers with high numbers of failing students, poor teacher preparation, the quality of early childhood education, and over-funding of 4K programs without a mandate on how that money is used. There has been some poor decision-making, and the kids are not responsible for that. We must somehow hold schools, school board, and individual educators accountable.
Champeau said teachers have no control over how money is spent. This accountability must be at the school and district level. More resources need to be available to some schools depending on the needs of their student population.
Lander: We must provide the necessary resources to identified schools.
Dykstra: We must develop an excellent system of value-added data so we can determine which schools are actually doing well. Right now we have no way of knowing. High-performing schools may actually be under-performing given their student demographics; projected student growth will not be the same in high and low performing schools.
Pedriana: We have long known how to teach even the most at-risk readers with evidence-based instruction. The truth is that much of our teacher training and classroom instruction is not evidence-based. We need the collective will to identify the evidence base on which we will base our choices, and then apply it consistently across the state. The task force has not yet taken on this critical question.
Pils: In her experience, she feels Wisconsin teachers are among the best in the country. There are some gaps we need to close.
Pedriana: Saying how good we are does not help the kids who are struggling.
Pils: We need to have our best teachers in the inner city, and teachers should not need to purchase their own supplies. We have to be careful with a limited list of approved programs. This may lead to ethics violations.
Pedriana: Referring to Pils’ mention of Wisconsin’s high graduation rates in a previous meeting, what does our poor performance on the NAEP reading test say about our graduation standards?
Michael Brickman (Governor’s aide): There is evidence of problems when you do retention, and evidence of problems when you do nothing. We can’t reduce the failing readers to zero using task force recommendations, so what should we do with students who leave 3rd grade not reading anywhere near grade level? Should we have mandatory summer school?
Henry: Response to Intervention (RTI) is a perfect model for intervening early in an appropriate way. A summer bridge program is excellent if it has the right focus. We must think more realistically about the budget we will require to do this intervention.
Olsen: If we do early intervention, we should have a very small number of kids who are still behind in 3rd grade. Are we teaching the right, most efficient way? We spend a lot of money on K-12 education in Wisconsin, but we may need to set priorities in reading. There is enough money to do it. Reading should be our mission at each grade level.
Facilitator: What will be the “stick” to make people provide the best instruction?
Dykstra: Accountability needs to start at the top in the state’s education system. When the same people continue to make the same mistakes, yet there are no consequences, we need to let some people go. That is what they did in Massachusetts and Florida: start with two or three people in whom you have great confidence, and build from there.
Facilitator: Is there consensus on mandatory summer school for failing students?
Michele Erickson: Summer school is OK if the right resources are available for curriculum and teachers.
Kestell: All grades 4K – 3 are gateway grades. They are all important.
Champeau: Summer school is a good idea, but we would need to solve transportation issues.
Dykstra: We should open up the concept of summer school beyond public schools to any agency that offers quality instruction using highly qualified instructors from outside the educational establishment.
Lander: Supports Dykstra’s idea. You can’t lay summer instruction on schools that can hardly educate during the school year.
Brown: Could support summer school in addition to, but not in place of, early intervention during the school year.
Erickson: Look at the school year first when allocating resources. Summer school is a hard sell to families.
Pedriana: Agrees with Olsen that we probably have sufficient funds for the school year, but we need to spend it more wisely. We cannot expect districts to make the commitment to extra instruction if there is no accountability at the top (including institutions of higher education). We need to resolve the issue of what knowledge and content standards will be taught before we address summer school or other issues.
Milwaukee Public Schools’ tiered RTI system was presented by DPI’s Troy Couillard as an example of an accountability system. MPS chose a new core reading program for 2010-11 after submitting its research base to DPI. Teachers were provided with some in-service training, and there are some site checks for fidelity of implementation. Tier 2 interventions will begin in 2011-12, and Tier 3 interventions in 2012-13. He felt that the pace of these changes, plus development of a data accountability system, student screening with MAP and other testing, progress monitoring, and professional development, has MPS moving much faster than most districts around the county on implementing RTI. DPI embedded RTI in the district’s Comprehensive Literacy Plan. DPI is pushing interventions that are listed on the National RTI site, but teachers are allowed to submit research for things they are using to see if those tools might be used.
Pils: Kids in MPS are already struggling. Reading First would suggest that they have 120 minuets of reading a day instead of the 90 minutes provided in the MPS plan.
Couillard: Tier 2 intervention for struggling students will add onto the 90 minutes of core instruction.
Olsen: Can this system work statewide without DPI monitoring all the districts?
Couillard: Districts are trained to monitor their own programs.
Pils: Veteran schools with proven strategies could be paired with struggling schools as mentors and models.
Pedriana: We have no way of knowing what proven strategies are unless we discuss what scientific evidence says works in reading. The task force must grapple with this question.
Brickman: Read to Lead task force needs to start with larger questions and then move to finer grain; this task force may not be able to do everything.
Pedriana: Is there anything more important for this task force to do than to decide what evidence-based reading instruction is?
Brickman: Task force members may submit suggestions for issues to discuss at the final meeting in September. Tony could submit some sample language on “evidence-based instruction” as a starting point for discussion.
Henry: The worst schools should be required to at least have specific guidelines, whether it is a legislative or DPI issue. Teacher retraining (not a 1-day workshop) is a necessity. Teachers are unprepared to teach.
Olsen: Wisconsin has always been a local control state, but one of the outcomes of the task force may be that we have a method for identifying schools that are not doing well, and then intervene with a plan. The state is ultimately responsible for K-12 education. Districts should take the state blueprint or come up with their own for approval by the state.
Erickson: Can we define what will work so districts can just do it?
Evers: MPS experience shows there is a process that works, and districts can do their own monitoring.
Dykstra: Sees value in making a list of things that districts are not allowed to do in reading instruction; also value in making a list of recommended programs based on alignment with the convergence of the science of reading research. That list would not be closed, but it should not include programs based on individual, publisher-funded studies that do not align with the convergence of the science. This could be of benefit to all districts. Even those doing relatively well could be doing better. Right now there is no list, and no learning targets. The MPS plan contains the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contain errors. DPI needs to correct that information and distribute it right now. That would be a good example of accountability at the state level.
Couillard: The new statewide data collection system will help districts monitor their own data.
Champeau: School needs change depending on demographics. The goal should be to build decision-making capacity at the local level, not dictation from outside. We should be talking more about people than programs. Have MPS teachers been doing a better job? What will they do if their program goes away? We need to work on the underlying expertise and knowledge base.
Facilitator: There appears to be agreement that the state can intervene in failing districts.
Lander: We might have some consensus as to what teachers need to know, and then go into schools to see if they know it. If not, we need to teach them.
Pedriana: What is so bad about providing a program, with training, of course? It would help people.
Facilitator: There is consensus around training of teachers.
Dykstra: Some of the distinction between training and programs is artificial. You need both.
Other things the state could require: weighting of reading in evaluation systems, grading of schools etc.
Dykstra: If giving schools grades, they should get separate grades for how they do in teaching separate content areas. In addition, everything should be reported in the best value-added system we can create, because it’s the only way to know if you’re doing a good job.
Pils: Doesn’t like grading of schools. She has a whole folder on cheating in districts that have grading of schools and high stakes tests.
Evers: Do we just want to measure what schools are doing, or do we want to use it to leverage change?
Erickson: Wisconsin has gone from 3rd to 30th on the NAEP, so of course we should be seeking change.
Walker: The idea is not to pick on failing schools, but to help them. We must be able to deploy the resources to the things that work in accordance with science and research to teach reading right.
Dykstra: We should seek small kernels of detailed information about which teachers consistently produce better results in a given type of school for a given type of student. There is a problem with reliability when using MAP data at an individual student level.
Supt. Evers talked about the new state accountability system as being a better alternative to no Child Left Behind. Governor Walker said the state is not just doing this as an alternative to NCLB, but in response to comments from business that our graduates are not well-prepared. Parents want to know what all schools are doing.
Olsen: We need a system to monitor reading in Wisconsin before we get into big trouble. Our changing population is leading us to discover challenges that other states have dealt with for years.
Kestell: The accountability design team is an excellent opportunity to discuss priorities in education; a time to set aside personal agendas and look for solutions that work.
Next Meeting/Status of Report
Michael Brickman will try to send out a draft of a report the week of August 29 with his best interpretation of task force consensus items. The final meeting will be Sept. 27, perhaps in Madison, Eau Claire, or Wausau. Some task force issues will need to be passed on to other task forces in the future.

Related: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges and Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting and www.wisconsin2.org.

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In education, money isn’t all

Mark Fermanich:

The amount of funding available for K-12 education in Colorado has led to considerable debate. The Lobato case being heard before the state Supreme Court challenges the constitutionality of our school finance system, and Proposition 103 is a ballot initiative for raising additional state revenues for public schools. If either of these efforts is successful, hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenues will flow to K-12 education. But if Colorado significantly increases funding for schools, can it reasonably expect dramatically better results?
It is true that studies examining the link between school funding levels and student outcomes, typically standardized test scores, have failed to find a strong relationship. These results have led some to conclude that money does not much matter.
However, this research may be misleading. Schools have many other responsibilities than teaching reading and math. Parents and policymakers expect schools to teach many other subjects such as social studies, science and the arts. We also expect schools to help socialize children. To the extent that schools dedicate resources to these ends, an aggregate fiscal measure such as total spending per student is not an appropriate metric when coupled with a narrowly defined outcome such as math or reading test scores.

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RheeFirst, Michelle Rhee Attack Site, Defended By Teachers Union

Joy Resmovits:

n the eyes of Steven Brill, the American Federation of Teachers building a website attacking Michelle Rhee and masking its origins is worse than Rhee’s creating a billion-dollar organization aimed at revamping education that doesn’t disclose its backers.
Brill, author of the recent Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, came to the education beat after writing a piece for the New Yorker about the “Rubber Room,” a place where New York City public school teachers were paid to stay out of classrooms.
“People are generally making a mistake when they don’t disclose who’s donating,” Brill told The Huffington Post. “But when you set up a website to attack them for it and don’t define the source, that’s worse.”

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The DPI Hold on the Madison Prep Planning Grant: Yes, It Is a Big Deal

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

III. The Sleeper Issue: A Collective Bargaining Agreement that Cannot Be Amended Even a Teeny, Tiny Bit
If this weren’t enough, there seems to be another legal issue. This is one that has not attracted much attention, but it seems to me to be a serious problem, at least over the short term.
The school district and Madison Teachers Inc (MTI) have a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs terms and conditions of employment for teachers and other represented staff. The plans for Madison Prep calls for working conditions and terms of employment for the school’s teachers that differ in significant ways from what the CBA calls for. For example, Madison Prep plans to offer an extended school day and school year and plans to structure its pay for teachers in a different way.
In more normal times, it would be theoretically possible for the school district and MTI to enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by which the parties agree to modify the terms of the CBA in some regards in order to accommodate Madison Prep’s plans.

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Larry Powell, Fresno School Superintendent, Takes $800,000 Pay Cut

Tracie Cone:

Some people give back to their community. Then there’s Fresno County School Superintendent Larry Powell, who’s really giving back. As in $800,000 – what would have been his compensation for the next three years.
Until his term expires in 2015, Powell will run 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students, all for less than a starting California teacher earns.
“How much do we need to keep accumulating?” asks Powell, 63. “There’s no reason for me to keep stockpiling money.”
Powell’s generosity is more than just a gesture in a region with some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment. As he prepares for retirement, he wants to ensure that his pet projects survive California budget cuts. And the man who started his career as a high school civics teacher, who has made anti-bullying his mission, hopes his act of generosity will help restore faith in the government he once taught students to respect.

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Indiana gives letter grades to schools

Grace Schneider:

The Indiana Department of Education released a new report card this week on all Hoosier public schools that boils school improvement on test scores and other federal academic standards into letter grades of A to F.
The new grading system received mixed review from educators, who wonder whether the new accountability system provides an accurate snapshot of their performance.
“The grading system as far as I’m concerned is about politics,” said Mary Mathes, a retired teacher who is a board member in the South Harrison school district.

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College Presidents Are Bullish on Online Education but Face a Skeptical Public

Jeffrey Young:

Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education’s quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle.
Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom’s. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents’ survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone.
The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Just 10 years ago, few colleges took teaching onto the Internet, and skepticism about the practice was the norm among professors and university leaders.

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To College or Not to College

64 Notes:

I finished my schooling back in 2010. As norms have it, I was supposed to join a college. But I didn’t.
My question: Why the____?
Hell broke loose! Relatives were all restless, self-righteous were giving lectures, concerned were trying to explain and dad nagged me day-and-night. But even after seeking advice of respected ones; there was little logic anywhere.
I didn’t think I could learn anything valuable in a college. So why go? Just because everyone does? It’s funny how “education” (I call it literacy) is not good enough for the real world. And still they are the standard. Irony!
So I took a gap year, to figure out my life and what next. During my gap year, I failed a startup, helped people, failed people, lost things, gained things, travelled, met people and did things I always wanted to do.

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Indiana vouchers prompt thousands to change schools

Tom Coyne:

Weeks after Indiana began the nation’s broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.
It’s a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.
In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.
“The bottom line from our perspective is, when you cut through all the chaff, nobody can deny that public money is going to be taken from public schools, and they’re going to end up in private, mostly religious schools,” said Nate Schnellenberger, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.

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K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Annual Income Lost/Gained due to Interstate Migration

Nick Kasprak:

Today’s map comes a day late – we’ve been hard at work getting the data ready. We’ve updated our interactive State Migration Calculator with the latest IRS data, and it now includes migration in 2008-09. I’ve used the new data to create a map of interstate movement of income over the past decade. Florida is the big winner – migrants bought a net $70 billion dollars in annual income into the state between 1999 and 2009. New York, on the other hand, lost the most income: $45 billion.

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Declining funding degrading quality

Katie Douglass:

In overwhelming numbers, Minnesota superintendents say the state education funding formula is broken and without changes education quality will diminish, according to Minnesota 2020’s latest survey of school administrators.
Download full report (pdf)
View online at Scribd
“To maintain a high level of academic achievement in a time of shrinking state funding, school districts have cut around the edges, but after nearly a decade of underfunding and recent delayed state payments, it’s getting difficult to keep cuts out of classrooms,” superintendents report in the survey sent to them at the end of the 2010-11 school year.

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Grading the Education Reformers

Richard Rothstein:

If you saw Waiting for “Superman,” Steven Brill’s tale in Class Warfare will be familiar. The founder of Court TV offers another polemic against teacher unions and a paean to self-styled “education reformers.” But even for those who follow education policy, he offers an eye-opening read that should not be missed. Where the movie evoked valiant underdogs waging an uphill battle against an ossified behemoth, Brill’s briskly written book exposes what critics of the reformers have long suspected but could never before prove: just how insular, coordinated, well-connected, and well-financed the reformers are. Class Warfare reveals their single-minded efforts to suppress any evidence that might challenge their mission to undermine the esteem in which most Americans held their public schools and teachers. These crusaders now are the establishment, as arrogant as any that preceded them.
Brill’s heroes make a high-profile gallery. They are public-school critics like former New York and Washington, D.C. schools chancellors Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. They also include charter school operators David Levin (KIPP) and Eva Moskowitz (Harlem Success Academies), as well as alternative teacher and principal recruiters Wendy Kopp (Teach for America) and Jon Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools). Their ranks boast billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama himself. And they don’t lack for savvy, richly endowed representation. Democrats for Education Reform, a lobbying, political action, and communications campaign rolled into one, has brought them all together. Lavishly supported by the newfound wealth of young Wall Street hedge fund managers answerable to no one, DFER’s troops have been working overtime to radically transform American public education.

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Wisconsin schools alter sick-leave plans

Erin Richards:

But when it comes to sick time for teachers who work around lots of kids known for having lots of germs, Forbes has cautioned districts to tread lightly and not make big changes if it’s not necessary to balance the budget.
The school districts of Hamilton and Elmbrook in Waukesha County both have modified their sick-time policies. Hamilton educators used to have about 20 sick days per year, and the new policy cuts that approximately in half, said Denise Dorn Lindberg, spokeswoman for the district.
Accrual reduction
Hamilton’s teaching staff members used to be able to accrue a maximum of 75 sick days over the course of their career; the new maximum is 30 days – time that can be used to cover extended recovery from illness or injury. But while the bank of days went down, it’s also been restructured to act more like a portable benefit, Lindberg said. For example, any unused leave acquired beyond 30 days can be converted to $125 per day and deposited in a teacher’s retirement account.

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26% Say U.S. Public Schools Provide World-Class Education

Rasmussen Reports:

While most adults agree with President Obama that a world-class education is the most important factor in the success of America’s children and status in the world, most don’t think U.S. public schools provide that level of education.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 61% agree with President Obama when he says “a world-class education is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world.” Twenty-five percent (25%) disagree with that statement, while another 14% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
However, only 26% believe U.S. public schools provide a world-class education. A majority (62%) does not think American public schooling provides that level of education, while another 12% are not sure.
The survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on August 20-21, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

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Five big education ideas headed TN’s way

Julie Hubbard & Heidi Hall:

It’s rare to hear the word “education” from Tennessee’s leaders without “reform” coming after it.
Three years ago, the state began rewriting its curriculum and rethinking the way it dealt with educators. The resulting changes won Tennessee a half-billion-dollar federal grant to attempt to move students from among the lowest-achieving in the nation to the top of the pack.
The state is birthing charter schools at a brisk pace, from none seven years ago to 40 today and, some estimate, up to 20 per year moving forward.
Teachers will be judged routinely on their classroom performance and their students’ test scores. Individual districts are rolling out their own reforms, such as Williamson County’s invitation for students to bring their own technology and Metro Nashville’s dividing of high school students into specific areas of study called academies.

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Three Radical Ideas to Reform Education. Surprise. They Don’t Involve School Buildings

The Innovative Educator, via a kind James Dias email:

Earlier this year, I shared my disappointment with Fast Company’s compilation of “13 Radical Ideas for Spending $100 Million to Overhaul Schools” The problem was that these ideas really just weren’t all that radical. Even Will Richardson, who was featured in the article, commented on my blog that he agreed (see comment here). Richardson did feature a radical idea in his own blog a few years back in his post, One Town’s Reform…Close the Schools. The article explains how a UK community shut down its 11 schools replacing them with dynamic learning centers that looked very different than traditional compulsory schools. According to their site, they are still going strong.
The learning center idea has certainly taken off as more and more people are realizing that the compulsory, oppressive, disconnected, test-driven schools that exist today are not the best option when it comes to preparing children for success in the world.

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School Choice Is Here to Stay

Richard Komer:

The 2010 elections had many obvious effects, but one of the lesser-known is that they revived the school-choice movement in a big way. Although many education writers had assumed the movement was dead, there have been far more efforts to pass school-choice programs this year than ever and, more importantly, the success rate has gone up too.
This reflects the political nature of school choice, which has in modern times been promoted primarily by Republicans. Increasingly, however, Democrats, particularly minority Democrats, have begun bucking the wishes of the national teachers unions, which oppose school choice in any form.
School choice has even broken into the national consciousness with the success of such documentaries as “The Lottery” and “Waiting for ‘Superman.'” These focused on parents’ efforts to get their children into charter schools, which are public schools operated independently of their local school districts–and, not coincidentally, without teacher union involvement.
From the perspective of status quo supporters, charter schools are the least threatening form of school choice, because they remain public schools, meaning they cannot charge tuition and their admissions practices typically are controlled by lottery. This year has seen dramatic increases in interest in charter schools, as an alternative to regular public schools. Even the Obama administration got into the act, by making the removal of existing caps on the number of charter schools a component of states’ applications for federal “Race to the Top” funds.

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Science can lead to better (Wisconsin) readers

Marcia Henry, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:

Fifteen years ago, Wisconsin fourth-graders placed third in the country in state rankings of reading ability known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 2009, our fourth-graders’ scores plunged to 30th, with a third of the students reading below basic levels. The scores of minority youth were even bleaker, with 65% of African-American and 50% of Hispanic students scoring in the below-basic range.
As a member of Gov. Scott Walker’s blue ribbon reading task force, I am one of 14 people charged with reversing that drop. And, as a 50-year veteran educator, I have a partial solution. Let me spell it out for you: We need better teacher preparation.
How many of you remember your very best teachers? I remember Miss Hickey at Lincoln School and Miss Brauer at Folwell School in Rochester, Minn. They taught me to read.
I travel throughout the country consulting and providing staff development for school districts and literacy organizations. I’ve met thousands of dedicated teachers who tell me they are unprepared to teach struggling readers.
This situation is not the teachers’ fault. Some teachers in Wisconsin had only one course in reading instruction. Most were never exposed to the latest research regarding early reading acquisition and instruction. In contrast, several states require three or four classes in courses that contain the latest in science-based reading instruction.

Related: Wisconsin’s “Read to Lead” task force and “a Capitol Conversation” on reading.

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Arrests, citations reach lowest level in 10 years at Madison high schools

Matthew DeFour:

The number of arrests and citations for incidents at Madison’s four main high schools dropped last year to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to police data.
But arrests and citations at West and Memorial were twice the number at East and La Follette — a reversal of the situation 10 years earlier when there were more than twice as many at the city’s East Side high schools.
West was the only school with an increase from the previous year.
The Wisconsin State Journal obtained the data from the Madison Police Department amid a debate over whether the Madison School District should use drug-sniffing police dogs in random sweeps of high schools. The School Board was to consider the issue Monday but delayed a vote until late September — in part to review the arrest and citation data.
District officials say an increase in drug-related disciplinary referrals in recent years, and the use of drug dogs in area school districts, support the use of police dogs. Community surveys also have showed strong support.
Luis Yudice, the School District’s security coordinator, who introduced the drug-sniffing dog proposal with the support of Madison police, is concerned drugs in schools can lead to more gang activity, fights and weapons in schools as students arm themselves in self-defense. He views the police dog policy as a possible deterrent that could prevent a crisis.

Related: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.
Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio/Video.

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Naive To Print Teachers’ Scores, Says TFA Founder

Alexander Russo:

Just a day after a New York court found that value-added ratings for public school teachers should be revealed and reported publicly — something that Joel Klein’s DOE succeeded in encouraging the press corps to ask for — TFA founder Wendy Kopp shot back at the notion that her organization should reveal the value-added ratings for its teachers — and in particular the charge of being “hilariously hypocritical” in Steve Brill’s book. Brill claimed that, because it promotes accountability so fiercely, TFA should reveal its teachers’ performance ratings. Kopp claims to have been outraged at the LA Times’ decision to name names last year and she writes, “Is it really naive to think that we should not be printing the names of teachers and the results they get on standardized tests in newspapers? Or is the naivete the notion that this might be a good path forward?” I wish Kopp had been so clear back a year ago when this was all first being debated — it would have been brave and right of her — and I love to poke TFA in the eye for, well, whatever I can think of (it’s not hard to find things). But she’s right that publishing the names and ratings is dumb, that the LA Times shouldn’t have done it, that there’s nothing necessarily hypocritical about TFA’s decision to use the scores internally, and that Brill was amusing but incorrect to slam TFA in his book. Full Kopp statement below.

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Wisconsin Teachers face new employment landscape

Erin Richards:

Jeni Callan sits near the front of the school bus, listening and taking tidy notes on a legal pad.
It’s new teacher orientation day in the Hamilton School District, and the yellow bus carrying nearly 30 new hires for the 2011-’12 school year is winding through Waukesha County as the district’s spokeswoman shouts out the history of each passing school.
Callan, 26, is about to start her dream job as a language arts teacher at Templeton Middle School and knows that her good fortune is partially attributable to an unusually high number of retirements in Hamilton at the end of the school year.
But the job market has not been so kind to other young educators hunting for work, especially those lacking credentials to teach in specialty fields such as special education, math or physics.
“This is maybe the most unusual hiring climate for teachers that I’ve ever seen,” said Bill Henk, dean of Marquette University’s College of Education.

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It’s good to be the good guy: Teaching in Korea

Doug Lasken:

For a while now, I’ve had to get accustomed to the characterization of my 25-year teaching career with the Los Angeles Unified School District as a series of reprehensible acts on my part. As a teacher, I’ve been the bad guy.
First, over the 16 years I taught elementary, I wanted to teach immigrant children how to speak, read and write in English. Prior to 1997 when the passage of Propostion 227 mandated that immigrant children in California should learn English, my views were considered reactionary and contrary to the best interests of Hispanic children. I was told bluntly that by refusing to teach exclusively in Spanish I was destroying the children’s chances of success. One coordinator told me I was perpetuating “English as King.” “No,” I countered, “English is the common language of most of the world,” but this was a non-starter in such circles.

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Education chief gets an F

Jack Kelly:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been a presidential candidate for barely two weeks, but already polls indicate he’s even with President Barack Obama. So the administration trotted out Education Secretary Arne Duncan to knock him down a peg.
Texas schools have “really struggled” under Gov. Perry, Mr. Duncan told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt Aug. 18. “Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college … I feel really badly for the children there.”
It’s cheesy for a Cabinet officer to be so political. But that’s not why Mr. Obama shouldn’t have used the former Chicago superintendent of schools as his attack dog.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth- and eighth-graders in Texas score substantially better in reading and math than do their counterparts in Chicago. The high school graduation rate in Texas (73 percent) is much better than Chicago’s (56 percent). Mr. Duncan’s charges were recycled. “In low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in March.

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Wisconsin K-12 Spending Commentary

Sunny Schubert:

You may have read some news stories lately about how some school districts are doing quite well under Gov. Scott Walker’s budget, despite a drastic decline in school aid.
Monona Grove is not one of them.
“We’re not great,” said MGHS Superintendent Craig Gerlach of the district’s financial situation.
Districts that have prospered under the Walker budget constraints “may have been in a better situation than we were beforehand,” he said.
The Walker budget is slightly more rewarding to school districts that have growing student populations, he said, “but we’re more in the ‘slightly declining’ enrollment situation.”
The district spends about $13,000 per student, Gerlach said, but will receive about $600 less per pupil this year than last.
MGSD will also lose about $1.2 million in other state money.
The budget is “relatively balanced” this year, partly because the district received $850,000 in federal job stimulus funds, but that is one-time money that won’t be around next year.
MGSD did save some money because teachers are now being forced to contribute to their own health insurance and retirement funds.

Peter Sobol:

Total Wi school funding in 1998 was $7,527, not the $4,956 reported by Sunny in her recent column. Corrected for inflation that’s $9899. In 2008 average spending was (correctly reported) $10,791. In real dollars that’s an 8% increase, less than 1% per year, not the whopping 64% increase reported by Sunny.
So were did that 1%/year go? Not into the pockets of teachers, who have been losing ground to inflation in the last decade, and not into smaller class sizes (average class size has been creeping up in Wisconsin.) No, any employer will tell you that health care costs have been increased by more than 50% over this period – and school districts feel the same effects. The fact that cost increases are slowly squeezing the life out of our schools is another reason we need to fix the broken health care system in this country.



Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.

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The Syllabus as TOS (Terms of Service)

Barbara Fister:

I just checked the definition of syllabus in the Oxford English Dictionary. It states what I used to assume it meant: “a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction or by an examination, in a school, college, etc.; a programme of study.” The oldest quotation using the word is from 1656, when it meant something more along the lines of a table of contents or concordance. The best quote, though, is from 1939 and is taken from W. H. Auden’s “Commentary” in Journey to War:
“… the young emerging from the closed parental circle, to whose uncertainty the certain years present their syllabus of limitless anxiety and labour.”
But I think we may be a little too fond of limiting and certainty. These days syllabi are looking more and more like those Terms of Service that pop up when we use software. You know, the long documents in fine print with a scrollbar that we click through so we can move on. I thought nobody read them, but it turns out the excellent people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually track changes to them for us. (The EFF points out that these documents have a sinister side. They are contracts that we can’t negotiate, and they contain provisions we might not agree to, if we understood what they actually meant.) But the most striking thing about TOS is that they are full of rules – and very few people read them. So maybe they’re not the best model for the syllabus.

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Is NEA Following the Path of the Industrial Unions?

Mike Antonucci:

The National Education Association has always been an outlier in the world of organized labor. A member of neither the AFL-CIO nor Change to Win, the union experienced consistent and substantial growth during the same decades industrial union membership was disintegrating.
The last couple of years have provided the first opportunity to observe NEA’s actions during a period of declining membership. It appears the teachers’ union is following the AFL-CIO model for remaining relevant despite dwindling numbers – accelerated political action.
One of the constant internal battles in the labor movement has been over organizing vs. political action. Do you devote resources to growing membership in order to increase political clout, or do you increase political contributions in order to establish a friendly organizing environment? Although there have been fits and starts in both directions, overall the latter choice prevailed.

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Where GOP stands in war on Wisconsin Education ‘triangle’

Alan Borsuk:a

The start of the school year isn’t normally the time for issuing report cards. But it’s been an unusual and momentous year, so as the first day of classes approaches for almost every school in the state, here’s a report card on what I’ll call the war against the triangle.
Last winter, before Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, a leading Republican told a group of people (according to a reliable person who was present) that there was a triangle that was blocking the path to educational improvement in Wisconsin and his party was going to take out each leg of the triangle.
What were the legs?
Teachers unions, particularly the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC spent hugely on political campaigns and was pro-Democratic. It also was the largest lobbying force in the Capitol. WEAC represented the unwillingness of teachers organizations to change and the need to get rid of most collective bargaining matters.
The state Department of Public Instruction, which represented the status quo, overregulation of schools and how things couldn’t change if they were in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Milwaukee Public Schools, which represented – well, which represented Milwaukee Public Schools. Or, to put it another way, a money pit where there was never any positive change.

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Arne Duncan Interview

Andrew Rotherham:

Because of space, some stuff couldn’t make it into the Arne Duncan School of Thought interview in TIME, here’s one answer I thought was pretty interesting though:
How should Americans think about the consequences of failing to address our educational problems?
Our ability to provide a great education and to have a strong country and a strong country are inextricably linked. The jobs of the future are going to require some sort of college-level experience whether it’s two-year, four-year, trade or technical but the world has changed. When I was growing up on the south side of Chicago thirty years ago in high school my friends could drop out and still get a decent job in the stockyards and steel mills and own their own homes, support a family, and do OK. Those jobs are a distant memory of a bygone era. The jobs today are going to go to countries that are producing knowledge workers. And many countries are out-educating us.

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Assessment As An Act of Care

Melanie Booth:

Yep – it’s the “A” word again. “Assessment.” And in higher education, that word is just about everywhere we turn. I suspect that when you saw that word, you likely got a chill up your spine – oh no! Not assessment. Not again! Yep – assessment. Again. But I have developed a take on assessment that might help us see it differently. I believe that doing assessment is not about pleasing accreditors or other external stakeholders (what Peter Ewell, in a 2009 occasional paper for NILOA, identifies as the “Accountability Paradigm”), nor is its strength in supporting continuous quality improvement (what Ewell identifies as the “Improvement Paradigm”). Though these are perfectly legitimate reasons for attending to the work of assessment, to be honest, neither truly fuels my intrinsic desire to engage in the hard work of it all. Instead, I believe that assessment is really an act of care.
I care about my students; therefore, I assess. Let me explain.

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Teachers reject 2 percent pay hike in return for 90 more minutes in school day

Rosalind Rossi & Kim Janssen:

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis Thursday rejected an offer of a 2 percent raise for working a 90-minute-longer school day, saying teachers would not be “bullied” by public attempts to push through a slapdash plan.
Lewis refused a proposal involving elementary-school teachers only that was aired in the media Tuesday evening by Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and later amplified in writing to the union Wednesday morning.
“We fully support a better, smarter school day for our children but teachers are now being asked to work 29 percent longer for only a 2 percent pay increase,” Lewis said in a written statement. “To that we say thanks but no thanks.”
Lewis left the door open to further talks on the issue, however. She told the Chicago Sun-Times the union is crafting ways to add 15 to 60 more minutes to the elementary school day.

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Colorado school tax hike gets on November ballot

Ivan Moreno:

A proposal to raise taxes by $3 billion over five years to help fund Colorado’s education system will be on the November ballot, Secretary of State Scott Gessler said Wednesday.
The idea from Democratic state Sen. Rollie Heath would raise the sales and use tax rate to 3 percent, up from 2.9 percent, and raise the state’s individual and corporate tax rates to 5 percent, up from 4.63 percent. The increases would be in effect from 2012 to 2017.
“I think we got a real shot at getting this done,” said Heath, a Boulder senator. He said he decided to ask for the tax increases because of repeated cuts to the state’s education budget in recent years.

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So You Think You Can Sub? U.S., UK, Japan Try Oddball Ideas To Replace Absent Teachers

Carolyn Bucior:

This month, 500,000 hopeful substitute teachers are queuing up for work in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and countless small-town schools across the nation. I know from first-hand experience that the extra income and flexibility are big draws, especially if one is unemployed.
But I also know that the job can be demanding, low paying, and conducted without supervision or assistance. Who, I wondered, could do this work coolly and expertly and be willing to accept per diems that start at $45 and average $105?
The answers — from the United States, the UK, and Japan — may surprise you.

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Breakthrough

TEACHERS NOT ENOUGH? WHO KNEW?
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students…
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance…” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning…”
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…(but) It’s a teacher’s job…to give students the motivation to learn.”
It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; “For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be–namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
——————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics(r)
www.tcr.org/blog

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Why are Finland’s Schools Successful

LynNell Hancock:

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme–by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators–including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist–convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.

More, here.

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Ohio preparing new way to rank school districts

Angela Gartner and Jean Bonchak:

School districts in they future won’t just receive report card ratings from the state, they will be ranked from best to worst in a new system.
The mandate in Gov. Kasich’s $112 billion executive budget was handed to the Ohio Department of Education to devise the ranking procedure.
The listing may be ready for the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, according to ODE spokesperson Patrick Gallaway.
The ODE is now required to rank schools within comparable groupings on the basis of student results and cost effectiveness, according to the fifth book of the governor’s budget containing selected reforms.

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Trenton to open an alternative middle school this September

Erin Duffy:

A new alternative middle school for students with behavior problems and learning disabilities is set to open this September.
School officials last night briefed the Trenton board of education on the district’s newest school.
Some, like board member T. Missy Balmir, called the concept “long, long overdue.”
Others, like board president Rev. Toby Sanders and vice president Sasa Olessi Montaño asked for strict monitoring of the program’s success and use of district dollars.
“This is a huge undertaking, a new school in our district, a district facing the financial situation that we’re facing,” said Olessi Montaño.

New Jersey Left Behind has more.

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A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin’s Reading Challenges

UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg and I had an informative conversation with two elected officials at the Capitol recently.
I am thankful for Mark’s time and the fact that both Luther Olsen and Steve Kestell along with staff members took the time to meet. I also met recently with Brett Hulsey and hope to meet with more elected officials, from both parties.
The topic du jour was education, specifically the Governor’s Read to Lead task force.
Mark kindly shared this handout:

My name is Mark Seidenberg, Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, seidenberg@wisc.edu, http://lcnl.wisc.edu. I have studied how reading works, how children learn to read, reading disabilities, and the brain bases of reading for over 30 years. I am a co-author of a forthcoming report from the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) on low literacy among older adolescents and adults. I’m writing a general audience book about reading research and educational practices.
We have a literacy problem: about 30% of the US (and WI) population reads at a “basic” or “below basic” level. Literacy levels are particularly low among poor and minority individuals. The identification of this problem does not rest on any single test (e.g., NAEP, WKCE, OECD). Our literacy problem arises from many causes, some of which are not easy to address by legislative fiat. However, far more could be done in several important areas.
1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
A vast amount is known about reading in particular, ranging from what your eyes do while reading to how people comprehend documents to what causes reading disabilities. However, there is a gulf between Education and Science, and so this research is largely ignored in teacher training and curriculum development.
2. How children are taught. There continue to be fruitless battles over how beginning readers should be taught, and how to insure that comprehension skills continue to develop through middle and high school. Teachers rely on outdated beliefs about how children learn, and how reading works. As a result, for many children, learning to read is harder than it should be. We lose many children because of how they are taught. This problem does NOT arise from “bad teachers”; there is a general, systematic problem related to teacher education and training in the US.
3. Identification of children at risk for reading failures. Some children are at risk for reading and school failure because of developmental conditions that interfere with learning to read. Such children can be identified at young ages (preschool, kindergarten) using relatively simple behavioral measures. They can also be helped by effective early interventions that target basic components of reading such as vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge. The 30% of the US population that cannot read adequately includes a large number of individuals whose reading/learning impairments were undiagnosed and untreated.
Recommendations: Improve teacher education. Mechanism: change the certification requirements for new teachers, as has been done in several other states. Certification exams must reflect the kinds of knowledge that teachers need, including relevant research findings from cognitive science and neuroscience. Instruction in these areas would then need to be provided by schools of education or via other channels. In-service training courses could be provided for current teachers (e.g., as on-line courses).
Children who are at risk for reading and schooling failures must be identified and supported at young ages. Although it is difficult to definitively confirm a reading/learning disability in children at young ages (e.g., 4-6) using behavioral, neuroimaging, or genetic measures, it is possible to identify children at risk, most of whom will develop reading difficulties unless intervention occurs, via screening that involves simple tests of pre-reading skills and spoken language plus other indicators. Few children just “grow out of” reading impairments; active intervention is required.

I am cautiously optimistic that we may see an improvement in Wisconsin’s K-12 curricular standards.
Related: Excellence in Education explains Florida’s reading reforms and compares Florida’s NAEP progress with Wisconsin’s at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting and www.wisconsin2.org.

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Our Response to State Education Department’s Hold on Madison Prep Grant

Kaleem Caire, via email

Dear Friends & Colleagues,
In the last 48 hours, local media has been abuzz about the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s decision to put a hold on our charter school planning grant. The grant application was formally endorsed in March 2011 by the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Last week, DPI officials contacted us to request that our team and the leadership of the Madison Metropolitan School District meet with them to discuss how we intend to address issues related to (a) the 1972 Title IX Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and (b) new federal Title IX regulations on the establishment of single sex classes, extracurricular activities and schools that took effect in 2006. This meeting has been scheduled.
DPI has publicly stated that it is not uncommon for grant awards to be delayed for various reasons. In our case, DPI wants to ensure that all parties – MMSD, DPI and the Urban League of Greater Madison – are on the same page with regard to how Madison Prep will comply with federal and state statutes relative to single sex public schools. We welcome this conversation. MMSD and the Urban League have been working together on this issue since June.
Single Sex Public Schools are Growing in the U.S.
According to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, there are presently 116 single sex public schools in the United States. The number of single sex public schools continues to grow each year. For example, the Houston (Texas) Independent School District’s Board of Education recently approved an all boys and later an all girls college preparatory academy for students in grades 6 – 12. Both campuses opened this week.
There are also public charter schools such as Bluford Drew Jemison S.T.E.M Academy for boys in Baltimore, Maryland that was approved by the Board of Education of Baltimore City Public Schools without approving a similar school for girls at the same time. Bluford Drew Jameson is part of BCPS’ bold and aggressive Charter, Innovative and Transformation Schools Plan to revitalize public education in the city. BCPS’ efforts are being heralded nationally as they are seeing clear signs of turning around.
With Confidence, Precedent and Support, We Will Succeed
Given the successful growth of single sex public/charter schools across the country, along with our plans to comply with the new Title IX regulations and our publicly stated commitment to establish the 6-12 grade Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women, we are confident that the issues raised by DPI will be resolved.
With your support and that of DPI and MMSD, Madison Prep will soon provide a long overdue solution to a deeply rooted pattern of academic failure and under-performance, particularly among African American and Latino boys in our community. It will also serve as a learning laboratory that informs the programs, strategies and practices of schools and educators across Greater Madison and the State of Wisconsin.
We look forward to Madison Prep producing hundreds of confident, excited and future-focused young men who are ready for college and committed to promoting the schools values – leadership, excellence, pride and service – in their community, homes, peer groups and daily lives.
Visit the website and sign our petition below.
Madison Prep 2012: Empowering Young Men for Life!

IB interviewed Kaleem a few weeks ago.
Much more on Kaleem Caire and the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.

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Evidence Supports Charter Autonomy from Milwaukee Public Schools Milwaukee’s Non-Instrumentality Charter Schools Outperform MPS on ACT

Christian D’Andrea:

There are two different types of charter schools in the City of Milwaukee, and by at least one measure, those not chartered by the Milwaukee Public Schools are performing better.
Milwaukee’s ACT scores rose in 2011, but they still weren’t able to match the production of the city’s non-union charter schools. In the end, the non-district charter schools left their instrumentality counterparts in the dust when it came to college readiness.
The city’s non-instrumentality charter schools outperformed the MPS average when it came to the ACT, a selective college readiness test, in the past school year. These schools aren’t operated or authorized by local school boards, and have been more successful in preparing students when weighed against the city’s average. In the four qualifying high schools, students averaged a score of 18.8.

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Chileans Strike for Education Reform

Voice of America:

Protesters have barricaded streets and burned tires in Chile’s capital, Santiago, amid a 48-hour strike to press for education reform.
Police and protesters clashed Wednesday, as the government tried to shut down demonstrations in some parts of the city.
Reports from Santiago say business in most parts of the city was un-interrupted, with public transportation continuing to function and traffic flowing through most streets.
The strike was called by Chile’s main labor union, CUT, in support of students who have been protesting for weeks for education reform and an overhaul of educational funding. In addition, strike organizers have called for tax reform and constitutional change.

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Time to Stop Increasing Education Spending?

Hans Bader:

Even The New York Times is now questioning the massive spending increases on education that have occurred over the last generation in a discussion entitled “Spending Too Much Time and Money on Education?”:

Americans are spending more and more on education, but the resulting credentials — a high-school diploma and college degrees — seem to be losing value in the labor market.
Americans who go to college are triply hurt by this. First, as taxpayers: state and federal education budgets have ballooned since the 1950s. Second, as consumers: the average college student spends $17,000 a year on school, and those with loans graduate more than $23,000 in debt. And third, as a worker: in 1970, an applicant with a college degree was among an elite 11 percent, but now almost 3 in 10 adults have a degree.
Given that a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree and even graduate school are no longer a ticket to middle-class life, and all these years of education delay the start of a career, does our society devote too much time and money to education?

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Don’t let Walker take credit for teachers’ good work

Nick Zweifel:

Now that Gov. Scott Walker’s major cuts for public schools have been enacted, my question for my fellow educators is: What do we do next? I am sick and tired of constantly reacting to bad news and bad policy and always being in the position of having to play defense. Educators and school districts should organize to go on the offensive.
Walker’s budget has significantly damaged one of the best public education systems in the country. He turned half of our community members against us using false information, and now we will be fighting a public relations battle while also working harder to educate students with fewer resources.
Through all of this, we Wisconsin educators will still stand tall and deliver a top-notch education for the children of this state, regardless of what Walker has done, because that is what Wisconsin professional educators do.
My fear is that after we deliver, Walker and his minions will use the media and their bully pulpit to take all the credit for the successes that we will achieve in our classrooms. I can see the headlines now of Walker proclaiming how well his budget cuts worked because schools are performing well under his budget.
So what do we do? What should our strategy be? Here are some suggestions:

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Hearing on Pennsylvania teacher anti-strike bill set for Thursday

philly.com

The Neshaminy School District, mired in a contract impasse with its teachers for more than three-and-a-half years, will host a state hearing Thursday on a bill that would make teacher strikes and school lockouts illegal.
The Pennsylvania House Education Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, will discuss House Bill 1369 at Neshaminy High School starting at 10 a.m. The hearing is open to the public.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Todd Rock, R-Franklin, contains financial penalties, including a $5,000 individual fine, per incident, for inciting a strike; striking teachers losing two days of pay for each day of an illegal strike; and the striking union forfeiting its dues check-off privilege for one year.

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Stop second-guessing educators on student placement

Chris Rickert:

I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their “learning styles.”
What a contrast between a parent who’s more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district’s willingness to hear it have “been a common thing as long as I can remember,” said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.

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Superintendent Comments on Wisconsin School Budgets

Susan Troller:

In his rural district, which serves 249 students, the 2011-13 state budget has been nothing to celebrate. In fact, it has accelerated a difficult process of belt-tightening that’s been going on for almost 20 years due to revenue controls that have limited the amount districts can increase taxes to keep up with rising costs. The revenue controls hit some schools especially hard, especially those with declining enrollment, high-needs students or high property values. The new state budget’s huge reduction in overall aid for schools — $793 million over the biennium — accompanied by new limits on how much money districts can raise in property taxes to offset those losses — has, for many school districts, made a bad situation worse.
According to Quinton, Pepin parents are supportive of education, and he credits his School Board and staff for helping run “a tight financial ship.” Nonetheless, many of the district’s programs and services have been trimmed once again, from transportation to teaching staff, athletics to academic assistance for at-risk students. Paring back has been a way of life in Pepin for many years, Quinton says, but the newest round of losses caused by this budget cut to the bone.

Related:

Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding and K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin State and Local Debt Rose Faster Than Federal Debt During 1990-2009 Average Annual Increase in State Debt, 7.8%; Local Debt, 7.3%
Wisconsin’s essential challenge is to grow the economy. We’ve been falling behind Minnesota for decades.
Siobhan Hughes:

The U.S. economy will have another big budget deficit in fiscal 2011 and faces at least a couple more years of sluggish growth, as the effects of the recent recession persist, government forecasters said Wednesday.
The Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of almost $1.3 trillion for fiscal 2011. Though that will mark the third straight year of deficits above $1 trillion, the deficit forecast was a slight improvement from the almost $1.4 trillion estimated in an April analysis and reflected higher-than-anticipated revenue from individual income taxes.
The outlook for the U.S. economy also remains challenging, with growth expected to remain too slow this year and next year to make a big dent in the unemployment rate. The jobless rate will fall to 8.9% by the end of calendar 2011 and 8.5% by the end of 2012, the forecast said, as the economy grows by 2.3% this year and 2.7% next year, measured from fourth quarter to fourth quarter.

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Q&A with Christensen and Eyring on their new book: “The Innovative University”

Forbes:

Could you give our readers a short crash course to the main ideas of your book?
“The Innovative University” makes the case that a “disruptive” technology, online learning, is bringing fundamental change to higher education. Traditional universities and colleges are vulnerable because their model of education was already becoming too expensive for many students. Most young students will continue to want the campus-based learning experience, but they will expect to pay less and to enjoy a combination of face-to-face and online instruction. Institutions that don’t provide a hybrid will see declining enrollments. Most institutions will also have to focus more narrowly on student instruction, rather than emulating the large research universities, such as Harvard. Making these changes will be hard, given the strength of higher education tradition and the autonomy of faculty members. However, we believe that it can be done.

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Shortchanged by the Bell

Luis Ubinas & Chris Gabrieli:

AFTER a summer of budget cuts in Washington and state capitals, we have only to look to our schools, when classes begin in the next few weeks, to see who will pay the price.
The minimum required school day in West Virginia is already about the length of a “Harry Potter” double feature. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, summer school programs are being slashed or eliminated. In Oregon and California this year, students will spend fewer days in the classroom; in rural communities from New Mexico to Idaho, some students will be in school only four days a week.
For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future.

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Chicago Public Schools begins move to extend school day

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:

Chicago Public Schools today launched their plans to extend students’ time in the classroom by 90 minutes each and by two weeks each year and set up an advisory committee to figure out how it’ll be done.
However, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said she would decline an invitation to serve on the committee, saying in a written statement that, “this news has nothing do with helping our children and everything to do with politicizing a real serious problem.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel began pushing for a longer school day while he was on the campaign trail, saying Chicago’s school day is the shortest in the nation when compared to public school systems in nine other large cities. School reform legislation passed in June allows the district to implement a longer school day in the fall of 2012 with or without the union’s agreement, and CPS officials have said they would do that.

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After Words with Steven Brill

C-Span:

The founder of The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV tells the story of a coalition of unlikely allies in the fight to change a school system that many parents believe is failing the nation’s children. He debated education solutions with former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch.

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Women See Value and Benefits of College; Men Lag on Both Fronts, Survey Finds

Wendy Wang & Kim Parker:

Since the early 1990s, more young women than young men have been completing college. The survey attempted to gauge the public’s reaction to this educational trend. Respondents were asked whether the fact that women are now more likely than men to get a college degree is a good thing for society, a bad thing or if it doesn’t make much difference. Slightly over half of the public (52%) say this is a good thing for society, 39% say that it doesn’t make much difference, and only 7% view this as a bad thing.
A similar share of men and women (50% and 55%, respectively) view the female advantage in college education as a good thing for society. Men are somewhat more likely than women to view this as neutral for society (45% vs. 34%), while women are nearly twice as likely as men to say it is a bad thing for society (9% vs. 5%).

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Florida Governor Scott explores higher-ed reforms

Denise-Marie Balona:

Gov. Rick Scott is exploring dramatic higher-education reforms that are similar to those already under way in Florida’s public school districts.
Patterned after reforms being championed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently announced he’s running for president, Scott is looking at changing the way professors are paid and moving toward a merit-pay system with limits on tenure.
Texas has been debating such changes to save money and bolster professor productivity — going so far as to consider tying professor pay to how many students they teach and how much research money they bring in.
Instructors would get annual bonuses as high as $10,000 a class if they rated highly on student satisfaction surveys. Even the assignment of faculty offices and parking spaces would be based on their performance.

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The school reform deniers

Steven Brill:

Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer – the magazine I founded and edited -who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.
In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, “Who says?” When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn’t won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides’ views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn’t. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon’s records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.

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Wisconsin DPI announces $6 million for charter school planning and dissemination grants; Proposed IB Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School Not Funded

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, via a kind reader’s email:

Groups planning new charter schools and established charter schools that want to replicate their success are sharing $6 million in federal charter school grants.
Planning grants total $4.5 million and will go for planning activities in 23 charter schools that have already been approved by their local school board or authorizing authority. Five of those grants are going to districts that do not currently have charter schools. Five grants, totaling $625,000, will support the expansion of successful charter school models. Another seven grants, totaling $875,000, will help charter schools that are in the second year dissemination activities.
“Planning grant proposals in this round of funding are for a mix of innovative charter schools,” said State Superintendent Tony Evers. “This is just what the charter school law promotes: local solutions to serve students and their families.”

Matthew DeFour has more.

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Why unions are livid about L.A.’s new teacher-evaluation experiment

Daniel Wood

After years of frustration with its own teacher-evaluation system, the second-largest school district in the country is pilot-testing a new idea against the wishes of its union.
With the Obama administration offering incentives for school systems to revamp how they evaluate teachers’ effectiveness, the episode with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) carries important lessons nationwide, analysts say.
The fresh approach in Los Angeles meshes with the Obama administration’s efforts to use more systematic and data-driven approaches to evaluate teachers. It includes parent and student feedback, students’ standardized test scores, and more detailed observations given by peers – who watch teachers and then type their observations and questions into laptop computers, then discuss their impressions the next day.

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WEAC head Mary Bell stands up to Gov. Scott Walker with sometimes controversial tactics

Roger Bybee:

Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, is quiet and thoughtful in one-on-one conversations. She’s a middle-aged, cheery, bespectacled woman whose dimpled face is surrounded by a thick corona of whitish-gray hair.
But when fighting for her members, Bell forcefully projects her belief in teachers’ right to respect, decent pay and union representation. At a rally with tens of thousands at the Capitol on a snowy, bitter Feb. 26, Bell expressed outrage at Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals for the near-total stripping of union rights for teachers, librarians, highway workers, prison guards and other public workers across the state. Yet her anger was tempered by her humor and her belief in Wisconsinites’ fundamental commitment to fairness and public education.
The rhetoric Mary Bell used that day about “Wisconsin values” was no stretch for her, because she perceives herself as a typical Wisconsinite, sharply different from the image of the insular Madison insider, as Walker likes to portray his enemies.

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Learning the Hard Way The reformers who want to save the public schools are starting to make a difference, against ferocious opposition

Joel Klein:

Like so many debates in America today, the fight over public education is as polarized as it is consequential. There appears to be a general sense of agreement that the results we are getting are woefully inadequate, especially given the demands that a high-tech, global economy will place on our future work force. Nevertheless, there’s a sharp disagreement over exactly what to do.
Spending more money is of course a perennial demand. Since 1970 America has more than doubled the real dollars spent on K-12 education. We have increased the number of teachers by more than a third, created legions of nonteaching staff, and raised salaries and benefits across the board. Yet fewer than 40% of the students who graduate from high school are ready for college. At the same time, students in other countries are moving ahead of us, scoring higher–often much higher–on international tests of reading, math and science skills.

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In Census Data, All Matter of Information Tied to Schools

Sabrina Tavernise:

It is August, and the Census Bureau is counting things again. This time it was items associated with school, which is just around the corner for children across the country.
Ever wondered, for example, how much people spend on back-to-school clothes? About $7 billion, according to figures released Friday by the bureau, judging from sales at family clothing stores in August 2010, the last back-to-school shopping month for which it has data. That is about the size of the Los Angeles city budget. It represents a small increase from 2009.
The bureau estimated that 55 million students would be enrolled in pre-kindergarten through high school this fall, and that 11 percent would be in private schools. That total is up by about 16 percent from 20 years ago.

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What Does Research Say About School District Consolidation?

REL Northwest:

One way REL Northwest connects practitioners with research is by posting responses to inquiries made to the Ask A REL Reference Desk. The free Reference Desk service provides educators, policymakers, and community members with prompt, authoritative resources on topical issues, customized to their local needs. Recent responses point to research on topics such as mathematics interventions, data-driven decision making, and the impact of early childhood education programs.
The latest inquiry is on a topic that’s receiving increased national attention due to budget challenges: whether consolidating school districts might result in lower overall costs for education. Unfortunately, research on consolidation does not offer definitive guidance for making such decisions. There are several reasons for this: empirical studies of consolidation employ different analytical approaches to data; older data in some studies yield results that may not be representative of current district conditions; studies do not uniformly separate costs related to merging only a narrow range of district services from costs related to merging entire districts or combining schools; different studies focus on different costs or estimate costs in different ways; and much of the literature consists of advocacy.

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No Common Core Standards in Waivers, but what about Assessments?

Anne Hyslop:

As Education Week has reported today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan clarified that states will not have to endorse the Common Core State Standards in order to successfully obtain a waiver from portions of No Child Left Behind. While the full details of Duncan’s all-or-nothing waiver proposal have not been released, most (including Education Sector’s Kevin Carey) speculated that states would have to demonstrate they embraced high academic content standards – i.e. Common Core – in order to be let off the hook for meeting the 100% proficiency by 2014 deadline.

While taping C-SPAN’s Newsmakers program, Duncan assured states who have not yet adopted Common Core that the Department is “happy to work with them” as long as they verify their own standards are rigorous. Duncan also noted that this process would likely involve states having their standards approved by their state’s postsecondary institutions – supposedly to certify that they are “college and career ready” standards.

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Not a Verb…..

notaverb.com

This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way. You have to pick one of the non-verbs about which this site knows:

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Charter management group just might help Milwaukee schools

Alan Borsuk:

First, a lesson from baseball: It was roughly a year ago that Brewers fans were wringing their hands that the pitching was bad and there was little prospect for fixing that in the off-season, given a weak free agent scene and limited finances. Now, the Brewers have pitching that is basically amazing.
Sometimes, things do improve dramatically. Sometimes, that happens even when there are sound arguments for why they won’t.
I could write this entire column – if not a book – on why I’m pessimistic about things getting a lot better on the Milwaukee education scene. I would present a pretty sound case, too.
Maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to see things take off like a rocket ship.

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What’s the link between time in school and achievement?

Jennifer Davis and Emily McCann:

There is perhaps no more eloquent statement on the essential link between time and learning than the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, which delivered its report in April 1994. In its highly-quotable declaration, the commission makes very clear that unless the education system is completely reconfigured around the objective of achieving proficiency, rather than meeting arbitrary time requirements, we will never reach the goal of serving all children well. In the commission’s words:
“Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available…. If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with different subjects. But we have put the cart before the horse: our schools and the people involved with them-students, parents, teachers, administrators, and staff-are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for students and learning.”

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Teacher Union Controlled Health Care Provider WEA Trust: Have to Adapt – and Fast

Karen Rivedal:

Less than two months after a new state law took health benefits off the bargaining table for public workers and required them to pay at least 12.6 percent — up from zero, in some school districts — of their health insurance premiums, WEA Trust has lost a fifth of its business.
And that means big changes could be coming for the Madison-based group health insurer of mostly school districts that employs nearly 500.
“We’re going to have to adapt and adjust,” said Mark Moody, president and CEO of WEA Trust. “You can’t absorb a 20 percent loss and not do anything.”
The Trust, a not-for-profit company, provides health insurance to just over 100,000 employees in about 60 percent of the state’s 425 school districts.
It was created in 1970 by the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC.
Critics have long accused the two bodies of working together to fleece taxpayers through over-priced contracts they say school boards have effectively been forced to sign under union pressure.

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Madison School District Trying Alternatives to Large Public Hearings

Matthew DeFour:

If you didn’t get the Madison School District’s invitation to Thursday’s meeting about a controversial proposal to let police bring drug-sniffing dogs into schools, don’t take it personally; neither did School Board President James Howard.
The meeting was for minority community leaders to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposal, which the School Board is expected to vote on Aug. 29.
School Board members weren’t invited, which Howard, who learned about the meeting Wednesday from a television reporter, said is a problem.
“Board members should always be informed of these meetings,” Howard said. “I don’t know why the ball got dropped.”
The School District’s revamped communications department organized the meeting at the Urban League on South Park Street as part of a new outreach effort, said Marcia Standiford, the department’s new manager.

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Women See Value and Benefits of College; Men Lag on Both Fronts, Survey Finds

Pew Research Center:

Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually. These results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey come at a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion.
The survey also found that while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.

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An “Extreme Makeover” for U.S. Education — Can We? Should We?

Beverly Eakman:

A front-page August 16 Washington Times’ headline screamed: “Scores show students aren’t ready for college — 75% may need remedial classes.”
Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people’s attention. It isn’t the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: “A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better.”
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don’t know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics’ Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, “Our idea of ‘advanced’ is clearly below international standards.”
According to the news article, “75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work.”

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Minn. ed commissioner wants ACT to be an even higher-stakes test

Tom Weber:

The state’s education commissioner says she’s exploring ways to make the ACT college entrance exam even higher-stakes for Minnesota students than it already is.
Wednesday’s release of ACT scores shows 72 percent of Minnesota high school graduates took the test. No state with that much participation scored higher. But 72 percent isn’t enough for Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, especially considering there are waivers available so students can take the test for free.
The problem, she said, is not enough students realize how crucial the ACT is.
“There are so many tests that they’re taking; they don’t know which is the important test,” Cassellius said. “We want to have a test that actually measures their career and college readiness.”

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Sending Your Child to College? Advice from Dr. Drew

Andrew Rotherham:

With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the “surgeon general of youth culture” by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn’t fielding abstract questions — his own kids are starting university this fall.
College isn’t always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can’t be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff — safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they’re on their own and are not invincible.
I’ve been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.

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Recruiters at Black Colleges Break From Tradition

Sue Shellenbarger:

Katy Daugherty enrolled at Tennessee State University because of the school’s flexible daytime, evening and online classes and its new urban-studies program.
Once on campus at this historically black college, where more than 70% of the students are African-American, Ms. Daugherty, 29, who is white, became the minority.
“It was definitely different, having grown up and been in the majority, and all of a sudden you are in the minority,” she says.
In what has become a mutually beneficial relationship for schools and students, many of the nation’s 105 historically black colleges are increasingly wooing non-black students. The goals: to boost lagging enrollment and offset funding shortfalls.

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Not For Profit College Board Getting Rich as Fees Hit Students

Janet Lorin

When Gaston Caperton was recruited to run the College Board, owner of the SAT entrance exam, he said he didn’t want to just run “a testing company.”
Founded by Harvard and 11 other universities in 1900 to create a standardized test to admit students based on merit rather than family connections, the College Board by 1999 was facing cash-flow problems.
Caperton turned the nonprofit company into a thriving business, more than doubling revenue to $660 million by boosting fees, expanding the Advanced Placement program and the sale of names of teenage test-takers to colleges. A former West Virginia governor, he persuaded 11 states to cover fees for a preliminary SAT in the 10th grade.

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Why Public Schools Need Less Regulation

Michael Horn:

Picture the following scenario. You ask your friend to come up with a creative meal that will amaze your guests at a dinner party you are holding, but you impose some constraints. Your friend can only use the ingredients from a restrictive list and must follow the specific directions from a meal you cooked these same guests just weeks earlier.
What are the odds that your friend makes something innovative? Not good. After all, you’ve practically defined the solution by specifying nearly all of its inputs before she can even consider what she might cook.
A far better way to generate an innovative solution is to define the outcome you need — a five-course meal for eight — and then allow your friend to figure out the best way to get there.

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Commentary on the Seattle School Board Races

Melissa Westbrook:

The (Seattle) Times’ editorial board is nothing if not amusing. Their current editorial on the School Board races puts forth the results without much analysis (because, of course, if they said, out loud, that the incumbents all appear to be in trouble that would hurt their cause). Here’s how they framed the results:

Frustration about Seattle School Board leadership weighed heavily on the minds of primary voters who, in all but one board race, were more generous with their votes for challengers than incumbents.

Yes, generous is one way to put it. Another would be that all the incumbents appear to be in trouble.
They can only say about the challengers that they raise valid concerns about the district and the current Board. Almost like, “thanks for pointing that out, now move along.”

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Apple, Microsoft May Bid for 15 Million Turkish Tablets, AA Says

Ercan Ersoy:

Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) may participate in the government’s project to supply as much as 15 million tablet computers for school children over four years, state-owned Anatolia news agency said, citing Turkish Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan.
Apple officials told Caglayan during his visit to the U.S. that the Cupertino, California-based maker of smart devices may also decide to use some Turkish manufacturers to make some peripheral equipment such as covers, earphones for its iPad and iPhone models, Caglayan said at a news conference with Turkish reporters in Seattle, according to the Ankara-based agency.

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More on WEAC’s Layoffs

Mike Antonucci

here are still some open questions in the aftermath of the WEAC layoffs – which the union appears reluctant to answer. WEAC executive director Dan Burkhalter wouldn’t tell the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about membership levels, saying it was “internal information,” and a WEAC spokeswoman “refused an on-camera interview with WISC-TV Monday, and a conference call later that day was cut short after only two reporters had asked questions.”
Most media outlets have been reporting that the 42 pink-slipped staffers constitute 40 percent of the union’s workforce, but there must be some detail missing. The union’s 2008-09 filings show 151 employees, and I can guarantee you WEAC was not servicing 98,000 members with 105 staffers.

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Villanova law school censured after misreporting test scores

St. Petersburg Times:

The law school at Villanova University has been censured for submitting falsified admissions data for several years to the American Bar Association. Villanova’s average Law School Admissions Test scores were padded by two to three points from 2005 to 2009, law school dean John Gotanda said. The median GPA was raised by up to 0.16 points. Both data sets often factor into law school rankings. The law school could have lost its accreditation because of the scandal. The school must post the reprimand on its website for two years. School officials described the misreporting as an “odd” scheme, considering the inflation “didn’t propel us into the top 50.”
Displaced whale dies in Calif. river
A 45-foot gray whale that delighted people for more than a month after taking up residence in Northern California’s Klamath River died Tuesday after beaching itself on a sandbar. In June, the whale and its calf took refuge in freshwater for an unknown reason while migrating north from Baja California. Scientists said it may have been escaping from killer whales. The calf swam out to sea on July 23, about the right time for it to go off on its own.

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New Jersey Superintendents Call State Agency Ineffective

Winnie Hu:

Nearly three-quarters of New Jersey school superintendents said the state Education Department did not play an important role in helping districts raise students’ achievement or prepare graduates for college and careers, according to a survey the department released Monday.
Many superintendents criticized how the state set goals and evaluated districts’ progress and said they did not find school report cards or state and federal data requirements useful in improving students’ performance.
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the state’s handling of special-education services and its guidance on curriculum and instruction. For instance, 63 percent of superintendents said they had not found the department’s efforts helpful in improving math instruction, and 59 percent said the same of improving literacy.

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Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet

Adam Thierer:

In the field of Internet policy, 2011 has been the year of privacy. Congress has introduced six bills related to online privacy, and the Obama administration released two major reports recommending greater federal oversight of online markets. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears poised to step up regulatory activity on this front. State-level activity is also percolating, led by California, which floated two major bills recently.
These efforts would expand regulatory oversight of online activities in various ways. Some measures would institute “Fair Information Practice Principles” (FIPPS), governing the collection and use of personal information online. Others would limit some types data collection, ban certain data or advertising practices, or create new mechanisms to help consumers block online ad-targeting techniques. Another measure would mandate websites adopt a so-called Internet “Eraser Button,” which would allow users to purge unwanted personal information from online sites and services.

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Madison teachers union files lawsuit challenging constitutionality of collective bargaining law

Ed Treleven:

Unions representing Madison teachers and Milwaukee sanitation workers sued Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday, alleging that the controversial law severely restricting the collective bargaining rights of most public workers in Wisconsin is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, brought by Madison Teachers Inc. and AFL-CIO Local 61 in Milwaukee alleges that the state legislature passed what was originally called the budget repair bill in violation of the state constitution’s provision that governs special legislative sessions.
The lawsuit also alleges that the law places severe and unfair restrictions on what unions and their members can discuss with municipalities and school districts, and imposes severe wage increase limits that don’t apply to nonunion workers.

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Cannon To Serve As Oregon Governor’s Education Policy Advisor

Glenn Vaagen:

Governor John Kitzhaber announced Tuesday that Representative Ben Cannon will join his staff as Education Policy Advisor. Representative Cannon, currently a state Representative for Portland, teaches middle school Humanities.
“Ben’s passion and expertise on education policy will be a great asset to my office and the state,” said Kitzhaber. “He’ll bring the same dedication he has shown his constituents to implementing an education improvement agenda to ensure better results for Oregon students, more resources for teachers, and a more prosperous future.”
“Serving as state Representative has been the highest honor I have ever held, and this was an incredibly difficult decision for me,” Cannon said. “But I am convinced that to advise the Governor on education policy represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference on the same issues that drew me to teaching and politics in the first place. The achievements of the Governor and the Legislature this year have created a rare window of opportunity to make important improvements to the Oregon’s public education system.”

Janie Har:

Oregon Rep. Ben Cannon, D-Portland, is resigning from the Legislature to become Gov. John Kitzhaber’s top education adviser.
Cannon, a Democrat now in his third term in the House, will replace Nancy Golden, a temporary hire who has returned to her position as superintendent of the Springfield School District this summer.
His resignation is effective Sept. 1. He starts his new position Sept. 6
“It was a tremendously difficult decision to leave the Legislature,” Cannon said by phone Tuesday, “but I have the opportunity now to continue to serve the people of Oregon and this governor on an issue that matters so much to me as a teacher, and to me as a father.”

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Test scores same at Milwaukee public, voucher schools, auditors say; Vouchers Spend 50% Less Per Student

Dinesh Ramde:

State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee’s school voucher program and those in the city’s public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers’ expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.

View the 950K PDF report, here.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: “Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn’t perform better in state tests”, “Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools”, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS”; Spend 50% Less Per Student.

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Globally Challenged: Wisconsin Lags 12 States & Numerous Countries in Math Proficiency





Paul E Peterson, Ludger Woessmann, Eric A. Hanushek, Carlos X. Lastra-Anadon, via a Chan Stroman email:

Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the national average.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).
In the 2010 PEPG report, “U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective,” the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics.1 The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.
Proficiency in Mathematics
U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate in mathematics, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Although performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the United States, 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficient level in math.
In six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong, a majority of students performed at the proficient level, while in the United States less than one-third did. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students were proficient. Other countries in which a majority–or near majority–of students performed at or above the proficient level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent).

Much more at www.wisconsin2.org.

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ACT Trends: National, Wisconsin, Madison

Jeff Henriques, via email.

Many notes and links, here.

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Senate Hearing on College Readiness (Imaginary)

on the 17th of never, 2011
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh–wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh–my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony–just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: “The centrality of reading and writing was ‘one of education’s great mistakes.'” In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can’t handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word “college” essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

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ACT Scores Decline Somewhat in Madison, Wisconsin Slightly Up, 32% of Badger Students “Ready” for College Level Courses in 4 Areas

Matthew DeFour:

The average ACT score among the Madison School District’s 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison’s average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison’s average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.

Amy Hetzner:

With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin’s Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year’s graduates and maintained the state’s third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
“The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students,” Evers said in a news release. “Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago.”
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin’s recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.

A few somewhat related links:

Ruth Robarts:

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

“Penelope Trunk”: (Adrienne Roston, Adrienne Greenheart(

10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

Notes and links on the recent, successful Madison Talented & Gifted parent complaint.

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Chicago Teachers upset enough to ask for strike vote, union chief says

Rosalind Rossi

The president of the Chicago Teachers Union said Friday on a radio show that there is a “very high” likelihood that teachers will ask her to take a strike vote, given how angry and disrespected they feel.
But clarifying later to the Chicago Sun-Times, Karen Lewis said she did not predict that teachers will ultimately go on strike, only that the probability is high that members will call for a strike vote.
“People are very upset. People feel disrespected,” Lewis told WLS- AM Radio’s Connected to Chicago, which airs at 6 a.m. Sunday.
“We have teachers who have been extremely vilified for political purposes,”

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Michigan accreditation system ‘no longer has relevance’

Dave Murray:

Michigan’s school accreditation system “no longer has relevance” state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.
The state Education Department released announced Monday that 79 percent of Michigan’s public school buildings and 93 percent of the school districts made federal testing goals – called “adequate yearly progress” – for the 2010-11 school year.
That’s down from 86 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts making AYP the previous school year.

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Rhode Island Commissioner Gist’s Budget: Consultants Cash In

Dan McGowan:

The Rhode Island Department of Education’s (RIDE) consulting budget has ballooned to over $28 million for the 2012 fiscal year, nearly double what it was spending just two years ago, GoLocalProv has learned.
According to the agency, the sudden jump in consultants and vendor spending is directly related to a number of federal grants the department has received over the past several years, including the $75 million in Race To The Top funds secured last year. RIDE says the outside contractors are helping with curriculum development, data management and overseeing an inter-district transportation system for new teachers.

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Student Loan Debt is Up Sharply

Justin Lahart:

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply — partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.
But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.

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Los Angeles teachers test a pilot evaluation program

Jason Song:

This is what one of Los Angeles Unified’s most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem.
The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions — “What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?” — all aimed at helping the teacher improve.
These training sessions are the school district’s first concrete steps toward replacing its age-old teacher evaluation system, which is widely regarded as a failure. The new version is based on more detailed observations, student and parent feedback, and students’ standardized test scores.

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Chicago Principals to Get Merit Pay

Rebecca Vevea:

Chicago Public Schools will offer merit pay to principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics that may include student growth on test scores, the school climate and leadership skills, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday.
The performance rewards will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to create a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the bonuses will range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per principal.

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We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading

Alan Jacobs:

While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI’s wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.

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Sun Prairie’s 2011-2012 Budget Pork

sp-eye:

It’s getting time to fish or cut bait. We’ve taken a good hard look at the proposed/draft 2011-12 SPASD budget, and we find a number of budget lines to be potentially low hanging fruit…ripe for the pickin’.
Download a PDF copy of SP-EYE Analysis of the 2011-12 SPASD Budget
Maybe we don’t have it right…we can admit it when we make an error…but it places the burden of proof squarely upon the district. PROVE to the community that you absolutely need all that is budgeted, and you have our support.

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Little Girl Found

Patti Waldmeir:

One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.
I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness – so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago – a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?

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The myth of the rational education market

Peg Tyre:

The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the “Parent Trigger” in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton “pulled the trigger,” but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures–including New York — are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.

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Curriculum & Doonesbury

Well worth reading….

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Web site lets you compare Michigan high schools’ success

Lori Higgins:

The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents — and everyone else — a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year’s worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.

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