Governance/Board Decision Making – Page 26

The Newark Schools Governance Debate

A visit to Newark by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Wednesday highlights the city’s emerging status as a focal point in struggle over how to improve public schools.
Duncan has high hopes for Newark, which is looking for a new superintendent at a time when both Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have made education their top issue. The Christie administration has approved a record number of public charter schools this year, many of them in Newark.
A $100 million education grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has meant, as Duncan put it, that “eyes of the country will be on Newark.”
“The goal in Newark is that in five years, not 10 years, it should be the best urban school system in the country,” Duncan said in an interview with the Star-Ledger.

Middleton Teachers, School Board Battle Over Contract

Channel3000:

The Middleton teachers’ union and school board continue to battle over the latest proposed contract.
The two sides met during a school board meeting on Monday and more than 50 people lined up to voice their concerns about the deal.
Many teachers said that they believe the contract takes away their collective bargaining rights by proposing non-negotiable changes, including the removal of “just cause for discipline.”
“Bullies are not welcome on school yards or on the school boards. It is time you step up to the plate and only deal with fiscal changes. Don’t play into politics going on throughout our state,” said Madison resident Cami Jo Sanner.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s AAA Bond Rating Under Threat

Gavyn Davies:

Standard & Poor’s surprised markets today with a warning that the AAA rating of US debt is now on “negative watch”, implying that there is a one-in-three chance that the US might lose its triple-A status in the next two years. Although there was nothing new in the underlying data cited by S&P, their judgment has clearly been impacted by the sharp political differences which have recently emerged in Washington about how to cut the deficit.
Both political parties agree that a large fiscal consolidation plan is needed, but they have widely different points of view on how the savings should be found. This has caused S&P to express scepticism about whether Washington can reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan and then stick to it over a series of difficult years.

via Wendy McElroy:

That’s how much the U.S. government spends, in inflation-adjusted dollars, per capita. Which means it’s adjusted for both inflation and population increase. And note that that graph has a logarithmic scale.
A hundred years ago, federal spending for each person was the equivalent of $200 in today’s dollars. After FDR, with all of his massive public spending, it was $1,000. This year, it’s over $12,000. How long can this continue?

James Cooper:

For the first time since the Great Depression, households are receiving more income from the government than they are paying the government in taxes. The combination of more cash from various programs, called transfer payments, and lower taxes has been a double-barreled boost to consumers’ buying power, while also blowing a hole in the deficit. The 1930s offer a cautionary tale: The only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936. That trend reversed in 1936, after a recovery was underway, and the economy fell back into a second leg of recession during 1937 and 1938.

Detroit Moves Against Unions: Mayor and Schools Chief Leverage State Law to Force Change, Close Budget Gaps

Matthew Dolan:

A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.
Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district’s 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment.
Earlier last week, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing presented a $3.1 billion annual budget to City Council in which he proposed higher casino taxes and substantial cuts in city workers’ health care and pensions to close an estimated $200 million budget gap.
Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools.
……
Mr. Bobb, appointed in 2009 by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and retained by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, pledged last week to use those powers to deal decisively with the district’s $327 million shortfall and its educational deficiencies. Mr. Bobb raised the possibility of making unilateral changes to the collective-bargaining agreements signed with teachers less than two years ago.
He is also expected to target seniority rights that protect longtime teachers from layoffs and give them the ability to reject certain school placements.
The Detroit Federation of Teachers will likely fight him on these issues. The union couldn’t be reached for comment.

Houston’s best and worst schools

Houston Chronicle:

The local nonprofit Children at Risk has released to the Chronicle its 2011 ranking of public elementary, middle and high schools in the eight-county Houston area. Each year, the list of the area’s best and worst campuses generates a great deal of discussion and, in some cases, debate. Talking about schools is a good thing, we think.
There is, of course, no one perfect way to grade schools. The Children at Risk methodology is designed to evaluate schools on multiple academic measures and goes beyond the state’s accountability system, which is based largely on whether students pass (or are projected to pass) the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Children at Risk looks at the higher standard of “commended” on the TAKS. At the high school level, the most weight is given to a six-year graduation rate, calculated by Children at Risk. No matter what a school is doing, if students don’t graduate, then did it get the job done?
The formula also gives a boost to schools with larger concentrations of low-income children in an attempt to adjust for the impact of poverty. Children at Risk attempted to include as many schools as possible in the rankings, but those with insufficient data or atypical grade-level configurations were excluded. The rankings are based on public data from the Texas Education Agency from 2010 or 2009 (using the most recent year available).

The New Madison Teachers, Inc. Pact will be Devastating for Support Staff

Fran Zell:

Early on in the protests at the Capitol, I ran into a friend who predicted that the unions would agree to all of Walker’s benefit cuts if he agreed to allow collective bargaining.
“They would do that?” I asked innocently. “They wouldn’t tell the governor to rescind tax cuts on businesses before he attempts to balance the budget on the backs of workers?”
“Just wait,” she said.
Little did either of us imagine that the unions would soon concede to all of the benefit cuts BEFORE Walker agreed to talk. When you give up key issues before the other side is at the table, there isn’t much left to negotiate. It is certainly not the way we educators teach children to deal with a bully.
However things turn out with Walker’s damaging repair bill, Wisconsin unions have helped dig themselves into a hole. Some unions may fare better than others. I am distraught about Madison Teachers Inc., which I belong to as a substitute teacher. In its rush to negotiate with the district immediately after Walker signed the bill, MTI plunged headlong into the very waters it was trying to avoid. The union allowed the lowest paid to, in effect, sail away in a leaky lifeboat.

Proposed Missouri standards overhaul alarms educators

Claudette Riley:

Proposed overhaul of state accreditation rules but remain alarmed by its far-reaching implications.
They continue to raise serious questions about the proposal, which, among other things, would
– increase the number of already controversial state-mandated exams,
– require districts to be reviewed annually, instead of every five years, and
– force districts to track the progress of graduates and to report a variety of new details, including how many students complete federal financial aid forms.

The labor movement after Wisconsin

Lee Sustar:

Two days before the big Los Angeles labor demonstration, for example, a coalition of six unions representing more than 14,500 municipal workers reached a tentative agreement on a contract with an estimated $400 million in concessions, including cancellation of scheduled pay raises and a measure that would almost double workers’ contributions to retirement benefits from 6 to 11 percent. That’s close to the pension contribution of 12.8 percent mandated for Wisconsin public-sector workers in Walker’s anti-union bill.
The LA contract, if approved, will save the city government $1 billion over 30 years. “The structural impact will go on forever,” admitted Service Employees International Union Local 721 President Bob Schoonover.
Meanwhile, California Gov. Jerry Brown is using the Republican minority in the state legislature as a bogeyman to pressure state employees’ unions to take concessions beyond the $400 million they accepted last year. “I tell my union friends, you’re going to have to make some changes now, or much more drastic changes later,” Brown said.
Nevertheless, union leaders are giving Brown a pass, despite budget proposals that will devastate working people in California. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently gave a speech in which she denounced Walker and defended public-sector workers–but embraced Brown’s call for “shared responsibility, one that will hopefully lead to a better budgetary outcome in the short term, and a better economic output in the long term.”

Rahm Says Chicago School Days Will Get Longer

Abdon Pallasch & Rosalind Ross:

Students in Chicago’s public schools will spend an extra hour or hour and a half in school each day once new legislation makes it out of Springfield, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
Emanuel said the issue of how much more teachers will get paid is open to negotiation — but not the question of whether the school day will be longer. It will be, Emanuel said.
“We’re not going to negotiate or discuss whether children get more instruction — we will work together so that gets done. I’m not deviating from that. I was clear about it,” Emanuel said after speaking at a South Side charter school.
More than any other mayoral candidate, Emanuel said he strongly backed curtailing teachers’ right to strike and a longer school day.
Chicago students are “cheated” by not getting as much school time as Houston’s students, Emanuel said.

In Illinois, teachers ready to talk about tenure

Kevin McDermott

Teachers unions insist they aren’t giving away the store in landmark education reform moving through Springfield this year that would make it harder for teachers to get tenure.
They point to other provisions — a more open collective-bargaining system, training rules for school board members, school-by-school surveys on working conditions — that they believe will work in teachers’ favor.
But there is also a mostly unspoken incentive in what they see going on in neighboring states. Missouri and Indiana are considering virtually dismantling tenure. In Wisconsin, the very concept of collective bargaining is on life-support.
“We were engaging in this process before Wisconsin occurred,” noted Ken Swanson, president of the Illinois Education Association. But he admits: “As all the parties saw what was unfolding in Wisconsin and elsewhere, it gave us further cause to come together and find common ground.”

OUR OPINION: Don’t blame schools for problems

Mansfield News Journal:

If there’s one consistent trait of Ohio’s governors, it’s their desire to leave a personal mark on the state’s education system.
Former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland wanted a longer school year, tougher standards and greater college access in his multi-faceted plan that never got off the ground thanks to politics and the state’s budget crunch.
Now, his successor Republican John Kasich wants to change the game with his own ambitious ideas, including:
» Publicly ranking Ohio schools and rewarding those in the top 10 percent, while punishing those in the bottom 5.
» Creating “innovation” schools that, with staff and school board agreement, could get rid of most rules and create their own, possibly including longer class time.

An Open Letter on Behalf of Public School Parents to New York City Chancellor Dennis Walcott

Bill de Blasio:

To Chancellor Walcott:
For the past nine years our schools have been run by a top-down bureaucracy that too often alienates public school parents. To your great credit, you have said that you want to engage parents and communities more than in the past. But you have also said that you plan to stay the course on the Bloomberg administration’s education policies and practices. I believe you have the background and experience to finally bring parents into our school system, but I know you will not be able to do it by maintaining the status quo.
I am a public school parent and I have talked with parents all over our city who are tired of the Department of Education treating them like problems instead of partners. They are looking for a chancellor who has the independence to bring real change to our school system. To accomplish this goal, I believe you must immediately take on three pressing issues facing our schools today: reforming the DOE’s closed off, bureaucratic process for closing and co-locating schools; fully supporting the parents of students with disabilities; and most importantly, saving the over 4,600 teachers who will be fired under Mayor Bloomberg’s budget.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Buy now pay later

The Economist:

PUBLIC finance can seem a dry, abstract subject until the point when it becomes all too real. Portugal and Greece managed for years with budget deficits, high public debt and low growth (Ireland, with the failure of its outsize banking sector, is a rather different case). Now they have been forced into painful restructuring by bond markets. On the other side of the Atlantic, America faces its most serious budget crisis for decades. On April 13th President Barack Obama is set to present yet another plan to reduce the country’s mammoth deficit. America’s economy is so large, and foreign appetite for greenbacks so voracious, that it seems inconceivable that it could suffer a fate similar to that of Portugal or Greece. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO), published this week, aims to shatter such complacency. America, its authors write, lacks a credible strategy for dealing with its growing public debt, and is expanding its budget deficit at a time when it should be shrinking. The chart below, drawn from the WEO, illustrates the size of the problem America faces.

Special Interest: Teacher Unions and America’s Public Schools

Matthew Ladner:

Terry Moe has spent years carefully researching this new book on the education unions. I look forward to seeing Terry’s research, which informed his taking of the teacher unions to the woodshed in a debate a couple of years ago. Terry’s opening statement was very powerful:

What we are saying is that the unions are and have long been major obstacles to real reform in the system. And we’re hardly alone in saying this. If you read “Newsweek,” “Time Magazine,” the “Washington Post,” lots of other well respected publications, they’re all saying the same thing: that the teachers unions are standing in the way of progress. So look. Let me start with an obvious example. The teachers unions have fought for all sorts of protections in labor contracts and in state laws that make it virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom. On average, it takes two years, $200,000, and 15% of the principal’s total time to get one bad teacher out of the classroom. As a result, principals don’t even try. They give 99% of teachers — no joke — satisfactory evaluations. The bad teachers just stay in the classroom. Well, if we figure that maybe 5% of the teachers, that’s a conservative estimate, are bad teachers nationwide, that means that 2.5 million kids are stuck in classrooms with teachers who aren’t teaching them anything. This is devastating. And the unions are largely responsible for that.
They’re also responsible for seniority provisions in these labor contracts that among other things often allow senior teachers to stake a claim to desirable jobs, even if they’re not good teachers and even if they’re a bad fit for that school. The seniority rules often require districts to lay off junior people before senior people. It’s happening all around the country now. And some of these junior people are some of the best teachers in the district. And some of the senior people that are being saved are the worst. Okay. So just ask yourself, would anyone in his right mind organize schools in this way, if all they cared about was what’s best for kids? And the answer is no. But this is the way our schools are actually organized. And it’s due largely to the power of the unions.

Why N.J. teacher-tenure reform plan matters to the rest of America

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

Gov. Chris Christie (R) took another step toward reforming teacher tenure in New Jersey when he unveiled a package of education proposals Wednesday.
Moves to weaken traditional job protections for teachers are gaining momentum around the country. Tenure reform bills were recently signed into law in Florida and Tennessee, and are being considered in Illinois, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and several other states. Delaware and Colorado passed such laws last year.
In Oklahoma, a bill cleared a House committee on April 12 that would broaden the list of reasons teachers can be fired to include dishonesty, insubordination, negligence, and failing to comply with school district policies.

Powerful unions key to education reform package

John O’Connor:

Illinois teacher unions have numbers and money that translate into influence at the state Capitol, but they’re still making major concessions on job security and the ability to strike.
While union leaders said they were driven by what’s best for kids, they also acknowledge watching high-profile fights over public employee rights in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.
“It made all the parties more cognizant that everyone was going to have to come away with less than their ideal on some issues,” IEA President Ken Swanson said Thursday. “But at the end of the day, this thing was too important to not come to agreement.”

Uncertain about future benefits, many veteran teachers are retiring early

Erin Richards & Amy Hetzner:

Two days before the April 1 teacher retirement notification deadline in Milwaukee Public Schools, Karen Scharrer-Erickson drove to the district’s human resources office on her lunch break.
The teacher of 43 years entered the room. Then she burst into tears.
“I am totally not ready,” Scharrer-Erickson, a literacy coach at the Academy of Accelerated Learning, said this week. “I never thought about retiring until the (Gov.) Scott Walker situation, because this school is so special and I am working with the most incredibly caring teachers I have ever known.”
At a time when the governor’s plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for teachers and increase state employees’ payments for health care and pension costs looms overhead, some school districts are seeing record numbers of senior teachers such as Scharrer-Erickson turn in their retirement paperwork.
Although their pensions are beyond the reach of lawmakers and local officials, many teachers fear that changes could mean they soon could lose early retirement benefits such as health insurance that helps support them until they are eligible for Medicare.

Buying an education or buying a brand?

Seth Godin:

It’s reported that student debt in the USA is approaching a trillion dollars, five times what it was ten years ago.
Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?
Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?
If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.

Stint at Madison’s Shabazz City High reaffirms belief in public schools

Thom Evans:

As a retired educator with slightly more than 35 years working in the Madison Metropolitan School District, I can only describe the last few months as dispiriting.
I’ve watched as our new governor has apparently chosen public educators and public employees as his primary targets in a campaign that appears to be more about politics than economics. My pride in my profession and fears about the future of public schools in Wisconsin have been shaken greatly.
I have protested at the Capitol and appeared before the Senate Education Committee when it was considering a revision in the law pertaining to charter schools in our state. The governor wants to move approval of charter schools from a process involving local school board control and supervision to one driven by a state board molded by political appointees.

Tougher FCAT standards kicking in this year

Alison Ross:

When students across the state sit down Monday to begin intensive testing in the main round of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, they’ll be faced with an exam that is a bit different – and, in some cases, harder – than in previous years.
The Florida Department of Education is unveiling the FCAT 2.0 this year for grades 3-10 in reading and grades 3-8 in math.
The new FCATs were designed using the state’s new Next Generation Sunshine State standards, which are considered more rigorous than the previous FCAT standards.
For instance, reading assessments will have more questions that require prior knowledge and reasonable inferences than previous FCAT exams. They will also include more historical documents and literature. Some of the reading passages are longer than in previous years.

Education reform bill passes Illinois Senate; Rahm & The Teacher Unions

Dave McKinney:

A sprawling education-reform package that could lengthen the school year in Chicago, give school districts new powers to oust poorly performing teachers and impose new obstacles on teachers strikes passed the Senate Thursday without dissent.
The Senate’s 59-0 vote on a plan that united teachers unions, reform groups and school boards capped a busy legislative day in which lawmakers rejected a business-backed workers compensation reform package and launched a new crackdown on the state’s cash-strapped prepaid college tuition program.
“This is the reason why I serve in this chamber: It’s for education youth development, giving that child who lives in a poor zip code the same opportunities as a child who lives in a wealthy zip code,” Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) said of her school-reform bill as she choked up with emotion.
The legislation drew backing from Gov. Quinn, who said it “helps us make sure that we have the best teachers in our classrooms and assures effective teacher performance.”

Ben Smith:

The bill under consideration is the result of negotiations between education groups Advance Illinois and Stand for Children, teachers’ unions, and school administrators and it reforms tenure, establishes performance as a hiring standard and limits seniority and the right to strike. The Chicago Teachers Union, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Education Association have all backed the measure.
On the campaign trail, Emanuel backed an early version of the bill that the unions originally opposed, using harsh rhetoric against the teachers unions.
“Chicago kids are being cheated out of four years’ worth of education,” Emanuel said in February signaling he backed reforms to tenure and curtailing the right to strike. Teachers, he said “are working very hard in adverse conditions in many places but they are not underpaid.”

Eleven Milwaukee Public Schools’ High Schools – Including Four Charter Schools – Get Low-Performer Tag in 2011; Will Federal Intervention Help?

Christian D’Andrea:

Eleven schools in Milwaukee have been identified as some of the lowest performing in the state and are in line for over $6.3 million in federal grants to spur a turnaround. If MPS’ targeted plans go through, more than half will be looking for new principals for the 2011-2012 school year – and one will be closed altogether.
Major reforms are in line for four of the schools, according to city superintendent Gregory Thornton. The city will adhere to the federal turnaround model designed specifically to combat the culture of failure in these schools. As a result, Pulaski High School, Northwest Secondary School, Washington High School of Information Technology, and Advanced Language and Academic Students (ALAS) will have their entire instructional staff released.
These schools will be tasked with finding a new principal and several new teachers, as only half of the existing teaching corps is eligible to be rehired. Many of these changes will come with assistance from outside sources, which will be accommodated by $6.3m of federal funding.

Questions for Seattle Superintendent Dr. Susan Enfield

Questionland:

The new Seattle Public School Superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield has promised to usher in a new era of transparency to SPS. In this spirit, she has agreed to answer your questions directly. Ask here about the direction Seattle Public Schools will be taking, how they are dealing with the budget crises, plans for opening/closing schools etc. On April 13, she will answer at least ten questions.

Why Do Charters Have Fewer Special Ed Kids Than Traditional Schools?

New Jersey Left Behind:

The Newark Council Education Committee met last night with group of stakeholders, including Theresa Adubato of the Robert Treat Academy, Junius Williams of the Abbott Leadership Institute, ELC founder Paul Tractenberg, and School Board Chair Shavar Jeffries. According to the Star-Ledger, the debate was noteworthy for its lack of contention, especially in light of recent fireworks. The meeting was chaired by South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka, who moonlights as Principal of Newark Central High School.
The conversation veered toward the disparity between the number of special needs kids in charter schools (like Robert Treat) and the number of special needs kids in traditional public schools. Here’s Michael Pallante, who is the former principal of Camden Street School, a district K-4 school. He’s now is at Robert Treat:

Food for thought on MPS workers

Terry Falk:

Two retired sanitation workers from Memphis stood proudly before the assembly gathered at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Milwaukee the Friday before the April 5 election. The Rev. Jesse Jackson made sure the message was clear. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for these workers when they went on strike in Memphis in 1968. Now those assembled were to march in King’s honor and vote for candidates who supported a basic civil right: collective bargaining.
Opponents of labor unions have cleverly made this budget battle a choice between workers and taxpayers, workers and children, workers and just about everything else. But these are false choices, and nowhere is this better illustrated than the attack on the Milwaukee Public Schools food service workers.
A high percentage of food service workers are black and Latino at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Like the sanitation workers in Memphis, school food service workers see themselves fighting for their civil rights. The false choice is that money saved from the cuts in pay and benefits could be used to help fund kindergarten or lower class sizes.

Union’s Ties to Madison Schools’ Work Stoppage Become More Clear

Brett Healy, via Google News:

A misdialed union voicemail message, emails obtained through an open records request and official court documents reveal new details about the Madison teachers’ work stoppage [Google Cached Link] that closed the district’s public schools for four days.
The Madison Metropolitan School District called the “sickouts” a “strike” and accused the union of organizing it. The union, Madison Teachers Inc., however, maintained that teachers were calling in sick on their own initiative. New evidence suggests the union’s claim is not true.
The MacIver News Service obtained dozens of emails in response to an open records request filed with the school district.
On Tuesday, February 15th, the day before the four day sick out began, Dan Nerad, Madison Schools Superintendent, sent out a mass email to teachers stating “Throughout the day we have received significant information indicating that staff members will call in ill tomorrow, Thursday and/or Friday to protest the Governor’s actions. While I believe his actions warrant protest, I am asking that this course of action not be taken,”
John Matthews, Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director, replied to that email with one of his own, “What teachers are doing is based on their own conscience, for education, the children in our schools, for their own families,” he wrote.

Emails Reveal Madison Teachers’ Union Behind the Scenes Strategy

Wednesday, March 9th.
Nerad was floored when he found out Matthews was telling the union MMSD was not willing to meet that past weekend. He said Matthews never confirmed a meeting with them.
Howard Bellman, the arbitrator, responded that he had suggested to Nerad they meet sometime over the weekend. Nerad said he wasn’t available until Tuesday, and Bellman relayed that to the union.
Matthews then sent Nerad an email stating “Dan: I know that you are dealing with your Mother’s illness at this time, and I respect that. However, for MMSD to not be prepared to deal with the issues facing both MMSD and MTI (your employees) today is reprehensible.”
Later that day the Senate passed an amended version of the budget repair bill, and Nerad wondered if he could expect his staff to report to work on Thursday.
Matthews responded the union asked all teachers to go to work in the morning. He also pushed for a contract agreement for MTI’s support staff groups.
“You have to know that our negotiations are at a very serious juncture. We simply must reach an agreement on Friday or the volcano may just erupt. It is not fair to those in the support unites to be treated differently than those in the professional unit. Because AFSCME took an inferior contract is no reason for MTI to do so. This matter is clearly in your hands to resolve, so be fair, creative and decisive. We have no time left to wring our hands. It is very difficult to hold people back from taking further action,” said Matthews.

What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they “grow” their students’ test scores? Colorado is about to find out.

Dana Goldstein:

On exam day in Sabina Trombetta’s Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso’s “Weeping Woman,” a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist’s lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant — almost neon — greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, “Women are suffering machines.”
The test asked the first-graders to look at “Weeping Woman” and “write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, “In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.
Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn’t really about them. It was about their teacher.
Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers — even those in art, music, and physical education — according to how much they “grow” student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape — bullet points on Colorado’s new fine-art curriculum standards.

The Economist has more.

Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

Sarah Lacy:

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.

Texas Governor a Winner on School Funds

Jennifer Steinhauer:

Among the winners in Friday night’s federal spending agreement, count Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Mr. Perry and Republican members of the Texas Congressional delegation have been seeking to shake off a requirement that the state use $830 million in federal education money to supplement the budgets of Texas schools, rather than simply using the federal money to replace state funds for schools.
The spending agreement reached Friday to avert a government shutdown included language to eliminate that provision. Texas, which like many states has massive budget problems, has moved to cut about $4.8 billion in state aid to schools over two years.

Year-round vs. 4-day-week schooling

Amy Turim:

As recently as 2009, during the tenure of the previous Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, year-round schooling was proposed for all MPS schools. Today, 22 year-round schools operate in Milwaukee. These schools run for the same number of days in Milwaukee as all other public schools, but they feature a spread-out schedule with a one-month break in the summer.
Many studies indicate the shortened breaks offered by year-round schooling lead to greater information retention and higher test scores over time, especially in math. A 2007 study by Johns Hopkins University also suggests increased benefits of year-round schooling for lower socioeconomic status or otherwise at-risk students. Year-round schooling is found to mitigate neighborhood and familial risk factors affecting educational attainment and achievement.
Many of these promising studies seem to indicate the schools that offered more than the standard number of days of instruction, however, were the schools that are most successful in educational outcomes. The MPS current year-round school does not offer more than the standard 180 days instruction offered by all MPS programs, however, and perhaps this is a flaw of the current arrangement.

Bill would increase pressure on Atlanta school board

Nancy Badertscher and Kristina Torres:

A major school accrediting agency gave board members until Sept. 30 to show major headway on six issues, including internal bickering, ethics and a “transparent” search for a new superintendent.
But board members could be on the hot seat — and literally fighting to hold onto their school board seats — as early as July under a bill that’s drawing fire as it heads to the House floor Monday for debate and a possible vote.
The bill would require the Atlanta board — and boards in a handful of other Georgia school systems — to face a hearing before the state Board of Education by July 31. The hearing would be the first step in a two-step process that could end in the wholesale removal of local boards by the governor if it is determined they are not doing enough to maintain high standards.

New Jersey Governor Christie unveils proposed legislation for changing tenure and teacher evaluations

Leslie Brody:

Teachers deemed great would earn higher pay and those judged ineffective could lose their jobs under bills the governor sent to the Legislature Wednesday.
Declaring he “can’t sit by and wait any longer” for lawmakers to draft their own bills for tenure reform, Governor Christie said he was hoping for sponsors for his legislation and wanted them to hold hearings quickly. He said the educations of too many children, especially in failing urban schools, were suffering because some lackluster teachers were in classrooms.
“New Jersey teachers should be held to the same standards of accountability that everybody else is,” the governor said. Under his plan, he said, “If you’re doing a good job, more times than not you’ll keep your job. If you don’t do a good job, you’re probably going to lose your job.”

Score One for NJEA

New Jersey Left Behind:

Everyone’s covering Gov. Christie’s conditional veto of Senate Bill 1940, which posits that if a collective bargaining unit (i.e., local arm of a teachers union) agrees to wage or benefits concessions then “the amount of money which would have been required to fund those wages and benefits shall be applied to the maintenance of bargaining unit stall member positions.” (See coverage from New Jersey Newsroom, The Record, Courier Post.)
The bill was approved by the Assembly on a vote of 69-11, and is sponsored by a bevy of 13 senators. It was apparently written by the NJEA executive office. From an editorial by NJEA President Barbara Keshishian that ran last month in the Star-Ledger:

New Jersey Gov. Christie says extra aid to 31 of N.J.’s poorest school districts is driving up taxes

Bloomberg News:

Gov. Chris Christie said a requirement that the state provide extra funding to its 31 poorest school systems is driving up property taxes in other districts.
State spending in those poorer districts has risen to 59 percent of education outlays from 36 percent in 1988, Christie said at a town-hall meeting today in Cape May. More than 550 districts across the state split the remaining 41 percent, the first-term Republican said.
New Jersey’s homeowners pay the nation’s highest average property-tax bills, according to the Washington-based Tax foundation. Residential real-estate levies, the prime source of education money in middle- and upper-class school systems, rose about 4 percent in 2010 to an average of $7,756 per property.

Pennsylvania Education’s Future: School Vouchers?

Jaccii Farris:

Some advocates think vouchers are the future of Pennsylvania’s troubled schools.
They say those vouchers will give parents choices and promote competition among the schools.
But the idea isn’t getting straight A’s across the board.
It’s an issue state legislators are hashing out in Harrisburg and some area school districts say they don’t want any part of.
Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett has already thrown his support behind vouchers..
While state Democratic leaders continue to debate the $730 million plan.

NAEP report: ‘Rigor works,’ so schools need tougher classes

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

More students – but still not enough – are taking a rigorous course load, according to the NAEP report card from The National Assessment of Educational Progress, released Wednesday.
American high-schoolers are earning more credits and taking more challenging courses than they did 20 years ago, according to a new study of high school transcripts. But education experts still worry that not enough of them are graduating ready to enter college or get on track for science- and math-based careers.
Almost twice as many students completed at least a standard curriculum in 2009 as in 1990, the report shows. Curricular rigor improved for students across racial and ethnic groups, but significant gaps still remain.
The economic future of the country depends on improving education, and “the message [of this study] is that rigor works,” says Bob Wise, president of Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, which advocates for improving high schools. “But it puts an obligation on all of us to be sure we’re not only providing rigorous courses, but also the support students need to succeed in them.”

Stop Waiting for a Savior

Timothy Hacsi:

DID Cathleen P. Black, the former publishing executive who was removed last week after just three months as New York City’s schools chancellor, fail because she lacked a background in education?
In this respect, she has had quite a bit of company over the decades. In 1996, Washington hired a former three-star Army general, Julius W. Becton Jr., to take over its low-performing schools; he left, exhausted, after less than two years. For most of the last decade, the Los Angeles Unified School District was run by non-educators: a former governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, and then a retired vice admiral, David L. Brewer III. They got mixed reviews. Raj Manhas, who had a background in banking and utilities, ran Seattle’s schools from 2003 to 2007, balancing the budget but facing fierce opposition over his plans to close schools.

State tests give parents information

Anneliese Dickman:

The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program’s performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program’s achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee’s long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?

Philadelphia School Boasts Improvement, But District Enlists Charter to Finish Job

Joe Barrett:

Long-troubled Audenried High School, once known locally as the Prison on the Hill, today boasts a new, $55 million building, a crop of dedicated young teachers and sharply higher test scores.
So when the school district announced in January that Audenried would be shut down, parents were surprised. Audenreid, they were told, would become one of 18 “turnaround” schools in the city.
Progress had been made in the school, but not enough, officials said. While scores have risen sharply, they fall short of the city’s average, along with other performance measures. Major discipline problems at the school last year included the beating of a female student in a classroom.

The California State College System reported recently that 47% of their freshmen must take remedial reading courses before they can be admitted to regular college academic courses. The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools Project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at our colleges each year.
Keep in mind that these are not high school dropouts. These are students who did what we asked them to do, were awarded their high school diplomas at graduation, applied to college, were accepted at college, and then told when they got there that they were not well prepared enough by their high schools to take college courses.
The Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of college professors, who reported that 90% of their freshmen were not very well prepared in reading, doing research or writing.
From my perspective, these students, regardless of their gender, race, creed, or national origin, have been disadvantaged during their twelve years in our public schools. My research indicates that the vast majority have never been asked to do a single serious research paper in high school, and, while I have been unable to find money to do a study of this, I have anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of our public high school students are never asked to read one complete nonfiction book by their teachers during their four years.
Race can be a disadvantage of course, even for the children of Vietnamese boat people, and poverty can be a disadvantage in education as well, even for the children of unemployed white families in Appalachia. But the disadvantages of disgracefully low expectations for academic reading and writing are disinterestedly applied to all of our public high school students, it appears.
Huge numbers of unprepared public high school students provide an achievement gap all by themselves, albeit one that is largely ignored by those who think that funding is the main reason so many of our students fail to complete any college degree.
In that study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, they also asked English teachers if they thought their students were prepared for college reading and writing tasks, and most of them thought their students were well prepared. The problem may be that English departments typically assign fiction as reading for students and the writing they ask for is almost universally personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, supplemented now by work on the little 500-word personal “college essay.”
It is hard to conceive of a literacy program better designed to render our public high school students poorly prepared for the nonfiction books and term papers at the college level. Of course, many colleges, eager to fill their dorms and please their “customers” with easy courses and grade inflation, are gradually reducing the number of books students are assigned and the length of papers they are asked to write, but this simply adds to the disadvantages to which we are subjecting our students, all the while charging them large amounts of money for tuition.
Many parents are satisfied when their children tell them that they love their high school, perhaps not fully realizing that the students are talking mostly about their social life and their after-school sports and other activities. They may remain unaware that our students are being prevented from learning to read history books and from writing serious term papers. No one mentions that disadvantage, so no doubt these parents are just as surprised, humiliated, and embarrassed as their children when they are not allowed into regular college courses when they get there.
Americans have big hearts, and are concerned when they are told of the plight of our disadvantaged students who are black, Hispanic, or poor. But they are naturally not really able to summon up much concern over an academic literacy achievement gap which disadvantages practically all of our public high school students, especially if the schools and the Edupundits keep them quite uninformed about it.
============
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Blaska Blogs the smoking gun of the Madison teachers union’s illegal sick-out

David Blaska:

Only a fool would think that the sick out that closed down Madison schools for five days in February was anything but an illegal, union-coordinated, illegal strike.
But there are a lot of fools in Madison, aren’t there?
Now there is proof that the sickout was a premeditated, union-authorized job action — a phone tree of teachers calling other teachers to close down the schools. This kind of activity is prohibited by the union’s own contract and illegal in WI Statute Chapter 111.84(2)(e):
It is unfair practice for an employee individually or in concert with others: To engage in, induce or encourage any employees to engage in a strike, or a concerted refusal to work or perform their usual duties as employees.
The problem, of course, is finding an impartial prosecutor — but that would require a level of professionalism sorely lacking in the Doyle-appointed incumbent.

Why U.S. School Kids Are Flunking Lunch

Jamie Oliver:

I spent the first two months of 2011 living in Los Angeles, filming the second season of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” for ABC. After last year’s experience of trying to change food culture in the beautiful town of Huntington, West Virginia, I expected the challenges in L.A. to be very different. Shockingly, they were all too familiar.
L.A. is home to the nation’s second biggest school district, which feeds 650,000 children every day. Half of these kids are eligible for free school meals. Within a few miles of the Hollywood sign there are entire communities with no access to fresh food. People travel for well over an hour to buy fruits and vegetables, and in one of the communities where I worked, children had an 80% obesity rate.
I had planned to work in the L.A. schools to try to figure out how school food could be better–and, ideally, cooked from scratch. Thousands of outraged parents, not to mention teachers and principals, wanted me in their schools. But I couldn’t even get in the door: the Los Angeles Unified School District banned me from filming any of their food service operations, claiming that they didn’t need me because they were already leading the charge. [You can read the LAUSD’s response here.]

The Deadlocked Debate Over Education Reform

Jonathan Mahler:

Few would argue that she was a good choice. But as you watched the almost giddy reception that greeted the departure of the New York City schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, last week — “She wasn’t in the class for the full semester so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to give her a grade,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers — it was hard not to wonder whether the debate over school reform has reached a point where debate is no longer possible.
As is often the case with morally charged policy issues — remember welfare reform? — false dichotomies seem to have replaced fruitful conversation. If you support the teachers’ union, you don’t care about the students. If you are critical of the teachers’ union, you don’t care about the teachers. If you are in favor of charter schools, you are opposed to public schools. If you believe in increased testing, you are on board with the corruption of our liberal society’s most cherished educational values. If you are against increased testing, you are against accountability. It goes on. Neither side seems capable of listening to the other.
The data can appear as divided as the rhetoric. New York City’s Department of Education will provide you with irrefutable statistics that school reform is working; opponents of reform will provide you with equally irrefutable statistics that it’s not. It can seem equally impossible to disentangle the overlapping factors: Are struggling schools struggling because they’ve been inundated with students from the failing schools that have closed around them? Are high school graduation rates up because the pressure to raise them has encouraged teachers and principals to pass students who aren’t really ready for college?

Federal law makes academic success nearly impossible, some experts say

Jerone Christenson:

Odds are, your kid is in a failing school district.
Odds are even better, if your kid’s school or school district isn’t failing now, by federal standards, it will be in a year or two.
Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that within three years no less than four out of five American schools will not meet the standard for “Adequate Yearly Progress.” That’s government speak for saying the schools aren’t meeting the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act.
This week Minnesota students will begin taking this year’s version of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments – the standardized tests that will determine the supposed success or failure of each Minnesota public school and school district. Results of the tests will be made public in late summer, and most educators, like Duncan, are not optimistic concerning the outcome.

Referendum drive greets Idaho education overhaul

Betsy Russell:

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed the state’s third major school-overhaul bill of the session into law Friday, and a parents’ group immediately filed paperwork for a referendum drive to overturn it.
The third bill, SB 1184, shifts funds from teacher salaries to technology upgrades and a merit-pay program, and brings a new focus on online learning. The two earlier bills, already signed into law and targeted in referendum drives, remove most collective-bargaining rights from teachers and set up a teacher merit-pay bonus plan. Both houses of Idaho’s Legislature are controlled by Republicans.
Otter, also a Republican, said, “The system we had wasn’t working, wasn’t producing the kind of students that we needed.”
State schools Superintendent Tom Luna, who joined Otter at the signing along with a group of legislative sponsors and supporters, said the bills will do “things that we know we should have done long ago.”

Louisiana Superintendent Paul Pastorek loses control of agenda to Internet

Nola.com:

A case of poor timing landed state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek in hot water with the House Appropriations Committee as he was testifying Wednesday about his agency’s budget.
Pastorek, whose cocksure manner and $377,000 annual pay package has rankled legislators in years past, told Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, early in the meeting that he planned to select a new superintendent for the Recovery School District “soon, very soon.” But Pastorek didn’t divulge to the committee members that he had tapped John White, deputy chancellor for New York City public schools, to take over the job held by Paul Vallas.
As Pastorek continued his testimony, lawmakers on the committee learned the truth, as the news of White’s selection was reported on NOLA.com. And that brought a rebuke from the courtly committee chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, who reminded the superintendent that he was under oath when he was being questioned. “So you weren’t willing to share that? That you had made the selection?” Fannin asked.

Reinventing the Way We Teach Engineers

Joseph Rosenbloom:

Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham. When Miller started, there were no buildings, no faculty, no curriculum, no students.
The foundation’s mandate: design a boldly original model for a 21st century school whose graduates would be not just accomplished engineers but world-beater entrepreneurs and leaders.
Now the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a wind-swept cluster of six earth-toned buildings, 347 brainy students who pay a maximum of $38,000 tuition, an untenured faculty totaling 25 men and 13 women and a curriculum oriented toward what Miller calls “design based” learning. Miller, who has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, has honed his leadership skills as Olin’s chief creator and builder. The following is an edited version of an interview with Miller conducted by Inc. contributor Joseph Rosenbloom.

A City School’s Uphill Fight Over Sharing Space With a Charter

Michael Winerip:

In a city where so many public schools are segregated by race and wealth, Public School 9 in Brooklyn is an exception.
It has a substantial number of poor children, with about 75 percent receiving subsidized lunches. And because it is in a gentrifying neighborhood, Prospect Heights, the school also has a sizable number of yuppie children.
The co-presidents of the parent-teacher organization are Nelly Heredia, a single mother with two children who is out of work, and Penelope Mahot, a married mother with two children who owns a product design company and a gift store. The mothers like the same things about P.S. 9: the principal, Sandra D’Avilar, makes herself available to parents; the school is full of experienced teachers; the parents’ groups are thriving; the children are learning; there are classes in art, music, theater and dance.

A three-year college degree in Ohio?

David Harrison:

Ohio Governor John Kasich wants the state’s universities to offer a three-year degree program to make college more affordable, The Plain-Dealer reports. Students would have to squeeze in more courses during their time at school in order to satisfy degree requirements, much as they do today without an established three-year program. Ball State University in Indiana already offers three-year degrees for 30 of its 180 degree programs and Rhode Island lawmakers approved a measure in 2009 to offer three-year degrees at both of the state’s public universities. Meanwhile, Kasich’s budget anticipates a 10.5 percent cut in higher education funding in the 2012 fiscal year, less than had been feared, followed by a 3.7 percent increase in 2013, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
SESSION ENDS: Idaho lawmakers gaveled their session to a close Thursday having approved three major education overhaul bills that had been a priority for Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter and state superintendent Tom Luna, according to The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review. The bills would weaken teachers’ tenure and collective bargaining provisions, expand online courses, reduce the number of teachers and institute a merit pay system. The state Senate also approved legislation to implement the changes immediately rather than on July 1 in an effort to dampen an attempt to put the controversial changes up to a referendum next year.

2011 Adoption of Madison’s Orchard Ridge Elementary School: 2/3 of Students of Color (56%) & Low Income (55%) Cannot Read

African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC), via a kind reader’s email:

As a logical stage of development, the African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC) has established a number of community projects for 2011. The AACCC will focus the wisdom and energy of its corresponding constituent groups toward areas in need of positive outcomes. The projects are designed to serve as a demonstration of what can be accomplished when the “talent” of the community is focused on solutions rather than symptoms.
Education
The AACCC’s first educational pilot project is the “adoption” of Orchard Ridge Elementary (ORE) School for the first six months of 2011 (second semester of 2010/2011 school year).
After assessing the primary issues and unmet needs concerning student achievement, the AACCC, the ORE School Principal and Central Office MMSD administration (including the Superintendent) have determined a number of vital activities in which the AACCC could play a vital role.
Too much is at stake for the AACCC adoption of Orchard Ridge Elementary to be viewed as a “feel good” project. The student population of ORE involves 56% students of color, and fifty five percent (55%) of its student enrollment is from low-income homes. As dramatically depicted below, approximately two thirds of that population cannot read.
Please note the following:

Much more on Orchard Ridge, here.

Implementing Luna’s Idaho Education plan

Maureen Dolan:

There are still a few things that have to happen before many of Idaho’s newly minted education reforms can be fully executed in the state’s kindergarten- through 12th-grade public schools.
Some of the responsibility for the success or failure of Idaho public schools chief Tom Luna’s “Students Come First” education reform plan now rests with members of the Idaho State Board of Education. Other reform package measures require that school boards throughout the state create their own local policies and procedures to put the reforms, now Idaho law, into action.
“Implementation will determine how effective the reforms are and if the promised efficiencies will be realized,” state education board spokesman Mark Browning said.
The sweeping changes to K-12 education were announced by Luna, with support from Gov. Butch Otter, in Janurary at the start of the legislative session.
Broken down into three bills, the reforms were passed by lawmakers during weeks of contentious House and Senate committee hearings, and protests by students and teachers throughout the state. The final bill was signed into law Friday by the governor, a day after the session adjourned.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A debt disaster behind a comic book budget squabble

Clive Crook:

The world had better start paying attention to the US government’s inability to govern. The prevailing mood over this has been strangely complacent. Six months of the fiscal year gone and only now a ramshackle budget? Government brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements? Absurd, one thinks, but this is Washington. Do as most Americans do, and regard the pantomime with blithe contempt. In the end, out of sheer exhaustion, the actors do their deals and it is business as usual.
So it proved with the shutdown farce. Capitol Hill and its followers tracked the quarrel avidly. TV news showed clocks counting down the hours and minutes before “inessential services” would be suspended. Talks between Congress and the White House were covered as though a nuclear strike was imminent. With an hour to go, a deal that no one understood was done.
The president stood before the cameras: “Americans of different beliefs came together again,” he said, as if expecting applause. Some laughed; most yawned.
The shutdown punch-up was a nuisance and proof of Washington’s recklessness, but little apart from political advantage was at stake. Mostly, it was theatre. But a real fiscal crisis is coming. The debt-ceiling fight, next on the playbill, raises the theoretical possibility of a government default. Beyond that, public debt keeps rising. The current dysfunction shows how hard it will be to stop.

What is the Academic Mission of the Seattle School District’s Central Office?

Charlie Mas

e know the District’s mission – to educate Seattle’s students. That work is done primarily in the schools. The mission of the schools – to educate students – no different from the District mission. The Central Office has two sides: Operations and Academics. The mission of the Operations side is also clear – to take on all of the non-academic work to free the schools to focus on academics. But what is the mission of the academic side of the Central Office?
What academic tasks are the proper work of the Central Office?
The lack of a clearly defined mission for the Academic side of the Central Office has led to two unacceptable consequences: tasks that the central office should do have been left undone and the central office has squandered resources and irritated colleagues by taking on work they should not be doing.
I suggest that the Central Office has three academic duties:
1. Quality Assurance. Someone needs to follow up on the schools and make sure that they are doing a good job. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate interventions for students working below grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate challenge for students working beyond grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are delivering – at a minimum – the core content in each subject at each grade level. Someone needs to make sure that the teachers understand that the Standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Someone needs to make sure that they are following the IEPs, that they are providing appropriate services to ELL students, that their Advanced Learning program meets the expectations for such programs, and so on. Someone needs to make sure that the schools offer all of the classes and opportunities that they are supposed to offer (music, AP classes, etc.). This work, Academic Assurances, is the District’s work. Much of it has not been done. Much of it still is not done.
Along these lines, Dr. Enfield wanted to clarify her “Spectrum is Spectrum is Spectrum” remark, but she didn’t really manage it. I will follow up with her.

Reading instruction focus of task force

Alan Borsuk:

Again and again, I clicked on Wisconsin on an interactive map of reading scores from across the nation. Wisconsin fourth-graders compared with other states. Eighth-graders compared with other states. White kids. Black kids. Hispanic kids. Low-income kids.
The color-coded results told a striking story: In each case, there were few states colored to show they had significantly lower scores than Wisconsin. For fourth-grade black kids, there were none. For fourth-grade low-income kids, there were four.
Here’s one that will probably surprise you: For fourth-grade white kids, there were only four (Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia) that were significantly below Wisconsin. Wisconsin white kids score slightly below the national average, putting us in a pack of states with kind-of-OK results, significantly below more than a dozen that are doing better.
Wisconsin is not the reading star it was a couple of decades ago. You’ll get little argument that this isn’t good.
..
But how reading is taught may be exactly what it heads for. In interviews, Dykstra and Pedriana said they hope there will be a comprehensive review of how reading is taught in Wisconsin – and how teachers are trained by universities to teach reading.
“We need to pay more attention to what works best,” Dykstra said. “We have known for 40 years a basic model for how to teach kids to read that is more effective than the predominant model in the state of Wisconsin.”
Pedriana said Wisconsin was a particularly “grievous example” of a state that had not done what it could to improve reading achievement. “Teacher training has to be addressed,” he said.

Fulfilling the charter school promise

Jed Wallace & Cinda Doughty:

Something unprecedented is happening with charter schools in San Diego and across California. This year, San Diego County saw a 14 percent increase in the number of charter schools operating, jumping from 81 to 92. Throughout California, 115 new charters opened – the largest number to ever open in a single year in any state in the nation. This brings California to 912 charter schools serving 365,000 students. Even though the state’s funding crisis is disproportionately affecting charter schools, the pipeline for expansion is more robust than it has ever been.
What is causing this growth?
Plain and simple, it is coming in response to demand from parents. Parents are seeing the successes that charter schools are generating. In addition to offering highly innovative programs that cater to individual student needs, charter schools are becoming known for generating high levels of learning.

School for sober kids gets funding boost from Madison school district

Susan Troller:

For students who have been treated for addiction, going back to a conventional high school is like sending an alcoholic into a bar, experts say. But, they add, it’s extremely hard to find a safe, nurturing educational option for teens who are struggling to stay drug or alcohol-free.
Horizon High School is a tiny, non-profit, Madison-based recovery school where students learn and help keep each other on track and sober, day in and day out. It’s one of only three recovery schools in Wisconsin.
Horizon High School serves about a dozen mostly local kids each year, employs a handful of teachers and counselors and operates out of rented space at Neighborhood House on Mills Street in Madison. For the students, it means close relationships with their teachers and each other, and routine, random drug tests as a fact of life.

Customized Learning: Will Washington Advance or Retreat?

EdReformer:

For several months, I had been listening to my friend agonize over the challenges she had been facing with her 16 year old daughter, “Tammy” , who was attending a suburban public high school in Washington state.
It started with a few phone calls from the school about some relationship issues between Tammy and some other girls at school. Within a month, Mom was getting two or three calls a week informing her Tammy had skipped several classes that day. Over the next several months the skipping continued, Tammy’s grades took a nose dive, and she became recluse and defiant at home. Meetings were held with the school administration, school counselor and the family. The parents did what they could administering consequences on their end. Yet nothing seemed to help.
My friend felt like she was loosing her daughter. Tammy could care less about graduating anymore – even though she used to love school as a child. That’s when I mentioned to her the idea of enrolling Tammy into one of Washington State’s online learning programs. At first, Mom was resistant. Like myself, my friend grew up in your “typical brick and mortar” school…..grouped by age, all taught the same thing at the same time no matter what level your were at, promoted regardless of mastery, huge masses of students moving through a system based on the industrial revolution. Tammy’s high school had close to 2000 students in it. Her teachers had about 180 students a day. Would anyone even notice Tammy’s plight?

Duncan: ‘We have to do things in a very, very different way’

Tina Maria Macias:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lauded the city and state for its post-Hurricane Katrina education reform during a wide-sweeping conversation about education on Friday.
Duncan spoke to a room of education journalists during the Education Writers Association National Seminar and touched on national issues relevant to Acadiana school systems.
He touted drastic reform in education, an issue that he said touches so many other problems. For example, only 25 percent of America’s youth qualify for the

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Absurd US Budget Debate

Michael Ramirez @ Investors.

Updated: Does Kiplinger’s claim of “weak” Madison schools compared to “suburban” schools hold up?

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Much more on Kiplingers, College Station Schools and a Wisconsin State Journal Editorial, here. Background on the oft criticized WKCE.

Wozniak says innovative projects, not tests, should determine a student’s grade; the popular DVR follows your every move

Lucas Mearian:

Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking – which is key to “the artistic side” of technology.
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.

Wisconsin School Choice & Student Testing

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett:

Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-’07 school year, and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.
But we have a lot more work to do to ensure this program is fair to all taxpayers.
For decades, our state has recognized that some communities have more wealth than others. That means that the amount spent on a child’s education could change dramatically depending on which “side of the tracks” a student lives on.

Anneliese Dickman:

The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program’s performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program’s achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee’s long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
That discussion is a relevant one given that higher educational attainment certainly is the overall goal for all Milwaukee students. Nevertheless, there are several reasons recent comparative test score results should not be dismissed.

Much more on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, here.

Pilot program could swap ACT for Nebraska statewide test in 11th grade

Joanne Young

Remember the statewide tests for public school students signed into law in 2008?
A Lincoln senator would like the state to consider deviating from that just a smidgen.
Lincoln Sen. Bill Avery would like to persuade the Legislature to go along with a pilot program that could change the statewide NeSA test for 11th-graders to the ACT college entrance exam.
The idea is to conduct the pilot in Lincoln and seven other districts in the state for three years. The program would evaluate whether the ACT would be an appropriate measure of content knowledge in reading, math and science, and of college and career readiness.
Avery believes having students take the ACT statewide could improve Nebraska’s college-going rate. The current rate is 67 percent for graduating high school students, he said.

Broken Business Model in Liberal Arts

Steve Kolowich:

Maybe what the liberal arts needed was a full-blown depression.
“A couple of years ago I had great hope, because of the externality of the economic situation,” Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed College, told a room full of fellow audience members at a summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) on Thursday.
“I was really hoping, contrary to all of my better judgment, that things would really go into the toilet,” Ringle continued. “Because if we didn’t stop at recession — if we went all the way down to depression — maybe that would be enough for the economic forces to require us to change.”

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2

Thomas Benton:

What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.
In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama’s call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college–at an ever greater cost–when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” after four years of education?
This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking?

Charter Schools & Unions

Rebecca Vevea:

There were no charter school unions in 2008, when the Chicago Teachers Union formed its Charter Outreach Committee to knock on doors and help charter teachers organize.
Nationally, 604 charter schools, roughly 12 percent, have collective-bargaining agreements. But 388 of those schools are in states where the law dictates that charters be included in existing collective-bargaining agreements with local districts, according to data collected by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Illinois law does not require charter schools to be part of local collective-bargaining units.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Bankrupt Nation Wakes Up; David Stockman on the Debt

Christopher Caldwell:

The high point in The Gallery of Antiquities, Balzac’s great novel of debt, comes when gendarmes are arresting the young Count d’Esgrignons for a forgery committed to cover his borrowing. The loyal notary Chesnel, attached to the d’Esgrignons family by generations of service, has already spent his own modest fortune to get the young count out of such scrapes, but he is at the end of his resources. “If I don’t manage to smother this story,” he tells the count matter-of-factly, “you’ll have to kill yourself before the indictment is read out.” The count realises in a flash that people have lent him money not because they have more than they know what to do with, or because he’s a nice guy, or because his privileges are the natural order of things. They have lent him money because they have made certain assumptions about his honour – misplaced assumptions, as it turns out.
Americans came face-to-face with their government debt this week and discovered that they are in the position of d’Esgrignons. There are several ways to measure how apocalyptic the situation is. The recent announcement by Pimco bond analyst Bill Gross that he was selling his long-term Treasury holdings has shaken people, and not just those who watch the business channels. In a memo laced with words like “staggering” and “incredible”, Mr Gross described himself as “confident” the US would default on its debt if did not reform its entitlement programmes (pensions and government healthcare). Mr Gross cited an estimate by Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist, that government unfunded liabilities stand at $75,000bn. To spend time with the federal budget is to suspect that the US is the sick man of the global economy.

Lloyd Grove:

Stockman described the impending showdown as a “wakeup call”–the political equivalent of getting whacked in the head by a two-by-four containing a rusty nail.
“And then,” Stockman added in a tone of lethal glee, “they’re going to be calling their own bluff. Because at that point the problem will remain 98 percent as large as it was the morning before.”
The 64-year-old Stockman, who made millions as an investment banker after serving as a Michigan congressman and then Reagan’s fiscal guru in the early 1980s, makes Debbie Downer sound like a cockeyed optimist. During a conversation punctuated by mirthless laughter, he characterized America’s elected officials as “the fools inside the Beltway,” dismissed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, generally celebrated as the GOP’s brightest policy star, as “an earnest young man” who offers discredited ideology over practical solutions, and predicted a long and agonizing epoch in which incomes will fall, the economy will stall and reality’s bite will leave painful tooth marks.

Related: Videographic on Pensions.

Who Speaks English?

The Economist:

EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists’s threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord. They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.

Kansas City Don Bosco Charter to close

Mara Rose Williams:

A second Kansas City charter school today announced it will close at the end of this school year.
Don Bosco Charter High School is shuttering its doors for good after operating more than a decade as a school for students at risk of dropping out.
School officials said this morning that because of poor student attendance they were unable to generate the revenue needed to continue operating the high school. State funding for public schools is based on a formula heavily weighted by the average student daily attendance.
But school leaders were quick to defend their students.
“It would be very easy to blame students, but I don’t want to do that,” said Al Dimmitt, chairman of the Don Bosco Charter High School Board of Directors. “We are dealing with a student population faced with a lot of challenges in life and attendance in school does not always arise to their top priority,”

2011: The Year of Education Reform

The Brookings Institution:

School districts across the nation are grappling with the question of how to improve student performance in a time of fiscal austerity. Some reformers are challenging the idea of automatic tenure, arguing that teachers should be paid based on performance rather than seniority. Moreover, recent legislative battles involving teacher compensation in Wisconsin and Ohio have put the issue squarely in the public spotlight.

The Education School Master’s Degree Factory

Paul Peterson:

One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master’s degree. Simply by giving up the extra payment for the master’s degree, school districts in Florida could save better than 3 percent of their teaching personnel costs without losing any of their classroom effectiveness. In a paper just published in the Economics of Education Review, Matthew Chingos and I look at the characteristics of effective 4th through 8th grade teachers in Florida over the period 2002 to 2010.
We found that teachers with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. Further, we found out that it did not make any difference from which public university in Florida a teacher had earned the degree. None of them had an educational program that correlated with a teacher’s classroom effectiveness.
Yet a teacher who has taught for 10 years will earn 6.5 percent more (or about $2500), if he or she has collected that extra diploma. Since about half the teachers have pursued that advanced degree–given the extra dollars, why not?–the state could save better than 3 percent of its teaching personnel costs by eliminating this useless feature of the teacher compensation scheme.

NJ Gov. Christie calls for peer teacher evaluation

Beth Fouhy & Angela Dellis Santi:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday called for public school teachers to be evaluated based equally on their classroom performance and student achievement and accused the state’s largest teachers union of being a group of “bullies and thugs.”
Christie laid out his proposal in a speech in New York sponsored by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank. A teachers union spokesman called the governor’s plan an “educational disaster.”
Since taking office last year, the Republican Christie has emerged as a popular figure among conservatives nationally for his willingness to confront public employee unions, including teachers, over their salaries and pensions. Several other governors have since followed suit, saying such benefits for public employees are unsustainable over time.

If Wisconsin is so careless with some schools’ reputations . . .

Patrick McIlheran:

The state, if you recall, released a snapshot of student performance in Milwaukee’s school choice program last week. Tony Evers, head of the Department of Public Instruction, used the numbers to make a political statement against school choice, which he opposes.

But the figures had issues, and now still more are emerging. One of the surprises in the figures were how poorly one particular choice school, Tamarack Waldorf, did.

It’s surprising because Tamarack is by reputation a good school, unusually deliberate in its curriculum and rigorous in the peculiar way of schools in the Waldorf movement – where, for instance, children do not just have a chapter on photosynthesis but, instead, spend a couple of weeks learning the chemistry behind it and studying the geometry of branches and doing a project on forest ecology and reading literature about trees and taking a field trip to the park, the better to appreciate art involving trees and to make some of their own. Rather than taking tests, the children produce books to demonstrate their learning.

The kind of people who send their kids to such a school are generally engaged and intellectual parents – and, generally, not favorably disposed to standardized testing.

So an unusual number of Tamarack parents opted their children out of the state’s tests, as is the right of any parent in the state. You can see the figures here: In math and reading, about 55% of choice students at Tamarack didn’t take the state tests.

The state’s figures say that 42% of Tamarack students did well – scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading, and 24% did in math. Those aren’t good scores. But they aren’t real, either.

As Tamarack administrator Jean Kacanek wrote to parents, “The data published is not complete because the Department of Public Instruction averaged scores of ‘0’ for each MPCP student in grades 4-8 at Tamarack who did not take the test. As one might expect for a Waldorf school, with a philosophy averse to standardized testing, many parents chose to opt out of the test.”

Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here.

How the Best School Systems Invest in Teachers

Asia Society:

When the rankings of the best school systems in the world were released earlier this year, Americans were shocked: our former number one standing slipped again, this time to number 26.
The rankings showed a new trend: the highest-performing school systems in the world are mostly in Asia.
What are the Asian school systems doing right? And what can the United States learn? Asia Society invited top education ministers from China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan and Singapore, to sound off on these questions.
There was no lively debate. The answer was clear: invest in teachers.

Weathering Education Cuts

Diana Middleton:

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett proposed cuts last month that would slash the state’s higher-education budget to $567 million from $1.2 billion, affecting more than a dozen state-run and state-supported universities.
For the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, tuition would have to be increased by 40% to break even, although the school doesn’t plan to implement such a dramatic increase.
John Delaney, who has been the school’s dean since August 2006, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the budget cuts and how far the school is prepared to go to keep itself afloat. “I think we’ll have to really change the way we do things,” Mr. Delaney says.

Watertown (MA) School Committee rejects teachers contract

Megan McKee:

The Watertown School Committee Monday night voted down the long-negotiated teachers’ union contract in front of a standing-room only audience, citing the dire financial situation the schools face next year.
The 5-3 vote means negotiators will have to go back to the bargaining table after teachers thought they had an agreement with the School Committee that came only after 18 months of negotiations and the involvement of a mediator.
“We recommended in good faith that our members ratify the agreement…Our members trusted us and voted to ratify the agreement,” said Watertown Educators Association president Debra King at Monday’s meeting. “We expected the School Committee team would also act in good faith and ratify the agreement. But then came the disturbing turn of events that have led us to tonight.”

How to Ensure School Failure

Bruce Murphy:

I got my start as a journalist freelancing stories for the old Milwaukee Sentinel about problems with achievement test results at Milwaukee Public Schools. Throughout the 1980s, the media’s increasing focus on problems at MPS helped to lay the groundwork for a radically different alternative – a voucher system where low-income families could choose to send their children to private schools. The case for school choice could not have been made without years of achievement test data showing the below-average performance of MPS schools.
So it is highly ironic – and quite alarming – that Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to end the requirement that choice schools participate in the state system of standardized testing. I can’t think of a better way to guarantee these schools are failures.
Last week the media reported the results of state tests for MPS and choice schools. The average scores were astoundingly bad for some choice schools. The proportion of students who were proficient in reading and math was just 12 percent and 14 percent at Texas Bufkin Christian Academy; 17 percent and 6 percent at Travis Technology High School; 20 percent and 7 percent at Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy; 23 percent and 9 percent at Right Step, Inc.; 18 percent and 0 percent (Did no one take the math test?) at Dr Brenda Noach Choice School; 16 percent and 9 percent at Destiny High School. You get the feeling some of these schools worked harder on creating their name than educating the students.

Much more on the Milwaukee school choice program, here.

Massachusetts School district petitions legislature to opt out of common education standards

Jack Minor:

A Massachusetts school committee has petitioned their legislature to opt out of Federal education standards which most states have adopted in attempt to get federal funding during lean budget times.
The Tantasqua Regional School Committee, the equivalent of our local Board of Education, is working with their state legislature to allow them to opt out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
School Committee Chairman Kathleen Neal told the Gazette committee members are concerned with the cost of implementing the program as well as the way the standards were adopted with little public input last year.
The Massachusetts Core initiative was adopted during the summer and Neal said the committee had no idea it was being discussed until after the vote was passed with almost no notice to the general public. “If you are going to change the way you do assessments you should bring the people who are invested in it to the table.” She expressed frustration at state officials lack of asking the local districts for solutions.

MATC full-time faculty earn more on average than faculty at most UW campuses

Deborah Ziff & Nick Heynen:

Full-time faculty members at Madison Area Technical College earned an average base pay of $79,030 last year, more than the average professor earned at all University of Wisconsin System campuses except UW-Madison.
Average take-home pay increased to $87,822 when sources such as summer school and overtime were factored in, according to a State Journal analysis of 2009-10 salary data, obtained through Wisconsin’s open records law.
Officials say one reason MATC faculty are paid more than those in the UW System is because the technical college must compete with high-paying private-sector jobs to hire faculty to teach subjects such as plumbing, electrical fields and information technology.
But another reason for the gap may be the way salaries are set. Raises for UW System faculty must be included in the state budget along with other state workers, while MATC faculty negotiate their salaries with the district board through union representation.

When It Comes to Teaching, Who Needs Experience?

Randy Turner:

As I think back over a dozen years in the classroom, I cannot recall the exact moment that I changed from an idealistic beginning teacher at the peak of my game to the space-wasting NEA member who is keeping some good young teacher on the unemployment line.
When did experience turn from an asset to the biggest roadblock to saving American public schools?
In Missouri, a bill has been proposed by Republican Rep. Scott Dieckhaus which would eliminate tenure and the due process it guarantees and allow administrators and school boards to fire teachers with or without reason.
Dieckhaus’ bill also calls for a four-tier merit pay system, based almost entirely on the scores on standardized tests. The bill specifically forbids basing teacher pay on years of experience or advanced schooling.

School Cuts Spur Michigan K-12, Higher Education Spending Conflict

Kate Linebaugh:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said earlier this year he wouldn’t “pick fights” with public-employee unions, but he’s now headed for a showdown with teachers over his proposed education cuts.
The Michigan Education Association, which represents 155,000 teachers statewide, began polling members late last month to gauge support for a range of “crisis activities,” including a strike, to protest the governor’s proposed 4% cut in school funding.
In response, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would add stiff new penalties for teacher strikes–which are barred by state law–including revoking a teacher’s certification. The teachers also plan a rally next week in the state capital of Lansing.
“The battle lines have already been drawn,” said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a political newsletter in Lansing. “There is the gathering prospect that we could end up with another Wisconsin.”

Democrat Oregon Governor Kitzhaber pushes for 1 board to oversee education, pre-kindergarten through grad school

Harry Esteve:

Gov. John Kitzhaber leads a full-court press today for what he considers to be the centerpiece of his education reform plan — a single board that would help set the budgets for pre-kindergarten programs to universities and everything in between.
At a news conference, he surrounded himself with every top education official in the state to tout his bill that would establish the Oregon Education Investment Board. The board would replace the state boards of education and higher education, and would oversee spending on all facets of learning.
“The state needs to move from a funder to an investor,” Kitzhaber said. And the money each program gets “needs to be based on outcomes rather than seat time.”
Later today, Kitzhaber is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee on Senate Bill 909, which takes the first steps toward establishing the new uber-board.

Chris Lehman:

Kitzhaber acknowledged that even under that system interest groups would still compete. But not as fiercely as they do under the current system.
John Kitzhaber: “If you’re developing a single joint budget based on some clear criteria going in, it creates a rationale for that debate. Right now it’s simply how do I get as much money as I can in my pot.”
The unified education budget would still have to be approved by lawmakers. Kitzhaber made his pitch to members of the Oregon Senate Education Committee.

Broadband Availability for US Schools

data.ed.gov

The U.S. Department of Education developed this broadband availability map and search engine as part of a collaborative effort with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This education-focused broadband map and database builds upon the NTIA State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) Program that surveys bi-annually broadband availability and connectivity for the 50 United States, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia.

How the System Ensures Teacher Quality

Stuart Buck:

As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.
In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers — she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master’s degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.

Gov. Christie creates task force to review N.J. education rules

Ginger Gibson:

Gov. Chris Christie created a committee today that will be tasked with reviewing all of the state’s education regulations.
The task force will return recommendations to eliminate regulations which take decision-making power away from the local districts, Christie said.
“What I want to have happen here is to return more of the power back to school districts and less from the central office in Trenton, so that we can encourage people to innovate,” Christie said. “We’ve gotten into a pattern over the course of time with increasing money coming from Trenton over the last 20 to 25 years years with increasing regulation coming from Trenton. I don’t think that’s the best way for us to go at transforming education.

Don’t use Michigan’s K-12 fund for higher education

Lansing State Journal:

Michigan’s education funding system has been broken for a long time.
Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to shift college and university funding into the School Aid Fund that pays for K-12 education is not a good long-term solution.
Snyder is trying to use the financial pressure to accelerate efforts to curb the overpromising of salaries, pensions and benefits – especially health care benefits – to teachers. Likewise, many in the Republican Party believe the state’s colleges and universities have spent too much on salaries and benefits.

Fun with the California Federation of Teachers

Mike Antonucci:

It’s a serious time in the world of education labor. Some even call it war. And while the California Federation of Teachers is stockpiling arms in the Fight for California’s Future, the union still has a wide range of priorities, as evidenced by its list of approved resolutions from last month’s convention at the Marriott Manhattan Beach.
Resolution 1 calls on the state to research the effects of methyl iodide and asks CalSTRS to divest any investment in the company that manufactures it for agricultural use.
Resolution 2 institutes compensation for additional statewide CFT officers, the amount to be determined by the CFT Executive Council.
Resolution 4 directs the union to lobby for compulsory kindergarten.

Tax credits for religious schools? Supreme Court says taxpayers have no say.

Warren Richey:

The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools.
In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona’s religious school tax credit program.

Pioneer of ballet wants girls to have more choices

Amy Nip:

Being born female set sometime actress Christine Liao on the road to a career in ballet, but it could all have been so different.
Growing up in a traditional, male-dominated environment, the founder of the Christine Liao School of Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet Company may never have had such an impact on the art form had she not seen other career paths blocked.
And that’s precisely why she is backing a new campaign called “Because I am a Girl”, which will promote the rights of girls.
Liao began dancing when she was eight and, at the age of 19, she became a film actress using the stage name Mao Mei, and starred in eight films from 1955 to 1962. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in languages and literature, she turned her back on the silver screen and considered becoming a lawyer or working in an office.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Google’s Low tax Strategy, Relations with President Obama and Anti-Intellectualism

Lisa O’Carroll:

Take Google, for example – like WPP it has sited its European headquarters in Dublin although it most of its European revenues are generated outside Ireland – from the UK and other large EMEA economies such as Germany.
The internet giant doesn’t pay 12.5% corporate tax in Ireland, it pays 20%. But that figure is not the interesting one. The interesting figure is the gargantuan “administrative expense” that reduces its gross profit from €5.5bn to just €45m.
Grant Thornton tax accountant Peter Vale, who works with multinationals in Dublin says the corporate tax rate of 12.5% may not be a critical factor for companies like Google.
The search engine is using Ireland as a conduit for revenues that end up being costed to another country where its intellectual property (the brand and technology such as Google’s algorithms) is registered. In Google’s case this country is Bermuda, according to an investigation by Bloomberg last year.
Vale points out that Bermuda is likely to be happy to receive tax revenues from such a huge company, saying: “To them, the 12.5% probably doesn’t matter.”
The 2009 Google Ireland Limited accounts show the company turned over a phenomenal €7.9bn in Europe for the year ending 2009 – up from €6.7bn the previous year.

Jeremy Bowers @ ycombinator

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy:

“Google was Obama territory [during the campaign], and vice versa. With its focus on speed, scale, and above all data, Google had identified and exploited the key ingredients for thinking and thriving in the Internet era. Barack Obama seemed to have integrated those concepts in his own approach to problem solving. Naturally, Googlers were excited to see what would happen when their successful methods were applied to Washington, D.C. They were optimistic that the Google worldview could prevail outside the Mountain View bubble. … [A]nyone visiting the Google campus during the election year could not miss a fervid swell of Obama-love. While some commentators wrung hands over the Spock-like nature of the senator’s personality, Googlers swooned over the dispassionate, reason-based approach he took to problem solving. … ‘It’s a selection bias,’ says Eric Schmidt of the unofficial choice of most of his employees. ‘The people here all have been selected very carefully, so obviously there’s going to be some prejudice in favor of a set of characteristics – highly educated, analytic, thoughtful, communicates well.’ …
“[O]ne of the company’s brightest young product managers, Dan Siroker [the Chrome browser], … got permission to take a few weeks off. … At [Obama] campaign headquarters in Chicago, Siroker began looking at the web efforts to recruit volunteers and solicit donations. … [H]e returned to Google to help launch Chrome. But over the July 4 weekend, he went back to Chicago to visit the friends he’d met on the campaign. Barack Obama walked through headquarters, and Siroker was introduced to him. He told the senator he was visiting from Google. Obama smiled. ‘I’ve been saying around here that we need a little more Google integration.’ That exchange with the candidate was enough to change Siroker’s course once more. Back in Mountain View, he told his bosses he was leaving for good. He became the chief analytics officer of the Obama campaign. …
“Just as Google ran endless experiments to find happy users, Siroker and his team used Google’s Website Optimizer [tool for testing site content] to run experiments to find happy contributors. The conventional wisdom had been to cadge donations by artful or emotional pitches, to engage people’s idealism or politics. Siroker ran a lot of A/B tests and found that by far the success came when you offered some sort of swag; a T-shirt or a coffee mug. Some of his more surprising tests came in figuring out what to put on the splash page, the one that greeted visitors when they went to Obama2008.com. Of four alternatives tested, the picture of Obama’s family drew the most clicks.
“Even the text on the buttons where people could click to get to the next page was subject to test. Should they say, SIGN UP, LEARN MORE, JOIN US NOW, or SIGN UP NOW? (Answer: LEARN MORE, by a significant margin.) Siroker refined things further by sending messages to people who had already donated. If they’d never signed up before, he’d offer them swag to donate. If they had gone through the process, there was no need for swag – it was more effective to have a button that said PLEASE DONATE. … There were a lot of reasons why Barack Obama raised $500 million online to McCain’s $210 million, but analytics undoubtedly played a part.”

Via Mike Allen.
The FTC on Google’s “deceptive tactics” and violation of its own privacy rules.

Google Inc. has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the practices violate the FTC Act. The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers’ information. In addition, this is the first time the FTC has alleged violations of the substantive privacy requirements of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, which provides a method for U.S. companies to transfer personal data lawfully from the European Union to the United States.
“When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honor them,” said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. “This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations.”
According to the FTC complaint, Google launched its Buzz social network through its Gmail web-based email product. Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective. For users who joined the Buzz network, the controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.

Finally: Massive Offshore Tax Giveaway supported by Senators Kohl & Feingold:

As mentioned here, I, too, would like the 5.25% tax rate that our good Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported (to repatriate foreign profits via a one year tax break). Timothy Aeppel looks at the results:

But it’s far from clear whether the spending has spurred the job growth that backers of the break touted.
A law signed by President Bush shortly before the 2004 election allows companies to transfer profit from overseas operations back to the U.S. this year at a special low tax rate of 5.25%. Businesses often keep such funds outside the country in part to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., where the effective rate on repatriated profit for many companies is normally closer to 25%. Backers said the measure would provide an incentive to companies to invest those funds in U.S. operations.
Most companies using the break have offered only broad outlines for how they intend to use their windfall. For the most part, they say they are using the bulk of the money for tasks such as paying down debt and meeting payrolls. Direct job creation rarely appears on the list.

Tom Foremski:

Why do countries and cities and states try to attract tech companies such as Google when they don’t want to support the local community tax base?
Twitter, for example is trying to get out of paying San Francisco payroll taxes.
Yet the Obama administration believes that innovation from companies like Google and Twitter will help build jobs and provide the wealth to eliminate US deficits. Other governments have similar hopes.
That’s a highly optimistic view and one that’s not supported by the actions of those companies who seek the best deals they can get, and use every loophole to get out of paying a share of their profits to the communities where they live and work.

Well worth Reading: John Mauldin: The Plight of the Working Class and Ed Wallace: What’s that Whining Sound?
This influence peddling at the highest levels is not unique to Google, or to the private sector for that matter. MG & E’s lobbying is another example where funds, generated from a large rate base (the general public), are spread to a few politicians. Facebook’s privacy problems and cellular user tracking are also worth following.

A new school in Sai Kung will be a model for sustainable design and education in Hong Kong

Viv Jones:

No longer the preserve of tree-huggers, the trend for sustainable design is gaining momentum as more people opt for homes and buildings created using renewable resources that don’t cost the earth, literally. No wonder – these buildings use less energy, cost less to operate, use fewer natural resources and have less of an impact on the environment than their conventional counterparts.
Hong Kong Academy’s green school, which opens in Sai Kung in 2013, is part of a new era in sustainable architecture in our city, says Josh Arnold, who teaches middle school science, maths and design technology at HKA.

Guaranteeing my future employment

Jay Matthews:

Three distinguished scholars at the Brookings Institution have been spending much time worrying about what we education writers are going to do with ourselves in the uncertain future. This week, they released their third consecutive report on this subject, and filled me with hope that I had not had before.
The three — governance studies director Darrell M. West, Brown Center on Education Policy Director Grover J. Whitehurst and governance studies senior fellow and Post political columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. — have discovered among our fellow Americans a stubborn faith in education reporting in newspapers. That’s right: The byproduct of dead trees sitting in front of your house getting soaked in the spring rain is still a useful tool.
They surveyed 1,211 adults in the continental United States and found that daily newspapers were the second-most common source for current education news among this diverse group, with 60 percent saying newspapers were a source of education news for them.

Racine schools want $118 million from voters, promise improvement

Amy Hetzner:

In a city hit hard by the recent economic downturn, school officials have set an ambitious agenda for turning around a struggling school system.
Within five years, Racine Unified School District officials say, their goal is to have 90% of third-graders reading at grade level or higher – a dramatic improvement over the 65% proficiency rate posted on the recent state test.
What they’re asking for in return in a Tuesday referendum is an additional $118.5 million. If approved, it would be the largest successful referendum in Wisconsin, not even counting another question on the ballot that seeks an additional $10 million for district reserves.
“What this referendum is about is us, as a district, making a commitment, but also having the community make a commitment, to make us demonstrably better,” Racine Unified Deputy Superintendent Alan Harris said.

Harris was formerly Principal of Madison’s East High School.

SEC recommends action against bank over $200 million school investments

Amy Hetzner:

School officials in Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay claim they were misled about the nature of the investments
Securities and Exchange Commission staff have recommended taking enforcement action against an investment bank involved in five Wisconsin school districts’ $200 million investment in risky financial instruments, the bank disclosed Friday.
The parent corporation for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. disclosed in an SEC filling that Stifel Nicolaus had received a “Wells Notice” from the federal agency on Friday, indicating that “the staff intends to recommend the filing of a civil or administrative enforcement action against Stifel Nicolaus for possible violations of securities laws related to its role” in the school districts’ investments.
“Stifel Nicolaus plans to respond and explain why it believes enforcement action is not warranted,” the company wrote in the filing.
Bankers with Stifel Nicolaus helped sell $200 million worth of complex financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations in 2006 to five school districts – Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay – as a way to help fund non-pension post-employment benefits for the districts’ employees.

Choice Schools Do Pay Off

Patrick McIlheran:

The striking bit of news out of that ongoing study comparing private and public schools in Milwaukee is this: Researchers aren’t yet sure how, but the private schools are better at getting kids across the finish line.
This is one bright spot in a report otherwise showing that children using Milwaukee’s school choice program were doing only about as well as Milwaukee Public Schools kids on state tests. The study, by independent university researchers, is following two sets of children, matched for background and poverty, to see which system does a better job of improving their scores on math and reading tests. So far, say researchers, there’s no statistically significant difference.
But the study’s oldest students have reached graduation age. There, say researchers, there is a difference. Children in choice schools were notably more likely to graduate from high school. Just among those who spent ninth grade taking their state aid to a private school in the form of a voucher, 77% graduated in four years; 69% of MPS kids did.
Among students who spent all four years in a choice school, 94% graduated on time; 75% of kids who stayed in MPS all four years did.

Much more on the Milwaukee Parental Choice program, here.

MISSED ADJUSTMENTS and OPPORTUNITIES RATIFICATION OF Madison School District/Madison Teachers Collective Bargaining Agreement 2011-2013

The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO ‘urgent’ need (nor ANY need at all) to ‘negotiate’ a new contract. The current contract doesn’t expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in ‘locking in’ the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.

Keeping the ‘step and advancement’ salary schedule locks in automatic salary increases; thereby establishing a new basis annually for salary adjustments. The schedule awards increases solely on tenure and educational attainment. This also significantly inhibits movement for development and implementation of ‘pay for performance’ and merit.
Continues the MOU agreement requiring 50% of teachers in 4-K programs (public and private sites combined) to be state certified and union members
Continues required union membership. There are 2700 total or 2400 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, numbers rounded. Full-time teachers pay $1100.00 (pro-rated for part-time) per year in automatic union dues deducted from paychecks and processed by the District. With 2400 FTE multiplied by $1100 equals $2,640,000 per year multiplied by two years of the collective bargaining unit equals $5,280,000 to be paid by teachers to their union (Madison Teachers Inc., for its union activities). These figures do not include staff members in the clerical and teacher assistant bargaining units who also pay union dues, but at a lower rate.
Continues to limit and delay processes for eliminating non-performing teachers Inhibits abilities of the District to determine the length and configuration of the school day, length and configuration of the school year calendar including professional development, breaks and summer school
Inhibits movement and placement of teachers where needed and best suited
Restricts adjustments to class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios
Continues very costly grievance options and procedures and litigation
Inhibits the District from developing attendance area level teacher/administrator councils for collaboration in problem-solving, built on trust and relationships in a non-confrontational environment
Continues costly extra-duties and extra-curricular agreements and processes
Restricts flexibility for teacher input and participation in professional development, curriculum selection and development and performance evaluation at the building level
Continues Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), costing upwards to $3M per year
Does not require teacher sharing in costs of health insurance premiums
Did not immediately eliminate extremely expensive Preferred Provider (WPS) health insurance plan
Did not significantly address health insurance reforms
Does not allow for reviews and possible reforms of Sick Leave and Disability Leave policies
Continues to be the basis for establishing “me too” contract agreements with administrators for salaries and benefits. This has impacts on CBAs with other employee units, i.e., support staff, custodians, food service employees, etc.
Continues inflexibilities for moving staff and resources based on changes and interpretations of state and federal program supported mandates
Inhibits educational reforms related to reading and math and other core courses, as well as reforms in the high schools and alternative programs

Each and every one of the above items has a financial cost associated with it. These are the so-called ‘hidden costs’ of the collective bargaining process that contribute to the over-all costs of the District and to restrictions for undertaking reforms in the educational system and the District. These costs could have been eliminated, reduced, minimized and/ or re-allocated in order to support reforms and higher priorities with more direct impact on academic achievement and staff performance.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
100k PDF version

It’s time for schools to focus on quality, not politics or structure

Alan Borsuk:

I’m tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we’ve proved anything in Milwaukee, we’ve proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.
Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation’s foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee’s publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and – for the first time – school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We’ve got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We’re not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee – MPS, voucher schools and charter schools – had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us – especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders – focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

I appreciate and approve of Borsuk’s sentiment.

Bennet introduces bill to close loophole in how feds fund high-poverty schools

Yesenia Robles:

In an attempt to close funding disparities between high- and low-poverty schools, a bill introduced in Washington, D.C., on Thursday would force districts to be more detailed in reporting school-by-school funding, closing a longtime loophole.
The bill, introduced by Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Thad Cochran, R-Miss., targets districts that collect federal Title I funding for high-poverty schools.
“All too often, well-intentioned policies hatched in Washington do not work the way they were intended,” Bennet said in a release. “We are one of only three developed countries to pump more money into affluent schools than low-income schools. That needs to change.”
When federal Title I funding was started, it was meant to be an additional resource on top of other funds to help students in need get on an equal academic playing field.

Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Tony Evers’ Budget Testimony

Questions, via WisPolitics:

JFC co-chair Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said in the last budget, cuts to K-12 education were offset by millions of stimulus dollars from the federal government.
“It was a luxury that was great at the time,” he said. “Now we don’t have that one-time money.”
While he admitted that the “tools” Gov. Walker provides may not offset funding cuts dollar-for-dollar, he said asking teachers to pay more for health insurance coverage and pension will help. Vos then asked Evers if he supports the mandate relief initiatives Walker proposed in his budget.
Evers said the mandates, which include repealing the requirement that schools schedule 180 days instruction but retains the required number of hours per school year, won’t generate much savings for school districts. He said the challenge schools face from reduced funding is much greater.
“It’s nibbling around the edges,” Evers said of the mandates. “I think we’re beyond that.”

via WisPolitics:

Excerpts from Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers prepared remarks to the Joint Finance Committee:
“We know that resources are scarce. School districts around the state have demonstrated that they are willing to do their part, both in recent weeks in response to this state budget crisis and throughout the past 18 years under the constraints of revenue caps. While this difficult budget demands shared sacrifice, we need a budget that is fair, equitable, and does not undercut the quality of our children’s education,” Evers said.
“As you know, the Governor’s budget proposal, which increases state spending by 1.7 percent over the next two years, would cut $840 million in state school aids over the biennium – the largest cut to education in state history. While these cuts present unprecedented challenges, an even larger concern is the proposed 5.5 percent reduction to school district revenue limits, which dictate exactly how much money schools have available to spend. Depending on the school district, schools would have to reduce their spending between $480 and $1,100 per pupil. Statewide, the proposed revenue limit cuts will result in a $1.7 billion cut over the biennium, as compared to current law. These dramatic and unprecedented revenue limit cuts will be a crushing challenge to our public schools, especially by the second year of the budget.”

Higher Education Governance Agreement in Oregon, For Now

Doug Lederman:

In contrast to some other states (yes, that means you, Wisconsin), Oregon’s politicians and the leaders of its public colleges and universities are on the same page about changes the state should make in how it manages higher education. But don’t blink, or you might miss the moment.
Governor John Kitzhaber and the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, agreed Tuesday that the university would postpone for a year its push for legislation that would give it a new financing stream and an independent governing board separate and apart from the existing State Board of Higher Education.
Under the agreement, which was memorialized in an exchange of letters, Lariviere said the university would throw its support behind the governor’s plan to create a single statewide board to oversee pre-K to postsecondary education. While Kitzhaber did not openly state in return that he would fully back the university’s autonomy plan, Lariviere said in an interview Thursday that he was heartened by what university officials had heard in their discussions with the governor and his staff. “What we have received is as strong and as clear an endorsement of our ideas as we could reasonably expect at this stage,” he said.