Governance/Board Decision Making – Page 42

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public & Private Sector Employment Changes

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released state-by-state employment data for the month of June. While national totals had already been released for June, this is the first look at June data for individual states. The national data had shown a very slight increase in private sector employment, compared with May, and slight continued declines in state and local government employment (see Figure 1). This is broadly consistent with past recessions, in which state and local government employment has been far more stable than private sector employment, and in fact rarely declined at all. As in past recessions, state and local government employment changes tend to lag responses in the private sector.

The Golden State’s War on Itself

Joel Kotkin:

California has long been a destination for those seeking a better place to live. For most of its history, the state enacted sensible policies that created one of the wealthiest and most innovative economies in human history. California realized the American dream but better, fostering a huge middle class that, for the most part, owned their homes, sent their kids to public schools, and found meaningful work connected to the state’s amazingly diverse, innovative economy.
Recently, though, the dream has been evaporating. Between 2003 and 2007, California state and local government spending grew 31 percent, even as the state’s population grew just 5 percent. The overall tax burden as a percentage of state income, once middling among the states, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation, says the Tax Foundation. Since 1990, according to an analysis by California Lutheran University, the state’s share of overall U.S. employment has dropped a remarkable 10 percent. When the state economy has done well, it has usually been the result of asset inflation–first during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and then during the housing boom, which was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created earlier in this decade.

The Decline in Student Study Time

Philip Babcok & Mindy:

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.
Key points in this Outlook:

Study time for full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States fell from twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003, and the decline is not explained by changes over time in student work status, parental education, major choice, or the type of institution students attended.
Evidence that declines in study time result from improvements in education technology is slim. A more plausible explanation is that achievement standards have fallen.
Longitudinal data indicate that students who study more in college earn more in the long run.

Fairbanks School report fails to deliver complete picture, but stats help

Dermot Cole:

Twenty of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made “Adequate Yearly Progress” in the past year, while 15 did not.
But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.
Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.
As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.

Children of Illegal Immigrants Caught in Education Politics Crossfire

Peggy Orchowski:

The DREAM Act is back in the news. President Obama referred to it in his immigration speech at the American University on July 1. Groups of high school and college students have been marching and getting arrested for it all summer. Sen. Dick Durbin supported a Capitol Hill demonstration on it on July 20. Pollster Celinda Lake said at a Brookings Institute immigration panel in May: “How can anyone be against it?” [See who supports Durbin.]
So do you know what the DREAM Act is exactly?
Durbin describes it as “a narrowly tailored, bipartisan bill that would provide immigration relief to a select group of students who grew up in the United States but are prevented from pursuing their dreams by current immigration law”.
President Obama said he supports it because it would “stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents by denying them the chance to stay here and earn an education and contribute their talents to build the country where they’ve grown up.”

Notes on Teacher Merit Pay

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

Susan Troller had a typically good and very substantive article in the Capital Times this week about merit pay for teachers and other dimensions of teacher evaluations.
Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let’s figure out what’s the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it’s the quality of the teacher. Well then, let’s evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let’s put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let’s have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.

Classes on the go: Distance education becoming more popularClasses on the go: Distance education becoming more popular

Todd Finkelmeyer

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Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison’s summer session, Peter Owen hasn’t spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.

Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he’s knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.

“I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed,” Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.

Welcome to the modern world of “distance education,” a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren’t sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it’s generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered — at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.

Houston’s New Math Tutoring Program: Seeking Math Fellows

Houston School District:

The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is a one-year Urban Education Fellowship Program located in Houston, Texas.
The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is looking for dynamic college graduates to commit one year to improving the academic achievement of inner-city students. You will tutor five pairs of middle- or high-school students in math, every day, for the whole school year. You will have the opportunity to build close relationships with each of your students, and the chance to make a significant impact on their lives. This program is unique in that it is the first large-scale tutoring program integrated into the students’ school day that has ever been launched in an urban public school district. With your help, Houston can become a leading innovator in the urban education field.

Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

MG Siegler:

Bill Gates thinks something is going to die too.
No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.
“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

Andrew Coulson wonders why Gatest distinguished between College and K-12? That’s a good question. There are many, many online resources that provide an excellent learning experience.

A Look at Wisconsin Teacher Compensation Increases

Matthew DeFour:

Statewide increases in teacher compensation contracts are on track to be the lowest in more than a decade following last year’s changes in state school district financing.
Based on 160 settled contracts out of 425 school districts, the average increase in compensation packages — including salary and benefits — is 3.75 percent, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Annual increases last dipped below 4 percent in 1999 and have averaged 4.13 percent since 1993, when the state first imposed revenue limits and introduced the so-called qualified economic offer (QEO) provision, which allowed districts to offer a 3.8 percent package increase instead of going to arbitration. The QEO was repealed in the state biennial budget approved last year, though revenue limits remain in place to keep property tax increases in check.
By another measure, the Wisconsin Educators Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, reported teacher salaries are on pace to increase about 2 percent. That doesn’t include benefits and certain assumptions about longevity raises. The increase is slightly less than the 2.3 percent annual average since 1993 and would be the lowest since 2003.

Education is key difference in Iowa gov race

Mike Glover:

As the Iowa governor’s race takes shape, some of the sharpest differences have been about the state’s education system, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of Iowa’s $5.3 billion budget.
Both Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and Republican Terry Branstad said education will be a priority, but they have made it clear that they favor different approaches for the state’s elementary and secondary schools. In fact, a key difference relates to children who haven’t even started kindergarten.
Culver speaks repeatedly about his success in making state-paid preschool available to nearly every 4-year-old in the state.

Schools Learn to Survive Those That Play Stabilizing Roles in Communities Escape Detroit Budget Cuts

Alex Kellog:

Based on the numbers, Carstens Elementary School on Detroit’s East Side should have closed by now. The building is 95 years old, and its enrollment last year fell to 234 from 719 a decade earlier, making it one of the fastest-shrinking schools in district history.
In the spring, Carstens was on a preliminary list of 45 schools targeted for closure by Robert C. Bobb, the state-appointed executive in charge of stabilizing the finances of Detroit Public Schools, and his team of accountants, planners and demographers.
But a deeper dive into the neighborhood changed their minds. Carstens, they discovered, was one of the few public institutions within miles. It also served as a health clinic, a seven-day-a-week recreation center and a food pantry. Closing Carstens, they concluded, would effectively turn off the lights on the whole neighborhood.

Irving school district to appeal ‘academically acceptable’ rating

Katherine Leal Unmuth:

The Irving school district missed achieving a “recognized” rating in the recently released state accountability ratings because the completion rates for black students fell 1 percentage point short of the standard.
The ratings showed an 84 percent completion rate for black students, short of the required 85 percent. Completion rates represent students who graduated or continued high school rather than dropping out. The district kept the “academically acceptable” rating it has maintained since 2004.

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

Mike Winerip:

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

Teachers unions improve schools

Karen Aronowitz:

It is with dismay that I listen to the relentless attacks against public school teachers and their unions. Let’s set the record straight. Teachers’ unions lead the way in educational reform initiatives, fighting for our teachers to have the resources, materials and support necessary to deliver high quality instruction to America’s students.
I am proud of the work United Teachers of Dade has done to mobilize the public to vote for and support Florida’s Class Size Amendment. Charter and private schools brag about their small class sizes because of the individualized attention their students receive. We are forced to fight for appropriate class sizes for the students in our public schools.
I am proud of our members who organized with parents to insist that our schools maintain physical education, the arts, music, world languages and bilingual education. I am proud that our School Board took a position opposing Senate Bill 6 after the members of United Teachers of Dade made them aware of the destructive measures of this piece of legislation, an assault against the teachers and students in our public schools.

St. Cloud school board elections feature Somali candidates

Ambar Espinoza:

St. Cloud residents will vote in two elections Tuesday to narrow down candidates for school board seats.
For the first time in St. Cloud history, two of the candidates are Somali. One is running in a primary election that will narrow down the candidates from seven to six to get in the general election in November, while the other is running in a special election (that will narrow the candidates from three to two to replace a resigning school board member.
Hassan Yussuf has been living in St. Cloud since 2001. He has been closely following the problems that the St. Cloud school district has faced in recent months. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating allegations that school administrators ignored complaints of racial harassment. And in June, the superintendent resigned with one year remaining on his contract. The superintendent said he couldn’t deal with the school district politics anymore. Yussuf said he’s concerned about what he sees in the district.

Badger Rock Middle School Proposal

Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee 1.8mb PDF:

Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,
Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we’ve got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
Thanks for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee

Madison Metropolitan School District Annual Equity Report 2010

Madison School District 4.8MB PDF:

The Board of Education adopted Equity Policy 9001 on June 2, 2008 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001). The policy incorporates recommendations from the Equity Task Force and charges MMSD administration with developing an annual report of the extent to which progress is being made towards eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement for all students. The Equity Task Force recommendations also requested annual data on the distribution of resources (budget, staff, programs, and facilities) by school.
On September 29, 2009, the Board of Education adopted a new strategic plan which established strategic priorities and objectives for the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Equity Task Force report and resulting Equity Policy 9001 were considered in the development of the strategic plan. This Annual Equity Report aligns the equity policy with priorities established in the strategic plan and reports equity progress using the same benchmarks as those used in the strategic plan.

Schools paying for tutors with mixed track record

Ericka Mellon:

School districts across Texas are paying tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for private tutoring that has a mixed track record of improving student test scores.

Even districts that want to stop footing the bill to ineffective providers are not allowed. The No Child Left Behind law guarantees free tutoring to low-income students who attend schools that repeatedly miss federal academic targets. Parents get to pick the tutoring provider from a state-approved list that has grown to more than 200 for-profit and nonprofit entities.

Since the law went into effect in 2002, Texas has never removed a provider from its list despite complaints from school districts and the state’s own evaluation that found seven of the eight tutoring companies studied had no significant impact on student achievement.

With the latest federal school ratings released last week, districts are preparing to send letters to parents from about 140 under-performing schools about the tutoring options. At the same time, officials with some of the state’s largest urban districts, including Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, are calling for tougher standards for the tutoring providers.

Obama to Tout Education Efforts

Janet Adamy:

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

Shaping Up PE: The rise in childhood obesity prompts a gym class makeover

Daniele Seiss:

Teacher Donald Hawkins shouts enthusiastically to his 3- and 4-year-old students: “Can you name any animals that hop?”
The answers trickle in from the sleepy but smiling youngsters: a kangaroo, a frog, a rabbit. They decide to mimic the frog. It’s 9:30ish in the morning inside Browne Education Campus’s comfortably warm gymnasium in Northeast Washington. Fast-tempoed music gets the kids in the mood to hop, and off they go, rhythmically squatting and bouncing across the room. When the music stops, the children rise, a little more awake.
“Are you ready?” Hawkins yells. “I can’t hear you!”
“Ready!” they reply.

National Cholesterol Education Program might update treatment recommendations

Melissa Healy:

In the next year or so, the market for statins may get a further boost.
The National Cholesterol Education Program, the group that drafted the 2001 and 2004 guidelines on statin use, is expected to update its treatment recommendations. In doing so, the group will decide whether to suggest the broad use of statins for healthy patients with high readings of a marker for inflammation called C-reactive protein.
If the group does urge statins for these healthy individuals, at least 6.5 million new patients could sign up for long-term statin use.

Senate Passes Child Nutrition Act

Andrew Martin:

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

Separate but equal: More schools are dividing classes by gender

Karen Houppert:

On a Tuesday morning in February, Soheila Ahmad’s first-grade class at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School has just finished language arts. The 12 children — all boys, all African American — are tidying up their desks.
There are no windows in this basement room, but one wall, the backdrop for posters, is painted sky blue.
“I need the cleanup crew here,” shouts Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
“Let’s practice counting by 10s to 100,” Ahmad says.

Report: Unions favored in Ohio school construction

Julie Carr Smyth:

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

Putting Our Brains on Hold

Bob Herbert, via a kind reader:

The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.
We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens’ lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.

German Schools to Teach Online Privacy

Jessica Donath:

Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have come in for repeated criticism in Germany, where the government has concerns about what they do with users’ data. Now one state, worried about the amount of information young people reveal online, plans to teach school pupils how to keep a low profile on the web.
Many of Facebook’s 2 million users in Germany are young people who might not give a second thought to posting pictures of themselves and their friends skinny-dipping or passed out at parties. Unfortunately, being casual with one’s data also has its risks. After all, potential employers also know how to use social networking tools.
Now the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recognizing that young people are not always aware of the dangers of revealing personal information on the Internet, is planning to teach school students how to deal with the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Our goal is to convey that the Internet doesn’t only offer chances and opportunities, but also has risks that students should understand in order to exercise autonomy with regards to digital media,” said North Rhine-Westphalia’s media minister, Angelica Schwall-Düren, in an interview with the Thursday edition of the regional newspaper WAZ.

Female Varsity Football Coach Ready For Season

Morning Edition:

Natalie Randolph is scheduled to start workouts Friday at Coolidge Senior High School in Washington, D.C. She spent Thursday observing the Washington Redskins’ training camp.

Scandal Haunts Atlanta’s School Chief

Shaila Dewan:

Early on in Beverly L. Hall’s 11-year tenure as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, she figured that the academic gains she intended to make with the city’s mostly poor, black students would face skepticism.
“I knew the day would come when people would question, was the progress real?” she said in an interview last week.
So Dr. Hall took a risk, signing up for a trial program to track and compare urban school districts. Since then, Atlanta has made the highest gains in the program in reading and among the highest in math, making it a national model and Dr. Hall a star in the education field.
But that has not insulated her from a cheating scandal that initially threatened to engulf two-thirds of the district’s 84 schools. Even after an independent investigation recently found that the problem was much less widespread, critics have called for her resignation and attacked the investigation’s credibility.

DeKalb, Georgia school board: We will save accreditation

Megan Matteucci:

DeKalb County school board members insist they are not heading down the same path as Clayton County and will salvage the district’s accreditation.
“I’m not concerned about us losing accreditation,” board chairman Tom Bowen said Friday. “There will have to be a lot of back and forth with [the accrediting agency] and non-compliance on our part. I don’t see that happening.”
But many of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ concerns about DeKalb mirror the questions the agency had about Clayton two years ago, which led to its losing accreditation.
On Friday, the DeKalb board announced that it received an extension to answer SACS questions about hiring practices, training, conflict of interest, nepotism, procurement policies, the superintendent search and other areas.

You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Jay Greene:

So much for my austerity idea, where real reform can only happen once the gusher of new money runs dry. The spigot is going to stay fully open for the foreseeable future, which will kill this opportunity for states and localities to restructure our education system and lower costs while improving outcomes.

The fact that the feds are bailing out schools and preventing reform doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But what is shocking is how the Senate bill proposes to pay for this extra $26 billion — cuts in food stamps. That’s right, we are literally going to take food out of the mouths of hungry people in order to keep upper-middle class teachers fully employed with their gold-plated pensions and health benefits.

And if that wasn’t outrageous enough, look at what the Milwaukee teachers union would like to do with their gold-plated health benefit. They want to restore a prescription benefit for Viagra, which had been cut in 2005 to save some money.

Great Oakland Public Schools??

Hae Sin Thomas:

I have been an educator and education advocate in Oakland, California for almost two decades, and I have spent those decades working towards the achievement of those four words. In California, an Academic Performance Index of 800 is the minimum score for a school to be considered good. In 1999, Oakland operated 42 “red” schools, schools with API scores of less than 500. 38 of those “red” schools sat firmly in what we call the “flatlands” of Oakland, the area occupied by predominantly low-income communities of color. At that time, there was only one charter public school, struggling as well. In 1999, Oakland Unified was widely considered one of the worst school districts in the country.
In response to this crisis, families across the flatlands mobilized to demand reforms that supported small, autonomous, new schools and more rigorous curriculum in all schools. New and bold leadership responded to this call and brought school and principal accountability, greater autonomy over school budgets and programs, student-based budgeting, an options policy for ALL families, and a policy to close failing schools and replace them with new schools.
In 2010, the Oakland public school landscape has been dramatically altered. From 2003 to 2007, Oakland Unified closed 18 failing schools and replaced them with 26 new schools, most with carefully-selected staffs, new program designs, and greater autonomies. The district created a culture of accountability and performance, used data strategically, and focused on rigorous standards-aligned instruction. Oakland Unified has been the most improved urban school district in California for five consecutive years, and today, there are only 5 “red” schools.

Leaked advice deals Michael Gove new blow in UK schools row

Patrick Hennessy:

The advice, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, is the latest blow for Mr Gove as he battles against the fallout from his botched announcement last month in which he axed more than 700 projects.
At least two local authorities – Sandwell and Nottingham City Council – are known to be preparing possible legal challenges, and several other councils may follow in moves which could see the taxpayer facing payouts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds.

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

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

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

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

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

View a transcript here.

The Ascent of America’s Choice and the Continuing Descent of America’s High Schools

Sandra Stotsky:

With an additional $30,000,000 to come to Marc Tucker’s NCEE from the USED’s “competition” for assessment consortia grants, his hare-brained scheme for enticing high school sophomores or juniors deemed “college-ready” by the results of the Cambridge University-adapted “Board” exams that he plans to pilot in 10 states (including Massachusetts now) comes closer to reality. The problems are not only with this scheme (and the exams NCEE will use to determine “college-readiness”) but also with the coursework NCEE’s America’s Choice is busy preparing to sell to our high schools to prepare students for these “Board” exams. (Try to find some good examples of the reading and math items and figure out their academic level.)

First, some background. NCEE’s scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers’ money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE’s start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America’s Choice to put its key people on Common Core’s ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to “align” its “Board” exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core’s “college-readiness” level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.

D.C. teachers union accuses Rhee of ‘playing loose’ with numbers on firings

Bill Turque:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee garnered big local headlines and national attention July 23 when she announced that she had fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor evaluations under a tough new assessment system that for the first time held some educators accountable for student test scores.
It turns out that the story is a bit more complicated, and Rhee is facing accusations from the Washington Teachers’ Union that she inflated the figures to burnish her image as a take-no-prisoners schools leader.
The number of teachers fired for scores in the “ineffective” range on the IMPACT evaluation system is 76, or fewer than half of the 165 originally cited, according to data presented by the District to the union last week. The rest of the 165, school officials acknowledge, were educators judged “minimally effective” who had lost their positions in the school system because of enrollment declines or program changes at their schools mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Exotic Deals Put Denver Schools Deeper in Debt

Gretchen Morgenson:

In the spring of 2008, the Denver public school system needed to plug a $400 million hole in its pension fund. Bankers at JPMorgan Chase offered what seemed to be a perfect solution.
The bankers said that the school system could raise $750 million in an exotic transaction that would eliminate the pension gap and save tens of millions of dollars annually in debt costs — money that could be plowed back into Denver’s classrooms, starved in recent years for funds.
To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system’s chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal’s advantages, according to interviews with its members.

The Waukesha School District’s exotic investments also did not work out well.

Tension grows over Seattle teacher evaluations

Amy Rolph:

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

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

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

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

Congress Set to Boost Federal Tax Dollar Aid to States

Naftali Bendavid:

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

Commentary on Madison’s Middle & High School Teacher Planning Time

Wisconsin State Journal:

It may sound reasonable enough.
Madison schools plan to give middle and high school teachers an hour of “professional collaboration time” on Wednesday afternoons starting this fall. The goal is to let teachers meet in groups to share ideas and improve their instruction.
We’re all for boosting performance and results.
But the logistics of this new policy, announced just weeks before the start of school, are troubling.
For starters, Madison elementary schools already release their students early on Mondays to give teachers time to collaborate. That means a lot of parents will now have to juggle two early release days rather than one.

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

Susan Troller:

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

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

When/why progress in closing achievement gap stalled

Valerie Strauss:

Progress seen over several decades in narrowing the educational achievement gap between black and white students has remained stalled for 20 years, according to data analyzed in a new report.

Called “The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped,” the report by the Educational Testing Service examines periods of progress and stagnation since 1910 in closing the achievement gap.

Anybody who thinks that the achievement gap will be closed by throwing more standardized test scores at kids and without addressing health and social issues should read the report and think again.

The report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS’s Policy Information Center, uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to show that there was a steady narrowing of the achievement gap from the 1970s until the late 1980s. Scores essentially remained the same since then.

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

Susan Kinzie:

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

Plugging the school funding leak

Jay Bullock:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: How is the MPS budget situation like the BP oil spill?
In the same way that BP has needed both to place a temporary cap on the well and drill a relief well to shut down the leak permanently, MPS–and Wisconsin’s public schools generally–needs immediate help as well as a significant revision to the school funding formula that can provide long-term stability and relief.
The immediate help can come in a couple of different ways. One is through work by some members of Congress to get additional emergency funds to states to address school budget shortfalls and rehire laid-off teachers. (Wisconsin, you are probably are not surprised to learn, is hardly alone in having a school funding crisis.) This one-time payment would offset some of the disappearing stimulus funds and hold back the flood of the estimated 300,000 teacher layoffs expected for the fall nationwide.
The amendment’s prognosis is poor, with a deficit-conscious Congress anxious about too much more spending.

New Questions on Test Bias

Scott Jaschik

For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word “regatta” as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It’s been a long time since the regatta question was used — and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential questions, designed to weed out questions that may favor one group of students over another.
But a major new research project — led by a scholar who favors standardized testing — has just concluded that the methods used by the College Board (and just about every other testing entity for either admissions or employment testing) are seriously flawed. While the new research doesn’t conclude that the tests are biased, it says that they could be — and that the existing methods of detection wouldn’t reveal that.

How to Talk About Education Reform

Charlie Mas

There appears to be a lot of support, right now, among politicians, the media, and rest of the “opinion-making” class, for Education Reform.
I understand that. The Education Reform movement has a lot of very attractive bumper-sticker type slogans that appear to make a lot of very good sense. Who wouldn’t be in favor of firing bad teachers? We’ve all had a bad teacher who should be fired – haven’t we? Even if you haven’t had a bad teacher, you’ve heard the horror stories about them. Who doesn’t think accountability is a good thing? Who wouldn’t support innovation and choice? It all sounds really good and worthy of our support. Morover, anyone who opposes it, such as teachers’ unions, must be doing so for their own selfish purposes.
It’s only when people go past the bumper-stick slogans, get past the anectdotes and myths, and begin to consider the realities that the elements of this vaunted Education Reform start to break down.

Best blog by far on D.C. test scores

Jay Matthews:

Reading the blog of the mildly mysterious G.F. Brandenburg, I gathered a clue to why the reports there are so easy to read for geezers like me who squint a lot at computer screens. Brandenburg reveals in passing that he retired as a D.C. teacher recently, so he is likely not too far from my age cohort, and understands us deeply.
Bless him, and not just for the amazing clarity of his written words. He is savage toward D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, whom I highly regard. But there is no substitute for his analysis of what is happening with D.C. achievement scores, and the ways they are being used for various political purposes.
Here is his deft analysis of what has happened to elementary scores, which have gone up, and then down, in the Rhee era:
Contrary to the spin put on things by [D.C. Mayor Adrian] Fenty and Rhee, at the elementary level, virtually all of the increases on DC-CAS scores over the past 4 years happened during the period ’07 to ’08. And it so happens that 2006 was the first year that DCPS switched to using the DC-CAS as its major standardized test, instead of using the Stanford-9 (also known as the SAT-9). That was under superintendent Janey.

Teachers and teachers unions: Get on board or get out of the way

Leonard Pitts:

A year or two ago, I received this e-mail. The writer was upset with me for arguing that school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform. As numerous educators have told me, union protections being what they are, dumping a teacher — even a bad one — is an almost impossible task.
My correspondent, a teacher, took issue with my desire to see that changed, noting that without those protections, she’d be at the mercy of some boss who decided one day to fire her.
In other words, she’d be just like the rest of us. The lady’s detachment from the reality most workers live with struck me as a telling clue as to why our education system frequently fails to educate. When you can’t get fired for doing bad work, what’s your impetus for doing good?
Many of us seem to be wondering the same thing.

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

Doug Erickson:

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

Monona Grove Liberal Arts Charter School for the 21st Century Receives $175,000 via a Wisconsin DPI Tax Dollar Grant

Wisconsin DPI Press Release, via a Phil McDade email. Clusty Search: Monona Grove Liberal Arts Charter School for the 21st Century and Google Search. Best wishes!

Ignorance By Degrees Colleges serve the people who work there more than the students who desperately need to learn something.

Mark Bauerlein:

Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.
Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent”–that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.

“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).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”

African-Americans for Charter Schools New survey data show black support on the rise. So why is the NAACP opposed?

Paul Peterson & Martin West:

This past week the NAACP, the National Urban League and other civil-rights groups collectively condemned charter schools. Claiming to speak for minority Americans, the organizations expressed “reservations” about the Obama administration’s “extensive reliance on charter schools.” They specifically voiced concern about “the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities.”
Someone should remind these leaders who they represent. The truth is that support for charters among ordinary African-Americans and Hispanics is strong and has only increased dramatically in the past two years. Opposition along the lines expressed by the NAACP and the Urban League is articulated by a small minority.
We know this because we’ve asked. For the past four years, Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, together with the journal Education Next, has surveyed a nationally representative cross-section of some 3,000 Americans about a variety of education policy issues. In 2010, we included extra samples of public-school teachers and all those living in zip codes where a charter school is located.

Obama Defends Teacher Policy

Laura Meckler:

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

Madison East High School: Students learn and grow, grow and learn

Pamela Cotant:

Talandra Jennings and Infinity Gamble couldn’t contain their excitement as the 11-year-olds showed off the zucchini picked from the East High Youth Farm on a recent morning.
It was the first vegetable harvested from their section of the farm, which consists of a number of gardens in an area next to Kennedy Elementary School. The two girls, who will be sixth graders at O’Keeffe Middle School, are working at the East High Youth Farm, which is a hands-on science and vocational program focused on sustainable agriculture and service learning.
“We help plant. We help wood chip and sometimes we trellis tomatoes and we harvest,” Talandra said. “I’m out here doing something instead of being a couch potato.”

How a national standard will affect the education industry

Kai Ryssdal:

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

The promise and peril of Race to the Top

Los Angeles Times:

As encouraging as it is to see California in the running to win a Race to the Top grant for its schools, we can’t help wondering how great a price the state will pay for the possibility of receiving as much as $700 million.
The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that California is one of 19 finalists in the second round of grant applications. Should it succeed — and the odds are decent, because officials say that more than half the finalists will receive grants — many of California’s neediest schools will receive infusions of new money. Even so, we see this potential win as mixed news.

No Christianity Please, We’re Academics

Timothy Larsen:

I had lunch this summer with a prospective graduate student at the evangelical college where I teach. I will call him John because that happens to be his name. John has done well academically at a public university. Nevertheless, as often happens, he said that he was looking forward to coming to a Christian university, and then launched into a story of religious discrimination.
John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an “opinion” piece and the required theme was “traditional marriage.” John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, “Which Bible would that be?” On the very same page, John’s phrase, “Christians who read the Bible,” provoked the same retort, “Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?” (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a “sermon,” and given an F, with the words, “I reject your dogmatism,” written at the bottom by way of explanation.

Today’s Edujobs Marching Orders from NEA

Mike Antonucci:

The following was sent this morning from NEA headquarters in Washington, DC:

Subject: URGENT REQUEST FOR MEMBER MOBILIZATION TODAY
Message from John Stocks
Deputy Executive Director
National Education Association
Senator Harry Reid has filed for a cloture vote on the Reid / Murray amendment to H.R. 1586 scheduled for today @ 5:30pm. This amendment contains the Ed Jobs and Federal Medical Assistance (FMAP) appropriations we have been fighting for all year. Senator Reid is determined to get an up or down vote on these issues before they recess.
Senator Reid has asked us to mobilize as much support as possible in support of his effort to pass FMAP and Ed Jobs today.

David Rogers:

With a Senate vote slated for Monday evening, the White House shows signs of a late-breaking push behind a $26.1 billion aid package to help state and local governments cope with revenue shortfalls due to the continuing housing crisis and slow economic recovery.
Last year’s recovery act helped fill the gap, but as the stimulus funds run out, Democrats fear more state layoffs, beginning with teachers just months before November elections. Cash-strapped governors are promised $16.1 billion to pay Medicaid bills next year and ease their budget situation; another $10 billion in education assistance would go to school boards to help with teacher hiring — a top priority for Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
“There is a tremendous amount at stake here,” Duncan told POLITICO. And even with the House gone until mid-September, he insisted that Senate passage would give local school boards “a real sense of hope” that federal dollars will be coming in time to avoid layoffs impacting tens of thousands of teachers.

Autism and the Madison School District

Michael Winerip, via a kind reader:

People with autism are often socially isolated, but the Madison public schools are nationally known for including children with disabilities in regular classes. Now, as a high school junior, Garner, 17, has added his little twist to many lives.
He likes to memorize plane, train and bus routes, and in middle school during a citywide scavenger hunt, he was so good that classmates nicknamed him “GPS-man.” He is not one of the fastest on the high school cross-country team, but he runs like no other. “Garner enjoys running with other kids, as opposed to past them,” said Casey Hopp, his coach.
Garner’s on the swim team, too, and gets rides to practice with a teammate, Michael Salerno. On cold mornings, no one wants to be first in the water, so Garner thinks it’s a riot to splash everyone with a colossal cannonball. “They get angry,” the coach, Paul Eckerle, said. “Then they see it’s Garner, and he gets away with it. And that’s how practice begins.”

Could Obama Outlaw Your Handwriting Style?

Via a Kate Gladstone email:

A handwriting program called “Handwriting Without Tears”
(at http://www.hwtears.com — see model-samples at
http://www.hwtears.com/files/HWT_Alphabet.pdf ) has begun aggressively lobbying to make every detail of its own particular instructional method and writing styles legallly *required* as the sole method in all USA schools, by piggybacking on current White House efforts to create and impose a detailed national curriculum for all USA schools.
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7 years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her organization’s training and recruitment workshops.. People unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called “Handwriting Standards” at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists’ web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface, but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards, these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears teaching sequence and even stylistic features and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site’s own descriptions of the same endeavor — to the point that, if the “Handwriting Standards” lobbyists succeed, no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program’s sequence/curriculum/practices.
This is clear if you make yourself familiar with the HWTears program materials/lesson plans/teacher-training sessions, and if you then read the lobby’s proposed “Handwriting Standards” for yourself in the level-by-level blue links at http://www.handwritingstandards.com/handwriting-standards as well as
reading their full document at http://www.handwritingstandards.com/sites/default/files/Standards-20k-4_FINAL.pdf.
Of special note: the proposed standards’ stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are — I hope — sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral “standards” organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA — with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words “lobby” and “handwriting”) and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program — it’s the one I designed — and I don’t hide that fact (see my signature below!) … but I’d never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students’ handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 – handwritingrepair@gmail.com
BETTER LETTERS (iPhone handwriting trainer app) — http://bit.ly/BetterLetters
SONGS OF PENDOM — http://stores.lulu.com/handwriting
POLITICIAN LEGIBILITY ACT Petition —
http://www.iPetitions.com/petition/PoliticianLegibility
Twitter — http://www.twitter.com/KateGladstone
Facebook — http://www.facebook.com/KateGladstone handwriting program called “Handwriting Without Tears”
(at http://www.hwtears.com — see model-samples at
http://www.hwtears.com/files/HWT_Alphabet.pdf ) has begun aggressively
lobbying to make every detail of its own particular instructional
method and writing styles legallly *required* as the sole method in
all USA schools, by piggybacking on current White House efforts to
create and impose a detailed national curriculum for all USA schools.
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7
years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her
organization’s training and recruitment workshops.. People
unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting
field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an
innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called “Handwriting
Standards” at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny
copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting
program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists’ web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface,
but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards,
these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears
teaching sequence and even stylistic features
and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site’s own
descriptions of the same endeavor —
to the point that, if the “Handwriting Standards” lobbyists succeed,
no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching
method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program’s sequence/curriculum/practices.
This is clear if you make yourself familiar with the HWTears program materials/lesson plans/teacher-training sessions, and if you then read the lobby’s proposed “Handwriting Standards” for yourself in the level-by-level blue links at http://www.handwritingstandards.com/handwriting-standards as well as
reading their full document at http://www.handwritingstandards.com/sites/default/files/Standards-20k-4_FINAL.pdf.
Of special note: the proposed standards’ stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are — I hope — sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral “standards” organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA — with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words “lobby” and “handwriting”) and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program — it’s the one I designed — and I don’t hide that fact (see my signature below!) … but I’d never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students’ handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 – handwritingrepair@gmail.com
BETTER LETTERS (iPhone handwriting trainer app) — http://bit.ly/BetterLetters
SONGS OF PENDOM — http://stores.lulu.com/handwriting
POLITICIAN LEGIBILITY ACT Petition —
http://www.iPetitions.com/petition/PoliticianLegibility
Twitter — http://www.twitter.com/KateGladstone
Facebook — http://www.facebook.com/KateGladstone

School boards need to hear all voices

Tina Hone:

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

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Pieces for a better Wisconsin school Finance plan

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

State leaders keep throwing Wisconsin’s broken school financing system into the too-hard-to-fix pile.
There’s so much money involved, and so many powerful interests, that just about any attempt to force change faces fierce criticism and a slim chance of success.
Yet that’s what leadership is about: Pulling people together, usually in the middle of the political spectrum, to find workable solutions.
State Superintendent of Schools Tony Evers just stepped up to try to provide some of that leadership on the vexing issue of how to pay for schools. Evers wants to change, in ways big and small, how Wisconsin distributes billions of dollars in state aid to schools each year.
Some of his ideas merit consideration. Others are less convincing. And some are missing.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Look at Wisconsin Gubernartorial Candidate Positions

Outstanding UK school rejected for academy status

Jessica Shepherd:

A Tory minister has publicly attacked the education secretary over his beleaguered academies expansion plans, it emerged tonight.
Theresa Villiers, the junior transport minister, has written a furious letter to Michael Gove, the education secretary, for turning down a school’s application to become an academy in her constituency.
Gove has said all schools rated outstanding by inspectors will be fast-tracked to become academies – schools run outside of local authority control – if they wish.
But despite being outstanding, Ravenscroft school in Barnet, north London, has had its academy application rejected by the government.

Texas Education Agency releases statewide rankings

Melissa Taboada:

For the second consecutive year, more schools statewide earned the state’s top accountability rating, “exemplary,” Texas Education Agency officials announced today.
Including charter schools, here’s a summary of how the state’s 1,237 districts performed:

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public Sector Benefits Under Fire, Wisconsin Tax Climate Update

Jon Ward:

America’s recession is exposing societal fault lines, as various groups fight over increasingly smaller pieces of the pie. Tensions are particularly flaring between government workers and employees of private businesses.
David Walker, the U.S. comptroller appointed by President Bill Clinton who continued in the role under George Bush, on Friday gave a bracing indictment of the pension and salary benefits being rewarded to government workers at the federal, state and local level. Walker said that public sector workers are growing prosperous on the back of private sector workers.
“There is a huge gap. State and local plans on average … are much more lucrative than typical plans for employees. State and local government employees, on average, have greater job security than people in the private sector. And state and local government employees, in the middle of government, in many cases make more money than their private sector counterparts,” Walker said during a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to Pew numbers provided by the Chamber, the budget gap to cover state employees’ benefits totals $1 trillion.

John Schmid:

Newly released U.S. census figures show that Wisconsin, often derided by its own residents as a “tax hell,” stayed out of the top 10 highest tax states for the third consecutive year in 2008, the year of the latest available data.
State and local taxes claimed 11.8% of total state personal income, landing the Badger State 13th among the 50 states, and slipping a notch from No. 14 a year earlier, according to an analysis of census data from the Madison-based Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

New York Schools Data Show Chasm

Barbara Martinez:

When New York state education officials recalibrated test scores this week, hundreds of New York City schools suddenly had vastly fewer children who could be termed “proficient” in math and English.
For many schools, the higher bar had barely an effect. For others, it was a devastating blow, revealing a much larger chasm between the city’s academic haves and have-nots.
Overall, the country’s largest school system lost a lot of ground. Last year, nearly 70% of students were considered proficient in English. Now, only 42% are. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, stressed this week that the only thing that changed was the definition of “proficient,” and that the gains that New York City students have made since they took over control of schools–as evidenced by performance on national tests–are real.

Veterans of the math wars

Debra Saunders:

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

Much more on poor Math curriculum, here.

Eating away at education: Math doesn’t add up when teacher salaries and budget cuts collide

Katy Murphy:

The math is simple: California schools have less money than most other states, but their teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.
Per pupil spending, on the other hand, trails the national average by about $2,500.
Until the financially troubled state government finds more money to invest in its public schools, which make up more than half of its general fund spending, something has to give.
School budgeting has become a zero-sum game.
California school districts spend more than half of their dollars on teacher pay and benefits. In better times, when education funding rose each year to keep pace with the cost of living, so did salaries. But the state now gives schools less money for each student than it did

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

The report mentions that California’s average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison’s 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A View from China

Andy Xie:

Powerful interest groups have paralyzed China’s macro-economic policy, with ominous long-term consequences. Local governments consider high land prices their lifeline. State-owned enterprises don’t want interest rates to rise. Exporters are vehemently against currency appreciation. China’s macro policies have been reduced to psychotherapy, relying on sound bites and small technical moves to scare speculators. In the meantime, inflation continues to pick up momentum. Unless the central government bites the bullet and makes choices, the economy might experience a disruptive adjustment in the foreseeable future.
The first key point is that local governments have become dependent on the property sector for revenue as profits from manufacturing decline and spending needs to rise. Attracting industry has been the main means of economic development and fiscal revenue for two decades. Coastal provinces grew rich by nurturing export-oriented industries. But the economics has changed in the past five years. Rising costs have sharply curtailed manufacturers’ profits, and most local governments now offer subsidies to attract industries. The real revenue has shifted to property.

The dependency on high land prices for property tax revenue is certainly not unique to China. Madison’s 2010-2011 budget will increase property taxes by about 10%, due to spending growth, declining redistributed state tax dollars and a decline in local property values.

National standards would harm math curriculum

Ze’ev Wurman & Bill Evers:

The State Board of Education is voting Monday on adopting national K-12 curriculum standards in a package that includes an obese, unteachable eighth-grade math course.
Back in May 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell pledged to adopt the then-not-yet-created national curriculum standards only if they “meet or exceed our own.”
The pledge these public officials took was wise and honorable. California has K-12 academic-content standards that are widely praised as the best in the nation. For example, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found on July 21 that California’s standards in both English and mathematics are the absolute best in the nation and better than the national standards. Clearly, Fordham’s expert reviewers did not agree with the calls we sometimes hear that we must ditch our standards because they are inadequate.

Palm Springs School board tackles charter schools

Michelle Mitchell:

Charter schools were the main topic at Palm Springs Unified School District’s board of education meeting on Tuesday.
A school dedicated to abused, neglected and foster children asked to set up in the district, while union members protested the language in Cielo Vista’s charter, which was amended on Tuesday.
The Father’s Heart Charter School made its first presentation to the board on Tuesday, asking to open a school for 25 students at Father’s Heart Ranch in Desert Hot Springs.
The ranch serves 6- to 15-year-old boys who have been abused, whose parents are in jail or who are in foster care.
Most of the boys attend district schools, but they often are in trouble regularly and fail academically.
“In traditional schools, it’s just really hard for teachers to be able to accommodate what these kids need,” said Susanne Coie, a consultant with Charter Schools Development Center.

How Does a School Board Enforce Policy?

Charlie Mas:

It’s a simple question, isn’t it? The Board Directors, if asked, all claim (rather indignantly) that they DO enforce policy. The state auditor says they don’t. I can’t find any evidence that indicates that the Board enforces policy. More than that, I can’t even think of HOW the Board enforces policy.
No Board member alone can speak for the Board. So no Board member, on their own, can direct the superintendent to do anything. So if an individual Board member, such as Director Martin-Morris, were to discover that a policy, such as Policy B61.00 which requires the superintendent to provide annual reports on District programs, wasn’t being followed because there is no report on the Spectrum program, what could he do about it? I suppose he could ask the superintendent, pretty please, to provide the report, but what if she didn’t? He could not, on his own, compel her compliance with the policy.
If the Board, as a group, wanted to enforce a policy, such as Policy C54.00 which requires the superintendent to get input from the community before assigning a principal to an alternative school, they would have to meet to do it. Any meeting of a quorum of Board members would be subject to the Open Meetings Act, and would require the posting of an agenda in advance and minutes afterward. There are no minutes from any meeting that describe the Board as taking action to enforce policies.

School Tenure Crackdown Teachers Face Tougher Hurdle as Student Test Scores Are Given More Weight

Barbara Martinez:

New York City principals are getting tougher: They denied tenure or continued the probation of a record 11% of teachers in the school year just ended, according to Department of Education data released Thursday.
Five years ago, less than 1% of teachers found themselves in the same predicament. Principals this year also gave hundreds more teachers “unsatisfactory” ratings.
The results come amid a push by schools chancellor Joel Klein for greater teacher accountability and a harder stance on tenure. In a letter to teachers in February, he said tenure had become “an expectation more than an honor.” He had also called on principals for the first time to consider student test scores when making tenure decisions, and the latest results show that they did.
“Our principals are retaining top teachers and they are dismissing low-performing teachers,” said John White, a deputy chancellor. “They are doing it as part of a culture shift of using evidence of student learning.”

Philadelphia Superintendent Reorganizes

Dafney Tales:

“This transformation is both essential and urgent if we are to accelerate achievement for all children and accomplish the goals of Imagine 2014,” she said in a statement, referring to the district’s five-year improvement plan.
Regional office facilities, which generally served as buffers between schools and the central office, will reopen this fall as parent- and family-resource centers designed to provide support services for parents.
Along with the changes to the regional offices, Ackerman has appointed three associate superintendents.
Tomas Hanna, Ackerman’s former chief of staff who was recently given the job of associate superintendent of academics, will serve as the associate superintendent of academic support.
David Weiner, former chief of accountability, will become the associate superintendent of academics and curriculum.

Broward Schools Superintendent Evaluated

wsvn.com:

A South Florida superintendent has been graded on his performance during the past school year.
The Broward County School Board gave Broward Schools Superintendent James Notter a grade of “C” in his annual evaluation, Wednesday morning. Notter received a 7.7 on a 10-point scale for his performance, an average grade for the year.
According to the school board, Notter needs to improve his communication with staff members and the general public; improve relations with the teachers union in Broward and cut administrative costs. “With all the complications we went through, I believe it is a fair and valid assessment of how the superintendent worked with the board, worked with his leadership team to do the right thing for our children,” said Notter.

Schools Within Schools

Chad Sensing:

Mike Ritzius works with students at the Integrated Studies Program, a project-based pilot program inside the Camden County Technical School, in New Jersey. Students work to master state content with the help of teacher-advisors and project-management applications, primarily Project Foundry.
Chad: Would you please describe your school for us?
Mike: The Integrated Studies Program (ISP) is a pilot at Camden County Technical School (CCTS). The school as a whole is a county-wide technical school, serving 32 sending districts with the largest being the city of Camden, NJ. The majority of the students come from challenging socio-economic situations, making the entire school eligible for Title 1 funds. Students choose to come to CCTS to pursue a trade but recently, the district has been adding more professionally minded career areas. As a whole, the district delivers content through very traditional means.
The ISP approach is 180 degrees different from the rest of the school. The program was piloted in the 2009-2010 school year with five advisors and 100 students, now down to 87. The attrition rate for the rest of the district is 27% due mostly to the high mobility of the student body and the rigorous demands of CCTS as a whole when compared to the larger sending districts.

Related: Small Learning Communities.

Po Bronson: “That’s why academics are so boring”

Andrew Keen:

And now Bronson has turned his fertile imagination to the act of creativity itself. In a Newsweek cover story early this month, Bronson and his co-author Merryman write about the crisis of creativity now affecting American schools and children. According to Bronson, the results of creativity tests for American kids has been falling since 1990 – a particularly worrying statistic given that these test scores have been rising over the past twenty years in most other industrialized countries around the world.
So it was a real honor to have Po come into the Techcrunch.TV studio last week to talk about Silicon Valley creativity, its role in the broader economy, his own creativity and why, exactly, there’s a creativity crisis today in American schools. This may be the single most important issue facing not only the American economy, but also our culture and society. And there are few, if any, writers around today who can discuss creativity with the same erudition, imagination and wit as Po Bronson.

Jerry Brown unveils education reform plan

Seema Mehta:

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown unveiled an education reform plan Wednesday that calls for a wholesale restructuring of California’s public school system, from changing the way schools are funded to revamping the state’s higher education system.
The eight-page plan touches upon the major issues facing the state’s education system, from the increasing cost of college to the state’s dismal dropout rate. Some of the proposals, such as changing the way schools are funded, would take years. Brown urged patience.
“There is no silver bullet that will fix everything,” he wrote. “Education improvement takes time, persistence and a systematic approach.”

Mystery, Drama, Deception in Alabama Is the state’s biggest teacher’s union behind a so-called “conservative” group?

Factcheck.org:

The big question in the final days of Alabama’s runoff election for the GOP gubernatorial nomination isn’t just who is going to win the tight race between Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley. It’s the mystery of who’s behind a largely bogus TV ad attacking Byrne.
A group calling itself the “Conservative Coalition for Alabama” is airing an ad that falsely accuses Byrne of a host of offenses. It says Byrne “took a 500 percent pay raise” (that’s misleading); steered government contracts to “cronies” (there’s no evidence of that); lost millions of dollars in the state’s prepaid college savings plan (so did nearly all other state plans); and ran up the taxpayers’ tab drinking “expensive wines” (false) and traveling in “style” (not entirely true).
Byrne suspects that the Conservative Coalition is a front group for the Alabama Education Association. He has good reason. AEA Executive Director Paul Hubbert (who also is co-chairman of the state Democratic party) admitted that he used “True Republican PAC” as a front group to attack Byrne during the June 1 primary fight.

Lessons from the 2010 New York State Tests

Maisie McAdoo:

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

New Sun Prairie High School Has Some Concerned About Taxes

Channel3000.com:

Students in Sun Prairie are preparing to enter a new state-of-the-art high school this year, but some residents of the city are upset with the amount their taxes could go up.
There’s no doubt Sun Prairie has been growing. School district enrollment has gone from nearly 4,800 to almost 6,800 in 10 years, WISC-TV reported.
Now, the district has a high school to fit those students, but the taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Teacher Scott Kloehn’s chemistry room just got a lot more high-tech with one of the many interactive whiteboards that are now in every Sun Prairie High School classroom.
“My job is to educate my kids the best way possible with the best means possible, and if that means using the technology in my room that I’ll have easy access to, it’s certainly what, as a good teacher, I’m going to go ahead and do,” said Kloehn.

Two very different AP schools, both with good news

Jay Matthews:

I received some interesting news recently from two Washington area high schools, Washington-Lee in Arlington County and the Friendship Collegiate Academy in the District. W-L, as it is often called, is a regular public school. Friendship is a public charter school. About 34 percent of the W-L students are low-income. That figure is twice as high, 70 percent, at Friendship.

W-L graduates about 400 seniors a year, Friendship about 250. They both have dedicated teachers and ambitious programs to give as many students as possible exposure to college-level courses. W-L has both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. Friendship also has AP, plus access to a significant number of University of Maryland and University of District of Columbia courses.

Friendship has fewer affluent, college-educated families than W-L does. (Arlington, where W-L is, has just been declared by the Brookings Institution as having the largest portion of adults with bachelor’s degrees, 68 percent, of any U.S. county.) Friendship students mostly come from D.C. schools with standards not as high as those in Arlington. So they start high school, on average, at a lower level.

Local boards win appeal on charter schools

Bob Egelko:

A state appeals court strengthened the authority of local school boards over charter schools Monday by making it harder for California education officials to approve statewide charters with campuses in multiple counties.
Charter schools are publicly funded and tuition-free but operate independently of local school districts and their union contracts, though districts are supposed to monitor their performance. They have been proliferating both in California and nationwide.
State law allows the state Board of Education, appointed by the governor, to let a company establish charter schools in far-flung counties without local approval or monitoring. Groups of school boards, administrators and teachers claimed the board was overstepping its authority, and on Monday, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed.

Education reforms take rambling path

News-Telegram:

In August 1818, Thomas Jefferson authored a report for the Virginia Legislature that laid out the topics to be included in the curriculum of his newly founded University of Virginia. Like so many foundational documents, Jefferson’s report resonated with such clear and specific language that it serves to this day as an accurate summation of his educational vision — and a blueprint upon which his intellectual heirs may continue to build.
Massachusetts, like Virginia, is among the great pioneers in American education, from Colonial times to the present. But last week’s decision by the state Board of Education to adopt national Common Core standards is an object lesson in how not to pursue education reform. It’s stuff that would have driven Jefferson to laughter or scorn, and should provoke nothing less among Massachusetts taxpayers.
What was approved, and how, make clear that this state’s educational leaders need refresher courses in the pursuit of educational excellence.

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

Barbara Martinez:

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

Related: The WKCE .

Lack of fiscal discipline in Seattle Public Schools

Lynne Varner:

The latest state audit of Seattle Public Schools didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know: The district is stuck in a culture of lax indifference when it comes to taxpayers’ money.
Despite the last decade’s phalanx of highly paid budget and money managers overseeing the district, few inroads have been made in transforming this culture.
Let’s start with the audit’s biggest discovery for the 2008-09 school year. The district overpaid at least 83 employees to the tune of $228,860. The district says the number of accidentally overpaid employees could be as high as 144.
Repayment plans have been set up for most of the employees. But others left the district, requiring costly measures, including collection agencies, to recover the money. Expect this debacle to reverberate as tax implications and impacts to the state retirement system unfold.

There’s a great deal of citizen activism underway in Seattle, including: a successful lawsuit that overturned the District’s adoption of Discovery Math, a recall drive for 5 of the 7 school board members and a lawsuit regarding the New Student Assignment Plan. Melissa Westbrook offers additional comments.
Spending and governance questions are not unique to Seattle.

Chester Finn Comes Out Against National Standards and Assessments

Jay Greene:

As Neal McCluskey revealed (and Greg highlighted), Checker made an excellent case against national standards… in 1997. The Weekly Standard has now allowed non-subscribers to link to the piece, so everyone can read it for him or herself.

Many of Checker’s arguments against national standards and assessments back in 1997 are remarkably similar to those of current critics.

Education secretary calls for 12-hour school days, longer school years

Paul Conner:

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school — and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past.
Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours.
“In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said. “This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes.”
He continued by explaining that the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.

Abby Phillip has more.

Education czar pushes Detroit school ballot proposal

Darren A. Nichols and Francis X. Donnelly:

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

Career educator Freda Williams takes helm of Memphis school board

Jane Roberts:

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

Wednesday early release set for Madison middle, high schools

Susan Troller:

Hey Madison parents, teachers and students, get ready for some changes.
I wrote about a letter sent to teachers several weeks ago, but snags in transporation had the plan still tentative until today.
Now it’s official: A plan for teacher collaboration at the Madison middle and high school levels beginning this fall will alter daily and weekly schedules for all eleven local middle schools and four high schools.
The most immediate change will be early release most Wednesdays for both high school and middle school students; middle school classes (except at Wright Middle School) will end on Wednesdays at 1:37 p.m. School will end at Wright at 2:15 p.m.

Gena Kittner has more.

Wisconsin Fails to Make “Race to the Top”, Governor Doyle Calls Process Flawed

Erin Richards:

Wisconsin lost its bid for $250 million in federal education reform grant money Tuesday, as 18 other states and Washington, D.C., were named finalists in the second round of the Race to the Top competition.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the finalists for $3.4 billion in funding during a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Those finalists were Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
This was Wisconsin’s final chance to win a piece of the $4.35 billion education reform competition, unless a proposed third round of $1.35 billion in 2011 is approved.
Gov. Jim Doyle criticized the federal government’s system for reviewing state applications, while several outside groups criticized Wisconsin for passing weak reform efforts or failing to show it could dramatically change the course of the troubled Milwaukee Public Schools.
“With the blind judging system used by the federal government, it’s hard to know how the applications were scored, but it’s pretty clear that the quality of a state’s education system was not taken into account,” Doyle said in a statement. “The states in the upper Midwest – Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan – are nationally recognized as having the best education systems in the country, and not a single one was a finalist in either round for Race to the Top funding,” he said.

Duncan being too ‘modest’

Valerie Strauss:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was being too modest when he said in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club that the Obama administration is playing a “modest role” in sparking a “quiet” revolution in education.
There is nothing modest about the administration’s role in driving reform, and there is nothing “quiet” about the change process, not in Washington or in state legislatures that rushed to change laws for a chance to win federal dollars.
The administration is Bigfoot, driving change with billions of dollars in the Race to the Top competition. In fact, Race to the Top, which started with $4.35 billion, is doling out the largest pot of discretionary federal education money ever. How’s that for modest?
Duncan announced the finalists for Round 2 — 18 states and the District of Columbia — each of which will send teams to Washinton, D.C., in August to explain why they deserve to be on top.

New Orleans Superintendent Leaving Legacy of Charter School Expansion

PBS NewsHour:

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

Giving Lousy Teachers the Boot

William McGurn:

Donald Trump is not the only one who knows how to get attention with the words, “You’re fired.” Michelle Rhee, chancellor for the District of Columbia schools, has just done a pretty nifty job of it herself.
On Friday, Ms. Rhee fired 241 teachers–roughly 6% of the total–mostly for scoring too low on a teacher evaluation that measures their performance against student achievement. Another 737 teachers and other school-based staff were put on notice that they had been rated “minimally effective.” Unless these people improve, they too face the boot.
The mass dismissals follow a landmark agreement Ms. Rhee negotiated with the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) at the end of June. The quid pro quo was this: Good teachers would get more money (including a 21.6% pay increase through 2012 and opportunities for merit pay). In exchange, bad teachers could be shown the door.
At the time, many gave the teachers union credit for approving this deal. Here’s how another New York-based newspaper described the contract:

A, B, C, F: No More D’s at One NJ School District

NBC New York:

At one school district in New Jersey, “D” now stands for for “dropped.”
Starting this September, middle and high school students in Mount Olive won’t be getting D’s anymore — because the board has dropped that letter from its grade system. Now, any score below 70 percent is an F.
The move passed the the Mount Olive School board in an 8-1 vote Monday.
Superintendent Larrie Reynolds, who proposed the new policy last month, says it will raise the bar for Mount Olive students.
“I’m tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it,” Reynolds told the Daily Record. “We intend to be the beacon of excellence in Morris County, and to do that, we have to fix it.”

Pearson raises forecast thanks to booming US education business

The Telegraph:

The group today reported that pre-tax profits were £94m in the first half compared with a loss of £7m in the same period in 2009. Sales at the group climbed to £2.34bn from £2.14bn.
“The 2010 finish line isn’t yet in sight, but this is as good a start to our years as I’ve seen,” chief executive Marjorie Scardino said. “That boosts our confidence in the full year, enabling us to brighten our outlook and raise our guidance.”

An Update on Seattle Schools Teacher Bargaining

Michael Rice:

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

Seattle Public Schools Administration Response to the Discovery Math Public Lawsuit Loss

602K PDF.

Respondents focus their brief on arguing that no reasonable school board would adopt “inquiry-based” high school mathematics textbooks instead of “direct instruction” textbooks. There are “dueling experts” and other conflicting evidence regarding the best available material for teaching high school math, and the Seattle School Board (“the Board”) gave due consideration to both sides of the debate before reaching its quasi legislative decision to adopt the Discovering series and other textbooks on a 4-3 vote.
The trial court erred by substituting its judgment for the Board’s in determining how much weight to place on the conflicting evidence. Several of the “facts” alleged in the Brief of Respondents (“BR”) are inaccurate, misleading, or lack any citation to the record in violation of RAP l0.3(a)(4). The Court should have an accurate view of the facts in the record to decide the important legal issues in this case. The Board is, therefore, compelled to correct any misimpressions that could arise from an unwary reading of respondents’ characterization of the facts.

Much more on the successful citizen lawsuit overturning the Seattle School District’s use of Discovery Math, here. http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/. Clusty Search: Discovery Math.
Local links: Math Task Force, Math Forum Audio/Video and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.

Failures Prompt a New Jersey Schools Battle

Barbara Martinez:

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