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RSS Newsletter·2024 Referendum·Gell-Man Amnesia Effect

California’s future demands bigger investment in schools

Beatrice Motamedi:

A story on National Public Radio’s Web site about MySpace and Facebook recently quoted students from the Urban School of San Francisco.
I teach at Urban, and what stung me was its description as “an elite private school.” As a journalist and teacher, this kind of thing gets under my skin.
With tuition at $30,800 a year, it’s inevitable that Urban will be stereotyped as a prep school for smarties who exist in a parallel universe of privilege. But as someone who has spent several years teaching in public schools, I also know that California’s per-pupil spending rate of $7,571 a year – watch out, Mississippi, we’re racing you to the bottom – doesn’t provide even the basics, let alone enough for a truly decent education. My hometown of Milwaukee spends twice as much, and still only 46 percent of high school students graduate. The fact is that we could and probably should be spending four times as much on public education as we do now.
At Urban, I’m rarely impressed by excess, just by thoughtful teaching, the resources to support it and kids who work so hard that I sometimes have to tell them to slow down. But stereotypes persist. When I got my job at Urban, a friend who works at a community college promptly checked my delight. “Isn’t that the fancy private school in the Haight?” she asked. “How nice for you.”

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Hats off to schools for raising the bar

Eau Claire Leader-Telegram:

Reading and math are two of the three “basics” of education, writing being the third. Those not proficient in these areas will be left behind in a society where there is a rapidly dwindling demand for “unskilled labor.”
That’s why a recent study by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is so encouraging. The group tracked test results of Wisconsin students who took a statewide exam as third-graders in the 2005-06 school year, and then charted that class as they were tested again as sixth-graders last school year.
The good news is that students at 52 percent of Wisconsin schools improved their proficiency ratings in both reading and math. Eau Claire, Altoona, Chippewa Falls and Menomonie were among the schools whose students improved in both areas as they progressed from third to sixth grade. Other area schools’ improvements were almost off the charts: Augusta students’ scores improved by 24.4 points in reading and 17.5 in math. Colfax, Cornell, Bruce and Somerset in our area also improved by double digits in both subjects.
Critics of standardized tests sometimes warn against taking too much from the results because they say education is about more than memorizing information. But reading and math are pretty straightforward. Either you can read and comprehend information, or you can’t. And either you have mastered the building blocks of math and can solve problems successfully, or you can’t. Any “teaching to the test” in reading and math can only be a good thing.

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Charter schools: Two studies, two conclusions

Nick Anderson:

As President Obama pushes for more charter schools, the education world craves a report card on an experiment nearly two decades old. How are these independent public schools doing? The safest and perhaps most accurate reply — it depends — leaves many unsatisfied.
This year, two major studies offer contradictory conclusions on a movement that now counts more than 5,000 charter schools nationwide, including dozens in the District and Maryland and a handful in Virginia.
Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, reported in June that most charter schools deliver academic results that are worse or no better than student accomplishments in regular public schools. She relied on test data from 15 states (not including Maryland or Virginia) and the District.
Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economist, reported in September that charter school students are making much more progress than peers who sought entry to those schools by lottery but were turned down. She drew on test data from New York City.

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“Helping Parents Better Understand Public Education”

Brittany Brown:

Parents for Public Schools is recruiting Pine Belt parents to attend a free, two-day leadership institute this spring designed to help parents better understand public education.
“Most of the time, they do not understand the language or acronyms used in education,” said Victoria Peters, a parent coach with the organization who works in the Pine Belt.
“We know parents have something to say, but the reason we don’t hear them is because they don’t know what to say to give feedback.”
The institute is sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, a national organization based in Jackson that promotes parent involvement and leadership in schools. It will be held Feb. 26-27, March 26-27 and April 16-17 at the Hilton in Jackson. The deadline to apply is Dec. 14.
Peters said 30 parents will be selected to attend a variety of interactive workshops and breakout sessions.
“We want a diverse group of parents,” she said.

Amazing….

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Plano Schools’ Boundary Changes

Matthew Haag:

The redrawing of school attendance zones usually upsets some parents, but a set of proposed changes in the Plano school district triggered a war of words the likes of which the district hadn’t seen in years.
Parents not only lambasted the proposed changes, but they also turned on one another, accusing opponents of selfishly thinking only about their own children.
“This school-vs.-school and neighborhood-vs.-neighborhood thing saddened me,” trustee Brad Shanklin said at a board meeting this month.
District officials recently put forth a new set of changes partly designed to quell the anger. And they will find out Tuesday whether they have succeeded.
That’s when residents will have a chance to speak publicly about the latest proposal. The district will host a similar meeting the next night in Spanish. School board members are expected to vote on the boundary changes Dec. 15.
New boundaries are needed to balance student enrollment across Plano ISD after more families moved into the district’s eastern side.

Presentations on the proposed boundary changes: School Board 2.8MB PDF / Staff 1.7MB PDF.

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Report finds wide disparities in gifted education

AP:

When Liz Fitzgerald realized her son and daughter were forced to read books in math class while the other children caught up, she had them moved into gifted classes at their suburban elementary school.
Just 100 miles down the road in Taliaferro County, that wouldn’t have been an option. All the gifted classes were canceled because of budget cuts.
Such disparities exist in every state, according to a new report by the National Association for Gifted Children that blames low federal funding and a focus on low-performing students.
The report, “State of the States in Gifted Education,” hits at a basic element of the federal government’s focus on education: Most of its money and effort goes into helping low-performing, poor and minority students achieve basic proficiency. It largely ignores the idea of helping gifted kids reach their highest potential, leaving those tasks to states and local school districts.

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The masters of education With the Gates Foundation grant in hand, Memphis City Schools will funnel incentives to develop the best and brightest teachers and seed the system with role models

Jane Roberts:

Kimberly Hamilton arrives and leaves work in the dark so often, custodians at Winchester Elementary School are on alert not to lock her in or out.
“If I leave at 5 o’clock, someone’s putting a hand to my forehead to see if I have a fever,” she says, laughing at the absurdity, but serious about the hours it takes to move children from barely proficient to mastery.
She teaches her third-graders to get along with others, be good citizens, live in a violent society and dream for the future.
The $90 million grant the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded this month to Memphis City Schools to improve the effectiveness of its teachers offers Hamilton the biggest one-time raise she could ever hope for in public education, going from the $49,000 she earned last year to the $75,000 base pay proposed for the district’s most talented teachers.

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Sorry, wisdom’s gone on furlough

David Shapiro:

There’s more drama than learning in local education as we “flASHback” on the week’s news that amused and confused:
• The Board of Education and teachers union question whether $50 million offered by Gov. Linda Lingle is enough to reopen public schools on “furlough Fridays.” That’s the old “no can do” spirit that made our schools what they are.
• U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is sending an aide to Hawai’i to meet state education leaders and visit schools. If he wants to visit on Friday, it’ll cost him $160 million to open the doors.
• Kids from lower-income families may lose out on preschool because of state plans to quadruple costs. They’ve left behind as many K-12 children as they can, so they’re moving down to the nursery schools.

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New York City’s Schools Share Space, And Bitterness, With Charters

Jennifer Medina:

Suzanne Tecza had spent a year redesigning the library at Middle School 126 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including colorful new furniture and elaborate murals of leafy trees. So when her principal decided this year to give the space to the charter high schools that share the building, Ms. Tecza was furious.
“It’s not fair to our students,” she said of the decision, which gives the charter students access to the room for most of the day. “It’s depriving them of a fully functioning library, something they deserve.”
In Red Hook, Brooklyn, teachers at Public School 15 said they avoid walking their students past rooms being used by the PAVE Academy Charter School, fearing that they will envy those students for their sparkling-clean classrooms and computers. On the Lower East Side, the Girls Preparatory Charter School was forced to turn away 50 students it had hoped to accept because it was unable to find more room in the Public School 188 building.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made charter schools one of his third-term priorities, and that means that in New York, battles and resentment over space — already a way of life — will become even more common. He and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have allowed nearly two-thirds of the city’s 99 charter schools to move into public school buildings, officials expect two dozen charter schools to open next fall, and the mayor has said he will push the Legislature to allow him to add 100 more in the next four years.

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Value-Added Education in the Race to the Top

David Davenport:

Bill Clinton may have invented triangulation – the art of finding a “third way” out of a policy dilemma – but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is practicing it to make desperately needed improvements in K-12 education. Unfortunately, his promotion of value-added education through “Race to the Top” grants to states could be thrown under the bus by powerful teachers’ unions that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning.
The traditional view of education holds that it is more process than product. Educators design a process, hire teachers and administrators to run it, put students through it and consider it a success. The focus is on the inputs – how much can we spend, what curriculum shall we use, what class size is best – with very little on measuring outputs, whether students actually learn. The popular surveys of America’s best schools and colleges reinforce this, measuring resources and reputation, not results. As they say, Harvard University has good graduates because it admits strong applicants, not necessarily because of what happens in the educational process.
In the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind program has ushered in a new era of testing and accountability, seeking to shift the focus to outcomes. But this more businesslike approach does not always fit a people-centered field such as education. Some students test well, and others do not. Some schools serve a disproportionately high number of students who are not well prepared. Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students. As a result, policymakers and educators have been ambivalent, at best, about the No Child Left Behind regime.

“Value Added Assessment” is underway in Madison, though the work is based in the oft-criticized state WKCE examinations.

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Making the Home-School Connection

Erin Richards:

Milwaukee Public Schools will spend some $4 million in federal stimulus money over two years to support a major parental involvement program in 35 schools
First of four parts
Lennise Crampton, a 40-year-old Milwaukee mother of eight, sometimes wonders how her children would have performed in school if she’d known how to be a better parent from the start.
A single mother until she married this year, Crampton usually managed decent meals and clothing and getting her kids to class. It was up to the school, she thought, to handle the education part.
Then in December of 2005, a representative from Lloyd Street School marched up to Crampton’s door and asked her to participate in a program that improves relationships between teachers, schools and families.
Crampton started coming to weekly meetings at Lloyd, where her two youngest attended. She learned about training she could get as a low-income parent. She learned how to engage in her children’s academics at home and how to advocate for their needs at school.
“These little ones get the best of the best now,” she said. “If it applies to my children’s academics, I’m on it.”

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Over-Punishment in Schools

New York Times Editorial:

New York City joined a national trend in 1998 when it put the police in charge of school security. The consensus is that public schools are now safe. But juvenile justice advocates across the country are rightly worried about policies under which children are sometimes arrested and criminalized for behavior that once was dealt with by principals or guidance counselors working with a student’s parents.
Children who are singled out for arrest and suspension are at greater risk of dropping out and becoming permanently entangled with the criminal justice system. It is especially troubling that these children tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic, and often have emotional problems or learning disabilities.
School officials in several cities have identified overpolicing as a problem in itself. The New York City Council has taken a first cut at the problem by drafting a bill, the Student Safety Act, that would bring badly needed accountability and transparency to the issue.
The draft bill would require police and education officials to file regular reports that would show how suspensions and other sanctions affect minority children, children with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. Detailed reports from the Police Department would show which students were arrested or issued summonses and why, so that lawmakers could get a sense of where overpolicing might be a problem.

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Milwaukee School Choice Shapes Educational Landscape

Alan Borsuk:

Time for a status report on all the different ways Milwaukee children can use public money to pay for their kindergarten through 12th grade education:

  • Private school voucher program enrollment: Up almost 5% from a year ago, just as it has been up every year for more than a decade.
  • City kids going to suburban public schools using the state’s “open enrollment” law: Up almost 11%, just as it has been up every year for about a decade.
  • Enrollment in charter schools given permission to operate by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Milwaukee’s City Hall: Up more than 19% and up substantially from a few years ago.
  • Enrollment of minority students from the city into suburban schools using the state’s voluntary racial desegregation law, known as Chapter 220: Up almost 5%, although the long-term trend has been downward.
  • Enrollment in what you can think of as the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system: Down, but by less than 1%, which is better than other recent years. Mainstream MPS enrollment has been slipping every year and went under 80,000 a year ago for the first time in many years.

With all the controversy in recent months around whether to overhaul the way MPS is run, the half dozen other routes that Milwaukee children have for getting publicly funded education have been almost entirely out of the spotlight. But Milwaukee remains a place where the term “school choice” shapes the educational landscape in hugely important ways.
How important?

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New Jersey teachers’ union’s ‘Electile Dysfunction’ for Corzine explained

NEAexposed.com:

An interesting document found its way to my inbox over the weekend. It was a PowerPoint presentation of an analysis done by the New Jersey Education Association, regarding its efforts to re-elect Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.
The document can be found at NEAexposed.com.
Citing “Electile Dysfunction,” meaning the polls were telling them that voters, including teachers, weren’t as enthusiastic about Corzine as they would like, the union’s Director of Government Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, proposed a double-dose remedy: “A robust member-to-member campaign,” followed by “an independent communications campaign to inoculate the public.”
The first dose of the union’s plan was to appeal to its members. The radical community organizer Saul Alinsky taught the NEA that the trick to “organizing people is to appeal to their self-interest.” Thus, the union promoted Corzine’s pro-union “accomplishments,” like investing $3 billion into public pensions, increasing school funding, increasing school construction, expanded pre-kindergarten programs, opposition to vouchers, and free medical benefits for teacher for life.
Oddly, the union didn’t cite any accomplishment that actually helped students.

A pdf of the powerpoint presentation can be viewed here.

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Calvert high school turns them lose at lunch

Jenna Johnson:

It’s lunchtime at Patuxent High School in Southern Maryland, but it looks and sounds more like recess.
Students lounge in hallways and classrooms with sack lunches and trays of food. They play Frisbee, get dating advice from teachers, hold club meetings, cram for afternoon quizzes, play video games or catch up on sleep.
Two years ago, Patuxent Principal Nancy Highsmith released students from the confines of the cafeteria and replaced the multiple 30-minute lunch periods with one hour-long, schoolwide lunch. With some creative scheduling class time has remained the same, she said, and the middle-of-the-day burst of freedom has increased club participation, taught time management skills and given stressed-out students time to chill.
But there’s an ulterior motive: raising test scores, grades and graduation rates.

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School district negotiations with teachers moving slowly

Tom Weber:

School districts across Minnesota are agreeing to terms with teachers at a slower pace than during the last contract cycle.
State law requires every Minnesota school district to be on the same schedule for teachers contracts. The next contract deadline is January 15th, about seven weeks away.
Tom Dooher, president of the Education Minnesota teachers’ union, said 61 of the state’s 339 districts have reached agreements. At this time two years ago, 82 districts had deals in place. Dooher said the bad economy and uncertain state funding are slowing the pace.
“The teachers are very sensitive to the economy and understand,” Dooher said. “Each locality is different; they’ve got a little different amount of money. So I think the locals are very aware of that and they’re just trying to get a fair and equitable settlement. I don’t think they’re asking for anything outrageous, from what I’ve seen.”
Even with the economy, Dooher said all contracts approved so far either keep salaries flat or include increases – none have included salary cuts.

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Michigan public schools could seek regional taxes

Dawson Bell:

Michigan public schools in financial straits and failing to make headway in their efforts to wring more revenue out of Lansing could consider this idea: asking local voters to approve a school operating millage.
Although seldom sought since voters approved the statewide school funding overhaul called Proposal A in 1994, public schools can legally seek more money from local property owners if they do so collectively. The limit they can ask for is 3 mills ($1 for every $1,000 of taxable property value), levied across an intermediate or regional school district. In most instances, that means countywide.
The reason that few so-called enhancement-millage elections have been held since ’94 is that getting countywide approval for a tax hike is difficult. Schools would share the revenue raised based on how many students their schools have.
Ron Fuller, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, said schools won’t know if voters might go along unless they ask. He represents one of the very few areas to win an enhancement-millage election in 2005.

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Nevada teachers union OK with using test scores for evaluations

James Haug:

In dropping their opposition to student test scores being used in teachers’ performance evaluations, Nevada’s teachers unions appear to be essentially adopting a compromise by the Obama administration.
While it earlier emphasized that student achievement data need to be linked with teacher performance evaluations, the Obama administration has since softened its tone after months of taking policy input from the public.
Student performance data, such as test scores, now should be considered along with as other performance measures, such as observation-based assessments and a teacher’s demonstration of leadership, according to a new policy announcement.
The U.S. Department of Education published its standards for teacher evaluations on Nov. 12 as part of the application criteria for the Race To the Top Funds, a $4 billion pool of competitive grants intended to spur educational reform at the local level.

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Verona charter school considers going green

Gena Kittner:

Facing possible closure because of flagging enrollment , Verona’s New Century charter school is proposing to become Dane County’s first “green,” or environmentally-focused, charter school.
The move, which must be approved by the district’s board, illustrates the challenges facing charter schools across the state: to find an academic niche that will continually attract students.
“Having a (charter school) choice means a lot to parents,” said Kristina Navarro-Haffner, who has a first-grader at New Century. “We really want to be that option for parents and help the Verona School District bring in more people.”
In the last two years, a few charter schools — public schools given autonomy from their district in exchange for strict accountability — have changed their focus to attract students, said John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. A lack of performance or non-compliance with state requirements to be a charter school led to the dissolution of 15 charter schools prior to this year, he said, leaving a total of 206 in the state and 10 in Dane County.

Verona’s Core Knowledge Charter School continues to have a waiting list.

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Los Angeles Unified school choices are a confusing maze

Howard Blume:

Pamela Krys, who moved to Woodland Hills a year ago, made a confession during a school fair this month at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park.
“I don’t understand the points,” she said, referring to one aspect of the application process for magnet programs. “They don’t do points in Florida.”
Understanding the points system is just one of the complications surrounding school choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although its “choices” website is improving, the school system provides no central location — online or off — to help parents manage all their options if they don’t want their children to attend their neighborhood school.
Separate programs have different application forms, processes and deadlines. Nor does the district supply some key information, such as student test scores for most magnets. Budget cuts led to the cancellation of districtwide magnet fairs, although some regional administrators have staged smaller events.

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Should We Inflate Advanced Placement (AP) Grades?

Jay Matthews:

The Rochester, N.Y., public schools do a fine job. Their leaders often have great ideas. But according to Rochester school board member Mike Reno, they are talking about doing something to their Advanced Placement courses that could be troublesome, even though I once thought it was a good idea. (Some people who know me say that is the very definition of a bad idea.)
Here is what Reno revealed in an email to me:
“Our district, in an effort to increase AP participation, is proposing to lower the grading scale for AP classes. The idea is based on the notion that kids in Rochester don’t want to take AP classes because they are afraid that the tougher work will lead to a lower grade, and they don’t want to damage their GPA for fear it will harm their college entrance chances. The district’s logic suggests by that lowering the grading scale, students will have a better chance of getting a better grade, and therefore be more willing to take the class.
“This is not their brainchild. They claim other districts are doing it. They are calling it internal weighting. They believe this is a better approach than grade weighting, where an A in an AP class would be worth, say, 5.0 instead of 4.0. The district argues that colleges strip off weighted grades, whereas an internal weight benefits the student during college entrance. (I believe grade weighting has value when calculating class ranking, vals, sals, top scholars, etc, but think colleges are free to recalculate anything they’d like). Am a crazy to think this is a bunch of nonsense?”

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Plain Talk: We’re failing the citizenship test

Dave Zweifel:

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has been busy the past several months speaking about her pet peeve — the sad state of teaching civics in our public schools.
“Civics education has been all but removed from our schools,” she often remarks. “Too many people do not understand how our political system works. We are currently failing in that endeavor.”
O’Connor cites examples in which Americans could name a judge on “American Idol,” but couldn’t name a single justice on the Supreme Court or the three branches of government.
She’s calling attention to an extremely important problem in the U.S. All too many American citizens don’t understand the country’s democratic system and why it’s crucial to the future of that democracy to stay informed and participate. The Founding Fathers, after all, counted on the citizenry to be the republic’s caretaker and that’s a major reason why they felt so strongly about education.
Unfortunately, schools over the years have been saddled with teaching just about everything but civics, history and the arts. The heralded No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, has forced schools to drop meaningful civics classes so that teachers can “teach to the test,” consisting primarily of math and reading. And now that the Obama administration wants to tie teachers’ pay and promotions to those tests, classes on citizenship will continue to get the short end of the stick.

I’m glad Dave Zweifel raised this issue. I hope he remains active on curricular issues, which, in my view are not simply driven by No Child Left Behind.

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Education salaries grow $8M in Louisiana’s ed department

Melinda Deslatte:

Salary costs have jumped in Louisiana’s education department, even as the number of full-time employees dropped, and the number of people drawing six-figure paychecks has more than doubled in the two years since Paul Pastorek took charge of the agency.
Payroll at the Department of Education grew by $8 million — 21 percent — after Pastorek became state superintendent of education in 2007, an Associated Press review of salary data shows.
Pastorek says the pay is needed to attract and keep the best talent. But with huge state budget shortfalls predicted for several years, the salary boosts have irked some lawmakers, already bristling about Pastorek’s own hefty pay increases.
“I just don’t, along with many of my colleagues, feel like we can put a lot of money into administration so this guy can go out and pay big salaries and not (put the money) into the classroom for the kids,” said state Rep. Jim Fannin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
A New Orleans lawyer and former general counsel for NASA, Pastorek had been on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for eight years when he was named superintendent in March 2007. He replaced Cecil Picard, who died after a decade in the post.
Salaries have grown markedly since then.

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Alexandria rethinks gifted education: more diversity sought in classes Virginia also will study ways to boost minority enrollment

Michael Alison Chandler:

When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city’s schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he’s watching is gifted.
“Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is” by looking at the colors of the students, he said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled “gifted.” Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.
Sherman, at the helm for a little more than a year, is bringing fresh attention to equity issues that have long confounded the small urban school system, where half of the 11,000 students live in poverty.

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School Reform Retreat? Duncan eases the rules for states to get ‘Race to the Top’ cash.

Wall Street Journal:

The Obama Administration’s education rhetoric, with its emphasis on charter schools and evaluating teachers based on student performance, has won plaudits from school reformers–and from us. But this month the Department of Education laid out in detail the eligibility requirements for states seeking federal grant money, and it looks like the praise may have been premature.
In the spring, when the White House announced its $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” initiative to improve K-12 schooling, President Obama said, “Any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways to compete for a grant.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters, “states that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application.”
The Administration appears to be retreating on both requirements. The final Race to the Top regulations allow states to use “multiple measures,” including peer reviews, to evaluate instructors. This means states that prohibit student test data from being used to measure a teacher’s performance may be eligible for the federal funds, even though the President clearly said that they wouldn’t be.

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D.C. expose–one teacher’s evaluation

Jay Matthews:

Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at the Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District’s new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn’t like the new system. He doesn’t like how it is being implemented by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.

But he is willing to reveal what the evaluator said to him, give me a copy of his evaluation and expose himself to what I expect will be an unhappy reaction from his principal and other D.C. school officials. So here goes. I think we learn more from small individual cases than big multi-variant studies. Goldfarb hit some bumps that deserve attention.

The assessment by his evaluator (the official title is Master Educator) occurred on Sept 25. The evaluator had never taught the subject Goldfarb was teaching, Advanced Placement U.S. History. “My ‘Master Educator’ has taught AP Government,” Goldfarb said. “Is there a difference? I would think so.”

The fact that Goldbarb has an AP class at the city’s only academic magnet school suggests that his supervisors determined long ago he was a good teacher. He is also, by his own description, not afraid to speak up. But he said he respects his principal, Anita Berger, who has had a long and successful career at the school, and will go along with the changes demanded by IMPACT because she has asked him to do so.

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A lesson in incompetence: How 1 in 3 schools fails to provide adequate teaching Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230668/How-1-3-schools-fails-provide-adequate-teaching.html#ixzz0Xsqow7u6

Laura Clark:

  • Half of academies are substandard
  • Countless school graduates start work without 3Rs
  • £5billion wasted on adult literacy classes

More than two million children are being taught in schools that are mediocre or failing, inspectors said yesterday.
A ‘stubborn core’ of incompetent teachers is holding pupils back and fuelling indiscipline and truancy, Ofsted warned.
Despite a raft of national initiatives, a third of schools still fail to offer a good education.

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Appeals Court: School district can ban Christmas carols

Philadelphia Inquirer:

The federal appeals court in Philadelphia has upheld a New Jersey school district’s ban on religious songs during the Christmas holiday season.
In their ruling, three judges of the Third Circuit of Appeals noted that such songs were once common in public schools, but that times have changed.
Michael Stratechuk sued the Maplewood-South Orange School District in 2004, saying the ban violated his two children’s First Amendment’s freedom of worship rights.

Read the opinion here.

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New York Mayor Bloomberg Finds Teacher Evaluation Education “loophole”

Beth Fertig:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city has found a loophole to a state law enabling it to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The mayor says the city will start using student test scores to evaluate teachers coming up for tenure this year. Speaking at an education event in Washington, DC today, Bloomberg said his lawyers have determined that a state law barring such evaluations only applies to teachers hired after July 2008. That means teachers hired in 2007, now coming up for tenure, can be evaluated with test scores.
Bloomberg took part in a panel discussion on education reform with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, sponsored by the liberal think tank The Center for American Progress. He urged the state legislature to lift the cap on charter schools and to end rules requiring principals to lay off the least senior teachers in times of budget cuts. He said these steps would make the state more competitive for federal grants rewarding school reforms.

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Faced with suit, Elmbrook now will allow girls to join hockey cooperative

Amy Hetzner:

Faced with a federal lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, the Elmbrook School District has reversed an earlier decision and will allow students from both its high schools to join a girls ice hockey cooperative.
Brookfield Central High School freshman Morgan Hollowell and her father, James, sued the School District last month after it refused to join a cooperative with other school districts to offer girls ice hockey, even though the district participates in a similar cooperative for boys ice hockey.
At the time, Elmbrook Superintendent Matt Gibson said the district chose not to join the girls cooperative because too few students were interested in playing the sport and it would be difficult for the district to supervise.

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Seattle Curriculum Discussions

Charlie Mas:

How can we be sure that the students are learning the curriculum? If students who are working below grade level do not get any intervention, then they will not be ready and able to succeed with the grade level curriculum. There will be no vertical alignment for them. They will continue to just get passed along and they won’t do any better. Where are the interventions needed to make curricular alignment successful? You will be told that the District is working on them, but they are NOT in place. Without them, Curricular Alignment is doomed. Note that we have always needed these interventions. Needing these interventions is nothing new, yet we have not been able to reliably provide them. What has changed that assures us that we will be able to reliably do what we have never been able to do before? There will be references to the MAP testing to identify the under-performing students. Okay, good. But how can we be assured that the identified students will get the necessary services?

There are some interesting accountability comments to this post.

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NCTE Presentation: College Readiness & The Research Paper

nctepa2009actual From the presentation

Preparation: John Robert Wooden, revered and very successful basketball coach at UCLA, used to tell his players: “If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
and,
Premise: The majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single (1) complete nonfiction book, or written one (1) serious (e.g. 4,000+ words, with endnotes and bibliography) research paper.
and,
Elitism” is making the best form of education available to only a few. The democratic ideal of education is to make the best form of education available to all. The democratic ideal is not achieved, and elitism is not defeated, by making the best form of education available to almost nobody.
Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia

Download the 200K presentation PDF here.

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High school research papers: a dying breed

Jay Matthews:

Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George’s County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as “a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia.” She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. “As time went by,” Burton said, “even the better seniors’ writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read.” Before her retirement in 1998, she said, “I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all.”
Rigorous research and writing instruction have never reached most high-schoolers. I thought I had terrific English and history teachers in the 1960s, but I just realized, counting up their writing assignments, that they, too, avoided anything very challenging. Only a few students, in public and private schools, ever get a chance to go deep and write long on a subject that intrigues them.
We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn’t just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.

(more…)

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Grading the teachers

Providence Journal:

News that a Rhode Island teachers union has won a $200,000 union-funded grant to develop teacher evaluations can’t help but stir fears that the fox wants to guard the henhouse. Public-employee unions, after all, are in the business of promoting their own economic interests, which do not always coincide with the interests of students.
Yet it appears to be welcome news that the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, under Marcia Reback, will be working to help develop some standards for weeding out sub-par teachers early on in their careers.
“The union is tired of being portrayed as a protector of bad teachers,” Ms. Reback said.
In a sense, the unions do have an economic interest in promoting higher standards in their profession, since that tends to build public support for giving teachers greater financial rewards. And early in their career is an excellent time to evaluate fairly whether teachers can truly cut the mustard. Under Ms. Reback’s proposal, unions would work closely with administrators to develop a proposed system of evaluations.

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Fiscal Health of Colorado School Districts

Colorado State Auditor [270K PDF]:

This report provides information on the Fiscal Health Analysis of the State’s school districts performed by the Local Government Audit Division of the Office of the State Auditor (OSA). The Fiscal Health Analysis provides a set of financial indicators for each school district that may be used by the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), school districts, local government officials, and citizens to evaluate the financial health of Colorado’s school districts. These financial indicators can warn of financial stress that may require examination and remedial action by the appropriate parties.
In Colorado, 178 school districts provide public education to more than 800,000 children enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). Funding for each school district’s total program is provided first by local sources of revenue, primarily through a property tax levy to finance the district’s local share. The General Assembly provides additional funding to supplement local revenue in order to fully fund the district’s program. This additional funding is based on a formula that considers, in part, the school district’s annual pupil count, as well as the district’s local share of revenues. In Fiscal Year 2008, the General Assembly provided more than $3 billion to school districts as the state share of districts’ total program funding.

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State must reveal, not conceal, school aptitude

Lance Izumi:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of California’s Public Schools Accountability Act, an early legislative triumph of then-Gov. Gray Davis. While some good things have come out of the law, the act has failed in its two key missions: to inform parents and the public about the true performance of schools and students, and to impose widespread tough consequences on failing or underperforming schools.
In contrast to funding-focused measures, such as Proposition 98, the act commendably sought to spotlight school and student outcomes, especially results on the state’s standardized tests. While many educators complain about this emphasis on student testing, the real problem turned out to be how the act uses test scores to measure school performance.
The act uses the Academic Performance Index, or API, to measure the performance of schools. Based on student results on the state’s California Standards Tests, the API calculates a score on a scale of 200 to 1,000 for every school, with the state designating 800 as the target to which all schools should strive to achieve.

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Race to the Top in Education We can get real reform if the president resists pressure to dilute standards

Harold Ford, Jr., Louis V. Gerstner & Eli Broad:

For decades, policy makers have talked about significantly improving public education. The problem has been clear: one-third of public school children fail to graduate, there are embarrassing achievement gaps between middle-class children and poor and minority children, and the gap between our students and those in other countries threatens to undermine our economic competitiveness. Yet for the better part of a quarter century, urgent calls for change have seldom translated into improved public schools.
Now, however, President Barack Obama has launched “Race to the Top,” a competition that is parceling out $4.35 billion in new education funding to states that are committed to real reform. This program offers us an opportunity to finally move the ball forward.
To that end Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pushing states toward meaningful change. Mr. Duncan has even stumped for reform alongside former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Yet the administration must continue to hang tough on two critical issues: performance standards and competition.
Already the administration is being pressured to dilute the program’s requirement that states adopt performance pay for teachers and to weaken its support for charter schools. If the president does not remain firm on standards, the whole endeavor will be just another example of great rhetoric and poor reform.

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Low school ratings are not acceptable

Greenwood Commonwealth:

The Mississippi Department of Education has been warning school districts and the public for months that the new, tougher accountability ratings were going to stun some people.
The previous accountability system had lulled schools and parents into thinking their students’ academic performance was better than it actually was. For the most part, the old system compared how Mississippi students performed academically in relation to students in other parts of the state. The new system compares how they perform in relation to students around the country.
As a result, there are a lot fewer superior schools and districts in Mississippi and a lot more that are failing or close to it. It’s not that the public schools in the state have gotten worse. It’s just that they and the public are getting a truer picture of really how they stack up nationally.
In Greenwood and Leflore County, the first year’s ratings, which were released Monday, are disappointing. Both districts have been listed as “At Risk of Failing,” the third lowest of the seven accountability levels. Although Greenwood officials say they feel their rating is undeservedly low and are pursuing an appeal, even if the district moves up a notch to “Academic Watch,” that’s still not good enough.
Between the two school districts, only three schools out of 13 are rated “Successful” (the third highest ranking) or better. One of those, T.Y. Fleming in Minter City, was shut down this year because of low enrollment.

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Kay Bailey Hutchison unveils plan for Texas public education

Gromer Jeffers:

Speaking at Collin College in Plano, Hutchison said that her plan includes better use of technology in the classroom, recruiting and retaining quality teachers, curbing the state’s dropout rate and helping local school districts become more efficient.
“We need more innovation, more efficiency and more accountability,” Hutchison said.
Hutchison, who is battling Rick Perry the Republican nomination for governor in the March primary, tied improvements in Texas schools to the state’s economic fate.
“Our labor force in Texas stands to suffer the most by this stagnation,” she said. “If we decline to treat education investment as economic investment, then our foundation for job creation will erode within.”

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Judge dismisses lawsuit against Madison School District over student transfer policy

Ed Treleven:

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a class-action lawsuit against the Madison School District over a student transfer policy the district has since re-written.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in a 36-page decision that the district was following state law – a law that was later determined to be unconstitutional – when it implemented its policy for assuring that open enrollment transfers did not create racial imbalances at schools.
Crabb wrote that a municipality like the school district cannot be held liable under federal law for trying to implement a state mandate when it has no other policy choices. State or federal law is responsible for any wrongdoing, she wrote.
Madison attorney Michael Fox, who is representing the class, which he estimated to be 200 to 300 people, said the decision will be appealed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The law in this area is unsettled, he said, and federal judicial circuits around the U.S. disagree on it.
In this case, a white East High School student, identified in court documents as “N.N.,” applied for transfer to either Waunakee or Monona Grove in 2007. The district denied her application because it said her departure from East would have caused the school’s minority student percentage to increase.

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How Connecticut Can Fix its Dysfunctional Education spending system to Reward success, Incentivize Choice and Boost Student Achievement

ConnCAN and education research firm Public Impact today (Nov. 23, 2009) released a groundbreaking report [1MB PDF] tracing the flow of funds through Connecticut’s public schools and offering a more rational system that will close that state’s yawning achievement gap.
Please visit ConnCAN’s website www.conncan.org to download the report The Tab.
I was very fortunate to be provided an advance copy which I read over the weekend. It is truly groundbreaking in every sense of the word. I can not encourage you enough to please take the time to read this extremely well done, thorough report.
Doug
p.s. For your convenience, I’ve attached the PDF file of The Tab, but please also visit ConnCAN’s web site!
Alex Johnston:

ConnCAN runs on big ideas. We launched our organization almost five years ago with a mission to do nothing less than offer every Connecticut child access to a great public school.
Living in the state with the nation’s largest achievement gap is too unsettling to tolerate plodding, incremental change. When more than 90 percent of fifth graders in wealthy Ridgefield can read at or above grade level but only 31 percent of Bridgeport kids can, there’s no time to dally. We demand breakthrough success.
ConnCAN has grown into a force: an education advocacy group powered by thousands of advocates who share our impatience. We proved the power of our movement through our hugely successful 2009 ‘Mind the Gaps’ legislative campaign. The campaign made real gains in data transparency, teacher effectiveness and funding for Connecticut’s excellent public charter schools.
But the campaign also illustrated the unsustainable way we pay for our public schools. Consider this tale: In 2008, Hartford asked Achieve- ment First to bring one of its excellent charter schools to the city. The Achievement First Hartford Academy opened its doors to kindergarten, first and fifth grade students, with plans to add one grade each year as these students advanced until the school was completed. Because charter schools are funded on their own line item in the state budget, the school will need more money each year to support this natural grade growth. This jewel of a school became a growing line item in the midst of the Great Recession and an easy target.

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School Reform Webinar 11/24 @ 5:00p.m. EST

Whitney Tilson, via email:

A final reminder for my school reform webinar, which will be from 5:00-6:30pm tomorrow (Tuesday). To join, go to: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/345183977 and enter meeting ID: 345-183-977. If you wish to use your phone for the audio, the call-in number is 215-383-1003 and the access code is 345-183-977.

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In Arizona, charter school movement flourishes

Nick Anderson:

Here, where suburb meets desert, students are clambering amid the cacti to dig soil samples and take notes on flora and fauna. In an old movie complex in nearby Chandler, others are dissecting a Renaissance tract on human nature. On a South Phoenix campus with a National Football League connection, still others are learning how to pass a basket of bread and help a lady into her chair.
These are just three charter schools among a multitude in the most wide-open public education market in America.
Arizona’s flourishing charter school movement underscores the popular appeal of unfettered school choice and the creativity of some educational entrepreneurs. But the state also offers a cautionary lesson as President Obama pushes to dismantle barriers to charter schools elsewhere: It is difficult to promote quantity and quality at the same time.
Under a 1994 law that strongly favors charter schools, 500 of them operate in this state, teaching more than 100,000 students. Those totals account for a quarter of Arizona’s public schools and a tenth of its public school enrollment, giving charters here a larger market share than in any other state.

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It’s time to evaluate the evaluation

Jay Matthews:

Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District’s new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn’t like the new system or how Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is implementing it.
He was willing to reveal what the evaluator said to him, give me a copy of his evaluation and expose himself to what I expect will be an unhappy reaction from his principal and other D.C. school officials. So here goes. Goldfarb hit some bumps that deserve attention.
The assessment by his evaluator (the official title is “master educator”) occurred Sept. 25. The fact that Goldfarb has an AP class at the city’s only academic magnet school suggests that his supervisors determined long ago that he is a good teacher. He is also, by his own description, not afraid to speak up. But he said he respects his principal, Anita Berger, who has had a long and successful career at the school, and will go along with the changes demanded by IMPACT because she has asked him to do so.

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White House Plans Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education

Kenneth Chang:

To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.
President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.
The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.
Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May.

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“Fast Track” Teacher Certification in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner:

Omar Masis doesn’t want to get a teaching license just for himself. He also wants to do it for the preschoolers he sees every day at Blair Elementary School in Waukesha.
For two years now, he has been leading a class full of youngsters through lessons that focus on building their vocabularies and improving motor skills. But, with a background in agricultural engineering instead of education, he has been doing so on an emergency teaching permit sustained by six credits of education classes a year.
Now he’s ready to make the leap to become a credentialed teacher.
“There’s something in me that tells me I need a formal education so I can help these kids and improve my teaching style,” said Masis, a native of Nicaragua who also has worked as a teacher’s aide in Waukesha. “I can do better.”
Before, Masis might have had to go elsewhere to fulfill his new dream.
But a recent decision by the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center, one of the largest certification programs in the state for college graduates who want to become teachers, means he can stay in Waukesha.
After more than a dozen years of working to place teachers in hard-to-fill classrooms in Milwaukee Public Schools, MTEC has opened its program to work with other public school districts.

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How Teachers Learn to be Radicals

Sol Stern:

Imagine you are a parent with a child in fifth grade in an inner-city public school. One day your child comes home and reports that the teacher taught a lesson in class about the evils of U.S. military intervention in Latin America.
You also learn that after school the teacher took the children to a rally protesting U.S. military aid to the Contras, who were then opposing the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The children made placards with slogans such as:
“Let them run their land!” “Help Central America, dont kill them.” “Give the Nicaraguans their freedom.”
Your child reports that the teacher encouraged the students to write about their day of protest in the class magazine and had high praise for the child who wrote the following description of the rally:
“On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras. The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads.”
A fantasy? An invention of some conspiracy-minded right-wing organization? Not at all. It happened exactly as described at a bilingual Milwaukee public school called La Escuela Fratney. The teacher who took the fifth-graders to the protest rally and indoctrinated them in international leftist politics is Robert Peterson.

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Advocating Virtual Schools

Sunny Schubert:

Virtual schools, viewed skeptically by the educational establishment, have a champion in this veteran teacher.
Kathy Hennings starts her day like any other Wisconsin public school teacher: She’s up, coiffed, appropriately dressed and ready to go.
And then she starts her commute: down the hall in her Cedarburg home from the kitchen to her office. She sits down in front of a bank of two linked computers, and starts going through the 20-plus emails she receives each day from the parents of her students.
Then she and her students settle down for another day of learning–21st-century style–in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, one of 14 Internet-based online charter schools in Wisconsin.
Hennings has 75 students: 30 first-graders and 45 second-graders. They live in rural areas, villages, towns and big cities all across Wisconsin, from Superior to Stevens Point, from Hudson to Milwaukee.

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West Virginia must embrace 21st-century education reform

Mark Bugher:

I recently was invited to attend a presentation in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of its 2009 education “Leaders and Laggards” report to the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
This report was a cooperative effort of the U.S. Chamber, the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The report is a state-by-state “report card” on education innovation. Education innovation is described by the report as “Discarding policies that no longer serve students while creating opportunities for smart, entrepreneurial problem-solvers to help children learn.”
The report graded state schools on seven criteria: school management, finance, hiring and evaluation of staff, removing ineffective teachers, data collection, pipeline to post-secondary education, and technology. West Virginia received an overall grade of D+, however, ranked first in the nation on technology, measured by student per Internet-connected computer.
No state received an overall grade higher than a C+, and although West Virginia was ranked in the bottom quarter of states, there were 11 states ranked below us. Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas ranked overall the highest, and Kansas, Montana and Nebraska were at the bottom of the rankings.

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Milwaukee Public Schools aim to even out special ed distribution

Erin Richards:

As principal of Custer High School, Kathy Bonds often faces criticism for having one of the most notoriously rough schools in the city.
Many of her students live in poverty, return at night to homeless shelters, commit severe crimes or deal with a staggering number of mental, emotional and physical disabilities.
Look at the numbers, Bonds says: 30.8% of her students are classified as special education, a main reason that performance at her school continues to suffer.
The Milwaukee School Board appeared to agree with the spirit of that assessment last week when it voted to even out the distribution of special education students within the city’s high schools.
As part of the approved recommendation, the board directed the administration to immediately begin making sure all schools are equipped to serve a wide range of student needs. Members also directed the administration to establish a target range of special education students, and to help schools with very high or low special education populations come closer to that target range.

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At U (of Minnesota), future teachers may be reeducated They must denounce exclusionary biases and embrace the vision. (Or else.)

Katherine Kertsen:

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.
In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U’s flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers’ lack of “cultural competence” contributes to the poor academic performance of the state’s minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.

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The cost of a good education: Are teachers overpaid or worth every penny?

Rickeena Richards:

When times get tough, teachers’ salaries are the last thing school districts should cut, local educators say.
“If you’re going to recruit and maintain the best, then you have to provide that environment. That includes compensation to some degree that supports that,” Belleville District 118 Superintendent Matt Klosterman said. “We’re going to hire the best of the best and create an environment that supports them while they’re here.”
Educators argue that quality instruction comes at a cost, but that cost is an investment in the community’s future since teachers are responsible for preparing our young people for the future. They said school districts look at several factors to determine that cost when hiring teachers, all the while trying to remain competitive with neighboring districts’ offers.
But critics say that school administrators sometimes throw more money at teachers than necessary.
For example, figures obtained by the News-Democrat for nine local school districts that signed new teachers contracts this summer show:
* A Belleville District 118 social studies teacher makes almost $80,000 a year.
* An O’Fallon District 203 family and consumer sciences teacher makes more than $100,000.
* A Granite City gym teacher makes $86,000.
* An East St. Louis first-grade teacher makes nearly $76,000 this school year.

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Gateses Give $290 Million for Teacher Evaluation, Effectivness and Tenure

Sam Dillon:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced its biggest education donation in a decade, $290 million, in support of three school districts and five charter groups working to transform how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure.
A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities, including New York, seeking to answer the question that has puzzled investigators for decades: What, exactly, makes a good teacher effective?
The twin projects represent a rethinking of the foundation’s education strategy, previously focused largely on smaller grants intended to remake troubled American high schools. With these new, larger grants, the foundation is seeking to transform teacher management policies in four cities in hopes that the innovations can spread.
The foundation committed $100 million to the Hillsborough County, Fla., schools; $90 million to the Memphis schools; $40 million to the Pittsburgh public schools. Some $60 million will go to five charter management organizations based in Los Angeles: Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.

Now that the Gates foundation is “rethinking” its previous “small learning community” grants, will local thinking change on the same?
In my view, we as a community should do everything we can to hire (and pay) the best teachers. That does, as the Gates Foundation recognizes via this grant, require changes to the current UAW teacher union model…..

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The Providence Effect in Action

Mark Bauerlein:

Fifty minutes into The Providence Effect, a documentary profile of Providence-St. Mel School in Chicago, an extraordinary episode unfolds.
The school principal, Jeannette M. DiBella, strolls down the hall and peeks inside a math classroom. All is quiet. The teacher sits at his desk at the back of the room looking down at his notes. Each students sits at a desk at work on books and papers (they look like 8th or 9th Graders). Everything appears orderly and proper.
DiBella doesn’t move on, though.
“Are they taking a test?” she whispers.
The teacher answers that the students are doing independent study to ensure that they are “ready for the next week.” DiBella begins to wander the rows, asking the teacher with a grin, “Are you sure that’s what they’re doing?”
One student turns to look up at her as she approaches–a sure sign of uncertainty.

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Portfolio exams–wave of the future or big cop-out?

Jay Matthews:

Today’s ed page has a startling story by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler on the rapid spread—and resulting score inflation—of portfolio exams in Virginia. These are collections of classwork of students with learning disabilities or insufficient English. They substitute for the usual state multiple choice tests in assessing those students’ progress, and the progress of their school. At one Fairfax County elementary school, Chandler reports, the reading passing rate for English learners has gone from 52 to 94 percent and for special education students 34 to 100 percent in the two years this system has been in place. Sound fishy to you? It does to me, but I think it is going to force some interesting and likely beneficial changes.
I am NOT saying the teachers who compile their students’ portfolios and the educators (who don’t usually know the students) who grade them are trying to deceive us. I am sure they are doing their best to be fair and accurate. But it is difficult for empathetic human beings like educators to resist the temptation to err on the side of generosity when assessing students, particularly when we are talking about those struggling with disadvantages.
It is clear to me, and I suspect to most readers, that this system inflates achievement scores. Of course, so has the assessment system we have been using in schools since the beginning of public education—teachers grading their own students’ work. We seem to have prospered as a nation despite giving many struggling students a break on their report cards. I don’t think portfolios used in this limited way are going to ruin the effort to set strong national standards, but I think it is going to give a big push to the idea of introducing independent inspectors to assess the effectiveness of schools and teachers.

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Teacher Union Chief Paul Hubbert says he’ll battle to keep charter schools out of Alabama

Rena Havner Philips:

Calling charter schools a “fad” that takes money away from public schools, teachers union boss Paul Hubbert said he will fight Gov. Bob Riley’s proposal to bring them to Alabama.
Riley told the Press-Register on Tuesday that he would like the Alabama Legislature to pass a law enabling the creation of charter schools. It’s the only way, he said, that Alabama will be able to compete against other states for $4.35 billion in education funds that President Barack Obama is giving out as part of his Race to the Top campaign.
But Hubbert, who holds influence as executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association, said Thursday that he’ll fight any charter proposal.
“I intend to oppose it strongly,” Hubbert said. “I think it’s wrong and I think it will hurt far more than help.
“It would absolutely take money from the public schools and put it in a charter school, which basically operates like a private school,” Hubbert said.

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Washington School Superintendent Calls for Delay on Math and Science Requirements

Teodora Popescu:

Yesterday, at the Washington State School Directors’ Association (WSSDA) conference at the Westin in downtown Seattle, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn announced his new plans for math and science graduation requirements to an audience of over 1,000 statewide school board members.
Dorn, elected as a reformer last year, said it was necessary to postpone stricter graduation requirements for math until the class of 2015, and all graduation requirements for science until the class of 2017, to give students and teachers appropriate time to adjust to pending reforms.
For math graduation requirements until 2015, Dorn is okay with giving students a fall back option of earning two credits of math after tenth grade in order to graduate (a choice that is set to disappear in 2013) in place of passing a set of exams. Reformers want the scheduled changes–getting rid of the additional course work graduation option–to kick in for the class of 2013. They want students to have to pass either a state exam or two end-of-course exams to graduate starting in 2013–without Dorn’s fallback.
For 2015 and onward, Dorn offered a two-tier proposal: Students either meet the proficiency level in two end-of-course exams or students meet the basic level in the exams and earn four math credits. Students who don’t meet the basic level in the exams have the option of retesting with a comprehensive exam or using state-approved alternatives such as the SAT.
As far as the science graduation requirement, Dorn proposed postponing any requirements until the class of 2017, and replacing the current comprehensive assessment with end-of-course assessments in physical and life sciences. The 2010 legislature (starting this January) is supposed to define the science requirements.

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Now is the Time to Overhaul the Milwaukee Public Schools – Brown Professor Kenneth Wong

Alan Borsuk:

nter professor Kenneth K. Wong of Brown University in Providence, R.I., lead author of the 2007 book “The Education Mayor: Improving America’s Schools.” It was the fullest examination to date of the range of ways mayors have become involved in school governance in dozens of cities across the United States.
The book was generally favorable to well-executed mayoral involvement, broadly saying mayoral control creates a political environment for stronger decision making about improving schools. But the conclusions on academic impact were more tepid – Wong and his associates said there were improvements in reading and in math in many cases, but that, overall, getting the mayor involved didn’t help and sometimes harmed efforts to close the achievement gaps between have and have-not students.
Both supporters and critics of mayoral control have cited things in the book as supporting their side.
Wong spent three days in Madison and Milwaukee, guest of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, both based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wong was more assertive about the merits of mayoral control than he was in the book. “Mayoral control has a statistically significant positive effect on student achievement in reading and math at both elementary and high school grades,” he said.
Mayoral control, he said, eliminates the “nobody’s in charge culture” that leads to many school systems just keeping on doing things the way they’ve been done, even though they aren’t succeeding overall. With a clear point of power, there is clear accountability and motivation to make needed changes, he said.

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D.C. Schools Chief Michelle Rhee Targets Teacher Tenure

Neil King, Jr. & John Hechinger:

The Obama administration says it wants to remake public education around the principle that the best teachers should be promoted and rewarded, regardless of seniority.
And a brawl over just that idea is now playing out in the shadow of the White House.
The chancellor of Washington’s school system, Michelle Rhee, is wrestling with one of the most expensive, worst performing school systems in the country. The dropout rate has hit 40%, and the cost per student is $14,000 a year. Buildings are crumbling and thousands of parents have abandoned the system, which serves about 45,000 students.
Ms. Rhee is trying to reduce what she believes to be a bloated school management and wrest more control over the district’s affairs from the powerful local teachers’ union. She has replaced principals, laid off teachers and closed underperforming schools.
She has also challenged what she feels is one of the biggest impediments to improvement: tenure, or strong job protections for teachers. The idea is to promise teachers much richer salaries, as well as performance bonuses, if they give up tenure. Good performers would be rewarded, poor performers gotten rid of.

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University of Calif. approves big fee hikes

Michael Blood:

The governing board of the University of California approved a $2,500 student fee increase Thursday after two days of tense campus protests across the state.
The vote by the Board of Regents in a windowless University of California, Los Angeles, meeting room took place as the drone of protesters could be heard from a plaza outside. Scores of police in riot gear guarded the building.
The 32 percent increase will push the cost of an undergraduate education at California’s premier public schools to over $10,000 a year by next fall, about triple the cost of a decade ago. The fees, the equivalent of tuition, do not include the cost of housing, board and books.
“Our hand has been forced,” UC President Mark Yudof told reporters after the vote. “When you don’t have any money, you don’t have any money.”

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Idaho urged to beef up public education

Bill Roberts:

More Idaho high school students should go to college.
They need more rigorous math and science instruction.
And the state needs to find more highly qualified teachers — those who have degrees in the subjects they are teaching.
Those are among several recommendations expected to be unveiled Wednesday by a group of Idaho business leaders, parents and educators as a way for Idaho to provide a high-quality, cost-effective education.
The group, called the Education Alliance of Idaho, was formed after Gov. Butch Otter challenged business leaders in 2007 to look for ways to improve education in Idaho. Otter will introduce the alliance and the report at a news conference Wednesday morning.
The four broad goals and 17 recommendations are aimed at improving Idaho’s educational quality as compared to the rest of the country, said Guy Hurlbutt, Alliance chairman.
A proposal that high school students graduate with up to 30 college credits goes back to plans offered by state schools Superintendent Tom Luna since he took office in 2007 to increase availability of college credits in high schools as a way to help kids get a leg up on higher education and save some money.
Demanding more rigor in high school math and science dates back to high school reform pushed by the State Board of Education earlier this decade. Then, the board succeeded in adding an additional year of math and science to high school graduation credits, beginning with the class of 2013.
Nor is the alliance’s work the first shot at reform in Idaho public schools.

IBCEE press release.

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Minorities in gifted classes studied

Michael Alison Chandler:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced Tuesday that the Virginia Education Department has launched a study of minority students’ low participation in gifted education programs statewide.
African Americans represent 26 percent of the state’s 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state’s schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.
“Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities. . . . It’s critical we assess any disproportionate barriers . . . so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate,” Kaine said in a release.
NAACP officials have urged Kaine in recent months to address racial and ethnic disparities in new regulations for gifted education that he is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Some said a study does not go far enough to address their concerns.

Related: ““They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT!”

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Golden Handcuffs: Teachers who change jobs or move pay a high price

Robert Costrell & Michael Podgursky:

Teacher pensions consume a substantial portion of school budgets. If relatively generous pensions help attract effective teachers, the expense might be justified. But new evidence suggests that current pension systems, by concentrating benefits on teachers who spend their entire careers in a single state and penalizing mobile teachers, may exacerbate the challenge of attracting to teaching young workers, who change jobs and move more often than did previous generations.
The design of teacher pension plans is a timely concern: like other public pension plans, those for teachers are becoming more costly. Employer contributions to pension funds tack on a larger percentage of earnings for public school teachers than for private-sector managers and professionals, and this gap is widening (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research, Spring 2009, Figure 1). Those data do not yet reflect the impact of the stock market decline since 2007: the drop in the value of pension funds means further increases in employer contributions will be required to fund promised benefits. As fiscal concerns force states to reevaluate the costs of teacher pension plans, officials might also consider the plans’ consequences for teacher quality.

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Alternative test may inflate score gains

Michael Alison Chandler:

Lynbrook Elementary School, which serves one of the poorest communities in Fairfax County, seems to be a model for reform. Three years ago, the Springfield school failed to meet state testing goals in English. Since then, it has charted double-digit gains in passing rates for every one of its closely monitored racial and ethnic groups of students.
But the success at Lynbrook and other schools throughout the state is not only due to better teaching. More and more, students who have struggled to pass Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams are taking different tests.
The trend dates to 2007, when federal officials approved an alternative assessment after the Fairfax School Board threatened to defy a mandate to give multiple-choice reading tests to students who were destined to fail — students who, like many at Lynbrook, were just beginning to learn English.

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Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan Presentation Audio / Video

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan Presentation 11/17/2009 from SIS.

Click to listen or CTRL-Click to download this 32mb mp3 audio file. Much more on the Madison School District’s new talented & gifted plan.
Thanks to Jeff Henriques and Laurie Frost for recording this event.

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DFER Reforming Education Speaker Series: Lessons for Milwaukee – Jon Schnur

via a Katy Venskus email:

Through out the fall of 2009 Democrats for Education Reform will bring to Milwaukee national education leaders with a proven record of reform in urban districts. Our speakers will offer new perspectives and experience with what works and what does not in a challenging urban district.
We are pleased to invite you to the second installment in this series featuring one of the most powerful national voices on education reform:
JON SCHNUR
CEO and Co-Founder: New Leaders for New Schools
As CEO and Co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, Jon works with the NLNS team and community to accomplish their mission- driving high levels of learning and achievement for every child by attracting, preparing, and supporting the next generation of outstanding principals for our nation’s urban schools. From September 2008 to June 2009, Jon served as an advisor to Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, a member of the Presidential Transition Team, and a Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Jon also served as Special Assistant to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, President Clinton’s White House Associate Director for Educational Policy, and Senior Advisor on Education to Vice President Gore. He developed national educational policies on teacher and principal quality, after-school programs, district reform, charter schools, and preschools.
When: Tuesday December 1, 2009
Where: United Community Center
1028 South 9th Street
Milwaukee, WI [Map]
Time: 5:30pm-7:00pm (Hors d’oeuvres and cash bar)
RSVP to:
Katy Venskus 414.801.2036
DFERWisconsin@gmail.com

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Two Wisconsin AP Scholars Named

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [40K PDF]:

Two graduates from Marshfield High School have been named Advanced Placement Scholars for Wisconsin. This is the third year that both scholars have been from the Marshfield School District. The College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Program recognized Kara Faciszewski and Stephen Nordin as 2009 State AP Scholars from Wisconsin for their performance on Advanced Placement exams. This is the 19th year that the organization has granted State AP Scholar Awards. The distinction goes to one male and one female student from each state and the District of Columbia with grades of three or higher on the greatest number of AP exams, and then the highest average score (at least 3.5) on all AP exams taken. For 2009, 109 students nationwide received AP Scholar Awards.

Related: Dane County High School AP Course Comparison. Marshfield High School offers 27 AP courses. Search high school AP course offerings here.

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K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America’s fiscal deficit



The Economist:

STUDENTS at National Defence University in Washington, DC, were recently given a model of the economy and told to fix the budget. To get the federal debt down, they jacked up taxes and slashed spending. The economy promptly tanked, sending the debt to higher levels than before. The lesson: “You’ll never get re-elected and you may do more harm than good,” concluded Eric Bee, an air-force colonel who took part in the exercise.
This is the ugly arithmetic of America’s public finances. Recession and aggressive fiscal stimulus have hugely swollen the federal deficit. Stimulus was essential to cushion a collapse in private demand. In spite of that, the economy has barely emerged from recession and unemployment is still rising, feeding speculation that more stimulus is needed. Yet at the same time voters are growing alarmed at the tide of red ink, and it may be only a matter of time before markets do, too.
On current policies the federal deficit, which hit a post-war high of 10% of GDP in the fiscal year that has just ended, will fall to 4.2% by 2014 and will then head steadily higher. Aides to Barack Obama know this is unacceptable. With a new budget due in February, government departments are said to be preparing to tighten their belts. Meanwhile an advisory committee, chaired by Paul Volcker, who used to head the Federal Reserve, will report to the president in early December on options for tweaking the tax system, though not how to raise much more revenue from it.

It is clearly unlikely that the K-12 world will see significant amounts of new funds, beyond the 5%+ annual growth experienced over the past twenty years, if that.

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The Phony Funding Crisis: Even in the worst of times, schools have money to spend

Arthur Peng & James Guthrie:

Chicken Little is alive and seemingly employed as a finance analyst or reporter for an education interest group. If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America’s schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating. Budgetary shortfalls, school district bankruptcies, teacher and administrator layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, pension system defaults, shorter school years, ever-larger classes, faculty furloughs, fewer course electives, reduced field trips, foregone or curtailed athletics, outdated textbooks, teachers having to make do with fewer supplies, cuts in school maintenance, and other tales of fiscal woe inevitably captivate the news media, particularly during the late-spring and summer budget and appropriations seasons.
Yet somehow, as the budget-planning cycle concludes and schools open their doors in the late summer and fall, virtually all classrooms have instructors, teachers receive their paychecks and use their health plans, athletic teams play, and textbooks are distributed. Regrettably, this story is seldom accorded the same media attention as are the prospects of budget reductions and teacher layoffs.

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Wisconsin School District Tax Levies to rise an average of 7.16%

Amy Hetzner:

Wisconsin school districts’ property tax levies will rise an average of 7.16% statewide for the current school year, according to new information from the state Department of Public Instruction.
Although a drop in state aid to public schools helped drive up property taxes in some areas, increased statewide restrictions on allowable per-pupil revenue as well as local decisions to keep the lid on potential tax increases kept the average levy from going higher.
In fact, this school year’s average increase is less than the average rise for school districts in 2007-’08. In the Milwaukee area, the average increase was about 5%.
Levy increases varied widely from one district to another for 2009-’10, with the Seneca School District posting the highest – a 41% increase in its portion of property taxes.
The Seneca levy spike was due to a new voter-approved operational tax increase and a 15% drop in state aid, said David Boland, superintendent of the small southwestern Wisconsin school system.
The original proposal for almost a 50% tax increase was voted down in the district’s annual meeting, as was a much smaller increase, he said.
Boland said the district’s expenses were pretty much set by the time the state finalized its budget and he learned the district would be receiving dramatically less in state aid.
“When it was done that late, there was no way to prepare,” he said. “We’re the same as a lot of other districts.”

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K-12 Governance: Rhee on “Wasted Spending in the Washington, DC School District”

Wall Street Journal CEO Council:

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Blowback on Madison’s “Talented & Gifted” Program: “TAG not a game Madison area schools need to play”

Sean Kittridge:

Bumper stickers are like tattoos for cars. They’re gaudy, mighty tough to get off and, no matter how hard they try, rarely inspiring. We don’t need goofy “coexist” decals to inform us that the person doing a mean 45 MPH in the passing lane is against religion-fueled hatred and wars. Of course that guy’s against war. He’s driving a Saturn Ion.
And we’ve just about had it up to here — lower jaw area — with those wretched honor roll notifications. “Oh really, Mrs. Johnson? Tommy’s getting straight A’s in middle school?” Somebody call NASA. Or, if nothing else, call B.S. Just wait ’til he starts listening to rap music.
But parents, as a species, aren’t rational beings. After all, if they were, they would’ve put you up for adoption. Instead, they foolishly assume their child is The Great White Hope, with equal parts of Jim Brown, Barack Obama and Jesus Christ mixed in — although, interestingly, none of them are white. In Madison, this wide-eyed parental belief that their genes will save the world is best represented by discussions surrounding programming for gifted youngsters.
As reported Monday in the Wisconsin State Journal, some area parents are becoming increasingly frustrated with the Madison school district’s weak implementation of TAG programming. TAG, which stands for “talented and gifted,” is class instruction designed to challenge more advanced students, and forever lost its credibility when it became loosely associated with a canned body spray. According to the article, the school district currently has eight and a half positions devoted to pushing TAG programming forward, and that’s simply not enough to spawn effective change.
Fortunately, it’s not necessary, especially when dealing with elementary and middle school students. Try and tell 9-year-olds they’re gifted; they’ll listen, but only after a good nose-picking and two minutes of straight laughter stemming from a joke that incorporated the word “butt.”

Fascinating. The TAG initiative, from my perspective, ideally should lead to increased rigor for all students. That is obviously a contentious topic…..

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Cisco CEO: Education Is Top National Priority

Roger Cheng:

Education should be the top national priority ahead of health care, the economy and climate change, according to Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Chief Executive John Chambers.
Education should be an issue that brings together Democrats and Republicans at a time when they can agree on little else, Chambers said. He helped present the findings of an education-focused task force at the WSJ CEO Council conference Tuesday.
The task force determined that the government should form a national council for an educated work force, linking together the secretaries of education, labor and commerce, said Accenture Ltd. (ACN) Chief Executive William Green.
“We don’t have a national agenda to be tops in the world in education,” Green said. “On every measure, we’re slipping.”
Indeed, countries are doing a better job of preparing their children for the global work force, Chambers said.
AT&T Inc. (T) Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said that the talent pool coming out high schools is getting diluted.
“Parents need to recognize that their children are falling behind,” he said.

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Leaders & Laggards: A State-By-State Report Card of Educational Innovation



Center for American Progress:

Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even more that requires urgent improvement. In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.
And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our education system needs to be reinvented. After decades of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.

Ben Paynter has more.

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Making the Grade

A Second Grade Teacher:

There were a lot of things I was anxious about when I came out of the School of Ed. One was the switch from being the graded to the being the grader. It was really an odd sensation to grade someone else’s work in black and white. All that time spent at a liberal undergraduate school attending vegan potluck dinners, talking about how terrible judging people can be, and now I was being paid to judge people every day.
It gets easier with time. At first you might pour over your grades for a very long time, thinking about how many points a student really deserves based on their effort and the demonstration of their comprehension of an idea. You might come up with rubrics for the littlest assignments to ensure fairness and award points to papers only after covering up their authors. A lot of that will disappear under the shear workload that is grading. Really, looking at students’ work takes forever! A very good friend of mine back in Kansas has over 150 students on her rosters. Think about it: you assign a two page paper in all of your classes and all of a sudden you have a 300 page novel to tear apart, comment on, revise and turn back to its many authors. Who has time for that?
In addition to time, it’s really difficult to do any kind of grading if things are going poorly in the first year of teaching. It’s unfair to fail all of the students for not learning if you’ve not grabbed hold of the reigns and taken control of the class. While the vast majority of the students who failed my class last year were making very poor decisions that led to that failure, fewer would have done so poorly if I’d been able to give them the structure and support they needed. How many? Who knows.

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Most oppose mayoral takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools, poll says

Larry Sandler:

A majority of city and suburban residents oppose giving Milwaukee’s mayor control over the Milwaukee Public Schools, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The People Speak Poll also found support for a high-speed rail system and a regional parks district; opposition to a regional transit authority and gasoline tax increases; and deep divisions on other transportation and government finance issues.
Among the four counties surveyed, Milwaukee County residents were the only ones who thought their county government was on the wrong track. Milwaukee city residents were about evenly split on the question of whether the city was on the right or wrong track, while suburbanites voiced a more negative view of the city’s direction.
Mayor Tom Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle have been pressing the Legislature to approve a bill that would give the mayor the power to hire and fire the MPS superintendent, along with ultimate authority over the school district’s budget and labor negotiations. They say the step is needed to improve student performance, following the lead of several other major U.S. cities.
But opponents object to taking power away from the elected School Board. A competing proposal would give the mayor the power to veto the School Board’s superintendent choice and budget decisions, but would let the board override those vetoes.

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Seattle PSAT Update: A Baseline for More Rigor in High Schools?

Melissa Westbrook:

As you may recall I was wondering how come the district had no results (by grade or school or district) for the PSAT given last fall to 9th, 10th and 11th graders. Bob Vaughn in Advanced Learning told me they had too much on their plate to get it done.
Joy Stevens, the Public Records officer said this:

I am writing in response to your email below requesting PSAT test results. In doing so, I learned that the test results that we receive are in a format that cannot be easily incorporated into our information, which would allow us to release statistical information without violating individual student confidentiality. I am looking into whether it would be possible to redact or remove student identification from the results we get from the College Boards and/or extract statistical totals.

I also placed a call to Boeing and got a very nice guy who was puzzled but said that they were expecting a report by Dec. 31. He got back to me on Friday and said he got a report and that the district said they would be releasing the results shortly.

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Opposition grows to Massachusetts education reform bill

James Vaznis:

An unlikely opponent has joined the mounting opposition against a bill in the state Senate this afternoon that would expand the number of charter schools.
The Massachusetts Association of Charter Public Schools said today the bill could actually stifle the growth of charter schools because of changes made to the legislation last Friday in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Those changes would pull first-year funding for all new charter schools from the state’s general education fund known as Chapter 70 and would create a new budget line for those costs, which the association fears could make it more vulnerable to line-item budget cutting.
Another change made by the committee would require that the first three new charter schools approved each year to be located in a district that ranks in the bottom 10 percent in MCAS scores. Given that the state only approves two or three applications a year, the association said the requirement would make it virtually impossible to open new charter schools in other parts of the state.

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Parents question focus and speed of Madison’s gifted students program

Gayle Worland:

The parents of exceptionally bright students in Madison schools waited 18 years for a plan to raise the academic bar for their children. But now, they’re really getting impatient.
Approved by the Madison school board in August, the district’s new three-year plan for talented and gifted (“TAG”) students already is raising questions from parents about focus and speed. The district’s TAG staff, they note, consists of only 8.5 positions in a district of 24,622 students – and three of those positions are vacant.
“Change of a large system takes time,” said Chris Gomez Schmidt, the mother of three young children who serves on the district’s advisory committee for talented and gifted students. “But I think there’s a lot of families within the system who are frustrated when they see that their students’ needs are not being met. I think that families don’t feel like they have a lot of time to wait.”
The district’s talented and gifted plan, which replaces a 1991 document, will be spelled out for the public Tuesday night in a community forum from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Hamilton Middle School, 4801 Waukesha St. The forum is meant to make the reforms understandable and “transparent” to the public, said Lisa Wachtel, executive director for teaching and learning for the district.

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The Edsel of Education Reform: The Ford Foundation finds a needy cause: teachers unions.

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

We hate to say it, but don’t be misled by headlines. The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant “to transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools.”
Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America’s 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford’s really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.
Would you believe the recipients of Ford’s largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word “retro.”
Ballyhooing the $100 million, the foundation’s president Luis Ubinas said, “Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us. With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”

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Farewell, Milwaukee Mayoral Takeover

Christian Schneider:

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s entrance into the race for Wisconsin Governor means many things; but perhaps most importantly, it means the death of the plan to have the mayor take over the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Last year, Wisconsin Interest magazine editor Charlie Sykes noted Barrett’s reluctance to follow through on the plan:

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett continues to downplay his interest in a mayoral takeover, saying “I’m not interested in a power grab.” But his call for a privately-funded assessment of the district marked a new activism on the mayor’s part, reflecting the growing national movement toward putting mayors in charge of their city’s schools.
In the last decade and a half at least a dozen of the nation’s largest school districts have been handed over to mayoral control, most notably in Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Philadelphia’s schools are run by a board jointly appointed by the mayor and the governor.

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The Preschool Picture – 4K?

Chester Finn, Jr.:

The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as strategists intended, many Americans have come to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide, even that not providing it will cruelly deprive our youngest residents of their birthrights, blight their educational futures, and dim their life prospects. Yet a troubling contradiction bordering on dishonesty casts a shadow over today’s mighty push for universal pre-K education in America (see “Preschool Puzzle,” forum, Fall 2008).
The principal intellectual and moral argument that advocates make–and for which I have considerable sympathy–is similar to that of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) backers: giving needy kids a boost up the ladder of educational and later-life success by narrowing the achievement gaps that now trap too many of them on the lower rungs. Serious pursuit of that objective would entail intensive, educationally sophisticated programs, starting early in a child’s life, perhaps even before birth, and enlisting and assisting the child’s parents from day one.
Yet the programmatic and political strategy embraced by today’s pre-K advocates is altogether different. They seek to furnish relatively skimpy preschool services to all 4 million of our nation’s four-year-olds (and then, of course, all 4 million three-year-olds), preferably under the aegis of the public schools.

4K is on the radar of our local Madison schools.

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Seattle School Board Meeting on Boundaries and Levies

Melissa Westbrook:

The School Board meeting for votes on both the new SAP boundaries and the levies is this Wednesday, the 18th at 6 p.m. You can sign up to speak starting tomorrow at 8 am by:
calling 252-0040 or e-mailing boardagenda@seattleschools.org
Here’s we are, almost to zero hour. I don’t want to disappoint anyone but I’m not sure I believe any amendments will come forward. I think only a broad-based one like the “soft” boundaries one (allowing anyone within a block of a school to have access even if it isn’t their attendance area school) or the “one-time” option (which would allow anyone within, say, 3 blocks of a non-attendance area school to make the one-time choice to commit to that school). Those would not require moving boundaries. But I think the Board will say they just can’t at this point. (And that’s why I do not like staff saying, “Oh yes, the Board can do anything up until the vote.”)
Please let us know if you attended Director Carr or De Bell’s community meeting yesterday. I heard from someone who attended Director Carr’s that there were a couple of issues. One, that when parents pressed about amendments, Sherry said it was too late because of staff issues. Two, that many parents were pressing for changes based on personal issues for their children. However, this person did end with this:
“Either way, we’ll work to make our kids’ school the best it can be.”

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Boulder Valley open-enrollment process goes online

Vanessa Miller:

Open enrollment has become part of the educational path that many families in the Boulder Valley School District follow, and this year officials have made some changes to the application process to make it both easier and greener.
For the first time, parents can file a request for their child to attend a Boulder Valley school outside their neighborhood on the district’s Web site, eliminating the need for applicants to pick up a paper form and drive it to the Boulder Valley Education Center. The online application will mirror the hard-copy version, allowing parents to choose their top choices and explain their reasoning.
“It will be more convenient, faster and it will mean that a person will not need to drop it by the education center,” said district assessment director Jonathan Dings. “We think this will save paper and gas, in an effort to be as green as we can in this process.”
Parents still will have the option of filling out a paper application and dropping it off, if that works best for them, Dings said. But, he said, the district is “hopeful that we will have a great deal of participation” in the inaugural online program.
“We know that if the product works well, a whole lot more people will try it,” he said.
Open enrollment is a statewide option that allows families to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. The option plays a substantial role in how Boulder Valley students are placed, Dings said.

Related: Wisconsin part-time and full-time open enrollment.

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K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Washington adapts to eastwards power shift

Edward Luce:

A few months ago Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, assured a group of Chinese students in Beijing that their country’s US dollar investments were in good hands. “Chinese assets are very safe,” Mr Geithner said. His comments brought the house down.
White House officials will be hoping that Barack Obama can avoid a similar loss of face on Monday when he meets a group of students in Shanghai for the set piece “town hall” that has become the US president’s signature event.
The chances are that he will. But no amount of dexterity can disguise the fact that Mr Obama’s visit to China crystallises a big shift in the global centre of gravity over the past few years. Just a decade ago Bill Clinton persuaded Capitol Hill that China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation would strengthen the forces of democracy within China.
Today, almost nobody in Washington even tries to make that case. Subsequent developments in China – and elsewhere – make it hard to sustain the argument that economic liberalisation leads necessarily to political liberty. More importantly, the US no longer has the luxury of being able to play teacher to China’s student (not that China ever took instruction).

It’s difficult to see significant increases in K-12 spending over the next few years.

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A ‘feel-good’ label for ‘at-risk’ kids?

Jay Matthews:

I sympathize with those who might not be comfortable with the latest plan to rid our schools of at-risk kids. Several educators across the country, including Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman, have decided not to call them that anymore. Henceforth they will be known as “at-promise” children.
“We use the term ‘at-promise’ in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving,” Sherman said in a July 23 op-ed in the Alexandria Gazette Packet. “Really, all children are at-promise, because we, as educators, have made a promise to each and every child that we will work toward higher achievement for all.”
Cathy David, Alexandria schools deputy superintendent, explained at a School Board meeting last December: “The previous ‘at-risk’ model was a deficit model that identified and categorized children by criteria such as low income, special education, ethnicity or English language proficiency, with the assumption that if the criteria fit the child, then the child must have some sort of deficit. The ‘at-promise’ model comes from strengths.”

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Hmong charter school has culture of learning

Alan Borsuk:

Give me some adjectives to describe your school, the visitor asked a couple of dozen eighth-graders at the Hmong American Peace Academy one morning last week.
Peaceful, one volunteered.
Dependable, another said.
Successful.
Educational.
Fair.
Respectful.
Hard.
Supportive.
Show me a school where kids volunteer a list like that, and I’ll show you a bright spot on Milwaukee’s educational landscape. Which is exactly the case with this school, popularly known as HAPA.
Entering its sixth year, HAPA has a kindergarten through eighth-grade enrollment of 435, nearly twice the number when the doors first opened in 2004. That’s not counting another 60 in a partner high school, International Peace Academy, that is in its second year and just beginning to grow.
On a wall near that eighth-grade classroom, charts list the attendance each day, classroom by classroom. Most of the entries read: “100%.” Overall attendance is not only higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools average, it is higher than the state average.

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WISCONSIN CHARTER SCHOOL AWARDS HIGHLIGHT EXCELLENCE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION ACROSS THE STATE

Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (Video – What is a Charter School), via email [88K PDF]:

The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) has announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as three career achievement honorees:
Charter School Person of the Year:
First Place: Dennis Conta
Second Place: Jan Bontz
Third Place: Lynne Sobczak & Kristi Cole (Milwaukee Public Schools)
Distinguished Merit: Robert Rauh (Milwaukee College Prep)
Distinguished Merit: Dr. Joe Sheehan and Ted Hamm (Sheboygan Area School District)
Charter School Teacher of the Year:
First Place: Victoria Rydberg (River Crossing Environmental Charter School, Portage)
Second Place: Erin Fuller (Carmen School of Science and Technology, Milwaukee)
Third Place: Kim Johnsen (WINGS Academy, Milwaukee)
Distinguished Merit: Darlene Machtan (Northwoods Community Secondary School, Rhinelander)
Distinguished Merit: Kirby Kohler (Rhinelander Environmental Stewardship Academy)
Charter School Innovator of the Year:
First Place: Department of Public Instruction (Project Based Learning Network)
Second Place: Danny Goldberg
Third Place: Seeds of Health Distinguished Merit: Valley New School (Appleton)
Overall Charter School of the Year: (overall winner, and 2 sub-categories within)
First Place (Platinum Award): Tenor High School (Milwaukee)

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Education reform tour stops in Baltimore

Arin Gencer:

An unlikely trio explored several Baltimore schools Friday as part of an effort to highlight education reform and challenges, and called on Maryland to give charter schools more autonomy.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich repeatedly emphasized the need for changes to the state’s charter school law, which he called “too restrictive,” as he, the Rev. Al Sharpton and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan toured three city schools and spoke with students, administrators and others about their schools – and what sets them apart.
“I hope that everybody in Maryland will call the governor, will call the legislators, and will let them know that if they want every child in Baltimore to have the chance to have a quality education … they have to reform the charter school law,” Gingrich said, standing with Duncan and Sharpton at Hampstead Hill Academy, a neighborhood charter. “If you have the ability to shape resources, to shape people, to focus time on the students, you really can have a dramatic impact. But to do that, you have to have a more flexible, a more creative charter law.”

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Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions

Winnie Hu:

Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
“To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,” said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.

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Seattle’s education: credit requirements and assignments plans

Seattle Times:

Trying to fix academic problems in high school by adding more credit requirements would likely result in one thing for certain: more cost to educate, due to a need to hire more staff to teach 20 percent more classes [“Boost credits to ensure high-school grads are ready to succeed,” Opinion, guest commentary, Nov. 12].
There are many school districts in this state that already have 24-credit programs, and they aren’t preparing kids for graduation. In fact, Washington state is now 43rd in the nation in high-school completion.
Writer Trish Millines Dziko is so right when she stated we are not preparing kids for adulthood. Why? Our secondary schools, unlike those in most of the rest of the world, are more social halls than places of learning.
In a 20-credit school, you can obtain all of the credits and courses you need to gain admission to the most competitive colleges in this country.
What is needed is a much more serious, focused, deliberate approach to secondary schools by educators, parents and students.

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Madison School Board Updates

via an Arlene Silveira email:

Board of Education Progress Report, November, 2009
BOE updates:
Dual Language Immersion (DLI): The Board approved the expansion of our DLI program into our 4 attendance areas at specified schools at the elementary/middle school levels. We are still studying high school models. DLI is a program where children are taught in both Spanish and English. DLI programs are currently at Nuestro Mundo and Leopold Elementary Schools. Next year our first middle school program will be at Sennett.
Cultural Relevance: The Board received an update on our Cultural Relevance initiatives. This is included in the strategic plan as a Strategic Objective in Curriculum. The District has a number of new/expanding projects in this area. Of note is a pilot created at Mendota and Falk Elementary Schools. Staff are collaborating with UW-Madison faculty for professional development in: African American language development; family involvement; black communications; classroom management; teaching from principles; culturally relevant literacy principles.
School Food Committee: This committee was formed to look at possible options for our food service operations. The district is bringing in an expert (Ann Cooper) in transitioning food service programs. Early next year she will come to Madison to look at our operations and provide a cost estimate for a feasibility study of the MMSD.
Budget: The Board approved our final budget and set the tax levy in October. Summary:

  • Total levy: $234,240,964 (3.49% increase)
  • Tax rate: $10.18 (3.77% increase)
  • Impact on $250,000 home: $92.83

Going into the meeting, the proposed tax rate was $10.40 with the impact on a $250,000 home of $147.50. Aware of the difficult economic times facing our community, the Board approved 6 budget amendments designed to decrease these numbers to the approved numbers. As part of our effort to decrease property taxes, the Board voted to freeze “non-essential” maintenance spending by deferring or foregoing $3,080,000 in maintenance referendum tax levy spending in 2009-10. By doing so, we were able to decrease the tax impact on the average home by $33.16. What does this mean for the schools? We will continue to make essential repairs using existing maintenance funds or other existing district resources. We have already spent 91% of the maintenance referendum that passed 5 years ago. We will evaluate and prioritize the remaining “non-essential” maintenance projects on the list, and will make funding decisions on an as needed basis using a different source of funding.
Lighthouse Project: The Board and Superintendent are participating in the Lighthouse Project. A study focused on behavior of school boards/superintendents in high-achieving school districts. Our participation in this project over the next 6 months will focus on the 7 conditions of school renewal: 1) Shared leadership; 2) Continuous improvement and shared decision-making; 3) Ability to create/sustain initiatives; 4) Supportive workplace for staff; 5) Staff development; 6) Support for school sites through data/information; 7) Community involvement.
H1N1 Activities: We received a presentation on the district’s H1N1 Pandemic Response Plan. The plan focused on 1) Education on H1N1; 2) Vaccination clinics; 3) Student/staff absences; 4) Supporting school operations; 5) Supporting students. An incredible amount of planning and communication went into the development of this plan and the district is now ready to deal with anything that comes our way as a result of H1N1.
If you have any questions/comments, please let us know.
board@madison.k12.wi.us
Arlene Silveira (516-8981)

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Should the Wisconsin school superintendent have more power?

Matthew DeFour:

n a nutshell
To seek a share of $4.5 billion in federal “Race to the Top” funding for public education, the Legislature passed a recent bill that among other things allows teachers to be evaluated, though not disciplined or fired, based on their students’ test scores.
However, to improve the state’s chances of receiving the most grant money possible, the Legislature is contemplating other changes to existing law. A bill in the Assembly to grant the state Superintendent of Public Instruction the power to take corrective action in failing schools and school districts is one such proposal.
The bill would give the state superintendent the power to implement new curriculum, expand school hours, add individual learning plans for pupils, make personnel changes and adopt accountability measures to monitor the school district’s finances.

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James Howard Announces Run for Madison School Board

via a kind reader’s email:

Hello, my name is James Howard.
I am running for School Board because I care about the success of our children. I want our schools to be even better. I strongly believe that in order for our community to be successful we need to support “ALL THE KIDS ALL THE TIME.”
At the same, I understand the importance of maintaining fiscal responsibility to taxpayers. As an economist with over 35 years of experience I know it is critical to analyze and evaluate the economic impact of decisions.

My Priorities

  • High expectations for all students
  • Raise educational standards
  • Narrow the achievement gap
  • Base school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research
  • Ensure fiscal responsibility to taxpayers
  • Improve communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community

Press Release:

–PRESS RELEASE–
Today James Howard officially announced his candidacy for the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education. Mr. Howard is a candidate for Seat 4 which is currently held by retiring Board member Johnny Winston, Jr.
“I’m announcing my candidacy with great excitement,” said Mr. Howard. “I care deeply about the success of our children. I strongly believe that in order for our community to have continued success we absolutely must support ‘ALL THE KIDS, ALL THE TIME.’ I want to work to ensure that happens.”
Mr. Howard, an economist and scientist at the Forest Products Laboratory, has been active in education and community matters for many years. He served on the MMSD Strategic Planning Committee, the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force, and was co-chair of Community and Schools Together (CAST), the school referendum support group. He has also served on the South Madison Economic Development Committee and the Town of Madison Economic Development Committee.
In making this announcement, Mr. Howard thanked Mr. Winston for his many years of dedicated public service to Madison’s children and community. “Mr. Johnny Winston, Jr. has been a leader on the board and in our Madison community. It will be a challenge for any newly elected board member to maintain the high standards that he exemplified,” said Mr. Howard.
Mr. Howard has identified as his Board priorities: ensuring high expectations for all students, raising educational standards; narrowing the achievement gap; basing school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research; ensuring fiscal responsibility to taxpayers; improving communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community; and improving state funding of public schools.
He and his wife, Kathryn, have three children. His adult daughter is a UW Madison senior studying abroad in Kenya, his son attends Sherman Middle School, and his youngest daughter attends Emerson elementary.
More information on Mr. Howard can be found at his campaign website: http://jameshowardforschoolboard.limewebs.com/index.html
For questions or comments, please contact:
James Howard
email address: jameshowardforschoolboard@gmail.com
telephone number: 244-5278

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Seattle Race Based School Assignment Policy Legal & Community Issues

via a kind reader’s email:

The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution’s right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.”
The results of this lawsuit in the Seattle Public School district are very discouraging, especially the disparity in income, race and available resources between “south end” and “north end” schools. A new school assignment plan currently being implemented for 2010-2011 will only relegate neighborhoods of color to the poorest schools in the district. The blog http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/, while mostly dealing with “north end” problems like APP programs and such, the fact that children will be forced into neighborhood schools is dividing an already divided district. Rainier Beach High School, for instance, demographic data indicates Caucasians at less than 7% and an African American at more than 65%, a graduation rate of 37% and test scores at the bottom of the barrel.

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Bracey’s last report–trashing our educational assumptions

Jay Matthews:

I got to the last page of the last icon-shattering piece Gerald W. Bracey will ever write, and felt sad and empty. As usual, he had skewered–with great erudition and insight–some of my fondest beliefs about how to improve schools. As a consequence, my thinking and writing about these issues will (I hope) be better next time. But who is going to do that for me in the future?
Jerry Bracey, the nation’s leading critic of unexamined assumptions in education, died Oct. 20 at age 69, apparently in his sleep, in his new home in beautiful Port Townsend, Wash. This was a shock to everyone who knew him because, although he had prostate cancer, it did not seem to have slowed him down.
The last person to receive one of his infamous emails questioning the ancestry and sanity of the recipient should frame the thing and put it on a wall. I don’t know anyone else in our community of education wonks who matched him in passion, honesty and wit. The 2009 edition of the Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education proves it.

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The ‘Highly Qualified Teacher’ Dodge

New York Times Editorial:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been widely held in high regard since he was appointed in January, but no honeymoon lasts forever. Mr. Duncan’s came to an abrupt end earlier this week when he issued long-awaited rules that the states must follow to apply for his $4.3 billion discretionary fund, known as the Race to the Top Fund, and the second round of federal financing under the $49 billion federal stimulus package known as the state fiscal stabilization fund.
….
The language in the application reflects timidity at the White House and in Congress, where some voices wanted to delay the fight over this issue until next year when Congress will likely reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The language also reflects the sometimes excessive influence of boutique alternative certification programs, which want to keep doors open for teachers who might be shut out under traditional criteria.

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Arne answers your questions

Jay Matthews:

I had a good chat with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning at his office. He had other important duties, but I would not let him go until he addressed each and every one of the questions sent in by readers last night and this morning. (Sorry, I missed questions that came in after 8:30 a.m. I had to get going. You know what D.C. traffic is like in the rain.) Here is what he said. I think most of his answers can be summed up as “we’re handing out $4.35 billion in stimulus funds for innovation, and if we do it properly we will help solve a lot of problems.”
From mhallet1: Ask him how he is coming on national Algebra I standards.
Duncan said that was the job of the group of 48 states and the Districts working to produce common standards. He said he is following their progress with great interest, but at the moment it is a state, not a federal, project.
From nicheVC: Disclosure: I spent the first 15 years of my career as an education practitioner, the last 10 investing in and discerning how the private sector might bring innovation and efficacy to the same.

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Doyle’s education reform plans could be held back in Senate

Erin Richards:

On the same day the federal government flicked a green light for states to apply for $4 billion in competitive education reform grants, the fate of two of Gov. Jim Doyle’s key initiatives remained uncertain.
The U.S. Department of Education finalized the application Thursday for the Race to the Top program and the criteria it will use to assess reform efforts from states, especially in the areas of standards and assessments, data systems, recruiting and rewarding good teachers and principals, and turning around low-performing schools.
Two reform proposals that Doyle says are crucial for Wisconsin to compete for funding – giving Milwaukee’s mayor the power to hire and fire the superintendent, and giving the state superintendent of public instruction more power to intervene in persistently poor-performing schools – are struggling to gain traction in the Legislature.
Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) said Thursday that he believes the state can receive Race to the Top money without changing the governance of MPS and giving more power to the state schools chief. He expressed skepticism about the plan for mayoral control.
“This process needs to have community buy-in,” Decker said in a news conference in his Capitol office. “This is a big takeover. . . . A lot of us are apprehensive at this point of just slam-dunking anything.”
As for the state superintendent’s powers, Decker said he was reluctant to give a statewide elected official that much authority to intervene in a local school district.

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School Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. not seeking a third term on Madison BOE

via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:

Dear Friends:
This message is to inform you that I will not be seeking re-election for a third term on the Madison School Board, Seat #4.
For six years, it has been my honor to serve our community as an elected member of the Madison Board of Education. Thank you for your confidence in electing me in 2004 and 2007.
During my tenure on the board, I had the pleasure of serving as the President, Vice President, Treasurer and Clerk. I also served on many committees including Long Range Planning, Partnerships, Finance and Operations and currently Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring. Serving in these roles and on these committees gave me a well rounded outlook on the district and helped shape a collective vision that assisted me in my decision making.
In addition to serving within the capacities of the school board, I was able to reach out to our community and listen to their views. With your help, we were able to build a new school to alleviate overcrowding, develop strong partnerships and complete many district maintenance projects. Lastly, being elected to the school board afforded me the opportunity to listen to parents, students and community members and assist them in identifying an appropriate district staff member or service that would help meet their needs.
Despite less than desirable financial constraints, I believe the MMSD’s future is brighter because of the development of a 4 year old kindergarten program, implementation of the district’s new strategic plan and school board members that work in collaboration with each other, the superintendent, the district staff, and its stakeholders. I thank all of my school board colleagues both current and former, for their knowledge, skills and their service.
Although, I leave the Madison School Board, I will continue to be actively involved in our community as a member of organizations such as the 100 Black Men of Madison’s Backpacks for Success event, Sable Flames, Inc. Scholarship Committee and other community groups that help make Madison a better place to live for everyone. I am also the proud parent of a current kindergartener so I will continue to be a proud supporter of the Madison Metropolitan School District and public education for many years to come.
Again, thank you for giving me the honor of serving our community.
Johnny Winston, Jr.

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