Contracts have helped tone down the hyper-sexed dance floor at some campuses, giving students clear guidelines on what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances.
Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft “dance contracts,” binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.
Administrators say the graphic descriptions in the contracts leave little room for arguments over interpretation and put everyone on notice about appropriate behavior.
The prom09contract.pdf, for example, specifies “no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals. No straddling each others’ legs. Both feet on the floor.” Students get two warnings about sexually suggestive behavior before being booted without a refund and barred from other dances.
Indian education system: Crying out for speedy reforms
At a recent India-China book launch, where human resource development minister Kapil Sibal was present, I made it a point to highlight the comparative picture between India and China in the education sector. This is a crucial sector for emerging economies attempting to achieve inclusive and rapid growth. Moreover, as several recent studies have brought out, returns on skill formation and higher education, which are already substantial, continue to rise as the world increasingly takes on the attributes of a knowledge economy. By the way, the book by Mohan Guruswamy and Zorawar Daulet Singh titled Chasing the Dragon is well worth a read for all those interested in finding out the distance we have to cover to catch up with China.
India’s adult literacy is 61 per cent compared with China’s 91 per cent. Expenditure on education as a percentage of total public expenditure is 10.7 per cent and 12.8 per cent, respectively. China has 708 researchers per million population compared with 19 in India. In 1990, publications by Indians in journals were 50 per cent higher but in 2008, Chinese publications outnumbered Indian ones by two to one. In 1985, the number of PhDs in science and engineering in India were 4,007 and 125 in China, but by 2004, China had 14,858 PhDs, while we had increased the number to only 6,318. In 2007, Indians filed 35,000 patents compared with 245,161 in China.
Major changes at 2 troubled D.C. schools
After days of frantic blogging on the latest D.C. schools crisis and trading speculation with interested readers, I find it refreshing to visit three educators who are making major changes in two of the city’s lowest-performing high schools. Unlike me and many of the people I exchange comments with, they know what they are talking about.
George Leonard, 57, chief executive officer of the Friends of Bedford group from New York; Chief Financial Officer Bevon Thompson, 35; and Chief Operating Officer Niaka Gaston, 34, sit around a table in the basement of the District’s Dunbar High School. The school was so dark and filthy when they first saw it that they cringe at the memory.
Dunbar and Coolidge high schools, both educational disaster areas, are under the command of their consulting company. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee handed them the keys to the two schools because of the rigor and high graduation rates they brought to a small public high school, the Bedford Academy, in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Why We’re Failing Math and Science
The problem is well-known: The U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science courses.
What can be done to change that? The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray posed that question to three experts: Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, who was also a member of the Obama administration transition team working on education issues.
Here are edited excerpts of their discussion:
It’s the Teachers
ALAN MURRAY: What will it take to get the American system up to the level of some of the other developed countries in terms of math and science education?
JOEL KLEIN: The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and science. Those countries that are doing best are recruiting their K-12 teachers from the top third of their college graduates. America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third, and when you go into our high-needs communities, we’re clearly underserving them.
MR. MURRAY: How do you explain that? It doesn’t seem to be a function of money. We spend more than any of these other countries.
MR. KLEIN: We spend it irrationally. My favorite example is, I pay teachers, basically, based on length of service and a few courses that they take. And I can’t by contract pay math and science teachers more than I would pay other teachers in the system, even though at different price points I could attract very different people. We’ve got to use the money we have much more wisely, attract talent, reward excellence.
THE INFLUENCE GAME: Bill Gates sways govt dollars
Libby Quaid & Donna Blankinship:
The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.
Now the foundation is taking unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools.
The federal dollars are unprecedented, too.
President Barack Obama persuaded Congress to give him the money as part of the economic stimulus so he could try new ideas to fix an education system that most agree is failing. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation’s approach.
Obama and the Gates Foundation share some goals that not everyone embraces: paying teachers based on student test scores, among other measures of achievement; charter schools that operate independently of local school boards; and a set of common academic standards adopted by every state.
10/26/2009 =, < or > 4/6/2010 in Madison?
How will tonight’s property tax increase vote play out on April 6, 2010? Three Madison School Board seats will be on the ballot that day. The seats are currently occupied by:
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| Beth Moss | Johnny Winston | Maya Cole | |
| Terms | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Regular Board Meetings > 2007 election | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Absent | 4 (14%) | 3 (10.7%) | 3 (10.7%) |
| Interviews: | 2007 Video | 2004 Video (Election info) | 2007 Video |
I emailed Beth, Johnny and Maya recently to see if they plan to seek re-election in the April 6, 2010 election. I will publish any responses received.
What issues might be on voters minds in five months?:
- The District’s $418,415,780 2009/2010 budget [1.1MB PDF] ($412,219,577 2008/2009 and $399,835,904 in 2007/2008) and recent property tax increases (the decline in Wisconsin K-12 spending growth – after years of substantial increases is a factor), but dealing with less is a reality for many citizens.
- Governance, in terms of
- program effectiveness review,
- Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will “Review the content and frequency of report cards”
- the math,
- fine arts,
- talented and gifted task forces
- and the full implementation of “infinite campus“, which should reduce costs and improve services
.
- The term high school redesign appears occasionally along with small learning communities.
- General district and possibly school governance issues may be topical as well.
- National conversations regarding
- Education school rigor (The UW-Madison School of Education has significant influence on our local District),
- teacher tenure
- and Madison’s lack of substantial charter school options
may also be on voter minds.
An Earthquake: Rhode Island School Superintendents Told To Abolish Teacher Seniority
Dropping a bombshell on the teachers’ unions, state Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist ordered school superintendents to abolish the practice of assigning teachers based on how many years they have in the school system.
Gist, who sent a letter to superintendents on Tuesday, is upending tradition and taking on two powerful unions, the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals (RIFT), who together represent 12,000 public school teachers.
On Friday, the unions said they were blindsided by Gist’s announcement, adding that the commissioner made no attempt to confer with labor before going public with the decision.
“We’re going to court,” said Marcia Reback, president of the Federation of Teachers. “I’m startled that there was no conversation with the unions about this. I’m startled there were no public hearings, and I’m startled at the content. This narrows the scope of collective bargaining.”
Gist says she has the authority to do away with seniority under the new Basic Education Plan, which the Rhode Island Board of Regents approved in June and which takes effect July 1.
Makes sense…..
NBC10 has more.
Are Teacher Colleges Turning out Mediocrity?
There has been a mantra of sorts going around education circles over the past few years: “Nothing matters more to a child’s education than good teachers.” Anyone who’s ever had a Ms. Green or a Mr. Miller whom they remember fondly instinctively knows this to be true. And while “Who’s teaching my kid?” is an important question for parents to ask, there may be an equally essential (and rarely remarked upon) question — “Who’s teaching my kid’s teachers?”
On Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Columbia University’s Teachers College, the oldest teacher-training school in the nation, and delivered a speech blasting the education schools that have trained the majority of the 3.2 million teachers working in U.S. public schools today. “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” he said to an audience of teaching students who listened with more curiosity than ire — this was Columbia University after all, and they knew Duncan wasn’t talking to them. It was a damning, but not unprecedented, assessment of teacher colleges, which have long been the stepchildren of the American university system and a frequent target of education reformers’ scorn over the past quarter-century.
DPI Superintendent as the Wisconsin Education Czar?
An effort has been launched in the state Capitol to give the state schools superintendent broader authority to turn around struggling schools and position Wisconsin to better compete for millions of dollars in federal education grants.
Little fanfare has accompanied potential legislative changes that would allow the superintendent of public instruction to order curriculum and personnel changes in chronically failing schools. It didn’t even make the news release for Gov. Jim Doyle’s three-city announcement on Monday of educational changes he is seeking to help Wisconsin qualify for some of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education.
State Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the idea of giving the state superintendent “super-duper powers” has attracted support from legislators and educational interest groups since it first surfaced earlier this month.
“There’s getting to be general agreement around these interventions,” he said.
Prior to any expansion of the Wisconsin DPI’s powers, I’d like to see them implement a usable and rigorous assessment system to replace the oft-criticized WKCE.
Perhaps, this is simply politics chasing new federal tax dollars….
Online Education’s Great Unknowns
Distance learning has broken into the mainstream of higher education. But at the campus level, many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality.
That is what Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, concludes in a study released today in conjunction with the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications.
The study, based on a survey of senior officials at 182 U.S. public and private nonprofit colleges, found that 45 percent of respondents said their institution did not know whether their online programs were making money. Forty-five percent said they had reorganized the management of their online programs in the last two years, with 52 percent anticipating a reshuffling within the next two years. And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.
A look at Yakima, WA School Board Candidates
Two of the five seats on the Yakima School District Board of Directors are up for grabs this election.
Of the four candidates vying for those spots, three have served — or are serving — on the school board. Two are incumbents. Two are retired. One taught in the district for 30 years. Another taught in the district for just over eight.
All of them identify several key issues — making tough budget decisions, implementing the new Measurements of Student Progress and High School Proficiency exams, and coordinating upcoming construction projects, specifically replacing Eisenhower High School, modernizing Davis High School and renovating six other schools.
The construction will be paid for through a 20-year, $114 million bond measure approved by taxpayers in May.
Ruling on Quebec language law gives hope to immigrant parents
Supreme Court strikes down law that has blocked children from attending English-language schools.
For thousands of francophone and immigrant parents in Quebec who want to send their children to English public schools but are barred from the system, a Supreme Court ruling Thursday seemed to offer hope.
“This is really wonderful news, it’s a great decision,” said Virender Singh Jamwal, one of the 25 parents who fought in court for seven years for the right to send their kids to school in English.
But in its attempt to reach a rare compromise in Quebec’s volatile language politics, the court may have managed to prick nationalist sentiment without doing much to protect Mr. Jamwal’s educational preference.
In a 7-0 decision, the court struck down a law known as Bill 104 that, since 2002, has blocked some 8,000 children in Montreal alone from attending English-language schools.
We don’t need this delay on e-textbooks
The benefits of electronic school textbooks are compelling. They cost half as much as ordinary books, are easy to locate and manage, can be quickly kept up to date, are environmentally responsible and do not risk a child’s physical well-being when carried in number in a backpack. Unsurprisingly, school boards and districts the world over are speedily adopting them. But such attributes are not so impressive to a Hong Kong government working group, which after a year of study, has recommended a cautious, go-slow, approach.
Among the group’s key suggestions are launching a three-year “promoting e-learning” pilot scheme in up to 30 of our city’s 1,060 schools and giving a one-off grant to buy resources. The conclusions are at vast odds with those drawn by the governor of the US state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in June launched a digital textbook initiative in the name of cutting costs and keeping learning material fresh and relevant. Students are being given free electronic readers, and publishers pushed to quickly make books available. California is by no means at the cutting edge; there are some Hong Kong schools already using the technology.
Regulating home schooling: An inspector calls
A SCHOOL headmaster once observed that he would regularly consult his prefects on the running of the establishment. When he agreed with them, he would allow their views to prevail. It was only when they disagreed that he had to impose his will. On October 19th the schools secretary, Ed Balls, closed a consultation, the outcome of which he seems to have decided already. Legislation will be introduced to force parents wishing to educate their children at home to register with the state and undergo regular inspections.
Mr Balls says he is worried that children who do not attend school risk being abused by those looking after them. An earlier review by Graham Badman, a former head of children’s services in Kent who is now based at London University’s Institute of Education, found that in some areas a disconcertingly high proportion of home-schooled children were known to social services–ie, cause for concern.
No one is sure how many children in Britain are taught at home. York Consulting, a management outfit, put the figure at 20,000 in 2007. It could actually be more than 50,000, reckons Mike Fortune-Wood, who runs a support service for parents educating their children at home, and the total may be rising by 10% a year.
Schools of Education: Mediocre? Not Us!
All colleges and graduate schools of education must do a better job of preparing future teachers for the classroom, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, said in a speech Thursday. Many leaders of teacher education programs said they agreed with his comments, but it was hard to find any who said they thought his criticisms applied to their institutions.
“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” he told an audience of faculty members, students and teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University. “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change — not evolutionary tinkering.”
Duncan’s speech bore down on the colleges and graduate schools that prepare more than half the teachers in U.S. primary and secondary schools — 60 percent of whom, by one count, entered the classroom feeling unprepared for the challenges that lay ahead — and called on those programs to introduce more in-the-classroom training and better tracking of teacher performance and student outcomes.
Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former dean of Teachers College, said the speech “threw a lifeline to university-based teacher education programs” as more states and school districts are turning to other kinds of teacher certification programs to get bodies to the blackboard.
Michigan Governor Reduces Education Spending by $212M
Gov. Jennifer Granholm today ordered a $212 million additional cut from the state’s public schools, citing worsening tax revenues.
That cut of $127 per pupil comes on top of a $165-per-pupil reduction (which was about a 2.3% cut for most districts) they’ll see under a new, 2009-10 budget for K-12 schools Granholm signed Monday.
“This is not someting I want to be doing at all, but I do want to fix the problem,” she said in a news conference. She said she did it today to give schools time to adjust their budgets.
The order, called a proration notice, takes effect in 30 days unless the Legislature puts more money in the pot. Granholm had said earlier this week that another cut was coming, but the suddenness still caught people off guard.
Schools are squeezed by the state’s economic crunch. Sales tax revenue, which continues to come in below the projections of state economists, are a major source of school funding. About 70% of funding for the state’s 552 school districts and 232 public school academies comes from the state in the form of sales and property tax collections with a lesser amount from the state’s general fund.
Seattle School Board candidates talk about equity
This election season, with so much money pouring into the King County executive race and the media attention given to the Seattle mayor’s race, School Board races have received far fewer eyes.
But with a new student assignment plan, Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s five-year strategic plan starting to take off and a $34 million budget gap, this election is as important as ever for the board.
District 5
In the District 5 race, Seattleites have the choice between Mary Bass, an eight-year board member known as the dissenting voice on the board and Kay Smith-Blum, a businesswoman and fundraiser with big ideas that could be challenging to implement.
Smith-Blum won the primary with 42 percent of the vote; Bass got nearly 36 percent. Smith-Blum has raised five times as much money: $52,000 compared to Bass’ $10,000.
Bass, who unsuccessfully fought the reform math curriculum that was passed 4-3 in this year, said she is “proud of my long track record of fighting failures.” Her battles include the $34 million budget collapse when she recently joined the council in 2002 and fighting the race tiebreaker, she said.
Smith-Blum appears to have energy, a knack for fundraising and passion for both early education and extending the school day with more cultural and arts programs. She said she established the first-ever Annual Fund for Montlake Elementary in 1991, helping raise $300,000 in five years.
Mississippi Task force to take on hot-button school district consolidation issue
A task force formed by the Legislature to improve underperforming schools has decided to take on the touchy subject of school district consolidation.
During a recent hearing of the task force, the story was told of an agency in the 1980s that had advocated Mississippi’s 152 school districts be consolidated into 82, basically along county lines. The task force was told, perhaps jokingly, that the agency was eliminated by the Legislature the next session.
Senate Education Chair Videt Carmichael, R-Meridian, the co-chair of the task force, responded, also perhaps jokingly, “I think I might disappear if consolidation happened in some of my school districts.”
For years, an array of groups has touted the virtue of school consolidation as a way to save money and increase efficiency in the public schools. The only problem has been finding agreement on how to do it.
“It’s been my observation everybody wants to consolidate everybody else’s district, but not their own,” said House Education Committee Chair Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, the other co-chair of the task force.
Tennessee’s Education Reform Plan
A statewide education reform commission headed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist issued its final recommendations today, with a goal of moving Tennessee to the top of the Southern states in K-12 education.
Search report cards
“The very simple goal is to make Tennessee – us, our kids – the best in the South in five years,” Frist said at a State Capitol event unveiling the report. “It’s a challenging, ambitious goal but it can be done.”
The recommendations of the bipartisan “State Collaborative on Reforming Education,” or SCORE, which Frist established early this year, includes 60 specific recommendations that revolve around four key “strategies:”
** Embracing the higher graduation standards that are about to go into effect as part of the Tennessee Diploma Project that aims at both raising standards and graduating more students. There has been some fear that when the impact of the more rigorous standards are felt, there will be political pressure on legislators to scale them back.
** Cultivating stronger school leaders, including superintendents and teachers.
Final Report: 2.4MB PDF.
Test scores should be traced to ed schools, Duncan says
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this morning for states to link student test data not only back to teachers, but also to the programs that trained them. New York State education officials said they are already working on it.
Speaking to a packed auditorium at Columbia University, Duncan criticized education schools for failing to graduate classroom-ready teachers. He said there needs to be a way to determine which programs are working.
“It’s a simple but obvious idea,” Duncan said. “Colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. The power of competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for programs stuck in the past.”
Duncan said he will use the competitive stimulus package funds known as the “Race to the Top” program to pressure states to use student data to evaluate teacher preparation programs.
US Education Secretary Arne Duncans Education School Accountability Speech
What the coverage leaves out is that Duncan won’t be anywhere near the first to tout the importance of teaching or lament the sad state of teacher prep programs. Or the first to mention Alverno, Emporia State, residency programs, the Levine report.
In addition, there are precious few real details in Duncan’s speech about what if any means the Secretary is going to try and use to make ed schools change their evil ways. He mentions changes will come as part of NCLB reauthorization, but that’s a long way off. He mentions teacher quality partnership grants, but that’s less than $200M. No bold specifics like rating ed schools based on graduates’ performance or longevity, or limiting Pell grant eligibility to ed schools that meet certain performance characteristics.
To Duncan’s credit, he notes that this is a quality problem, not a teacher shortage, and that alt cert programs train fewer than 10K candidates a year (out of 200K overall).But it’s just a speech. A very nice, somewhat long, quote-laden speech that someone finally sent me this morning. In other words, in thiss balloon-boy era, it’s news! The text of the speech is below. See for yourself.
Secretary Duncan singles out Wisconsin-based Alverno College (among other institutions) and the state of Louisiana for praise. I also discuss both Alverno College and Louisiana’s teacher preparation accountability system in my policy brief.
“By almost any standard, many, if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,” Duncan said today in a speech at Columbia University in New York.
Duncan said hundreds of teachers have told him their colleges didn’t provide enough hands-on classroom training or instruct them in the use of data to improve student learning. He also cited a 2006 report by Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia’s Teachers College, in which 61 percent of educators surveyed said their colleges didn’t offer enough instruction to prepare them for the classroom.
The nation’s 95,000 public schools will have to hire as many as 1 million educators in the next five years as teachers and principals from the so-called baby-boom generation retire, according to Education Department projections. More than half of the new teachers will have been trained at education colleges, Duncan said.
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for the reform of college programs that educate
teachers, Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen said that Duncan must back up his rhetoric with strong provisions regarding teacher quality at the federal level. Allen recently released guidance to the federal government urging tough regulations on federal funds used for state teacher quality efforts.
In response to Duncan’s speech today at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Allen praised the Education Secretary’s demand for revolutionary changes to the way that colleges of education prepare educators, saying that his remarks should serve as a wake up call to teacher unions, education bureaucrats, and entrenched special interests who would block data-driven performance reviews of teachers in an effort to monitor teacher quality throughout their careers.
Ripon School District Administrator Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
San Francisco Schools Lunch Money Cut off, Rules Broken
Since April, the school district has had to pony up the $1.5 million monthly cost of the lunch program for low-income students after state inspectors on a surprise visit found violations they deemed so serious and recurring that they cut off the flow of federal reimbursements.
The violations had nothing to do with the quality of food being served, but stem from the school district’s inability to follow bureaucratic rules governing the federally subsidized National School Lunch Program, which is administered by the state.
To ensure no child goes without a lunch, the district, meanwhile, has spent more than $11 million, money it will get back once city schools show they can follow the rules – something district officials have been working on since the inspection.
Mayor Bing urges Detroiters to support $500M school bond proposal
Mayor Dave Bing called on Detroiters to support Proposal S, the $500 million school bond proposal that he said will bring jobs and life into city neighborhoods.
Flanked by Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, Bing said Detroit children deserve modern school buildings and the city can’t pass by the opportunity to take advantage of one-time federal stimulus dollars to borrow money at zero- and low-interest rates for school construction and renovation.
“This is real shot in the arm for the city of Detroit and for the children of the city of Detroit,” Bing said.
Hawaii schools to move to four-day week in state cost-cutting measure
Thousands of working parents in Hawaii are scrambling to make childcare arrangements ahead of the closure on Friday of all public schools, in a bid by the state’s education authorities to cut costs.
All 256 of Hawaii’s public schools will be closed in the first of 17 “furlough Fridays” that will see a drastic cut in school time for up to 171,000 children. The reduction of the school week from five to four days will last for at least the next two years.
The furloughs are the most draconian measure yet taken in the US, where the recession has forced many states to slash public services. At least 25 states have forced teachers to take unpaid days off, but most of the cuts have fallen on holidays or on preparation days rather than on actual school days.
Students Aren’t Learning Math. Can NCLB Help?
New statistics show that U.S. students are struggling to learn basic math. The 2009 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math, a test given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide, were released this week. Although average overall scores have doubled since the NAEP was introduced in 1990, results have completely flat-lined among fourth-graders, and the achievement gap between white and black students isn’t narrowing.
The New York Times notes that such trends could be linked to the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002:
Duncan to ed schools: End ‘mediocre’ training
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation’s schools of education of doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”
My colleague Nick Anderson, on the national education beat, and I found the advance text a meaty read.
Duncan’s speech, to be delivered at Columbia University, goes further than any other I can remember from an education secretary in ripping into the failure of education schools to ready teachers for the challenges of the day, particularly the demand for academic growth in all students.
Duncan’s speech points out two major deficiencies in education school teaching with which most critics would agree: They do a bad job teaching students how to manage disruptive classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and they don’t offer much in the way of training new teachers how to use data to improve their classroom results.
The excerpts of the speech we were given, however, did not appear to address one part of the classroom management problem that is often raised when successful teachers explain how they learned to keep students in order. These teachers often say they learned by doing, by facing a class alone without help, trying one thing after another until something worked for them. Education school deans have been critical of the Teach for America program, which pushes recent college graduates into classrooms with only a few weeks training, but teachers who have survived that toss-them-into-the-water approach say it works better than class management classes at their teacher’s colleges.
Locally, the UW-Madison School of Education has been involved in many Madison School District initiatives.
Maryland Governor O’Malley urges School Superintendents to cut costs
Nelson Hernandez & John Wagner:
With Maryland facing a $2 billion budget shortfall next year, Gov. Martin O’Malley warned the chiefs of the state’s school systems Tuesday of hard times ahead, and the Senate president told them that they were “going to have to start taking a portion of the hit.”
Speaking in Annapolis to a gathering of the Public School Superintendents Association of Maryland, O’Malley (D) urged the heads of the county’s 24 school jurisdictions to find ways to save money but maintain the quality that earned the state a No. 1 ranking in a national survey by the Education Week trade newspaper.
O’Malley’s cost-saving suggestions included creating a school building design that could be used across the state, buying furniture from the state prison industry and installing solar panels on roofs to generate energy.
But he offered few specifics about what cuts the superintendents might expect in state funding even as he repeatedly stressed the challenge of chopping $2 billion from a $13 billion budget.
Memphis City Schools lines up donations worth $1.4 million for Merit Pay
Memphis City Schools has signed short-term contracts worth $1.4 million with several consultants, including a local public relations agency, as the district moves toward merit pay for teachers and getting rid of those who miss the mark.
Supt. Kriner Cash quickly raised the capital from donors, including the Hyde Family Foundations, so work could begin Oct. 1.
The PR firm CS, on Union Avenue, got a $152,000 contract through June 30. The agency’s main job will be communicating with teachers, making sure the district’s message is clear and consistent, potentially warding off union strife.
The contracts are a prelude to a seven-year teacher improvement plan the district hopes to accomplish with nearly $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates will announce the winners of its national grants in early November. Memphis is one of five finalists.
Cash does not want to wait, saying Tuesday that “a lull in work like this can become the devil’s playground.
Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today
Jean Johnson, Andrew Yarrow, Jonathan Rochkind and Amber Ott:
Two out of five of America’s 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.
The nationwide study, “Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today,” whose results are being reported here for the first time, offers a comprehensive and nuanced look at how teachers differ in their perspectives on their profession, why they entered teaching, the atmosphere and leadership in their schools, the problems they face, their students and student outcomes, and ideas for reform. Taking a closer look at the nation’s teacher corps based on educators’ attitudes and motivations for teaching provides some notable implications for how to identify, retain, and support the most effective teachers, according to the researchers.
This portrait of American teachers, completed in time for the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, presents a new means for appraising the state of the profession at a time when school reform, approaches to teaching, and student achievement remain high on the nation’s agenda. It also comes as billions of economic-stimulus dollars pour into America’s schools focused on ensuring that effective teachers are distributed among all schools, and Congress will have to consider reauthorization or modification of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act., the nearly 8-year-old latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Washington, DC School Vouchers Have a Brighter Outlook in Congress
The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.
Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
At a congressional hearing last month, Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and vocal critic of the program who heads the subcommittee that controls its funding, said he was open to supporting its continuation if certain changes were made. They include requiring voucher recipients to take the same achievement tests as public-school students.
The senator’s comments were a “really positive sign,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that supports vouchers and charter schools — public schools that can bypass many regulations that govern their traditional counterparts. “It’s clear the momentum is coming our way,” added Kevin Chavous, a former Washington city councilman who has appeared in television ads supporting the voucher plan, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Task force to develop Kentucky education strategy
In a move he says is meant to re-energize support for public education, Gov. Steve Beshear announced Monday the creation of a task force charged with developing a unified vision of what Kentucky schools need to offer to better prepare students for the 21st century.
“Our world has changed dramatically since the reforms of 1990,” Beshear said, during a press conference at Louisville Male High School, where he discussed the Transforming Education in Kentucky initiative. “We must now turn our focus to the future and again to our schools to ensure that our strategies and programs are designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”
Not all embraced Beshear’s task force, which is suppose to spend the next year developing recommendations on how to improve education in the state.
In a letter to the governor, Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said he believed the task force “is duplicative” of education efforts already underway.
“I respectfully submit that it is past time for your administration to move beyond discussion and to immediate action,” Williams said, noting that topics on the task force’s agenda are already being discussed by legislative committees or have been the subject of legislative bills. “…These issues cannot be put off another year.”
A lesson in school lunch
“Eat the taco salad. It’s good.”
The reassuring comment came from a crowd of seventh-grade boys at Velma Hamilton Middle School as I prepared to eat my first school lunch in more than 40 years.
They politely made room for me at the front of a line that circled the cafeteria/multipurpose room, nodding enthusiastically as I took the salad. As a former food writer and restaurant critic newly returned to covering topics about children and education, I wanted to experience firsthand school lunches at Madison’s elementary, middle and high schools. Madison, like communities across the nation, is re-evaluating school meals with an eye toward making them more nutritious and appealing.
The taco salad featured finely shredded lettuce, providing a reasonably crisp bed for a mound of mildly seasoned ground beef; a dab of sour cream, a small plastic container of salsa and a small package of salty, tortilla chips completed the spread. It was the most popular purchased lunch option that day, although a majority of Hamilton’s sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders appeared to have brought their own lunches. With a half-pint of milk, the meal cost $3.30 (adult full-price middle school lunch). I’d probably give it a grade of C+ or B-.
School District Strategic Planning: How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out On Top
Via a kind reader’s email [9.5MB PDF]:
The experiences of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most:
- getting the right people to become teachers,
- developing them into effective instructors, and
- ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible education for every child.
Obama aide defends education stimulus plan
President Barack Obama’s top education aide said Friday that now is educators’ “moment to shine” thanks to an unprecedented federal investment in school reform contained in February’s economic stimulus package.
Speaking to a convention of state school board members from throughout the country at the Hyatt Regency, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he has more money than all his predecessors combined to encourage fundamental changes to American schools.
“If something’s working at two schools, and they want to take it to 10, this is the opportunity,” Duncan said. “This is the time to think big, and wherever resources have been the constraint, we’re trying to fundamentally break through.”
Washington, DC Unions Want Probe Of Layoffs by Rhee
Union leaders asked the D.C. Council on Friday for an investigation into the layoffs of 266 teachers and staff members, including an independent audit of the school system’s decision to hire 934 educators this spring and summer.
Officials of unions representing teachers, principals and other public school personnel assailed the Oct. 2 dismissals as an attempt by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to winnow veteran instructors from the system. They said the 934 hires were far in excess of what was necessary to fill job openings and were used to create a budget crisis to justify the firings.
“There seems to be an attitude in this administration that it doesn’t care about breaking the rules,” said Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker.
Rhee has said that the layoffs were necessary to help address a $43.9 million shortfall in the 2010 public school budget. The gap was created in part, Rhee has said, by the council’s decision to cut $20.7 million at the end of July because of declining revenue projections.
Teachers’ unions uneasy with Obama
A skirmish between powerful teachers’ unions and President Barack Obama over nearly $5 billion in education spending is shaping up as a preview of the battle to come over No Child Left Behind in Congress early next year.
But the tables are turned: now the unions are worried that Obama, a Democratic ally, is going to be just as tough on them as President George W. Bush, a longtime foe.
The dispute adds teachers’ unions to a growing list of key Democratic constituencies that have been frustrated by Obama’s lunges toward the political middle, along with gay-rights activists upset Obama won’t lift the ban on gays in the military, and Latino officials who say Obama is slow-walking immigration reform.
So far, both the unions and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have tried to avoid a full-on collision, and the unions are showing new flexibility in accepting previously unheard-of moves like stricter teacher evaluations.
But they’re also making it clear they’ll only go so far with Obama, who was booed at two teachers’ union conventions when he was a candidate.
Stimulus money could open door to keeping kids in school longer, Nerad says
If the State of Wisconsin wins federal stimulus dollars to help local districts lengthen their school days or their school year, Madison could be open to keeping kids in school for more learning time, according to Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad.
Nerad’s comments followed an announcement Monday by Gov. Jim Doyle, who promoted the idea of longer school days when laying out a plan for the state’s application for a piece of $4.5 billion in federal education stimulus dollars known as “Race to the Top” funds.
Governors and educators across the country are waiting for the U.S. Department of Education to release “Race to the Top” guidelines this fall. States will then be on a fast track to apply for funds, said Doyle, whose other priorities for Wisconsin include overhauling student testing, making student test scores a factor in teacher evaluations, creating new data systems to track student and teacher performance, and changing the state aid funding formula so districts have more flexibility under caps limiting how many tax dollars they can collect.
“What I’m laying out today are the directions we’re taking in this application,” Doyle said. Teams from the governor’s office and the state Department of Instruction are working on the plans, but haven’t yet calculated how many dollars Wisconsin will request, he said.
I hope the local school district does not use these short term, borrowed funds for operating expenses….
Patrick Marley has more:
Gov. Jim Doyle said Monday the state must give control of Milwaukee schools to the mayor to put in a “good faith” application for federal economic stimulus funds.
He and state school Superintendent Tony Evers also said the state should tie teacher pay to student performance and give districts incentives to lengthen the school day or school year, particularly for students who need extra help.
Doyle said the education reforms he and Evers are advocating would require the steady push only a mayor can provide. Otherwise, school policy could “vacillate from year to year” with changes on the School Board, he said.
$2.3 million in federal stimulus money is going to pay for Tampa Bay area beauty school tuition
More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants have gone to eight Tampa Bay area cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow.
That’s swell news for those who see the beauty trades as a way to gain a firmer footing in the job market. But is there truly demand for more beauty school graduates at bay area salons?
Not really, said Monica Ponce, owner of Muse The Salon in Tampa.
“Instead of encouraging more people to go to beauty schools,” Ponce said, “they should probably help the stylists who are unemployed.”
Some area salons are hiring in this economy, but even industry lobbyists say beauty school is rarely a ticket to a thriving career.
Only 1 to 2 percent of beauty school graduates will be working in the field five years from graduation, said Bonnie Poole, treasurer of the Florida Cosmetology Association.
Arts Education and Graduation Rates
In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city’s Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.
In some classrooms, books are a thing of the past
The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.
A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation in her notebook before clicking on a multiple-choice answer on her screen.
Their teacher at Agoura High School, Russell Stephans, sits at the back of the room, watching as scores pop up in real time on his computer grade sheet. One student has passed a level, the data shows; another is retaking a quiz.
“Whoever thought this up makes life so much easier,” Stephans says with a chuckle.
Fairfax County Schools Propoze Second Year Wage Freeze due to Reduced Revenues in its $2,200,000,00 Budget; Where is Madison’s 2009/2010 Final Budget?
The Fairfax County School Board is bracing for the most dramatic reduction in services in more than 20 years as it attempts to bridge a projected $176 million budget shortfall with cuts that could extend to closing schools, increasing class size, ending summer school, discontinuing most full-day kindergarten classes and eliminating foreign language instruction in elementary schools.
Superintendent Jack D. Dale will not present a formal budget proposal until January, but school officials are releasing a list of potential cuts because they want to give the public the earliest possible look at the severity of this year’s deficit. “What we are trying to get people to understand is, you are all at risk this time,” said board member Jane K. Strauss (Dranesville), the budget chairwoman.
Board members say that classrooms are already strained from adjustments made over the past two years, including consecutive increases in class sizes.
The current budget is $18 million less than last year’s, and the school system has grown by about 5,000 students. Federal stimulus money helped offset even deeper cuts, but the school board still eliminated nearly 800 positions and reduced many program budgets.
This year, programs will probably be discontinued, said school board chairman Kathy L. Smith (Sully). “There is no trimming around the edges anymore,” she said.
In Fairfax, the projected $176 million shortfall assumes 2,000 new students, no increase in county funding and no pay increase for teachers or other staff. If approved, it would mean a second year of salary freezes.
Related:
- Fairfax County Public Schools Budget Documents.
- 9/25/2009: Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will “Review the content and frequency of report cards”
- Fairfax County Schools Approved 2009-2010 Approved Budget [8.9MB PDF]
It will be interesting to see the Madison School District’s “final” 2009/2010 budget, which will be reviewed and voted on by the local school board soon. The budget has, in the past, increased as the year progresses. The 2007/8 budget was $339,685,844; 2008/9 was $368,012,286, and the 2009/10 preliminary budget was 367,912,077, according to the MMSD “Financials” PDF Document).
Stillwater, MN 9th Grade AP Geology students use new technology to map data
Brady Tynen needed to find out which states have the largest concentrations of people with mixed American Indian-African American ancestry. The Stillwater Junior High ninth-grader could have pored through the U.S. Census database, noted the appropriate percentage, ranked the states in a list and tried to divine some trend.
Then again, his geography class is just 50 minutes long, and Tynen needed to repeat Wednesday’s exercise two more times for different groups.
Thankfully, the Census website can show the information on a map with the press of a few buttons. In mere minutes, Tynen could tell that the group he was looking at is concentrated in the eastern U.S., particularly southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia.
“Maps are a good way to find out all sorts of things,” he said. “It’d be kind of hard if you didn’t have a map because maps organize your data.”
The exercise gave students in Sara Damon’s ninth-grade Advanced Placement geography class a taste of a technology called geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is simply technology that merges data with maps. Something as basic as Google Maps can be considered GIS because it links a map to data, in that case street addresses.
Stillwater high school offers 17 Advanced Placement classes, according to the AP Course Audit Website.
Tests don’t always offer right answers
Politicians and pundits are using results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests to say our kids are falling behind the rest of the world, so maybe we should get some PISA practice. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, a member of the U.S. advisory board to PISA, offered this sample question for 15-year-olds from the mathematics literacy section of the exam:
For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100m by 50m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?
Class size, student background and schools’ funding appear to be less critical than has long been believed.
For years, schools and students have been judged on raw standardized test scores. Experts say this approach is flawed because they tend to reflect socioeconomic levels more than learning.
The “value-added” approach attempts to level the playing field by focusing on growth rather than achievement. Using a statistical analysis of test scores, it tracks an individual student’s improvement year to year, and uses that progress to estimate the effectiveness of teachers, principals and schools.
Academics have also used the approach to test many assumptions about what matters in schools. Scholars are still puzzling over what makes for a great teacher or school, but their results challenge orthodox assumptions like these:
All teachers are equal. For decades, schools have treated teachers like interchangeable parts. Value-added results suggest there are sharp differences in teachers’ effectiveness.
United Teachers Los Angeles: Absent from reform
t’s easy to see why United Teachers Los Angeles doesn’t like the new Public School Choice policy at L.A. Unified, which allows outside groups to apply to take over about 250 new or underperforming schools. Those groups are likely to include a large number of charter school operators that would hire their own teachers rather than sign a contract with the teachers union.
What’s less understandable is why UTLA would minimize its chances of keeping some of the schools within the district, along with their union jobs. Yet that’s what appears to be happening. A rift has developed within the union’s leadership over whether to allow more so-called pilot schools, and if so, how many and under what conditions. Pilot schools are similar to charter schools, except that they remain within L.A. Unified, staffed by the district’s union employees. The staff is given more independence to make instructional and budgeting decisions in exchange for greater accountability and “thin contracts,” which contain fewer of the prescriptive work rules that can stultify progress.
Related: A Wisconsin State Journal Editorial on Madison’s lack of charter school opportunities.
Pack children off to school as soon as you can
No one could argue that the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest report on primary schools for over 40 years, isn’t a weighty-looking document. Six years to complete, 600 pages long, one of its main arguments is that British children are starting school far too early, around the four-year mark.
Terrible, cries the report. In the manner of most European countries, children should be starting school at around six years old, in Finland’s case, seven. Thereby enabling Britain to catch up in terms of child literacy, numeracy, and well-being. All of which sounds extremely exciting for British education. What a shame they forgot to factor in British parents.
Even today, when there is a report like this, we seem automatically to revert to a template of idealised British family life, circa 1955 (Mummy in her pinny, happily baking jam tarts; Daddy arriving home with his brolly) that has no bearing on modern reality.
Exchange the 1950s fantasy for parents who both have to work, and have other children to sort out. Parents, who already have to pick up, clean up, organise, and juggle, to the point where they feel as though they are trapped within a slow-motion nervous breakdown. And this is the middle class, relatively do-able, version. Into this engorged ready-to-blow scenario they want to introduce the concept of up to two to three years less primary schooling? Are they insane?
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: US State & Local Sales Tax Rates
The Tax Foundation has released Updated Combined State and Local Sales Tax Rates. Here are the ten states with the highest and lowest rates:
Milwaukee Vincent High School to start daily metal detector checks
Students entering Vincent High School will be subjected to a metal detector on a daily basis in the wake of widespread fighting at the school, Milwaukee Public Schools officials said Friday.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos confirmed Friday that Matthew Boswell, principal of Northwest Secondary School, has been appointed Vincent principal, replacing Alvin Baldwin, who is being reassigned to an elementary school.
Andrekopoulos also said two additional support staff members would be brought to Vincent to aid the administration. Three of the four assistant principals at the school also have been replaced, according to MPS officials.
Andrekopoulos said he was moved to make leadership changes after a visit to Vincent this week. He said he was struck in particular when he observed the presence of 17 adults supervising the cafeteria and not one of them was talking with students.
“I want to make sure we build a positive climate” at the school, he said.
Andrekopoulos spoke at a news conference Friday at district offices, capping off a volatile week at Vincent that began with a spate of fights and ended with some 100 students on suspension. He said eight of those students were suspected of behavior so serious that they’d be given a hearing at MPS’ central office.
Let’s help teachers solve bullying problem at schools
It was three years ago that 15-year-old Eric Hainstock entered Weston High School with a 22-caliber pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun.
Within a few short minutes, Principal John Klang confronted Hainstock, trying to protect his school’s students and staff.
After a brief struggle, Klang was shot three times. He died later that day.
Debate continues on exactly what Hainstock intended to do – get the school’s attention for the help he needed, or execute a fatalistic death wish for himself and his school.
What is clear is Hainstock had been bullied.
He was bullied by his father who, he says, treated him like a slave and refused to let him wash. At school and after school, he claimed he was bullied by as many as 30 of his fellow classmates. He says he snapped.
Dumbing down education weakens U.S.
As if NAFTA’s dismantling of America’s manufacturing base and corporate destruction of the middle class isn’t enough to challenge the needs of the country’s national security, now we have a systematic assault on the nation’s educational system.
In Michigan, it is the dumbing down of needed math standards to compete globally; at the national level, it is the drying up of funds used to harness the talent of young people who cannot afford an elitist entitlement system that’s cost-prohibitive for many.
The common thread of lost manufacturing jobs, a dying middle class and an impaired educational system that promotes inferior curriculum and economic exclusion all serve to undermine the well-being and national security of the country in ways that hostile external elements could never match. The hypocrisy of weakening America while extolling patriotism is a calculated deviousness that, for the sake of the country and the working class, must be challenged.
Cross Purposes
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.
At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word “personal statements,” which have become known as “college essays,” and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.
History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.
Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing? College professors want students to be able to write serious research papers when they are assigned in their history, economics, political science, etc., classes, but that is not the message that is going out to high school applicants from the college admissions offices.
Most of the attention, if not all, in the college counseling offices at the secondary level is on what it will take to gain students admission to colleges, not on whether, for example, they have the academic knowledge and skills to graduate from college. That is someone else’s concern. Recently the Gates Foundation has taken up the challenge of trying to find out why students drop out of community colleges in such large numbers.
Value Added Teacher Assessment
Terry Grier, former superintendent of San Diego schools, encountered union opposition when he tried to use the novel method. His fight offers a peek at a brewing national debate.
When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name — “value-added” — sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn’t in the nation’s classrooms.
It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil’s academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the San Diego district’s poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson proposes 1.5% education cuts; no tax increases
Gov. Bill Richardson released his budget counterproposal on Saturday afternoon, just as the Senate was discussing the constitutionality of his proclamation convening the special session. Richardson’s proposal contains 1.5 percent cuts to education–as long as those cuts don’t affect classrooms.
Richardson said he wouldn’t consider tax increases during the special session, but that he would consider a tax revenue package during the regular session in January.
“I have made adjustments to my original budget proposal to reflect our new budget realities,” Richardson said in his statement. “… I have made it very clear to legislators that any cuts to education must be minimal and not affect our classrooms, kids and teachers.”
New Orleans educator could force big changes at MPS
Alan Coulter is working on a short list of goals for students in Milwaukee Public Schools:
A very large majority of them should get good, professional and prompt help learning reading, especially if they’re struggling.
The same with math.
The same with behavior problems – good, professional and prompt responses for those acting out too often, getting suspended too often, disrupting classes and so on.
Think about what the impact would be if those goals were met.
Coulter is holding a lever that may make a lot of that happen in the next several years. A nationally recognized expert in special education and a professor at the Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans, he now carries the title of “independent expert” for implementation of a court order dealing with special education services in MPS.
That means he’s the lead figure in making MPS change on some crucial fronts because the court order goes well beyond special education to the overall way Milwaukee schools deal with students who aren’t on grade level or who are misbehaving frequently. With the backing of the state Department of Public Instruction and the court, Coulter and Alisia Moutry, a former MPS official who is his on-the-ground staff person in Milwaukee, carry a lot of weight now.
Obama Wins a Battle as the New Haven Teachers’ Union “Shows Flexibility”
A showdown between the White House and the powerful teachers’ unions looks, for the moment, a little less likely.
This week in New Haven, Conn., the local teachers union agreed, in a 21-1 vote, to changes widely resisted by unions elsewhere, including tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as the unions, said the New Haven contract could be repeated in other school districts.
Kim Torello, left, and Karen Lavorgna, teachers in New Haven, Conn., discuss the contract that was ratified by their union this week. Terms included tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections.
“I rarely say that something is a model or a template for something else, but this is both,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who helped broker the New Haven deal.
“This shows a willingness to go into areas that used to be seen as untouchable,” Mr. Duncan said.
His cause for optimism is this: If teachers’ unions start showing flexibility in other cities, the administration’s high-stakes push to boost graduation rates and improve test scores at public schools could get a lot easier. That might even spare the administration an unwanted fight with a labor force that gave Mr. Obama a big lift in his election.
Maine’s School District Consolidation Law
For more than two years, school district consolidation has been a contentious issue in Maine.
Opponents argue that it has been an ill-conceived, hastily put together and poorly implemented law that has not achieved its goals. Proponents maintain that it represents much-needed reform and is an effective step toward reducing the cost of education in Maine. Question 3 on the Nov. 3 ballot gives voters a chance to weigh those opposing views and decide whether to repeal the law. The question asks: “Do you want to repeal the 2007 law on school district consolidation and restore the laws previously in effect?”
The law, enacted in 2007, attempted to reduce the number of school districts in Maine from 290 to 80, but as of July 2009, there were still 218 districts remaining in the state.
Voters in more than 100 districts, largely in rural areas, rejected reorganization plans despite the penalty they faced through the loss of state education subsidies.
Truancy costs us all
When Michael was in kindergarten, he missed more than 80 days of school. He was not ill and no one from Michael’s family ever called to say why he was not attending school.
When I was elected district attorney, I learned that 5,500 students in San Francisco were habitually truant and – shockingly – 44 percent of the truant students were in elementary school. That is when I partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to combat school truancy. At the time, many asked why the city’s chief prosecutor was concerned with the problem of school attendance. The answer was simple, and as our partnership now enters its fourth year, the reason remains the same: a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.
Despite his young age, Michael’s truancy makes him far more likely to be arrested or fall victim to a crime later in life. In San Francisco, over 94 percent of all homicide victims under the age of 25 are high school dropouts. Statewide, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts.
Broward Teachers Union Says School District Officials Kept Scores of Emails From School Board Members
The Broward Teachers Union accused the school district Thursday of blocking hundreds of e-mails sent by school employees to School Board members since March — without board members’ knowledge.
The union says e-mails about teacher raises, use of federal stimulus money and employee contract negotiations never made it to board members’ in-boxes — or to their junk e-mail folders. Instead, they were filed away on a server and never read.
BTU lawyers sent Board Chairwoman Maureen Dinnen and board attorney Edward Marko a letter Thursday asking the district to stop blocking e-mails and threatening to sue if they don’t do so by Oct. 26.
The letter argues blocking e-mails violates the sender’s and the receiver’s constitutional rights under U.S. and Florida laws.
Superintendent Jim Notter said district attorneys were reviewing BTU’s letter. He questioned its timing, with the district in the throes of negotiating a contract with the union. BTU has asked for an average 4 percent pay increase. The district isn’t offering any raise, but has offered to pick up the difference in employee health insurance.
“Unfortunately we’re back in a position where it’s adversarial,” Notter said.
Advocating Charter Schools in Madison
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial, via a kind reader:
Charter schools have no bigger fan than President Barack Obama.
The federal government gave Wisconsin $86 million on Thursday to help launch and sustain more charter schools across the state.
State schools chief Tony Evers said $5 million will go to two dozen school districts this year, with the rest of the money distributed over five years.
Madison, to no surprise, wasn’t on Thursday’s winner list. And don’t expect any of the $86 million for planning and implementing new strategies for public education to be heading Madison’s way.
That’s because the Madison School Board continues to resist Obama’s call for more charter schools. The latest evidence is the School Board’s refusal to even mention the words “charter school” in its strategic action plans.
In sharp contrast, Obama can hardly say a word about public education without touting charters as key to sparking innovation and engaging disadvantaged students.
Obama visited a New Orleans charter school Thursday (and raised money that evening in San Francisco at a $34K per couple dinner) and is preparing to shower billions on states to experiment with new educational strategies. But states that limit charter growth will not be eligible for the money.
I am in favor of a diffused governance model here. I think improvement is more likely via smaller organizations (charters, magnets, whatever). The failed Madison Studio School initiative illustrates the challenges that lie ahead.
Merit-Based Pay Cuts for Academics?
George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has an interesting post advocating merit-based pay cuts for academics:
Many universities now have pay freezes or even nominal pay cuts. Under the circumstances, several professors have told me that there’s little point in doing faculty evaluations. If there’s zero – or negative – money for raises, why bother saying who’s doing well and who’s not?
It amazes me how much these remarks take for granted. Suppose a department is 5% over-budget. It may be obvious that it needs to cut total compensation by 5%, but it isn’t obvious that any particular professor’s salary needs to be cut by 5%. If raises can depend on performance, so can cuts! If a chairman normally gives a 0% raise to his worst performer, and a 5% raise to his best performer, why not respond to fiscal austerity by simply changing the range from -7.5% to -.2.5%?I agree with Bryan’s argument, though I suspect many of my fellow academics won’t. One possible objection is that the criteria for evaluating “merit” in academia are too subjective. But academic departments already have merit criteria for making hiring and promotion decisions. If our criteria are good enough to decide whether or not someone deserves to be hired or offered lifelong employment, they should be good enough to make much less consequential judgments on whether a given scholar should get a 3% pay cut as opposed to 1%. A department that lacks good criteria for evaluating merit ought to get some pronto – whether it intends to base pay cuts on them or not.
Generation of pupils being put off school, report says
Richard Garner, via a kind reader’s email:
A devastating attack on what is taught in primary schools is delivered today by the biggest inquiry into the sector for more than 40 years.
Too much stress is being placed on the three Rs, imposing a curriculum on primary school pupils that is “even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools”, it says. The inquiry is recommending sweeping changes to stop children being left disenchanted by schooling at an early age.
Children should not start formal schooling until the age of six – in line with other European countries – the 600-page report on the future of primary education recommends. It was produced by a team directed by Robin Alexander of Cambridge University.
Tests for 11-year-olds and league tables based on them should be scrapped, and instead children should be assessed in every subject they take at 11.
The report is heavily critical of successive Conservative and Labour governments for dictating to teachers how they should do their jobs. Professor Alexander cites “more than one” Labour education secretary saying that primary schools should be teaching children to “read, write and add up properly” – leaving the rest of education to secondary schools. “It is not good enough to say we want high standards in the basics but we just have to take our chance with the rest,” said Professor Alexander.
The Democrat Party and the Schools
The Democratic Party has battled for universal health care this year, and over the decades it has admirably led the fight against poverty — except in the one way that would have the greatest impact.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.
President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that — and one test for the Democrats will be whether they embrace administration reforms that teachers’ unions are already sniping at.
It’s difficult to improve failing schools when you can’t create alternatives such as charter schools and can’t remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence — so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called “rubber rooms.”
A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards. The teacher claimed that she was being punished for union activity, but an independent observer approved by the union confirmed the allegations and declared the teacher incompetent. The school system’s lawyer put it best: “These children were abused in stealth.”
Pittsburgh’s model of school governance reform
Milwaukee Public Policy Forum:
In the past few weeks Milwaukee has had numerous town hall meetings, panel discussions, and presentations regarding the idea of school district governance reform. At issue is whether the mayor of Milwaukee should be in charge of the Milwaukee Public Schools, rather than an independent board of directors.
At each of these meetings, accountability has been thrown about as both an argument for and against a mayoral take-over of the district. Perhaps a mayor elected in a higher turn-out citywide election would provide more accountability; or maybe losing the opportunity to elect a school board representative would disenfranchise certain voters, diluting accountability.
In Pittsburgh, civic leaders, parents, and citizens decided to stop talking about accountability and actually implement it. A local nonprofit group, A+ Schools: Pittsburgh’s Community Alliance for Public Education, started an initiative called “Board Watch” last winter. The idea is quite simple: send volunteers to attend every board and committee meeting and have them report to the public whether the board is being effective in meeting the district’s strategic goals.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: States’ Tax Revenue Sources
Oregon, more than any other state, relies on its residents’ income tax payments for revenue, while its northern neighbor, Washington, depends more heavily than any other state on sales taxes, according to a new 50-state analysis of state finances.
The analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation uses newly released U.S. Census Bureau data about state and local government finances in fiscal year 2007 (the latest year for which statistics are available) to break down each state’s tax revenue sources and group states by which taxes they rely on most. The report combines state and local taxes for the sake of comparison because “what some states accomplish with local taxes is accomplished in other states with state-level taxes.”
States that rely too heavily on one tax are vulnerable to revenue fluctuations that can be especially harmful during recessions. In Oregon, for instance, where individual income taxes account for 44.1 percent of total government tax revenue, lawmakers this year were slammed by a huge revenue decline as employment — and personal income — decreased. That has resulted in major spending cuts and is forcing some school districts to resort to four-day weeks.
AP Interview: Ed Chief Says Grants Are For Reforms
AP:
With states jockeying for extra school dollars from the economic stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reminded them Tuesday the point is to help kids do better.
Cash-strapped states are competing for $5 billion in grants from the economic stimulus for changes the Obama administration wants, such as charter schools and teacher pay based on student performance.
“It’s really not about the money _ it’s about pushing a strong reform agenda that’s going to improve student achievement,” Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
States can’t even apply for the money yet. Still, nine states have changed their laws or made budget decisions to improve their standing. The latest is California, where a bill was signed Sunday allowing student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Duncan said the moves are encouraging. Still, he said states will have to do more than make promises.
“We’re going to invest in those states that aren’t just talking the talk but that are walking the walk,” he said. “If folks are doing this to chase money, it’s for the wrong reasons.”
Going to school can be a deadly journey
Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school.
“I wonder how many more teens will be murdered while coming home from school,” said Leonardo D. Gilbert, a Local School Council member in the Roseland community. “All this kid was trying to do was go home and it cost him his life. If we are going to save our children from violence we must make sure children have a safe way home from school.”
According to Chicago police, Derrion Albert, 16, was murdered after school on Sept. 24 while waiting for a bus to go home.
“He was not in a gang but in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Michael Shields, a retired Chicago police officer who now works as director of security for Chicago Public Schools.
Make Parenting Education Part of Public School Reform
Mayor Richard Riordan, your disappointment in the progress of educational reform in the Los Angeles Unified School District, after all you’ve done as mayor and secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was palpable in your Oct. 12 Times Op-Ed article, “Course outline for the LAUSD.” This lack of progress breaks my heart too.
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, may I make a suggestion to you and to educational reformers everywhere — a suggestion that is based on experience, common sense and research?
I was an urban public high school English teacher for many years. I tried hard: I took courses in teaching reading and writing; I prepared for classes; I graded research papers on vacations; I won grants for my schools; I won teacher of the year awards; I got advanced degrees; I supported reform.
D.C.’s Braveheart: Can Michelle Rhee wrest control of the D.C. school system from decades of failure?
Michelle Rhee’s senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers’ lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn’t run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.
But then, Rhee wades in with, “Here’s what I think,” or “What I don’t want,” or “This is crap,” or “I want someone to figure this out,” or “I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do; we can talk about how we’re gonna do it.” And that is that. Next order of business, please.
Rhee’s style–as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway–has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn’t kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers’ credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.
Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy attacks ‘woefully low’ education standards
Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, has slated the UK’s education system, saying “woefully low” standards in too many schools leave private sector companies to “pick up the pieces”.
On an scathing attack, Sir Terry said that Tesco is the largest private employer in the country and therefore depends on high standards in schools.
“Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces.”
He added that too many educational agencies and bodies hamper the work of teachers in the classroom.
“One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.
“At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and – above all – we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, ‘less is more’,” he said. Sir Terry was speaking at the Institute of Grocery Distribution’s annual conference in London.
Lieve Maria: A SIS Quiz – Translate!
A kind reader forward this Dutch student curriculum statement:
Lievemaria.nl was een initiatief dat begin 2006 opgezet is door alle wiskunde en natuurkunde studieverenigingen van Nederland. Naar aanleiding van deze actie heeft toenmalig minister Maria van der Hoeven op dinsdag 24 januari 2006 haar plannen met betrekking tot aanpassen van de Tweede Fase aangepast
(Bekijk het nieuwste persbericht, de e-mailconversatie met een medewerker van de minister, het tentamen dat de Kamerleden voorgeschoteld kregen, lees de echte brief (pdf) of de korte versie hieronder)
Wij zijn boos. Wij merken dat wij het universitair niveau eigenlijk niet aankunnen. Er treden dagelijks situaties op waarbij we merken dat we te weinig wiskunde op de middelbare school hebben gehad. Daarom moeten wij nu bijspijkercursussen volgen, of zelfs stoppen met onze studie. Wij horen het geklaag van onze docenten, maar wat kunnen wij eraan doen? Wij zouden willen dat we meer wiskunde hadden gehad op de middelbare school.
Nu bent u bezig om het onderwijs te vernieuwen. Goed idee! Maar we hoorden dat u van plan bent om nòg minder wiskunde te geven. Als u dat doorzet, dan kunnen de nieuwe studenten straks helemaal niets meer begrijpen! Het lijkt ons een beter idee om juist méér wiskunde te geven!
We hopen dat u er nog even over nadenkt.
http://www.lievemaria.nl
Groetjes, 10.000 studenten (wiskunde, natuurkunde en informatica)
Ed chief says grants are for reforms
With states jockeying for extra school dollars from the economic stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reminded them Tuesday the point is to help kids do better.
Cash-strapped states are competing for $5 billion in grants from the economic stimulus for changes the Obama administration wants, such as charter schools and teacher pay based on student performance.
“It’s really not about the money — it’s about pushing a strong reform agenda that’s going to improve student achievement,” Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
States can’t even apply for the money yet. Still, nine states have changed their laws or made budget decisions to improve their standing. The latest is California, where a bill was signed Sunday allowing student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Duncan said the moves are encouraging. Still, he said states will have to do more than make promises.
Five myths about paying good teachers more
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says paying public school teachers based on their performance is his “highest priority,” and he plans to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars to states and school systems that embrace the idea. In the District of Columbia, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has made such reform a cornerstone of her agenda — and a backdrop to her recent move to lay off 229 teachers in response to budget cuts. But school reformers have been trying unsuccessfully to introduce performance pay in public education for decades. If today’s reformers want to break the deadlock, they’re going to have to let go of several myths hanging over the debate:
1. Merit pay has a strong track record.
The logic of performance pay is compelling: Paying teachers based on the college credits they’ve amassed and the years they’ve taught — a practice introduced in the 1920s to counter salary disparities between male and female teachers — means bad teachers draw the same paychecks as good ones. That, in turn, seemingly makes it tougher to recruit and retain talented teachers, meaning students end up with inferior instructors. No surprise, then, that people have been pushing merit pay for a long time: “Every effort must be made to devise ways to reward teachers according to their ability without opening the school door to unfair personnel practices,” a commission urged President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955.
(Indiana) Education revisions must be well planned
All the people participating already knew that dropping out is a bad idea. He needed to invite those prison inmates, those who are unemployed, and those in poverty for the input about what would have been most helpful to have met their needs when they were in school. That’s where the answers are.
My own middle school once held annual forums with our students who had gone on to high school, and we purposely wanted to talk, not with just the A-students, but with the C students and the D-minus students. We asked them what we as a middle school could have done better in hopes of finding insights for our continual improvement.
A teacher or counselor can make his/her best “argument” to a young person that his/her life will be more successful if he/she stays in school, but that young person may drop out anyway. We need that person’s input by hindsight as to what we all could have done better in the face of what the rest of us see as common sense but, nevertheless, led to a decision for which that dropout was still on his/her own responsibility.
Bennett further cites that Indiana is “raising the bar for every student” through academic standards. While we must always analyze what we expect our students to learn and continuously try to measure their success, raising standards for the sake of raising standards will not save students who are failing in school. That would be akin to requiring students to pass a test on algebra who haven’t learned to multiply and divide or requiring students with limited English or learning disabilities to test at the same standards at a chonological age while saying we need, as Bennett said, “targeted, individualized improvement plans for these students.”
There seems to be a contradiction here. The state has an ISTEP test that it keeps tweaking and changing, giving little comparison to previous results although those comparisons are made anyway and schools are graded in an apples-and-oranges world. Give the test some time.
Indiana Superintendent’s website
Thompson and Bloomberg spar over their education records in first mayoral debate
Nothing the candidates said during tonight’s mayoral debate was more surprising than the Rev. Billy Talen’s spirited heckling, but a few choice comments were made about the city’s schools and mayoral control.
Right out of the gate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched into a list of comparisons between the Department of Education during the last eight years and the Board of Education during the time that Comptroller Bill Thompson was president. He recited graduation statistics, said that schools are safer today than they were in the 1990s, and boasted about test scores increases.
Thompson said it was ironic that Bloomberg was holding him accountable for the city’s schools when the mayor has repeatedly said that no one had control over the Board of Education.“He pointed out, under the old Board of Education, no one was in charge. The mayor, the board, the chancellor, so many people were in charge, no one was in charge, so it’s ironic that he would try and distort facts and information, try and change the past, to say that I was the person who was in charge of the Board of Education. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Superintendent Governance: Michelle Rhee “Has no Choice but to Play Tough”
The forces lined up against D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee — angry teachers, grumpy D.C. Council members, the nation’s top teachers’ union leader quarterbacking the opposition — are essentially asking one question: Why can’t you behave more like that nice Arne Duncan?
Indeed, with his aw-shucks humility and his anecdotes about playing b-ball with the president, Duncan has undeniable charm. That charm was honed in Chicago, where he never played in-your-face politics and never publicly suggested there was widespread incompetence among the teaching force, qualities that contributed to President Obama’s tapping him to be U.S. secretary of education.
By contrast, Rhee appeared on the cover of Time wielding a broom to symbolically sweep incompetence out of her public schools. Yikes.
But there’s a reason Rhee plays hardball: She has no choice.
School Choice Even Obama Supports
As a presidential aspirant last year, Barack Obama gained the support of the National Education Association — and the scorn of school choice activists — when he declared his skepticism of the school choice and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in the early months of this year, the newly-elected president further pleased teachers unions when he tacitly allowed congressional Democrats to shutter the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Plan, the school voucher program that helps 1,716 Washington students attend private schools — even though he avoided sending his own children to D.C.’s abysmal public schools.
Declared Cato Institute Director Andrew Coulson this past May in the Washington Post: “[Obama] has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions.”
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Report: Wisconsin taxes claim 12 percent of income
Wisconsin taxes as a percentage of personal income are 12th highest nationwide and greater than any of its neighbors, according to a new report.
The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance report was based on U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007, the most recent year available.
While the tax burden has been steady in recent years, the president of the independent Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance said Monday he expects it to get worse given recent tax increases and slowed growth in personal income.
During the earlier part of the decade, personal income in Wisconsin grew faster than the national average while taxes increased less, said Todd Berry, president of the alliance.
However, Wisconsin faced a record state budget shortfall this year as tax revenue took a dive during the recession. That resulted in the Legislature approving about $3 billion in tax increases to be collected by mid-2011. That doesn’t count local property taxes, which also are expected to increase by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Detroit Public Schools to Spend $40,000,000 on Consultants
On Friday, Detroit Public School officials said Robert Bobb, 61, the DPS emergency financial manager plans to spend $40 million for consulting fees.
The fees will be spent in an ongoing effort to conduct internal financial audits to root out waste and corruption in Detroit Public Schools.
In March, Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed Bobb to clean up the district’s deficit estimated to be at $259 million.
However union leaders say they unhappy about the money that is going to spent on advisers since there has been approximately 2,500 layoffs since summer.
Bobb said finding costs savings is critical to improving the district’s finances and said he doesn’t want to lose one cent that should be given to classrooms.
Palo Alto Schools Gifted & Talented Proposed Standards
Palo Alto Unified School District Gifted & Talented Program [219K PDF]:
Palo Alto Unified school district’s Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:
- To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students’ abilities.
- To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
- To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
- To engender an enthusiasm for learning.
Program Model
In elementary and middle school, the program model for GATE is differentiation within the mainstream classroom. In 2001, new legislation called for a change in GATE education. Rather than pull children from class for a different curriculum, all differentiation takes place within the context of standards-based instruction in the regular classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potential. These differentiated curricular opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. In middle school, students also have access to the Renzulli Learning System to allow them to individualize their education based on their needs, interests and creative abilities and to explore the curriculum in greater depth and complexity. Advanced math courses are available for the first time in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.
Palo Alto School District Strategic Plan [780K PDF]
Madison School District’s Gifted & Talented Plan.
Lesson for teachers union: It takes two to cooperate
AS EDUCATION reform moves forward, Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman says he wants an inclusive process. Testifying at a recent State House hearing, Stutman told the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education that “the solution to better school lies in working with us, not in working against us.” But no collaborative spirit is evident in the union’s resistance to bringing the acclaimed Teach for America program to Boston or creating more pilot schools.
Teach for America trains new college graduates who weren’t education majors to work as teachers in urban and rural districts, generally in hard-to-fill areas such as math, science, and special education. The school system opened itself up to union criticism by signing an agreement with Teach for America that could be construed to give its teachers more job security than union teachers, offering Teach for America recruits two years of employment while regular recruits can be laid off after one. The School Committee has pledged to rectify the discrepancy.
In theory, a quick settlement could be a model for the kind of cooperation Stutman says he wants. But the union has a more basic, and less justifiable, objection: It maintains that laid-off teachers should be retrained for empty positions – even if, in practice, the laid-off teachers aren’t cut out for the vacancies.
California learns to trim the cost of education
W hen Mark Yudof addressed the Uni versity of Califor nia’s board of regents recently, what would have normally been a quiet gathering turned into a circus.
Fourteen people were arrested after protesting against cuts in the funding of the UC network, which includes UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego and business schools such as Haas , the Anderson School of Management and the Rady School of Management.
As California grapples with a budget crisis that has affected all public services, the UC system has been asked to absorb a funding shortfall of more than $800m. Student protests on a scale unseen since the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s have been held at Berkeley, while other protests have been held at UCLA and UC Irvine.
Mr Yudof, the president of the UC system, told the regents that steep tuition fee rises were un-avoidable. “What we cannot do is surrender to the greatest enemy of the University of California, which is mediocrity. We have to stabilise our situation and then we can build [again].”
For now, the test everyone hates (WKCE) is sticking around
All across Wisconsin, schools received boxes and boxes of stuff they didn’t want last week.
Unfortunately, they were about the most important deliveries they’ll get this year: Hundreds of thousands of test booklets for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the state’s annual standardized test.
The testing window, one of the biggest events in every school year, is about to open. More than 400,000 students in third through eighth grade, as well as in 10th grade, will be tested in either two or five subjects in coming weeks, with a handful of schools starting this week and the large majority doing the testing in November.
It’s the test everyone loves to hate. It takes up large amounts of time and disrupts schedules for days on end. There are widespread complaints about what is actually tested. The test yields almost nothing that is useful to teachers in shaping the way they educate students. It’s often a public relations problem and sometimes a nightmare if a school’s scores are low or sometimes even just not better than the prior year.
Furthermore, the test is dying a slow death, and everyone knows it.
Just to be contrary, let’s say something good about the WKCE. For all its flaws, it’s the only broad scale accountability tool we’ve got in this state. It succeeds in putting a lot of heat on schools across the state, and many of them need it.
And the test scores are actually a pretty good reflection of student achievement in a school – which is to say, I’ve never heard of a school with low scores that could make a convincing case that the kids were actually doing well and the scores were off base.
But the state testing system is moving toward an overhaul, and for good reasons.
The New Federal Education Policies: California’s Challenge
Coming on the heels of the state’s unprecedented budget crisis, the federal stimulus–also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)–first received attention in California as a source of extra, much needed funding for schools.
In the months since, it has become increasingly clear that the reforms it embodies could have a bigger and more lasting impact than the nearly $8 billion it is providing to public K-12 education in the state.
The education components of the federal stimulus place a strong emphasis on four reform areas:
- Teacher and administrator effectiveness
- Data systems
- Standards
- Turning around low-performing schools
Six-year-old sent to reform school for bringing a “weapon” (Cub Scout camping cutlery) to school
Zachary Christie is a six-year old student in Newark, Delaware who is facing 45 days in reform school because he brought his new Cub Scout eating utensil to school for lunch. The utensil includes a knife, and this violates the school’s brainlessly, robotically enforced zero-tolerance policy on “weapons on school property.”
Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.
“Something has to change,” said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district’s reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.
Seattle Public Schools Boundary/School Assignment Plan Comments
FAMILIES chafe at the Seattle Public Schools‘ wild variability on student assignments. Proposed new school boundaries and a simplified assignment plan offer promising change. [Complete Assignment/Boundary Plan – 358K PDF]
A complex maze that used to determine what school students attended has been streamlined into an uncomplicated rule: students’ addresses determine their school.
Students entering kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade in the 2010-11 year will be assigned to a school near their home. Students in other grades will remain at their current schools, an appropriate grandfathering that minimizes disruptions.
Many families won’t notice a difference. For others, this plan is a huge change. Families living on Queen Anne and in Magnolia have long asked for a neighborhood high school so students weren’t bused across the city. They’re being assigned to one of the best: Ballard High School.
This shift is the correct route forward. After the district ended bussing for integration purposes, it veered into an expensive and convoluted open choice system. Families could choose any school they wanted but the result was a lack of predictability and stability. Most troubling, the system weighed heavily against less savvy families who were unable to navigate the application process.
Seattle Schools Strategic Plan
Schools need overhaul to get students job-ready
These comments are excerpted from a Sept. 16 panel discussion on education and workforce preparation at Santa Clara University. The event, Projections 2010: Leadership California, was hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Moderator, Marshall Kilduff, Chronicle editorial writer: With a lot of bad news in education, including test scores, declining financial support, what would you do?
Mayor Gavin Newsom: I’ll tell you what we’ve done in San Francisco. I believe not just in public-private partnerships. I believe in public-public partnerships. … The City and County of San Francisco does not run its school district … but, nonetheless, we’ve taken some responsibility to addressing the needs of our public-school kids by building a partnership. … We focus on universal preschool. We’ve created a framework, a partnership, that guarantees the opportunity of a four-year college education for every single sixth-grader. It’s those partnerships that I’m arguing for.
Aart J. De Geus, CEO, Synopsys: If I look at it as if I were the CEO of education of California, I would look at a company (in terms of), “What are the resources? What are the results? And what is the management system?” I’d say, “Well, let’s look at the CEO of the educational system.” There is no CEO of the educational system. I know there are commissioners, and whatever they’re called, but, to be a CEO, you need to have both responsibility and power.
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman made similar, structural points during a recent Madison Rotary club talk.
Did Rhee Overplay Her Hand or Seek A Showdown?
I want to love Michelle Rhee — really, I do — but she makes it so hard sometimes.
The D.C. schools chancellor has made it especially difficult this month with her layoffs of 229 teachers and 159 other staff workers. She picked a spectacularly bad time, just as the school year was shifting into high gear. She also mishandled the theatrics in such a way that she enraged the unions and D.C. Council even more than she usually does.
As a result, labor and political tensions simmering in the city over Rhee’s reforms since she arrived in 2007 boiled over last week. The spillage might jeopardize her whole project and poses a significant challenge for her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), as he seeks reelection next year.
The uproar is regrettable because the city and the region have a strong interest in seeing Rhee succeed. She is the first leader of the D.C. schools in recent memory who seems sufficiently tough and determined to fix the shockingly poor school performance that we’ve tolerated complacently for decades.
Teacher Union Politics in Washington, DC
Washington Post Editorial:
Let’s review the record to examine the plausibility of those charges.
More than 14 months ago , Ms. Rhee offered a contract to Washington’s teachers that was unprecedented in its largess. The proposal would have provided teachers with, at a minimum, a 28 percent pay raise over five years, plus $10,000 in bonuses. They would have had to give up nothing in the way of job security to obtain the raise. All Ms. Rhee asked in return was the freedom to offer, on a voluntary basis, even more money to a subset of teachers, if they would agree to have their compensation linked to performance. Their evaluation would have been based on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the improvement their students showed from the beginning of the school year to the end. Ms. Rhee — who has been branded anti-teacher — wanted to make the District’s teachers among the highest paid in America, and she had managed to raise private funds to make it possible.
Washington’s teachers might well have welcomed this generous offer — who wouldn’t? — but we don’t know because Mr. Parker and other union leaders never allowed them to vote on a proposed contract. Labor law barred Ms. Rhee from directly explaining to teachers what she had in mind. At one point, it seemed that Mr. Parker and Ms. Rhee were close to an agreement, but then the national leadership stepped in. Since Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, involved herself, another 10 months have passed, and Washington’s teachers remain without a contract. Talks are said to be continuing.
Madison Property Taxes up more than 4%
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
A snowflake is small. But a blizzard of snowflakes can bury a house.
You can view your looming property tax bill in similar ways.
A single tax increase by one local unit of government might seem negligible.
Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, for example, is proposing a $38 increase on the county’s portion of the average local property tax bill in Madison for 2010. That’s an increase of only a few dollars a month.
But that $38 represents a 6.5 percent increase at a time when most people’s wages are relatively flat or falling. And that $38 pushes the county’s portion of the average property tax bill in Madison to $626.
Don’t Leave Gifted Kids Behind
Hey, kids, stay in school!
That oft-used refrain soon may have new meaning. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed extending the school day, lengthening the school year and adding Saturday classes. Their laudable goal is to prepare the next generation for adulthood in an increasingly complex world.
Is this the way to do it? For at least one group of students, the answer is no. Based on studies I have read, the dropout rate for gifted students is between 5 and 20 percent.
What scourge is stealing so many of our smartest kids? Extreme debilitating boredom coupled with agile minds that can’t let them patiently wait for the end of class. If we lengthen their classroom hours, how many gifted kids are likely to stay?
To understand how boredom feels to these kids, imagine making a school’s fastest runner sit in a chair next to the track all day, every day, while her teammates are racing past her. Imagine her frustration. Imagine how she’s going to feel about running after a few days of that. Most likely, she’ll walk off the field and never turn back. By dropping out, that’s what these lost gifted children do. Many of the boys leave to get a job. Many of the girls leave pregnant.
Related: Late 1990’s Madison School District Dropout Data and the recent Talented and Gifted Plan.
Support for extending school hours or school year is growing
Teacher Kristin Bretch snaps instructions to her young charges, reading words from her teacher’s guide, pacing in front of the white board like a drill sergeant.
“We’re on word three: ‘belt.’ Spell ‘belt,’ everyone.”
The pupils are second- and third-graders, almost all poor and many of whom could barely speak English when they arrived in Kansas City as refugees from countries like Burundi and Sudan, Vietnam and Somalia. They reply, almost shouting, in unison.
B-E-L-T. Belt.
Here, at the Della Lamb Charter Elementary School, these lessons go on for 227 days, compared with the average 180 days of most U.S. school districts.
The reason is clear:
“To make us smarter. To give us better brains,” said Abdirihman Akil, age 9.
Exactly, said President Barack Obama. He and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have reiterated support for the idea of adding hours to the school day to boost academic achievement and compete with other nations.
2% State Tax Dollar Increase for Pennsylvania schools
The state budget that Gov. Rendell signed last night ensured that almost all school districts would get funding increases over last year.
The level of spending for education, the largest single item in the overall $27.8 billion budget and more than a third of the total, had been a point of contention between Rendell and many Republicans during the months-long standoff. But in the end, the agreement appeared to provide something for everyone.
“In a year where there is so much pain, with the economy the worst in anybody’s memory, to be anything but happy about this budget would be foolish,” Timothy Allwein, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said yesterday.
All school districts would get a hike of at least 2 percent in basic education funding, Pennsylvania’s main subsidy to schools.
Statewide, the total K-12 increase, including federal funding, would be about $250 million over last year’s level. Much of that would go to less wealthy districts.
“The school districts I’ve talked to are glad that they can now get down to implementing the programs they had planned on,” Allwein said.
Education in Malaysia
On the National Key Result Areas, the deputy premier said there were four areas that touched on education.
The first was on efforts for all children to attend pre-school from the present 63 per cent only. Starting next year, he said new schools would be built, starting with 378 classrooms, and in three years, all children would be able to attend pre-school.
“From our research, we found that pre-school is very important and we want to make it possible for everyone to send their children.”
Secondly, Muhyiddin said it was the government’s target that all children could read and count by the time they were in Year Three.
“We will identify weak students in Year One itself and provide special classes for them to ensure they are not left behind,” he said.
The third area was to identify 100 schools in the next three years to be converted into high performance schools. These schools, Muhyiddin said, would cater for excellent students and receive additional assistance from the government.
School district contracts push up tax levy
At a time when taxpayers are struggling in this destabilizing recession and most are not seeing wage gains, the Appleton Area School District (AASD) has proposed a budget that increases the tax levy by 9.7%.
At a time when the state budget is suffering billion dollar deficits, when the state has cut its support of AASD, when enrollment has declined by 220 students, and when inflation is 0%, still the district’s total budget increased by over $3 million (from $176 million to $179 million)!
The district’s budget increase is primarily fueled by employee compensation increases, including an 8.2% increase in health care benefits – for a benefit plan that is already a Cadillac. Cost reductions could most certainly be achieved via increased efforts to decrease utilization and increased premium participation (school employees pay only 5% of their health insurance premium that for a family is almost $20,000 a year) and/or simply putting the very costly health insurance program out to bid. As it is now, the union dictates that the health insurance must be carried by an arm of WEAC.
In addition, though the budget reflects a wage freeze for administration employees, no such offer has been forthcoming from the teachers union.
State education chief supports cultural learning
Cultural and academic education shouldn’t be separate and unequal, Alaska Commissioner of Education Larry LeDoux said on Wednesday.
“We can prepare kids to engage in any career they have a dream for and still be conversant in their language and their culture,” he said.
LeDoux was speaking as part of an education panel at the 97th annual Grand Camp Convention of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood. It’s a convention in which education needs for the Native population features prominently: The theme is “Wooch.éen; Gu dángahl: Yes We Can! Cultural Unity through Education and Communication.”
ANB President Brad Fluetsch also mentioned the gap between cultural and academic education, giving the example of harvesting a seal.
“To us, it’s cultural education, but to the university, it’s biology credits,” he said.
LeDoux said the department is planning cultural training for new teachers, though it does not yet have funding. Seventy percent of Alaska teachers come from out of state, he said.
One thing for which the department does have funding is hiring a director of rural education, which LeDoux said will happen “any day now.”
Committee backs $53 million in interest-free bonds for MPS projects
Larry Sandler & Erin Richards:
Milwaukee Public Schools could borrow up to $53.1 million interest-free to create new science and engineering laboratories, build a community learning center and repair aging schools, under a plan backed Wednesday by a Common Council committee.
If the plan wins final approval from the full council, federal stimulus dollars would pay the interest on the bonds and property taxes would be used to repay the principal. The School Board has voted to seek up to $53.1 million of the $72.1 million maximum that the federal government authorized for MPS borrowing, but the city issues school bonds.
Wednesday’s vote by the council’s Finance & Personnel Committee calls for the council to give preliminary approval Tuesday to borrowing the money without a referendum. Further action would be needed to issue the bonds. Mayor Tom Barrett plans to recommend a bond issue of about $48 million, said his chief of staff, Patrick Curley.
Michelle Nate, chief financial officer for MPS, said the ability to borrow at free or extremely low interest rates would allow the district to spend about $30 million on maintenance projects that have been put off for years.
“It’s like any major expense (for a homeowner),” Nate said. “You know you need a new roof, but you put it off until you can afford it.”
UK Education Political Battle
Michael Gove’s ruinous plans for education
Today’s speech showed a party committed to micro-managing schools, using policies that have no empirical backing
Michael Gove delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference which played to the prejudices of his audience. His oration was peppered again and again with talk of how the Labour party has failed the country in creating schools which lack discipline and high standards and fail to make our children literate or patriotic. Funnily enough though, he failed to mention that the academy that he felt was a beacon shining in a world of dross was in fact created by the Labour party.
Throughout his speech, he referred to the Labour initiative of academies as a panacea for our educational ills. If in power, the Tories would enable any school to become an academy. In this sense, this flagship policy is no different from Labour’s.
Stand By for Higher Madison Taxes
Since Labor Day, County Exec Kathleen Falk has been calling it “the toughest budget since the Great Depression”. Her mouthpiece, Josh Wescott, echoes the depression line, and adds another cliché – “the perfect storm” of declining revenues. Falk has proposed a 7.9% property tax increase and is hoping for a 3 percent wage cut from county employees.
Mayor Cieslewicz calls his plan “a budget for hard times”, and says “the primary theme is steadiness”. He’s proposed the lowest spending increase in the past fifteen years. His operating budget will increase taxes 3.8% on the average Madison home. He’s hoping other city employees will join the firefighters, who’ve agreed to no raises for two years, and then 3% at the end of the two-year period.
Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago, Madison teachers hauled in a 4% raise in each of the next two years – a quarter of it in salary increases (1%) and the rest in other bennies, mainly insurance. They get a small pay increase, while county workers may take a cut, and city workers will likely get nothing.
Moral of the story: you want John Matthews on your side of the bargaining table.
Youth Violence a National Issue
Following the recent incident of youth violence in Chicago, the Obama administration dispatched two Cabinet officials, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to deal with the issue. Duncan says the issue is a national one — not just urban or rural or suburban.
More on Duncan’s Chicago appearance here.
On the Proposed Mayoral Takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools
Reducing Crime, Violence, Disproportionate Black Incarceration Rates and Prison/Jail Overcrowding Through Education Reform of MPS
Q: Why as a top law enforcement official have you continually been outspoken on the failure of K-12 public education in Milwaukee?
For the seven years that I have been Sheriff of Milwaukee County, I have been outspoken on the research-proven nexus between school failure, violent crime and criminal behavior; between school failure and disproportionate minority incarceration rates; and between school failure and jail and prison overcrowding. The connection is clear and that’s why I have had from day one a sense of urgency about the need to fundamentally improve K-12 public education in Milwaukee–and that means Milwaukee Public Schools.
If we’re ever going to solve the problems of poverty, crime, violence, disproportionate minority incarceration rates and jail and prison overcrowding, no remedy is more important than dramatically improving MPS.
