School has once again successfully lifted off, thanks to a great deal of hard work on the part of many people including teachers, staff and administrators. I thought it would be useful to pass along a few observations:

• A Madison teacher spent quite a bit of personal time after school last year helping children who were behind in math catch up.
• My aunt is a Minnesota teacher. During a recent visit to a prospective student’s home:”I got hit on my head with a folder, my camera got taken away, and my shirt got pulled up. The mom just calmly kept talking about school.“

Please add your anecdotes in the comments below!

Click on the image to view the article.
Jason Shephard starts Isthmus’s excellent biweekly Talking Out of School Column with a look at the Madison School District’s minority hiring policies.

“I don’t think we’re doing enough to put people of color into influential positions,” says [Board Member Juan Jose] Lopez, who halted a routine approval of new hires at a board meeting earlier this month to criticize the district’s minority hiring record.

School Board Member Ruth Robarts says [Superintendent] Rainwater’s minority administrator hiring rate of more than 40% this year is to be commended.

According to a note next to this article, Talking out of School will be available on Isthmus’s website. We’ll link to those, of course.

Sandy Cullen:

Twenty-eight parents have filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Madison School District against a Jefferson Middle School teacher they claim created a hostile learning environment for their children last year.
Roger Greenwald, a member of the Committee of Concerned Parents of Jefferson Middle School, said the Title IX complaint was filed Friday because parents were unhappy with the district’s initial response to their concerns about Spanish teacher Hector Vasquez, who came to Jefferson last year from Sennett Middle School.

Jamie Stengle:

A suburban Dallas school district launched the “Virtual Cafeteria” site to show what’s being served each day at each school. It can tally nutritional information for items on a lunch tray, including calories, fat grams, carbs, protein, vitamin A and vitamin C.
For instance, a meal of a chef salad, a slice of pizza, a cookie and milk will cost $4.75 and runs about 746 calories.
“We are really making a valiant effort to put nutritional information in the hands of our customers, be it parents, a grandmother, a teacher or the student themselves,” said Rachelle Fowler, student nutrition director for the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district.

Wisconsin DPI (PDF):

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction will conduct a hearing Aug. 29 at the agency headquarters in Madison to take public testimony on a change in administrative rules affecting the open enrollment program. The hearing will be held from 5 to 6 p.m. in Room 041 of the GEF 3 Building, 125 South Webster Street, Madison.

Map

Several Madison School District parents emailed the following questions recently:

• “I was just trying to find information on teachers in the Madison School System. Is there a site that you know of that gives information on the teachers (bio, cv, anything)?” This seems like a good idea. Perhaps each school’s website could include a teacher page?
• “[There’s been some discussion] that multi-age classrooms are not the best learning environment for all kids. Does your group have any access to studies or data on multi-age classrooms? Apparently, MMSD has plans to make these the district-wide approach to elementary schools.”

Please post information you might have on these topics by clicking the comments link below. Thanks.

The Sun Prairie School District’s increasingly active weblog:

On August 9, 2005, a public hearing was held on the proposed high school facilities in Sun Prairie. At the hearing a question was asked regarding the high school drop-out rates for all Wisconsin public high schools. Drop out rates refer to the percent of students who do not complete a high school education We have compiled information for three years for all public school districts except the Milwaukee Public Schools. The data is the latest information available from DPI. A clear pattern is evident over the three years. It is apparent that as high schools grow above 1500 students, the percentage of drop-outs doubles and triples over that of high school with enrollments between 1000-1500.

Sun Prairie is planning to construct two new, smaller higher schools rather than one very large facility.

American Beverage Association:

Under the new policy, the beverage industry will provide:

• Elementary Schools with only water and 100 percent juice.
• Middle Schools with only nutritious and/or lower calorie beverages, such as water, 100 percent juice, sports drinks, no-calorie soft drinks, and low-calorie juice drinks. No full-calorie soft drinks or full-calorie juice drinks with five percent or less juice until after school; and
• High Schools with a variety of beverage choices, such as bottled water, 100 percent juice, sports drinks, and juice drinks. No more than 50 percent of the vending selections will be soft drinks.

The American Beverage Association is asking beverage producers and school districts to implement the new policy as soon as possible. Where school beverage contracts already exist, the policy would be implemented when the contract expires or earlier if both parties agree. The success of the policy is dependent on voluntary implementation of it by individual beverage companies and by school officials. The policy will not supercede federal, state and local regulations already in place. ABA’s Board of Directors, which unanimously approved the policy, represents 20 companies that comprise approximately 85 percent of school vending beverage sales by bottlers.

Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the U.S., and the responsibility for finding common-sense solutions is shared by everyone, including our industry. We intend to be part of the solution by increasing the availability of lower-calorie and/or nutritious beverages in schools,” said Susan K. Neely, ABA president and chief executive officer.

Pepsi Statement | Coke Statement (not yet online). Betsy McKay has more (click the link below).

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Mark Chediak:

When students in Leslie Chernila’s English class at the Art Institute of Washington write an essay about the work of Garrison Keillor, she has them send it off to a critic halfway across the country before turning it in. The paper soon returns, complete with comments about structure and word choice.
The service, offered by District-based Smarthinking Inc., is part of a growing educational trend that has millions of students logging on to get assistance with reading, writing and arithmetic. Once a dot-com pipe dream, online education is now maturing into a viable market. More than 2.6 million students in the United States were expected to study online through courses and tutoring last fall, up from 1.9 million in 2003, according to the Sloan Consortium, an online research group.
Burck Smith, chief executive and co-founder of Smarthinking, credits the rise in demand for online educational services to several factors, including an increase in the number of non-traditional students who don’t have a lot of time to look for on-campus resources, a more competitive educational landscape in which colleges and schools are trying harder to attract students with additional services and students’ greater familiarity with the Internet.
More than 500 institutions, including Anne Arundel Community College, Gallaudet University and the Art Institute of Washington, subscribe to Smarthinking. And the company says it has signed up 19 institutions for this fall, including District-based Southeastern University.

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Milwaukee Public Schools – PDF:

With 95,600 students enrolled in its facilities, and room for 122,000 students, MPS has too much vacant space. To save money and more prudently use MPS resources, the administration, working with consultants, developed the draft guidelines for public input. After the public has had the opportunity to provide feedback, the guidelines will be finalized and sent to the school board for final approval this fall.

Michael Winerip:

Teachers rarely know the full story behind their students, and this is particularly so at Locke, in South Central, one of the city’s poorest and toughest areas. “So much goes on away from school,” says Ms. Levine, who loses students to homelessness, pregnancy, work, drugs and jail. She never knows which ones will make it through. Most don’t. The ninth grade at Locke four years ago had 979 students; in June, 322 graduated.

Kurt Kiefer kindly posted a link to the demo site. Take a look and if you’d like to give it a spin, request a password. Thanks, Kurt for posting this information!

Jenny D:

The big difference between the US. and other nations is at the low end of the achievement spectrum. Our kids who score low are at the VERY bottom, well below the lowest scoring kids in other nations that we compare ourselves to (think Germany, Japan, Singapore, Denmark). Thus our average score is much lower than that of other nations. Not because our smart kids are scoring poorly, but because we have so many kids at the bottom, and our bottom is so low.
This is overlooked by education ideologists who just want to whine without solving problems. And the solutions don’t cost more money. But they demand that we rethink the way we deploy educational resources. I’m talking as a nation, not a parent. Any individual parent wants what they want for their kid. But from a public policy perspective, it is better for the nation as a whole if we raise the floor.
All the organizational stuff–class size (and btw, the rich white parents in my district are the MOST vocal about getting smaller class sizes, and many send their kids to private schools in order to get junior into a class of 18), desk arrangements, etc.–is just moving deck chairs around on the deck of the Titanic. Education is in trouble because it’s very core is rotten. We don’t know how to teach teachers.

Richard Forno:

Alas, the e-books are encoded in DRM which pretty much spoils the potential success of this pilot project:

• Textbook is locked to the computer where you downloaded it from;
• Copying and burning to CD is prohibited;
• Printing is limited to small passages;
• Unless otherwise stated, textbook activation expires after 5 months
  (*gasp*);

• Activated textbooks are not returnable;
• Buyback is not possible.

We all need to become familiar with the ongoing DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) machinations all around us. Things are getting worse. Learn more about DRM via wikipedia.

(With apologies to readers – it is not possible to respond using the comments feature on the blog.)
Response to Lucy’s Post on PEOPLE program
JOAN: Tempting though it is to rebut your arguments tit for tat I am not sure it will necessarily be productive.
RESPONSE: I would be interested in a “tit for tat” response to my comments on the reasons why the PEOPLE program is needed.
JOAN: Let’s back up and look at the assumptions underlying this program. The first is that minority students are not getting adequate preparation in their home schools. You assert that this is true in the well-staffed, well-funded Madison school district because of institutional racism. You believe your visual review of a school proves your point. That’s not particularily strong evidence.
RESPONSE: I think you need to go back and read what I wrote. I said,

“All of the above examples are conditions that I have witnessed first hand or, in one or two cases, have heard of from other parents – including parents of white students. When the above conditions disappear and/or white students experience these same conditions, we can talk about equity.”

Nowhere did I say or imply that my comments were “based on a visual review of a school.” It is true that there is no systematic, methodologically defensible, study of how students of color and their parents fare in Madison’s schools. I would welcome a well-crafted study of this nature.

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Ethan Todras-Whitehill:

He was introduced to blogging as an educational tool by Patrick Delaney, Galileo’s librarian. Mr. Delaney also helped Mindy Chiang, a Mandarin-language teacher at Galileo, set up a blog for her Chinese-American and Chinese immigrant students to write about and post their experiences for the benefit of fifth and sixth graders from schools in Elk Grove and Santa Barbara, Calif., who were studying Chinatowns.
Ms. Chiang and Mr. Delaney were delighted to discover that the quality of the writing for the blog surpassed her students’ previous work. Moreover, when Ms. Chiang had them record audio versions of their essays in English and Mandarin using school iPod’s, the students’ accents were vastly improved.
“It’s pretty clear that they were worried about being embarrassed,” said Mr. Delaney, noting that the essays were available to the students’ families and Web surfers in China. “Having an audience compelled these kids to step it up a notch.”
Still, some educators are not completely sold on the value of interactivity. “If interactivity becomes the fundamental basis of the educational process, how do we judge merit?” asked Robbie McClintock, a learning technologies expert at Teachers College of Columbia University.

Wisconsin DPI (PDF):

The grant will support the planning, design, and implementation of charter schools in areas of the state with a large proportion of schools that have been identified for improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Additionally, it will support increased collaboration among educational partners to enhance the charter climate and support educational options through charter schools; assure quality educators and strong leadership in every charter school; increase capacity for opening charter schools that boost student achievement and comply with NCLB and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004; evaluate the effectiveness of charter schools and share those results; strengthen management and fiscal sustainability of the state’s charter schools; and increase parent, teacher, and community involvement in the development of charter schools through the dissemination of best practices that improve student achievement.

Tyler Currie:

Still, when Jallon showed up in Annapolis last August with her proposal to create KIPP Harbor Academy, she was not received with open arms. For months, the Anne Arundel County school board appeared poised to reject Annapolis’s first charter school, which would be publicly funded but independently operated. School board members worried that the charter school would drain students and resources from Annapolis’s two existing middle schools. Jallon, who lives in Hanover near Arundel Mills Mall, found herself in constant — and ultimately successful — negotiation with school board members and leaders from the county teachers union.

Sara Miller:

Under a new plan, a student who misses not a single day per quarter will receive $25 in an account – redeemable upon graduation. In doing so, the school joins a number of districts throughout the country turning to incentives to boost test scores, GPAs, and student turnout.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Sarah Carr:

Suspensions are down. Test scores and attendance are up. And many people are happier.
So concludes a first-of-its-kind report in Milwaukee on how sixth- through eighth graders are faring in the school district’s rapidly growing number of kindergarten through eighth-grade (or K-8) schools.
In a relatively short period of time, K-8s have expanded to dominate the school landscape in Milwaukee and other cities such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Baltimore and Philadelphia, so the report will be heavily scrutinized here and elsewhere.
In 2000, there were only about 10 K-8 schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools district; this fall there will be 61 K-8 schools, including those that are transitioning to become K-8s. Meanwhile enrollment in traditional middle schools is expected to plummet by 16% in one year alone, from about 13,200 students last fall to about 11,050 this fall.

Jonathan D. Glater:

“The use of race in California, whether or not it’s for segregation purposes or integration purposes, is illegal,” said Sharon Browne, a lawyer at the firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation. “Any type of discrimination is wrong, and the people of California, in adopting 209, said it was wrong.”
Last month the firm filed suit on behalf of Mr. Winsten and other parents, some of whose children would have to travel 13 miles to the high school they might be reassigned to. Lawyers for the foundation have asked a state court judge to bar the school district from implementing the new boundaries until the suit is resolved; the judge denied that request.
The suit against the Capistrano Unified School District is not the first instance in which the foundation has sought to use Proposition 209 to block a voluntary integration plan. It successfully attacked a race-conscious student transfer plan in Huntington Beach, Calif., in 2002. A suit in 2003 to halt a voluntary desegregation plan in Berkeley, however, did not succeed.

Claudio Sanchez, All Things Considered:

As Washington policymakers talk of leaving no child behind, the reality in places like East St. Louis, Ill., is that schools can’t do it alone. When the school day is over and during the long summer vacation, children in these communities face poverty, crime, broken families and despair.

Audio

Reader Erika Frederick emailed this article by John Fialka:

As a step to save energy, Congress appears poised to extend U.S. daylight-saving time for two months, starting it earlier, on the first Sunday in March, and ending it later, on the last Sunday of November.

The move was first approved in May as part of the energy bill by the House. The idea has now been agreed upon by House and Senate committee staffs, with the approval of both Republican chairmen and ranking Democrats. That means it is likely to be approved by the full House-Senate conference committee, which begins squaring the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill this week.

The change is not without controversy:

The Air Transport Association has asserted that its members, long-distance American airlines, could lose millions of dollars because of schedule disruptions that the proposal would cause by throwing U.S. arrivals at foreign airports out of synchronization with European schedules and Europe’s system of awarding “slots,” or landing rights at airports.

Some large church groups also oppose extending daylight-saving time into the early spring and late fall, because it would require children to wait for school buses in the dark. “Without the light of day, they are more susceptible to accidents with school buses, or other motorists, and the darkness also provides cover for individuals who prey on children,” said the Rev. William F. Davis, deputy secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a letter written to the House sponsors of the measure

The proposed change is part of the Energy Bill.

Recently married Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown comments on the LA Board of Education’s proposed requirement that all students take the courses necessary to enter California State Universities.

Sarah Carr:

That’s largely because Community High lacks a traditional hierarchy. The school is one of a rapidly growing number of so-called “teacher-led” schools that operate without administrators – including principals and assistant principals. The teachers make decisions about the curriculum, the budget and student discipline. They perform peer evaluations of each other. Often, they come to decisions through discussion and debate, taking a vote if a consensus is not reached. The buck stops with them, not in the principal’s office.
In Milwaukee, which is a national leader in the movement toward teacher-led schools, there will be at least 14 such programs next year, and that figure does not count private schools.

Cristina Daglas:

He was known as “Big Joe” when he transitioned from student to staff member in the Madison school district more than 10 years ago. But times have changed and titles altered, and “Big Joe” is now Principal Gothard.
For the first time in 13 years, Joe Gothard will not be coaching football this season, and he says he’s open to hobbies. However, the new top job at Toki Middle School and chasing after his three young children at home may just take up this 32-year-old’s “extra” time.
Just recently hired, Gothard is settling into his new office and working diligently to get accustomed to the environment before the year’s beginning rolls around. He’s hoping to make the transition as smooth as possible keeping consistency for the Toki community. But the scenery isn’t all too new for the Madison native, a true product of the district’s “grow your own” administrator initiative, which one board member campaigns for rather frequently.

Channel3000:

The “Lawson Project” aim to replace old mainframe technology with new comprehensive payroll software.
A News 3 investigation finds after years of work, and tens of millions of dollars, system officials still can’t say when it will be powered up or how much it will cost.
“We have spent more money at this point than the people who initially envisioned the project thought we would have spent five years out, and we’re not as far along as they thought we would be,” said Don Mash, chairman of the steering committee for the APBS/Lawson project, which is an unprecedented endeavor that will impact every UW System campus and its 42,000 workers statewide.

The Madison School Distrct has also been working to implement a new Lawson HR/Finance (ERP) System.

WPR’s Ben Merens interviewed Jack Norman, research director for the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future on their “Wisconsin Adequacy Plan”. Real audio – WPR is not, unfortunately podcasting at the moment. The Institute’s Website has a number of useful articles and publications. Their Wisconsin Atlas of School Finance is worth looking at.

MSNBC:

A high school in Vail will become the state’s first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans.
Vail Unified School District’s decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare, experts say. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper.

Phil Brinkman takes a look at the Florence School District, which may disband:

“I want them to teach our children within their means,” said Tibbs, probably the chief antagonist in what has become a battle between cash-strapped residents and an equally cash- strapped school district over the future of education here.
Members of the Florence County School Board are finally conceding that battle after voters last month turned down the third spending referendum in the past two years. The measure would have let the district exceed state- imposed revenue caps by $750,000 a year for three years.
“There are other school districts of the same size, wealth and makeup that aren’t dissolving,” said Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction. “Clearly, things happened in this school district that didn’t happen in other school districts.”
But Evers said Florence County’s death spiral provides sobering evidence that the state’s school funding formula is overdue for a change. Under that formula, state aid is provided in roughly inverse proportion to a community’s property wealth, and the total revenue a district can raise is capped. If costs exceed that – and officials in districts from Florence to Madison to Milwaukee say they are – districts must ask property taxpayers for more.
“We will need to, absolutely, continue to find better ways to measure wealth than property value,” Evers said.

note: this link will suffer “linkrot” as Capital Newspapers takes their links down after a period of time.

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George Archibald:

“There are no secret agendas here. Divergency [of views] in the classroom is being stifled. More and more, what we can say in the classroom is being restricted,” said Mr. Jackson, a high school English teacher from Kennewick, Wash.
Teachers have a responsibility “to instruct students how to think, not to indoctrinate,” he said. “All this is trying to do is to open this up and to prevent restriction” of the academic freedom of students as well as teachers.
But Tom Oxter, president of a Florida higher-education group that led the fight before the Florida Legislature against a similar campaign for a student academic bill of rights there, denounced the proposal as “really just the beginning of a witch hunt” by conservatives.

Via Joanne Jacobs. Joanne also summarizes the NEA’s comments on the Achievement Gap.

Susan Lampert Smith: “West High kids may have more opportunities because their parents are able to pay so they can play”. Evidently, the issue is $6,000 in the Madison School District’s $320M+ budget.
Meanwhile, Sandy Cullen discusses an attempt to move extramural sports to MSCR (part of Fund 80) as a response to the elimination earlier this year of freshman no cut sports. Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater mentioned:

“Our problem is facilities,” Rainwater said, adding that after-school activities, practices and games, as well as community programs, are already using the space needed for an extramural program. “If we don’t have facilities, we can’t do it.”

I hope and assume that programs for our school age children always come first in these discussions.

Tom Kertscher:

At the same time, a new system for disciplining students also helped reduce the number of Badger Middle School students sent to the dean’s office because of misbehavior, said first-year principal Ted Neitzke, 34. But the use of a daily “blog” – an adaptation of e-mails shared among teachers and other staff – was perhaps more important, Neitzke said. He had used the system a year earlier on his previous job as an assistant principal in Sheboygan.

The blog, Neitzke said, is a “positive, proactive communication tool.”

The West Bend School Board received annual reports from schools on progress they are making on individual improvement plans. Badger, the larger of West Bend’s two middle schools, said reducing behavioral problems was its “greatest achievement” in the school year that just ended.

Rep Tamara Grigsby, via Wispolitics:

• Wisconsin has the highest incidence of African-American teen births in the nation.
• Milwaukee has the highest high school drop-out rates for African-Americans in the country, which is directly connected to the high teen birth rate in our state.
• In 2001, Milwaukee had the second highest teen birth rate of the nation’s 50 biggest cities.
• Wisconsin has the 14th highest chlamydia rate (17,942 cases reported) and the 21st highest rate of syphilis in the nation (5,663 cases reported).
• Almost ½ of all new sexually transmitted infections are contracted by 15-24 year olds, despite the fact that this population only makes up 25% of the sexually active population.

Reader David Lehane emailed this article by Evelyn J. Pringle:

he scheme concocted by the pharmaceutical industry and pushed forward by the Bush administration to screen the entire nation’s public school population for mental illness and treat them with controversial drugs was already setting off alarms among parents all across the country. But in the state of Indiana, the alarm just got louder.
Tax payers had better get out their check books because school taxes are about to go up as the law suits against school boards start mounting over the TeenScreen depression survey being administered to children in the school.
The first notice of intent to sue was filed this month in Indiana by Michael and Teresa Rhoades who were outraged when they learned their daughter had been given a psychological test at school without their consent.
In December 2004, their daughter came home from school and said she had been diagnosed with an obsessive compulsive and social anxiety disorder after taking the TeenScreen survey.

Economist Mark Thoma offers some thoughts on grade inflation:

There are two episodes that account for most grade inflation. The first is from the 1960s through the early 1970s. This is usually explained by the draft rules for the Vietnam War. The second episode begins around 1990 and is harder to explain….

My study finds an interesting correlation in the data. During the time grades were increasing, budgets were also tightening inducing a substitution towards younger and less permanent faculty. I broke down grade inflation by instructor rank and found it is much higher among assistant professors, adjuncts, TAs, instructors, etc. than for associate or full professors. These are instructors who are usually hired year-to-year or need to demonstrate teaching effectiveness for the job market, so they have an incentive to inflate evaluations as much as possible, and high grades are one means of manipulating student course evaluations.

Alex Tabarrock offers some additional thoughts & background links.

Via Wispolitics:

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) today announced the second phase of its community engagement initiative regarding the future use of its facilities. School officials will again host a series of meetings to seek and gather information from teachers, principals, community organizations and parents.
MPS must eliminate vacant space that exists because of a downward trend in enrollment, and make solid decisions regarding dwindling resources. MPS currently has 95,600 students, but it operates buildings that, combined, feature room for 122,000 students.
“We are encouraging the community to come out for the second round of meetings,” said Tyrone Dumas, Milwaukee Public Schools’ Community Engagement project leader. “We’ve heard from some teachers, administrators and parents in the first phase of this process, however, we need to touch many more in order to develop fair and accurate guidelines by which we could close some school sites.”

Alan Borsuk & Sarah Carr visit many Milwaukee voucher schools. Here’s their story.

• The Good
• The Bad
• Vouchers Elsewhere

The Cap Times published two articles today on East High:

• Lee Sensenbrenner interviews new Principal Alan Harris
• Pat Scheider writes about East High United, a new parents advocacy group.

Rock Springs, WY Teacher Jennifer Wilmetti writes:

While the intent of the No Child Left Behind Act was praiseworthy, the means put in place to achieve the goals are flawed in several ways.

Lisa Snell, writing in Reason Magazine:

But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they’re using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools’ failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington—which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014—has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.
The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.

Milton Friedman:

Little did I know when I published an article in 1955 on “The Role of Government in Education” that it would lead to my becoming an activist for a major reform in the organization of schooling, and indeed that my wife and I would be led to establish a foundation to promote parental choice. The original article was not a reaction to a perceived deficiency in schooling. The quality of schooling in the United States then was far better than it is now, and both my wife and I were satisfied with the public schools we had attended. My interest was in the philosophy of a free society. Education was the area that I happened to write on early. I then went on to consider other areas as well. The end result was “Capitalism and Freedom,” published seven years later with the education article as one chapter.

John Tierney:

How can you claim the moral high ground when you’re denying him a chance to escape to a better private school?
Well, the public system did lose $4,400, but that’s actually $1,000 less than the cost of educating the average student and there was one pupil fewer to teach.
As enrollment has dropped at Edison, the student-to-teacher ratio has improved to about 22 from about 30. In the past two years, a new principal has revamped the administration and replaced half the teachers in the school. Under the new leadership, the average test score at the school last year rose dramatically – one of the largest increases of any high school in Florida.
Edison’s improvement is not an isolated example, as three separate studies have found in Florida. Test scores have gone up more rapidly at schools facing the threat of vouchers than at other schools. The latest study, by Martin West and Paul Peterson of Harvard, shows that Florida’s program is much more effective than the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Weekend Edition Audio:

Utah has led state opposition to the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Now U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is applying pressure, saying Utah should worry more about educating minority students than concerns about the law.

Amy Hetzner takes a look at Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s proposal forwarded to the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee.

Peter T. Kilborn:

Ms. Link and her husband, Jim, 42, a financial services sales manager for the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, N.C., belong to a growing segment of the upper middle class, executive gypsies. The shock troops of companies that continually expand across the country and abroad, they move every few years, from St. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and the urban poor.
As a subgroup, relos are economically homogenous, with midcareer incomes starting at $100,000 a year. Most are white. Some find the salaries and perks compensating; the developments that cater to them come with big houses, schools with top SAT scores, parks for youth sports and upscale shopping strips.

I found this article quite interesting, particularily the choice this family made with respect to their next move (an older, established neighborhood).

Jay Matthews:

After a one-hour bus trip, including one transfer, they reached the private Nannie Helen Burroughs School in Northeast Washington, which the children began attending in the fall under the D.C. school voucher program. Then their mother took a 45-minute bus trip to her job as a store clerk in Pentagon City.
In the evening, she did the same bus commute in reverse, picked up her children from the school’s day-care program at 6 p.m. and escorted them home. The next day, she would rise at 6:15 a.m. to do it all again.
Nine months into the experiment, it is too early to know how the nation’s first federally funded voucher program is affecting the academic achievement of the hundreds of D.C. children who won the private school scholarships. But spending time with the Hammonds provides a glimpse of the benefits and the sacrifices that the program entails for one family.

Daniel Yee:

Health officials hope it will increase parents’ involvement in what their kids eat at school. It’s a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.
“My parents do care about what I eat. They try, like, to keep up with it,” said Hughes, a 14-year-old student at Marietta Middle School.
Three school districts in the Atlanta area last week became the first in the country to offer the parental-monitoring option of an electronic lunch payment system called Mealpay.com, created by Horizon Software International of Loganville, Ga

David Brooks:

The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.

Cristi Hegranes:

Will we be more secure — or just less competitive — if the government forces hundreds of thousands of international science students to get export licenses simply to look through a microscope?

JennyD has a thought provoking article on General Motors, The Education Establishment and Journalism:

Most of the institutions in both of these fields are based on decades-old structures, with work structures and beliefs that are being battered everyday. Journalism is under enormous pressure, and newspeople feel it. They’d like to say it’s not their fault (see this Tim Porter post on the mood of the newsroom for more on that) but as Porter points out, they are as responsible as everyone at GM is for their predicament. Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis write about this all the time…and offer criticism and alternative id

Tom Scullen (Scullen is superintendent of the Appleton Area School District, which has 10 charter schools. He also is president of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association.):

Charter schools are playing an increasingly important role in that success story.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster, at a recent state charter school conference, said charter schools “are critical in making schools learning environments for all children.” She added, “Charter schools encourage community and parental involvement and innovative teaching practices within the system of accountability for results in public education.”

Late Monday afternoon, the school district finalized the search committee for the East High principal. The committee met Tuesday night for orientation, and I believe that the interviews will start next Monday, May 1.
As Mr. Rathert reported at the April 14 meeting of the new parent/staff/school community organization, there are 8 candidates who will be interviewed. The district typically doesn’t release the names until the field is narrowed to the finalists, so the names of the eight candidates are not available at this time.
It is likely that the new parent/staff/school community organization’s May 12 meeting (7:00, East High cafeteria) will focus on the search, results if any, and ways that the East High community can participate in the transition process.
According to Bob Nadler, head of Human Resources for the district, the committee members are:
Parents: Kymberli Crowder, Larry Riechers, Cynthia Walton-Jackson
Staff: Scott Eckel, Sara Krauskopf, Jen Simpson
Administrators: Ed Holmes, Mary Ramberg, Ted Szalkowski [Note: in the past the other three high school principals have served on the committee, but apparently there are reasons why that didn’t work this time.]
Students: Two students applied

Lee Sensenbrenner:

But several parents in an audience of about 50 said they have little hope that the May 24 referendum to build a new school will pass. Meanwhile, they said, school district officials need to reconsider their plans if the school isn’t built, and also, perhaps, consider alternative building plans.
…..
But she said the main reason she did not support the contract was because the administration provided board members only a few details from it.
“I would have a hard time approving an agreement unless I see it in writing,” said Kobza, who is an attorney. “Maybe it’s just the line of work I’m in.”

Developing incentive pay plans are a challenge. Gov. Schwarzenegger is pushing this in California. Dan Weintraub writes:

Everyone knows that our poorest kids tend to clump in schools that depend too much on inexperienced teachers, many of whom are still trying to find their way in the profession. We have good, experienced teachers who would teach in these schools if they were rewarded financially for their trouble – just as in every other profession, where the toughest-to-fill jobs normally earn higher pay. So who or what is standing in the way of the students who need better teachers getting those teachers? The teachers unions.

(more…)

Florida is making news again: This time, having handcuffed a five-year old black girl, of course, but after her tantrum was over.
What impressed me was the incompetence of Nicole Dibenedetto, the new assistant principal of Fairmont Park Elementary school. This principal had just been through Crisis Prevention training and, I suppose, was following the rules and procedures she had learned there. It doesn’t say much about the competence of the training either.
Any parent who has had to handle the typical and not that unusual tantrum from a 5-year-old will recognize both the child’s behavior and the thorough lack of knowledge this principal has in handling children.
Here is the recent link to the news report that has links to the video. Total video time is about 30 minutes. Report and Video

The LA Times opposes Rob Reiner’s proposed “Universal Pre-School” scheme:

The last thing California needs right now is to raise another huge sum of money $2.3 billion a year to start that can’t be used to close existing gaps.
Reiner would do that with a higher tax on incomes of more than $400,000 a year. Last November, voters approved a poorly thought-out measure to tax million-dollar earners to fund mental health programs. The line of good causes calling out for a tax on the rich will only get longer.
This editorial page has advocated reinstating higher tax levels on top incomes, but only if the revenue is used to heal the crippled general fund, and only temporarily. With a healthier budget, the Legislature could have a rational discussion about funding more preschool.

Education Intelligence Agency posted this data from the US Census Bureau, US Dept of Education and the NEA. Take a look.

Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia employ more non-teachers than teachers. South Carolina ranks highest in the percentage of teacher employees at 65 percent, while Kentucky brings up the rear with classroom teachers making up only 42.6 percent of its public education workforce.

via joanne jacobs

In 2000, The Justice Matters Institute Discipline Task Force published a report called Turning TO Each Other Not ON Each Other: How School Communities Prevent Racial Bias in School Discipline.” The report provides helpful insights and resources for people who are concerned about creating more effective and equitable approaches to discipline in our schools.
That report is available in PDF form at: http://www.justicematters.org/turnto.html

Anne Marie Chaker:

. . . a growing body of evidence is showing that preteen students do better when they can remain in their familiar elementary schools for longer — with better grades and fewer disciplinary problems than their middle-school peers.
. . . An early study tracked hundreds of middle-school-age students in Milwaukee public schools, comparing those who switched to a new school in grade seven with their counterparts in a K-8 school who didn’t have to make any switch. The research found that those who switched had more negative attitudes toward school and lower grades. Girls in particular didn’t recover in middle adolescence (grades nine and 10) when it came to self-esteem and participation in extracurricular activities.

Via Eduwonk & Joanne Jacobs

Via Wispolitics:

Daniel Burkhalter, who has been director of government relations for the Illinois Education Association since 1993, is the new executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
The WEAC Board of Directors approved the appointment of Burkhalter Friday (April 8, 2005). He succeeds Michael A. Butera, who left in November to take a position with the National Education Association. WEAC Legal Counsel Bruce Meredith has been acting executive director.

Wispolitics. Clusty search

Schoolmatters:

a public source for information and analysis about our nation’s public schools

Attached is a fact sheet from Shel Gross, Director of Public Policy for the Mental Health Association in Milwaukee County. He is the head of the Wisconsin Prevention Network.
The fact sheet is to help people lobby against the elimination of Safe and Drug Free Schools funding from the Federal government.
Lucy Gibson

Margaret Krome on a middle school talent show.