School Climate – Page 86 – School Information System

Loyola to start school of education

Loyola University is launching a new school of education that will focus on solving problems in urban schools and on forging practical relationships between the university and Baltimore’s public school system.
The school, which Loyola will dedicate at a ceremony this evening, will house a research center dedicated to innovation in urban education. University officials hope the center will attract top-notch faculty and students with an interest in making practical improvements to Baltimore schools, said Peter Murrell, dean of the school of education.
“It really fits with the Jesuit philosophy that to do good work in the world, you have to get out there and roll up your sleeves,” Murrell said.
Murrell has focused his research on urban education and came to Loyola last year after directing a similar research center at Northeastern University in Boston.

Superintendent Governance: Michelle Rhee “Has no Choice but to Play Tough”

Richard Whitmire:

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

Rishawn Biddle:

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.”

Black Male Dropouts Lead Nation in Incarceration

Reuters:

On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution in America, according to a disturbing new national report released today on the dire economic and social consequences of not graduating from high school.
Dropouts become incarcerated at a shocking rate: 23 of every 100 young Black male dropouts were in jail on any given day in 2006-07 compared to only 6 to 7 of every 100 Asian, Hispanic or White dropouts. While young Black men are disproportionately affected, the report found that this crisis cuts across racial and ethnic lines. Male dropouts of all races were 47 times more likely to be incarcerated than their peers of a similar age who had graduated from a four-year college or university.
“For too long, and in too many ways, young people across the country have been let down by the education system and by the adults responsible for their care and development. Now is the time to increase the investments we make in young people, enhance the content, opportunities and supports we provide, and empower them to make better choices about both their individual future and the future of our nation. This report is another important step towards those ends,” said Marc Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League.

Jessie Jackson: A State of Emergency in Obama Homeland

Bob Ellis:

n Tuesday morning, Rev. Jackson hopped onboard a bus and took students to the school at 11200 S. Wallace St. He took the ride to draw more attention to school safety in the wake of the beating death of Fenger student Derrion Albert, 16, last month.
Buses left shortly after 7 a.m. Beforehand, Jackson held a news conference on South Ellis Avenue just outside the Altgeld Gardens public housing development.
Jackson blamed the closure of Carver High School, at 13100 S. Doty Ave. close to Altgeld Gardens, for the violence that has erupted at Fenger.
The fight that led to Albert’s death was between Fenger students who lived in the Ville neighborhood around the school, and students form Altgeld Gardens. Critics have complained that these fights began when Carver closed and reopened as a military academy.
“This is a state of emergency given patterns of violence and patterns of killing,” Jackson said in a news conference.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Report: Wisconsin taxes claim 12 percent of income

Scott Bauer:

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

Rebecca Kelley:

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.

Harvard’s Hollow Core

“The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could ‘approach’ books if it were ever necessary to do so.”

Caleb Nelson ’88 (Mathematics) writing in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990:

Even before Harvard’s Core Curriculum made its debut, in 1979, Saturday Review hailed it as “a quiet revolution.” The magazine was wrong on both counts: not only was the core unrevolutionary but it rapidly became one of the loudest curricula in America. Time, Newsweek, and other popular periodicals celebrated the new program, which required undergraduates to take special courses designed to reveal the methods–not the content–of the various academic disciplines. “Not since…1945,” The Washington Post said, “had the academic world dared to devise a new formula for developing ‘the educated man.'” The reform was front-page news for The New York Times, and even network television covered it. Media enthusiasm continues today, with Edward Fiske, the former education editor of The New York Times advising readers of The Fiske Guide to Colleges: “Back in the mid-1970s Harvard helped launch the current curriculum reform movement, and the core curriculum that emerged ranks as perhaps the most exciting collection of academic offerings in all of American higher education.”
The core did indeed start a movement. A 1981 report issued by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching spoke of “the Harvard lead” and recommended a general-education program that put more emphasis on “the shared relationships common to all people” than on any particular facts. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill soon adopted the Harvard approach, and other schools have instituted programs that stress skills over facts. The structures of these programs vary, but the Harvard core’s singular influence is suggested by Ernest Boyer’s 1987 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. Boyer’s survey of academic deans at colleges and universities nationwide found that the Harvard core was the most frequently mentioned example of a successful program of general education.
For their part, Harvard officials seem delighted with the program. A. Michael Spence, who just finished a six-year term as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, has labeled it “a smash hit”; President Derek Bok has heralded its “enormous success.” Indeed, Bok, who will step down next year after two decades at the helm, said in 1983, when the faculty approved the continuation of the core, that the development of the program had given him more satisfaction than any other project undertaken during his presidency. In 1985 the members of Harvard’s chief governing board showed that they had no complaints either when the elected the core’s architect, Henry Rosovsky, to their number. (Rosovsky, who preceded Spence as dean of the faculty, has now been appointed acting dean while Harvard searches for Spence’s permanent replacement.) The program recently marked its tenth anniversary, and no fundamental changes are on the horizon.
Forty-five years ago Harvard had a clear idea of its mission. In 1945 it published a 267-page book laying out goals for educators, with the hope of giving American colleges and secondary schools a “unifying purpose and idea.” The thrust of this volume, titled General Education in a Free Society but nicknamed “the Redbook,” was that educational institutions should strive to create responsible democratic citizens, well versed in the heritage of the West and endowed with “the common knowledge and the common values on which a free society depends.” As James Bryant Conant, then the president of Harvard, once summed up his goal, “Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free.”
To accomplish this goal at Harvard, the Redbook recommended that every undergraduate be required to take two full-year survey courses, tentatively called “Great Texts of Literature” and “Western Thought and Institutions,” and a full-year course on the principles of either the physical or the biological sciences. The Harvard faculty balked at this specific program, but it endorsed the Redbook’s essence. In each of three areas–the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences–it established a short list of approved courses. The general education program was first required in the fall of 1949 and was fully phased in two years later, when all entering students were required to do two semesters of approved coursework in each area.

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Lesson for teachers union: It takes two to cooperate

Boston Globe Editorial:

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

Matthew Garrahan:

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

Alan Borsuk:

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

EdSource via email:

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

Youth Prison Model Sets High Bar

Bobby White:

After recent changes to California’s juvenile-prison system brought down recidivism rates and the number of incarcerated youths, and also saved millions of dollars, the state is now aiming to treat its adult prisoners more like youthful offenders.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday signed into law a bill to overhaul the state’s adult-prison system. Among other things, the legislation will shift more funding and responsibility for paroled offenders to counties from the state. That echoes a key move in the state’s overhaul of juvenile detention — placing more nonviolent inmates in county jails instead of state prisons and helping counties fund rehabilitation services.
“We used the juvenile reforms as a starting point” for the bill, said Democratic Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, who helped to craft the legislation. “We said, ‘What if you take this and expand on it?’ We were attracted to the ideas that worked.”

Did School Change Your Life?

BBC:

Pupils around the world have been telling BBC News about the battle they face to get an education. But why is school worth the effort?
The BBC’s ‘Hunger To Learn‘ would like you to tell us how your education changed your life. What was the most important lesson you learned at school?
Did your education transform your fortunes? Or do you feel that the things you learned outside school – with your family, your friends and in your working life – had a greater influence on your destiny?

Six-year-old sent to reform school for bringing a “weapon” (Cub Scout camping cutlery) to school

Cory Doctorow:

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.

Huckleberry Finn good for starting positive discussions about race

Carmen Van Kerckhove:

written by Anti-Racist Parent contributor Deanna Shoss; originally published at Intercultural Talk
My dad and I came to an impasse again recently. It happens whenever we get into a conversation about race. Or more specifically, a conversation about something that happened in the news or real life where people of different races were involved. As in “they believe this way” from him, and “you can’t call an entire group of people they” from me.
It always ends with him thinking that I think he’s racist, and with me thinking that he thinks I’m all about politically correct language with no real depth of meaning. Rather than digging for clarification, we back away from the conversation. The funny part is that this time we were agreeing about the same thing: Huckleberry Finn should not be banned.
This conversation has been lingering for a few months after my father introduced the book to my 8 year old son, who let me know by announcing that he had learned the ‘N’ word. I’ve blogged about it here and here. It reintroduced me to Mark Twain, who really is a brilliant writer, and it created an insight into institutional racism that I hadn’t anticipated, when Dillon said “back then this word was okay to use.”

Via a kind reader’s email.

Seattle Public Schools Boundary/School Assignment Plan Comments

The Seattle Times:

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

San Francisco Chronicle:

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.

TEEN RANT College hunt: It’s a jungle

Helen Wang:

I spend seven hours each day next to metamorphosed monsters. The stresses of college applications unfortunately transform perfunctory peers into college creatures. They are predatory and are camouflaged as seniors, but with the right tactics, anyone can survive the jungle of college applications. Among the creatures lurking there:
College crabs scuttle about school hoping to undercut any competition. The crab exhibits its aggressive territorial dance to discourage the approach of other UC Berkeley applicants. A stack of books clasped in its claws and a bulging backpack-induced hunch characterize the agitated crab.
Prestige parrots are like ordinary parrots, squawking the same questions day after day. But these pretentious peers are primarily hunting for a name-brand university and will eagerly cannibalize competitors. Their obnoxious calls from afar warn victims: “Squawwwk, what’s your SAT score?”

Chicago teens’ world fraught with violence

Azam Ahmed & Kristen Mack:

His left eye still swollen shut, Vashion Bullock doesn’t deny fighting in the melee that claimed a Chicago high school student’s life last month.
He’s watched the grainy cellphone video and seen himself standing shirtless in the middle of the mob. But to him, the footage is a 2 1/2 -minute clip of his world without context, broadcast endlessly on television and the Web.
This mob included students who made the honor roll, held after-school jobs, played sports and planned for college. But they wake up in worlds frayed by poverty and violence.
For years, Vashion and others bused in from Altgeld Gardens have fought with kids who live closer to Fenger High School and who see them as outsiders, according to interviews with dozens of students and parents. The Fenger senior said he often races to the bus stop to avoid confrontation. But that Thursday, he had been suspended for a school fight. And he’d had enough.

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.

Madison Country Day School Host Japanese Students

Pamela Cotant:

Fabian Fernandez, a junior at Madison Country Day School, said hosting a student from Japan forces you to look at your own culture, and to consider the differences and similarities.
“You kind of get to re-experience your own culture,” said Fernandez, whose family has hosted a number of students from other countries. “Even the small things.”
Recently, eight Japanese 10th-graders and one teacher were here for nine days and stayed with host families from Madison Country Day School, which they also attended.
Every other year, the students from Hakuoh High School visit Madison Country Day, a private school for pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students, through a sister-school relationship.
During alternate years, Madison Country Day students visit the school in Ashikaga City, Japan, about 90 miles from Tokyo. This year, five juniors and seniors are considering the trip.

McFarland’s Wisconsin Virtual Academy doing ‘remarkably well’ in year one

Devin Rose:

Q How has the school year been going for students at the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the online school contracted by the McFarland School District?
A Things have gone “remarkably well” so far for the virtual charter school in its first year of operation, said Leslye Erickson, the head of the school.
The McFarland School District contracted with the nonprofit Wisconsin Virtual Academy and K12 Virtual Schools to run and provide the research-based curriculum for the school, which has 488 students enrolled in kindergarten through high school.
Students come from all over the state, Erickson said, so orientations were held before school began to allow students, parents and teachers to meet face-to-face.

Don’t Leave Gifted Kids Behind

Lisa Virgoe:

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

Eric Adler:

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

Dan Hardy:

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.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “Killing the Goose – What Were We Thinking?”

John Mauldin:

Peggy Noonan, maybe the most gifted essayist of our time, wrote a few weeks ago about the vague concern that many of us have that the monster looming up ahead of us has the potential (my interpretation) for not just plucking a few feathers from the goose that lays the golden egg (the US free-market economy), or stealing a few more of the valuable eggs, but of actually killing the goose. Today we look at the possibility that the fiscal path of the enormous US government deficits we are on could indeed kill the goose, or harm it so badly it will make the lost decades that Japan has suffered seem like a stroll in the park.
And while I do not think we will get to that point (though I can’t deny the possibility), for reasons I will go into, there is the very real prospect that the upheavals created by not dealing proactively with the problems (or denying they exist) will be as bad as or worse than the credit crisis we have gone through. This is not going to be something that happens overnight, and the seeming return to normalcy that so many predict has the rather alarming aspect of creating a sense of complacency that will only serve to “kick the can” down the road.
This week we look at the problem, and then muse upon what the more likely scenarios are that may play out. This is a longer version of a speech I gave this morning to the New Orleans Conference, where I also offered a path out of the problems. This letter will be a little more controversial than normal, but I hope it makes us all think about the very serious plight we have put ourselves in.
Let’s review a few paragraphs I wrote last month: “I have seven kids. As our family grew, we limited the choices our kids could make; but as they grew into teenagers, they were given more leeway. Not all of their choices were good. How many times did Dad say, ‘What were you thinking?’ and get a mute reply or a mumbled ‘I don’t know.’
“Yet how else do you teach them that bad choices have bad consequences? You can lecture, you can be a role model; but in the end you have to let them make their own choices. And a lot of them make a lot of bad choices. After having raised six, with one more teenage son at home, I have come to the conclusion that you just breathe a sigh of relief if they grow up and have avoided fatal, life-altering choices. I am lucky. So far. Knock on a lot of wood.
“I have watched good kids from good families make bad choices, and kids with no seeming chance make good choices. But one thing I have observed. Very few teenagers make the hard choice without some outside encouragement or help in understanding the known consequences, from some source. They nearly always opt for the choice that involves the most fun and/or the least immediate pain, and then learn later that they now have to make yet another choice as a consequence of the original one. And thus they grow up. So quickly.”

Education in Malaysia

New Straits Times:

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.

The Global Achievement Gap

Sara Bennett:

While I’m recommending books…. I recently read The Global Achievement Gap, by Tony Wagner, an excellent book about the failures of today’s secondary schools and how schools prepare students to memorize facts rather than problem solve. He identifies seven skills necessary to survive in the 21st century: critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration across networks; agility and adaptability; initiative and entrepreneurialism; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analyzing information; and developing curiosity and imagination. He takes “learning walks” through schools, and provides snapshots of school days, both good and bad. I wish every principal would read this book, take a learning walk of her/his own, and then implement many of the wonderful suggestions for ways to engage students in a meaningful way.

Pakistan’s Education System and Links to Extremism

Council on Foreign Relations:

Pakistan’s poor education system has increasingly become a matter of international concern. Lack of access to quality education, which in turn limits economic opportunity, makes young Pakistanis targets for extremist groups, some experts say. The World Bank says nearly half the adult population of Pakistan can’t read, and net primary enrollment rates remain the lowest in South Asia. Experts say the system suffers from inadequate government investment, corruption, lack of institutional capacity, and a poor curriculum that often incites intolerance. In August 2009, chief counterterrorism adviser to the White House John Brennan, summing up a concern held by many U.S. terrorism experts, said extremist groups in Pakistan have exploited this weakness. “It is why they offer free education to impoverished Pakistani children, where they can recruit and indoctrinate the next generation,” he said. There have been some efforts by the Pakistani government, Western governments, and the World Bank to reform the system, but serious challenges remain.

Washington, DC Area Educators Study Promising Japanese Teaching Method

Emma Brown:

Third-grade teacher Andy Gomez stood at a whiteboard before 10 of his colleagues on a recent Thursday afternoon at Marie Reed Elementary in Adams Morgan. His students were stumbling over subtraction problems like 700 minus 369, he said — the zeros were tripping them up.
The solution to their difficulties was coming — by way of Japan.
For the next half-hour, the group discussed — down to nitty-gritty details about vocabulary to use or avoid — what the students’ fundamental misunderstandings about numbers might be and how to address them.
This collaborative examination of the mechanics of teaching is part of the school’s embrace of “lesson study,” a model of professional development for teachers that was developed in Japan. It was pioneered in the District by five teachers at Marie Reed, who began meeting weekly two years ago to study math content and pedagogy.

School district contracts push up tax levy

Jo Egelhoff:

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.

Parents Judging Parents of Home-Schoolers

Lisa Belkin:

Over on Salon.com last week, senior editor Andrew O’Hehir posted the first in what will be a series of essays about home-schooling his 5-year-old twins with his wife, Leslie. It is long, but insightful and informative, filled both with the whys and the hows of this choice.
What struck me most about the piece, though, was not its practical bent, but its philosophical notes, where O’Hehir describes the reactions of strangers when he mentions home schooling to them — the judgment, spoken or not, particularly from other parents. He writes:

After various tense conversations with friends, family members and strangers, Leslie and I have concluded that earnest, heartfelt discussion of exactly how we’re approaching our kids’ education and why we’re doing it is a bad idea. For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it’s like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert. I can certainly remember having a weirdly defensive response (“You know, I hardly ever eat red meat”), one where I reacted to someone else’s comment about themselves as if it were really all about me.

Education in Uruguay: Laptops for all

The Economist:

FOR the past year the pupils of Escuela 95, in a poor neighbourhood of Montevideo, have had a new learning tool. Each has been issued with a laptop computer. This has been of particular help to the 30 or so children with severe learning difficulties, says Elias Portugal, a special-needs teacher at the school. Before, he struggled to give them individual attention. Now, the laptops are helping them with basic language skills. “The machines capture the kids’ attention. They can type a word and the computer pronounces it,” he says.
Nearly all of Uruguay’s 380,000 primary-school pupils have now received a simple and cheap XO laptop, a model developed by One Laptop Per Child, an NGO based in Massachusetts. The government hopes this will help poorer and disadvantaged children do better in school while also improving the overall standard of education. These ambitions will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects. The rest of the world should be intrigued: the first country in Latin America to provide free, compulsory schooling will become the first, globally, to find out whether furnishing a whole generation with laptops is a worthwhile investment. (Peru, a bigger, poorer and less homogenous country, is trying something similar.)

School Reform

Ed Garvey:

Just about every meaningful reform begins with education. If our schools are not working well, then ultimately nothing works. Wisconsin has enjoyed great schools from kindergarten to the university system to technical colleges.
One reason our kids score at or near the top in national testing is parental involvement. Parents in Wisconsin demand high quality education and the elected school boards respond.
The Wisconsin Constitution guarantees public school education for all children from age 4 to 20. At one time that protection did not apply to children with “learning problems.” They were called “retarded” and were sent to institutions, but in 1966 parents decided that was unacceptable. They turned to Attorney General Bronson La Follette for his opinion and he ruled that “all” meant “all.” Every child in Wisconsin would be educated.

State education chief supports cultural learning

Mary Catherine Martin:

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.”

Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap

Mark Hugo Lopez:

Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number-48%-say that they themselves plan to get a college degree, according to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from Aug. 5 to Sept. 16, 2009.
The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family. Other reasons include poor English skills (cited by about half of respondents who cut short their education), a dislike of school and a feeling that they don’t need more education for the careers they want (each cited by about four-in-ten respondents who cut their education short).
Latino schooling in the U.S. has long been characterized by high dropout rates and low college completion rates. Both problems have moderated over time, but a persistent educational attainment gap remains between Hispanics and whites.

William McKenzie has more.

NEA Sends $200,000 to Washington to Fight Initiative 1033

Mike Antonucci:

ext month, Washington state voters will consider Initiative 1033, which would limit the growth of government general fund revenue to a rate tied to population and inflation. The latest poll shows the measure leading 45%-32%, with 22% undecided. It’s hardly surprising that the teachers’ union is leading the opposition.
In an off-year, we would normally expect huge wads of national money to be flowing into Washington from NEA headquarters. But because of the vagaries of Washington’s campaign finance laws, NEA cannot fund the opposition from its multi-million dollar ballot measure fund. Instead, NEA allocated $200,000 from its contingency fund, which is capped at $2.5 million and must cover a host of other costs – most notably the half-million dollar expense of instituting the new business items passed by the NEA Representative Assembly last July.

Baby Bundle: Japan’s Cash Incentive for Parenthood

Daisuke Wakabyashi & Miho Inada:

Japan wants to set just the right mood to get its people to make more babies. But forget dinner and candlelight: The government’s plan depends heavily on large amounts of cash.
With a worried eye on declining birth rates and an aging population, Japan’s new leaders propose offering new parents monthly payments totaling about $3,300 a year for every new child until the age of 15. Other initiatives include more state-supported day care, tuition waivers and other efforts designed to make parenthood more appealing.
But experts warn money alone does not a baby make. Governments have a mixed record in pushing up birth rates, as economic inducements sometimes fail to overcome other complex societal forces that affect baby-making decisions.
In Japan, they include the traditional reliance on mothers to perform the bulk of duties in the home, including child-rearing. Demographers say Japan might have more success if they also encourage more Japanese men to come home and do the dishes.

Scottish School Cash “Not Getting Results”

BBC:

Spending on education in Scotland could be cut by up to £680m without affecting standards, a study has suggested.
Researchers at the Centre for Public Policy for Regions [Complete Report – PDF] said good teachers were key to improving standards, not smaller class sizes or higher spending.
They said spending on education in Scotland was high relative to that in the other home nations.
They added attainment had “flatlined” since devolution and Scottish pupils were falling behind UK counterparts.
The Centre for Public Policy for Regions (CPPR) at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities concedes attempts to compare Scotland with England, Wales and Northern Ireland are fraught with uncertainty, but it insists ministers could find savings without compromising quality.

Private school pupils ‘dominate’

BBC:

Forty-two per cent of the UK’s top scientists and scholars were privately educated and the trend looks likely to continue, a report suggests.
A study by the Sutton Trust educational charity looked at the schools and universities attended by 1,700 top scientists and scholars.
It also found 51% of medics, 70% of judges, 54% of leading journalists and 32% of MPs went to independent schools.
The charity says less-privileged children should be given equal chances.
Private schools educate about 7% of children in the UK and about 9% of 17-year-olds. About 14% of university entrants are from independent schools.
In the study, analysts looked at the educational backgrounds of 1,700 of the 2,200 fellows of the Royal Society and British Academy.

Top 200 World Universities

Times Higher Education:

Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings 2009 Top 200 world universities

Herta Müller Wins Literature Nobel

AP:

Herta Müller, a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse.
Ms. Müller, born in Romania’s Transylvania Banat region, was honored for work that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” the Swedish Academy said.
“I am very surprised and still can not believe it,” Ms. Müller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany. “I can’t say anything more at the moment.”
The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy’s pattern of awarding the prize to European writers.

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.”

Education Agency Will Offer Grants for Innovative Ideas

Sam Dillon:

The federal Department of Education sketched out a new nationwide competition on Tuesday under which some 2,700 school districts and nonprofit groups are expected to compete for pieces of a $650 million innovation fund.
The department already has the 50 states vying for chunks of a $5.4 billion education improvement fund that it calls Race to the Top; the innovation fund is a separate competition.
Federal officials said the Investing in Innovation Fund would be distributed in three categories. Small development grants of up to $5 million will support new, unproven ideas that seem worth exploring, they said. Validation grants of up to $30 million will support existing programs that have shown evidence that they can work. Scale-up grants of up to $50 million will go to programs that have developed a strong track record for improving student achievement, the officials said.

UK Education Political Battle

Francis Gilbert:

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

Tim Morrissey:

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.

Community Leaders Excluded from Duncan and Holder Four Seasons Chicago Meeting

Dick Johnson & Steve Bryant:

Community leaders and parents outside Fenger are in disbelief that they are not at the breakfast table with Arne Duncan and Eric Holder.
Attorney General Holder and Secretary of Education Duncan are in town to speak, ostensibly, with the community about youth violence — a blight on Chicago neighborhoods so vividly brought to national attention by the videotaped beating of Derrion Albert.
“They are meeting about us without us,” said Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project, a Chicago-based educational reform organization.
Duncan and Holder’s meeting at the Four Seasons also includes Mayor Daley, Pastor Michael Pfleger, CEO of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman, and Police Superintendent Jody Weis.

Material for the Daily Show.

Madison Schools enrollment remains steady at 24,622

via a Madison School District email:

Student enrollment in the Madison Metropolitan School District for the 2009-10 school year is up 82 students to 24,622 according to the official enrollment count conducted on the third Friday in September, as required by state law.
The 82 student rise over last year’s official enrollment count of 24,540 represents an increase of one third of one percent (0.33%).
Enrollment in Madison Schools has been remarkably consistent. This is the ninth straight year that MMSD enrollment has been between 24 and 25-thousand students.
Of note is the increase in the number of kindergarten students enrolled in Madison Schools. The count of 2,146 kindergarten students is:

140 students above last year’s number (2,006);
the highest enrollment for that grade level in the last 15 years;
nearly four percent greater than the most recent projection (80 students above 2,066 projection).

For more information on kindergarten-12th grade enrollment, go to http://infosvcweb.madison.k12.wi.us/stats

Related: “Where have all the students gone?” The student population drives a school district’s tax & spending authority.

Youth Violence a National Issue

All Things Considered:

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

Sheriff David Clarke:

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.

The School Volunteer Jobs That Most Help Your Kids

Sue Shellenbarger:

Rosa Rivera receives so many invitations to volunteer at her children’s school and other activities that the dozens of daily emails and calls about various projects can be “just overwhelming,” says the mother of two.
At her children’s stage, ages 7 and 9, her top priority is to take the projects that will help them most in school and life, says Ms. Rivera, Austin, Texas. But it can be hard to figure out which projects those are. “You’re pulled and stretched in so many directions, now more than ever,” she says.
Cash-strapped schools are leaning hard on parents for help this fall. Some 53% of parents plan to volunteer at their children’s schools, up from 44% last year, says a poll of 1,086 parents by Harris Interactive and GreatSchools, a nonprofit parent-involvement group. The re-opening of schools this fall has triggered a 50% increase in volunteer signups at VolunteerSpot.com, a Web site for organizing volunteers, to 75,000 from 50,000 last summer, says founder Karen Bantuveris,.
Sometimes, of course, it is best to volunteer where a school needs you most. And most school volunteer projects have worthy goals. Fundraisers keep alive arts, sports or music programs. Helping out in the school office fills staffing gaps. Painting classrooms improves kids’ environment. Serving on the school board helps shape schools’ strategy and direction.
But for parents with limited time and energy, which roles deliver the biggest benefit for your kids? And how does the answer to that question change as a student grows up? Here’s what research and experts say:
• Elementary School: Volunteer where your child can see you.

New Prince George’s Superintendent Promises “Dramatic Achievement Improvement”

Nelson Hernandez:

The head of Prince George’s County schools vowed Tuesday night to “dramatically improve student achievement” as he said that the county had showed strong academic gains.
In his first State of the Schools address since becoming superintendent this year, William R. Hite Jr. said the system should try to “make every child in Prince George’s County smarter.” He spoke for greater accountability for teachers, more prekindergarten classes, better customer service and alternatives for students who aren’t succeeding.
In recent years, Prince George’s has experimented in some schools with a pay-for-performance model that offers bonuses to excellent teachers, and Hite said Tuesday that effective teachers can make significant differences.
“We cannot construct a definition [of teacher effectiveness] that does not include student performance as one of the indicators,” Hite said.

Focus in Chicago: Students at Risk of Violence

Susan Saulny:

The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city’s public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.
The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.
The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year — and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.

Fewer Schools Sell Students Snacks

AP:

Fewer U.S. high schools and middle schools are selling candy and salty snacks to students, the federal government said in a report released Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on a survey of public schools in 34 states that compared results from 2006 to 2008. The study didn’t report the total number of schools that have changed. Instead, it looked at the proportion of schools in each state.
It found that the median proportion of high schools and middle schools that sell sugary or salty snacks dropped to 36% from 54%. The share of schools that sell soda and artificial fruit drinks fell to 37% from 62%.

New Tack on Math Promoted Problem-Solving Is Focus of High School Guide

Sean Cavanagh:

Three years after calling for a reordering of elementary and middle school math curricula, the nation’s largest group of math teachers is urging a new approach to high school instruction, one that aims to build students’ ability to choose and apply the most effective problem-solving techniques, in the classroom and in life.
Cultivating those skills will make math more useful, and more meaningful, to students, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics argues in a document scheduled for release this week.
“Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making” is a follow-up to the NCTM’s 2006 document, “Curriculum Focal Points,” which offered grade-by-grade content standards in math for prekindergarten through 8th grade. “Focal Points” won general praise in math circles, even from some of the NCTM’s strongest critics.
The high school document has both a different purpose and a different structure. It is not a suggested set of content standards, but rather a framework that attempts to show how skills that the NCTM considers essential–reasoning and sense-making–can be promoted across high school math.

Portfolio school districts: promising but ‘Works in progress’

via a Deb Britt email:

“Portfolio school districts are promising new developments but they still have big problems to solve,” is how Dr. Paul Hill describes reforms in the four big cities being studied by his team at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), University of Washington Bothell.
In New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, school officials are revamping the traditional school district model: from being an operator of a uniform set of schools and related services to being a holder of a diverse portfolio of schools, each meant to meet a particular need, and all subject to evaluation in light of evidence.
“A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement via expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest-performing, and constant search for new ideas,” says Hill. “So far we’ve found that each city is taking a different approach to developing their portfolio. By the end of our study (in 2011), we think this will tell us a lot more about this approach to public education.”
Portfolio School Districts for Big Cities: An Interim Report, published today by CRPE, introduces the subject of portfolio districts and opens a window on the particular approaches being taken in the four cities.
New York City – gave schools freedom over hiring and use of funds in return for accepting performance-based accountability and by adopting pupil-based funding of schools citywide.

Crusader for Syntactic Disambiguation Exprobrates Banks’ Labored Locutions

Sara Schaefer Munoz:

A few months ago, 71-year-old Chrissie Maher got a mailing from her bank titled “Personal and Private Banking — Keeping You Informed.” Baffled by its blizzard of terms such as “account facility limit,” Ms. Maher replied in simpler language.
“The leaflet needs much more thought if it is to be understood by your customers,” she said in a letter to Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. “As it stands, it should be renamed ‘Keeping You Confused.’ ”
After critiquing the pamphlet’s “tortuous and ambiguous sentences,” she redrafted it, changing terms like “maximum debit balance” to “the most that can be owed.”
RBS may have picked the wrong woman to target with financial mumbo jumbo. Ms. Maher is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose stated goal is to stem “the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language” that “takes away our democratic rights.”
Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the “frequently bizarre language” of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as “unlock clusters,” “subsidiarity” and “sector-specific benchmarking.”) She has blasted local government on the use of “worklessness” to refer to unemployment and once attacked the president of the U.K. Spelling Society over his claim that the apostrophe is “a waste of time.”

CDC: Fewer schools selling candy, soda to students

Mike Stobbe:

Fewer U.S. high schools and middle schools are selling candy and salty snacks to students, the federal government said in a report released Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on a survey of public schools in 34 states that compared results from 2006 to 2008. The study did not report the total number of schools that have changed. Instead, it looked at the proportion of schools in each state.
It found that the median proportion of high schools and middle schools that sell the sugary or salty snacks dropped from 54 percent to 36 percent.
The share of schools that sell soda and artificial fruit drinks dropped from 62 percent to 37 percent.

High School Civics: Mourning Constitutional

Matthew Ladner, via a kind reader’s email:

September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the day 222 years ago in Philadelphia when the Constitution of the United States was signed. Legend has it that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the constitutional convention, what sort of government had been created. Franklin’s reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
A major justification for supporting a system of public schools has been the promotion of a general diffusion of civic knowledge necessary for a well-informed citizenry. America’s founders, hoping to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” knew that our system of ordered liberty would endure only if its citizens understood the nation’s guiding principles. The endurance of American liberty, the founders believed, depends upon a broad knowledge of the nation’s history and an understanding of its institutions.
Charles N. Quigley, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, once explained the critical nature of civic knowledge: “From this nation’s earliest days, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams recognized that even the well-designed institutions are not sufficient to maintain a free society. Ultimately, a vibrant democracy must rely on the knowledge, skill, and virtues of its citizens and their elected officials. Education that imparts that knowledge and skill and fosters those virtues is essential to the preservation and improvement of American constitutional democracy and civic life.
“The goal of education in civics and government is informed, responsible participation in political life by citizens committed to the fundamental values and principles of American constitutional democracy.”1
For its part, the State of Oklahoma also lays out the goals of social studies education. According to the state’s academic standards: “Oklahoma schools teach social studies in Kindergarten through Grade 12. … However it is presented, social studies as a field of study incorporates many disciplines in an integrated fashion, and is designed to promote civic competence. Civic competence is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of students to be able to assume ‘the office of citizen,’ as Thomas Jefferson called it.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: 47% will pay no federal income tax

Jeanne Sahadi:

An increasing number of households end up owing nothing in major federal taxes, but the situation may not be sustainable over the long run.
Most people think they pay too much to Uncle Sam, but for some people it simply is not true.
In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks.
The ranks of those whose major federal tax burdens net out at zero — or less — is on the rise. The center’s original 2009 estimate was 38%. That was before enactment in February of the $787 billion economic recovery package, which included a host of new or expanded tax breaks.
The issue doesn’t get a lot of attention even as lawmakers debate how to pay for policy initiatives like health reform, whether to extend the Bush tax cuts and how to reduce the deficit.

Education + Politics = $

Cartel, the Movie:

eachers punished for speaking out. Principals fired for trying to do the right thing. Union leaders defending the indefensible. Bureaucrats blocking new charter schools. These are just some of the people we meet in The Cartel. The film also introduces us to teens who can’t read, parents desperate for change, and teachers struggling to launch stable alternative schools for inner city kids who want to learn. We witness the tears of a little girl denied a coveted charter school spot, and we share the triumph of a Camden homeschool’s first graduating class.
Together, these people and their stories offer an unforgettable look at how a widespread national crisis manifests itself in the educational failures and frustrations of individual communities. They also underscore what happens when our schools don’t do their job. “These are real children whose lives are being destroyed,” director Bob Bowdon explains.
The Cartel shows us our educational system like we’ve never seen it before. Behind every dropout factory, we discover, lurks a powerful, entrenched, and self-serving cartel. But The Cartel doesn’t just describe the problem. Balancing local storylines against interviews with education experts such as Clint Bolick (former president of Alliance for School Choice), Gerard Robinson (president of Black Alliance for Educational Options), and Chester Finn (president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), The Cartel explores what dedicated parents, committed teachers, clear-eyed officials, and tireless reformers are doing to make our schools better for our kids.

Reviving America’s schools: Ready, set, go

The Economist:

BETWEEN classes at Fenger High School, on the far South Side of Chicago, hundreds of students churn through the halls. Elizabeth Dozier, the new principal, keeps a watchful eye. “Let’s go, gentlemen!” she shouts. “Let’s go to class!” Ms Dozier wears a two-way radio to deal with problems the minute they arise. One is small: the girls’ toilets have no paper towels. One is bigger: there’s a brawl upstairs. It’s not to be ignored: on September 24th an honour-roll student was beaten to death near Fenger, swept up in senseless violence.
For an idea of the task confronting Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, Fenger is a good place to start. The school lies closer to Indiana’s mills than Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. From 2006 to 2008 fewer than 3% of pupils met Illinois’s meagre standards of achievement. But this year everything is supposed to change. The Chicago school district chose Fenger as a “turnaround”. Old teachers have been sacked and new programmes put in place. Fenger faces formidable odds. But if Mr Duncan has his way, the school’s transformation will be the start of a larger shift.

The Evolution Of Technology In Schools

Daniel Brusilovsky:

Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology–with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards–but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.
Our school just upgraded our computer labs to brand new computers, Windows XP machines, that of course, block Facebook, YouTube, and all those other good “time wasting” sites. Just this year, all the teachers’ computers got connected to projectors so that teachers can show presentations, documents, etc. Also this year, our school finally got WiFi, but it is password protected and not open to students.
The restrictions on the use of school computers and the internet, are in my opinion, extreme. Each night all student accessible computers are wiped completely, and restored with all the basic programs – Mozilla Firefox, IE6, Microsoft Office 2003. I understand the need for schools to protect local machines from viruses and spyware, but I feel like school policy is too extreme when it comes to blocking YouTube, Facebook, and other sites. These sites can be “time wasting” sites, but there are occasions when the sites are useful. I was the Technology Editor for my school newspaper last year, where we needed to get pictures and information from fellow students. We used Facebook chat and messages to communicate with other students to get information, to co-ordinate and to find things such as video from events.

New Houston Superintendent Terry Grier’s first impressions

Ericka Mellon:

New Superintendent Terry Grier wasn’t shy about sharing his opinions at his first workshop with the school board last week.
On technology in HISD: “I think we are very, very far behind in technology for a district our size.” I’d expect Grier to push for major technology upgrades in the district, but could he fund them without another bond referendum? In San Diego, Grier oversaw the passage of a bond that included funding for a one-to-one technology package, where every classroom will get
a laptop for every student, an interactive white board, digital cameras and an audio system. Research hasn’t always supported the give-every-kid-a-laptop approach, but perhaps HISD can learn from the San Diego experiment.
On principals: Grier said the district has to change how it selects and interviews principals. He said his staff recently brought him a few candidates to interview and he wasn’t pleased with the quality. After that, he said he basically told his staff, “If you can’t bring me better principals to interview, don’t bring them.” Just because a candidate is popular with a school board member or the community doesn’t mean that person can lead, Grier said. Ouch! Read here about the so-called Haberman interview process Grier implemented in Guilford County (and perhaps in San Diego too).

Tips for parent-teacher conferences

Mrs. Cornelius:

Who doesn’t want to make parent teacher conference time go more smoothly?
Let’s remember: you’ve probably worked all day and barely had time to grab a bite to eat, and then you sit and meet with parents rapid-fire in ten or fifteen minute increments.
So here’s some tips:
1. Dress professionally in welcoming colors that flatter your skin tone. I like blue or green due to my coloring. Avoid red or black. Think about matadors and bulls, here.
If you can, don’t wear your dressy clothes all day– they will be wrinkled and possibly sweaty if your schools HVAC works as well as mine does. Wear comfortable clothes during the day, and then change after the kids leave.
Brush your teeth before the parents come, too.

UC Berkeley To Pay Consultant to Find Cost Cuts

Nanette Asimov:

UC Berkeley has agreed to pay a consultant $3 million to help the school find new ways to save money – an agreement that has irritated some faculty members whose pay is being cut this year.
The university is facing a $150 million budget deficit for the 2009-10 year, a consequence of less state funding and higher operating costs. Like all 10 UC campuses, UC Berkeley has cut faculty pay through furloughing workers, laying off employees, reducing course offerings and raising student fees.
These short-term fixes, however, “are an unsustainable long-term financial strategy,” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said Friday in an announcement posted on the campus Web site. “We are now planning for a future that relies less on volatile state funding.”

Gates Foundation Pays Consultants to Help Ohio (and other states) Apply for Federal Tax Dollar “Race to the Top” Grants

Catherine Candisky:

Ohio appears well-positioned to win a share of $4 billion in federal education money, but the state’s budget problems and limits on charter schools could prove costly.
Although education officials believe Ohio can meet the requirements for funding, the most creative proposals will win out. “We have to think innovatively,” said Scott Blake, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.
Blake’s department is preparing the state’s application for the federal aid. Called “Race to the Top,” the money was set aside to create rigorous academic standards, data systems for measuring student success, tougher teacher evaluations, and to turn around low-performing schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for private firms to help Ohio and 15 other states prepare their grant applications.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said the Obama administration wants to reward states willing to commit to significant education initiatives, including tax-funded, privately operated charter schools that have been controversial in Ohio and elsewhere.
“I think, based on outside evaluations that have been done by the Gates Foundation and others, Ohio is fairly well positioned for Race to the Top dollars,” said Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Dayton.

Gifted Student Is Being Held Back By Graduation Rules

Jay Matthews:

Anyone who wants to appreciate how strong a grip high school has on the American imagination — and how clueless some school districts are about this — should consider the story of Drew Gamblin, a 16-year-old student at Howard High School in Ellicott City.
Drew, a child so gifted he taught himself to write at age 3, craves a high school education and all that comes with it — debate team, music, drama and senior prom.
After a series of inexplicable decisions by Howard County school officials, such as requiring him to stay in a Howard High algebra class he had already mastered, his parents decided to home-school him and put him in college classes. But Drew insisted on his high school dream.
So he is back at Howard, although it’s not clear what grade he is in, and the school district is making it hard to enjoy what the school has to offer. He is being forced to take a world history course he already took at Howard Community College and a junior-year English course he took at home, as well as classes in other subjects he has studied.

Good educators all differ

Alan Borsuk:

A Milwaukee-area middle school. Two boys playing around, nothing terrible, but things get a bit too rough. One of them tears the sleeve of the other one’s shirt. Not such a big deal – except the shirt belonged to the boy’s late father. It carried a lot of emotion for him.
The boy goes to pieces. He ends up in front of the principal.
The principal has an idea: Save the shirt. Convert it to short sleeves.
The principal goes to the school’s family and consumer education teacher (OK, they were called home economics teachers in my day). She’s only in the building part of the day, she doesn’t teach sewing, she doesn’t have the boy in class or even know him. But maybe she’ll do it.
She does it – that evening, on her own time, the way lots of teachers do out-of-the-way things for their kids, or even for kids they don’t directly teach.
The shirt is saved. The emotions are treated with dignity. By the next day, the boy again has this renewed memento of his father.

Study critiques schools over subjective grading

Washington Post:

If you have ever rolled your eyes when your child says a teacher’s grade was unfair, you might want to think again. Your child might be right.
Douglas Reeves, an expert on grading systems, conducted an experiment with more than 10,000 educators that he says proves just how subjective grades can be.
Reeves asked teachers and administrators in the United States, Australia, Canada and South America to determine a final semester grade for a student who received the following grades for assignments, in this order:
C, C, MA (Missing Assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A.
The educators gave the student final semester grades from A to F, Reeves said.
Why? Because, he said, teachers use different criteria for grading.

On Teacher Unions, Political Power and Reform

Kyle Olson:

Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:

Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.
NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:

Related: the most recent proposed agreement between the Madison School District and Madison Teacher’s, Inc. , local comments and the expression of political power through the current Democrat majority in the Wisconsin legislature via the elimination of “revenue limits and economic conditions from collective bargaining arbitration”.

Ben Chavis: “The Democrats have it wrong, guys,” Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “We have screwed up the public school systems.”

Lynsi Burton:

Although a Democrat, Ben Chavis, the former principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, is an unlikely advocate for the education reform plan backed by President Obama.
Chavis bucks the conventions typically associated with his party’s education platform, which is generally union-friendly.
“The Democrats have it wrong, guys,” Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “We have screwed up the public school systems.”
When he took over one of Oakland’s worst-performing charter schools, he emphasized the importance of standardized test scores, shamelessly ousted teachers he considered substandard, and employed military-style discipline on his students.
Now, based on California’s Academic Performance Index, only four middle schools in California perform better than his Oakland charter school, where 81 percent of kids are classified as low-income.
It is this style of teaching accountability that the Obama administration seeks to employ – much to the chagrin of unions – with Race to the Top, a competitive grant program for schools that the White House unveiled in July.

California Teacher Layoffs

Seema Mehta:

As thousands of laid off California teachers sit out the school year, educators are worried about the long-term effect of losing so many teachers. Some instructors are considering leaving the state or even the profession, and if history is any indication, fewer young people will pursue careers in teaching.
“The pipeline issue is one of the most significant challenges that we’re dealing with, with the layoff situation or the pink-slipping,” said Margaret Gaston, executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit focused on strengthening California’s teacher workforce.
Faced with severe budget cuts, school districts last spring issued more than 27,000 pink slips. Although many of those teachers were eventually rehired by school districts, thousands are still out of work, existing on a combination of unemployment benefits, their savings, spouses’ wages and substitute teaching income when possible.

Virginia Governor Candidates on The Schools

Michael Alison Chandler:

Hundreds of teachers, social workers, librarians and superintendents made clear in a series of hearings across the state last week the challenges that face the next Virginia governor: Overworked teachers. Shorter library hours. Longer bus routes. Bigger class sizes.
“Virginia is 37th in the nation in per pupil state spending. That is a sad fact,” said Jim Livingston, a math teacher from Prince William County, speaking Wednesday night before members of the state Board of Education at West Potomac High School in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County. “Further cuts in funding will make it all but impossible to provide the children of the commonwealth” with a high-quality education.
Both gubernatorial candidates have vowed to improve the public schools by raising teacher salaries and strengthening math and science instruction. Robert F. McDonnell (R) wants to increase the number of charter schools and institute a performance pay system to reward successful teachers. State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) hopes to continue expanding access to pre-kindergarten and create a college scholarship program for students who pledge two years to public service.

More Transferring from Private to Public Schools in Montgomery County

Michael Birnbaum:

At the end of August, Gabriel Liegey left his crisp school uniform gathering dust in his closet in favor of jeans and T-shirts. Natalie Medrano and her sister traded a long drive to private school in Frederick for a ride on the school bus with other kids on their block. And Lawson Hamilton gave up an eighth-grade class of 26 for a freshman class of almost 500.
All four joined the rising number of Washington area students who have switched out of private schools this year as financial pressures and the availability of good public schools have made the option irresistible to some.
In Montgomery County, the only jurisdiction in the area that tracks movement between private and public schools, the net number of students who jumped from private to public schools rose to 727 in the 2008-09 school year, according to preliminary figures. That is more than double the number in 2006-07 and the largest total since the county began tracking the numbers in 1988.
Other public schools across the region reported a rise in the number of families transferring in.

A longer school year, day?

Justin Reynolds:

A longer school year for American students? It would be the ideal reality if the Obama administration has its way.
Earlier this year, according to the Associated Press, President Obama said that, while an unpopular idea, longer school days and longer school years are necessary to deal with the challenges of a new century.
Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, recently told the Associated Press that America’s “school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today.”
“Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30% longer than our students here,” Secretary Duncan said. “I want to just level the playing field.”
While students in other countries might spend more days in school, students in America, on average, spend more hours in school each year, the Associated Press reported.
Dr. Gary Richards, superintendent of schools, said he doesn’t necessarily agree with the President.

M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree

Tamar Lewin:

Cristen Chinea, a senior at M.I.T., made a confession in her blog on the college Web site.
“There’ve been several times when I felt like I didn’t really fit in at M.I.T.,” she wrote. “I nearly fell asleep during a Star Wars marathon. It wasn’t a result of sleep deprivation. I was bored out of my mind.”
Still, in other ways, Ms. Chinea feels right at home at the institute — she loves the anime club, and that her hall has its own wiki Web site and an Internet Relay for real-time messaging. As she wrote on her blog, a hallmate once told her that “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”
Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

One Reason Why Risky D.C. Teacher Evaluation Might Work

Jay Matthews:

My colleague Bill Turque has a terrific story today about D.C. Schools Chancellor MIchelle Rhee’s plan to evaluate the effectiveness of her teachers and get rid of those who are not helping students learn.
The idea is full of risks. Rhee’s plan to evaluate each teacher’s class at the beginning of the year, based on prior test scores and other factors, and set a reasonable mark for their improvement, has not, as far as I can tell, ever been tried before on this scale.
There is only one reason why I think it has a reasonable chance of success, and his name is Jason Kamras. He is now Rhee’s deputy for human capital, an unusual title, but I sort of understand what it means.
Turque said Kamras “led the effort to revamp the District’s system” for assessing teachers. If Kamras were just another headquarters paper pusher, I would predict doom for his plan.
But he is one of the best teachers in the country. Long ago, I once spent a few days getting his life story and checking him out with other great teachers I know. He taught math at Sousa Middle School in the District, and also offered a photography class for those students, most of them from low-income families.

How Teachers Unions Lost the Media

Richard Whitmire & Andrew Rotherham:

Quick: Which newspaper in recent editorials called teachers unions “indefensible” and a barrier to reform? You’d be excused for guessing one of the conservative outlets, but it was that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. A month ago, The New Yorker–yes, The New Yorker–published a scathing piece on the problems with New York City’s “rubber room,” a union-negotiated arrangement that lets incompetent teachers while away the day at full salary while doing nothing. The piece quoted a principal saying that union leader Randi Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”
Things only got worse for the unions this past week. A Washington Post editorial about charter schools carried this sarcastic headline: “Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased.” And the Times weighed in again Monday, calling a national teachers union “aggressively hidebound.”
In recent months, the press has not merely been harsh on unions–it has championed some controversial school reformers. Washington’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who won’t win any popularity contests among teachers, enjoys unwavering support from the Post editorial page for her plans to institute merit pay and abolish tenure.

Increase in ‘academic doping’ could spark routine urine tests for exam students

ScienceBlog:

The increasing use of smart drugs or “nootropics,” to boost academic performance, could mean that exam students will face routine doping tests in future, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Despite raising many dilemmas about the legitimacy of chemically enhanced academic performance, these drugs will be near impossible to ban, says Vince Cakic of the Department of Psychology, University of Sydney.
He draws several parallels with doping in competitive sports, where it is suggested that “95%” of elite athletes have used performance enhancing drugs.
“It is apparent that the failures and inconsistencies inherent in anti doping policy in sport will be mirrored in academia unless a reasonable and realistic approach to the issue of nootropics is adopted,” he claims.

Education Spending: Lies Our Professors Tell Us

Neal McCluskey:

On Sunday, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by the chancellor and vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, in which the writers proposed that the federal government start pumping money into a select few public universities. Why? On the constantly repeated but never substantiated assertion that state and local governments have been cutting those schools off.
As I point out in the following, unpublished letter to the editor, that is what we in the business call “a lie:”

It’s unfortunate that officials of a taxpayer-funded university felt the need to deceive in order to get more taxpayer dough, but that’s what UC Berkeley’s Robert Birgeneau and Frank Yeary did. Writing about the supposedly dire financial straits of public higher education (“Rescuing Our Public Universities,” September 27), Birgeneau and Yeary lamented decades of “material and progressive disinvestment by states in higher education.” But there’s been no such disinvestment, at least over the last quarter-century. According to inflation-adjusted data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, in 1983 state and local expenditures per public-college pupil totaled $6,478. In 2008 they hit $7,059. At the same time, public-college enrollment ballooned from under 8 million students to over 10 million. That translates into anything but a “disinvestment” in the public ivory tower, no matter what its penthouse residents may say.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The term “cut” is often used when referring to a reduction in the annual increase in education spending.

Education Management Initial Public Offering (IPO)

Lynn Cowan:

The IPO of for-profit college operator Education Management Corp. scored well with investors Friday, while shipment router Echo Global Logistics Inc. struggled to attract them.
Education Management’s initial public offering of stock closed at $21.77 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, up 21% from its offering price of $18. It sold 20 million shares at the low end of its expected price range of $18 to $20 a share.
Pittsburgh-based Education Management has increased its enrollment and revenue through 2008 and 2009. The company operates four for-profit colleges: the Art Institutes, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University.
About 82% of Education Management’s revenue is derived from federal student-aid programs, which require it to meet certain financial responsibility standards. But a high level of debt — $1.99 billion in June — puts it out of compliance and requires the company to post a $120.5 million letter of credit.
Education Management was taken private for $3.4 billion in 2006 by a consortium of investors that included Providence Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and Leeds Equity Partners. The buyout was financed by a large chunk of debt.

More on Singapore Math & The Madison School District

Next week’s Madison School Board agenda includes a number of pages [PDF] regarding the purchase of Singapore Math materials for elementary schools. Recent activity on this front included the purchase of workbooks without textbooks.

Inflation Adjusted United States Federal Spending Per Pupil & Achievement of 17 Year Olds, % Change since 1970

Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader’s email:

The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.
Except it isn’t.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let’s step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation’s schools… in one thousand words or less:

Teachers Union Shifts Stance, Backs Looser Staffing Rules

Robert Tomsho:

With the Obama administration trying to turn around failing schools, the nation’s largest teachers’ union will ask its local bargaining units to waive contract language that might hamper school districts from staffing troubled schools with highly qualified teachers.
For the National Education Association, the announcement represents a major shift away from some of its traditional stands regarding teacher staffing. Some observers, however, expressed caution about whether it will result in significant change.
School administrators long have complained that collective-bargaining pacts often require them to fill job openings based on seniority, leading experienced teachers to transfer out of low-performing, high-poverty schools as soon as they can find an opening elsewhere in a district. Many union agreements also bar districts from using merit pay or other incentives to persuade their best teachers to staff these schools.
As a result, students in such schools are more likely to be taught by teachers who have little experience or expertise in their field. Four out of 10 classes in high-poverty schools are taught by out-of-field teachers, more than double the rate found in more affluent schools, according to a 2008 study by the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group that focuses on low-income schools.

Detroit Coaxes Students to High-Stakes Roll Call

Alex Kellogg:

Annual ‘Count Day’ Determines How Much State Money Schools Will Get; a Test for District’s Emergency Financial Manager
Public school districts across Michigan mobilized Wednesday to boost attendance for Count Day, the annual fall roll call that largely determines how much money each district receives under the state’s per-pupil funding system.
Students in Detroit were treated to free meals, ice-cream parties, T-shirts, celebrity visits and a chance to win iPods and a plasma-screen TV — just for showing up for class.
Districts received an average of $7,810 per student last year, but that could decline by more than $200 a pupil this year as Michigan looks to close a $1.7 billion budget hole. Every student in class Wednesday represented funding for the school year.
The stakes were especially high for the Detroit Public Schools, where Wednesday’s carnival atmosphere masked grim financial realities. Enrollment has plummeted roughly 50% in the past decade, contributing to a $259 million deficit this year that has put the district on the brink of bankruptcy.
The results of the count will serve as the first report card for Robert C. Bobb, the district’s state-appointed emergency financial manager, who is hoping to stave off bankruptcy and stabilize enrollment. Detroit schools this summer launched a $500,000 campaign aimed at keeping students that included ads by Bill Cosby.

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

Paul Tough:

“Come on, Abigail.”
“No, wait!” Abigail said. “I’m not finished!” She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book’s title, one by one: T H E. . . .
“Abigail, we’re waiting!” Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.
“I’m going as fast as I can!” Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .
The three children were seated at their classroom’s listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .

At School in Queens, Success Draws Crowd

Jennifer Medina:

ining up for lunch with their plastic foam trays, students at Francis Lewis High School pile on their choices — hamburgers here, chicken nuggets there, some steamed vegetables over there.
At Francis Lewis, in Fresh Meadows, Queens, with nearly twice as many students as the 2,400 it was designed for, administrators have been forced to look for every possible nook and cranny of space — and time — to cram in more bodies. The first lunch period starts at 8:57 a.m.; the last one ends at 2:46 p.m. Some students begin classes as early as 7 a.m., while others do not finish until 12 hours later.
The flag team practices in the hallway. Hundreds of students are assigned to physical education in room “Outs” — the schedule abbreviation for outside. When it snows or the temperature drops below 34 degrees, they run in the corridors. A few science classes are held in one tiny square room with no ventilation.

The College Calculation

David Leonhardt:

The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college. Sure, Harvard graduates make more money than graduates of just about any other college. And most community-college students will end up making far less than graduates of flagship state universities. But of course these students didn’t enter college with the same preparation and skills. Colleges don’t help to clear up the situation either, because they do so little to measure what students learn between freshman and senior years. So doubt lurks: how much does a college education — the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus — really matter?
A recession makes such doubt all the more salient. Last month, National Public Radio ran a segment called “http://www.npr.org%2Ftemplates%2Fstory%2Fstory.php%3FstoryId%3D112432364“>Is a College Education Worth the Debt?” in which an economist noted that 12 percent of mail carriers have college degrees — the point being that they could have gotten the same jobs without the degrees. In January, “20/20” ran a similar segment, in which somebody identified as an education consultant and a career counselor summed up the case against college. “You could take the pool of collegebound students and you could lock them in a closet for four years,” he said, and thanks to their smarts and work ethic, they would still outearn people who never went to college. I heard a more measured version of these concerns when I recently sat down with a group of college students. They were paying tuition and studying hard, and yet they weren’t sure what they would find on the other side of graduation.

Binghamton Lecturer Critical of Athletics Is Fired

Pete Thamel:

The Binghamton University adjunct lecturer who accused the athletic department of giving preferential treatment to men’s basketball players and pressuring her to change her grading policy for players was dismissed Tuesday.
The lecturer, Sally Dear, who taught human development for 11 years, said she felt the decision was linked to her criticism that appeared in a New York Times article in February.

A Push for New York Charter Schools

Gail Robinson:

In the wake of a study finding charter schools help close the student achievement gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced a series of steps to expand and otherwise bolster charter schools in the city. (We’re not sure why this announcement came from his campaign and not the mayor’s office or the education department but it did.)
Much of the plan suggests proposals that charter proponents have sought for a while: lifting the cap on the number of charter schools, giving the schools chancellor the power to grant charters (an authority that now rests with the State Board of Regents) and streamlining the charter review process.
But the statement also provides additional evidence of the mutual back scratching between the Bloomberg administration and the Harlem Children’s Zone and its founder, Geoffrey Canada.

The Billion Dollar Gram

Information is beautiful:

Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. What does it all look like? Hopefully The Billion Dollar Gram will help.
This image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. That is, they’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. But they can start to be understood visually and relatively, IMHO.

The Inner-City Prep School Experience

Maggie Jones:

In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT — “daedal,” “holus-bolus,” “calamari” — are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.
Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast’s Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny’s.

A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day

“A College Teacher“:

A few days ago, President Obama talked about increasing the length of the school day and school year. Before I even had a chance to fashion a response in my head, I received this piece from K, who has been teaching science at a small independent college for over a decade and has written for this blog before here. She spends her leisure time learning from her three young boys. You can read more of her random thoughts at her blog, raisingthewreckingcrew.
A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day
by K, A College Teacher
President Obama advocates increasing the length of the school day and the length of the school year. More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer Vacation.
There are many problems with this.
President Obama seems to be arguing: if something isn’t working, what we really need is more of it. It just plain doesn’t make sense. While some countries provide more learning in more time, there are other nations that make better use of less time and have better student outcomes.

NEA moves to help poor schools with best teachers

Greg Toppo:

The USA’s largest teachers union will encourage local chapters to ignore contract provisions that in the past have kept school districts’ best teachers out of schools that serve mostly poor and minority students.
Testifying Tuesday before the House education committee, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said the union, which represents about 3.2 million teachers and other workers, will ask local affiliates to draw up memoranda of understanding with local school districts that would “waive any contract language that prohibits staffing high-needs schools with great teachers.”
Van Roekel said the move is part of the union’s “Priority Schools” campaign that will also encourage “the most accomplished teachers-members” to start their teaching careers in high-needs schools, remain there or transfer there.
In the past, NEA has come under fire from critics for supporting contracts that allow experienced teachers with more seniority to transfer to schools that serve more middle-class children.

Steve Barr’s Answers for School Reform

Malaika Costello-Dougherty:

Green Dot’s founder, who led the turnaround of the toughest school in Los Angeles, discusses his ideas on how to fix a failing system.
This might be the moment for Green Dot founder Steve Barr.
The Obama administration has set a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, supported by an expected $3 billion in stimulus funds and $2 billion in the 2009 and 2010 budgets. Known in education circles and beyond as an aggressive agent of change, Barr has been in talks with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about how to boost failing schools and whether Green Dot’s methods can serve as a blueprint for fixing schools across the country.
It was these same failing schools that inspired Barr to start Green Dot. Having known hard times in his youth, including some time as a foster child, Barr was drawn to improving schools for disenfranchised youth.
After working in politics for many years (and cofounding Rock the Vote), he began researching the push to wire all schools with technology. He saw a map that used green dots to represent schools with the necessary infrastructure to be wired and red dots for schools that lacked that foundation. Barr had the vision that every school should be a green dot, and thus began his crusade.
Green Dot consists of 19 small charter high schools in Los Angeles — several of which were formerly part of Watts’s infamous Locke High School, which Green Dot, in an unprecedented coup, broke down into smaller schools. In addition, Green Dot New York finished its first year last June.

Democrat Senator (Illinois) Dick Durbin and Washington, DC School Vouchers

Wall Street Journal:

Low-income families in the District of Columbia got some encouraging words yesterday from an unlikely source. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin signaled that he may be open to reauthorizing the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school voucher program that allows 1,700 disadvantaged kids to opt out of lousy D.C. public schools and attend a private school.
“I have to work with my colleagues if this is going to be reauthorized, which it might be,” said Mr. Durbin at an appropriations hearing Tuesday morning. He also said that he had visited one of the participating private schools and understood that “many students are getting a good education from the program.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Durbin inserted language into a spending bill that phases out the program after 2010 unless Congress renews it and the D.C. Council approves. A Department of Education evaluation has since revealed that the mostly minority students are making measurable academic gains and narrowing the black-white learning gap. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and a majority of the D.C. Council have expressed support for continuing the program.