Staff Support – Page 31 – School Information System

Wheelbarrow

There is an old story about a worker, at one of the South African diamond mines, who would leave work once a week or so pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The guard would stop him and search the sand thoroughly, looking for any smuggled diamonds. When he found none, he would wave the worker through. This happened month after month, and finally the guard said, “Look, I know you are smuggling something, and I know it isn’t diamonds. If you tell me what it is, I won’t say anything, but I really want to know. The worker smiled, and said, “wheelbarrows.”
I think of this story when teachers find excuses for not letting their students see the exemplary history essays written by their high school peers for The Concord Review. Often they feel they cannot give their students copies unless they can “teach” the contents. Or they already teach the topic of one of the essays they see in the issue. Or they don’t know anything about one of the topics. Or they don’t have time to teach one of the topics they see, or they don’t think students have time to read one or more of the essays, or they worry about plagiarism, or something else. There are many reasons to keep this unique journal away from secondary students.
They are, to my mind, “searching the sand.” The most important reason to show their high school students the journal is to let them see the wheelbarrow itself, that is, to show them that there exists in the world a professional journal that takes the history research papers of high school students seriously enough to have published them on a quarterly basis for the last 21 years. Whether the students read all the essays, or one of them, or none of them, they will see that for some of their peers academic work is treated with respect. And that is a message worth letting through the guard post, whatever anyone may think about, or want to do something with, the diamonds inside.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
And of course some teachers are eager to show their students the work of their peers….
The Concord Review — Varsity Academics®

I am happy to send along this letter describing both “logistical” and pedagogical dimensions of how I have used The Concord Review in class since employing the first class sets in the 1988-1989 academic year. You know from the fact that we have expanded our class subscription “coverage” from all U.S. History classes to all U.S. History and World History since 1500 classes that we have been very satisfied with the Review. In fact, I am glad to say that, due to an expanding school enrollment, our class set for this year will number about 80 subscriptions.

(more…)

‘New’ Voice Speaks About Teachers at Convention

Michele McNeil:

The teachers’ unions weren’t the only voices representing teachers on the first night of the Democratic National Convention.
Enter Jon Schnur.
The CEO of the reform group New Leaders for New Schools, also an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign, got a prime seat on the stage of the Democratic National Convention Monday night during the first of three American town halls.
The 15-minute town hall meeting managed to cram in issues including health care, tax reform, and education

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

Amy Harmon:

David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”
In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

DC Teachers Torn as Rhee Tries to Allay Fears About Pay Plan

Bill Turque:

The morning began with the buoyant spirit of a pep rally — all cheers, prizes and inspirational words from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and other officials to launch the District’s teachers into the fall term that starts Monday.
Before it ended, however, the “welcome back” assembly at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center yesterday took a more anxious turn. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker each seized the opportunity to speak to the audience of 4,000 teachers about Rhee’s pay package proposal, which has roiled and divided them.
Rhee was there to win hearts and minds. Parker was there to count them.
Rhee is offering teachers a “green tier” plan that would boost many of them over the $100,000 mark in salary and performance bonuses. In exchange, they must surrender tenure protections for a year and risk dismissal by going on probation. Teachers who want to retain tenure can opt for the “red tier,” which would offer lower, but still significant, raises and bonuses.

Student Control

Thomas Crocker:

In a world of increased occasions for forms of social control, the university is extending its reach. In an AP story today we learn that universities are broadening the scope of their campus behavior codes to apply to student conduct off campus, in an effort to cultivate humanity, to borrow from Martha Nussbaum. One purpose is to make students better citizens within the community. From the article:

We have a responsibility to educate our students about being responsible citizens,” said Elizabeth A. Higgins, Washington’s director of community standards and student conduct, whose office has ‘educated’ 19 students since the extended code of conduct took effect in January.
The scope of these codes can be quite broad, as the article reports that the University of Colorado code “regulates any conduct that ”affects the health, safety or security of any member of the university community or the mission of the university.” The article further reports that Seattle University “has put its students on notice that cyber-patrolling will continue this year.”

Tangentially, this is one of the issues worth looking into around local high schools: given the open campus, how much undesirable activity occurs near those facilities, and who has jurisdiction? This data: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.

Chicago Urban League Lawsuit makes school funding a civil rights matter

via a kind reader’s email. Matt Arado:

Illinois courts refused twice in the 1990s to enter the school-funding debate, saying the matter belonged with state lawmakers, not the judiciary.
The Chicago Urban League, which filed a new school-funding lawsuit against the state this week, believes it can make the courts rethink that position.
The lawsuit characterizes the school-funding question as a civil rights matter, alleging that the current system, which uses property taxes to fund schools, discriminates against low-income minority students, especially blacks and Hispanics.
Using civil rights law should ensure that the courts will hear the case this time around, Urban League Executive Vice President Sharon Jones said.
“Courts have been deciding racial discrimination cases for years,” she said, adding that the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003 didn’t exist during earlier school-funding cases.

Maudlyne Ihejirika:

A day after a civil rights lawsuit called the state’s school funding system discriminatory, those who have been battling inequities in the Chicago Public Schools were optimistic, pointing to a historic win in New York.
“The New York suit was successful, and very similar, so we’re hoping that case will set precedent,” said Julie Woestehoff of Parents United for Responsible Education.
As in Illinois, previous suits challenging New York State’s school funding system had failed. But in 1993, a coalition there filed suit alleging for the first time that the system had a “disparate racial impact” based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After 10 years and several appeals, New York’s highest court ruled in 2003 in favor of the plaintiffs. Further appeals by New York’s governor ended with the Court of Appeals upholding the ruling in 2006 and ordering the state to meet a minimum funding figure. That new funding level was finally enacted in April 2007.
Those involved in two previous lawsuits in Illinois said that without the new “disparate impact” claim, the Chicago Urban League’s suit would face bleak prospects.

Links:

Notes and links on funding and education from Kansas City (where a judge ordered a massive spending increase during the early 1990’s and Texas.

When Schools Offer Money As a Motivator
More Districts Use Incentives To Reward Top Test Scores; So Far, Results Are Mixed

Jeremy Singer-Vine:

In the latest study of student-incentive programs, researchers examining a 12-year-old program in Texas found that rewarding pupils for achieving high scores on tough tests can work. A handful of earlier studies of programs in Ohio, Israel and Canada have had mixed conclusions; results of a New York City initiative are expected in October. Comparing results is further complicated by the fact that districts across the country have implemented the programs differently.
Still, school administrators and philanthropists have pushed to launch pay-for-performance programs at hundreds of schools in the past two years. Advocates say incentives are an effective way to motivate learning — especially among poor and minority students — and reward teaching skills. Critics argue that the programs don’t fix underlying problems, such as crowded classrooms or subpar schools.
In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes who got top scores on math, science and English tests were paid up to $500. (AP classes are considered more difficult than traditional high school curricula, and some colleges award credit for AP coursework.) The research, by C. Kirabo Jackson, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that over time, more students took Advanced Placement courses and tests, and that more graduating seniors attended college. Most of the gains came from minority students in the 40 high schools studied, accounting for about 70,000 students in all. The study, set for release on Thursday, will appear in the fall issue of Education Next, a journal published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Dalles Eases Grading Policies in an Effort to Limit Dropouts

Jeffrey Ball:

As students prepare to return to school here Monday, teachers and parents criticized the relaxation of the district’s grading policies in a state that helped trigger national testing requirements.
The Dallas Independent School District’s new policies give students who do poorly more chances to improve their grades. Among the changes: High-school students who fail major tests can retake them within five school days, and only the higher scores count.
School officials say the changes are designed to reduce one of the highest dropout rates in the state. According to the Texas Education Agency, 25.8% of students in the Dallas district who enrolled as ninth-graders in 2003 dropped out before their class’s scheduled 2007 graduation.
But the policies have sparked criticism since the Dallas Morning News reported them last week, with angry parents and teachers contending that the district is watering down educational standards for its more than 160,000 students.

Locally, the ongoing implementation of a one size fits all curriculum has been rather controversial.
Links: Center on Reinventing Public Education.

English Spelling: You write potato, I write ghoughpteighbteau

The Economist:

The rules need updating, not scrapping
GHOTI and tchoghs may not immediately strike readers as staples of the British diet; and even those most enamoured of written English’s idiosyncrasies may wince at this tendentious rendering of “fish and chips”. Yet the spelling, easily derived from other words*, highlights the shortcomings of English orthography. This has long bamboozled foreigners and natives alike, and may underlie the national test results released on August 12th which revealed that almost a third of English 14-year-olds cannot read properly.
One solution, suggested recently by Ken Smith of the Buckinghamshire New University, is to accept the most common misspellings as variants rather than correct them. Mr Smith is too tolerant, but he is right that something needs to change. Due partly to its mixed Germanic and Latin origins, English spelling is strikingly inconsistent.
Three things have exacerbated this confusion. The Great Vowel Shift in the 15th and 16th centuries altered the pronunciation of many words but left their spelling unchanged; and as Masha Bell, an independent literacy researcher, notes, the 15th-century advent of printing presses initially staffed by non-English speakers helped to magnify the muddle. Second, misguided attempts to align English spelling with (often imagined) Latin roots (debt and debitum; island and insula) led to the introduction of superfluous “silent” letters. Third, despite interest in spelling among figures as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Prince Philip and the Mormons, English has never, unlike Spanish, Italian and French, had a central regulatory authority capable of overseeing standardisation.

Denver Teacher Contract Negotiations: Controversey over Incentive Pay and Increased Compensation for Younger Teachers

Stephanie Simon:

National education experts are dismayed. If merit pay can’t work in Denver, “future initiatives are destined to fail,” said Matthew Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
The breakdown stems from a philosophical disagreement between the school district and the union.
The district is offering large increases in incentive pay. But the biggest rewards will go to early- and midcareer teachers — and to those willing to take risks by working in impoverished schools or taking jobs few others want, such as teaching middle-school math. Yearly bonuses for such work would nearly triple, to about $3,000.
The union is all for boosting bonuses but also wants an across-the-board pay increase. Most crucially, union leadership objects to proposed changes that would hold down the salaries of veteran teachers to free more money for novices.
Mediation is scheduled to begin Wednesday. If it fails, the union could begin job actions just as the Democratic National Convention comes to town.

Much more on Denver incentive pay here.
It will be interesting if similar issues arise in Madison’s next teacher contract.

A Teachable Moment: On Changes in Governance and Curriculum in New Orleans Schools

Paul Tough:

But it wasn’t only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate — poor African-American kids — can achieve high levels of academic success.
Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush’s education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to “scale up” those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.

Related:Clusty Search:

Tiffany Hardrick

Fascinating. Innovation occurs at the edges and is more likely to flourish in the absence of traditional monolithic governance, or a “one size fits all” approach to education.
More from Kevin Carey.

Transforming the way to learn through dialogue and participation

Global University Network for Innovation:

Why should issues such as citizenship, sustainable development or multiculturalism be included in higher education curricula?
Because they are really pressing issues, which the world is facing today. If we think about the traditional role of higher education, when it first began, it was very socially engaged. In fact, the early universities really grew from the need from the church to actually engage in society and the role of the universities reflected that. Overtime, I think universities have become more removed from society and gradually have been involved in a production of knowledge, which tends to objectify reality. In fact, the multiple realities of the world are very complex. So it is very hard to see how that kind of learning, based on a belief in an objective truth, really can be maintained within many higher education systems at the moment when we see so many challenges facing people: of living in multicultural contexts or in contexts where there is violence and conflict; where they are trying to understand much better their relationship with wider society and with the state, and are thinking how they can engage in acting on the problems and the challenges that they face on a daily basis, either individually or collectively.
My reason for wanting to see an integration of those ideas in the curricula of universities is to enable people to learn in a way that is different from simply being passive recipients of preformed ideas. For me, education is about learning and learning is about change. So where we see the need for social change, for human and social development, which really is rooted in issues of rights, power and voice of people, then I think it is absolutely necessary for higher education to actually build the curricula upon these issues, not just to add them but actually to integrate them and use them as foundations for learning and teaching.

Winners Never Quit? Well, Yes, They Do

Alina Tugend:

I’VE been thinking about quitting lately. No, not my job, nor my marriage nor the incredibly long Russian novel I need to read by September for my book group (check back with me on that later).
Rather, I’ve been thinking about the concept in general. Watching the superhuman feats of the Olympic athletes this week, I’ve admired the dedication and single-minded focus they exhibit. I think about how maybe if I had just worked harder — much harder — at gymnastics when I was young, I could have reached that lofty goal (conveniently forgetting how ill-suited I was to the sport because of my great fear of falling on my head).
Olympians embody one of the great clichés about quitting: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” My athletic career, on the other hand, is summed up by the other platitude about quitting: “You’ve gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”

Future ‘Top 10’ Hot Careers in 2012: Space Tourism to Genetic Counseling

Rebecca Sato:

In our information-rich society there is an ever increasing demand for workers in the fields of computers, health care, science and space technology—much of it driven by the demands of the retiring baby boomers. If you like to plan ahead, here is sampling of some of the jobs that will be hot in the next several years and beyond.
1) Organic food Industry
By 2010, organic food and beverage will represent about 10 percent of the total market — a tenfold increase from 1998. Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation says the industry will soon need more organic food producers, certification experts, retailers and scientists as organic becomes mainstream.

The Thinking Behind Critical Thinking Courses

Jay Matthews:

Looking for a way to improve your mind and make some money? Check out the latest “critical thinking” courses. Many come up on a Google search. Many promise better grades and higher test scores. Without much effort, you can create your own course and tap into this hot topic.
The only thing is, it turns out such programs don’t work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators. A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations.
Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.

Milwaukee Schools Urged to Revise Discipline Policy

Alan Borsuk:

A team of national experts has urged a major overhaul in the way Milwaukee Public Schools handles behavior issues in schools, saying MPS does not do enough to deal with problems short of suspending students and may have the highest suspension rate of any urban school system in America.
“District staff members need to mobilize to meet this challenge” of dealing with behavior issues in ways that don’t involve suspensions but are more effective in improving both a student’s behavior and academic work, the team said in a report to MPS officials.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said in an interview that changes in line with the report’s recommendations are under way, including a new policy in which every parent will be given a written statement this fall on the disciplinary practices that will be used in a child’s classroom.
The report, submitted several months ago, is the second in two years by a team from the Council of Great City Schools that was critical of major aspects of what goes on in MPS classrooms. In both cases, the reports were not made public until a Journal Sentinel reporter asked for them. In 2006, a report from the council criticized academic practices and low achievement by students, called for more direction from the central administration of what was being done in schools, and said people involved in MPS, from the School Board to the classroom, “appear fairly complacent.”

Madison police calls near local high schools 1996-2006.

Eric Hainstock: Free at Last
Prison may be the best thing that ever happened to Eric Hainstock

Bill Lueders:

Eric Hainstock’s first letter to Isthmus, dated April 15, 2008, got right to the point: “When I was 15 years old I shot my high school principal. I never meant for this to happen. He grabbed me from behind and I got scared. I was already pretty stressed, so that freaked me out even more. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not blaming Mr. Klang for grabbing me. But I am blaming him, the teachers, social services and the school as a whole for never listening to me…. No one ever listened.”
Like other communications to follow, the letter is a plaintive appeal for understanding, with a heavy dollop of self-pity. “No one ever listened”? Perhaps it felt that way to Hainstock.
“I want my story told,” wrote Hainstock, now 17, who picked Isthmus on the recommendation of his “celly,” a former Madison resident. “I want all the social service agencies to listen, the schools, parents all over the state.” He pegged his purpose as altruistic — to make sure no one else would ever have to “live in the hell that I did.” (Quotations from Hainstock’s letters have been edited for spelling and style.)

Future looking bleak for state education?

Victoria Camron:

The vast majority of low-achieving students in Colorado are not making enough progress to reach grade level in three years, according to growth model date the Colorado Department of Education released Tuesday.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien is optimistic the new information — which compares individual students’ academic growth to their academic peers over time — will help educators determine which strategies work and which don’t, she said.
“It’s about helping students get the education they need,” O’Brien said Tuesday when the Colorado Student Assessment Program test results were released at the Department of Education in Denver.

Kalamazoo’s lesson: Educate and they will come

Jeff Bennett:

More than a year ago, Kaiser Aluminum Corp. was looking for a spot to build an $80 million office-and-research center that would employ 150 workers.
After considering cities in three different states, the maker of aluminum products settled on Kalamazoo, Mich., a once-prosperous manufacturing city that had lost thousands of jobs in the last decade or so.
One of the draws: The Kalamazoo Promise, a program that provides at least partial college tuition to all graduating seniors who spent their high-school years in the city’s public schools.
Just as Kaiser was gearing up its search, a group of wealthy philanthropists who have remained anonymous unveiled the Promise as a gift to the city. The lure of the program as a benefit for Kaiser employees, and its potential to produce a highly educated work force, proved a big attraction, says Martin Carter, vice president and general manager of common alloy products at Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based Kaiser.

The Final Bell:
Is closing an underperforming high school part of the solution to what ails our public education system—or part of the problem?

Paul Burka:

Seven years ago, I watched my daughter, Janet, receive her diploma from Johnston High School, in East Austin. No parent will ever do that again: In June, Johnston ceased to exist. A few days before this year’s graduation ceremony, Texas education commissioner Robert Scott informed the Austin Independent School District that he was invoking the nuclear option authorized by the Texas Education Code to close the school after five consecutive years of “academically unacceptable” performances on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Scores improved this year, but not enough to save the school. State rules mandate that three fourths of Johnston’s teachers and half of its students be reassigned when the 2008—2009 academic year begins (some students and teachers can opt to remain at the current campus, which will be “repurposed”). The Johnston name will be expunged, and AISD must produce a plan for some sort of educational triage.
I was saddened to read about Johnston’s fate—but not surprised. For almost two years I had served on its campus advisory council (CAC) with other parents, teachers, administrators, and representatives of the community. I knew Johnston’s problems all too well. In one of my first meetings, we learned that 50 percent of the freshman class had failed all four core courses (English, math, science, social studies) the previous year. In an educational environment dominated by high-stakes testing, Johnston got the black mark, but the roots of the problem reached back into the elementary and middle schools that had failed to prepare their students for high school.

Attention all faculty and staff: The principal is out of the building. Again.

Ray Cox:

I thoroughly enjoy working for my principal. He’s a great guy, has a no-nonsense approach to dealing with discipline and doesn’t try to micromanage the staff. He’s not perfect (e.g. he still requires me to wear a tie), but after reading all of the comments about other principals, he does an outstanding job. That said, I would very much enjoy to see him more at school, not off at DISD-mandated principals’ meetings.
Now, I don’t know the exact number he has gone to meetings across Dallas, but it’s often more than once a week, and usually half a day or longer. He tries to make it every morning, give the announcements, meet with parents, etc., but then he’s off in a flash to learn about some new initiative, see how our OHI scores are faring, or TAKS test security guidelines. And when we hit the AYP list the first time, he was gone almost twice as much. I’ve yet to see the man take a day off and I wonder how he maintains his sanity sitting in meetings all the time.

The Odd World of E-School Teachers

Ian Shapira:

For Trinity Wilbourn, teaching high school via the Internet offers a heartening and maddening prism into the teenage mind-set.
Sitting one day at her home office overlooking a golf course, the Prince William County teacher received a snarky comment in all capital letters from a devil-may-care summer school student. But the next moment, she marveled at another male student’s frank e-mail: “[W]hen I first went to high school, I did not know who I was for awhile. . . . I tried being someone I could not be.”
“I feel like, what kind of guy is going to say that out loud in his class?” Wilbourn said.
Educators who supplement or replace their day jobs with online teaching for local public schools are discovering that the perks of working at home come with hurdles: grappling with awkward or confusing lines of communication with their pupils; gauging student performance without seeing facial expressions; and struggling to withstand the urge to check e-mails from students during weekends.

D.C. Schools Chief Institutes Tough Changes, Weathers Controversy

John Merrow @ NewsHour:

JOHN MERROW: … when she announced she would close the 23 chronically under-enrolled schools. Ongoing protests did not slow Rhee down. By the end of the school year, she had removed 36 principals, 22 assistant principals, and 121 employees in her central office.
She also revealed plans to overhaul 27 additional schools that had failed to meet federal standards for academic improvement.
MICHELLE RHEE: I’m proud of the fact that we have made some very difficult decisions that there was very vocal opposition to, that we stuck to our guns.
ADRIAN FENTY: We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make this school system excellent. And to the extent we can allow her to do that, as free from outside obstacles as humanly possible, the faster she will move.
JOHN MERROW: Last year, D.C. voted to dissolve the elected school board. Unlike her predecessors, Rhee reports to one person alone: the mayor.
Has he ever said no to you?
MICHELLE RHEE: No.
JOHN MERROW: Never?

A test used by business schools to help choose students is at the centre of a controversy

The Economist:

IT WOULD make great material for a business ethics course. In late June ScoreTop.com, a website that helped users prepare for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), was shut down following allegations that it had published questions being used in current GMAT exam papers. The Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), the business-school body that created the test, intimated that test-takers’ scores might be cancelled if they had abused access to “live” questions (though the council later said it was concentrating on users who may have posted the offending material).
Ominous rumblings from GMAC sparked a flurry of virtual hand-wringing on websites and in the blogosphere. “As the site always maintained that all the questions are its own material there is not much a student can do”, complained one ScoreTop customer posting on BusinessWeek.com. Students are not the only ones fretting. A multi-million dollar industry of test-preparation publishers and training schools has grown up to help aspiring business moguls prepare for the GMAT and the ScoreTop scandal has caused consternation among its ranks. “These threats put users [of test-preparation materials] in a strange position,” wrote a GMAT trainer. “What do you do when sites tell you they have great practice material but you have no clue if its [sic] legal or not?”

Schools & Unions: Learning their lesson – Can a teachers’ union be an engine for reform?

The Economist:

THE election on July 14th of Randi Weingarten as president marks a new era for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), or so the union says. For years teachers’ unions have been demonised as the main obstacles to school reform, often with good reason. Now the AFT is billing Ms Weingarten as a “reform-minded advocate”. With American students lagging, Ms Weingarten insists that “the union is the solution.” She has some convincing to do.
If any teachers’ union were to promote reform, it would be the AFT, America’s second-biggest. While the larger National Education Association has historically been less nimble, the AFT’s president from 1974 to 1997, Al Shanker, supported accountability and even some pay-for-performance schemes. (“I used to shy away from bribery,” he reportedly said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that it has a place.”) Today the AFT supports such bonuses, if negotiated with a local union. It also represents teachers in more than 70 charter (publicly funded but self-governing) schools, in ten states.

Educators debate gulf dividing schools, students

Andy Gammill:

Ruby Payne and Jawanza Kunjufu had never shared the stage before Friday, but their careers have intertwined for years in a debate over how American teachers differ from their students.
Both believe teachers fail to make connections with students because of differences in cultural backgrounds. Payne, a white former principal, believes poverty is the root of that disconnect. Kunjufu, a black educator, says that theory ignores race.
The two have sparred in writing and in separate appearances but spoke together for the first time Friday at Indiana Black Expo to a room of hundreds of educators from around the state.
“They do not agree on many issues, but they have agreed on one important thing: They have agreed to come together and talk to us and help us better understand their views,” Brownsburg Schools Superintendent Kathleen Corbin said in an introduction.

As education in Iowa slips, where’s the public outcry?

Des Moines Register Editorial:

What would it take for Iowa – and the nation – to fully prepare students for the globally competitive world of today and tomorrow?
What does that mean for the curriculum, training of teachers and expectations for students? What is the best way to transform classrooms to deliver this world-class education, not just to elite students but to everyone? Are national standards the answer, or should that be left to states?
Those are some of the questions The Des Moines Register’s editorial board has asked in recent months. We’ve talked with educators and policymakers, we’ve visited schools and we’ll visit others here and abroad.
everal things are clear from conversations to date:
One is a growing, though hardly universal, concern that the United States must better educate students to keep its competitive edge in a fast-changing global economy. The rise of Asia and the flattening of the world with technology – allowing jobs to move virtually anywhere in the world – create great opportunities but also pose significant threats. That’s especially worrisome when American youngsters perform so poorly in math and science on international tests compared to their peers in many other places.
Interest grows in higher standards.

Use technology to connect students around the world

Des Moines Register Editorial:

Elementary students in Sioux City and Wales have been getting together occasionally for years to talk about holiday traditions, sports and school lunches, said Jim Christensen, distance-learning coordinator at the Northwest Area Education Agency in Sioux City. They’ve made presentations and held interactive question-and-answer sessions.
“It’s easy to say, ‘What does that have to do with the curriculum?’ But it has everything to do with learning to communicate and a perspective on the world that’s unbelievable,” he said.
Colin Evans, head teacher of the school in Wales, echoed those thoughts in an e-mail: “Exchanging e-mails or written letters and photographs would be a poor substitute for these experiences. This has brought a whole new dimension to the curriculum… Use of technology is uniting two schools 6,000 miles apart into one global classroom.”

Related: Credit for Non Madison School District Courses.

The Next Kind of Integration: Class, Race and Desegregating American Schools

Emily Bazelon:

In June of last year, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the racial-integration efforts of two school districts unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no longer assign students to schools based on their race, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his lead opinion in Meredith v. Jefferson County School Board (and its companion case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). Justice Stephen Breyer sounded a sad and grim note of dissent. Pointing out that the court was rejecting student-assignment plans that the districts had designed to stave off de facto resegregation, Breyer wrote that “to invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.” By invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the court’s landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, Breyer accused the majority of abandoning a touchstone in the country’s efforts to overcome racial division. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he concluded.
Breyer’s warning, along with even more dire predictions from civil rights groups, helped place the court’s ruling at the center of the liberal indictment of the Roberts court. In Louisville, too, the court’s verdict met with resentment. Last fall, I asked Pat Todd, the assignment director for the school district of Jefferson County, which encompasses Louisville and its suburbs, whether any good could come of the ruling. She shook her head so hard that strands of blond hair loosened from her bun. “No,” she said with uncharacteristic exasperation, “we’re already doing what we should be.”
Todd was referring to Louisville’s success in distributing black and white students, which it does more evenly than any district in the country with a comparable black student population; almost every school is between 15 and 50 percent African-American. The district’s combination of school choice, busing and magnet programs has brought general, if not uniform, acceptance — rather than white flight and disaffection, the legacy of desegregation in cities like Boston and Kansas City, Mo. The student population, which now numbers nearly 100,000, has held steady at about 35 percent black and 55 percent white, along with a small and growing number of Hispanics and Asians.

Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater was a principal and assistant Superintendent in Kansas City.

Presidential Election Curricula for the Gifted

Carol Fertig:

As the excitement builds this fall with the upcoming election, teachers and parents will want to have good resources at hand to help gifted students understand the election process. Here are just a few resourses. If you have other good resources to share, please list them in the comments area of this blog entry.
Specific Curricula
Rutherford Public Schools in New Jersey has developed curricula for their gifted program, grades 7–8. The information is very general and includes objectives, course outline, curriculum content standards, assessments, resources, and activities.
One of the resources used in the Rutherford Public Schools curriculum is the Interact simulation The Presidential Election Process. Interact recommends this curriculum for grades 5–8. If you scroll down on this page, you will see that Interact materials were recommended in my June 28, 2008 blog entry.

Why are Public Schools So Bad at Hiring Good Instructors?

Ray Fisman:

PS 49 in Queens used to be an average school in New York City’s decidedly below-average school system. That was before Anthony Lombardi moved into the principal’s office. When Lombardi took charge in 1997, 37 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, compared with nearly 90 percent today; there have also been double-digit improvements in math scores. By 2002, PS 49 made the state’s list of most improved schools. If you ask Lombardi how it happened, he’ll launch into a well-practiced monologue on the many changes that he brought to PS 49 (an arts program, a new curriculum from Columbia’s Teachers College). But he keeps coming back to one highly controversial element of the school’s turnaround: getting rid of incompetent teachers.
Firing bad teachers may seem like a rather obvious solution, but it requires some gumption to take on a teachers union. And cleaning house isn’t necessarily the only answer. There are three basic ways to improve a school’s faculty: take greater care in selecting good teachers upfront, throw out the bad ones who are already teaching, and provide training to make current teachers better. In theory, the first two should have more or less the same effect, and it might seem preferable to focus on never hiring unpromising instructors—once entrenched, it’s nearly impossible in most places to remove teachers from their union-protected jobs. But that’s assuming we’re good at predicting who will teach well in the first place.

Transformation, Not Just Reform of Public Education

Sir Ken Robinson speaking to the Apple Education Leadership Summit earlier this year. video

Trendy teaching is back: Four out of five primary schools are introducing ‘creative learning’, with lessons about ‘groovy Greeks’. Should we worry?

Sian Griffiths:

Katie Harris, 11, is telling me that she recently spent a lesson making paper aeroplanes and measuring how far they flew. What did she learn? “It was really enjoyable. It wasn’t just about one subject like maths, there was science in there as well,” she replied.
Katie is a pupil at Bursted Wood primary in Bexley, southeast London, one of eight schools in the borough at the forefront of a stampede back to “creative learning” and progressive teaching methods that were popular more than a decade ago.
Despite the bad press such methods got back then, when they were blamed for turning out thousands of children who couldn’t read or write properly, a survey of 115 primary schools last week revealed that four out of five are returning to teaching based around “topics” such as chocolate.
At Bursted Wood, traditional secondary-school style classes in subjects such as history, geography and maths have been ditched for topics planned out on “creative learning wheels”.

States eye cycle of retiring, rehiring

Dennis Cauchon:

States are cracking down on a controversial practice that lets government workers collect pension benefits while continuing to work for a salary.
The practice — called “double dipping” — lets tens of thousands of state and local workers retire, collect pension benefits and then keep working, often at the same job.
“What was going on was absolutely ludicrous,” says Kentucky state Rep. Mike Cherry, a Democrat. Kentucky’s Legislature last month ended a policy that let workers retire, get rehired and start a second pension in addition to the first.
Double-dipping is legal in nearly every state under existing pension and hiring rules. It is especially common among educators, police officers and others who retire young after 20 to 30 years on the job.

Peter Schrag: The quick road to math success: Get a bigger whip

Peter Schrag:

There’ve been lots of complaints that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has neither much interest in education policy, nor the capacity to deal with it. But his precipitous plunge into the algebra wars last week and the state Board of Education’s sudden decision to bow to his demand makes you wish that that he had less interest or a lot more capacity.
The leap, in the form of a letter urging the board to require that every eighth-grader take beginning algebra and the board’s overnight agreement to mandate it within three years is like trying to make a scrawny horse pull a heavier load with a bigger whip. At best, it won’t work; at worst, it will kill the horse.
The state has for some years had an admirable “goal” that every eighth-grader take algebra, combined with a set of incentives for districts to get all students there. The incentives – essentially penalizing schools by reducing a school’s Academic Proficiency Index for each student who takes only general math – have worked. More than half of California’s eighth-graders now take either algebra or geometry.

Leaders explain schools’ gains

Gadi Dechter:

Middle school students at the Crossroads School near Fells Point were evaluated by teachers every single day last school year, with the results driving the next day’s instruction.
At East Baltimore’s Fort Worthington Elementary, about a quarter of the school’s parents turned out for MSA Family Fun Night and sampled questions from the Maryland School Assessments.
Alexander Hamilton Elementary, situated in a West Baltimore neighborhood that the principal calls “gang-infested,” started a gifted education program last year to challenge students to learn beyond their grade levels.
The principals of the three schools credit those and myriad other initiatives with making their schools among of the most improved in Baltimore, during a year in which the school system overall posted historic gains on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Former Math Teacher’s Lesson of the Day

Claudia Ayers:

It isn’t absurd enough that we test high school students with a High School Exit Exam that is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers, but now we are all congratulating ourselves with a decision to test eighth graders for algebra. At least state schools chief Jack O’Connell has learned from his own past mistakes and opposed this decision. If only he had the guts to say he blew it on advocating for the exit exam, which is not only a complete waste of tens of millions of dollars, but sends more and more kids into the streets and trouble with the law when they fail to graduate because they do not test as well as others. (About 10 percent of high school students must “fail,” otherwise it isn’t a “test.”)
I tutored algebra to younger students when I myself was in high school. Later I taught it in public high schools for nearly 20 years, concurrently with other math courses, including geometry, pre-algebra and seventh and eighth grade math. I taught in some of the highest achieving, and some of the lowest achieving middle and high schools in the state. So, maybe my perspective is broader than the average citizen’s. Still, anyone who thinks it is a good idea to begin testing all eighth graders in algebra is simply delusional. It would be more PC to say uninformed, but I am at wit’s end.

Teacher’s Pay: Better marks, more money

The Economist

BAD schools, the left insists, are bad because they do not have enough money. The nation’s capital somewhat undermines this theory. Spending per pupil in Washington, DC, is a whopping 50% higher than the national average, yet the city’s public schools are atrocious. If it were a state, its pupils’ test scores would rank dead last.
Some schools struggle with the basics, such as discipline. Until last year, for example, the Johnson Middle School “had a nightclub on every floor”, says Clarence Burrell, a youth adviser at the school. There would be dozens of kids hanging out on each corridor during classes, schoolboys “with their shirts off getting massages” from female classmates and fights “all the time”, he says.
Mr Burrell, a tough-looking reformed convict, was hired by LifeSTARTS, a local charity, to help restore order. With his four colleagues, he pays attention to the most disruptive kids. He listens to them. He nudges them to pipe down and study. He offers his own “hectic” life as a cautionary tale. “Jail is ten times worse than school,” he warns young troublemakers. “It’s a long time, just you in that cell with a bunch of dudes.”

Taking Aim at Youth Gun Violence

Rodrigo Zamith:

A new initiative for Minneapolis and Hennepin County will increase penalties for juveniles caught with firearms, both replica and real.
Minneapolis and Hennepin County officials hope to reduce juvenile gun crime this summer by stiffening penalties for youths caught with BB guns, real guns or replicas.
The new Juvenile Gun Offender Initiative was announced Tuesday by Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman and others. It will also increase enforcement of youth curfew laws, replica firearms ordinances and supervision of juveniles on probation for gun offenses.
The new rules apply to offenders between 10 and 17 years old. First-time offenders with a real gun will be given probation, four to six weeks of out-of-home placement and 40 hours of education on the dangers and effects of guns. If the requirements aren’t met, youths will be given four to six months of out-of-home placement.

Gangs & School Violence Forum.

Madison teacher’s impact fondly recalled

Tamira Madsen
In his job as an educator, Ted Widerski left an indelible imprint on the lives of many Madison Metropolitan School District students. Friends and family are remembering Widerski as an exemplary teacher and person as they come to terms with his unexpected death at age 56 on June 29. Widerski suffered a massive heart attack at his Cambridge home.
Widerski was so influential to Bailey Wundrow during her prep years at La Follette High School that she followed in his footsteps and became a math teacher. Besides being Wundrow’s homeroom teacher for four years, Widerski laid a strong foundation for Wundrow with math as she prepared to pursue an education degree at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Wundrow, a 2002 La Follette graduate, recently completed her second year teaching math at Verona High School. She said Widerski set an example she wanted to follow. “He enjoyed what he did every day,” Wundrow said. “He sold me on that end of teaching. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for (UW) Madison and I told him I wanted to teach. He always joked, ‘I’ll wait and when I retire and you graduate, you can have my job.’ ”
Widerski got a bachelor’s degree in 1973 from UW-Madison and received a master’s degree in math education from UW-Milwaukee in 1976. He taught in Green Bay and Waterloo and eventually became a school principal in Waterloo before starting in Madison 12 years ago. Widerski taught at La Follette for seven years and joined the school district’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) program three years ago as a resource teacher. Widerski oversaw programming for talented students at the middle and high school levels.
He also was instrumental in creating the district’s first MathFests, events that gave students the opportunity to compete individually and in groups to decipher math problems. Welda Simousek, who will retire in August as coordinator of the Talented and Gifted program, said her staff will create a fund in Widerski’s name so the MathFest competition can be held on an annual basis.

Teacher Mentoring & Student Achievement

Jonah Rockoff:

As a first-year TFA teacher in Charlotte, it sounds like Guarino experienced some sporadic and haphazard mentoring. It’s an experience from which we can learn. She references four different mentors giving her advice with four different visions of what their roles were. Four mentors?!?! Egads! That might sound like an embarrassment of riches, but certainly it isn’t if the mentors are operating at cross-purposes and if they haven’t been trained for the role.
Guarino is correct in saying that “Mentoring is more complicated than it seems.” That’s a lesson that policymakers and district leaders need to learn. It is not enough simply to require mentoring. It’s not enough merely to assign a mentor to every new teacher. There’s much more that goes into designing induction and mentoring programs to produce the desired impact on teaching and learning.

Attention Goes a Long Way at a School, Small by Design

Jennifer Medina:

They sighed with relief when the college applications were completed, and celebrated when the acceptance letters poured in. But even after graduation on Thursday, one more job remained for the high school’s college counselor and principal: hound their students to make sure they have completed every last task to enroll in their college classes in the fall.
So it goes at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where many in the school’s first graduating class of 79 seniors are from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and have struggled academically for years. Yet they received the kind of personal attention more commonly associated with the priciest prep schools.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom. But many of these schools have struggled with problems of high faculty turnover or of sharing space with other schools. Still, when Education Department officials say the strategy is working, they point to examples like Thursday’s graduation at Law and Justice, where 93 percent of the senior class — nearly all collegebound — collected their diplomas, far higher than the city’s graduation rate of roughly 50 percent.

School Choice: Is Milwaukee still state-of-the-art

Anneliese Dickman:

Milwaukee has long been called “ground zero” of education reform in America, due mostly to our nearly two-decade-long “experiment” with publicly-funded private school vouchers. Now New Orleans, LA (NOLA) threatens to revoke our title as the epicenter of school choice by heeding the lessons learned here in Milwaukee and advancing the policy design with its new voucher program.
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is set to sign the nation’s fifth voucher program into law, allowing impoverished students in under-performing New Orleans public schools to leave for other options. The NOLA program’s legislation looks designed to avoid many of the failings of Milwaukee’s program: it borrows certain elements of our program, building on Milwaukee’s strengths, yet limits our deficiencies.

Police, sheriff’s units tackle growing Seattle-area gang problem

Jennifer Sullivan & Lauren Vane:

Tearing through the winding streets of the Central Area and Rainier Valley at 70 mph last Friday night, Seattle gang detectives Jim Dyment and Tom Mooney experienced an unsettling déjà vu — it was the third shooting they had responded to in a week.
As they drew near the scene of a drive-by shooting, Dyment and Mooney saw a group of officers gathered around five teens who sat handcuffed on a sidewalk in the Rainier Beach neighborhood. The hands of two teens were eventually wrapped in brown-paper sacks to protect any telltale gunpowder residue.
Dyment, a sergeant who has spent years investigating drugs, prostitutes and youth violence, muttered to no one in particular: “Being a gangster is a young man’s sport.”
And chasing gang members is becoming a full-time priority for police officers and sheriff’s deputies throughout the Puget Sound region, where authorities say gang membership is surging. From graffiti spray-painted on a mailbox in Kent’s West Hill neighborhood to recent shootings at area shopping malls, police say crimes associated with gangs appear to be on the upswing.

Gangs & School Violence Forum.

Georgia notifies parents before releasing awful test scores

Laura Diamond:

Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.
Students who failed math exams — as well as those who might have failed reading — can retake the exam this summer. Schools will provide optional free classes to get them ready. Students who failed the social studies exam don’t face any consequences under Georgia law.
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox said test scores in both subjects dropped because students took harder tests to match the state’s tougher and more rigorous curriculum.
“When you raise standards and expectations, it is not unusual to see a temporary dip in the percent of students who are meeting those expectations,” Cox wrote in a statement released Monday afternoon. “We have seen this in other grades and other areas of the curriculum.”

Anti-Gang Education for Third & Fourth Graders

Katie Wang:

In a second floor classroom at St. Lima School in Newark today, 22 pupils were mulling over questions about anger.
What, they were asked, do they do if they are angry?
What makes them angry?
And what can they do to control their anger?
“Go to anger management class,” suggested Sean Smart, a fourth-grader.
The real lesson, though, was about a topic that was never mentioned in class yesterday: gangs.
With street gangs recruiting at a younger age, law enforcement officials are trying to get to them sooner through the federally-funded Gang Resistance Education and Training program. The state parole board’s gang unit began working with sixth graders two years ago, but then expanded it to third and fourth-graders this year.

The Third World Challenge

Bob Compton, via a kind reader’s email:

ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.

Sent home: The suspension gap

James Walsh:

Black students are far more likely to be suspended from school than are their white classmates — and Minnesota’s disparity in suspensions is twice the national average. Why? What are the consequences?
Keenan Hooper likes to joke around and admits he has a motormouth. He also admits to getting into trouble again and again with teachers weary of his antics. School officials have sent him home more times than Keenan or his mom can count. ¶ So often, in fact, during his past couple years at Jackson Middle School in Champlin that he was referred to special education for a “behavioral disability” and saw his grades plummet.
This is not what Keisha Hooper wants for her son, who is black. She said she has asked how sending him away is helping.
“Teachers need order in the classroom, I agree,” Keisha Hooper said. “I think where we part ways is that they seem to lose patience with the black kids more than they do the white.”

An Interview with Janie Feinberg and Delia Stafford: On-going research stresses that the single most important factor in the classroom is ….

Michael Shaughnessy:

On-going research stresses that the single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the teacher. Teachers being the most important variable, have a major impact on a student’s success or their failure. Delia Stafford and Janie Feinberg have spent the majority of their professional lives ensuring that students get the best teachers.Ms. Stafford, president of the Haberman Educational Foundation, teaches research-based strategies to assist school districts identify teachers and principals of excellence. Ms. Feinberg, president of JP Associates,provides ongoing staff support in classrooms to assist teachers via her exemplary coaching strategies.In this interview, they respond to a number of questions about teacher quality, teacher evaluation and alternative certification.

Stats show alarming growth in violent racial and girl-on-girl incidents, including Blair’s ‘Day of Six Fights’

Andre Coleman:

The expulsion of four elementary school students for bringing knives onto campus and a rise in violence involving female African-American students have left city and school officials scrambling for solutions.
Records obtained by the Pasadena Weekly show that more than half of the 31 students expelled from the start of the school year through March were African American, and 11 of those 17 kids were girls, including five former students of Blair International Baccalaureate Magnet School who were involved in what has come to be known by teachers, students and administrators as “The Day of Six Fights” on Feb 18.
Although all those incidents involved weapons or violence or both, and a multijurisdictional board had been working since October on combating instances of youth- and gang-related violence, that information was not shared with the former 14-member Committee on Youth Development and Violence Prevention — even though that board included two sitting members of the Board
of Education, which ultimately approved all of the expulsions.
Further, the Pasadena Unified School District has few programs in place to address the rise in violence and no facilities available to help with the increase in expulsions from the district’s elementary schools.

The Madison School District’s Security Coordinator, Luis Yudice mentioned increased school violence involving girls during meeting on West High School / Regent area neighborhood crime last fall.

Schools Promote Students Despite Widespread Failure

Arizona Daily Star:

Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County’s largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.
In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.
The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson’s schools.
The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region’s economy.
The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.
The Star’s analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.

Ted Widerski

All,
The Board received the following sad news today. I am sorry to inform you that Ted Widerski, an Instructional Resource Teacher-Secondary in the Talented and Gifted area, passed away unexpectedly this past weekend.
I apologize for the informal way of notifying all of you of Ted’s passing but I know many of you have worked with Ted and I wanted to make sure you were aware of this sad news. My understanding is that there will be an obituary in the paper on Tuesday.
Sadly,
Arlene Silveira

Are Video Games the New Textbooks?

Julia Hoppock:

“Immune Attack” is still in its final stage of development and is not on shelves yet, but can be downloaded for free at their website. The game has already been evaluated in 14 high schools across the country with nearly a thousand more educators registered to evaluate it in the next phase of development. The reaction among teachers who have used the game has been positive.
Woodbridge, Va., high school AP biology teacher Netia Elam says the video game brought the concepts of immunology to life for her students.
“[With text books] they might read something, drag vocabulary words onto paper, or use their math, but they’re not really integrated into it,” Elam said. “Because they are playing video games, they were really engrossed in what they were doing. They took on more of an interest and more of an initiative to pay attention.”

Grand jury: School district should change how students are assigned to S.F. schools

Heather Knight:

The San Francisco Unified School District should dump its “confusing, time-consuming, alienating” system of assigning students to schools and instead allow them to go to ones in their neighborhoods, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury said in a report released Thursday.
The grand jury focused on the way kindergarten students were assigned to schools in the 2007-08 school year. The district’s system, dubbed “the diversity index,” is used for students of all ages entering new schools.
Under the current system, families submit their top seven school choices and a number of socioeconomic indicators, but not race. The vast majority of families get one of their seven choices, but families who can’t get their child into a school in their neighborhood have complained it’s unfair. Studies have shown schools are becoming increasingly resegregated.
The grand jury blasted the system for being expensive to run, driving families away from the district and not doing much to diversify schools.

Q&A with the US Education Secretary: Challenge Assumptions about Time and Teachers

Des Moines Register:

Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.

California: Education Data Tells a Sorry Story

Dan Walters:

“Most incoming (community college) students are not ready for college-level work,” the report says. “In addition, relatively few of these students reach proficiency during their time (in community college).”
That’s interesting, but it also raises this question: Since virtually all of those community college students graduated from high school, what is that telling us about the level of K-12 instruction?
One presumes, perhaps naively, that if someone possesses a California high school diploma, thus signifying 12 years of education costing taxpayers around $130,000, that someone must possess basic reading, writing and computational skills.
Remember, we’re not talking about the roughly one-third of California’s teenagers who don’t graduate from high school; with few exceptions we’re talking about graduates who have enough gumption to attend community college, and yet, this report says most don’t have the appropriate basic skills for college-level studies. By the way, that also doesn’t count the large numbers of high school graduates – well over a third – who require remedial instruction after being accepted into the California State University system.

LA Tries to Put the “Wow” in School Lunches

Mary MacVean:

Mark Baida was pleased with his latest taste test: lots of empty little black trays, sometimes stacked three deep in front of his guinea pigs, a group of Garfield High School students.
But the pressure is on the new executive chef of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Demands are growing from parent groups, the school board and students for food that is delicious, healthful, served quickly — and really, really inexpensive. In the last few years, the school board has banned soda and set standards for salt and fat, among other things. Now the aim is to make it more appealing too.

Growth in Minnesota Charter School Enrollment

Norman Draper:

At a time when overall Minnesota school enrollment is declining, enrollment in charter schools in the state soared by a record number last year, according to a study released Thursday.
The study, conducted by the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, found that the number of students attending charter schools rose by 4,337 during the 2007-08 school year. That marks the biggest enrollment increase since 1991-92, when the charter school option was first made available to Minnesota students and parents.
Total enrollment for charter schools stands at 28,206. That’s almost three times the enrollment in the 2001-02 school year. The total public school enrollment last year in Minnesota was 796,757, a number that has been declining for several years.

High School Hackers Load Spyware To Change Grades

Mark Selfe:

Omar Khan and Tanvir Singh, both 18-years old, face more than just a trip down to the Principal’s office as they are both charged for breaking into and then hacking Tesoro High School computers in Orange County California.
According to prosecutors, the two individuals used stolen passwords and usernames to hack into school computers to change their grades from D’s and C’s to A’s and B+’s. Khan was also accused of stealing tests before they had been given and for loading spyware which would enable him access servers remotley to change the grades of 12 other students.

Education: As the twig is bent …

Jerry Large:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single solution to our most vexing problems?
We could add productive workers, cut crime, reduce teen pregnancies and save money, too. Well, just click your heels, because we already have that power; we just have to recognize it and act on it.
The magic lies in early education: all the emotional, physical, social and cognitive learning kids do between birth and 5.
But when people talk about the power of education, it’s usually only K-12 education they’re thinking about, which may be why we just keep talking.
Last week a group of educators and social activists declared education a civil-rights issue.
The head of the school systems in New York City and Washington, D.C., were among the people who formed a new group to advocate for shaking up public education to eliminate achievement gaps based on race and income.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wrote in The Seattle Times last week about urban areas as the foundation of U.S. prosperity and said the quality of education kids get affects our ability to address other problems cities face.

Teacher salaries: Performance-based, incentive system for educators

Lawmakers and education leaders agree on at least one thing: It’s time to rethink the way Utah pays teachers.
The question is, will they agree on how to do it?
Utah leaders are working to join a nationwide trend toward paying teachers based on performance in the classroom. The idea is to both ease the teacher shortage and improve instruction. It would be a huge change from the current system in which teachers are paid based on years of experience and educational backgrounds.
It’s a change that could affect instructional quality in Utah – for good or bad, depending on how it’s done.
“By providing incentives we can get teachers to focus like a laser on student achievement,” said Rep. Brad Last, R-St. George, who serves in both of the groups working on a new pay system.
On the other hand, he said, “if we try to ram something down their throats they don’t want, it will backfire.”

100 Black Men of America:
African American History Bowl Challenge Finals

Teams from 100 Black Men of Charlotte and 100 Black Men of Madison faced each other in Friday evening’s Junior Division finals [Photo (Charlotte Left, Madison Right)]. Madison (Cherokee Heights Middle School) prevailed.
100 Black Men of Jackson (MS) faced 100 Black Men of Chicago in the Senior Division Finals [Photo (Jackson Left, Chicago Right)]. Chicago won.
Madison’s team: Marshaun Hall, Maria Lee and Carrie Zellmer. The team was coached by Cherokee Middle School’s Learning Coordinator Jeff Horney. Enis Ragland, founding President of the Madison chapter and Ken Black, current President of the 100 Black Men of Madison accompanied the team (a team from Madison Memorial High School competed in the Senior Division).
Finally, this photo of the Madison team notifying friends and loved ones that they advanced to the finals provides a useful look at the zeitgeist of a 14 year old, circa 2008.
March, 2008 Madison African American History Challenge Bowl.
100 Black Men of America.

Dane County, WI Schools Consider MAP Assessement Tests After Frustration with State WKCE Exams
Waunakee Urges that the State Dump the WKCE

Andy Hall takes a look at a useful topic:

From Wisconsin Heights on the west to Marshall on the east, 10 Dane County school districts and the private Eagle School in Fitchburg are among more than 170 Wisconsin public and private school systems purchasing tests from Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in the state of Oregon.
The aim of those tests, known as Measures of Academic Progress, and others purchased from other vendors, is to give educators, students and parents more information about students ‘ strengths and weaknesses. Officials at these districts say the cost, about $12 per student per year for MAP tests, is a good investment.
The tests ‘ popularity also reflects widespread frustration over the state ‘s $10 million testing program, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.
Critics say that WKCE, which is used to hold schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law, fails to provide adequate data to help improve the teaching methods and curriculum used in the classrooms.
They complain that because the tests are administered just once a year, and it takes nearly six months to receive the results, the information arrives in May — too late to be of use to teachers during the school year.
The testing controversy is “a healthy debate, ” said Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, whose agency contends that there ‘s room for both WKCE and MAP.
….
“It ‘s a test that we feel is much more relevant to assisting students and helping them with their skills development, ” said Mike Hensgen, director of curriculum and instruction for the Waunakee School District, who acknowledges he ‘s a radical in his dislike of WKCE.
“To me, the WKCE is not rigorous enough. When a kid sees he ‘s proficient, ‘ he thinks he ‘s fine. ”
Hensgen contends that the WKCE, which is based on the state ‘s academic content for each grade level, does a poor job of depicting what elite students, and students performing at the bottom level, really know.
The Waunakee School Board, in a letter being distributed this month, is urging state legislators and education officials to find ways to dump WKCE in favor of MAP and tests from ACT and other vendors.

The Madison School District and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research are using the WKCE as a benchmark for “Value Added Assessment”.
Related:

Madison East Custodian Tells Graduates: “Judge Success From Your Heart”

Tamira Madsen:

James Ely has been blessed with two Madison East High School graduations 37 years apart.
Ely, a 1971 alumnus of East and the school’s custodian the past 15 years, was keynote speaker for the 2008 class that marked its commencement Friday night at the Kohl Center. The lifetime Madison resident’s second “graduation” coincided with his retirement from the school, located at 2222 E. Washington Ave.

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School Safety: It’s About Respect

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

The Milwaukee police chief’s concerns about the summer aren’t overinflated when three officers are injured in a melee near a high school that began with a water balloon fight.

Study of Small High Schools (Small Learning Communities or SLC) Yields Little on Achievement

David Hoff:

High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.

Do new teachers mean a new era in education?

Walt Gardner:

Long regarded as a monolith with predictable views on controversial issues affecting their profession, the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are increasingly split along generational lines. For reformers intent on improving the country’s 90,000 public schools, the division presents the possibility of change on an unprecedented scale.
“Waiting to be Won Over,” a survey of 1,010 public school teachers in K-12 released in May by Education Sector, a nonpartisan think tank, concluded that the “loyalty of teachers is up for grabs.” It identified several key areas where the generational differences in attitudes among teachers offer the greatest potential for transforming the system. At the same time, however, it cautioned against stereotyping teachers by years of service.

Shameful effort to undermine charter school

San Jose Mercury News Editorial:

Leadership Public Schools’ longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.
The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.
Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.
But let’s be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.
Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.
Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)

Local Politics: Zig & Zag with the Madison Studio School.

Toledo Teachers’ Group Touts Peer Review

Claudio Sanchez:

Teachers’ unions are often blamed for protecting educators who are burned out or should never have been allowed to teach in the first place. But in Toledo, Ohio, the union has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It’s called “peer review” and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.

Proposed West Bend School District Harassment Policy

Owen Robinson:

At tomorrow’s meeting of the West Bend School Board, they will he hearing the third reading and possibly passing a new harassment policy. This proposed policy goes way overboard. Here is the proposed policy:
Sorry for the images, but that’s all I have. A policy like this is a good idea. What constitutes harassment and what should be done about it should be defined to protect both the students and the faculty. But this policy is way too broad and fraught with problems. Let’s look at a couple of them. Here is the definition of “harassment:”

Harassment means verbal or physical conduct related to an individual’s membership in a protected class (including, but not limited to: sex, race, religion, national origin, ancestry, creed, pregnancy, marital or parental status, sexual orientation or physical, mental, emotional or learning disability) that has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working or learning environment or interferes with the individual’s work or learning performance.

In Big Easy, Charter School Era

Jay Matthews:

The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”
Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.
For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.

Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

Marla Dickerson:

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith“>Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.
Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.

Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire

Kurt Gutknecht:

Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.

Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform

via a kind reader’s email – David A. Mittell, Jr., a fascinating look at the political sausage making and special interests behind, or blocking school “reform”:

THE (Deval) PATRICK administration is big on reform when it comes to organizational charts, which in the to and fro of politics are accidents of history; are aesthetically displeasing to social scientists; and more often than not downright inefficient. It is the last point that deserves attention. The Patrick administration seems partly inhabited by people concerned with the second point and partly by people impatient for more power to do what they want by direct administrative order, rather than having to cajole semi-autonomous boards and authorities.
Mitt Romney had plans along the same lines and was pleased with himself when, early in his term, he was able to persuade the legislature to eliminate the notoriously inefficient Metropolitan District Commission and transfer its functions to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. How much actual efficiency was achieved is debatable.
Mr. Romney also tried to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. As a Republican governor he had no chance of eradicating this termites’ nest, despite its many public failings. Thereafter, wisely, he resolved to do what he could with the rusty tools that hehad. The danger of persisting in trying to clean up the flow chart in the face of political opposition was that, even had he succeeded to some extent, he would have spent his whole term doing it. Redirectin the mission of state government would have been lost.
With more than a third of his own term gone by, Mr. Patrick faces the same conundrum. He too wants to put the Turnpike Authority and all other transportation-related agencies under his direct control. That will need a column of its own. Here I want to deal with his partly completed effort to put all education-related agencies under his control.
Critics, especially those concerned about the foundering success of the Education Reform Act of 1993, see an attempt by the governor to gut the aspects of education reform that his political supporters in the education establishment do not like. On a partial list of suspected “gutters” are assorted state bureaucrats, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents and the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association.
That’s not my list and I do not endorse it. But the evidence to date is that the critics have the politics right. Not only does Governor Patrick seem to be moving to quash some of the most hopeful aspects of education reform, appointed minions are acting on his behalf in petty and vindictive ways:

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Prevention called cure for school violence

Liz Bowie:

Communities and schools should take a preventive approach to school violence rather than focus solely on punishing students who have behavior problems, experts said yesterday at a summit on school violence.
Students are looking for structure, high academic expectations, and teachers who understand and can communicate with them, said Ivan J. Juzang, a consultant who gave the keynote address at the daylong meeting at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Providing those basics will make schools safer, he said.
The summit was organized by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick after several high-profile incidents of violence in schools this year, including the beating of a Baltimore teacher that became nationwide news after it was recorded on a student’s cell phone and posted on the Internet.
The summit was called to find solutions to the problems of school violence, but the conversation among participants and speakers focused more broadly on the need to intervene in the lives of troubled children as early as elementary school. The participants included legislators, teachers, school board members, community leaders, parents and students from across the state.

Gangs & School Violence Forum
Corwin Kronenberg SIS links, Clusty Search
Cell phone video of a local school fight was recently posted online.

It’s time to open the doors to out-of-state school models

Former Providence School Board Member Julie Steiny:

Across the nation, charter laws have spawned certain schools that are so successful they’re being replicated in other towns and states.
Nonprofit providers of these nationally acclaimed schools have been wooed and welcomed into communities hungry for better, more-effective options. The best of these models can prove their strategies’ merits with lots of encouraging data, testimonies from happy parents and impressive stories about their successful students.
These networks include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Green Dot Schools, among others. Pop down to New Haven, Conn., to see the thing of beauty that is the Amistad Academy run by Achievement First. Or drive up to Lynn, Mass., to take in a KIPP.
Can Rhode Island benefit from these proven successes? In a word, no.
Our laws fiercely protect Rhode Island’s educational status quo, as though it were a real treasure like Narragansett Bay or our historical architecture. The protectionist laws make it impossible for outside providers to do business in the state. (One could argue that the state laws make it impossible even for local schools to do business effectively. Certain Rhode Island charter schools are now being crushed by our protectionist culture.)
Take as only one example Rhode Island’s General Law 16-13-6 which cements teacher tenure, seniority and “bumping” into place, leaving Rhode Island administrators little if any control over the quality of their staff. No school providers from saner states can possibly assure us that they can be successful here if they can’t retain the stability of their staff and let ineffective teachers go, when necessary. Longtime Rhode Island residents have been drinking the protectionist Kool-Aid for so long they forget what effective school governance might look like.

Fascinating.

Colorado’s Innovation Schools Act of 2008

Colorado State Senate President Peter Groff (D-Denver) submitted a bill that:

Allows hiring decisions outside Union Labor Contracts
Gives schools control over:budgets, hiring decisions, and length of school days
Allows schools to dictate teacher qualifications and how much time to spend in class
Allows public schools to sidestep restrictions for the purpose of creating wide-ranging innovation in Colorado schools.

First big change
The original bill required only “a statement of the level of support” for the plan by school employees, students and parents, and the community. The amended bill requires a four-part test of support among various constituencies: “a majority of administrators,” “a majority of teachers” and a “majority of the school advisory council,” plus “a statement of the level of support” among other school employees, students and parents, and the surrounding community.
The amendments add a requirement to the application process – a description of the elements of any collective bargaining agreement that would need to be waived for an innovation plan to work.
Second (really) big change
The original bill gave innovation schools blanket exemption from laws and rules on: performance evaluations, authority of principals, employment of teachers, transfer of teachers, dismissal of teachers, salary schedules, teacher licensing and teacher salary payment.
All of that was struck by the amendments and replaced with language allowing a school board to waive any requirements deemed necessary to an innovation plan, except provisions of the school finance law, the exceptional children’s educational act, data requirements necessary for School Accountability Reports, laws requiring criminal background checks of employees and the children’s Internet protection act. (The original language barred any waivers of CSAP and No Child Left Behind requirements, and those remain in the bill.)
Third (really) big change
The original bill allowed innovation schools to be removed from a district’s entire collective bargaining agreement by a vote of a majority of the personnel at the affected school or schools.
The amendments require “waiver of one or more of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement” (italics added) to be approved by vote of “at least sixty percent of the members of the collective bargain unit who are employed at the innovation school.”

Education activist led school board
After 10-year hiatus, she joined efforts to remove controversial superintendent

Liam Ford::

Margaret V. Soucek and a small group of friends set out in the mid-1960s to help reform the Morton High School District 201 Board.
Their group, The Organization for Better Education, met with so much stonewalling and hostility from local political forces in Berwyn and Cicero that one of their candidates, Mary Karasek, considered dropping out of the race, Karasek recalled Monday. But when Mrs. Soucek heard about her friend’s wish, she wouldn’t have it.
“I thought, ‘It isn’t worth it,'” Karasek said. “But Margaret got so worked up about the fact that I withdrew, that I decided I had to [run].”
Mrs. Soucek, 86, a longtime Berwyn resident, would go on to serve as president of the District 201 Board, frequently squaring off against forces loyal to west suburban figures such as former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese. Mrs. Soucek died Wednesday, May 21, in Adventist La Grange Memorial Hospital after a heart attack.

May 21, 2008 Congressional Hearing on Math Curriculum

Via a kind reader email: House Committee on Education & Labor:

The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing to examine a recent report released by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel on the state of math education and instruction in the United States. Among other things, the report found that the nation’s system for teaching math is “broken and must be fixed” if the U.S. wants to maintain its competitive edge.

Skip Fennel’s wide ranging testimony can be read here [66K PDF]:

However, I would add that at a time of teacher surplus at the elementary school level, it is perhaps time to scrap the model of elementary teacher as generalist. Why not have specifically trained elementary mathematics specialists starting from day one of their career? Our country can’t wait until such specialists are graduate students.

Francis “Skip” Fennell is Professor of Education, McDaniel College and Past President, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Notes and links on the recent NCTM report.

“That’s Why it is Called a Grade Point Average”

Ms. Cornelius:

Like my new haircut?
I got it from the whirling blades of the latest helicopter parents to hover over my head now that the semester is inexorably subsiding like a California mudslide into the onslaught of finality which is known as “end of semester” time.
The question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is if it possible for Sugarplum to increase his semester average 8 percentage points in the next six school days. Never mind that Sugarplum has never come within sniffing distance of the grade that this parent has suddenly just plucked out of the ether as their “dream grade.”
Sugarplum has come to after school help sessions 4 times over the entire year. I speak to Sugarplum every single day after class for at least five minutes– or for as long as I can take his whining about how something is “not fair!” or his wheedling for me to increase his grade on the latest assignment because he “tried really hard”– as I have my planning period and Sugarplum has lunch. Never mind that I have to repeat every single thing I say to Sugarplum, and yet he still tells his mom that I never told him about deadlines. I actually like Sugarplum, since if you haven’t gotten to the point that you can tolerate this behavior, you would go batty as a teacher. But liking Sugarplum and buying the crock he’s selling are two different things.

Shaved Heads and Fund Raising for Becky Buchman at Madison’s Cherokee Middle School

WKOW-TV:

The school year started with tragedy for Cherokee Middle School when their librarian was killed in an accident right in front of the school.
Friday, students and staff remembered Becky Buchman with a fundraiser in her honor.
Three students and nine staff members shaved their heads to raise funds for a memorial in honor of the beloved librarian.

Donations can be sent to

Cherokee Middle School
4301 Cherokee Dr.
Madison, WI 53711

Download (CTRL-Click) this mpeg4 video clip for your iPod, iPhone or other portable device.

Garden City New York School Board Seeks to Expand AP & International Baccalaureate Opportunities

Stephanie Mariel Petrellese:

The AB/IB Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Prendergast and Bacotti, and comprised of administrators, teachers and three parents, conducted a comprehensive study of the current AP program and researched the possibility of implementing the IB program. They then compared the two and presented their recommendations to the Board.
“It is clear that some of the issues that we realize are out there with AP programs may in fact be addressed by a rigorous IB program,” said School Board President Kenneth Monaghan. He gave the example of the study of world language. Many students do not pursue foreign language study at the AP level because the course and exam are recognized to be extremely difficult and students are concerned with how it might affect their overall grade point average.
“It’s not that the AP program is irrelevant. It’s not,” he continued. “Nor is it a matter of whether or not the IB program is more relevant. The question is whether or not the two together, or in combination, may balance out each other’s shortcomings and help us devise a program which has greater relevance for our students going forward, in particular for the vast majority of our students who are going on to collegiate work. We want to make sure that they are as prepared as possible.”
The committee will take their research to the next level by establishing contacts with other high-performing districts that are offering the IB program and expanding the number of parents on the committee. Committee members plan to attend a Guild of IB Schools of the Northeast orientation seminar in Commack on June 7th and file an official “Intent to Apply” interest form with the International Baccalaureate Organization. After they file the interest form, teachers and administrators will be allowed to attend professional development Level 1 workshops. The committee will report back to the Board in the fall.

Garden City, NY School District
Garden City Demographics
Notes and links on Madison’s proposed High School redesign.
Dane County AP course offering comparison.

I’m glad Garden City included three parents and some teachers on their AP/IB committee.

“Legendary Madison West Girls Soccer Coach Retiring”

Dennis Semrau:

While the administrative headaches he has endured this year have played a huge factor in his decision to retire from coaching, Kaehler preferred to talk about why he enjoyed coaching a sport with which he didn’t become involved until he was an adult.
“I was a four-sport athlete. I played football, basketball and baseball and I ran track at Delavan-Darien High School. I’ve been involved in sports all my life and I played semi-pro basketball in Europe, in Grenoble, France,” he said. “I picked up the game of soccer in France. I was there six years and it took me about two years to appreciate the game. What I’ve always said is that soccer is a player’s sport. It’s not a coach’s sport.

DC Teacher Contract Would End Seniority

V. Dion Haynes:

The Washington Teachers’ Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday.
Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice. She would be able to fill positions with less experienced teachers.
Under the proposed contract, teachers would give up seniority in exchange for annual raises of about 6 percent, more personal-leave days and more money for supplies, the union member said. In the last contract, which expired in the fall, teachers received a 10 percent raise over two years.
Rhee “does want to infuse some new blood [into the schools]. She wants to make it attractive for young people coming in to advance,” said the union member, adding that the union’s negotiating team will meet with her tomorrow or Friday. “We’ve come to realize we’re going to have to give in to her.”

‘Hands-on’ science teaching gains momentum in Wisconsin

Karyn Saemann:

In an approach based in Green Bay that has spread down the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 40 Wisconsin districts (though not Madison) belong to a consortium called the Einstein Project, a nonprofit group that buys the kits from publishers, leases them for a nominal fee to schools and arranges teacher training on their use.
Hailed as a national model by the National Science Teachers Association, the Einstein Project began on a shoestring and now has 10 employees, two kit warehouses and a $1 million annual budget supported by the rental fees, year-round fundraising and private and corporate backing.
But critics of the hands-on movement charge that without textbooks and the structured reading, teacher-driven learning and broad memorization of facts that traditionally define classroom science, kids are being short-changed on core knowledge.
A major fight over science curriculum in California got national attention in 2004, as the state weighed a proposal to allow no more than 25 percent of science classroom time for hands-on activities. But in an abrupt reversal after intense debate, the adopted standard reads that at least 25 percent of science classroom time has to be hands-on.
Stanley Metzenberg, an assistant biology professor from California State University-Northridge, said in congressional testimony that reading is critical for scientists and that children are best served through traditional textbooks and teacher-directed instruction.

The Netherlands – A Proper Emphasis on Vocational Education

Open Education:

Today we wrap up our four-part series on education in the Netherlands with a final look at the vocational training track available to students. Whereas in America we continue to try and force feed students of all abilities and interests through a high school program that is almost entirely academic-based, the Dutch school system has created an extremely viable option for students who prefer hands on learning and a career in the skilled trades.
Though we have used the term track to refer to this option, particularly since students are assigned to one of the secondary school options based on test results and performance at the primary level, it should be noted that the model does not mirror American school tracking. Instead of students essentially taking the same classes as they progress through school but being placed in those classes based on ability (the American tracking system), the Dutch offer both different programming and outcome expectations for the various tracks.
There is an understanding that students may not be able to (or for that matter, want to) pursue academics at a university. More importantly, there is an understanding that students who do not attend such a post-secondary option must develop specific labor skills to have some form of work option available to them. Yet, even within that component of studies there is additional delineation between those who will become laborers and those who will become designers, administrators and even company owners.

Urban-education scholar Charles Payne sets out to measure the University’s efforts at school improvement.

University of Chicago Magazine, via a kind reader’s email:

Charles M. Payne has been a scholar of urban education long enough to see many fashions of public-school reform come and go. The School of Social Service Administration’s Frank P. Hixon professor, Payne first developed an interest in education in 1969, while a Syracuse University undergraduate. Administrators there, Payne recalls, had brought an inner-city school to campus with a bold, if naive and unfocused, purpose: “to change this.” The program failed to establish a model for effective school reform, Payne says, because “none of us understood how hard this was going to be.”
With a sociology PhD from Northwestern University and 40 years of research and advocacy under his belt, Payne believes that the same core problem—a misunderstanding of the difficulties involved—continues to hinder school-reform efforts. His years as founding director of an education nonprofit in Orange, New Jersey, and studying schools in Chicago and around the world have taught him that the solution to school failure is deep and fundamental. Initiatives that focus on particular grade levels or types of students don’t work, Payne says. In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), he argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the “culture of failure” that perpetuates dismal school performance.

An End to Classroom Surfing

University of Chicago Law School:

The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most classrooms in order to ensure the value of the classroom experience.
With the implementation of wireless Internet access in Law School classrooms came better opportunities for students, who typically carry laptop computers, to be online during class—a common practice at institutions across the country, said Saul Levmore, Dean of the Law School.
“As soon as we discovered that we had the capacity turn off Internet access during class time, we felt that we ought to move in that direction. Our goal is to provide the best legal educational experience in the country, with students and faculty focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner,” said Levmore, who noted that many students have expressed support of the decision to remove wireless access in classrooms, including second-year Law School student Peter Rock Ternes.
“What makes our Law School is our faculty,” Ternes said. “I think it makes sense to encourage focusing on them and on the classroom discussions.”

More at Freakonomics.
Locally, the Madison School Board will discuss “Modifications to Board Policy and Procedure 4403 concerning Student Possession and Use of Cell Phones and Other Electronic Devices” Monday evening, May 19, 2008.

Madison West Rocketry Club Travels to the Team America Rocketry Challenge

TARC website:

The scores are in, and all the hard work has paid off for the 100 finalists for the Team America Rocketry Challenge. Those teams will face one another during the exciting final fly-off on Saturday, May 17 in The Plains, Va. for the title of national TARC champion. After a full day of launches, held at the Great Meadows facility, the winners will be crowned and $60,000 in scholarships will be divided up among the top finishers.

West Rocketry website.

Teach For America’s Growth

Sam Dillon:

Teach for America, the program that recruits top college graduates to teach for two years in public schools that are difficult to staff, has experienced a year of prodigious growth and will place 3,700 new teachers this fall, up from 2,900 last year, a 28 percent increase.
That growth was outpaced, however, by a surge in applications from college seniors. About 24,700 applied this spring to be teachers, up from 18,000 last year, a 37 percent increase, according to figures released by the organization on Wednesday.
The nonprofit program sent its first 500 recruits into American public school classrooms in 1990. It has a large recruiting staff that visits campuses, contacting top prospects and recruiting aggressively. Founded by a Princeton graduate, it has always carefully sifted through applicants’ grade-point averages and other data in recruiting. But with the numbers of applicants increasing faster than the number of teachers placed, it was even more selective this year than before, the organization said.

Football, Dartmouth and a Third Grade Teacher

George Vecsey:

Williams, 53, is not just any retired player. He has been a shining light of the N.F.L., his name even floated around when the commissionership was open a couple of years ago. And he won awards for citizenship and sportsmanship while playing in two Super Bowls.
Before the 1982 Super Bowl near Detroit, not far from his childhood home in Flint, Mich., he told reporters how he had been underachieving in the third grade until his teacher, Geraldine Chapel, sent him off for tests that proved he was quite smart but hard of hearing. The hearing improved, and so did his self-image and his schoolwork.
Williams majored in psychology at Dartmouth and was all-Ivy linebacker for three years as well as an Ivy heavyweight wrestling champion. Undersized at 6 feet and 228 pounds, Williams merged his intelligence and his outsider’s drive to make the Bengals.

Moms team up to battle influence of gangs: ‘We didn’t raise our kids this way’

Annie Sweeney:

It’s what everyone wants to know after a gang member terrorizes a neighborhood: Where are the parents?
For the last several months, at least some of them have been meeting in a South Side church basement to pray and cry and face a deep shame: They are mothers of the gang-bangers on the corners. Or they fear their child is about to join a gang.
Many are also single parents, struggling to pay bills. They work 16 hours a day, and every time they hear a gunshot, they worry their child has been shot or has shot someone else’s child. Some chase after their kids at 2 a.m.; others have stood in defiance when they won’t leave a corner.
And yes, they wonder what they did wrong.

Philadelphia safe-schools advocate say the lack of discipline violates the law

Kristen Graham:

Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is “dysfunctional and unjust,” according to a report by the district’s safe-schools advocate.
In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.
Prompted by questions from The Inquirer and two months after receiving Stollsteimer’s report – which he is required by law to complete – the state blasted the safe-schools advocate’s document and said it would release its own version next week.
“The draft report has serious problems – some of the data analysis is inaccurate, the legal analysis is flawed. We are releasing the official report on Monday,” said Sheila Ballen, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

On Madison’s Lack of a 4K Program

Andy Hall:

In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially “the next best tool” for raising students’ performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
“It’s one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do,” said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
“We’ve never been able to get around the money,” said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state’s limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he’s “always believed that those things could have been resolved” if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state’s school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts’ startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
“I am excited about it,” said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district’s Web site. “He’s gone out and he’s made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison’s inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin’s approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state’s largest district, long has offered 4K.
“It’s been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
“The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way.”

Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
MMSD Budget History: Madison’s spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).

Student Tests and Teacher Grades

John Merrow:

Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he’d taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?
Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?
These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.
However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don’t have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?
Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That’s because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.

Clusty search: John Merrow.

Red ties and boys’ pride: Sowing the seeds of good schools in the Midwest

The Economist:

EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago’s South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago’s bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago’s business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.

Six Books a Week: Harlem parents are voting for charter schools with their feet

The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th’s Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.
The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

Priya Venkatesan Interview

Dartlog:

Review correspondent Tyler Brace conducted the following two interviews with Prof. Priya Venkatesan after news broke here on Saturday afternoon that she was threatening to sue seven students from her Writing 5 classes. Prof. Venkatesan—now of Northwestern University—is currently still planning to sue the College. —A.S.
……………
DR: Thanks for that. Why do you think a pretty significant amount of your students did complain about you? Why do you think that is?
PV: I think that sometimes when you have some students and some instructors they mix like oil and water. That could just be the explanation. It happens all the time, Tyler. Sometimes when a person goes into a corporation, they mix like oil and water. Sometimes when a person goes into a fellowship at a research institution like the one that I’m at now, the supervisor and the fellow mix like oil and water. It just happens a lot.

Joseph Rago:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Madison La Follette Principal Joe Gothard helped turn around his alma mater

Tamira Madsen:

John Broome lasted just four months as principal of La Follette High School.
Under pressure due to escalating fighting at the 1,710-student east side school and hearing far-reaching complaints from parents and staff over his management style, Broome resigned in December 2006. Veteran district administrator Loren Rathert came out of retirement to finish the school year as interim principal.
So when Joe Gothard took over as principal last September, it was no secret that he was entering a difficult situation.
“Actually it was really bad,” says Jamison Vacek, a member of a Lancer senior class that has had four principals in four years. “There were fights almost every day at the school when we had those other principals.”
But ask students, staff and observers about La Follette now, and there seems a consensus that Gothard has helped put the school on the right path.

Much more on La Follette here.

2008-2009 Madison School Board Budget Discussion

Monday evening’s (5/5/2008) meeting agenda (PDF) includes a discussion of the proposed $367,806,712 budget. It will be interesting to see what type of changes to retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s last budget are discussed. Perhaps, a place to start would be the report card initiative from the District’s curriculum creation department (Teaching & Learning). Watch a presentation on the proposed “Standards Based” report cards. Contact the Madison School Board here comments@madison.k12.wi.us