Student Support – Page 28 – School Information System

Virtual classmates forge real friendships

They are classmates – and strangers.
And they are standing attentively in the lobby of the Mitchell Park Domes.
“What makes these buildings so unique?” asked Paula Zamiatowski, education coordinator at the Domes.
“The nature inside,” one girl said.
“Their shape,” said another boy.
The students Zamiatowski led through the three beehive-shaped glass buildings that sit just south of I-94 were from an equally unique place – a virtual school.
Students from Wisconsin Connections Academy, a kindergarten through eighth-grade public school that operates almost entirely over the Internet and is chartered through the Appleton School District, took a field trip to learn about the world’s ecosystems and interact with the classmates they may have never met. About 400 students are enrolled at WCA, and roughly 100 of those are from southeastern Wisconsin, said school spokeswoman Lauren Olstad.

Urban League of Greater Madison CEO invited to Oprah Winfrey Show

Kaleem Caire, via email:

September 21, 2010
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
Today, our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, was invited to participate in a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show as a member of the studio audience for a town hall discussion Ms. Winfrey is having on education reform as a follow-up to her show yesterday on the critically acclaimed documentary, “Waiting for Superman.” The film is directed by award winning filmmaker, David Guggenheim, the creative genius behind AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Ms. Winfrey has invited leaders in education, along with parents, community, business leaders, and students to discuss what needs to be done to fix America’s public schools. The full format has not yet been shared but guests have also been invited to view a showing of Waiting for Superman Thursday evening at her studio. The show will air this Friday afternoon. If anything should change, we will let you know.
Considering just 7 percent of Madison’s African American graduating seniors in the class of 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam were considered “college ready” by the test-maker (93 percent were deemed “not ready”), it is more important now than ever that the Urban League, our local school districts, local leaders, and other organizations move swiftly and deliberately to implement solutions that can move our children from low performance to high performance. It is even more important that we provide our children with schools that will prepare them to succeed in the economy of the future . With the right approaches, we believe our education community can get the job done!
We look forward to working with our partners at the United Way of Dane County, Madison Metropolitan School District, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, YMCA of Dane County, Madison Community Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education, and many others to get our youth on the right track.
Madison Prep 2012
Whatever it Takes!

Much more on the proposed Charter IB Madison Preparatory Academy here.

On Waiting for Superman

Sarah Lacy:

Whether it’s this post or Oprah, today may be the first time you hear of the movie “Waiting for Superman” but it won’t be the last. A flood of pissed-off parents, Charter Schools and reformers and deep-pocketed billionaires and millionaires will make sure of that.
But the other reason you’ll keep hearing about this documentary on the state of America’s public education system is that it’s just a really great documentary.
I’ve never quite understood how the public school system of the wealthiest country in the world-one where every President pledges to “fix” education and one where education spending continually goes up-could be so intractably horrible. The problem seems too big, bloated, complex and confusing to even have a smart debate around, much less try to fix. Fortunately, since I’m not a parent, it’s an issue where I can just throw up my hands, assume any politician saying they’ll fix it is lying, and start saving for the private school I’ll one day need when I do have kids.

‘I Hate School’ Extreme Edition What ‘School Refusal’ Means and How to Fix It

Andrea Petersen:

What child hasn’t dreaded September, the end of summer and the return to school. But for some kids, the prospect of school produces a level of fear so intense that it is immobilizing, resulting in what’s known as school-refusal behavior.
These are the kids who may be absent for weeks or months. Some may cry or scream for hours every morning in an effort to resist leaving home. Others may hide out in the nurse’s office. Some kids who miss school are simply truant–they’d just rather be doing something else. But in about two-thirds of cases, a psychiatric problem, most commonly an anxiety disorder, is the cause, according to research led by Christopher A. Kearney, professor and director of clinical training at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Anywhere from 5% to 28% of children will exhibit some degree of school-refusal behavior at some point, including truancy, according to Dr. Kearney, a leading authority on the behavior, and other experts. For kids with anxiety-fueled school refusal, the fear is real and can take time to overcome. Families may struggle for months to help a child get back into the classroom. Ignoring the problem, or failing to deal with it completely, can lead to more-serious problems later on.

Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching: Only 23 percent of entering teachers come from the top third of their graduating class. What would it take to do better?

McKinsey:

Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are now in their early stages or being planned focus either on building the skills of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best and dismissing the least effective performers. The question of who should actually teach and how the nation’s schools might attract more young people from the top tier of college graduates, as part of a systematic effort to improve teaching in the United States, has received comparatively little attention.
McKinsey’s experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the US debate. In a new report, Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching, we review the experiences of the world’s top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort. Along with strong training and good working conditions, this extraordinary selectivity is part of an integrated system that promotes the prestige of teaching–and has achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that systematically recruit top students to teaching if the United States decided that it was worthwhile to do so.

Great Schools? Not Without Great Teachers

Sarah Archibald:

ere is one of the great disconnects of our time: 60 percent of Wisconsin citizens rated the public schools in the state, with the exception of Milwaukee, as excellent or good. Two years ago, that number was even higher–just under 70 percent. People don’t seem to believe anything is holding education back in Wisconsin. But there are times when fact interferes with perception and–bad news here–this is one of those times. When compared to 17 other large urban districts including Chicago and New York City, Milwaukee’s students are in the back of the pack–only Detroit’s students score lower in math and reading in fourth and eighth grades. Largely driven by the abysmal performance of many of Milwaukee’s public schools, our state has the most persistent gap in achievement between black and white students in the country.
This isn’t just a Milwaukee problem; it’s a state problem. And the problems don’t end there.
Wisconsin employs more than 50,000 teachers, at an annual cost of approximately $3.65 billion,1 and yet it has no common means of measuring teacher effectiveness. The majority of these teachers have a continuing contract, which is another word for tenure — meaning, with few exceptions, they have that job for life if they want it. This might not be such a bad thing if teachers had to demonstrate their effectiveness in the classroom to get this lifelong contract–but they don’t. To put this in context, is your job guaranteed for life? And if it is, did you have to prove your ability in your job to get it?
Somehow, it has come to pass that most teachers are immune from the realities of the workplace that every other citizen faces. Can you imagine another profession in which it is against the law to fire someone from their job because they are not achieving the desired outcome?

A Private Matter: Am I hurting my local public schools – and hurting America–by sending my kids to expensive private schools?

Patty & Standy Stonesifer:

My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one’s own child in service to the greater good?
In our desire to protect our children physically and academically, we send them to very expensive schools that are inherently segregated ethnically and economically. We, being white, educated, and comparatively affluent, are the agenda-setters in society. The agenda does not include fierce protection of the public school system we value in general terms but abandon in our own specific cases.

Sustaining a Great Public University

Mike Knetter & Gwen Eudey:

Wisconsin faces a conundrum: Just when thestate and its citizens need a research universitymost to attract outside funding, fuel job growth, equip individuals to compete in a more knowledge-intensive labor market, and help spawn our own technology-intensive companies– the state is finding it harder to fund the university. There is, however, a logical solution.
Precisely because research universities are able to create much more economic value in today’s economy, they have the potential to be more self-reliant. This essay describes the value of a great research university to the state and the regulatory changes needed to enable the growth of that asset without imposing a greater burden on taxpayers.
The ability of UW -Madison to maximize its contribution to Wisconsin’s economy will require a new partnership between the university, the state, students, and alumni. The state and university will need to reduce regulations and increase flexibility in order to reduce costs and improve quality and efficiency.
UW-Madison students and alumni, who, because of their skills and education, are among the main beneficiaries of the recent economic trends, will need to assume greater responsibility for the operating costs in the future through higher tuition and philanthropy. UW-Madison will need greater autonomy to set and retain tuition and manage enrollment, while being held accountable for preserving the core values of educational and research quality, access and affordability that are vital to a public university.

Program boosts community college transfers

Daniel de Vise:

A Community College Transfer Initiative launched four years ago by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation greatly increased the volume of students transferring from community colleges to eight selective four-year colleges.
By supporting the transfer process at receiving schools, the initiative dramatically boosted community college transfers to some of the nation’s most prestigious schools: Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California. A report on the initiative, “Partnerships that Promote Success,” was released this month.
Among the eight schools, the initiative yielded 550 transfers in the 2007-08 academic year. By 2009-10, transfer enrollment had risen to 1,723.
The University of Michigan enrolled 1,104 community college transfers as of 2009-10; Mount Holyoke, 275; Berkeley, 245; Cornell, 113.

5 Madison School Board Goals

Madison School Board (6/21/2010 consensus vote):

We need an improved, ongoing process to develop a five-year budget plan that focuses on key issues and considers worst-case possibilities. Encourage more participation of teachers & staff in decision-making.
We need to study post-secondary outcomes of all our students. Determine successful practices for meeting the needs of struggling students, high- achieving students, and students with special needs. Determine better student assessments and retaining more families. Study the approach at Shabazz (reaching students) especially when looking at transitions.
Improve the MMSD diversity situation. MMSD should recruit locally or within midwestern region. Success is measured by relationship to eLF data. White men should always help develop this goal.

Board and administration need to build a culture of accuracy and accountability. The board relies on administration for accurate information to make decisions. Board needs to make clear, respectful and timely requestsandexpectresults. Administrationneedstoacknowledge,clarify intent, check for accuracy, and respond with accurate, appropriate, complete datal information.
Program and Services Evaluations
Need to develop sound methods for evaluating programs and business services and implement plans to improve professional performance, evaluations could be external. Those evaluations should yield information and data that can be used to make decisions.

A useful, succinct one page set of priorities.

Memo to the Media on Open Enrollment: When We (The Madison School Board) Unanimously Reject a Proposal, That Means We Don’t Support It

Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:

The Board discussed the issue. Individual members expressed concern about the 3% cap, suggesting that this wasn’t the way for us to deal with the open enrollment issue. I was one of those who spoke against the proposal. The Board voted unanimously to support the other two proposed changes to WASB policy, but not the 3% cap. This amounted to a unanimous rejection of the 3% limit. (A video of the Board meeting can be found here. The WASB discussion begins about 48 minutes in.)
From the Board’s perspective, the endorsement of the proposal regarding financial stability wasn’t seen as one that had much bearing on our district. But we’d like support from other districts on our push for a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars, and so we were willing to support proposals important to other districts, like this one, as a way of building a coalition for fresh consideration of open enrollment issues by the WASB.
The “financial stability” proposal certainly wasn’t intended by us as a dagger to the heart of the open enrollment policy; I don’t suppose that it was ever the intent of the legislators who supported the open enrollment statute that the policy could render school districts financially unstable.
The State Journal never reported that the Board rejected the 3% cap proposal. It ran letters to the editor on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that all seemed premised on the assumption that we had in fact supported such a cap. The Wednesday letter said in part, “[T]he Madison School District’s answer to its shortcomings is to build a Berlin wall, preventing students from leaving.” From the Thursday letter, “Unfortunately, instead of looking inward to address the problems and issues causing flight from Madison schools, the School Board would rather maintain the status quo and use the coercive force of government to prevent its customers from fleeing for what they think is a better value.” From Friday’s letter: “So the way you stem the tide of students wanting to leave the Madison School District is to change the rules so that not so many can leave? That makes perfect Madison School Board logic.” (The State Journal also ran a letter to the editor on Friday that was more supportive of the district.)

Much more on outbound open enrollment and the Madison School Board here.
I’m glad Ed continues to write online. I continue to have reservations about the “financial stability” angle since it can be interpreted (assuming it becomes law…. what are the odds?) any way the Board deems necessary. Further, I agree with Ed that there are certainly more pressing matters at hand.

Closing the Racial Achievement Gap: Learning from Florida’s Reforms

Matthew Ladner & Lindsey Burke, via a kind reader’s email:

Abstract: An education gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers is something to which most Americans have become accustomed. But this racial division of education–and hence of prospects for the future– is nothing less than tragic. The good news is that the racial divide in learning is a problem that can be fixed. Of course, it can only be fixed if education reform is approached in a common sense and innovative way. Continuing to repeat the largely failed national policies and ever-increasing spending of the past decades is surely not commonsense. One state, Florida, has demonstrated that meaningful academic improvement–for students of all races and economic backgrounds–is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted far-reaching K-12 education reform that includes public and private school choice, charter schools, virtual education, performance-based pay for teachers, grading of schools and districts, annual tests, curbing social promotion, and alternative teacher certification. As a result of parental choice, higher standards, accountability, and flexibility, Florida’s Hispanic students are now outperforming or tied with the overall average for all students in 31 states. It is vital that national and state policymakers take the lessons of Florida’s success to heart. The future of millions of American children depends on it.
For years, policymakers around the country have looked for ways to address the racial achievement gap in K-12 education. Despite significant increases in education spending at all levels and the federal government’s ever-increasing role in education, national academic achievement has remained relatively flat, graduation rates have stagnated around 70 percent, and racial disparities persist. Many states have enacted policies to address racial disparities in academic achievement and attainment, but the changes have been largely piecemeal.
One state, however, has demonstrated that meaningful improvement is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted a series of far-reaching K-12 education reforms that have increased academic achievement for all students and substantially narrowed the racial achievement gap. Today, Florida’s Hispanic and black students outscore many statewide reading averages for all students.

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom

Sara Corbett:

One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.
Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school’s Web site as “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design.
The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game. The students — a pack of about 20 boisterous sixth graders — were meant to observe how the robots moved, then chart any patterns they saw on pieces of graph paper. Later in the class period, working on laptops, they would design their own games. For the moment, though, they were spectators.

To combat poverty, get Africa’s children to school

Gordon Brown:

As developed countries strive for post-crisis growth, Africa is on the verge of an economic leap forward. A $1,500bn economy, the continent is ready to leave the third world. Its resources, both natural and human, are untapped. Foreign investment is at last beginning to flow. Its leading nations are even competing to join the fast-developing “Bric” countries. But as will be clear at today’s millennium development goals summit in New York, while Africa is close to a breakthrough it has not happened yet.
Any African advance will depend on three crucial factors. First, a wider opening to trade, given that 80 per cent of current exports remains in oil and agriculture. Second, a new African common market is needed. Only regional integration can overcome the fact that only a 10th of Africa’s trade is within Africa itself. Finally, better infrastructure: African road capacity is half that of Latin America and less than a third of Asia’s.

Tacoma middle-schoolers all in uniforms

Associated Press:

All nine middle schools in the Tacoma School District now have something in common – their students were school uniforms.
The News Tribune says this fall Jason Lee Middle School became the last to require uniforms. Most schools require polo shirts or school-logo sweat shirts – some allow jeans, others don’t.
Many parents say the uniforms make life easier – there’s no drama about what to wear, costs are lower and there’s no peer pressure to wear expensive, popular brands. Others say the uniforms limit the kids’ personal freedom.

Furious father confronts daughter’s school bus bullies

Erin Migdol:

The father of an 11-year-old bullying victim threatened to kill his daughter’s tormenters after joining her on her Florida school bus.
James Jones took his daughter, who has cerebral palsy, onto her school bus and told her to point out the bullies. Then, he said he would kill them.
“I’m gonna (expletive) you up — this is my daughter, and I will kill the (expletive) who fought her,” Jones said.

Madison School Board’s vote (to limit Outbound Open Enrollment) hurts kids — and the city

Chris Rickert:

Open enrollment allows students to go to schools outside their district. If “school choice” and “vouchers” are the buzz words popping into your head right now, you’re probably not alone. When the legislation passed in 1997, it was in the same ballpark as those two old Republican saws. Open enrollment supposedly introduces choice to the public education “marketplace,” forcing districts to compete and get better.
Democrats typically see such policies as the first step toward balkanizing the public schools into the haves and have-nots, when they should be a hallmark of a society in which any kid can become president.
Open enrollment has not shown a particularly good light on Madison in recent years. More kids have been transferring out than in, with the net loss last year 435 students. The resolution the school board passed Monday calls on the state to allow districts to limit the students that could leave under open enrollment “if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened.”
Clearly, district leaders feel open enrollment is a fiscal threat; their analysis shows it created about a $2.7 million hole in the district budget last school year.

Much more on the Madison School District’s attempt to limit outbound open enrollment here.

On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking

Steve Stecklow:

A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.
The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.
The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.
Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.
The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people’s activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.
The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don’t include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.

Check your Google “preferences” here.

Philadelphia’s District and charter high schools: How are they doing?

The Notebook:

The Notebook gathered data including enrollment, student demographics, attendance, and test scores. You can sort through the information in an Excel sheet or view a PDF of the center spread of data from the print edition.
Key to data for District schools
SAT, PSSA scores: for 2009 from Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Graduation rates: Rates are as determined in 2009 for entering 9th graders from fall 2005, from School District of Philadelphia. Students are attributed to their 9th grade school.
All other data are reported by the School District of Philadelphia for the 2009-10 school year.

Useful.

The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped

Paul Barton & Richard Coley, via a Richard Askey email:

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself.
This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement.
That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation’s top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that
could be repeated.
Next, there are the decades since the late 1980s, in which there has been no clear trend in the gap, or sustained period of change in the gap, one way or another. While there has been considerable investigation of the gap that remained, little advance in knowledge has occurred as attention was directed to alternating small declines and small gains, interspersed with periods of no change.
Paul Barton and Richard Coley drop back in time to the beginning of the 20th century when the gap in educational attainment started to narrow, and bring us to the startling and ironic conclusion that progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination. Had those things that were helping to close the gap stopped, or had they been overshadowed by new adversities that were not remedied by gaining equality before the law? Unfortunately, no comprehensive modeling by researchers is available that might identify and quantify the culprits, nor is it likely that there will ever be. The authors draw on the knowledge base that is available, from whatever schools of scholarship that have made relevant investigations, whether they be historians, or sociologists, or economists, or practitioners. Barton and Coley explore topics that remain sensitive in public discussion in their search for answers.
A lot of suspects are rounded up, and their pictures are posted for public view. Ultimately, readers will have to turn to their own good judgment. The report informs the judgments that have to be made, for there is no escaping the fact that failure to re-start progress is an unacceptable and dangerous prospect for the nation.
Michael T. Nettles.
Senior Vice President .
Policy Evaluation and Research Center
The nation’s attention has been — and remains — riveted on the persistent Black-White gap in the achievement of our elementary and secondary school students. Each year when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) releases “the nation’s report card,” the front-page news focuses on whether scores are rising or falling and whether the achievement gap is changing. Speculation is rife as to whether any change is some indication of either the success or failure of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and other efforts in our local-state-federal education system.
The nation’s efforts to address the achievement gap have a long history. Expectations increased with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954 and with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which focused on the inequality of school resources. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spiked optimism for progress in education and in society at large. And most recently, NCLB was purposeful in its requirement to “disaggregate” the average achievement scores of state accountability programs to expose the inequality that had to be addressed.
This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. We try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap.

The report can also be downloaded here.

Serious ideas from State of Education speech. Seriously.

Susan Troller:

For instance, he’s the only state elected official to actually and seriously float a proposal to repair the broken state funding system for schools. He promises the proposal for his “Funding for Our Future” will be ready to introduce to lawmakers this fall and will include details on its impact on the state’s 424 school districts.
Evers also is interested in the potential of charter schools. Let’s be open and supportive about education alternatives, he says, but mindful of what’s already working well in public schools.
And he says qualified 11th and 12th graders should be allowed to move directly on to post-secondary education or training if they wish. Dual enrollment opportunites for high school age students attending college and technical schools will require a shift in thinking that shares turf and breaks down barriers, making seamless education — pre-K through post-secondary — a reality instead of some distant dream, according to Evers.
As to Evers’ comments on teacher testing, he joins a national conversation that has been sparked, in part, by the Obama administration as well as research that shows the single universal element in improved student performance is teacher quality. We recently featured a story about concerns over teacher evaluation based on student performance and test scores, and the issue has been a potent topic elsewhere, as well.

The proof, as always, is in the pudding, or substance.
Melissa Westbrook wrote a very useful and timely article on education reform:

I think many ed reformers rightly say, “Kids can’t wait.” I agree.
There is nothing more depressing than realizing that any change that might be good will likely come AFTER your child ages out of elementary, middle or high school. Not to say that we don’t do things for the greater good or the future greater good but as a parent, you want for your child now. Of course, we are told that change needs to happen now but the reality is what it might or might not produce in results is years off. (Which matters not to Bill Gates or President Obama because their children are in private schools.)
All this leads to wonder about our teachers and what this change will mean. A reader, Lendlees, passed on a link to a story that appeared in the LA Times about their teacher ratings. (You may recall that the LA Times got the classroom test scores for every single teacher in Los Angeles and published them in ranked order.)

Susan Troller notes that Wisconsin’s oft criticized WKCE (on which Madison’s value added assessment program is based) will be replaced – by 2014:

Evers also promised that the much maligned Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, used to test student proficiency in 3rd through 6th, 8th and 10th grades, is on its way out. By 2014, there will be a much better assessment of student proficiency to take its place, Evers says, and he should know. He’s become a leading figure in the push for national core education standards, and for effective means for measuring student progress.

Madison schools produce more National Merit semifinalists than any other district in state

Wisconsin State Journal:

Madison public schools produced more National Merit Scholarship semifinalists than any other school district in the state again this year.
Thirty-nine students from Madison East, West, La Follette and Memorial high schools, along with 10 other Madison seniors who receive home schooling or attend Edgewood High or Abundant Life Christian School, are among 16,000 students nationwide to receive the honor. The semifinalists, who represent fewer than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, will continue to compete for some 8,400 National Merit scholarships worth more than $36 million to be announced next spring.

View individual state cut scores, by year here. In 2010, Minnesota’s cut score was 215, Illinois’ 214, Iowa 209 and Michigan 209. Wisconsin’s was 207.
Congratulations all around!

UW-Madison students, faculty struggle with plagiarism in Internet era

Todd Finkelmeyer:

When UW-Madison chemistry lecturer Jeanine Batterton accused 42 students last fall of plagiarism on a written lab assignment in Chem 104, she was floored by the range of “bizarre excuses” offered by the undergraduates.
Some contended that cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia — the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia — was OK because no single author writes the entries.
Others argued that since the assignment was a group project, and since they didn’t write the part of the report in question, how could she punish them for any wrongdoing?
One student even told Batterton that when he was caught copying homework answers in another class, the professor let him re-do the assignment — so why couldn’t she do the same?

A Look at Madison’s Use of Value Added Assessment

Lynn Welch:

In the two years Madison has collected and shared value-added numbers, it has seen some patterns emerging in elementary school math learning. But when compared with other districts, such as Milwaukee, Kiefer says there’s much less variation in the value- added scores of schools within the Madison district.
“You don’t see the variation because we do a fairly good job at making sure all staff has the same professional development,” he says.
Proponents of the value-added approach agree the data would be more useful if the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction were to establish a statewide value-added system. DPI is instead developing an assessment system to look at school-wide trends and improve instruction for individual students.
…..
But some question whether value-added data truly benefits all students, or is geared toward closing the gap between high- and low-performing students.
“Will the MMSD use new assessments…of students’ progress to match instruction levels with demonstrated learning levels?” asks Lorie Raihala, a Madison parent who is part of a group seeking better programming for high-achieving ninth- and 10th-graders at West High School. “So far the district has not done this.”
Others are leery of adding another measurement tool. David Wasserman, a teacher at Sennett Middle School and part of a planning group pushing to open Badger Rock Middle School, a green charter (see sidebar), made national news a few years ago when he refused to administer a mandatory statewide test. He still feels that a broad, student-centered evaluation model that takes multiple assessments into account gives the best picture.
“Assessment,” he says, “shouldn’t drive learning.”

Notes and links on “Value Added Assessment“, and the oft-criticized WKCE, on which it is based, here.

Madison’s Attempts to Limit Outbound Open Enrollment: A Discussion with Vicki McKenna & Don Severson

two mp3 audio files, via a kind reader’s email: 30mb. The open enrollment conversation begins at about 19:40 in this first mp3 file and continues in the second (33mb) mp3 file.
Much more on outbound open enrollment here.

Report: More women than men in U.S. earned doctorates last year for first time

Daniel de Vise:

For the first time, more women than men in the United States received doctoral degrees last year, the culmination of decades of change in the status of women at colleges nationwide.
The number of women at every level of academia has been rising for decades. Women now hold a nearly 3-to-2 majority in undergraduate and graduate education. Doctoral study was the last holdout – the only remaining area of higher education that still had an enduring male majority.

Cheating Charter Schools Some teachers are apparently more deserving than others

The Wall Street Journal:

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.
The Administration’s initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
“A charter school,” says the department, “may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school.” Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.

Managing Expectations of Costly Kids

Sue Shellenbarger:

At 10, Grace Morgan is a young fashionista and takes pains to dress in the latest styles. But her mom, Amy, works part-time and her husband was recently laid off, leaving little room in the family budget for designer-brand clothes.
So Grace didn’t ask her mom to open her wallet this fall to buy clothes. Instead, she sold a stack of her own old jeans and shirts at a rummage sale and paired the proceeds with discount coupons to get the stylish jeggings and tops she wanted for school, says her mother, of Lake in the Hills, Ill. Grace is learning “we have to make choices with our money,” she says.
The cost of raising kids is continuing to rise. A middle-income family can expect to shell out nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or $222,360, to raise a baby born in 2009 to age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture. That is up about 1.4% from 2007, before the recession began–and it doesn’t include college costs.

The Bubble: Higher Education’s Precarious Hold on Consumer Confidence

Peter Wood:

Is American higher education caught in the 21st century equivalent of the Dutch tulip mania? On February 3, 1636, the contract price of tulip bulbs traded in Haarlem collapsed. The prices for the fancier multi-colored varieties had been driven up to crazy heights by futures speculators. The reckoning that followed has, of course, become everyone’s favorite metaphor for subsequent “bubbles”–those aberrations of the market in which people vastly overvalue a good because they believe its price will only continue to soar. We have had in recent memory a tech bubble and a real estate bubble, both on a scale to make seventeenth century Dutch tulips blush for shame.
Could American higher education be in the same fix? In the last few years an increasing number of observers speaking from distinct perspectives have converged on this idea. The outlines are simple. The price of attaining a college degree has skyrocketed while the rewards of attaining a college degree have slumped. Sooner or later, people will notice that they are being asked to spend a great deal of money for a meager result. If enough people notice this and consequently decide not to spend at comparable levels and to seek lower priced alternatives–daisies instead of tulips–the bubble will burst.
Defenders of the current system point to reasons why this won’t happen. My own view is that we are indeed facing a bubble, but before turning to that prognosis, it helps to start with the counter-arguments. There are many in higher ed who see no bubble and who read the tulip leaves differently.

Heed lesson on education reform from Massachusetts

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin has showed little muscle when it comes to motivating students, teachers or schools to achieve ambitious academic goals.
Massachusetts provides a particularly striking comparison to Wisconsin. Just 15 to 20 years ago, Massachusetts and Wisconsin were fairly even. Since then, Massachusetts has moved forward substantially. The state has led the nation in reading and math scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress in recent years. A recent New York Times article said, “Many regard (Massachusetts) as having the nation’s best education system.” And Boston is widely regarded as a leader in tackling urban school issues.
So what explains the successes in Massachusetts and Boston?
There is nearly universal agreement that the key is “the grand bargain” struck in the Bay State’s legislature in 1993. At heart, it was a simple deal: Give schools more money and demand better results.
A multibillion-dollar infusion of state aid to schools righted inequities between have- and have-not school districts. But along with the money came one of the nation’s most rigorous sets of standards for what children were expected to learn, and a demanding state testing system, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

“They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”

ibmadison.com interviews Kaleem Caire about the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, via a kind reader:

In Caire’s mind, kids can’t wait. Consider the data he cites from the ACT District Profile Report for the Madison Metropolitan School District’s 2010 graduating class:

Of students taking the ACT, average test scores differed significantly between African Americans and white students:

English Math Reading Science Composite

African Americans 16.3 18.0 17.1 18.4 17.6

Caucasian/White 25.1 25.6 25.8 24.8 25.4

The percent of students meeting ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores, broken out by ethnicity, for the 2010 graduating class seems more alarming:

Total Tested English (18) Math (22) Reading (21) Science (24)

All Students 1,122 81% 68% 71% 51%

African Americans 76 38% 24% 25% 9%

Caucasian/White 733 90% 77% 79% 60%

Hispanic 71 59% 39% 45% 18%

Asian/Pacific Isl. 119 67% 65% 61% 45%

Numbers like these fuel Caire’s fire, and his vision for The Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. “I’m amazed that [the primarily white leadership in the city] hasn’t looked at this data and said, ‘wow!’ They have the power, but I don’t think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I’m the angry black man.”

Caire understands the challenges that lie ahead. By November, he needs to formally propose the idea to the School Board, after which he will seek a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction. He anticipates other hurdles along the way. Among them, a misconstrued conception. “Madison believes it’s creative, but the reality is, it’s not innovative.” Will the community accept this idea, or sit back and wait, he wonders.
Second: The resources to do it. “We can survive largely on what the school system can give us [once we’re up and running], but there’s seed money you need to get to that point.”
Third: The teacher’s union response. “No one knows what that will be,” Caire said. “The school board and district are so influenced by the teacher’s union, which represents teachers. We represent kids. To me, it’s not, ‘teachers at all costs,’ it’s ‘kids first.’ We’ll see where our philosophies line up.” He added that the Urban League and those behind the Charter School idea are not at all opposed to the teacher’s union, but the Prep School’s design includes, for example, a school day longer than the teacher’s contract allows. “This isn’t about compensation,” he said of the contract, “it’s about commitment. We don’t want red tape caught up in this, and we want to guarantee long-term success.”

Teacher turnover is a disadvantaged school problem, not a charter school problem

Betheny Gross, Michael DeArmond, via a Deb Britt email:

Recent research and media reports have raised serious concerns about teacher turnover rates in charter schools. But it isn’t exactly clear why teacher turnover rates might be high in charter schools: is it a consequence of their less regulated labor market, or is it the types of students and neighborhoods where they tend to operate?
This study tracked the careers of 956 newly hired charter school teachers and 19,695 newly hired traditional public school teachers in Wisconsin between 1998 and 2006. Although not representative of the charter school sector overall, the study’s analysis of Wisconsin’s charter school sector provides some important clues about the nature of teacher turnover in charter schools: (1) high teacher turnover rates in Wisconsin’s charter schools are mostly a function of teacher characteristics (young and inexperienced) and school contexts (poor and urban), rather than a “charter effect,” and (2) teachers in Wisconsin’s urban charter schools are less likely to leave their schools than similar teachers in urban traditional public schools.
To better understand teachers’ motivations for leaving and staying, researchers turned to national data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 1999-00 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS). The SASS-TFS asked traditional public school teachers and charter school teachers who left their schools why they left. In response, teachers in both sectors pointed to a lack of administrative support, poor working conditions, and low salaries. However, compared to traditional public school teachers, charter school teachers were more likely to say that they left because of a lack of job security and the expansive nature of their work.

Model preschool program emphasizes inclusion for children with disabilities

Shawn Doherty:

It is 8:30 on a crisp September morning, the start of a busy day for preschoolers at the Waisman Center’s Early Childhood Program, a nationally renowned laboratory school.
At a piano in the gym, a teacher holds a 4-year-old named Michael in her lap and helps him tap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She speaks to him using both sign language and a singsong voice. Several other boys driving toy cars swerve around another teacher doing duty as traffic cop. A student teacher is coloring at a table with students. In a corner of the gym, two girls are playing house. “This is your bed, Baby Kitty. Go to sleep right NOW!” one of them says. A tiny child with big brown eyes, named Caroline, curls up on a mat and pretends to sleep.
Michael, distracted by the noisy traffic behind him, wriggles out of Kerri Lynch’s lap and runs up to the boys in cars, making guttural sounds. The boys ignore him and continue to whiz past. Lynch waves down an especially energetic driver in a red T-shirt who has snagged the school’s popular police car. “Michael is talking to you,” she says, holding Michael, who is clearly becoming frustrated. She puts Michael’s face between her hands gently so that he makes eye contact with the other child and encourages him to try to speak again. The other boy listens carefully as the teacher translates: “Michael is wondering when he can have a turn?”

Testing, the Chinese Way

Elisabeth Rosenthal

When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?

Companies Favor Big State Schools With One-Stop Shopping for Graduates With Necessary Skills

Teri Evans

State universities have become the favorite of companies recruiting new hires because their big student populations and focus on teaching practical skills gives the companies more bang for their recruiting buck.
Under pressure to cut costs and streamline their hiring efforts, recruiting managers find it’s more efficient to focus on fewer large schools and forge deeper relationships with them, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of top corporate recruiters whose companies last year hired 43,000 new graduates. Big state schools Pennsylvania State University, Texas A&M University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were the top three picks among recruiters surveyed.
Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms.
Employers also like schools where they can form partnerships that allow them to work with professors and their students, giving them an inside track when it comes time to make offers for internships and jobs.

Handwriting program worth writing home about

The handwriting workshop at Meriter Hospital is much more than penmanship drills.
The 8-week program for elementary students focuses on areas such as upper body strength and stability and eye-hand coordination. Some students took the hour-long class, which was held once a week, in the summer to be more prepared for school this fall. Two more evening workshops for students grades second through fifth will start Sept. 28.
“Handwriting is really important,” said Noah Walker, 7, a second grader at Cottage Grove Elementary School. “It won’t be all scribbly.”
At a recent session, Noah practiced throwing animal-shaped bean bags against the wall. Later he practiced writing with a vibrating pen to work on grip strength and to make the task more enjoyable.

Black Male Grad Rates: Despair, And A Ray Of Hope

NPR:

In the past few weeks, more than 400,000 young black men entered American high schools as freshmen. Four years from now, fewer than half of them will get diplomas.
That’s according to a new study from the Schott Foundation for Public Education. It found that only 47 percent of black male students entering high school in 2003 graduated in 2008. For white males, the graduation rate was 78 percent.
Dr. John Jackson, the foundation’s president and CEO, tells NPR’s Guy Raz that those numbers are dismal largely because of the lack of resources in schools with high black populations. He says that when young black men are given opportunities to learn in schools with more resources, they perform well.
Not Necessarily Black And White

Hong Kong pupils shine in top Asian maths contest

Lana Lam

Two primary school pupils from Hong Kong won the top awards in one of Asia’s most prestigious maths competitions.
It’s the first time that any Hong Kong pupil has won a grand champion award at the International Mathematics Contest which was held in Singapore last month. About 1,000 pupils competed in the event which sees teams from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand battling it out in algebra, geometry, statistics and measurements.
Nine-year-old boy Li Ka-wing scored the highest marks in the Primary Three category and 11-year-old girl Lam Ho-yan was the best pupil for the Primary Five exams.
They both train at the Hong Kong Mathematical Olympiad School in Kowloon which offers intensive maths coaching.
“Each year, there are good results. However this year, it was very special,” the school’s principal, Pinky Lam Sui-ping, said. Every year, thousands of Hong Kong pupils applied to compete in the event by sitting online tests, she said.

New Superintendent: Taking on Milwaukee Public Schools

Erin Richards:

He’s got their attention, but only for a few minutes. A few precious minutes to teach in a position that is otherwise layers removed from teaching. Right now, these are his students.
The adults in the room are also intrigued. The new superintendent is an outsider leading a district where staff morale and student achievement are at an all-time low. He arrived on the heels of a fierce debate about mayoral control that polarized the city. His predecessors – including the last superintendent of eight years – have found little success. He’s inherited reports that show the district’s financial operations and human resource practices need serious improvement.
In addition, there’s a $55 million hole in the budget, hundreds of teachers on layoff, 40,000 empty seats in mothballed buildings and a union committed to health care benefits the district can’t afford. Teachers are working under a contract that expired in 2009.
And then there are the children. At Starms, all of them on the floor are black, like Thornton, and they are facing tremendous odds. The achievement gap in Wisconsin between white and black students is one of the highest in the nation. African-American fourth-graders in MPS have lower reading scores than their peers anywhere else in the country, even lower than kids in rural Mississippi or Alabama.

Lucky breaks as juvenile kept Latin Kings leader free Barragan, a homicide suspect on the lam, was convicted in Children’s Court but sentence was stayed

John Diedrich:

When it came to violent crime, Armando Barragan started young, shooting up a van of rival gang members at age 14 and, eight months later, attacking a Milwaukee police officer, trying to grab his gun.
The crimes landed Barragan in the juvenile justice system, but he got breaks that kept him on the street, where he committed new crimes, according to Children’s Court records and police reports reviewed by the Journal Sentinel.
Barragan quickly rose to become a leader of the Latin Kings and was charged with ordering the execution of a man who tried to stop a fight outside a Cudahy gas station in 2003 – one of six homicides or attempted homicides he was investigated for by the time he was 18.
The Journal Sentinel reported in July that miscommunication between federal and state authorities resulted in missing a chance to arrest Barragan in a courtroom before he fled to Mexico and became one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives.
Court documents show Barragan could have – and probably should have – been behind bars in April 2003, when Kevin Hirschfield was shot to death outside the gas station. He was free because of breaks he received, first from a judge and later from police, according to court records and interviews.

It’s Time To Listen To Teachers On Issues Of Education

John Ostenburg

Why is it that the last people listened to regarding problems in public education are the ones who deal with it on the front line day after day?
Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 education plan came onto the charts back in 2004. Immediately, classroom teachers pointed out its many flaws. Were they listened to? Of course not. Instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley and now U.S. Secretary of Education — then Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer — Arne Duncan pushed ahead with a program that had come not from the educational community, but rather from the business community.
Lest anyone forget, that’s the same business community that has demonstrated questionable wisdom in the world of finance, ultimately leading the United States into its current economic crisis.

Some say bypassing a higher education is smarter than paying for a degree

Sarah Kaufman

Across the region and around the country, parents are kissing their college-bound kids — and potentially up to $200,000 in tuition, room and board — goodbye.
Especially in the supremely well-educated Washington area, this is expected. It’s a rite of passage, part of an orderly progression toward success.
Or is it . . . herd mentality?
Hear this, high achievers: If you crunch the numbers, some experts say, college is a bad investment.
“You’ve been fooled into thinking there’s no other way for my kid to get a job . . . or learn critical thinking or make social connections,” hedge fund manager James Altucher says.
Altucher, president of Formula Capital, says he sees people making bad investment decisions all the time — and one of them is paying for college.

Misguided use of microchip technology

San Francisco Chronicle

Officials with Contra Costa County’s Head Start program were frustrated. In order to meet federal requirements, they had to take attendance every hour.
These and other administrative tasks were taking up a lot of teachers’ time – between one and three hours a day per teacher – and using up a lot of the program’s limited funds.
We sympathize with their pain. An hourly attendance requirement is indeed burdensome, and it’s a useless distraction from the very important work that Head Start does – preparing low-income preschoolers for school. But we can’t support what those officials did next, which was to implement a microchip tracking program for those very young children.

Where do graduates end up doing unskilled work? And earning most?

The Economist:

ACADEMIC qualifications’ value in the workplace is a big issue for students, policymakers and taxpayers, especially as the rising numbers of students in higher education make them less distinctive. In the latest annual report on education by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, the answer is clear: the pay-off from tertiary education is still good, both for the individual and the economy. Most graduates take jobs fitting their qualifications, earn more than non-graduates, and thus tend to pay more in taxes.
The workforce is smartening up. In the OECD 35% of the 25- to 34-year-old workforce has completed tertiary education, compared with 20% of the cohort approaching retirement. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have invested so heavily in educating their young that more than half now hold post-school qualifications. Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are close behind. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s chief of education research, reckons that these countries may well become more competitive as a result.

Yikes! Kids to judge healthy food options

Susan Troller

The REAP Food Group will stage what sounds like a pretty daunting culinary challenge that should be fun to watch at its Food for Thought Festival at the end of September. On Saturday, Sept. 24, three local chefs will join three local school principals as kitchen collaborators, working together to plan and prepare a healthy, nutritious, child-friendly meal that will be judged by the harshest critics around: school age kids themselves.
And that’s not all. The intrepid cooks must do it all on a budget, under a deadline and in front of an audience. School cooks would say it’s almost as hard as what they face daily in the lunchroom.
“I know they will be hard on us,” chef Steve Eriksen says of the young judges. Eriksen is one of the contestants and associate team leader for the kitchen at Madison’s Whole Foods grocery store. “What you get out of children’s mouths is brutal honesty.”
But Eriksen says he has a secret weapon as he prepares for the competition: his 3-year-old daughter, Ella, who is a picky eater. “If we can make something that I think Ella will eat, any kid will like it,” he says with a grin.

ACLU sues California for allowing school districts to charge fees

Jason Song:

The suit alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for books and other basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the state of California on Friday for allowing school districts to charge students for books, uniforms, classes and other basic supplies.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost. Districts cited in the lawsuit include Beverly Hills, Burbank and Long Beach.
The Los Angeles Unified School District was not named in the suit, although “we have heard anecdotal reports about Los Angeles,” Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, said at a morning news conference.

Wisconsin State Journal Removes This Story

The Madison School District’s Ken Syke via email:

Jim,
I’ve been made aware of the entry on the School Info Systems site about La Follette student taking gun to school. That story has been retracted by madison.com and thus the story excerpt on the the SIS site is not supported any longer. It’s our understanding that this madison.com story will remain retracted.
Thus we request that the story excerpt be pulled from the School Info Systems site.
Thank you.

I phoned (608) 252-6120 the Wisconsin State Journal (part of Capital Newspapers, which owns madison.com) and spoke with Jason (I did not ask his last name) today at about 2:20p.m. I asked about the status of this story [Dane County Case Number: 2010CF001460, Police call data via Crime Reports COMMUNITY POLICING 03 Sep 2010 1 BLOCK ASH ST Distance: 0 miles Identifier: 201000252977 Suspicious Vehicle Agency: City of Madison]. He spoke with another person, returned to the phone and said that a police officer phoned the reporter, Sandy Cullen and said the report she mentioned was incorrect. They then took the article down. I asked him to email me this summary, which I will post upon receipt.
Links from the original post:
Related:

La Follette student charged in gang-related gun incident.
Madison West High gang incident raises specter of retaliation.
Much more on gangs & school violence; forum audio / video.
Dane County Case #2010CF001460 Count #2: “Possess Firearm in School Zone”.
Wisconsin State Journal Twitter link: http://twitter.com/WiStateJournal/status/24158645996

Racial Disparity on Education in Wisconsin: Wisconsin is “Getting Taken to School on Reading Results by SEC States”

Brian Schimming interviews Dr. Matthew Ladner via a kind reader: 28mbp mp3 file.
The biggest opportunity we have is to “get more bang for our buck”. The mp3 file includes an interesting discussion on Florida’s approach to public information on school performance. Ladner also mentioned teacher certification reform, particularly in math & science.
New education report card grades student success:

Today the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a new book that provides a simple, direct way of comparing the effectiveness of public education in every state. I co-authored the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform with Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips and school choice expert Andrew LeFevre. ALEC is distributing the book to state lawmakers across the country.
For the Report Card, we rank all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on student test scores and learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We focused in particular on the scores of low-income students who were not in special education programs from 2003 to 2009, the years in which all jurisdictions took the tests used by NAEP.
Our rankings give the same weight to overall performance (which states had the highest test scores) and overall gains (which states made the most progress over time). The table below shows the rankings:

Clusty Search: Matthew Ladner

Narcisse outlines his Iowa education goals

Staci Hupp:

Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party candidate for governor, said Wednesday that parents and teachers, not the federal government, are the key to making Iowa schools great again.
Federal involvement in schools “has diminished the excellence of education in our state in general and placed in peril urban education in Iowa,” Narcisse said.
His speech at Culture Inc., a Des Moines nonprofit youth program that emphasizes the arts, came less than a week after a state report showed a quarter of Iowa schools were labeled “in need of assistance,” or failing, based on math and reading test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Narcisse, 46, a former Des Moines school board member, blamed the federal law for a culture in which fearful teachers “teach to the test” and students are deprived of a “real education.”

Madison School District’s Attempt to Limit Outbound Open Enrollment, via a WASB Policy Recommendation

Fascinating: I don’t think this will help. The Madison School District 55K PDF:

WASB Policy Modifications Related to Open Enrollment Recommended changes to the current WASB resolution on open enrollment (Policy 3.77):
Current f.: The options for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes that number is large enough to threaten the viability of the district.
Proposed f.: The option for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened.
Rationale – As school districts are confronted by a combination of revenue limits and declining state aid, fiscal issues are overriding attention paid to the educational programs offered to our children. The law originally limited open enrollment transfers to 3% of a district’s total enrollment and was designed to provide parents with enrollment options for their students.
Now, districts lack the flexibility or capacity to adjust to large scale student population shifts. Districts already fiscally weakened by nearly two decades of revenue limits, and more recently, cuts to general state aids – particularly in small, rural districts – are left with the options of dissolving the district, or Draconian cuts to the educational program.
**********
Current i.: The WASB supports a clarification in state statutes to limit the number of students enrolling in nonreSident school districts to 10 percent of the resident district membership.
Proposed i.: The WASB supports limiting the number of students enrolling in nonresident school districts to 3 percent of the resident district membership.
Rationale – The law originally capped open enrollment to 3% of a district’s total enrollment. This change returns control of open enrollment transfers to locally elected school board members. If districts choose to limit open enrollment transfers to less than 3%, correspondingly, a district would have to use the same method/policy for accepting students through open enrollment. **********
Proposed i: The WASB supports a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars in open enrollment transfers.
Rationale – Current law requires that a sending district pay the receiving school district approximately $6,500. The $6,500 payment is the estimated statewide cost of educating a student; however, in practice this amount doesn’t really reflect the costs of educating a student in the receiving district, or takes into account the loss of revenue to the sending district.
The law could be changed by lowering the dollar amount to $5,000, or the amount of state aid per pupil received by the sending district in the prior year, whichever is less.
While the WASB supports public school open enrollment, participation in the program should not be a fiscal hardship. The current state/nation fiscal climate and local economic circumstances confronted by school districts, has dramatically changed the fiscal equation and requires modifications to the state’s open enrollment law.
Approved by the School Board of: Madison Metropolitan School District Date: 9/13/10
kt:4tf,s;:.C~ Signed: (Board President)

Related: Madison School Board Discussion: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys.

The essential question: do these proposed open enrollment changes benefit students, or adult employment?

New Program Provides Basic Health Care For Madison School District Students

channel3000:

The year-round program covers annual physical exams, primary care office visits at the assigned clinic, including visits when the child is sick, as well as some prescription medicines.
“It’s a new program so I think I signed up 12 families probably in a couple weeks time at the end of school last year,” she said.
The program starts with the school nurse in every school in the district. The nurse identifies students based on two main criteria: they don’t have any health insurance and do not qualify for any state programs like Badger Care.
The nurse then forwards an application for the program to the health care provider that has been paired up with the school. The health care provider then contacts the student’s parents.
The program is available to undocumented students. MMSD Superintendent Dan Nerad defends this decision by citing the U.S. Supreme Court case that requires schools to educate all children regardless of immigration status.
“These are children that have needs and we have an obligation to educate them both legally and ethically and morally but underscoring it’s a legal obligation first and foremost for us,” he said. “And when kids aren’t well they need to be taken care of.”

Free Online School Curriculum Draws $11 Million in Funding

Tomio Geron:

or public schools looking to improve their curricula, it’s hard to argue with a free product.
That has proved to be a good thing for Web-based education company Everfi, which has raised $11 million in Series A financing from New Enterprise Associates and Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, as well as angels including Michael Chasen, chief executive of Blackboard, which sells a learning management system.
Everfi provides Web-based learning programs for students, particularly in public schools, focusing on subjects that are not covered in traditional courses, such as nutrition and wellness, personal finance and student loan management.
The company’s curriculum is different from the traditional textbook model because it includes 3-D animated gaming-oriented applications. For example, for a lesson about stocks, students virtually visit the New York Stock Exchange and learn how to make a trade, while for a section about student loans, students virtually go to a college campus and learn how to fill out forms and the like.

Dear alma mater: I can’t pay

Rick Karlin:

At New York’s colleges and universities, the arrival of a new school year brings anticipation tinged with anxiety. For many students, the second emotion is prompted by one nagging question: How am I going to pay for this?
Many of them won’t be able to find an answer. The Higher Education Services Corp., which services and collects federally backed college loans in New York, has almost $2 billion worth of defaulted debt on its hands.
As of July 1, HESC listed 145,437 accounts with $1,983,922,931 in college loans that had gone into default. That’s up from last year, when there were 144,216 borrowers for a total of $1,895,211,727 by the end of July.
In 1991, the defaulted sum was just $230 million.

Visualizing the U.S. Higher Education Bubble

seeking alpha:

Is there really a bubble in US higher education?
Today, one way or another, we’re going to find out! First, let’s define just what a bubble is:

An economic bubble exists whenever the price of an asset that may be freely exchanged in a well-established market first soars then plummets over a sustained period of time at rates that are decoupled from the rate of growth of the income that might be realized from either owning or holding the asset.

Here, we’ll consider the asset to be one year of college education at a four-year institution, whose price is given by the cost of tuition and any required fees for attendance.

Desk Arrest Stirs Protest

Sean Gardiner:

In February, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez doodled on her desk in social studies class at her junior high school in Forest Hills: “Lexi was here 2/1/10” and “I Love my babis, Abby & Faith.”
Ms. Gonzalez was escorted to the dean’s office where school safety officers had her empty her backpack, take off her shoes and sweater and then searched her pockets. The New York Police Department was then called and four officers arrived, arrested her then walked her out of the school with her wrists handcuffed behind her back as classmates looked on. Her mother was told she would have to report to family court on vandalism charges.
The severity of authorities’ reaction has turned Ms. Gonzalez, who was using an erasable marker, into the poster child for a student rights movement that wants more transparency on the suspensions, expulsions and arrests in each school. A protest rally, sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union and student rights groups, was held at the Board of Education building behind City Hall on Tuesday calling on law makers to pass the so-called Student Safety Act. It would provide detailed data of disciplinary action taken by the School Safety Division, which is part of the NYPD, by race, sex, age, disability and socioeconomic status.
Both the city’s Department of Education and NYPD have conceded their officers overreacted in Ms. Gonzalez’s case and didn’t act within their guidelines.

Top 10 Colleges Where the Pursuit of Knowledge Goes Beyond the Classroom

unigo:

For most college students, there’s a differentiation between life inside the classroom and out; there’s a time to be cerebral and then there’s the other 22 hours of the day. But these aren’t most college students. We looked for schools that cater to students who happily spend all their waking hours in pursuit of intellectual stimulation, questioning life, challenging the status quo, and letting their curiosity run wild. 30,000 student votes later, we’ve identified the Top 10 Schools where being a “nerd” (as they often, and lovingly, refer to themselves) is truly the norm.

On Superintendent Ealuations

Charlie Mas:

It is shocking to hear that almost no one in Seattle Public Schools had a job description, had regular performance reviews, or even had any set criteria for a performance review. That represents a grosteque failure of management at just about every level of District management, but primarily at the top. I don’t know why people think that Raj Manhas was in any way capable, because the CACIEE final report was basically a catalog of his utter failure to fulfill any part of his responsibilities. Joseph Olchefske was no better, and John Stanford started the whole thing by failing/refusing to take on a quality assurance role when he de-centralized decision-making. I certainly appluad the Superintendent for introducing management to Seattle Public Schools. But the REAL focus of her Performance Management effort is schools. Not teachers and principals so much as schools taken a whole.

Why 17-year-olds’ scores have stalled since the ’70s

Jay Matthews:

Robert J. Samuelson, the Newsweek and Washington Post economics columnist, edited my first news story. We were both college sophomores. I was trying out for the student newspaper. He was already a seasoned reporter and editor on the staff. He tossed the typewritten sheets back to me and said to try again.
I did as I was told. I learned much from him during that first encounter, as I have continued to do during our long friendship. He enlightens me even on topics in my specialty, such as his latest column in the Post, “The failure of school reform.”

“Digital Maoism”; Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual-reality technology, has more recently become an outspoken critic of online social media

The Economist:

FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?
No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.”
If this criticism of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia had come from an outsider–a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe–then nobody would have paid much attention. But Mr Lanier’s denunciation of internet groupthink as “digital Maoism” carries more weight because of his career at technology’s cutting edge.

Who’s That Texting Your Kids in Class 66% of the Time? Parents

Austin Carr:

The days of getting caught talking in class are over–and so aren’t the days of even getting caught.
According to a new survey by app developer textPlus, which surveyed more than 600 of its users aged 13 to 17, texting is more rampant than ever in the classroom. A whopping 42.5% of teens admit to texting during class, and more than half of those say they text sometimes or constantly. What’s more, nearly 80% of students say they’ve never gotten in trouble for texting during class, suggesting the eyes-down, cell-under-the-desk method is slipping past even your most yard-stick taunting school teachers.
With more than 42% of teens admitting to bringing a cell phone or iPod Touch to class, isn’t it time schools start cracking down? And if technology is to become more a part of education, how will teachers ever track students who are already able to pull off using these devices when they’re not supposed to? As more and more gadgets enter the classroom, won’t it just make it easier to find distractions?

Madison West High gang incident raises specter of retaliation

Sandy Cullen:

An armed altercation Friday outside West High School involving known and suspected members of two street gangs involved in an April homicide heightened concerns of possible retaliation, police and school officials said Tuesday.
Sgt. Amy Schwartz, who leads the Madison Police Department’s Crime Prevention Gang Unit, said it is not known if members of the South Side Carnales gang went to the high school looking for members of the rival Clanton 14, or C-14 gang.
But staff at West and the city’s three other main high schools and two middle schools were told Tuesday to determine if safety plans are needed for any students who might be at risk, said Luis Yudice, security coordinator for the Madison School District.
Police have not notified the School District of a specific threat against any student, Yudice said.
But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student. Five people, who police say are associated with the South Side Carnales and MS-13 gangs, are charged in Perez’s slaying. Two of them remain at large.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio / video.
A kind reader noted this quote from the article:

“But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student.”

Much more here.

Debunking “Learning & Teaching Styles”

Benedict Carey:

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

Newark public schools need revolutionary reform

Shavar Jeffries:

Yet in Newark’s public schools, as in many other urban districts, our children’s endless talent meets headfirst with a stultifying bureaucracy that too often extinguishes rather than ignites their genius. It is beset with rules that ignore the individual talents of school leaders and teachers.
Its primary features — tenure, lockstep pay, and seniority — deny the complexity and creativity of effective teaching and learning, implying that teachers and principals are little more than interchangeable assemblyline workers. These practices instill performance-blindness into the fabric of our schools, dishonoring the talent, commitment and effort of our many good teachers and principals, whose excellence is systematically unrecognized and thus underappreciated. This both disrespects the notion of education as a sophisticated profession and produces a system in which student achievement is peripheral to the day-to-day operations of schools.
Simply put, our children have no limits; our schools have too many.
The future for our children depends on revolutionary school reform, executed relentlessly. Our children can no longer afford tinkering around the edges. This reform must include at least four elements:
•Reform of tenure and collective bargaining, including eliminating tenure for principals and significantly restricting it for teachers.

Clusty Search: Shavar Jeffries.

Paying Third-Graders for Better Test Scores

Phil Izzo:

Efforts to improve education in the U.S. has included financial incentives for high-performing teachers and programs have targeted middle- and high-school students, but a recent study found success in giving money to kids as young as third grade who scored well on standardized tests.
In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Paying to Learn: The Effect of Financial Incentives on Elementary School Test Scores” Eric P. Bettinger of the Stanford School of Education looks at a program in the poor, Appalachian community of Coshocton, Ohio.
The pay-for-performance plan targeted third through sixth graders who took standardized tests in math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. The students could earn up to $100 — $20 per score of Advanced in each test. Students who scored proficient were awarded $15 per test. In order to make sure the proceeds went directly to the students, payment was made in “Coshocton Children’s Bucks,” which could only be redeemed by kids for children’s items. Participation in the program was randomized based on a lottery as specified by Robert Simpson, a local factory owner, who financed the effort.
The program showed generally positive results, with the biggest gains coming in math. Students who were eligible for the payments improved about 0.15 standard deviations, a statistically significant result. Though there were small improvements shown for other subject areas, the difference wasn’t statistically significant.

Writer and financier get go-ahead for new UK schools

Richard Garner

Fears that the Government’s “free” schools programme will be dominated by faith groups and create more segregation between religions were re-ignited yesterday. Five of the first 16 schools announced by Education Secretary Michael Gove will be faith-orientated – two Jewish, one Hindu, one Sikh and one Christian.
In two other cases, organisers say there will be a strong Christian influence but the school will not officially be a faith school. Two of the projects are proposed by the education charity ARK, which was set up by the hedge fund millionaire Arpad Busson. The author Toby Young was also given the green light for his proposal for a secondary school in Acton, west London, which will concentrate on the classics – every child will be expected to learn Latin at least up to GCSE level.
Under the Government’s plans, parents, teachers, charities and faith groups are being encouraged to put in bids to run their own schools with state financial support. They will be able to determine their own curriculum and be free of local authority controls, but the British Humanist Association warned yesterday that they would also be free to promote religious intolerance.

Keeping Track of the Kids

New York Times:

This is an era in which many devices are watching us. We carry about wireless phones that tell our service providers exactly where we are. Surveillance cameras blink down from corners and storefronts. Advertisers follow us effortlessly around the Internet. Still, plans in Contra Costa County, Calif., to tag preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips to keep track of their whereabouts at school seem to go too far.
The concern that school officials would use the ID chips to keep tabs on children’s behavior — and tag them perhaps as hyperactive or excessively passive — seems overwrought. County officials point out that the tags will save money and allow teachers to devote less time to attendance paperwork and more time to their students. And the chips, which will be randomly assigned to different children every day, according to a county representative, will not carry personal information that could be intercepted by others.

Where are the activists outraged over city’s failing schools?

Shirley Stancato

When the Michigan Department of Education classified 41 schools in the Detroit Public Schools system as “failing” last month, I braced myself for a thunderous public outcry.
After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a very energized group descended on the Detroit City Council to loudly and angrily express themselves about education in Detroit. Surely these concerned citizens, having just voiced such a strong concern about education, would leap to action to demand that something be done to fix these “failing” schools now.
But that hasn’t happened. The silence, as the old cliché goes, has been deafening.
Why would people who were so passionate and loud so recently remain silent about a report that shows our children are being severely shortchanged? Why would members of the school board who fought to preserve the status quo remain equally silent about such a devastating report?
After all, nothing is as important to our children’s future as education. And nothing is more important to our future as a city than our young people.

Has college sendoff always been so tough?

Martha Irvine

The hour when Ariana Kramer will begin her college career is fast approaching — and her parents are in an office supply store, disagreeing about hanging files, of all things.
“She’ll need them,” her mother says.
“I don’t think so,” her dad counters.
Ariana, meanwhile, walks dreamily through the store, offering no opinion on this particular decision. She is, in fact, confident that she will have what she needs when she starts her freshman year at the University of Iowa.
She has mom, the family organizer, with her, and dad, the calm encourager. And they have “the list,” which mom printed from one of those “what-you’ll-need-at-college” websites.
New laptop. Check.

Private vs Public Education

Linda Thomas:

The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”

The New Black Migration: The Suburbs or Bust

Steven Snead, via a kind reader

Recall now the biblical phrase, “from whence comes my help?” It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.
They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother’s prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.

Clusty Search: Steven Snead.
Related: Madison Preparatory Academy.

Educate the public on teacher performance

The Daily News

The Los Angeles Times last week did what few, if any, school districts are willing to do — analyze teacher performance over multiple years with the intent of making the results of that analysis available to teachers and parents, alike. Teacher union representatives have been quick to condemn the newspaper’s plans to post this information online in a searchable database. But U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and no few teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District saw merit in the project, as do we.
Public education can benefit from more transparency. The disclosure of data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness can be a good thing — for teachers, parents and American education.
“Too often our systems keep all of our teachers in the dark about the quality of their own work,” Duncan told an audience in Little Rock, Ark. “In other fields, we talk about success constantly, with statistics and other measures to prove it. Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?”
It seems a great many teachers have no such fear. Duncan noted that more than 2,000 Los Angeles teachers had called the Times last week to ask for their scores.
The concern has always been that achievement tests are not a reliable or complete measure of teacher eectiveness. It’s a valid concern. Certainly, test scores are not a complete measure, and should never be used as such in decisions on hiring, firing or career advancement. Whether or not test scores can be a reliable, or fair, measure depends on how thorough and careful the analysis.

In a New Role, Teachers Move to Run Schools

Winnie Hu:

Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”
“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said: ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.”

Camp trains students in classical theater acting

Pamela Cotant

A group of high school thespians sharpened their skills this summer at a camp where they worked with professional actors by day and then watched them perform at American Players Theatre at night.
The 27 students ages 13 to 17 attended Acting for Classical Theatre, an American Players Theatre residential camp. The annual six-day camp was based at Bethel Horizons Camp and Retreat Center in Dodgeville where the campers received their training and lodging.
On four nights, they traveled to the nearby American Players Theatre in Spring Green to watch Shakespearean plays. On another night, they received a backstage tour. When they got back to camp, they played theater games — despite the late hour.
On the last day, parents and American Players Theatre employees were invited to watch the youth perform a shortened, 60-minute version of Hamlet on the American Players Theatre stage.

States Test Out New Math Changes to Education Laws Kick In as School Year Begins; Makeover in Chicago

Stephanie Banchero:

When Marshall High School opens for the new school year Tuesday, it will have an almost entirely new teaching staff, a revamped curriculum and a $2 million infusion of federal money.
The students and teachers at Marshall–a hulking three-story building on the city’s violent West Side known as much for its powerhouse basketball teams as its abysmal test scores–are among millions nationwide who will see changes this fall as part of President Barack Obama’s push to overhaul K-12 public schools.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used much of his $100 billion budget–almost twice what his recent predecessors had–to lure states into reshaping schools through programs such as Race to the Top and school transformations like the one Marshall is undergoing.
“Mainly, this is a year to lay a foundation for the long-term reforms that will get all students college-ready,” said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonpartisan group of state school chiefs.

Teaching for a Shared Future: American Educators Need to Think Globally

Esther Wojcicki & Michael Levine, via a Kris Olds email:

American students’ lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.
According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today’s high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in “higher performing” schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.

Schools: The Disaster Movie A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.

John Heilemann:

The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children’s Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America’s schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted “Call my office,” which translated to “Buzz off.”
Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he’d made–An Inconvenient Truth–and Canada snapped to attention. “I had absolutely seen it,” Canada recalls, “and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something.” Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. “I honestly didn’t think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk.”
Two years later, Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.

Related: An increased emphasis on adult employment – Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s recent speech to the Madison Rotary Club and growing expenditures on adult to adult “professional development“.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison’s new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
Caire is driving the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy International Baccalaureate charter school initiative.

An interview with Diane Ravitch

Columbus Education Association:

Dr. Diane Ravitch is a polarizing figure in the education world. From 1991-1993, Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. Originally a strong proponent of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing, her views have changed considerably. She argues for her change of heart and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
It was recently announced that Dr. Ravitch will receive NEA’s 2010 Friend of Education Award. CEA recently interviewed Dr. Ravitch about the role of teaching and learning in the age of accountability.

Let’s say you were to walk into an elementary classroom in any school district ten years from now. If we stay on the present course set by NCLB, how will teaching and learning be different?
I think that there will be a great deal of drilling and teaching to the test. Most of the day will be spent on reading and mathematics. Kids will be encouraged to take lots and lots of test prep. This is happening now and I don’t see any change in the foreseeable future. The secretary has said that 100 percent of all kids should be proficient. There doesn’t seem to be an end date where this regime will conclude in victory. Now that so many states are tying teacher evaluation to test scores, it is predictable that we will have a system in which testing of basic skills is the basic purpose of education.

Mike Antonucci has more.

Study finds capable children are their own best defense against abduction

Donna St. George

The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14, many on their way to or from school, and they escape harm mostly through their own fast thinking or fierce resistance, according to a new national analysis.
Probing a crime that is infrequent but strikes fear in the hearts of parents as little else does, analysts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that children who encountered would-be abductors were usually alone, often in the late afternoon or early evening.
It’s a chilling thought for working parents and all those who have asked children to hold hands tightly in crowds or to phone as soon as they get home from school. It calls to mind last year’s killing of Somer Thompson, 7, snatched en route from school in Florida as she ran ahead of her siblings, and the highly publicized case of Elizabeth Smart, taken from her Utah bedroom at age 14.

Excellent schools tend to choose their pupils. Is there another way?

The Economist

PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.
In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008.
Mr Blair’s successors have lacked his zeal, but religious schools continue to flourish. One reason is that their pupils tend to do better than others in exams. In 2009, 57% of them at around age 16 passed national exams (GCSEs) with acceptable grades, including those in maths and English, compared with 51% at non-religious state schools.

7 strategies to avoid the college debt trap

Janet Bodnar

Is it worth it to pay $200,000 for a liberal arts education, especially if it means taking out loans? One of my 20-something Kiplinger colleagues answers bluntly: “If I had realized how much debt I was getting into, I would have gone to my state school instead of an expensive private college.”
As important as education is in today’s world, families need to find more affordable ways to pay for it. Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com, has calculated that total student-loan debt exceeds revolving credit (mostly credit-card debt).
Here’s my guide for parents about avoiding the student-debt trap:

Schools’ Role in Credit Cards

Matt Jarzemsky:

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a statewide investigation of credit-card companies marketing to college students through schools.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat running for governor of the state, said the investigation builds on his efforts to examine conflicts of interest in the student-lending industry generally, which led to nationwide changes. His campaign website touts the changes as one of his major accomplishments as attorney general.
Dozens of direct marketers and lenders were contacted in 2007 by Mr. Cuomo’s office seeking documents and information on whether they used deceptive offers, fraudulent solicitations or illegal incentives to lure students into applying for loans or loan consolidations.

State appeals court blocks school drug tests

In a ruling by California’s chief justice nominee, a state appeals court has barred a school district from drug testing all students in extracurricular activities such as choir, the school band and Future Farmers of America.
The Shasta Union High School District in Northern California began the testing in 2008, saying the prospect of being disqualified from a favorite after-school activity would discourage youths from using drugs or alcohol.
The district noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that random drug tests of all students in extracurricular programs did not violate the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches.

Broke–and Building the Most Expensive School in U.S. History

Allysia Finley

At $578 million–or about $140,000 per student–the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.
The K-12 complex isn’t merely an overwrought paean to the nation’s most celebrated liberal political family. It’s a jarring reminder that money doesn’t guarantee success–though it certainly beautifies failure.
The cluster of schools is situated on the premises of the old Ambassador Hotel where the New York senator and presidential candidate was shot in 1968. The school district insists that it chose the site not merely for sentimental reasons, but because it was the only space available in the area and the property was dirt cheap.

How AP and IB mess up college enrollment

Jay Matthews:

Whiteflame128, a participant in my Admissions 101 discussion group, described what happened when he graduated from a Fairfax County high school and showed up for college enrollment with an entire freshman year’s worth of credit from Advanced Placement courses and tests. “My advisor had absolutely no idea what to do with my schedule at orientation,” he said.
Many students have encountered this problem, some of them in just the last few weeks in this enrollment season. All those extra credits, from AP or International Baccalaureate, don’t fit easily into the standard college schedule. They force newcomers to compete with second-year students for limited space in second-year courses. They aggravate the need to take less favored courses just to maintain full-time status. They waste time and money. What do to about this is hard to figure out. Most of the colleges seem to throw up their hands.
Admissions 101 participant grcxx3 said “my son and I were just caught off-guard about how difficult it would be to schedule classes for that first year.” Grcxxe said the AP, IB or local college dual enrollment her son took in high school meant he was “coming in with 18-plus hours of credit, much of which [could exempt him from] common freshman classes (like freshman English) and basic general ed classes that are often taken during the first year”

Too often, students’ parents get lost in the equation

Alan Borsuk

Vernita Otukoya said her son, Babatunde, was struggling in third grade last year. So she met with his teacher at Milwaukee’s 53rd St. School.
“We made a plan, we stuck with it, we checked with each other on a regular basis,” Otukoya said. The literacy coach at the school gave her books that her son could read. The teamwork and the focus on how to help Babatunde paid off.
“He actually made the honor roll” by the end of the school year, Otukoya said proudly as her son began his first day of fourth grade Wednesday.
Would that all stories of parent-teacher interaction were that positive. For that matter, would that there were a lot more stories of parent-teacher interaction at all.
There is no getting around the fact that the low level of parent involvement in helping children succeed in school is a huge impediment to educational success, especially in low-income communities.
That’s true nationwide. It’s true in Milwaukee. The teacher who has 30 kids and maybe five parents show up for conferences is a common and discouraging story.

Irrepressible ed blogger beats “Jay Matthews” up, again

Jay Matthews:

In his most recent post he also hands me some ammo to fire back at him. He quotes an online letter to President Obama from a reader, Ira Socol. Socol is critical of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), as an example of the kind of charter school the president admires, and compares KIPP unfavorably—too rigid, too uncreative, too imperialist—to the Sidwell Friends School which Obama’s daughters attend. This is reminiscent of a point made by the late, great Gerald W. Bracey at the beginning of the Obama administration.
Sadly, Socol makes the same mistake Jim has made many times. He cites as evidence for his views of teaching at KIPP and Sidwell some descriptions he found on their Web sites. Any good teacher would tell you that is no way to judge a school. Socol gives no indication he has ever spent time inside a KIPP school, or Sidwell. Neither has Jim, unless I have missed something. They are among the many KIPP critics who consider it sufficient to judge schools by what they read on the Internet.
I think they should visit the schools they write about and tell us what they see. All of the KIPP schools I know have an open door policy. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., including one in each of the 20 largest cities except Phoenix. I have visited many KIPP schools and Sidwell. I think Socol, and Jim, will be surprised, once they get inside, at how little difference there is between the great teaching going on at both places.

L.A. civic leaders urge LAUSD, union to revamp teacher evaluations

Jason Song

The group, including the presidents of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., urges the use of student test score data and more access to information about instructors for families.
A group of business and civic leaders is urging the Los Angeles school district and teachers union to quickly develop a new evaluation system that incorporates student test score data and gives families more access to information about instructors.
“This system should be transparent and the results of the teacher evaluations should be made available to parents,” said a letter signed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as well as the presidents of both the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., and 18 other people.
The civic group also endorsed including value-added analysis — a statistical method that links student test scores to their teachers — in teacher performance reviews and cited a Times series on the subject as one reason they decided to weigh in.

Seattle Teacher Contract Gets National Attention

Melissa Westbrook

Interesting discussion on the teachers contract at the Daily Kos. From the thread (italics mine, bold theirs):

Wednesday afternoon the Seattle teachers’ union (SEA) achieved a huge victory over the proponents of what is popularly (and erroneously) known as “education reform.”
After many, many hours of hard negotiations, the SEA negotiators achieved a tentative contract with the district. What is remarkable about this contract is that:

Teachers’ final evaluations will not depend on student test scores. * Teachers’ jobs will not depend on student test scores.
Teachers’ pay will not depend on student test scores.

This tentative agreement was reached despite intensive efforts by the Broad-Foundation-connected superintendent to insert test scores into all three of the above areas.

And actually, it is a real victory for the teachers (in terms of ridding themselves of what they did not want in the contract) and anyone who does not support the ed-reform push by wealthy foundations and the DOE.

Block Scheduling – Is More of Less Cheating Students?

Rob Manwaring

In search of a quick fix to your school’s dropout problem? This spring I visited a low performing high school AKA “dropout factory” that had recently made a lot of progress in improving its graduation rate. I wanted to know what it had been doing to improve. It turns out the biggest factor seemed to be their transition to a block schedule. I have not figured out if this is just a fad or is a trend, but I have since come across more and more high schools serving at risk students that have also recently made this transition. I had always thought that block scheduling was about providing more time for students in core subjects so that they could learn the material at a slower more in depth pass. It turns out that I was wrong and that in many cases the opposite might be happening.
Here is how it works. By redesigning the same number of instructional minutes in the school year, these high schools are able to move from offering students 6 courses a year to offering 8 courses a year. Now my initial assumption was that the school must adjust the total number of classes that a student needs to pass during his or her high school career in order to graduate. Not so. With the new block schedule, a student can simply fail more classes, and still graduate.

Advice for kids on the first day of school

Brian Brehmer

I wrote a column in June that offered advice to the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. With the new school year beginning, I thought I would offer some advice to MPS students on their first day of class.
Good morning, students. On your first day of school, there are a million things going through your minds. I hate to do this to you, but I am going to add a few more things for you to think about.
First and foremost, take a look around. Do you see where you are? Make it a habit. Attend all of your classes each and every day. That is the only way you are going to get an education.
Second, do your homework. Don’t just bring it home and back to school – actually do it. The only way you can get anything out of it is by actually doing your best to complete each and every assignment.

Singapore’s New Educational Initiatives

GovMonitor

Minister Ng Eng Hen announced several education initiatives.
These include better infrastructure to support learning, new progression choices for Normal (Academic) students, new specialised schools for Normal (Technical) students, and an extension of the Integrated Programme to more schools .
A new medical school will start in 2013 and MOE will also fund a number of new places in new degree courses in NAFA and LASALLE.
Opening Remarks by Dr Ng Eng Hen at the National Day Rally Media Conference held at the MOE Function Room 31 August 2010.
Investing in All Learners, Creating New Opportunities and Pathways
Singapore’s rapid progress has been made possible only through the sheer ability, tenacity and wits of its people.
We must nurture this critical human resource through education as it is our most precious asset. Singapore is fortunate to have a strong and respected education system and good teachers, which have resulted from persistent efforts in the last three decades.

Good teachers, good students

Los Angeles Times Editorial

The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students’ scores.
Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don’t show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times’ articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.

Ouch! Madison schools are ‘weak’? and College Station’s School District

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial

Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation’s best cities in which to raise a family.
That’s something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger’s, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as “weak” in its latest edition.
That’s troubling.
“Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools,” the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County’s suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges – higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the ‘burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.

Madison School Board member Ed Hughes compares WKCE scores, comments on the Kiplinger and Wisconsin State Journal article and wonders if anyone would move from Madison to College Station, TX [map], which Kiplinger’s ranked above our local $15,241 2009/2010 per student public schools.
I compared Madison, WI to College Station, TX using a handy Census Bureau report.

93.8% of College Station residents over 25 are high school graduates, a bit higher than Madison’s 92.4%.
58.1% of College Station residents over 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to Madison’s 48.2%

Madison does have a higher median household and per capita income along with a population about three times that of College Station.
Turning to the public school districts, readers might be interested in having a look at both websites: the College Station Independent School District and the Madison Metropolitan School District. 75% of College Station students took the ACT (average score: 22.6) while 67% of Madison students took the exam and achieved a composite score of 24.2.
College Station publishes a useful set of individual school report cards, which include state and national test results along with attendance and dropout data.
College Station’s 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison’s 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station’s A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual…), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station’s “student profile” notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
Texas’s 2010 National Merit Semifinalist cut score was 216 while Wisconsin’s was 207. College Station’s high school had 16 National Merit Semi-Finalists (the number might be 40 were College Station the same size as Madison and perhaps still higher with Wisconsin’s lower cut score) during the most recent year while Madison’s high schools had 57.

Robotic Nation

Marshall Brain

I went to McDonald’s this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald’s to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald’s, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald’s, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, “Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?” The kids screamed, “Yeah!” “McDonald’s has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?” The kids screamed, “Yeah!”
The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, “We want to do it!” So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It’s a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.

Bill Dickens versus the Signaling Model of Education

Bryan Caplan

I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I’ve seen leads me to believe that isn’t the case.
For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren’t very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn’t they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn’t mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.

Getting Beyond the Race to the Top

Laura Waters

A whole week of catharsis, yet the Garden State still agonizes over the loss of $400 million in Race To The Top money. Ex-Commissioner Bret Schundler is out on his keister — amid calls for legislative hearings because of a botched question that pushed us into the losers’ column by three points. (NJ came in 11th with 437.8 points; Ohio, the 10th of 10 winners, got 440.8.)
NJ Facebook Group: New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze
More pertinent is the NJ Department of Education’s perceived ineptitude. During the presentation of our application to federal reviewers, five high-level DOE staffers were unable to conjure up basic fiscal information for 2008 and 2009, instead of the mistakenly/cravenly entered information on 2011. And that’s after spending $500K on a consultant.
Was the incorrect answer a clerical error? Was it a ham-handed effort to elude accountability on state school aid cuts?
Final answer: it’s irrelevant.
We didn’t lose the Race To The Top by a grimace-inducing three points because of a whiffed answer valued at less than one-half percent of the total 500 points. We lost because our ambitious reform plans elicited lukewarm support from local school boards and superintendents (about half signed on) and ice-cold censure from NJEA affiliates.
For comparison’s sake, New York State won and had buy-in from every local union president.

Will the Book Survive Generation Text?

Carlin Romano

Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with “extreme weather.” No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get.
Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp a fifth of Pakistan. President Mohamed Nasheed, of the Maldives, worries enough about future sea levels to hold a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear. (Don’t miss this on YouTube!)
Parallel thinking should apply to a phenomenon of greater concern to readers here: “extreme academe.” Think of it as the hysterical upgrading of ugly visions of the future already found in polite critiques of higher ed.
Back in 2003, for instance, former Harvard President Derek Bok, in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press), drilled home the problem capsulized in his subtitle by noting that throughout the 1980s, deans and professors brought him “one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money–often, quite substantial sums of money.”

We all must take part in education

Caryl Davis

I had the pleasure of teaching a group of Milwaukee Public Schools students this summer. And, yes, it was a pleasure. Classes were small – 15 students maximum – there was team-teaching and students and faculty had access to technology.
Many of the students were those who had not met math and literacy requirements during the 2009-’10 academic year. Some had let their behavior get in the way of their learning, so we were eager to provide some structure that would help them move forward.
By the end of the summer session, our data revealed that our students made gains in math and vocabulary acquisition. According to MPS standards, a 7% to 9% gain in math or literacy is acceptable. Many of our students had 10% to 60% gains.
I don’t believe this progress would be possible with 40 students in a classroom, without access to technology or without extra adults in the classroom. We were able to give our students the individualized attention that they would not get in an overcrowded and understaffed classroom.
It is crucial that our educational leaders go back to the basics during the 2010-’11 school year. Education is a contact activity, and more contact is better.

Galloping inflation in American college fees

The Economist

FOR decades, college fees have risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes most other kinds look modest by comparison. Students may not be getting a good deal in return

U.S. education chief praises Manchester school

Beth Lamontangne Hall

Local education officials presented a glowing image of Bakersville Elementary School and the Manchester School District during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Tuesday morning.
Teachers told the secretary that faculty members love what they do and treat each other like family. Parents said their children feel comfortable in the welcoming school, and Superintendent Thomas Brennan thanked city officials for providing much needed resources for books and staff.
Duncan was at Bakersville, labeled a “persistently low-achieving school” by the state Department of Education, as part of his Courage in the Classroom tour throughout the state this week. On Monday, Duncan visited Keene State College, and on Tuesday afternoon, he headed to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to talk to military families.

	English	Math	Reading	Science	Composite
African Americans	16.3	18.0	17.1	18.4	17.6
Caucasian/White	25.1	25.6	25.8	24.8	25.4

	Total Tested	English (18)	Math (22)	Reading (21)	Science (24)
All Students	1,122	81%	68%	71%	51%
African Americans	76	38%	24%	25%	9%
Caucasian/White	733	90%	77%	79%	60%
Hispanic	71	59%	39%	45%	18%
Asian/Pacific Isl.	119	67%	65%	61%	45%