Student Support – Page 59 – School Information System

At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts

Peter Schilling — the director of information technology at Amherst College — crunched the numbers on the technological habits of this year’s incoming class, and discovered some fascinating stuff. He’s published it online as the “IT Index“, crafted in the style of a Harper’s Index, and it’s an intriguing snapshot of some of the technologically-driven behavioral changes that will mark the next generation.
Below are a few of my favorite stats, culled from the list. As you read, keep in mind that this incoming class has 438 students in it:

Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding

via WISTAX

WISTAX published a fascinating chart in their most recent issue of FOCUS [Page 1, Page 2]:

However, the state pledge to provide two-thirds of schools revenues in 1996-97 changed the budget landscape. By 2006-07, state-tax support for the UW System had almost doubled during Ihe 25 years prior. However, inflation (CPI, up 115%). school aids/credits (320%). and overall slate GPR expenditures (222%) rose more.

Referendum Climate: Charts – Enrollment; Local, State, Federal and Global Education Spending
Property Tax Effect – Madison School District
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate
The subject of local property taxes, state and federal income taxes and fees vis a vis school spending was discussed at Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad’s recent appearance at the Dane County Public Affairs Council

Further proof that there is no free lunch. The ongoing calls for additional state redistributed tax dollars for K-12 public education will likely have an effect on other programs, as this information illustrates. I do think that there should be a conversation on spending priorities.

Beware of the Easy School Fix

Jay Matthews:

When fixing schools, beware of miracle cures. Every week people send me ideas they say will change the future of education and lead all humanity to enlightenment. So, when management expert William G. Ouchi let me look at his new work on the surprising power of total student loads per teacher, or TSL, I was skeptical.
He says when middle or high school principals are given control of their schools’ budgets — a rare occurrence in big districts — they tend to make changes in staffing, curriculum and scheduling that sharply reduce TSL, the number of students each of their teachers is responsible for. Some urban districts have TSLs approaching 200 kids per teacher. But after principals get budgeting power, the load drops sharply, sometimes to as low as 80 kids per instructor. When that happens, the portion of students scoring “proficient” on state tests climbs. A group of New York schools had a surge of 11 percentage points after they reduced average TSL by 25 students per teacher.
I hear the mumbles out there. Yes, correlation is not causation. Test scores are not a perfect measure. Many other factors could explain the rise in achievement. For instance, the principals might be using their new powers to hire good teachers and fire bad ones.

[For] Crying Out Loud

September 24, 2008 By Glenn Ricketts:

Yes, yes, we know that you’ve been an outstanding high school history student and that you’d like to major in that subject in college, but we’re not sure why you’re inquiring about scholarships here. Wait, not so fast: it’s certainly impressive that you’ve had some original research published, and your grades are indeed outstanding. But if, as you say, you’re looking for a scholarship, we’d like to hear about your curve ball. Oh, you didn’t play baseball in high school? Well, then how about football or basketball? No? Lacrosse, soccer, swimming, maybe? Golf, bowling, tennis? In that case, do you sing or dance? You don’t appear to have any disabilities, not that we’d ask.
No, sorry, speaking fluent French is not really what we had in mind by “diversity.” Do you by chance play the xylophone? What’s that? History scholarships? You mean something geared specifically towards outstanding high school history students? Ho! Ho! Good one.
No, not here. Haven’t heard of ’em anywhere else, either. Where’d you come up with that idea anyway? Look, we’re not sure we can do anything for you at this point unless…wait a minute, did you say you were a cheerleader? Sit down. I think we’re finally on to something. Yes, that’s right, we have several scholarships for cheerleaders. Can you send us all of the relevant information about your high school cheerleading experience? We may also be able to direct you to other sources of support for promising college cheerleading prospects. Why didn’t you tell us this at the outset, instead of getting sidetracked with all of that stuff about history? We’re very busy in this office, you know. No doubt you’re an outstanding history student, and by all means major in it if you like, but that’s not going to get you anywhere if you’re looking for a scholarship. Good thing you mentioned the cheerleading angle, especially since we have to be careful to choose only the most outstanding applicants.
I made up this little drama, but it is based on the “true facts.” History scholarships are rare. Cheerleading scholarships are pretty common–even at colleges and universities that one might think value intellectual achievement over human pyramids.
Will Fitzhugh is a former high school history teacher who, frustrated with the lack of opportunities to showcase academic achievement among young students, in 1987 founded The Concord Review, (www.tcr.org) a quarterly journal devoted entirely to outstanding research essays by high school students. Anyone who doubts the possibility of impressive research skills and consummate writing ability among some of today’s secondary school students should read at least one issue of the Review, where future historians and teachers might well be making their first appearances. These students don’t need remedial English, and could probably be bumped up beyond the usual introductory survey courses in history to begin work as history majors on the fast track.
Trouble is, as Will has pointed out to us, the students who write in The Concord Review don’t get much recognition beyond that, to say nothing of scholarship assistance. A few colleges–most notably Reed College–have recently started supporting The Concord Review financially–which is bound to encourage some bright, highly capable students to consider attending college out in Portland, Oregon. But by and large, the prospect for students winning scholarships on the basis of outstanding ability to engage in historical scholarship isn’t very bright.

(more…)

Spare the Rod: Why You Shouldn’t Hit Your Kids

Alan Kazdin:

The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn’t pause to wonder: “What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?” If they are thinking anything at all, it’s: “Here comes justice!” And while the typical parent may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of kids is pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent of parents physically discipline their 1- to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of adolescents have been physically punished by their parents. Parents cite children’s aggression and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It’s a rare human being who can refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won’t hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month won’t harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment addictive would be imprecise, but there’s a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment has serious, well-proven bad effects.

Is a university degree still worth the time and money it takes?

The Economist:

“MORE will mean worse,” wrote an angry Kingsley Amis in 1961, contemplating plans to expand university education. His prediction has been tested past anything he could have imagined, as that era’s new universities were joined by the ex-polytechnics in the 1990s, and the proportion of youngsters who go on to university rose from less than 10% to almost 40% now. The 430,000 new undergraduates heading off to freshers’ weeks later this month will find themselves part of Britain’s largest university cohort ever.
Similar rumblings have continued since Amis’s jeremiad. With less government money (in real terms) per student than in his day, universities have to pack them in and keep them in to balance the books. Paul Buckland, an archaeology professor at Bournemouth University, resigned when administrators overruled his failing grades for ten students (last month he won a case for “constructive dismissal”). In June a barnstorming lecture by Geoffrey Alderman, of Buckingham University, gained wide attention with its claims of impotent external examiners, widespread unpunished plagiarism and a “grotesque bidding game” in which universities dished out good grades in order to claw their way up league tables.

Local Students Considered for National Achievement Honors

Tamira Madsen:

Four area high school students were named semifinalists for the National Achievement Scholarship Program competition and are eligible for scholarships for Black American students through the National Merit Scholarship Program.

Middleton students Zowie L. Miles and Kristina M. Teuschler, Matthew Bowie-Wilson from Madison West and Taylor M. Behnke from Madison Edgewood, along with 13 other Wisconsin students, made the list.

More than 150,000 juniors requested consideration for the 2009 National Achievement Scholarship Program competition by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, a test which served as an initially screening of the applicants.

The Special Needs Kindergarten Crunch

Christine Gralow:

It’s the third week of pre-school. Kids are still settling in, and many are still crying when their parents drop them off in the morning. During these first weeks of school, pre-school teachers do a lot of waiting and wondering — waiting patiently for the separation tears to end and wondering what fascinating young characters will begin to emerge in this year’s class. My students’ parents, however, are already thinking about next year — they’re worried about getting their kids into kindergarten.
As a pre-school special needs teacher in New York, I’ve learned that the city’s culture of cut-throat competition extends to kindergarten admissions. And from that, an unexpected part of my job has evolved — providing psychological and emotional support to parents as they undertake the daunting task of finding an appropriate placement for their child. Securing a good spot in an oversubscribed New York City kindergarten, whether public or private, is difficult enough for most parents. But for the parents of children with special needs, it is especially challenging.

California’s new 8th-grade algebra rule gets some poor marks

Howard Blume:

The new state policy of requiring algebra in the eighth grade will set up unprepared students for failure while holding back others with solid math skills, a new report has concluded.
These predictions, based on national data, come in the wake of an algebra mandate that the state Board of Education, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopted in July. That decision won widespread praise from some reform advocates and the Bush administration, putting California out front in a national debate over improving mathematics instruction.
The policy also led to a lawsuit filed this month by groups representing school districts and school administrators. They contend that the state board adopted the new rules illegally. Their underlying concern is that the algebra policy is unworkable and unfunded.
The new study, released today by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., looked at who is taking eighth-grade algebra and how they are doing.
And there was some ostensibly good news. Nationwide, more students are taking algebra than before. Over five years, the percentage of eighth-graders in advanced math — algebra or higher — went up by more than one-third. In total, about 37% of all U.S. students took advanced math in 2005, the most recent year in the analysis.

More here and here.

Schools Sour on Giving Students Sweet Rewards

Daniel de Vise:

Schools around the Washington region are quietly removing Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Pops from the teacher’s desk, ending a long tradition of rewarding classroom obeisance with candy.
In the District and many suburbs, school systems have imposed rules during the past two years that discourage teachers from using candy or other junk food as an incentive. Some policies reject any offer of food as reward, or denial of food as punishment, on the theory that students should not be taught it is a privilege to eat.
Regulation of classroom candy is part of a broader “wellness” movement that has swept public schools this decade. Federal law required school systems to establish rules by fall 2006 to govern Gummi Worms in cafeterias and sodas in vending machines, birthday cupcake parties and Halloween binges, physical education and recess, as well as the proliferation of candy and other food of questionable nutritional value in contests, promotions and everyday classroom activities.

History Lesson

Bob McGum:

Want to read another story about the dumbing down of American students? How far SAT scores have dropped or standards fallen?
If so, look elsewhere.
We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard ’round the world.
The Review is the child of Will Fitzhugh, a Harvard alumnus who started publishing it out of his own home in 1987 while a high school teacher himself. The next year he quit his job and dedicated himself to the journal full-time. Not least of the spurs behind his decision was having witnessed two of his fellow Concord teachers propose an after-school program to help a select group of students prepare a serious history essay-only to be shot down by the administration on the grounds of “elitism.”
Like most such academic adventures, the Review isn’t going to challenge People magazine any time soon; it still has only about 850 subscribers, and among the high schools that don’t subscribe are a number whose students have been published in the Review itself. But it is attracting attention. The Concord Review has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who says “there should be a copy in every high school.” Another fan is James Basker, a Barnard and Columbia professor who also serves as president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
“Students rise to the expectations you have of them,” states Mr. Basker. “All you have to do is show them they are capable of writing serious historical essays, and off they go.” To emphasize the point, his institute will on June 10 inaugurate three annual Gilder Lehrman Essay Prizes in American History drawn from Concord Review essayists. This year’s first prize, for $5,000, goes to Hannah S. Field for her contribution about library efforts to suppress Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
All this acclaim notwithstanding, Mr. Fitzhugh believes today’s culture retains a pronounced bias against academic achievement and excellence. He cites the example of a Concord Review essayist from Connecticut who subsequently went on to Dartmouth and will be studying medicine this fall at Harvard. When Mr. Fitzhugh paid a visit to her high school, he found that though everyone knew she was all-state in soccer, no one knew that an essay of hers had appeared in the Review, beating out hundreds of the finest student essays from not only the U.S. but other parts of the English-speaking world. It’s one of the things that tells him that the need for such a journal remains strong.
“Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere,” Mr. Fitzhugh says. “We’ve decided to celebrate varsity academics.”

The Misplaced Math Student: Lost in Eighth-Grade Algebra

Tom Loveless:

Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student. In 1990, very few eighth graders, about one out of six, were enrolled in an algebra course. As the decade unfolded, leaders began urging schools to increase that number. President Clinton lamented, “Around the world, middle students are learning algebra and geometry. Here at home, just a quarter of all students take algebra before high school.”1 The administration made enrolling all children in an algebra course by eighth grade a national goal. In a handbook offering advice to middle school students on how to plan for college, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley urged, “Take algebra beginning in the eighth grade and build from there.”2 Robert Moses ratcheted up the significance of the issue by labeling algebra “The New Civil Right,” thereby highlighting the social consequences of so many poor and minority students taking remedial and general math courses instead of algebra.3
The campaign was incredibly successful. Several urban school districts declared a goal of algebra for all eighth graders. In 1996, the District of Columbia led the nation with 53 percent of eighth graders enrolled in algebra. From 1990 to 2000, national enrollment in algebra courses soared from 16 percent to 24 percent of all eighth graders.
The surge continued into the next decade. Eighth-grade enrollment in algebra hit 31 percent nationally in 2007, a near doubling of the 1990 proportion. Today more U.S. eighth graders take algebra than any other math course.4 In July 2008, the State of California decided to adopt an algebra test as its eighth-grade assessment of student proficiency. The policy in effect mandates that all eighth graders will be enrolled in algebra by 2011.

Related from Jay Matthews.

Recalculating The 8th-Grade Algebra Rush

Jay Matthews:

Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra’s abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.
Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.
Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.
The report (to be available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx ) reprints this simple NAEP problem:
There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?
A) 9
B) 81
C) 91
D) 99
E) 100
The correct answer is D. Ten percent of 90 is 9. Add that to 90 and you get 99. How many of the misplaced students got it right? Just 9.8 percent. Not good.

The Harmful Mistakes of Sex Education in School

Minette Marrin:

Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can’t, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can’t teach, teach sex education.
Judged by its results – not a bad way of judging – sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.
Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people – half of them under 25 – were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.
When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.

Student Music at the Madison Farmer’s Market

Two Madison West High School Students play at the Saturday morning Dane County Farmer's Market in Madison, WI

Enterprising students from Madison’s West High School. I learned that one can make well over $100 on a Saturday morning.

Engaging students in discussion on the achievement gap

A. David Dahmer:

Two hundred students from 23 school districts across the country will convene in Madison for the annual Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) Student Conference Sept. 24-27. This year’s theme will be “Futura De La Juventud: Laying Foundation, Affirming Our Identity, Building Relationships.”
“One of the things that the conference is really focused on is engaging the kids in discussion about the achievement gap and what barriers that students of color face in their school environment,” says Lisa Black, special assistant to the Superintendent for Race & Equity and the planning chair for the MSAN Conference. “Our goals really are to increase access to post-secondary options.”
African American and Latino students from around the country will gather at Monona Terrace to share experiences and develop strategies for improving student academic achievement and school climate in their home districts.
Black stresses that the students have really taken ownership of the planning for the conference.
“The students really set the agenda. We shared with them what MSAN is all about and they studied the gap and all the data in the district, and they are taking it from there,” she says. “It’s important that their voices and views are heard, and [that] it’s not always adults setting the agenda.”
Each year, MSAN holds a student conference in a different city across the United States where teams of students of member district schools engage in discussion and plan for follow up activities related to improving the effectiveness of their schools in educating African American and Latino youth.

What Happens When a School District Fails?

Jessica Calefati:

Students, families, and educators in Georgia still are struggling to make sense of how a school district recently lost its accreditation and what impact the ruling will have on the students’ chances of getting into competitive colleges. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation’s major accrediting agencies, revoked the Clayton County school system’s accreditation in late August after the district’s leaders failed to achieve eight of nine mandates for improvement set by SACS in February. Some of the unmet mandates include establishment of a responsible school board, removal of outside influences that disrupt the district’s ability to function, and adherence to a code of ethics.
SACS Chief Executive Officer Mark Elgart said the board’s problems permeated the system, but that dysfunction did not directly affect the quality of learning offered by the 50,000-student district located just south of Atlanta. Revocation of accreditation, he said, was the only way to prevent further damage to that system. The last school system to lose its accreditation in the United States was Florida’s Duval County in 1969.

Cultivating Algebra Enthusiasm

Michael Alison Chandler:

“Nothing like a little math to wake you up in the morning,” teacher Tricia Colclaser said this month after a taxing round of word problems.
Abstract math is not known for its stirring effect on U.S. teenagers. But algebra is viewed as increasingly essential for students preparing for college or careers in a fast-changing, technology-based economy. Some advocates call it the new literacy.
Strengthening the math abilities of all students is a steep challenge. Educators must reinforce basic concepts early on, attract teachers talented enough to go beyond dictating formulas, and, not least, overcome an anti-math bias many students harbor long into adulthood, that all the hours spent mixing letters and numbers yield more punishment than possibility.
How hard can it be?
The question led this education reporter back to high school to try again, as a student in Colclaser’s class. To prepare, I reviewed a recent version of Virginia’s Algebra II Standards of Learning exam. The 50 questions conjured a familiar wave of anxiety but little actual math. I then fumbled through a state Algebra I test, getting at most 10 answers right.

Teens, Video Games & Civics

Amanda Lenhart Joseph Kahne Ellen Middaugh Alexandra Rankin Macgill Chris Evans Jessica Vitak:

The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center and was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The primary findings in the survey of 1,102 youth ages 12-17 include —
Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.
Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.

Mentoring, in addition to metal detectors, are needed to curb violence in schools.

Milwaukee Journal – Sentinel Editorial:

The stabbing at Hamilton High School last week, in which a 15-year-old girl was attacked with a knife by another girl in a bathroom, came on the day the school was to roll out its airport-quality metal detector.
But while metal detectors can keep weapons out of schools when properly used, we believe no machine could have guaranteed this attack wouldn’t have happened. Students can be attacked anywhere. In order to get a handle on violence, more mentoring is needed among at-risk youth.
The Violence-Free Zones program, now in use in seven local high schools, has been successful in reducing violence and suspensions by offering a big brother, big sister type of approach.

Police calls at and near Madison high schools: 1996-2006.

College Applicants, Beware: Your Facebook Page Is Showing

John Hechinger:

High-school seniors already fretting about grades and test scores now have another worry: Will their Facebook or MySpace pages count against them in college admissions?
A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. Of those colleges making use of the online information, 38% said that what they saw “negatively affected” their views of the applicant. Only a quarter of the schools checking the sites said their views were improved, according to the survey by education company Kaplan, a unit of Washington Post Co.
Some admissions officers said they had rejected students because of material on the sites. Jeff Olson, who heads research for Kaplan’s test-preparation division, says one university did so after the student gushed about the school while visiting the campus, then trashed it online. Kaplan promised anonymity to the colleges, of which 320 responded. The company surveyed schools with the most selective admissions.

History Scholar

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
9/18/2008
College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on – there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.
Consider an example: there is a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students, and it is a strong candidate for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would be doing what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.
But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history students of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history know about and take an interest in his work? No. Would there be college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, attract attention from his peers at the college and university level? No.
I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by edupundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.
In 21 years of working to publish 824 history research papers by secondary students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their academic work in history.
When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.
Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of if, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.
I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.
I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.
It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own contempt for and neglect of academic work at the secondary (aka “pre-college”) level.
Will Fitzhugh [founder], Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987], Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998], TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org, Varsity Academics®

Unprepared high school grads focus of state education hearing

Diane D’Amico:

David Morales never thought much about going to college. But in 12th grade he watched his aunt graduate from The Richard Stockton College in Galloway Town-ship.
“After seeing her succeed in everything she wanted to do and watching her face light up with her own accomplishment, this inspired me to change my mind,” Morales told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
It was too late to switch to college preparatory classes, but Morales thought that since he had received all A’s and B’s in his courses, he could still handle college. But when he took the Accuplacer placement test at Cumberland County College, he found he would have to take remedial courses first.
“Now I will be in school a year longer to get my degree (in radiology),” he said.
Morales was one of three current and former Cumberland County College students who spoke to the board about their high school experiences. CCC President Ken Ender brought them to the meeting to demonstrate the consequences for students who meet the current high school graduation requirements but are still not ready for college.

Educating Migrant Children

The Economist:

How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them.
MOST teachers admit that occasionally, when a lesson is going badly, they suspect the problem lies not with the subject or pedagogy, but with the pupils. Some children just seem harder to teach than others. But why? Is it because of, say, cultural factors: parents from some backgrounds place a low value on education and do not push their children? Or is it to do with schools themselves, and their capacity to teach children of different abilities?
It might seem impossible to answer such a question. To do so would require exposing similar sorts of children to many different education systems and see which does best. As it happens, however, an experiment along those lines already exists–as a result of mass migration. Children of migrants from a single country of origin come as near to being a test of the question as you are likely to find.

An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Credit for non MMSD Courses

Dear Superintendent Nerad:
I was rather surprised to learn today from the Wisconsin State Journal that:
“The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.”
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would “cave in” to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to “freeze” policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District’s online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. “Success for all” must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their “special” individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don’t really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a “tipping point”, with there currently being almost 50% “free and reduced lunch” students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD’s public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours,
Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
Tamira Madsen has more:

“Tuesday’s agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
“This is that foundation we need,” Matthews said. “There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other’s personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
“It’s going to be good for the entire school district if we’re able to do this kind of thing, and we’re already talking about what’s next.”

The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [150K PDF], via a kind reader’s email:

Wisconsin needs a comprehensive assessment system that provides educators and parents with timely and relevant information that helps them make instructional decisions to improve student achievement,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing members of a statewide Next Generation Assessment Task Force.
Representatives from business, commerce, and education will make recommendations to the state superintendent on the components of an assessment system that are essential to increase student achievement. Task force members will review the history of assessment in Wisconsin and learn about the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches. They will hear presentations on a number of other states’ assessment systems. Those systems may include ACT as part of a comprehensive assessment system, diagnostic or benchmark assessments given throughout the year, or other assessment instruments and test administration methods. The group’s first meeting will be held October 8 in Madison.

A few notes:

“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment System” uses WKCE results.
The Fordham Foundation has criticized the lack of rigor in the WKCE

Educators focus attention on ninth-graders’ transition to high school

Seema Mehta:

Because the first year of high school is considered crucial to a student’s success, more campuses are sheltering freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
As Jessica McClain, 14, stood in line to get her student ID picture taken on her first official day as a Muir High School student, she was a churning mix of anticipation and anxiety.
“The campus is huge,” a wide-eyed McClain said as she looked at hundreds of freshmen lined up in the school’s cavernous gymnasium. “I am excited, but I’m nervous. New school. Bigger school. Bigger people.”
But for McClain, freshman year will be a more intimate experience than for earlier generations. Ninth grade is crucial to a student’s eventual academic success, so secondary schools across the nation, including Pasadena’s Muir High, are increasingly sheltering their freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
“We really wanted to make sure our freshmen have a strong, solid foundation and are able to bond with the school,” said Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District. “If they don’t connect well in ninth grade, they tend to disappear in 10th. A high percentage drop out.”

Read On Wisconsin Website Launched

Via a Jessica Doyle email:

Greetings and welcome to the updated website! Read On Wisconsin, is my book club for students and book-lovers across the state. I hope you will get involved in this statewide book club by reading and discussing fascinating books. This year’s top picks are recommended by students and educators across the state. Through the club, students, teachers, and parents can read and discuss award-winning books in and outside of the classroom.
I hope you will use the improved Student and Teacher Web Logs, and the Events section to keep you informed of school visits. I really encourage you to post your opinions and reactions to the books.

Massachusetts Lowers Science Standards

Worcester Telegram:

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education this week took a step back from educational excellence by approving “emergency rules” that will permit high school students to appeal for relief from the MCAS science requirement after just one failure.
The change undermines a key goal of the state’s education reform effort: to ensure all high school graduates have achieved at least minimal competence in science.
An appeals process exists for English or math requirements. However, students are eligible to appeal only after failing those portions of the MCAS tests three times — a policy that, properly, gives students an incentive to improve their skills.

School Choice Better Choice for Poor

Amy Hall:

Barack Obama, whose campaign is heavily funded by teachers unions, plans to funnel more money into the existing public education system. In this system, poor kids remain the only ones who don’t get to choose which school they attend. Mr. McCain is a strong supporter of school choice and has a record of this in Arizona.
As a teacher of 30 years, I am outraged that the liberal leaders in this country pretend to champion the poor, while, through their opposition to school choice, they act to keep the poor uneducated and poor.

Fossil hunts, music classes, museum trips and more. Our picks for some of the best bets in educational travel

Kelly Greene:

As a kid, going back to school was never quite like this.
As part of a shipboard education program, Marty Zafman, a retired human-resources consultant, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and dined in Havana — while Fidel Castro spoke to him and his classmates for four hours.
On a hunt for fossils in Mexico, Warren Stortroen, a former insurance-claims manager, led a paleontologist and fellow diggers to the remains of a giant glyptodont, a three-million-year-old ancestor of the armadillo that’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
And as part of a cultural tour of Morocco this spring, Paul Tausche, a retired international marketer, rode a camel to the top of a desert dune at sunset, then enjoyed dinner and a musical performance around a campfire before retiring to a nomadic tent.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

Charles Murray:

America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.
To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.
Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:

An Innovative Program That Could Serve as a Model for At Risk Children

Paul Tough:

The reason I think the Harlem Children’s Zone is so important–the reason I wrote a whole book about the program–is that I think it’s the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt–a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.

To Raise Smart and Successful Children, Focus on Developing a Work Ethic

Thomas:

In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most enduring short stories, Harrison Bergeron, everyone is finally equal thanks to the efforts of the Handicapper General. However, one of the many lasting messages of the story is a derisive one. In the futuristic world of Harrison Bergeron, accomplishment is no longer the measure of stature. Instead, it is all about trying, of recognizing effort, regardless of result.
However, a recent summary of three decades of research reveals that when it comes to raising smart children, developing their work ethic is in fact the most critical component. Whether it is success in school or in life, research indicates that innate intelligence and ability are simply not as important as a person’s level of effort.

When Achievement Push Comes to Shove

Jay Matthews:

We have some of the top schools in the country in Arlington County. Is there some point with our children at which we could back off and not continue to push for rising achievement, an official goal of the county schools? Is there a way we can say, good enough is good enough?
My oldest son is in middle school. He is a talented but not gifted math student. Midway through this past school year, it was clear that he was not ready for algebraic thinking, and his seventh-grade math teacher compassionately helped us help him decide to move back to a more appropriate math level. Because I teach human development, I was able to help him understand that this wasn’t about being dumb, but a developmental marker he had not yet hit. He moved back to repeat the math class he took last year.
Now I have a boy who is not enthusiastic about math. He doesn’t believe he is good at it and doesn’t think math is fun, all because we want rising achievement for all students.

Plugging In, Tuning Out
The digital culture has changed the way kids learn, but at the expense of literacy and cultural awareness.

Don Campbell:

I ask students on the first day of my journalism classes to fill out a questionnaire. Most questions inquire about their interest in journalism and any experience they have that is journalism-related. One question is: “What do you read, at least fairly regularly?”
Used to be, they would say The New York Times or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. A few would list the local newspaper, or The New Yorker or The Economist to impress me. In recent years, the answers more often have been CNN.com, ESPN.com, blogs and other Internet offerings.
And then, at the beginning of the last semester, a student who claimed to be interested in journalism wrote this about what she reads: “Nothing.”
Her answer astonished me but shouldn’t have, because it epitomized the lack of intellectual curiosity in students that I have noticed in recent years, along with a decline in such basic skills as grammar, spelling and simple math. A sense of history? History is what happened since they left middle school.
As both a teacher and a father of two multi-tasking teenage daughters, I had long suspected that something was going on. While some students seem just as smart or smarter than they did 15 years ago, I’m also confronted with college sophomores who can’t identify Henry Kissinger or perform simple percentage exercises; who argue, as one did, that misspelling someone’s name was no big deal because I knew who she meant; students who begin sentences with lower-case letters and embellish news stories by adding their own facts.

Thanks to a kind fellow traveller for pointing this out.

School District Steps Back from Controversial Math Curriculum

Janese Heavin via a kind reader’s email:

Columbia Public Schools’ chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
“We’re going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward,” she told the Tribune. “We’re still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we’re hearing.”
Lyon’s comments followed last night’s Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. “They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class,” said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.

Lyon’s comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night’s board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.

9% of state students habitually truant

Dani McClain:

More than 9% of Wisconsin’s students had at least five unexcused absences a semester in the 2006-’07 school year, according to a report released today by the state Legislative Audit Bureau.
The report, a statewide review of best practices in public school districts’ truancy reduction efforts, also found that nearly half of all Milwaukee Public Schools students, 46%, are habitually truant. The district has worked with the Milwaukee Police Department since 1993 to operate the Truancy Abatement and Burglary Suppression program.

470K PDF Report

Goal by Goal

Steven Davis:

I WAS born and raised in Milwaukee, the youngest of five children. My mother worked as a postal clerk, and my father was a welder and line supervisor.
My parents set a goal that all of their kids would go to college. All five of us have college degrees. My mother had started college at 16, but had finished only a year and half when her mother became ill and she had to quit. My father never had the means to go to college.
Recently, my mother told me, “Our best friends were the people at our credit union.” My parents borrowed money at the beginning of each school year and hurried to try to pay back that loan before the next school year started.
Their unspoken message was that the sky is the limit. They never said that because you are an African-American, you can go only this far or do only this or that. They just said, “Go for it.”

Madison Schools’ Math Task Force Discussion

25MB mp3 audio file from the September 8, 2008 meeting.
Links:

Complete 3.9MB PDF Report

Sex ed in schools: Little connection between what’s taught, teen behavior

Sharon Jayson:

Another pregnant teenager in the limelight has focused new attention on just how much teens know about sex and when they know it.
This pregnant teen, of course, is the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and the pregnancy has reignited the national debate over two different approaches to sex education: abstinence-only vs. comprehensive. But as it turns out, there’s no systematic tracking of what U.S. schools are teaching kids about sex — and either way, there seems to be little connection between what they’re taught and their behaviors, researchers say.

Madison West senior nearly wins reality show

Gayle Worland:

Madison West High School senior Tierney Chamberlain nearly made it to the top of the class Monday night in the ABC reality TV series “High School Musical: Get in the Picture.”
Chamberlain, 17, was runner-up to first-place winner Stan Carrizosa of Visalia, Calif., in the show, a prime-time spinoff to Disney’s phenomenally successful “High School Musical” film series. The TV finale was taped late this summer in Los Angeles; Chamberlain watched it at home in Madison with her family and a few friends, she said after the broadcast.
In her first solo performance on Monday’s show, Chamberlain, wearing a red full-length dress, sang a jazzy rendition of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” — a performance she was happy with, she told show host Nick Lachey after the song.
“I think I made my mom cry,” she said, as cameras briefly cut away to shots of her family in the audience.

Prince William County, Maryland Pupils Still Grapple With Math Test

Ian Shapira:

New state test results show that Prince William County’s third-graders are struggling to score at the highest level since the implementation of a controversial math program that was intended to boost performance.
The scores, which are the first state Standards of Learning (SOL) results to gauge the new program’s effectiveness, reveal that fewer than half of Prince William’s third-graders scored in the advanced category this year, the first that the Pearson math program “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” was taught in that grade. Last year, third-graders who had not begun “Investigations” posted the same results.
The flat scores are a sizable decline since 2006, when 56 percent of third-graders reached the advanced level in math.
” ‘Investigations’ didn’t cure the problem,” said Vern Williams, a Fairfax County teacher and former member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel who was invited by the Prince William School Board to speak at its work session later this month.

It will be interesting to see what, if any effect the soon to be released Madison Math Task Force report has on the local curriculum.
Math Forum

Teaching Fractions Effectively Webcast

The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates:

This interactive video webcast is hosted by The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates. The Center is funded by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. The webcast will highlight the following:
Recommendations from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel
Instructional strategies to foster deep “conceptual and procedural knowledge of fractions”
Video clips from teacher training sessions and elementary classrooms
There is no charge for this event. It is open to the public, so please invite your colleagues to join in. Registrationis required, and minimal information is requested.
To register, visit the webcast registration page.
For more information, please contact Abner Oakes. We look forward to your participation!

The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement

Cry for change resounds in St. Paul schools

Emily Johns:

The St. Paul School District this fall is planning on engaging community members, parents and school district staff in an indepth discussion about the district’s future with one major premise: Things need to change.
The district, which serves about 38,800 students, faces considerable challenges. It has made more than $93 million in budget cuts over the last nine years. Only half its students are proficient in reading, the achievement gap between white students and students of color is among the widest in the nation, and federal and state expectations for student achievement are accelerating.
The district “is at a crossroads,” according to a presentation that district staff made to school board members on Thursday night. “Business as usual is not a sustainable option for achieving our mission.”
The St. Paul district’s efforts to comply with federal and state desegregation laws over the past 30 years and retain students have resulted in a complex network of magnet and neighborhood schools.

19 Wisconsin Felons Kept Teaching License

Jason Stein:

But Robertson, a former middle school principal in Milwaukee, still had at least one thing going for him — he didn’t lose his license to teach children in Wisconsin, at least not then.
Robertson was among a group of 18 people licensed to teach in the state as of June who had felony convictions and were still being monitored by probation or parole agents at the start of this year, a Wisconsin State Journal investigation found. That number included at least 13 felony convictions previously unknown to the agency in charge of licensing the state’s teachers.
As a result of the newspaper’s reporting, the state Department of Public Instruction has revoked or placed under scrutiny the licenses of Robertson and seven others.
In their cases, the State Journal found no evidence that any students faced immediate risk. Those eight people under scrutiny, including Robertson, are not shown in state records as currently teaching in a public school, and they likely would have faced hurdles returning to teaching because of their convictions.

Related.

Finland’s Lesson: Education

Andres Oppenheimer:

Like many other foreign journalists, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Helsinki, Finland, to learn how this country has climbed to the top spots in key international rankings measuring economic, political and social success. The answer, I was told, is amazingly simple.
First, the facts. Finland ranks first among 179 countries in Transparency International’s index of the least corrupt nations in the world (the United States is No.20); No.1 in Freedom House’s ranking of the world’s most democratic countries (the U.S. ranks No.15); No.1 in the world in 15-year-old students’ standardized test scores in science (the U.S. ranks No.29), and is among the 10 most competitive economies in the World Economic Forum’s annual competitiveness index (the U.S. topped the list this year).
A small country of 5.3 million, which only two decades ago was by most measures the poorest country in northern Europe, Finland also boasts the headquarters of the world’s biggest cellphone maker — Nokia — and cutting-edge paper and pulp-technology firms.

Healthy school meal vs a Big Mac. Which one wins? Ask your inner child

Tim Hayward:

England is bringing in ‘the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world’ – but we might have to force them down children’s throats
This week “the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world” come into force in English primary schools. The new menus announced by the schools secretary, Ed Balls, include healthy versions of lunchroom standards – “from traditional roasts to chilli con carne and shepherd’s pie; from homemade salmon fingers and stir fries to risotto, with fresh fruit, vegetables and salads”.
Junk food is already banned from school canteens and vending machines – but the new standards specify the maximum (fat, saturated fat, sugar, salt) and minimum (carbohydrate, protein, fibre, vitamin A, vitamin C, folate, calcium, iron, zinc) nutrient value of an average school lunch.
Getting high-quality food into schools is only half the issue. According to Balls, many children who eat healthy lunches at primary school stop when they go to senior school – put off by long queues, unpopular menus or having to eat in the same room as teenagers six or seven years older. The guidelines move into new territory by suggesting kids won’t be put off school meals if they are treated “like the paying customers they are”.

Online tools let parents peer into their kids’ school day

Alana Semuels:

What’s he eating for lunch? Is she showing up for class? What subjects are they weak in? Software is helping unravel the mystery.
It’s tough sending little Bobby or Suzy back to school. Parents may worry what kinds of teachers their children will encounter, whether they’ll be as smart as their classmates and whether bullies will steal their lunch money.
But technology is helping eliminate some of the guesswork about what happens after kids climb onto the bus. Increasingly common Web programs let parents track lunch-money spending, schoolwork habits and tardiness.
“There’s this black box — a child goes away and comes home, what happened during this time?” said Shelley Pasnik, director of the nonprofit Center for Children and Technology in New York. “Now, new information and communications technology allows for the mystery of what transpires on any given day to unravel.”
The programs, from companies such as Pearson School Systems, Aries Technology Inc. and Horizon Software International, are gaining popularity as more parents demand transparency in schools, Pasnik said.

Successful use of these systems is a wonderful thing for parental involvement. That requires teacher AND parent participation.

US Senator Herb Kohl Supports Merit Pay for Teachers

Pete Selkowe:

Kohl spoke at length about education, especially the failure of the public school system in Milwaukee, “where many neighborhoods are not inhabitable … a problem spread across the country. When we have a large number of people unproductive, who do you think pays for it? We all do.”
In answer to a question about school choice, and what the questioner called the “horrible” academic gap here in Racine, Kohl responded: “Anybody who had the answer would be lauded and sainted.”
He mentioned meeting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NY School Chancellor Joel Klein, and hearing from them “how important high standards and accountability are. We all know it’s not only the schools that fail; it’s the homes and neighborhoods the kids come out of. I would have very high, very high accountability, and reward good teachers, measure teachers. We need to find a way to pay teachers more, and the better ones more than that, and schools that fail should be closed.”
Kohl related his approach toward education to his firing of the Bucks GM and coach last year. “We were not getting the job done.” Ditto in education. “For too long we’ve not been willing to do enough to get the job done.”

World Class Writing

Michael Shaughnessy:

Over the past few weeks, much has been said by Senator Clinton, Michelle Obama and Senator Obama about “world class education”. Those three words have resounded in all of their speeches of late. I would like to acknowledge some “world class writing” which has recently appeared in The Concord Review, edited by Will Fitzhugh.
Below are the papers, the authors, and the high school with which the student is affiliated or enrolled. We should acknowledge the teachers, and principals of these schools, as well as the parents of these fine “world class writers”.
Congratulations to these fine young scholars on their exemplary research and writing.
Bessemer Process…Pearson W. Miller……Hunter College High School, Manhattan Island, New York.
Soviet- Afghan War…Colin Rhys Hill…….Atlanta International School, Atlanta, Georgia
Silencio!…Ines Melicias Geraldes Cardoso …Frank C. Carlucci American International School of Lisbon
Jews in England…Milo Brendan Barisof…Homescholar, Santa Cruz, California
United States Frigates…Caleb Greinke….Park Hill South High School, Riverside, Missouri
Roxy Stinson….Elizabeth W. Doe….Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts
Mary, Queen of Scots….Elizabeth Pitts….Charlotte Country Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina
Viking Gifts….Elisabeth Rosen….St. Ann’s School, Brooklyn, New York
Hugh Dowding….Connor Rowntree…William Hall High School, West Hartford, Connecticut
Confederate Gold….Steffi Delcourt….Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia
Max Weber…Diane (Elly) Brinkley….Dalton School, Manhattan Island, New York
I daresay that social studies, history teachers and even history professors would learn a great deal about a variety of topics by reading these essays.Further, I would hope that these essays would serve as models of excellent scholarship and writing for high school students across America.

Schools warned of pupils hooked on energy drinks

Polly Curtis:

Children are becoming dependent on energy drinks that have dramatic effects on their concentration and behaviour in schools, drug experts have warned.
Schools are being advised to observe children for signs of agitation which could be a result of excessive caffeine consumption. It follows reports of pupils drinking large quantities of energy drinks or taking caffeine-based pills.
The warning, from the anti-drugs advisory group Drug Education UK, comes as ministers prepare to unveil new measures tomorrow to improve school dinners and advise parents on children’s packed lunches.
Bob Tait, from Drug Education UK, said: “There is a growing problem of caffeine abuse in schools. Most schools have a drug education programme to advise kids against illegal drugs, but there is less known about legal highs.”
He made his warning at a conference of school nurses this week, the Nursing Standard reported. Tait said: “Children will drink them on the walk to school, at break and lunch time. If you have got a child who is worked up on an energy drink, they are going to be agitated during lesson time.”

Sharing Classroom Created Media

Jeanette Rundquist:

t looks like part of a documentary from a cable TV nature channel, with dramatic music, video of frogs and a narrator solemnly warning that a fungus is killing the animals around the world.
It’s posted on iTunes, available for downloading. And it was produced by elementary school students in Montclair.
Students there and in four other New Jersey school districts will take a leap in classroom technology this year, using Apple’s iTunes store to post and share educational material.
Lectures, student projects, orientation videos and other media can be posted on iTunes, available free to students and parents in the five districts, or anyone else. Other New Jersey districts taking part are East Orange, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Perth Amboy and Union City.
“The idea is that there are educators and others producing digital content that really can have value for others,” said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which helped Apple roll out the program, called “K-12 on iTunes U.” It is modeled after iTunes U, started about two years ago for colleges and universities.

Head of the Class: Finding the Right School for Your Child

Ariel Swartley:

For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better. We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she’s a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like A Year in Van Nuys. We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.
Whatever the target–eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas–Loh’s a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With Mother on Fire (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she’s taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.
How harrowing, you tax-gouged nonparents may wonder, can this be? In my experience the trauma of a difficult birth is nothing compared with the scars of being polite to a teacher who has forbidden a second grader to look at a book that intrigues her “because it’s too hard.” These don’t fade even after said child has obtained a graduate degree. Schooling, in short, pushes buttons. In Los Angeles, it’s also tied to a full range of inflammatory issues, from immigration to celebrity.

Clusty Search: Sandra Tsing Lo.

“Middle School Madness Blog”

by Unnamed MMSD Educators [RSS]. The blog touches on the “Standards Based Report Card” initiative among a number of other topics.

What about . . . THE 6th GRADE STUDENT READING AT A 2nd GRADE LEVEL?
From the district Curricular Standards:
“These Grade Level Performance Standards describe behaviors typical at the specified grade level. They represent behaviors students generally exhibit as they move from novice to expert in their ability to take control of language processes. It is important to remember, however, that literacy learning may not be sequential and each child has a unique developmental pattern.”
The 6th grade student reading at a 2nd grade level earns a ONE (remember, no zeroes) for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Why? For not meeting the “behaviors typical at the specified grade level ” (6th).
Now, if said student raises her/his reading level to that of a 4th-grade student, guess what. That student still does not meet the 6th grade standard and will still earn a ONE for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Effort and improvement are not taken into consideration in this constricted construct for grading.

via a kind reader email.
Much more on standards based report cards here.

Madison Edgewood senior gets a perfect ACT, almost on SAT
6 Dane County Students Score a Perfect 36 on the 2007 ACT

Andy Hall:

Edgewood High School senior Matthew Everts recently learned he’s just about perfect — when it comes to the two major college-entrance exams, anyway.
Matthew, who hopes to attend a university on the West Coast, received a 36, the highest possible composite score, on the ACT.
He remembers feeling focused when he took the ACT in June, a week before tackling the SAT.
“I knew that if I did well I wouldn’t have to take the test again,” Matthew said Tuesday. “Not having to take a four-hour test is always a good thing.”
On the SAT, Matthew received a perfect 800 on critical reading and math, two of the three SAT Critical Reasoning Tests, along with a 740 out of a possible 800 on the writing test.
Matthew also took the SAT in three subject areas — chemistry, math level two and U.S. history — and received a perfect score on all three tests.

Tamira Madsen:

(Adam) Schneider, who plays trumpet in the Middleton school band and is a member of the ecology club, expects to attend college and study biology at UW-Eau Claire or St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. He also plans on working toward a graduate degree in botany, doing field research and teaching once he finishes school.
Schneider is one of six Dane County students to post perfect marks on the ACT test during the 2007-08 school. Others who earned perfect marks were Mary Kate Wall and Matthew Everts from Edgewood High School, Axel Glaubitz and Dianna Amasino from Madison West High School and Alex Van Abel from Monona Grove High School. All the students were juniors when they took the test.
At the state level, 22 students received perfect scores on the ACT test last school year. On the national level, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of students that take the ACT test earn a perfect mark.
Meanwhile, six Madison Metropolitan School District students earned perfect test scores in 2006.

New Study Raises More Questions Over Antidepressants, Teen Suicide

Sarah Rubenstein:

A new study raises fresh questions over whether strong warnings about the use of antidepressants among young people have sparked an increase in teen-age suicides.
Researchers said an analysis that included 2005 data — the latest available — indicates that a surprising rise seen in the suicide rate in 2004 continued into the next year. While the rate dropped somewhat in 2005, researchers say, it remained higher than expected.
Last fall, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a widely publicized finding, said the suicide rate for 10-to-24-year-olds increased by 8% from 2003 to 2004 — after a drop totaling more than 28% from 1990 to 2003. But the agency cautioned that it didn’t know if the rise was “short-lived” or the “beginning of a trend.”
The CDC has monitored the data since then, but has not come to a conclusion, saying several years of data are needed. The new analysis by outside researchers suggests the prior increase “was not a single-year anomaly” and may reflect “an emerging public health crisis,” according to a paper being published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Columbia University’s Teen Screen Program
Journal of the American Medical Association: Suicide Trends Among Youths Aged 10 to 19 Years in the United Google News Search by Jeffrey Bridge and Joel Greenhouse.

Spot on Popularity Scale Speaks to the Future; Middle Has Its Rewards

Benedict Carey:

The cult of popularity that reigns in high school can look quaint from a safe distance, like your 20th reunion. By then the social order may have turned over like an hourglass: teenagers who were socially invisible have emerged as colorful characters, confident, transformed. Others seem preserved in time, same as ever, while some former princes and queen bees are diminished or simply absent, now invisible themselves.
For years researchers focused much attention on those prominent teenagers, tracking their traits and behaviors. The studies found, to no one’s surprise, that social dominance in adolescence often involves an aggressive, selfish streak that may not play well outside the locker-lined corridors.
The cult disbands, and the rules change.
Yet high school students know in their gut that popularity is far more than a superficial, temporary competition, and in recent years psychologists have confirmed that intuition. The newer findings suggest that adolescents’ niche in school — their popularity, and how they understand and exploit it — offers important clues to their later psychological well-being.

Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today
Choosing the most radical education reform there is

Tony Woodlief:

So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we’ve decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that’s exactly what we’ve done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: “The School of Revolutionary Resistance,” but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble.
The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It’s because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.
Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession’s nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don’t know where those schools are.

A wise friend recently mentioned that “choice is good”. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Madison School District math review addresses ongoing concerns over reduced rigor. Math Forum audio / video.

Study: “Ohio State Tests Invalid for Rating Schools”

Randy Hoover:

This is the table of contents to the final findings from the research study of Ohio school district performance on the OPT and OSRC. This site is the data, graph, links, and comment page for Hoover’s research study of Ohio school district proficiency test and school report card performance accountability. These data and findings have been released to the public as of February 27, 2000. The entire study is available online for your use. If you wish to be included in the emailing list of updates about OPT and OSRC issues, click on the logo at the top of this page and send me your request.
The graphs and data presented here are from the final replication of the study. This final analysis represents the culmination of several hundred hours of work put forth to gain empirical insights into OPT performance across all Ohio school districts. At the time the study was completed there were 611 school districts in the State of Ohio. This study uses data from 593 districts out of the 611 total. 18 districts were not included in the study because of incomplete data or because the districts were too small such as North Bass Island. All data were taken from EMIS online data and no data other than the data presented by the State of Ohio were used. My confidence level is high that there are very few errors in the data array. Though errors are certainly possible, I am confident that if they exist they are minor and do not significantly affect the overall conclusions of this study. (RLH)

Scott Elliott has more.
Related: The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment” program uses the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction’s WKCE results. The WKCE’s rigor has been criticized.

To Be Young and Anxiety-Free

Andrea Petersen:

Last fall, 12-year-old John Morganti was a very anxious kid. He was too scared to ride the bus to school or have sleepovers at friends’ houses. He had frequent stomachaches, hid out in the nurse’s office and begged his mother to let him skip school.
“He would get so scared, he would be in a little ball in the corner,” says John’s mother, Danielle Morganti, of Pittsgrove, N.J.
John was later diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and underwent a treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy. By spring, he had largely recovered and was happily taking the bus and playing with friends at parties.
Historically, anxiety disorders were seen as something that primarily hit teens and adults. Anxious kids, many experts thought, would simply grow out of their fears. But now, many doctors believe that John’s illness was caught at the ideal time. Indeed, there’s a new push by doctors and therapists to identify children afflicted with anxiety disorders — even those as young as preschool age — and treat them early.

You Need to Take My Son to Jail

Ann Bauer:

MY husband and I were sitting down to dinner when the police called. It was a female dispatcher whose voice I recognized from previous incidents involving my 20-year-old son, Andrew, who has autism.
In recent years, this police department has picked him up for shoplifting, taken reports from restaurants where he had dined and dashed, and once even brought him back from the airport after he tried to stow away on a plane.
Roughly half of the force has lectured me about keeping a closer eye on him, placing him in a secure facility, and finding a better psychiatrist, while the other half has been sweet and apologetic, concerned about how I’m bearing up.
On this occasion the dispatcher explained that my car, which I had earlier reported stolen, had been found on the side of the highway some 70 miles away in St. Cloud, Minn. — scratched, filthy and out of gas but otherwise undamaged. I would need to retrieve it from the impound lot. My son, unhurt, was waiting at the station. When would I be able to pick him up?
I swallowed a sip of Chianti and recited the line I had been rehearsing all afternoon: “I want to press charges.”
“I told you, the car is fine. Your son is fine. All you have to do is come pick them both up.”
“I want to press charges,” I said again, resolved to see this through.
“Against your son?” she asked, incredulous.

Helping Kids Who Hate High School

Jay Matthews:

A couple of years ago I debated Chris Peters, a thoughtful and energetic high school teacher in San Bernardino, Calif., about vocational education. He thought it had more value than I did and could energize students who can’t stand dry academics. I thought high schools were incapable of doing vocational ed well, and too often made it a dumping ground for students from low-income families thought incapable of college.
We did not convince each other, but my recent column on the surprising results of research into high school career academies, showing they had great benefit for students’ job and family prospects, led him to conclude I was still educable on the subject. He came back to me with a plan to shake up high school in a way that would give both college-oriented and job-oriented students an equal chance, rather than force kids who don’t like school to stew in English and science classes.
Peters’ plan, which he conceived without benefit of well-paid staff, shares important elements with the very expensive report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which Peters had not seen until I pointed it out to him. Many people, it seems, want to fix high school in this way, which I trashed in a previous column.

Better Education Through Innovation
Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance

Cory Booker, John Doerr and Ted Mitchell:

In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America’s newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?
Bailey replied, “I don’t know.”
That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution — an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, “in the stimulus which it gives” to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.
Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH’s ability to stimulate innovation.
Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited.” Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

Safety Climate: A look at Police Calls to Madison High Schools

Doug Erickson:

Total police calls to Madison’s four main high schools declined 38 percent from the fall semester of 2006 to last spring. But those figures tell only a partial story, and not a very meaningful one.
That’s because the numbers include all police calls, including ones for 911 disconnects, parking lot crashes and stranded baby ducks. (It happened at La Follette last May.)
The State Journal then looked at police calls in eight categories closely related to safety — aggravated batteries, batteries, weapons offenses, fights, bomb threats, disturbances, robberies and sexual assaults. Those calls are down 46 percent from fall 2006 to spring 2008.
The schools varied little last spring in the eight categories. Memorial and West each had 13 such calls, La Follette 14 and East 16.
School officials are relieved by the downward trend but careful not to read too much into the figures.
“We know there’s almost a cyclical nature to crime statistics and even to individual behavior,” said Luis Yudice, who is beginning his third year as district security coordinator.
Art Camosy, a veteran science teacher at Memorial, said he thinks the climate is improving at his school. Yet he views the police figures skeptically, in part because the numbers are “blips in time” but also because he wonders if the district’s central office is behind the drop.
“Are our building administrators being pressured not to call police as often?” he asks.
John Matthews, the longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the district’s teachers union, contends that the district’s leadership has indeed done this from time to time, directing building administrators to hold off on calling police so often.
Yudice, a former Madison police captain, said there was a time years ago when the district was extremely sensitive about appearing to have a large police presence at its schools. He rejects that notion now.
“It’s just the opposite,” he said. “We are more openly acknowledging that we have issues that need to be dealt with by the police. Since I’ve been working here, there has never been a directive to me or the school principals to minimize the involvement of police.”

All four Madison high schools feature an open campus. It appears that Erickson only reviewed calls to the High Schools, not those nearby. 1996-2006 police calls near Madison High Schools is worth a look along with the Gangs & School violence forum.
Finally, I hope that the Madison Police Department will begin publishing all police calls online, daily, so that the public can review and evaluate the information.

A Watershed Teacher Labor Negotiation in Washington, DC

Steven Pearlstein:

As we head into the Labor Day weekend, it is only fitting that we consider what may be the country’s most significant contract negotiation, which happens to be going on right here in Washington between the teachers union and the District’s dynamic and determined new schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.
Negotiations are stalled over Rhee’s proposal to give teachers the option of earning up to $131,000 during the 10-month school year in exchange for giving up absolute job security and a personnel-and-pay system based almost exclusively on years served.
If Rhee succeeds in ending tenure and seniority as we know them while introducing merit pay into one of the country’s most expensive and underperforming school systems, it would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history, on a par with President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. It would trigger a national debate on why public employees continue to enjoy what amounts to ironclad job security without accountability while the taxpayers who fund their salaries have long since been forced to accept the realities of a performance-based global economy.
Union leaders from around the country, concerned about the attention the Rhee proposal has received and the precedent it could set, have been pressing the Washington local to resist. But Rhee clearly has the upper hand. The chancellor has the solid support of the mayor and city council, and should it come to a showdown, there is little doubt that the voters would stand behind her in a battle with a union already badly tarnished by an embezzlement scandal and deeply implicated in the school system’s chronic failure.

There are signs that things may be a bit different in Madison today, compared to past practices.

West Adams High, A Model For The Future?

Karen Grigsby Gates @ NPR:

Many seniors at L.A.’s West Adams Preparatory High School are actually looking forward to returning to school. The brand new institution is based on a mission to help students realize their dreams in a multicultural world. This is far from common in Southern California.

audio

Raising the Bar: How Parents Can Fix Education

Daniel Akst:

Everyone, it seems, has a complaint about the schools. Indifferent bureaucracy, change-averse unions, faddish curricula, soaring school taxes matched with mediocre student performance — the list is long and seemingly unchanging.
At the start of yet another school year, it’s time for some radical change in your local schools — a specific change that only parents can bring about. It’s a thing already being done in some far-off countries but that remains strangely rare here in America. It’s something I’ve tried — and, despite the skepticism of friends and neighbors, it seems to work.
What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It’s simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies — and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.
These will sound like obvious ideas. In fact, given all the distractions of modern life, it is a radical departure from the normal order of things. Let’s face it: More than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.

A Well-Rounded Education Doesn’t Have to Start with College

Charles Wheelan:

I’m going to step back from economics for a moment and write about teaching economics to both undergraduates and graduate students. Based on that experience, I have some advice for talented high school students: Don’t go to college.
And advice for talented college graduates: Don’t get a job.
A Complete Education
Of course there is a caveat. You should do both of them eventually, just not right away. Take a year off, either after high school or after college.
Use that year to do something interesting that you’ll likely never be able to do again: write a book, hike the Appalachian Trail, live with your grandparents, trek in Katmandu, volunteer at a health clinic in India, or serve your country in the military.
Just do something that will make you a more complete person. I suspect that it’ll also make you appreciate your education more (and, ironically, make you more attractive when you do apply for college or enter the job market).

Madison Police Chief Noble Wray Sees “Serious Gang Connection” in Crime Hike

Kristin Czubkowski:

Making connections among various types of crimes and ways to remedy them was the theme of the night as Police Chief Noble Wray gave a talk on public safety in Madison to the City Council Wednesday night.
Statistically, crime in Madison was a mixed bag in 2007, Wray said. While overall crime was up 5.5 percent from 2006, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, that increase stemmed primarily from an 8.3 percent increase in property crimes such as burglary, theft and arson. By contrast, violent crime, which includes acts such as homicide, rape and aggravated assault, decreased 14.2 percent in 2007.
Wray explained that the rising rates of property crimes came from the increased theft of precious metals, in particular copper, as well as thefts of big-ticket items such as televisions from businesses, which were directly related to gang activity and the drug trade, he said.
“This is the first time that I’ve noticed this, and I’ve worked for the Madison department for 24 years, that there is a serious gang connection with these (burglaries),” he said. “We haven’t had that in the past.”

Police calls near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006.
Gangs & School Violence Forum audio/video.

Wheelbarrow

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

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

(more…)

SAT Comparison: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan and Iowa

The average SAT scores for Wisconsin and the neighboring states are summarized below. The higher the percentage of students who take the test, the lower
the average score is likely to be.

State	% Taking Test	Critical Reading	Math	Writing
Minnesota	8	596	609	579
Illinois	7	583	601	578
Michigan	6	581	598	572
Wisconsin	5	587	604	577
Iowa	3	603	612	582
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Press Release [255K PDF] only compared Wisconsin to the National Average, below.
National Average	45	502	516	494

College Board 2008 SAT information.

‘New’ Voice Speaks About Teachers at Convention

Michele McNeil:

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

More Minnesota Students Taking Advanced Placement (AP) Exams

Emily Johns:

The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests in Minnesota has increased, as well as the number of students getting scores worthy of college credit.
There was a 6 percent increase in the number of students taking the tests, which are taken near the end of an Advanced Placement course to earn college credit, according to information released Tuesday by the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, .
Data show 27,605 students took 44,281 exams during the 2007-08 school year.
Almost 8 percent more tests also had a score of at least three out of five, meaning that 28,138 of the tests could be used by colleges to award credit to entering students.

Radical idea: Open the doors of affluent suburban schools to Chicago students

Richard Kahlenberg via a kind reader’s email:

Sen. James Meeks’ (D-Chicago) proposed student boycott of Chicago public schools next month has sparked furious controversy. Should students miss their first day of class for the worthy goal of promoting equity in public school spending? Leaders such as Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan are worried about the disruption involved as Meeks seeks to enroll Chicago students at New Trier High School in Winnetka.
Missing from the discussion is a bigger point: The main reason New Trier’s students achieve and graduate at much higher levels isn’t per-pupil expenditure; it’s differences in the socioeconomic status of the student bodies in Chicago and New Trier.
Decades of research have found that the biggest determinant of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from and the second biggest determinant is the socioeconomic status of the school she attends. The main problem with Chicago schools isn’t that too little is spent on students but that the school district has overwhelming concentrations of poverty.
In the 2005-06 school year, Chicago public schools spent $10,409 per pupil, much less than New Trier ($16,856), but slightly more than several high-performing suburban school districts, including ones in Naperville ($9,881) and Geneva ($9,807). The key difference is that while 84.9 percent of Chicago students come from low-income homes, New Trier has a low-income population of 1.9 percent, Naperville has 5 percent and Geneva 2.4percent.

Texas truant students to be tracked by GPS anklets

Elizabeth White:

Court authorities here will be able to track students with a history of skipping school under a new program requiring them to wear ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring.
But at least one group is worried the ankle bracelets will infringe on students’ privacy.
Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts _ likely to be mostly high schoolers _ will wear the anklets during the six-month pilot program announced Friday. She said the time the students wear the anklets will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
“We are at a critical point in our time where we can either educate or incarcerate,” Penn said, linking truancy with juvenile delinquency and later criminal activity. “We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on in life. I don’t want to see the latter.”

Future of education is online, Web-school pioneer says

The Arizona Republic:

Damian Creamer, founder of Primavera Online High School, was the guest last week on Live Talk Wednesday, talking about secondary education via the computer.
Creamer formerly was an enrollment counselor at the University of Phoenix.
“Their (online) program was in its infancy and it was a unique opportunity to be involved with such a dynamic organization as they pioneered online education at the post-secondary level,” he said.
Afterward, he helped a small charter school in the West Valley found two additional charter schools.
Creamer opened Primavera Technical Learning Center (the predecessor to Primavera Online High School) in 2001.
” In its first year, Primavera had a few hundred students. Last year, I believe that we carried an average daily membership of 2,700 students,” Creamer said.
Last year, Primavera graduated 469 students, according to Creamer.
Info: www.primaveratech.org.

When Education is Unequal

Cheryl Jackson via a kind reader’s email:

his week, in a lawsuit brought against the State of Illinois and the State Board of Education, the Chicago Urban League and Quad County Urban League called on the courts to end the discriminatory and unconstitutional way public school education is funded in Illinois. This is not just an educational issue, but a civil rights issue, too, for thousands of African-American and Latino students whose social and economic future is being shortchanged by a flawed state policy.
After more than a decade of legislative gridlock on education funding reform, set against a bleak backdrop of crumbling schoolhouses, moldy books and shamefully low graduation rates–the time has come to dismantle the current property-based system of school financing.
That system is discriminatory in its impact, sustaining huge funding gaps between black and white schools.
It makes quality education nearly impossible for thousands of students of color. It confounds the best efforts of well-meaning parents, teachers and administrators. And it puts children on a pathway to lifelong poverty and social pathologies that squander their potential and exact enormous social costs.

2008 SAT Scores Released

AP:

For the second consecutive year, SAT scores for the most recent high school graduating class remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade, according to results released Tuesday.
But the College Board, which owns the exam, attributes the lower averages of late to a more positive development: a broader array of students are taking the test, from more first-generation college students to a record number of students — nearly one in seven — whose family income qualifies them to take the test for free.
“More than ever, the SAT reflects the face of education in this country,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which owns the test and released the results.
The class of 2008 scored an average of 515 out of a possible 800 points on the math section of the college entrance exam, a performance identical to graduating seniors in the previous year. (See SAT stats.)
Scores in the critical reading component among last spring’s high-school seniors also held steady at 502, but the decline over time has been more dramatic: The past two years represent the lowest reading average since 1994, when graduating seniors scored 499.

The College Board:

The SAT’s writing section has proven to be the most predictive section of the test for determining first-year college performance, as evidenced by recent studies by the College Board and independent studies by the University of California and the University of Georgia. The College Board analysis, which evaluated data from about 150,000 students at 110 four-year colleges and universities, also found the writing section to be the most predictive for all students and therefore across all racial/ethnic minority groups.
Of all three sections of the SAT, the writing section is the most predictive of students’ freshman year college performance for all students, demonstrating that writing is a critical skill and an excellent indicator of academic success in college.
The writing section is also the most predictive section for all racial/ethnic minority groups, which demonstrates that the SAT is a fair and valid test for all students.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

Wisconsin’s 2008 graduates posted an average score of 604 points in mathematics on the SAT college admissions test, an increase of six points from last year and 89 points above the national mean score of 515. Along with solid SAT results, preliminary data on the College Board’s Advanced Placement program showed continued growth of the program in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin had 3,522 public and private school graduates who took the SAT during high school. They represent about 5 percent of the state’s graduates. Their critical reading score averaged 587, the same as last year; mathematics was 604, up six points from last year; and writing was 577, up two points. Nationally, 1.5 million graduates, about 45 percent of all graduates, took the SAT. The national overall mean scores were the same as in 2007: critical reading, 502; mathematics, 515; and writing, 494. On the ACT college admissions tests, more popular in Midwestern states, 67 percent of Wisconsin’s 2008 graduates took the exams. Their scores also were well above national averages.

Give students the choice to attend charter schools where kids perform well

Collin Hitt via a kind reader’s email:

In protest of Chicago’s failing school system, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) is staging a field trip of sorts. He’s urging kids from his legislative district to skip the first day of school, board buses, travel to Winnetka, and attempt to enroll in New Trier High School.
One can understand why Meeks would want better educational options for Chicago kids. But on his way to Winnetka, the senator might want to take a look out the window where there are already many Chicago public schools–charter schools–that are performing on par with top-notch suburban and downstate schools. One such school, Chicago International Charter School, graduates its students 86 percent of the time–comparing quite favorably with public schools Downstate and suburban Chicago, which have an average graduation rate of 84 percent. Overall, charter public schools in Chicago graduate 77 percent of their students, compared with a citywide average of 51 percent.
Why aren’t there more charter schools in Chicago? Because state law caps the number of charters in the city at 30. Today, approximately 13,000 Chicago public school children are on a waiting list to get into charters–schools that have offered a proven formula for success. To give inner-city kids the opportunities they deserve, the charter-school cap should be lifted.

Student Control

Thomas Crocker:

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

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

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

Unwrapping the Gifted

Tamara Fisher:

Varsity Academics
Hello from the Ice Cream Capital of the World!
On the morning of July 7, I had my TV on in the other room while I was getting ready for the day. I overheard an interview on the Today Show that Matt Lauer did with swimmer Dara Torres. The day before, she had managed to qualify for her fifth Olympics at the age of 41, even breaking an American record (for the ninth time in that event!) in the qualifying process.
Near the end of the interview, Matt asked Dara how she did it, noting his age and noting hers. (They know each other off-camera, it might be important to mention.) “When I turned 40,” he said, “I had trouble going up stairs. I was winded more easily.”
After describing her workout regimen and then outlining how she was proactively being regularly blood-tested to prove that she was doing all this cleanly, she said to Matt, good-naturedly and with a twinkle in her eye,
“And besides, you know, maybe I’m a little more athletically gifted than you are.”

Cash Incentives and Achievement in School

Zubin Jelveh:

In the second half of the 1990’s, student grades in Ecuador started to fall. In response, the government set up a conditional cash transfer program for poor families which would pay parents for making sure their children attended school for a predefined number of days.
While most research has shown that the cash payment program has indeed increased attendance levels, there’s little known about how students performed.
Now, Ecuadorian economist Juan Ponce and Arjun Bedi of the Institute for the Study of Labor have run the numbers and conclude that there was no positive (or negative) impact on grades from the incentive pay program.

Chicago Urban League Lawsuit makes school funding a civil rights matter

via a kind reader’s email. Matt Arado:

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

Maudlyne Ihejirika:

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

Links:

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

Jump in US measles cases linked to vaccine fears

Mike Stobbe:

Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination, health officials reported Thursday.
Worried doctors are troubled by the trend fueled by unfounded fears that vaccines may cause autism. The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that’s only for the first seven months of the year. There were only 42 cases for all of last year.
“We’re seeing a lot more spread. That is concerning to us,” said Dr. Jane Seward, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

D.C. Tries Cash as a Motivator In School

V. Dion Haynes & Michael Birnbaum:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced plans yesterday to boost dismal achievement at half the city’s middle schools by offering students an unusual incentive: cash.
For years, school officials have used detention, remedial classes, summer school and suspensions to turn around poorly behaved, underachieving middle school students, with little results. Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior.
Beginning in October, 3,000 students at 14 middle schools will be eligible to earn up to 50 points per month and be paid $2 per point for attending class regularly and on time, turning in homework, displaying manners and earning high marks. A maximum of $2.7 million has been set aside for the program, and the money students earn will be deposited every two weeks into bank accounts the system plans to open for them.
The system has 28 middle-grade schools. Rhee will select the schools to participate in the pilot program.
“We believe this is the time for radical intervention,” Rhee said at a news conference outside Hardy Middle School in Northwest Washington. “We’re very excited about this particular program.”

Not a promising trend.

When Learning Has a Limit

Ben Wildavsky:

Since the release of “A Nation at Risk” 25 years ago, we have seen the introduction of top-down standards (including the No Child Behind Act), the spread of a bottom-up school-choice movement (including vouchers and charter schools), and the advent of entrepreneurial programs, like Teach for America, that combine a market-oriented approach with a focus on academic results.
Meanwhile, record numbers of students aspire to higher education, not least because the economic returns to a college degree are, despite a recent leveling off, indisputable. Thus all sorts of people are busy trying to make sure that more high-school grads get a shot not only at enrolling in college but at finishing it.
None of this much impresses Charles Murray. In “Real Education,” he suggests that teachers, students and reformers are all suffering from a case of false consciousness. “The education system,” he says, “is living a lie.”
The problem with American education, according to Mr. Murray, is not what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations” but rather the opposite: Far too many young people with inherent intellectual limitations are being pushed to advance academically when, Mr. Murray says, they are “just not smart enough” to improve much at all. It is “a triumph of hope over experience,” he says, to believe that school reform can make meaningful improvements in the academic performance of below-average students. (He might have noted, but doesn’t, that such students are disproportionately black and Hispanic.)

Real Education by Charles Murray.

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

Jeremy Singer-Vine:

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

Seeking Greater High School Rigor:
Wisconsin ACT Scores Show College Readiness Gap

Wisconsin Taxpayer’s Alliance [156K PDF Report]:

Wisconsin high school seniors have the second-highest average ACT scores in the U.S. However, ACT finds that only 29% of those tested have a 50% chance of earning a B or a 75% chance of earning a C in each of four college freshman courses: English composition, algebra, social sciences, and biology. Among African-American students, that chance is 4%.
In studying 2007 high school graduates, ACT found that only 29% (boxed in table below) of 46,430 Wisconsin students tested met college-readiness benchmarks in four core subject areas; the national percentage was even lower (23%). In its report “College Readiness: Rigor at Risk,” the ACT testing service concluded that “our high school graduates are in danger of entering college or the workforce without sufficient academic preparation.”

The ACT testing service has urged high schools to offer–and students to pursue–core curricula of sufficient depth and rigor to ensure college success. The minimum core (detailed in the table above, col. 1) includes four years of English and three years each of social studies, math, and science. Unfortunately, ACT has found that the current “quality and intensity–inother words rigor–of the high school curriculum” is not adequate to prepare students for college unless they take courses beyond the core. Calling that “neither realistic nor justifiable,” ACT says it is “essential” that we “improve the quality of core courses that really matter in preparing students for college and work.”
The testing firm goes onto observe that much of the loss in momentum toward college readiness “appears to be occurring during the last two years of high school.” Data in the table support ACT’s concern. The first four columns show the “core” curriculum, as well as a maximal course load (“core plus”) that includes math through calculus. The final two show the percentages of Wisconsin-tested students who met the readiness benchmarks, having pursued one of the two curricula. The need for rigor in all high school courses is reflected in the “collegeready” percentages of Wisconsin students taking four or more years of classes in all areas (“core +”).

How to Write With Style

Kurt Vonnegut:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.
Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

Dalles Eases Grading Policies in an Effort to Limit Dropouts

Jeffrey Ball:

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

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

Dan Nerad gets it!
Madison’s new superintendent is serious about listening to students

Natalia Thompson:

Last month, I wrote about the potential for the Madison school district’s new superintendent, Dr. Daniel Nerad, to make Madison schools more receptive to students’ voices (“Daniel Nerad, Stop Shutting Out Student Input,” 7/24/08).
When the piece was published in Isthmus, I was traveling in central Mexico. The day after it appeared, I sat down in front of a computer at an Internet cafe in Mexico City, half expecting a barrage of messages criticizing my naiveté and idealism.
After all, how many people would take seriously a high school student who suggests not only “holding a series of listening sessions [for students] at several of the district’s middle and high schools,” but also “advancing students [on school advisory boards and task forces] from the confines of tokenism to a position of shared power”?
When I opened an email from my mom relating that Dr. Nerad had called our home shortly after my column was printed, I almost thought she was joking. He wants to meet with you, she wrote, to hear more about your ideas on student engagement.
She wasn’t kidding — and neither is Nerad, whom I met with recently at the Doyle Building, the school district’s administrative headquarters. As he told me, “When I read your article, this first thing I wanted to know was, ‘What’s her phone number?”

It appears that Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad has taken a much different approach to community engagement than previous administrations. As always, the proof is in the pudding (or was it “Trust but Verify”); we’ll see how these interactions play out in terms of rigorous curriculum, discipline policy, budget transparency, program effectiveness, expanded educational options and ultimately, growing enrollment after decades of stagnant numbers.

English Spelling: You write potato, I write ghoughpteighbteau

The Economist:

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

Who Will Pay for College?

Jeff Opdyke:

Who pays for college?
With our son in sixth grade and our little girl only 5 years old, Amy and I certainly have many years to contemplate that question. But if I’ve demonstrated any trait in this column through the years, it’s that I’m constantly peering ahead, at future costs, so that Amy and I can prepare for what we know is coming.
Yet, while we’re saving for that day, we’re probably not saving enough. But that’s by design. I think that instead of a free ride through college, a better gift to my kids is a mom and dad financially self-sufficient in their dotage.
But is that a fair approach? Should parents put their future needs above their kids’? Or, should we strive to save every possible dime we can for our kids’ education on the theory that we’re supposed to give them a head start to a better life than we have?

Five Reasons to Warn Your Daughter about Alcohol

Barbara Kantrowitz & Pat Wingert:

In the next few weeks, parents of college freshmen will be helping their kids pack up all those seemingly indispensable items for dorm life. Sending a child off for what is probably his or her first extended period of independence is scary, and many parents try to cram in last-minute bits of advice. Here’s one more: talk about drinking. This is a critical conversation whether you have a son or a daughter, but it’s especially important for young women to understand the ways in which they risk both short-term and lifelong health problems if they abuse alcohol during these years.
First, a reality check. Laws against underage drinking don’t stop kids who really want to drink. Colleges around the country have made efforts to crack down at on-campus functions, but it isn’t easy when fake IDs are just a scanner away. So don’t count on fear of the law to do your work for you.

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

Paul Tough:

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

Related:Clusty Search:

Tiffany Hardrick

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

Doyle hires director for Wisconsin Covenant program

Tamira Madsen:

Amy Bechtum has been named the first-ever director of the Wisconsin Covenant, a new program designed by Gov. Jim Doyle to offer eighth-grade students financial incentives for college if they meet certain objectives throughout their high school careers.
Approximately 17,000 students in 72 counties across the state in 2007 signed the covenant, promising to earn a B average in high school, take college preparatory courses, stay out of trouble and perform community service work. If students meet these objectives, they are guaranteed a spot in the University of Wisconsin System, the Wisconsin Technical College System or one of the state’s 20 private, nonprofit and independent colleges. The first group of Wisconsin Covenant scholars will begin college in 2011.
Bechtum, a La Crosse native who currently works as assistant director at Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver, will begin her job with the Wisconsin Covenant in mid-September with a salary of $89,000.

Much more on the Wisconsin Covenant here.

Wisconsin GED completion lags behind other states

Amy Hetzner:

Pregnant at 18, Telisa Haynes said she cried when she saw her classmates in caps and gowns, knowing she would not be joining them for graduation.
Now, 23 years later, Haynes is on the verge of fulfilling her goal of earning her General Educational Development certificate, commonly called the GED.
It hasn’t been easy.
“What makes it hard is your life,” she said. “When you get ready to do this, you have to be focused. . . . You have to want it. You have to want it badly.”

Judge says UC can deny class credit to Christian school students

Bob Egelko:

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.
Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts – not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.
Otero’s ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

A Taste of Failure Fuels an Appetite for Success at South Korea’s Cram Schools

Choe Sang-Hun:

As the sun was dipping behind the pine hills surrounding this rural campus one recent Monday, Chung Il-wook and his wife drove up with Min-ju, their 18-year-old daughter. They gave her a quick hug and she hurried into the school building, dragging a suitcase behind her.
Inside, a raucous crowd of 300 teenage boys and girls had returned from a two-night leave and were lining up to have their teachers search their bags.
The students here were forsaking all the pleasures of teenage life. No cellphones allowed, no fashion magazines, no television, no Internet. No dating, no concerts, no earrings, no manicures — no acting their age.
All these are mere distractions from an overriding goal. On this regimented campus, miles from the nearest public transportation, Min-ju and her classmates cram from 6:30 a.m. to past midnight, seven days a week, to clear the fearsome hurdle that can decide their future — the national college entrance examination.