Student Support – Page 61 – School Information System

The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.

I work part-time in the evenings as an adjunct instructor of English. I teach two courses, Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), at a small private college and at a community college. The campuses are physically lovely—quiet havens of ornate stonework and columns, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and tidy Victorian scalloping. Students chat or examine their cell phones or study languidly under spreading trees. Balls click faintly against »
bats on the athletic fields. Inside the arts and humanities building, my students and I discuss Shakespeare, Dubliners, poetic rhythms, and Edward Said. We might seem, at first glance, to be enacting some sort of college idyll. We could be at Harvard. But this is not Harvard, and our classes are no idyll. Beneath the surface of this serene and scholarly mise-en-scène roil waters of frustration and bad feeling, for these colleges teem with students who are in over their heads.
I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Anti-Gang Education for Third & Fourth Graders

Katie Wang:

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

Juvenile courts can confuse kids, parents, report says

Hans Laetz:

Two years in the making, a report on California’s juvenile courts warns that children and parents are often bewildered by what happens in courtrooms, and judges and attorneys don’t always have access to all the information they need to make decisions.
The California Judicial Council’s stem-to-stern inspection is the first full-scale examination of court procedures and effectiveness. Juvenile courts were established statewide in 1961.
Many courts are failing in their basic responsibility to make sure children and parents know what is happening to them, according to the report, which was released in April.
“A lot of it is as basic as a kid who doesn’t understand what the word allegation’ means,” said Judge Brian John Back, who headed the examination. “And when we have a room full of prosecutors, defense lawyers all using numbers from penal codes, shorthand and jargon, the kids just cannot comprehend what has just happened to them,” said Back, who spent six years as presiding judge at Ventura County’s Juvenile Court. “Juveniles uniformly said, We have no idea what just happened in court.’ There is an inability for them to know what judges and attorneys do.”

Welcome to Max’s World

Mary Carmichael:

Bipolar disorder is a mystery and a subject of medical debate. But for the Blakes, it’s just reality.
Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don’t really know what death is, as the last page of Max’s will made clear: “If I’m still alive when I have grandchildren,” it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer. On a recent Monday afternoon, Max, now 10, was supposed to come home on the schoolbus, but a counselor summoned his mother at 2:15. When Amy Blake arrived at school, her son gave her the note that had prompted the call. “Dear Mommy & Daddy,” it read, “I am really feeling sad and depressed and lousy about myself. I love you but I still feel like I want to kill myself. I am really sad but I just want help to feel happy again. The reason I feel so bad is because I can’t sleep at night. And dad yells at me to just sleep at night. But, I can’t control it. It is not me that does control it. I don’t know what controls it, but it is not me. I really really need some help, love Max!!!!! I Love you Mommy I Love you Daddy.”

The Third World Challenge

Bob Compton, via a kind reader’s email:

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

Sent home: The suspension gap

James Walsh:

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

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

Michael Shaughnessy:

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

Bringing Potential Dropouts Back From the Brink

Juli Charkes:

ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.
Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.
Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.

Related: a look at Madison dropout data, including those with advanced abilities.

Marquette’s new engineering school will focus on creating a collaborative culture and produce grads and marketable ideas.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

The spark plug igniting this creative combustion is engineering school Dean Stan Jaskolski, who returned to his alma mater five years ago after retiring as chief technology officer at Eaton Corp. and a stint on the board of the National Science Foundation.
Jaskolski is re-engineering the engineering program with money, innovation and collaboration. The new engineering complex will link up faculty and students from all levels and disciplines, along with sales and marketing students and labs. Out of this intellectual stew, Jaskolski believes, will come a better prepared, more innovative engineering graduate. The school has raised $60 million out of the $100 million needed to build the complex.

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

Andre Coleman:

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

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

Schools Promote Students Despite Widespread Failure

Arizona Daily Star:

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

$2.6 million drives unique Boys & Girls Club, MMSD partnership
New joint program aims to double minority/low-income student college enrollment

Via the Madison School District [Press Release | AVID – TOPS Fact Sheet]:

The Boys & Girls Club (BGC) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced today a new joint initiative that intends to double the number of minority and low-income students who plan to pursue four-year college and technical college degrees upon high school graduation. The launch of the initiative is made possible through private commitments of $2.6 million to the Boys & Girls Club covering 50% of the first five years of the programs cost.
“We are so excited to partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District on this groundbreaking initiative, said Mary Burke, President of the Board of Directors for the Boys & Girls Club. “combining the school district’s AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program with the Boys & Girls Club Teens Of Promise program (TOPs) we will make a difference, not only in the lives of the students involved in the program but also in the community at large. The health of our community is closely tied to having an educated, skilled workforce. This initiative is designed to do just that.”
The AVID program is a rigorous in-school elective that students take throughout high school to their improve study skills, grades, time management, reading and writing skills to better prepare them for college. The TOPs program offers summer job internships, mentors, scholarships, field trips, career exploration and financial support for tutoring. Students commit to staying on the college track, maintaining a 2.5 GPA, taking courses that will prepare them for college and having a good attendance record.

Kevin Murphy:

Impressed with the success of the 28 East High students enrolled in the program last year, the Boys and Girls Club of Madison has committed to raising $2.6 million, half the funding needed to increase enrollment to 100 students districtwide this fall and to add 100 each year until an 800-student cap is reached.
“This will fund college preparation for students not currently getting that opportunity,” said Boys and Girls Club board President Mary Burke.
Developed in California and based partly on a similar Milwaukee program, AVID is aimed at students from low-income households who want to develop the motivation to succeed in school. It is a daily elective students take throughout high school to improve their study skills, grades and time management.

Karen Rivedal:

Madison School District leaders on Monday announced a partnership with Boys and Girls Club of Dane County aimed at doubling the number of minority and low-income students who will be ready to enter college after high school.
District officials stressed that the new offering was not a remedial program or a free ride but instead was geared to help motivated students with average grades who have the desire to attend college but lack the practical skills and knowledge to get there and be successful.
And to do that really well, it was vital to involve the community, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for the district ‘s four high schools, said at a news conference at East High School.

A Look at the Dropout Issue

Jay Matthews:

Some of the most troubling questions about schools, such as what causes dropouts, have few clear answers because there is so little research. And the reason that data is lacking, at least in part, is that educators who would otherwise demand it are too busy with more even pressing issues, such as improving teaching and raising low student achievement.
The few schools that have made significant progress in teaching and learning, however, are beginning to look more closely at the dropout issue because they cannot be content when so many students miss out on what they have to offer. Note, for instance, a report just released by the KIPP Foundation (available at www.kipp.org) on the number of students who have left that well-regarded public charter school network.

Lucy Mathiak discussed a late 1990’s analysis of Madison’s dropouts here.

New Schools for Poor?

Nancy Mitchell:

Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.
The loose-knit group, called the New Schools Collaborative, includes the Piton Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, names known for their work in urban education.
The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.
That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.

Are Video Games the New Textbooks?

Julia Hoppock:

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

Economic Growth Provides Money for Education

The Billings Gazette asked Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-Montana) the following questions:

The Gazette invited Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who is seeking re-election, and state Sen. Roy Brown of Billings, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, to address these education-funding questions:
A few weeks ago, the Billings school board cut $2.2 million out of its K-8 budget after a proposed $817,000 levy failed. Some education proponents say those developments are the result of the state failing to meet its constitutional mandate to fund a basic system of quality education.
Do you think the state education-funding system is fulfilling its mandate?
How have you as governor or state legislator worked to fulfill the education-funding mandate while balancing the state budget?
What changes – if any – do you propose that the 2009 Legislature make in how Montana funds its K-12 schools?

Schweitzer is correct to emphasize economic growth (or, put another way, expansion of the tax base rather than tax rates). A growing tax base is essential, as Schweitzer points out.

“Best” Graduate Schools

US News & World Report:

U.S. News has collected data from more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year’s rankings. Start by selecting a discipline for access to our top program rankings.

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

Heather Knight:

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

More “Algebra” for Chicago Public Schools Eighth Graders

Alexander Russo:

What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?
From Catalyst: “The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.
“With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.

A commenter nails the issue:

The exit exams have to be real. They can’t be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.
Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.
I’m all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.

Madison West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus:

Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
Math Forum audio / video and links

It will be interesting to see the results of the Madison Math Task Force’s work.

Study: Many teens get alcohol from adults

Hope Yen:

Many of the nation’s estimated 10.8 million underage drinkers are turning to their parents or other adults for free alcohol.
A government survey of teens from 2002 to 2006 said slightly more than half had engaged in underage drinking.
Asked about the source of alcohol, 40 percent they got it from an adult for free over the past month, the survey said. Of those, about one in four said they got it from an unrelated adult, one in 16 got it from a parent or guardian and one in 12 got it from another adult family member.
Roughly 4 percent reported taking the alcohol from their own home.
“In far too many instances parents directly enable their children’s underage drinking — in essence encouraging them to risk their health and well-being,” said acting Surgeon General Steven K. Galson. “Proper parental guidance alone may not be the complete solution to this devastating public health problem — but it is a critical part.”

Channel3000:

Doctors in Madison said this problem is real and they’ve seen some young teens come in with alcohol poisoning.
Physicians fear drinking at a young age can lead not only to lower performance in school and stressed relationships with family members but can also lead to more serious problems later in life, WISC-TV reported.

Middle school critical to students’ success in high school

Russell Rumberger:

More than 100,000 California students quit high school each year, but the path toward dropping out begins long before high school. Three new studies from the California Dropout Research Project reveal how and why academic success in middle school is critical to graduating from high school.
The studies, based on data from four of California’s largest school districts, found that both middle school grades and test scores predicted whether students graduated from high school. The strongest predictor was whether students passed all their core academic subjects in math, English, history and science.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 40 percent of students who failed two or more academic classes in middle school graduated within four years of entering ninth grade. In Fresno, Long Beach and San Francisco only a third of the students who failed two or more courses in seventh grade graduated on time.

Universal preschool students perform better

Greg Toppo:

An ambitious public pre-kindergarten program in Oklahoma boosts kids’ skills dramatically, a long-awaited study finds, for the first time offering across-the-board evidence that universal preschool, open to all children, benefits both low-income and middle-class kids.
The large-scale study, by researchers from Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and Center for Research on Children in the United States, looked at the skills of about 3,500 incoming kindergartners in Tulsa, where state-funded pre-kindergarten has been in place for 18 years — and offered universally for nearly a decade.
The researchers found that as the kids entered kindergarten those enrolled in the state program had better reading, math and writing skills than kids who were either not enrolled in preschool or who spent time in the federally funded Head Start program.
Previous research has shown that high-quality preschool pays off in better skills, especially for low-income kids. But until today’s findings, even the biggest studies stopped short of making the case that universal programs, with children from all backgrounds, benefit virtually all of them.

National Institute for Early Education Research.

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

Des Moines Register:

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

What the Dating Rules You Set For Your Kids Say About You

Sue Shellenbarger:

Researchers have known for a while that closeness to parents is linked to less risky sexual behavior by teenagers.
Now, they’re turning their microscopes on the dating rules parents set, with some surprising results: The limits you place on your teenager’s dating may say more about your own love life than your teen’s needs. Also, parents’ satisfaction with their own life roles shapes the kind of rules they set.
Parents who are involved in stable romantic relationships with spouses or partners tend more than other parents to set rules limiting teen dating behavior, such as curfews, minimum ages for dating, limits on places teens can go and explicit rules against sexual activity, says a new study of 169 parents and 102 teens by Stephanie Madsen, an associate professor of psychology at Maryland’s McDaniel College. While the reason isn’t clear, the author suggests these parents may hold more conservative beliefs in general; many of the rules involved sexuality.

Oregon Students May Choose Their Graduation Exam

Julia Silverman:

The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the “one-size-fits-all” high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon’s plan, while in Maryland, students who can’t pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.
But some say such choices allow some students _ and states _ to take the easy way out.
Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.

Parenting, Inc: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting

Emily Bazelon reviews Pamela Paul’s new book. “How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers — and What It Means for Our Children.”

Parenting books tend to fall into two categories. There are the advice books that play on readers’ anxieties, urging parents to scale ever greater heights on behalf of their kids. (Try harder! Move faster! Buy more!) And then there are the anti-advice books that promise to deflect all of this anxiety-mongering by helping parents ward off the latest sales pitch.
Pamela Paul and Carl Honoré seek to fit into this second category. And yet their books are as anxious about staving off anxiety as any advice book is about stoking it. The effect is a bit like being told to calm down by someone whose neck veins are bulging.
Paul’s focus is on the money that parents spend, and her premise is pretty unassailable: It’s hard not to buy things for your kid, especially if you can afford it. Paul calls this “the anxiety of underspending.” Baring her own wallet, she writes, “No matter what I do, someone else seems to be doing enviably more or improbably less, and either way, their child and family seem all the better for it.”

Kids making a difference: Sport for Africa CAR WASH June 28th at Middleton Cycle

Bulleh Bablitch via email:

Project Liberia inspires students to give
Middleton/Madison, Wis. — With the Summer in full bloom, it would be easy for any area high school student to spend his or her time sleeping away their summer and hanging out with their friends. But for one group of students at Middleton High School, there is no time like the present to start a new project, aimed at helping those in need halfway around the world.
For the past six weeks, this group of students have been collecting used sports equipment for children in the country of Liberia, all in the name of helping the youth of this nation, which is recovering from a 15-year civil war, learn how to see each other as teammates rather than enemies. Now that they have collected the items, it is time to raise the money needed to ship the items to Liberia.

Middleton Cycle.

(more…)

California: Education Data Tells a Sorry Story

Dan Walters:

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

The Nation’s Most Elite Public High Schools

Jay Matthews:

I am ranking them by one of the most common, and to me most annoying, measures of high school worth–average total reading and math SAT scores. Those test results are most closely tied to the income of the families that raise these fine students. There is something of that relationship at these schools too. But once you get this many bright students together, SAT becomes largely irrelevant, since they have all gone far beyond the 10th-grade reading comprehension and math puzzles that make up those exams. Notice, for instance, the surprises. Some very well-known elite schools have much lower average SATs than some others. Some selective high schools with terrific reputations, like Lowell in San Francisco, do not have high enough SAT averages to make the Public Elites list and so remain on the main list. It shows how little significance SAT numbers have.
I am still amazed that there are high schools whose average scores would be high enough to get any student who got that score, with a little luck, into the Ivy League. Our rule is if a non-traditional school’s average is 1300, or 29 or above on the ACT, it goes on the Public Elites list. We picked 1300 and 29 because those scores are just above the highest average scores of any regular enrollment public school in the country.

The list:

SAT will let students pick which scores to show colleges

Seema Mehta & Larry Gordon:

High school students seeking to put the best shine on their college applications will soon be able to choose which of their SAT scores to share with admissions officers and which to hide, the College Board said Friday.
The new policy, starting with the class of 2010, will allow students to take the widely used college entrance exam multiple times without admissions officers seeing their less-than-stellar efforts. Now, colleges receive scores of all the times a student attempted the dreaded test, whether the results were spectacular, mediocre or worse.
“Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT. “. . . We can do that without in any way diminishing the value and integrity of the SAT.”

LA Tries to Put the “Wow” in School Lunches

Mary MacVean:

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

And the Band Honked On: A Professional Musician Teaches 6th Graders

Daniel Wakin:

It was early in the school year. A young professional French horn player named Alana Vegter, a thoroughbred musician trained by elite teachers, took a handful of trumpet and trombone players into an equipment supply room. Speaking in the flat tones of the Chicago suburb where she grew up, Ms. Vegter tried to coax notes out of each player. A tall sixth-grade trumpeter named Kenny Ocean, his pants sagging around his hips, played too high, then too low. A smile spread across his face when he hit it right.
“You see, every time you do it, it gets easier,” Ms. Vegter said. On her cue they all bleated together. “I’m starting to hear everybody making nice, healthy sounds,” she said, half in praise, half in hope.
So began Ms. Vegter’s year in Ditmas Junior High School, Intermediate School 62, in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. It was a year that would teach her the satisfaction of tiny victories in a place where homelessness means that some kids cannot take their instruments home to practice, where chronic asthma forces some to switch from wind instruments to percussion, where the roar of a lunchroom leaves a newcomer stunned.
Ms. Vegter, 25, was there as part of a well-financed experiment by some of the nation’s most powerful musical institutions. The experiment is called, clumsily, the Academy — a Program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute (the institute being an arm of Carnegie).
In its second season, which ended this month, the academy extended fellowships to 34 graduates of leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons in a two-year program. They play concerts on Carnegie’s stages and participate in master classes. Part of the deal is a commitment to teach one and a half days a week at a New York public school, which pays the academy $13,200 for the service.

Clusty Search: Lemont High School Band.

Return of the Math Wars

Debra Saunders:

1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California.
On the one side stood educrats, who advocated mushy math – or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 +2.)
They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless.
On the other side were reformers, who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education’s vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.

Math Forum Audio, Video and links.

Growth in Minnesota Charter School Enrollment

Norman Draper:

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

Parents seek safety report cards

Erica Perez:

The unsolved murder of a college student in Madison, a string of robberies near Marquette University and a recent spike in assaults at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have some parents packing summer orientation sessions at local colleges, anxious about students’ safety.
Colleges, in turn, are trying to ease those fears while helping parents take an active role.
In a new twist, UWM parents can now sign up for emergency text alerts on their cell phones, a service that previously has been available only for students, faculty and staff. With only about a fifth of UWM students registered for the S.A.F.E. alerts, administrators are making a harder push this summer to get new freshmen to hand over their cell phone numbers and sign up. Once registered, they would be notified via text message or e-mail in the event of a campus emergency.
UW-Madison administrators are making a similar push to register freshmen for new cell-phone alerts at orientation, although their service is not yet available to parents.
For the hundreds of parents gathered in UWM’s Zelazo Center this week, a few assurances from a campus police officer produced some visible signs of relief.

High School Hackers Load Spyware To Change Grades

Mark Selfe:

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

A Robin Hood Effect: Does the focus on students who are furthest behind come at the expense of top students?

Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Tom Loveless: High Achieving Students in the era of NCLB.

This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers’ own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.

Locally, these issues have manifested themselves with a controversial move toward one size fits all curriculum: English 10 and mandatory academic grouping, High School Redesign and a letter from the West High School Math teachers to Isthmus. Dane County AP Class offering comparison.
Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains by Sam Dillon:

And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: “Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school — we’re not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive”.

Download the complete 7.3MB report here.
Thanks to a reader for emailing the report.

Gaithersburg School Tailors Teaching To Help Students Cope With Asperger

Daniel de Vise:

The first day of kindergarten found Alex Barth in the principal’s office. The teacher had asked students to draw self-portraits. Alex had wanted to draw his in red crayon. There was no red crayon. Alex had melted down.
Alex was a capable child with superior intelligence — and no end of eccentricities. He would flee noisy school assemblies. He couldn’t bear the smell of the cafeteria. By the end of first grade, his mother was spending much of the day at Alex’s side.
Robyne Barth soon learned her son had Asperger syndrome, a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum. Children with the disorder, known in shorthand as Asperger’s, might have strong academic gifts but deficiencies in such social skills as carrying on a conversation and playing with others at recess.

School pretends students have been killed to teach dangers of drink-driving

Megan Levy:

A police officer in uniform walked into 20 classrooms at El Camino High School in California and announced that several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
The hoax was intended to teach the dangers of drink-driving.
But the scare tactic backfired when some students, who were not told that it was a stunt for two hours, became hysterical and wept uncontrollably.
Their grief turned to fury when they learned they had been duped.
Some students made posters declaring: “Death is real. Don’t play with our emotions”, while a number of parents also complained to the education department.

Raising Minority Graduation Rates in College

Jay Matthews:

The Catholic University and Trinity Washington University are well-regarded institutions located next to each other in a verdant section of northeast Washington. Yet there is a huge gap between them in the relative graduation rates of their black and white students.
Trinity, with an enrollment of about 1,600 mostly female undergraduates, graduated 51 percent of its black students entering in 2000 within six years, higher than the national black graduation rate of about 40 percent and almost identical to Trinity’s white graduation rate, 53 percent. Catholic, with an enrollment of about 6,200, has a six-year graduation rate of 25 percent for black students and 72 percent for white students who entered in 2000, one of the largest discrepancies in the country in this vital statistic.
Kevin Carey, a noted graduation rate researcher, merely reveals this interesting divergence in the data about the two schools. He does not explain it. But his startling new report, “Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority,” which can be found online at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=678433, identifies the most likely sources of such differences and provides more hopeful data about raising the graduation rates of low-income and minority students than I have seen gathered in one place.

Education: As the twig is bent …

Jerry Large:

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

Germans eye kindergarten for next engineers

Richard Milne:

Germany’s shortage of engineers has become so acute that some of its leading companies are turning to nursery schools to guarantee future supplies.
Industrial giants such as Siemens and Bosch are among hundreds of companies giving materials and money to kindergartens to try to interest children as young as three in technology and science.
Many European countries from Switzerland to Spain suffer shortages of graduates. But the problem is especially acute in Germany, renowned as a land of engineering. German companies have 95,000 vacancies for engineers and only about 40,000 are trained, according to the engineers’ association.
“It is a new development in that we have seen we need to start very early with children. Starting at school is not good enough – we need to help them to understand as early as possible how things work,” said Maria Schumm-Tschauder, head of Siemens’ Generation21 education programme.

Madison Math Task Force Minutes

March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:

Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from “Curriculum Review and Research Findings” to “Learning from Curricula.”
“Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. “
“Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization.” Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
“Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. “
“Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance — want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. “
“Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement.”
“Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources”
“District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: “No”). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. “
The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
MMSD Math Task Force website

Math Forum audio / video and links.

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

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

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

Andy Hall takes a look at a useful topic:

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

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

Bullied boy’s parents say West Islip school responsible

Jennifer Maloney:

Patrick Kohlmann was scared. For more than a year at Udall Road Middle School in West Islip, the soft-spoken 13-year-old had been taunted and shoved, chased through the halls and slammed into lockers.
Then one day last month, Patrick says, one of his regular tormentors said, “I’m going to kill you tomorrow.”
The next morning, Patrick’s mother says, she warned the school’s vice principal about the threat. That afternoon, Patrick says, the bully struck him on the head with a rock.
He suffered a concussion.

Studying Abroad – Two American Students Discuss Their Experiences

Open Education:

From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.
Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.
However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).
Each has also made the most rare of commitments – neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.

Madison’s Cherokee Middle School Wins the 100 Black Men of America Championship

A team from Madison’s Cherokee Middle School (100 Black men of Madison) defeated students from Charlotte, NC (100 Black Men – Charlotte) in this evening’s middle school African American History Challenge Bowl at the 100 Black Men of America Annual Conference in Orlando.
A team from Madison Memorial High School participated in the event’s initial round Thursday evening.
Photos and links from the March, 2008 Madison competition.
The above photo was taken at the March, 2008 Madison competition.

School Safety: It’s About Respect

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

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

Schools can’t take gifted students for granted

Niki Paul
With the recent news about Salem-Keizer’s talented and gifted program under scrutiny again, I would like to commend the parents for their continual push and voice. Too often, important issues in education are dropped because the matters are not repeatedly brought to light.
Gifted students deserve appropriate learning opportunities and academic challenges so that they may become talented. We certainly reward competent athletes. It would be unthinkable to eliminate varsity or college football; we value the process of preparing professionals. Should we not then strive to add to our society highly talented artists, exceptional engineers, literary geniuses and the like?
School districts do not worry about their gifted students because from them, districts get better attendance, great test scores and graduates. School leaders view the parents as an annoyance and tune out their voices whenever possible. Yet the message has been sent and stands clear: Gifted and talented students are a special population needing special services.
What happens to bright, active learners when they aren’t challenged is they challenge the system. The underperforming gifted and talented become intellectually depressed in an academic environment that fails to challenge them. They are the “too smart for their own good” students who can pass every test without doing any of the time-filling work created to fill mandatory seat time.
When a gifted learner senses that learning opportunities are absent, he or she responds with challenging behavior. Wouldn’t it be wiser for teachers to be in the place of challenging learners rather than creating and managing challenging behaviors?
Again, district and schools respond to the needs of gifted and talented learners with blank stares, especially at the high school level. Students who attend, pass state tests and graduate do not arouse the attention of bureaucrats. Teachers cannot implement what is not programmatically available. They need tools, resources and time to challenge learners.

College Track

Carolyne Zinko:

The educational nonprofit was founded in East Palo Alto in 1997 to help low-income students boost their grades, apply to college and obtain scholarships.
Students must apply to the after-school supplement to their high school studies and maintain a 3.0 grade point average. Those who falter are steered into a counseling group called Inspire, which tries, through group chat sessions, to motivate them to try harder.
There’s fun, too – summer field trips to Yosemite and Tahoe, because many students have never experienced the outdoors. And tucked into all this is counseling. College Track officials find there are times when they have to cajole parents into allowing their children to attend college out of the Bay Area or out of state. Parents who don’t speak English often look to their children as leaders, relying on them for help with translating and enlisting them in child care duties. They want their children close to home.

www.collegetrack.org

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

David Hoff:

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

Out of Sight

Bob Herbert:

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.

Schools Give Teachers a New Kind of Apple

Erin Richards:

It was after lunch in a social studies classroom at North Shore Middle School in Hartland when seventh-graders began tapping out messages to students in Germany, France, Kosovo and Bosnia on a fleet of shiny Apple laptops.
The modernized electronic version of paper-and-stamp correspondence the children were using, called ePals, is one of several programs being piloted in suburban districts this year as teachers and curriculum coordinators seek ways to extend learning beyond the physical limitations of the classroom.
The next big step, say officials in suburban districts, as well as in Milwaukee Public Schools, is exploring a 1-to-1 student laptop initiative or the possibility of issuing every student a hand-held computer, such as an iPod touch.
“There’s a far greater use of technology (in schools) when you make it mobile,” MPS Director of Technology Jim Davis said.

Education fundamental building block

Martin Shields:

Because economists tend to point out things like this, it is not surprising that I was not invited to give a commencement address. But if I had been, my message would have been a simple one.
Don’t worry. You made the right decision.
Recent earnings data indicates the essentiality of education. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) annual earnings for Colorado’s full-time workers without a high school diploma averaged $25,916 in 2006. For Centennial State residents holding a high school degree only, annual earnings averaged $34,698. Over just 15 years, a (crude) calculation shows the high school diploma is worth about $132,000.
High school graduates are also less likely to live in poverty. CPS data from 2005 indicate 22.1 percent of Colorado’s adult population without a high school diploma lived in poverty. By comparison, the state’s high school only graduates had poverty rates of 11.6 percent.

Columbia, Missouri ACT Results Compared with Math Curriculum

Columbia Parents for Real Math:

CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don’t distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math “preparation” each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.

I’ve heard that Madison’s Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater’s June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.

Imperial College ditches A levels and sets its own entrance exam

Alexandra Frean:

One of Britain’s leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can’t rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.

The Enemy Within British Education

Melanie Phillips via a kind reader:

In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.

The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.

Hard work translates to success at La Tinaja school in Ocampo

Macarena Hernandez & Gary Jacobson:

The elementary school at La Tinaja — Escuela Primaria 18 de Marzo — is named after one of the most famous dates in Mexico history. On March 18, 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the country’s oil industry, kicking out foreign-owned companies.
Principal Socorro Lara has been at the school 15 years and in the Ocampo municipality 35. She doubles as a teacher. In the mornings, she substitutes, and in the evenings, she teaches kids who are struggling.
There are a total of about 50 schools in Ocampo, and this is the best, municipality education official Jose Juan Salazar says.
Why?

Milwaukee Schools Ordered to Do More for Special needs

Alan Borsuk:

Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Sunday that the decision will bring “the most substantial reform in MPS history,” one that will bring higher graduation rates, fewer discipline problems and improved test scores within a few a years.
MPS officials have fought the goals set forth in the decision of Federal Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein, saying they would lead to big increases in spending and taxes and actually harm children and lower educational standards. MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board members had not yet seen the decision and did not want to comment until they met about it. She quoted Andrekopoulos saying only, “We’re going to continue to move forward with education reforms that meet the needs of all our children.”
Goodstein’s decision, signed Friday and circulated over the weekend, came down on every point in favor of the position of the plaintiffs, an organization now known as Disability Rights Wisconsin, and in favor of a settlement reached recently between that organization and the state Department of Public Instruction, which was also a defendant in the case. Goodstein rejected all grounds MPS offered for finding things wrong with that settlement.

On Arizona’s Proposed School District Consolidation

The Arizona Republic:

1. Given the high-interest and often emotionally charged and political topic of education and school districts, what has been your experience serving on the commission?
I think all of us on the Commission have been inspired by the commitment we’ve seen from parents and educators throughout Arizona to turning our system around so it can better serve our children. Their insights and input strongly shaped the recommendations we presented to Gov. Janet Napolitano last December. But make no mistake, change is hard and we expected some degree of resistance to our plan simply because it meant the end of the status quo. I am a little disappointed that some have rushed to judgment without fully investigating our proposals or considering the benefits of making better use of our precious educational resources. We hope to dispel some of these concerns this summer during a series of public forums that will be scheduled across the state.

Shameful effort to undermine charter school

San Jose Mercury News Editorial:

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

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

Toledo Teachers’ Group Touts Peer Review

Claudio Sanchez:

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

The school bully dilemma

Sharon Noguchi:

It started with four older girls calling her vulgar names, one pouring a bottle of water on her head, then yanking a fistful of hair from her scalp – right in the Los Gatos High School cafeteria.
It led to school authorities summoning police, suspending the lead bully, convening mediation sessions and checking in daily with the freshman who was bullied. The school even mapped routes around campus to ensure the antagonists remain apart after the victim’s parents took out a restraining order against their daughter’s harasser.
But at a time when awareness of harassment at schools seems to be growing, the Los Gatos incident underscores the difficulty of dealing with the problem: Short of kicking a bully out of school, even when educators do a lot they are often accused of doing too little to appease parents and ease victims’ fears.
“We’re trying to help on a daily basis,” Los Gatos-Saratoga Union School District Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said. “But there’s only so much we can control in the world of 14-, 15-year-old adolescents.”
Across the valley, parents of harassment victims insist school authorities don’t react quickly or forcefully enough to protect their children – even as school officials say they’re working harder than ever to prevent and respond to bullying and aggression.
Harassment peaks in middle school, the time when kids are sorting out themselves and their place in life. In California, 42 percent of seventh-graders, 38 percent of ninth-graders and 33 percent of 11th-graders reported being victims of harassment, according to the 2005-07 Healthy Kids survey.

Proposed West Bend School District Harassment Policy

Owen Robinson:

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

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

Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead

Dennis Hevesi:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.
No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.
The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”
Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

In Big Easy, Charter School Era

Jay Matthews:

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

Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

Marla Dickerson:

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

A Goal of 100%

Maureen Downey:

Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there’s far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.

Three Child Psychiatry Experts at Harvard Made Millions from Drug Makers

Gardiner Harris & Benedict Carey:

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.
By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Some of their research is financed by government grants.
Like Dr. Biederman, Dr. Wilens belatedly reported earning at least $1.6 million from 2000 to 2007, and another Harvard colleague, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. But even these amended disclosures may understate the researchers’ outside income because some entries contradict payment information from drug makers, Mr. Grassley found.

As the economy hits rough waters, competition is surging for beach lifeguard jobs. Three rookies join the race for a role in a real-life ‘Baywatch.’

Ellen Gamerman:

After the first run on the first day of Los Angeles County’s lifeguard-training academy, a rookie throws up, walks off the beach and quits.
None of the other recruits turn to look. L.A. lifeguard training is run with military discipline, and one rule is, always face the water. The class stands frozen in squad formation. No one wants to risk his or her chances just to watch a defeated rookie slink away.
This will be a tough summer to land any good job, and for lifeguards, the competition is especially fierce. In South Walton, on the Florida Panhandle, lifeguard applications have risen 30% in the past year, boosted by older recruits with military and law-enforcement experience. In Volusia County, Fla., there were 60 openings this year compared with 80 last year, in part because college graduates are returning to their old summer posts after striking out in the bleak job market. “The economy is not as good as it once was, and that’s helping us recruit,” says Kevin Sweat, the county director of beach safety.
Lifeguarding is no longer a summer pastime for bored teens. Pay and benefits have grown as more cities merge their lifeguards into the fire department. L.A. County employs 180 full-time and 760 part-time lifeguards, with top pay pushing six figures.

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

Kurt Gutknecht:

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

Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform

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

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

(more…)

Toyota Chief: Refrain from Using PowerPoint

Garr Reynolds:

An article that got some attention in Japan last week was this one (in Japanese), which says the Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged employees to show self-restraint and stop the wasteful practice of using PowerPoint for the creation of documents (what I call slideuments). The CEO made this statement while talking about the need to reduce costs at Toyota. He is reminding employees to be cost conscious and he used the practice of using PowerPoint as an example of waste. Watanabe said that (in the good old days?) they used to use one piece of paper to make a clear point or proposal, or to summarize an issue, but now everything is in PowerPoint, he says, which uses many sheets of paper and expensive colors…but it’s a waste. The CEO is not saying that PowerPoint is necessarily harmful (he does not mention its use for actual presentations), but he is saying printed “documents” made with the presentation tool tend to have less content, less clarity, and yet use more paper/ink and take more time. In the context of a challenging economy and an atmosphere of reducing costs, what would you say of any business practice that (1) takes more time, (2) costs more money, and yet (3) appears to be less effective? In the spirit of kaizen (continuous improvement), even if the waste is small, it must be eliminated.

The Poverty of PowerPoint by Gregory McNamee:

Many forces are at work in the dumbing-down of the world: censorship, historical amnesia, the collapse of general education, doctrinaire domination of the airwaves and other media outlets, the spread of religious fundamentalism, creationism, and other forms of ignorance.
And then there’s PowerPoint.
Microsoft’s market-leading “slideware”—software that produces virtual transparencies for use in public presentations—is responsible for “trillions of slides each year,” writes the statistician, publisher, and design guru Edward R. Tufte in his provocative booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And not just any old slides. PowerPoint’s popular templates, Tufte argues, are responsible for an explosion in useless data stupidly displayed, for these ready-made designs “usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”

More on Finland’s Schools

The Economist:

THE OECD’s PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland’s schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.
I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I’m lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?

A School Milwaukee’s District Could Learn From

Dolores Herbstreith:

There is a school on Milwaukee’s near south side that should be a beacon of light to the many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that are having trouble keeping about 50% of their students in attendance and graduating.
It is Notre Dame Middle School, a Catholic school for girls in fifth through eighth grade. I tutored there for almost two years, and it was a great experience.
The school accepts Hispanic girls from that area who have spent the first few years of elementary school at MPS. Few come from what could be called “advantaged” homes. Most struggle with their studies. Many of them speak only Spanish at home because that is the only language their parents know. Then they must adjust to English the next morning when they return to school.
In spite of these challenges, the school shows an impressive record, with 96% of the girls graduating from high school after they leave Notre Dame and 76% of those continuing with a post-secondary education. How do they do it when more advantaged students drop out of school rather than apply themselves

$10M for Math in Milwaukee

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools officials got the assurance they were seeking when Gov. Jim Doyle said Wednesday that he will release $10 million to improve math instruction in Milwaukee next year.
Although the money was included in the budget approved last fall, Doyle had the option of not awarding it. After Doyle used his veto powers recently to require a $270 million cut in spending next year, MPS leaders were concerned the $10 million might be chopped.
Doyle used an eighth-grade classroom at the Lincoln Center of the Arts, an MPS middle school on the lower east side, to announce he was awarding the money, which is to be used to pay for more than 100 math teaching positions.

On Finland’s Schools

The Economist:

I AM feeling nostalgic. I spent two years in Finland in the late 1990s on a European Union post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Jyvaskyla in central Finland, and haven’t been back since. I wonder how much things will have changed—the country had only just joined the European Union back then, and has since joined the euro and experienced an economic boom.
First stop this morning is Kulosaari comprehensive school, in a suburb of Helsinki. Finnish comprehensives teach children from seven to 16; after that almost all youngsters spend another three years in either grammar or vocational schools.
Kulosaari school is lovely. The children are calm (far calmer than those at my son’s primary school in Cambridge, England) and talk to adults respectfully, but as equals.
Dan Wood, from Maidstone in England, one of two native English speakers on the staff, teaches children in the school’s bilingual programme. He has been in Finland for ten years now, and has no intention of leaving. “My mum works in a school at home,” he tells me. “I really just don’t want to go back to that system, the stress of school inspections.”

Hard to find a job, but not an internship

Tami Luhby:

Even as they trim their payrolls, companies are keeping one eye on the future by stocking up on summer interns.
Employers, in a sign that they are looking beyond the current economic slowdown, are using intern programs to help build their junior ranks. Certainly interns can provide cheap and eager labor. But they also bring fresh ideas and allow companies to build their talent pools, experts said. Firms are hiring a larger number of their entry-level workers from their intern pool, so they are looking to lure top college students well before graduation.
“We’re seeing growth every year in the number of interns being hired,” said Camille Luckenbaugh, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers. “One reason companies are looking to hire is to fill their talent pipeline. They are looking five to 10 years down the road.”

Prevention called cure for school violence

Liz Bowie:

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

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

“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”

Peter Sobol on the 2007 Wisconsin DPI State test results (WKCE):

The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):

… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.

Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?

The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for “Value Added Assessment“.
Much more on the WKCE here.
Minnesota recently administered their first online science test.

Accelerated Math Adds Up To a Division Over Merits

Daniel de Vise:

Next fall, 26 of the sharpest fifth-grade minds at Potomac Elementary School will study seventh-grade math. The rest of the fifth grade will learn sixth-grade math. Fifth-grade math will be left to the third- and fourth-graders.
Public schools nationwide are working to increase the number of students who study Algebra I, the traditional first-year high school math course, in eighth grade. Many Washington area schools have gone further, pushing large numbers of students two or three years ahead of the grade-level curriculum.
Math study in Montgomery County has evolved from one or two academic paths to many. Acceleration often begins in kindergarten. In a county known for demanding parents, the math push has generated an unexpected backlash. Many parents say children are pushed too far, too fast.
Sixty Montgomery math teachers complained, in a November forum, that students were being led into math classes beyond their abilities.

Their 3 R’s include running

Amy Hetzner:

Midday recess at Riverside Elementary School had reached a cacophonic pitch Monday, with students tossing assorted balls through the air, when a class of kindergartners added to the mix by bolting around the play area.
Far from scolding the children, their teachers encouraged the activity.
What happens on this vast plot of gravel, the thinking goes, can be as important as what goes on inside the classroom.
“When you’re talking about education, you have to look at the whole child,” Riverside counselor Kara Baker said, “because if they’re not well, they’re not going to learn.”
That focus on wellness has won the school recognition over the past two years, as a Governor’s School Health Award silver-level winner.
Riverside was the only Waukesha County school to receive the award in 2008. James Fenimore Cooper School in Milwaukee was a gold award winner.

Students find the ’08 presidential race is not politics as usual

Greg Toppo:

It was the first week of February, and Jesse Sharkey’s students were doing the math.
They were not amused.
Most of his juniors and seniors at Chicago’s Senn High School are Barack Obama supporters — Obama is from Chicago, after all. So they wanted to know why Obama, who had won 14 of 22 states on Super Tuesday, had barely scored more delegates than Hillary Clinton.
(Answer: Democrats award delegates based on percentage of votes received.)
And why was he still behind in the total count? And what’s a superdelegate anyway?

Community College Transfer Mess

Jay Matthews:

Like many community college students, Josie Showers saw her classes at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville as the first step toward a four-year degree. She was among the nearly half of American students who start college in two-year community schools. They are told if they work hard, their state’s four-year colleges will be happy to accept them as transfers and cheer them on to graduation. But Showers, like many others, discovered those four-year schools are not as helpful as she had been led to believe.
After she transferred to the University of Louisville as a 27-year-old political science major, she was told she could not get her bachelor’s degree until she had taken the university’s pre-algebra class. That made no sense to her. She had already taken an algebra course, learning concepts more advanced than pre-algebra, at her community college. Sorry, she was told. Rules are rules. That kind of red tape cost her an extra semester and $4,000 before she could graduate.

Saudi Prince Sultan Thanks Education Ministry for Winning WTO Education Tourism Award

Mohammed Rasooldeen:

“This is a prestigious award we have received for the Education Scholastic Tourism Program (Smile) which we launched in 2005 in cooperation with the Ministry of Education,” Prince Sultan ibn Salman, secretary general of the Supreme Commission For Tourism (SCT), told newsmen at a packed press conference at the SCT headquarters held here yesterday to celebrate the award which was given in in Madrid on Wednesday.
The prince formally presented the award to Education Minister Dr. Abdullah Saleh Al-Obeid, whose ministry was instrumental in implementing the program for 150,000 students during the past three years.
Thanking the ministry of education for its unstinted cooperation, the prince recalled that during the past two years, the program — Smile — has covered 150,000 students and 1,800 teachers in 2,700 schools in 42 education department offices. “We want to extend this proven program to another 900,000 students — both boys and girls — in the intermediate and high schools,” Prince Sultan added.

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education.

Education in Sweden and Finland
Competition—and ignoring the 1970s—breeds success

The Economist:

THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds’ reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.

Put a Little Science in Your Life

Brian Greene:

A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
Brian Greene:

A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.

But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
Allow me a moment to explain.

Find Answer to Achievement Gap

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Test scores released last week clearly show one of the primary tasks confronting Madison School District ‘s incoming superintendent, Daniel Nerad:
The district should find more effective ways to educate its rapidly growing populations of foreign-speaking students and lower-income students.
Students from immigrant families and students from lower-income families continue to score low on the annual tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
That ‘s the chief reason the Madison district fell below the state average in 22 of 23 scores.

Many notes and links on the latest Wisconsin scores here.

Private vs. Public Schools

The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. So what am I doing here?
Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”
Words from an e-mail conversation with Rasmussen scroll across my brain as I glance around Lakeside: “Absolutely no doubt … one of the best decisions … that’s how valuable.”
A lot of families are like the Rasmussens. In Seattle, almost one out of four students attends private schools, according to an estimate from Seattle Public Schools. The national average is one in 10.
I’ve talked with the president of Seattle Preparatory School, the mom of a Holy Names Academy student, researchers at the Center on Education Policy and a local education author. They’ve given me a better understanding of why private education is extraordinary and also what public schools do well. Which is better for my kids? For your kids?
Related Links:

Lakeside School
Seattle Preparatory School
Holy Names Academy
Islander Middle School
Seattle Public Schools
Whitman Middle School – Seattle
Ballard High School
Center on Education Policy: Are Private High Schools Better than Public High Schools?

Continue reading here.

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

Former Providence School Board Member Julie Steiny:

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

Fascinating.

More colleges move toward optional SATs

Elizabeth Landau:

Smith College and Wake Forest University no longer require the SAT for admissions
Nearly 760 institutions have made a step in this direction, advocacy group says
Schools say SAT is biased against students who can’t afford preparation
The College Board, which owns the SAT, says test is a good predictor of success

Joanne has more.

Another Look at High School Performance Assessments

Bill Tucker:

Just returned from Providence where I spent two days learning about Rhode Island’s diploma system, which includes a number of performance-based assessment requirements. Today at Portsmouth High School I saw students present their senior projects to groups of teachers, classmates, and outside community judges. Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200+ seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the “4Ps” — a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today’s oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she’d designed for the school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Another student’s project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.
The students were, of course, outstanding. But, what surprised me most were my conversations with the principal, teachers, and state officials about the cultural changes that were emerging from the senior project requirement. Roy Seitsinger, Director of RI High School Redesign, was emphatic that this work was “about transformative cultural change.”

Perfect school attendance earns teen a brand-new car

AP:

Andria Baker has pretty much always been present.
From the first day of kindergarten through her last day of high school, Baker somehow made it to school for every day of classes, despite colds and sports injuries. Why? If she kept it up, her father promised her a car.
Baker kept up her end of the bargain, willing herself to go to school on those days when she felt under the weather. She notched her 13th year of uninterrupted classroom attendance with her final day at Constantine High School on Friday.

One district is finding that simple measures are helping kids read.

Maria Elena Baca:

If administrators in the Centennial School District are right, all it takes is a few minutes a day to get many of their struggling readers on track.
The district’s five elementary schools are finishing the first year of the Centennial Early Reading Foundations program (CERF), a K-3 literacy initiative created to reduce the number of special education referrals, to lift more students to grade level, and to improve children’s social development, through increased small-group instruction and assessment, tailored to each child’s needs. Much of the extra work occurs right in the classroom.
“We recognize that literacy is a cornerstone to the success of our children,” said Dan Bittman, the district’s director of elementary and secondary schools. “Literacy affects achievement in all areas and prepares them for the global world.”

Do We Really Need School Boards?

Marilla Stephenson:

A school board expert from Iowa who spoke at a conference in Dartmouth earlier this month noted that elected school boards in both Canada and the United States are increasingly being replaced by appointed bureaucrats.
Mary L. Delagardelle, who is in favour of elected boards, warned that “giving up elected school boards . . . is also giving up a little piece of democracy.”
True enough. But we have surely reached the point in Nova Scotia, after a decade of troubles with school boards, where a little less democracy would be welcome change.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Releases Latest State Test Results, Madison Trails State Averages

380K PDF Press Release [AP’s posting of DPI’s press release]:

Results for statewide testing show an overall upward trend for mathematics, stable scores in reading, and a slight narrowing of several achievement gaps. This three-year trend comes at a time when poverty is continuing to increase among Wisconsin students.
The 434,507 students who took the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) and the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for Students with Disabilities (WAA-SwD) this school year showed gains over the past three years in mathematics in six out of seven grades tested. Reading achievement at the elementary, middle, and high school levels was stable over three years. An analysis of all combined grades indicates a narrowing of some achievement gaps by racial/ethnic group.
“These three years of assessment data show some positive trends. While some results point to achievement gains, we must continue our focus on closing achievement gaps and raising achievement for all students,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster.

Andy Hall notes that Madison Trails State Averages [Dane County Test Result Comparison prepared by Andy Hall & Phil Brinkman – pdf]:

But in the Madison School District, just two of the 23 proficiency scores improved, while five were unchanged and 16 declined, according to a Wisconsin State Journal review of the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school year data from the state Department of Public Instruction.
Madison’s scores trail the state average in 22 of the 23 scores. Typically the percentage of Madison students attaining proficient or advanced ratings trails the state average by several percentage points.
“The fact that we’re able to stay close to the state average as our demographics have made dramatic changes, I think is a positive,” said Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater, who added that the district’s “strong instructional program” is meeting many of the challenges of immigrant and low-income students while ensuring that “high fliers are still flying high.”
A district analysis shows that when the district’s students are compared with their peers across the state, a higher percentage of Madison students continue to attain “advanced” proficiency scores — the highest category.
Madison students who aren’t from low-income families “continue to outperform their state counterparts,” with higher percentages with advanced scores in reading and math at all seven tested grade levels, the district reported.
Rainwater said he’s long feared that the district’s increasingly needy student population, coupled with the state’s revenue limits that regularly force the district to cut programs and services, someday will cause test scores to drop sharply. But so far, he said, the district’s scores are higher than would be expected, based on research examining the effects of poverty and limited English abilities on achievement.
This school year, 43 percent of Madison students are from low-income families eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, while 16 percent of students are classified as English language learners — numbers that are far above those of any other Dane County school district.
Rainwater noted that students with limited English abilities receive little help while taking the reading and language arts tests in English.

Tamira Madsen:

Reading test scores for Madison students changed little compared to 2006-07, but math results decreased in six of the seven grades tested. Of 23 scores in five topics tested statewide, Madison lagged behind state peers in 22 of 23 of those scores.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater attributes the district’s performance and trends to the growing population of English language learners in the district.

Officials now are able to draw upon three years of results since Wisconsin began administering testing to students in grades three through eight and grade 10 in reading and mathematics. Based on state regulations, students in fourth, eighth and 10th grade were also tested in language arts, science and social studies.

Alan Borsuk on Milwaukee’s results:

But there is little room for debate about what the scores say about the need for improvement in the outcomes for Milwaukee Public Schools students: The gaps between Milwaukee students and the rest of the state remain large, and school improvement efforts of many kinds over the years have not made much of a dent.
The problem is especially vivid when it comes to 10th-graders, the highest grade that is part of Wisconsin’s testing system. The gap between sophomores in Milwaukee and those statewide has grown larger over the last two years, and, once again, no more than 40% of 10th-graders in MPS were rated as proficient or better in any of the five areas tested by the state. For math and science, the figure is under 30%.

Amy Hetzner notes that Waukesha County’s test scores also slipped.
Notes and links regarding the rigor of Wisconsin DPI standards. DPI academic standards home page. Search individual school and district results here. The 2006 Math Forum discussed changes to the DPI math test and local results.
TJ Mertz reviews Wright Middle School’s results.
Chan Stroman’s June, 2007 summary of Madison WKCE PR, data and an interesting discussion. Notes on spin from Jason Spencer.
Jeff Henriques dove into the 2007 WKCE results and found that Madison tested fewer 10th graders than Green Bay, Appleton, Milwaukee and Kenosha. There’s also a useful discussion on Jeff’s post.
Advocating a Standard Grad Rate & Madison’s “2004 Elimination of the Racial Achievement Gap in 3rd Grade Reading Scores”.
Madison School District’s Press Release and analysis: Slight decline on WKCE; non-low income students shine

Advocating a Standard Graduation Rate & Madison’s “2004 Elimination of the Racial Achievement Gap in 3rd Grade Reading Scores”

Leslie Ann Howard:

Back in 1995, when the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV began a civic journalism project to study the racial achievement gaps in our schools, the statistical measures of student achievement and reading in third grade put the issue in sharp focus.
United Way and our community partners’ efforts, through a variety of strategies including the Schools of Hope tutoring program, relied on those strong, focused statistics to measure the success of our 1-on-1 and 1-on-2 tutoring.
By 2004, Superintendent Art Rainwater was able to announce the elimination of the racial achievement gap in third grade reading scores, because our community had focused on stable statistical measure for over 10 years.
A standard graduation rate formula would create the same public focus for our nation’s efforts to increase high school graduation rates.

Ruth Robarts Letter to Isthmus on 3rd Grade Reading Scores
Jason Shephards: The Fate of the Schools discusses those 2004 3rd grade reading scores.
Ruth Robarts: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
A teacher’s letter to Isthmus on 3rd grade reading scores.
Channel3000 on the Schools of Hope project and 3rd grade reading scores.
Value Added Assessment in the Madison School District. Ed Hughes: Madison schools need to get real on equity, New value-added approach is needed for improving schools
Leslie Ann Howard’s biography.
Ed Hughes wrote a fascinating piece in 2005 on the local budget, collective bargaining and school climate. The piece includes this gem:

This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker — and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member — believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
Madison & Math Data, 8th Grade.

U.S. Schools Tap Growing Ranks of Chinese Students

Larry Abramson @ NPR:

As more and more Chinese go to college, U.S. universities are trying to grab a piece of this growing market. Even smaller schools feel they must have some sort of exchange program with Chinese schools. Exchange students were once motivated by a desire to spread international understanding, but now many feel that global education is important to their success in the job market.

audio.

National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through

Rebecca Dana:

A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation.
Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and the movement, exhausted by its own rhetoric and disputes within its ranks, sputtered out. It’s back.
Spelling reform is currently enjoying a renaissance in the U.S. and Britain. At a time when young people are inventing their own shorthand for email and text messages, the reformers see a fresh opportunity 2 convert people 2 the cause.
In recent years, the ranks of Britain’s Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council have swelled from a few stalwart members to more than 500, which in this effort is a lot. Reformers are energized: Some are writing to dictionary editors urging them to include simplified spellings in new editions. Others are organizing academic conferences, including one on June 7 in Coventry, England, on “The Cost of Spelling.” The American Literacy Council just allocated $45,000 of its $250,000 private endowment to develop a series of DVDs using simplified spelling to teach English to international students. The Spelling Society has hired its first publicist.