Teacher Support – Page 23 – School Information System

L.A. study affirms benefits of preschool

Children enrolled in Los Angeles Universal Preschool programs made significant improvements in the social and emotional skills needed to do well in kindergarten, according to a study released Monday. The gains were especially pronounced for English language learners, the study showed.
The findings confirmed observations of preschool teachers that children attending high-quality programs are better prepared for kindergarten. For the first time, the study provided data to back up those observations, officials with the nonprofit preschool organization said.
“This is unique because there’s very little research in terms of cognitive progression in the preschool years,” said Celia C. Ayala, chief operating officer for Los Angeles Universal Preschool. “We know there are differences, we see the differences, but this gives us a way to assess improvements.”

Clusty Search: Los Angeles Universal Preschool.

A Toxic Dispute With Teachers in Washington, DC

New York Times:

Last fall, Michelle Rhee, the tough-minded and creative schools chancellor in Washington, laid off 266 teachers, citing a budget crunch. She has since reported finding a budget surplus. The city’s teachers’ union, which challenged the layoffs unsuccessfully last fall, has now asked a judge to review them again. The atmosphere has grown increasingly toxic.
Some of Ms. Rhee’s critics have implausibly suggested that she might have withheld information to justify the layoffs. It would be terrible for the city’s children if the dispute reached a point where it upended the innovative union contract that Ms. Rhee and union leaders provisionally agreed to earlier this month.
The contract, which changes the terms under which teachers are paid and evaluated, could pave the way for better schools for the District of Columbia’s students and could become a model for agreements between school districts and teachers’ unions around the country.

What to do with ‘persistently underperforming’ schools?

San Francisco School Board Member Rachel Norton:

On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent’s plans for our 10 schools labeled “persistently underperforming” by the state of California.
This list was created as part of the state’s efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state’s schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There’s no choice in the matter, though it’s unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks–and begin the work within six months.
I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that–D’oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools–no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)

A Home Library’s Educational Edge

Tom Kuntz:

Now they tell you, just when you’ve sold the old Harvard Classics on eBay, hauled the Britannicas down to the dump and signed up Junior for online SAT prep. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller-McCune:

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.
“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

The Bad Teacher Protection Racket

Mike Nichols:

Legislators trying to help save a generation of Milwaukee children from lives of poverty and unemployment want to add a new law to the books in Madison this week.
They should, if they want to make a real difference, also delete one.
Part of the new education bill passed by the Senate the other day, and now being considered by the Assembly, calls for rigorous, annual teacher performance evaluations – something that many districts all across America already supposedly administer.
But not really.
Last year, the New Teacher Project researched teacher evaluations in 12 districts, both big and small, across the country. Methods and frequency of evaluation differed from district to district, but one thing was found to be strikingly similar. Virtually all teachers in the districts studied are told over and over and over again that they are either good or great. In districts that use binary rating systems, for instance, (generally “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” categories are used) more than 99% of teachers are given the “satisfactory” designation, according to the researchers.

Principal tells ninth graders to study, or leave

Jay Matthews:

One of my education reporting maxims is that principals of schools in troubled districts never seek me out. Journalists are poison to them. We only want to write about bad stuff. Anything they say can be held against them.
So I was surprised when Charlie Thomas, principal of Crossland High School in Prince George’s County, began sending me emails. His school has been one of the worst in a low-performing district for a long time. But Thomas, who arrived in 2004, was trying to improve his school and was willing even to deal with a fault-finding columnist if it would help. Nearly 66 percent of his students were low-income, but he was not going to let that slow him down.
I confess he has gotten my attention with some unusual moves. For instance, he quickly discovered that close to 800 of his 1,800 students were still in the ninth grade. “I asked for a list of every ninth grade student that was 16 years old or older with a grade point average of less than 1.0 [a D average],” he told me. The list had 330 names. Some had been there four or five years.

Alternate Path for Teachers Gains Ground

Lisa Foderaro:

Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master’s degrees.
But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.
In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.
And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master’s degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.

Merit Pay for Teachers

Alan Pagano:

A heated debate surrounding merit pay for teachers has existed for decades in the United States, where since the 1920s public schools began awarding compensation primarily according to title and years of experience rather than performance.
Political leaders such as President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have recently expressed support for the notion of merit pay for teachers. In March 2009, Obama said that teachers should be treated “like the professionals they are while also being held more accountable. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools.”
This has reinvigorated the debate, with many groups staking out positions on either side. The National Education Association, for example, has opposed merit pay, while the United Federation of Teachers, at least in part, seems to support the idea.
Here is a summary of questions and pro and con responses within the debate.

Madison School Board to Discuss the Superintendent’s Proposed Administrative Reorganization Monday Evening

Organization Chart 352K PDF
Reorgnanization Budget 180K PDF
February, 2010 background memo from Superintendent Dan Nerad.
I spoke with the Superintendent Friday regarding the proposed reorganization. The conversation occurred subsequent to an email I sent to the School Board regarding Administrative cost growth and the proposed reduction in Superintendent direct reports.
I inquired about the reduction in direct reports, the addition of a Chief Learning Officer, or Deputy Superintendent and the apparent increased costs of this change. Mr. Nerad said that he would email updated budget numbers Monday (he said Friday that there would be cost savings). With respect to the change in direct reports, he said that the District surveyed other large Wisconsin Schools and found that those Superintendents typically had 6 to 8, maybe 9 direct reports. He also reminded me that the District formerly had a Deputy Superintendent. Art Rainwater served in that position prior to his boss, Cheryl Wilhoyte’s demise. He discussed a number of reasons for the proposed changes, largely to eliminate management silos and support the District’s strategic plan. He also referenced a proposed reduction in Teaching & Learning staff.
I mentioned Administrative costs vis a vis the current financial climate.
I will post the budget numbers and any related information upon receipt.
Finally, I ran into a wonderful MMSD teacher this weekend. I mentioned my recent conversation with the Superintendent. This teacher asked if I “set him straight” on the “dumbing down of the Madison School District”?
That’s a good question. This teacher believes that we should be learning from Geoffrey Canada’s efforts with respect to the achievement gap, particularly his high expectations. Much more on the Harlem Children’s Zone here.
Finally, TJ Mertz offers a bit of commentary on Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.

Milwaukee’s Plans for a One Size Fits All Reading Curriculum

Alan Borsuk:

The textbooks and the workbooks and the teachers manuals and all the other materials were displayed attractively. There were mini-candy bars and cloth shopping bags for visitors to take.
America’s biggest text book companies – Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt – each had large, handsome displays.
For three days last week, the third-floor library of the Juneau High School building was the center of looming big change in the way children in Milwaukee Public Schools are taught reading. MPS officials are selecting a new reading program.
A special committee will make a recommendation and the School Board will make the choice in the winner-takes-all curriculum selection process. The sunlit scene in the Juneau library was the part of the process where anyone could take a look and give input.
It was an amiable scene. The representatives of the publishers were friendly, talkative, knowledgeable, and quite willing to schmooze. “Great tie,” one told me as I walked down the aisle. She appeared to know something about this tie that no one else had noticed in the 20 years I’ve owned it.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg has written a number of articles on Madison’s reading programs.

An Open Mind

Katie Hafner:

At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it’s difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus’s largest lecture hall, with room for 736.
She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box’s contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, “because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?” The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.
Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world’s foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.

Oakland schools fact-finding report released

Jill Tucker:

With a one-day teacher strike looming in Oakland, a fact-finding report released Thursday gave both the district and the teachers union some ammunition in the bitter battle over a new labor contract.
The report, a required step following failed contract negotiations, validated the district’s claims of financial desperation, but it also gave a nod to the Oakland Education Association’s claims of relatively low teacher pay and need for small class sizes.
It urged both sides to get over the past – a history mired in fiscal mismanagement and bitterness.

Seattle Teachers Union Bristles at New Coalition’s Effort to Muscle In on Contract Negotiations

Nina Shapiro:

Contract negotiations began this week between Seattle Public Schools and the teachers union, and the atmosphere is already getting testy–but not between the parties you might expect. Seattle Education Association president Olga Addae is peeved over a new coalition led by the non-profit Alliance for Education that is trying to muscle in on the talks.
Although technically no one else is allowed at the bargaining table besides the union and the district, the “Our Schools Coalition” last week launched a campaign to influence the process by unveiling a list of nine proposed changes it would like to see in the new contract–all of which are aimed at supporting good teachers and weeding out the bad.
While the group’s ideas are not necessarily new, its effort to influence the negotiations is. And the coalition may have the political clout to do just that.

Grade Inflation: Who Really Failed?

Scott Jaschik:

Dominique G. Homberger won’t apologize for setting high expectations for her students.
The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn’t use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn’t want students to get very far with guessing.
Students in introductory biology don’t need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university’s administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor’s right to set standards in her own course.
To Homberger and her supporters, the university’s action has violated principles of academic freedom and weakened the faculty.

UNDERFUNDED TEACHER PENSION PLANS: It’s Worse Than You Think

Josh Barro & Stuart Buck:

To all the other fiscal travails facing this country’s states and largest cities, now add their pension obligations, which are far greater than they may realize or are willing to admit. This paper focuses on the crisis in funding teachers’ pensions, because education is often the largest program area in state budgets, making it an obvious target for cuts.
Although it is generally acknowledged that education is the foundation of every modern society’s future prosperity, schools unfortunately will have to compete with retirees for scarce dollars. This competition is uneven, because retirees have a legal claim on promised pension benefits that supersedes schools’ budgetary needs. Consequently, Americans can look forward to higher taxes and cuts in services, resulting in fewer teachers, bigger classes, and facilities that are allowed to deteriorate. In several states, these developments have already arrived.
The crux of the problem is the gap between assets and liabilities affecting the fifty-nine pension funds that cover most public school teachers in America. Some of these are general state-employee pension funds, while others cover only teachers. Among the findings of our study of these funds:

Milwaukee Public Schools’ labor relations and the new superintendent

Public Policy Forum:

Over the past few days, four former MPS superintendents have met in two public forums to share the lessons they have learned about running the state’s largest school district. In both forums a recurring theme was Howard Fuller’s contention that: “I was in charge, but I wasn’t in control.”
His meaning, with which the other former superintendents generally agreed, was that the labor contracts with the teachers and principals unions constrained his ability to make dramatic changes in the district. The implication was that the district’s new superintendent, Gregory Thornton, would find it similarly difficult to improve outcomes under the current labor-management dynamic.
Whether this perception is accurate or not with regard to MPS, a new, still tentative, labor agreement in the Washington D.C. school district provides an example of a superintendent turning labor negotiating on its head. The D.C. superintendent, Michelle Rhee, has received much national press over the past two years as she pushed for a new paradigm of how, and how much, teachers are paid in D.C.

Why Smart, Ambitious People Rarely Become Teachers

Forrest Hinton:

WARNING: This blog post is utterly simple and obvious. There are some life phenomena, events, and trends that are widely recognized and accepted by most people as just plain Truth. (Majority perception isn’t always right, but it often is.) The argument that follows needs no regressions, 5-page data sets, or integration symbols.
This is a fact: Smart, ambitious people are rarely choosing K-12 teaching as a career these days.
Consider that, in 2007, among high school seniors who took the SAT and intended to major in education, the average scores were a dismal 480 in Critical Reading, 483 in Mathematics, and 476 in Writing. Compare those scores with the average scores of students intending to become engineers–524, 579, and 510. Or to students intending to enter the fields of communications and journalism: 523, 501, 519. Also consider that the most competitive, elite colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, aren’t offering undergraduate majors in teaching or education.

Another Chicken Little Madison School District Budget

Lynn Welch:

It’s a good thing Madison is a full of certified smarty-pants. It takes a high level of smarts just to comprehend the complex and shifting budget situation faced by the Madison school district. Even some school board members have a hard time making sense of it.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Lucy Mathiak, the board’s vice president, of the process by which the district has presented information about its proposed $372.8 million budget this year. “When you have the health and welfare of schools on the line, I feel like I have to ask for answers. It’s not a comfortable position.”
Frustrated, Mathiak first raised questions about how the district came to its projected $30 million budget hole in her School Daze blog. She notes, first of all, that the gap was closer to $18 million, presuming the board exercises its existing ability to raise taxes, as approved by voters in a 2008 referendum: “This means that the draconian school closings and massive staff layoffs reported earlier are unlikely to happen.”
But even if that gap is plugged, new ones are opening up. Recently the district was told by a consultant that it needs to do $85.7 million in repairs to existing buildings over the next five years, well beyond the $4 million a year it budgets to this end.

100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

James Crow professor emeritus of genetics at the UW-Madison

James Crow, professor emeritus of genetics at the UW-Madison recently gave a talk to the Madison Literary Club on “100 Years of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Click to download a 4.5mb .zip file that contains a few images from Monday’s Madison Literary Club talk.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin pension funding for teachers falls $10.9 billion short, report says

Amy Hetzner:

Wisconsin’s statewide pension system for public employees may not be as well-funded as the state reports, with a new study estimating it could be as much as $10.9 billion short in meeting its obligations just to teachers.
While the state estimates that the Wisconsin Retirement System is nearly 100% funded, the report by the conservative Manhattan Institute and Foundation for Educational Choice warns that the amount could be far less.
By using asset growth projection rates similar to what are required for private pension plans, the study found that Wisconsin’s retirement system would be considered only 78% funded. In addition, an analysis that takes into account recent stock market activity drops it to 72% funding, according to the report.
“We think this is more accurate than the stated market value of assets,” said Josh Barro, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the report, which was released Tuesday.
Pension plans that are not adequately funded could lead to higher property taxes or take resources away from the classrooms, Barro said. “Pension obligations are not some big ethereal thing,” he said.

Reading Period

When I was a student at Cambridge University, I was told that term time was for attending lectures and socializing, at Oxford and Cambridge, and vacation time was for reading lots of books (a reading period). When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, (this is my 50th reunion year), we were given a formal Reading Period before exams, to help us catch up on semester reading assignments and prepare for finals.
If we would like to expect high school teachers of English and History to work with their students on the sort of serious research paper from which they will learn a lot on their own, and which will prepare them for college term papers, we have to give teachers a Reading Period, too, but we don’t, so many don’t assign such papers, and the majority of our public high school students now go on to college unprepared for college writing and panicked when their first assignments come down.
Laura Arandes, when she was a Freshman at Harvard, was shocked at the newacademic writing expectations, because at her public high school in Southern California she had never been asked to write more than a five-paragraph essay. She wrote me that:

I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they’re right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.
It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn’t easily quantified and demonstrable.

A survey of college professors done a couple of years ago by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them thought the students they were seeing were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from 2008 found that more than one million of our high school graduates, with diploma and college acceptances in hand, are put into remedial courses when they arrive at college. The California State College people reported at a conference in Philadelphia last fall that 47% of their Freshman were in remedial writing courses. I asked the Director of Composition at Stanford if they had any remedial writing courses, and she told me that, no, all Freshman had to take a composition course.
So, what is the matter with all those public high school English and History teachers, that they are not preparing our graduates for college writing tasks? Many public high school teachers have five classes of thirty students each. With 150 students, if the teacher assigns a 20-page paper, she/he will have 3,000 pages of student research and writing to read, consider and correct when they come in. If she/he takes an hour on each paper, that would require 150 hours, or 30 days at five hours a day.
Even teachers who do a lot of their preparation and correcting after regular school hours, at night and on the weekends, do not have 150 hours to go over research papers. As a result, they do not assign them, students do not learn how to do the reading and writing required, and colleges (and students) complain when students arrive unprepared.
A sensible solution, it seems to me, would be to provide a Reading Period of perhaps eight school days for History and English teachers to do the necessary work to prepare their students for serious academic papers. This will seem excessive and unmanageable to administrators, but not, perhaps, if they consider the extra time already allotted in our public high schools for other things, like band practice, layup drills for basketball, yearbook, concerts, football and baseball practice, and on and on and on, when it comes to non-academic purposes.
If we do give the necessary time for teachers of English and History to work with their students on research papers, and to evaluate their work, I believe our students will learn how to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious term papers, but if we continue to expect the impossible of our teachers, they will continue to ask less academically of their students than they can do, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

D.C. Contract Previsionist History!

Andrew Rotherham:

I have a great deal of respect for Larry Cuban and his important work, but this blog post on Michelle Rhee reads like boilerplate applied to a situation that it doesn’t fit.
For starters, when you actually read the new contract you’ll see that Rhee didn’t compromise a lot away, she basically got everything she wanted – including tenure reform. If there is a lesson in the contact timeline and resolution it’s far less about compromise than about fortitude. Cuban says that the teachers got the raises they wanted. OK, sure. But Rhee wanted those, too!
The AFT’s Randi Weingarten deserves a great deal of credit (which so far she hasn’t gotten in the media in my view**) for signing a contract that effectively ends tenure and addresses layoffs in a respectful but cost-sustainable form, but the spin that this was a give and take deal evaporates when you actually read the document. It’s precedent setting in some key ways.*
Second, I don’t know where Cuban gets his 5 percent figure on the number of ineffective teachers in D.C.’s schools but while the percent can certainly be overstated in the public debate you’re hard pressed to find anyone with firsthand experience in the D.C. schools or around them who does not peg that number higher. I was a charter trustee in D.C. for seven years and have spent a lot of time in both sector’s of the city’s public schools and would place that figure higher than 5 percent in a lot of the city’s charter schools, too, by the way. This just isn’t something the field does well yet.

Teacher debate over Washington, DC contract heats up

Bill Turque:

Twenty percent over five years is the best we’re ever going to do. Yes, there are problems, but let’s sign and move on.
Private donors such as the Walton Family Foundation are not to be trusted. They’ll be gone, along with their money, the moment Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee leaves.
The deal is a trap, because it does nothing to limit the IMPACT evaluation system, which is a disaster, or to protect teachers from the kind of layoffs Rhee instigated last October.
This, in paraphrase, is some of the conversation among teachers over the tentative contract agreement announced last week. If District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi certifies the funding commitments of the four foundation donors as sound, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) will mail out ballots to begin a two-week voting period. This week, WTU president George Parker begins a series of informational meetings for teachers to discuss the proposed deal. The sessions, which all start at 4:30 p.m., will be Tuesday at McKinley High School, Thursday at Woodrow Wilson, Monday, April 19, at Ballou and Wednesday, April 21, at Spingarn.

Fewer Students, More Teachers: Even as enrollment falls, school districts keep hiring.

Wall Street Journal:

New York Governor David Paterson wants to reduce state aid to local school districts next year by 5% to address the state’s $9.2 billion budget deficit, and state educators are complaining that the cuts could result in teacher layoffs. Maybe so, but the reality in New York and other states is that teacher hires in recent years have far outpaced student enrollment.
A new report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy found that New York public schools added 15,000 teachers between 2000 and 2009, even though enrollment fell by 121,000 students over the same period. New York City, home to the nation’s largest school system, added 7,000 teachers and 4,000 nonteaching professionals (guidance counselors, administrators, nurses) even as its enrollment was decreasing by 63,000 kids, according to state data.
Teachers unions prefer fewer students per class because it means more dues-paying jobs, but the evidence that it improves academic outcomes is thin. In any case, the Empire Center report found that “by national standards, class sizes in New York were small even before the further staff expansion of the past nine years.” In 2008 New York’s pupil-teacher ratio was 13.1, the eighth lowest among the 50 states, and its per-pupil spending ($16,000) leads the nation.

Proposed Madison School District Maintenance Referendum: 1999, 2005 and 2010 Documents

The Madison School District is considering another maintenance referendum ($85M?). The documents below provide a list of completed (1999, 2005) and planned projects (2010+). The reader may wish to review and compare the lists:

The 2005 special election included 3 referenda questions, just one of which passed – the maintenance matter.

New Madison School District Senior Administrator Hiring Requests

Superintendent Dan Nerad:

In the approved Plan to Align the Work of the Administration to the District’s Mission and Strategic Plan, the Reorganization Plan, it states “For all revised or newly created positions, job descriptions will be developed and submitted to the Board of Education for approval.”
On the April 12, 2010 Regular Meeting agenda – Superintendent’s Announcements and Reports – I am seeking action on four position descriptions representing three new positions as a result of the approved reorganization plan and one revised description. These include:

Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer
Director Professional Development Director
Early and Extended Learning
Executive Director – Curriculum and Assessment

Action on these position descriptions is being sought at this time in order to allow the newly created positions to be posted in as timely a manner as possible.
When additional existing position descriptions are revised, as a result of the reorganization plan, they will be submitted to the Board for review and approval. Please let me know if you have any questions on these position descriptions.

The Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer adds a layer between the current Superintendent, Dan Nerad and a number of positions that formerly reported to him:

The Deputy Superintendent/Chief Learning Officer provides leadership in the ongoing development, implementation and (curriculum, instructional and responsible for the improvement of all learner-related programs within the all assigned administrators
Supervises:
Assistant Superintendents-Elementary and Executive Director of Educational Services Executive Director of Curriculum and Ksse:,snm Executive Director of Student Services Director of Professional Development Coordinator-Grants and Fund Development Executive Assistant

Historic Madison School District staffing levels can be reviewed here: 2004-2005 FTE counts were 3872. A 2010-2011 MMSD Budget Book document displays a FTE total of 3,755.03.

Wisconsin Schools Chief May Get More Power

Alan Borsuk:

Key legislators and major players in Wisconsin’s education scene are close to agreement on a package of ideas aimed at invigorating efforts to improve low performing schools, particularly in Milwaukee.
The focus of the proposal is on giving Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, an array of new tools for taking on the problems of the schools in the state that get the weakest results.
According to a draft of the proposal, when it comes to low-performing schools, Evers would have powers to order school boards to change how principals are hired and fired; how teachers are assigned; how teachers and principals are evaluated, including the use of student performance data; and how curriculum and training of teachers is handled.
“There’s a large consensus of people who are around this,” State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said. “That’s exciting.”
Evers said, “We feel confident we have a good, meaningful piece of legislation.” He said it had been “an amazing few weeks” as prospects for a major education reform package this year went from bleak to energized. He said conversations, including a session Wednesday at the Capitol with many of the major players, had involved hard conversations in which people had given ground on stands they had taken previously.

Redesigning Education: Rethinking the School Corridor

Trung Le:

“I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive.”

– John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, “No Easy Victories” (1968)
Education reform is in the air and taking root in thousands of classrooms across the country. From overhauling No Child Left Behind to closing poorly performing schools and raising student expectations, the push for change is powerful. Yet, the space where most learning takes place–the school and classroom–has changed little over the last 200 years.
Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. School designers call these hallways “double-loaded corridors.” The factory model of control and direct instruction still pervades most new schools. If we are to have thorough-going school reform, we must change the design model, too, starting with the place students first enter the school.

Veto merit pay for teachers?

Palm Beach Post:

Merit pay for teachers based on genuine, verifiable student learning would be a good thing. But the bill the Legislature finalized early Friday morning has too many holes in it, takes away local control and doesn’t pay for the changes it orders.
Gov. Crist has said he might veto the bill, and that’s exactly what he should do.
The bill requires local school districts to hire, fire and pay teachers according to how well students do on end-of-course exams in all subjects. But those tests don’t exist yet. So how can teachers and students know they’ll be valid when they go into effect in 2014? The Legislature says the state Department of Education will take care of the details.
That would be more reassuring if the state had a better track record on the FCAT. For a decade Florida has corrupted an otherwise useful test by putting way too much weight on it. Entire schools and districts are graded on a high-stakes test that doesn’t even cover most subjects.

A pact for D.C. school reform

Washington Post:

THROUGHOUT the torturous contract talks between D.C. schools and teachers, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee vowed she would not agree to anything that didn’t further her efforts at reform. The innovative agreement announced Wednesday is evidence of that resolve — and also of a gutsy willingness by local and national union leaders to make the changes that are needed if D.C. children are to do better in school.
Ms. Rhee and officials of the Washington Teachers’ Union reached an accord — subject to ratification by the full membership and approval by the D.C. Council — that would provide base salary increases of 21 percent over five years. In return, school officials would get important tools to reward teachers who do well with children and hold accountable those who don’t. This includes a performance-based bonus system to be instituted in the fall, greater autonomy in assigning teachers and better means of getting rid of teachers unable to produce results.

Vouchers and the Rising Tide

Greg Forster:

I haven’t had a chance to read the details yet, but from the executive summary of the new results released today by the School Choice Demonstration Project, it looks like vouchers have done a good job of improving education for all students in the city of Milwaukee.
What? That’s not the way you heard it?
Of course not. Because the new result, taken in isolation from other information, simply says that after two years, the voucher students are making learning improvements about the same as public school students. The scores for the voucher students are higher, but the difference is not statistically certain.
However, let’s plug that into the larger universe of information. We know – from the very same research project – that vouchers are improving education in Milwaukee public schools. The positive incentives of competition and the improved matching of student needs to school strengths are causing public schools to deliver a better education.

On New Jersey K-12 Schools’ Staffing (and spending) Growth

Steven Malanga:

Gov. Chris Christie is trying to solve New Jersey’s chronic bud get problems by cutting spending, including state aid to local schools. But the state’s powerful teacher unions and many school boards are balking — claiming that this will either drive up local property taxes or result in devastating cuts to school services.
In fact, there’s plenty of fat to cut. For proof, just take a close look at the recent hiring and spending patterns of Jersey’s school districts: Both hiring and spending have risen far faster than can be justified by the mild growth in enrollment. Thus, most should have plenty of room to cut spending without major impact.
Given the state’s chronic budget woes, the schools’ hiring spree defies logic. Since 2001, just as budget problems began in earnest, public-school enrollment in Jersey has risen by less than 3 percent, or slightly more than 36,000 students. But total school hiring (full-time employees and equivalents) has jumped by 14 percent, or nearly 28,000 employees, according to federal Census statistics.

Rhode Island Education Commissioner Gist: Failing schools need sweeping change

Eric Tucker:

Failing schools are a drain on the state’s already sluggish economy and require wholesale transformation, not just minor tinkering, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist told lawmakers Wednesday in a speech on education reform.
Gist, whose reform efforts led to the firings of all teachers and staff at one of the state’s worst-performing schools, said test scores in the state need vast improvement, the graduation rate must grow and too few high school graduates — just more than half — are heading directly to college.
Improving schools is critical to the economy in Rhode Island, a state with nearly 13 percent unemployment, since students who drop out will struggle and be a cost to society, Gist said in an address to the General Assembly.
“We cannot thrive in a knowledge-based marketplace if 45 percent of our high-school students cannot do math and 39 percent cannot do science at the very basic level,” said Gist, who is in her first year as commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
The commissioner annually addresses the Legislature.

California’s schools From bad to worse

The Economist:

AS THE Obama administration spreads enthusiasm about a proposal to replace a patchwork of state education standards with national ones, it might also heed a cautionary tale. In the 1990s California too established rigorous standards. “We thought they were the highest,” up there with those of Massachusetts and Indiana, says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC. But California never translated those standards into results. Its public schools are, with some exceptions, awful. Moreover, the state’s fiscal crisis is about to make them even worse.
California’s 8th-graders (14-year-olds), for example, ranked 46th in maths last year. Only Alabama, Mississippi and the District of Columbia did worse. California also sends a smaller share of its high-school graduates to college than all but three other states. One of its roughly 1,000 school districts, Los Angeles Unified, which happens to be the second-largest in the country, has just become the first to be investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights about whether it adequately teaches pupils who have little or no English.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist who is trying to reform education, blames a combination of California’s dysfunctional governance, with “elected school boards made up of wannabes and unions”, and the fact that the state’s teachers’ union is both more powerful and “more regressive” than elsewhere. The California Teachers Association (CTA) is the biggest lobby in the state, having spent some $210m in the past decade–more than any other group– to intervene in California’s politics.

We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities

Peter Conn:

Predictions are always perilous. Many of us recall the hearty enthusiasm of the Bowen report of 1989, which assured prospective graduate students that they would find “a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences” when they earned their degrees in the mid-1990s. Of course, they did not.
Moral: Avoid confident assertions about the future of the academic job market in the humanities (or in any other field). It may be that our current dilemma is another episode in a longish cyclical history. It may also be, as I rather pessimistically suspect, that something more serious is going on.
My reason is that just about all of the key drivers are simultaneously pointed in the wrong direction. Full-time tenured and tenure-track jobs in the humanities are endangered by half a dozen trends, most of them long-term.

Dispelling Myths about Gifted Students and Gifted Education

Tamara Fisher:

Back in 1982, Gifted Child Quarterly published a special edition that focused on myths about gifted education – and the research that dispels those myths. For a look at those first articles, check out this link. It really was an important collection of works, focusing on such myths as “myth: we need to have the same scores for everyone” and “myth: there is a single curriculum for the gifted” and “ myth: the gifted constitutes a single, homogenous group.”

Recently, GCQ undertook the same task, tackling a series of current myths about gifted students and gifted education and providing the research that backs up why those myths are not true. Many of the myths tackled in the 2009 issue are the very same ones tackled in the 1982 issue, plus the list is expanded with timely and relevant new (actually – old) myths, such as “myth: it is fair to teach all children the same way” and “myth: classroom teachers have the time, the skill, and the will to differentiate adequately” and “myth: high-ability students don’t face problems and challenges.”

States push to pay teachers based on performance

Dorie Turner:

For parents and politicians hungry for better schools, the idea of paying teachers more if their students perform better can seem as basic as adding two and two or spelling “cat.”
Yet just a handful of schools and districts around the country use such strategies. In some states, the idea is effectively illegal.
That could all be changing as the federal government wields billions of dollars in grants to lure states and school districts to try the idea. The money is persuading lawmakers around the country, while highlighting the complex problems surrounding pay-for-performance systems.
Some teachers, like Trenise Duvernay, who teaches math at Alice M. Harte Charter School outside of New Orleans, want to be rewarded for helping students succeed. Duvernay is eligible for $2,000 a year or more in merit bonuses based on how well her students perform in classroom observations and on achievement tests.

School Choice Deserves the Red Carpet Treatment

Christian Schneider:

I generally have a great deal of sympathy for regular schmoes who look inordinately like famous people. Through no fault of their own, they walk through life being judged on what they are not (the famous person), rather than what they are (a working stiff that is sick of being told he looks like Jim from “The Office.”)
Imagine if you were the guy who works at Kinko’s who looks sort of like Matt Damon. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) People don’t notice that you may be better looking than your average guy – they only judge you on how far you fall short of looking like Jason Bourne. (After all, if you looked exactly like Matt Damon, you probably wouldn’t be working at Kinko’s. Staples, maybe – but certainly not Kinko’s.)
On Wednesday of this week, the results of a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were released. The study, mandated by a state law enacted in 2006 and conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, is an attempt to compare student achievement in the Choice program in Milwaukee to similar students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

Ongoing evaluation of Milwaukee Choice Program finds students achieving on same level as peers

Stacy Forster:

Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, presented their findings at UW-Madison. The study also found that Milwaukee Public Schools are doing better than expected when compared with other urban school districts.
The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.
The comparison between students in private voucher schools and those in public schools was made two years after large panels of students in the program and students in the Milwaukee public school system had been carefully matched to each other.

Minnesota Governor Urges Changes in Teacher Licensing

Associated Press:

Minnesota was hoping for $330 million in grants, which go to states deemed innovative in their school policies. In the next round, Minnesota can’t get more than $175 million.
Pawlenty wants more latitude to let experts become teachers without going through traditional routes, to reassign teachers based on effectiveness and to more closely link teacher pay to student performance.
Democratic state Rep. Mindy Greiling said the alternative licensure proposal has a better shot than the others.

Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don’t believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn’t simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren’t we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren’t answered in the teachers’ manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don’t yet know how to teach it to others.

Wisconsin Likely to Adopt “Common Core” K-12 Standards, Drop Oft-Criticized WKCE

Gayle Worland:

Wisconsin students can count on one hand the number of times they’ll still have to take the math section — or any section — of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the annual weeklong test whose results for 2009-10 were scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That’s because the WKCE is expected to give way in a few years to tests based on new national academic standards proposed last month that could become final this spring.
The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and all 50 U.S. states except Alaska and Texas in the fall signed on to the development of the Common Core State Standards for math and English, which spell out what the nation’s public schoolchildren should be taught from kindergarten through high school.
When the final standards are unveiled, probably in late May, Wisconsin likely will adopt them, said Sue Grady, executive assistant to the state school superintendent.

Lessons from the First Round of Race to the Top

The New Teacher Project:

In Round 1 of Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education delivered on its promise to hold states to a high bar for reform. Only 2 states out of 16 finalists and 41 total applicants were selected for awards: Delaware and Tennessee.
These states won because they outlined bold, comprehensive visions of reform and demonstrated the ability to make them a reality. Statewide teacher effectiveness policies were the foundation for their success. They focused on putting effective teachers in every classroom and giving teachers the critical feedback and support they need to do their best work. They shifted to evaluation systems that improve their ability to recognize great teachers and respond to poor performance. Together they set a new benchmark for reform that Round 2 applicants must meet in order to win.
This analysis offers a close look at the scoring of the Round 1 finalists. It refutes some of the most common myths about Race to the Top and offers important lessons for states applying for the $3.4 billion in funding that remains available in Round 2.
At the same time, it examines scoring deficiencies that the Department of Education must address. While these issues did not result in a lowering of the bar for Round 1 winners, they could mean the difference between winning and losing for states applying in Round 2.

More Pay for Teachers Reform bills will pay off for teachers, House sponsor says

Kenric Ward:

Florida’s education reform bills would mean more money — not less — for public-school teachers, says Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey.
“This bill (HB7189) does not affect retirement, it does not cut salaries, it does not eliminate tenure for current teachers,” Legg told a packed meeting of the House Education Policy Council on Monday.
Instead, Legg said, a new performance-based pay program would bring “value-added” components to setting salaries.
Effective July 1, 2014, school districts would be required to reward “effective” or “highly effective” teachers “on top of base pay,” Legg said. Half of those ratings would be based on student learning gains, with the remaining 50 percent tied to other factors, subject to collective bargaining agreements.
Since 1999, districts have been under orders from the state Department of Education to implement pay scales “primarily” linked to academic performance. The reform bills define “primarily” as 50 percent and order districts to earmark 5 percent of funding for performance pay. Statewide, that 5 percent share currently amounts to $900 million annually.

TIP/School voucher study results

Stacy Forster:

Reports on the third-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will be released in Madison on Wednesday, April 7.
The reports on growth, school switching, testing, integration and other measures of the 20-year-old program will be released by the evaluation team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Room 313 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The evaluation team includes professor John Witte of UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs; Patrick Wolf, Jeffery Dean, Jonathan Mills and Brian Kisida, all of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas; Joshua Cowen of the University of Kentucky; David Fleming of Furman University; Meghan Condon of UW-Madison; and Thomas Stewart of Qwaku & Associates.
The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the evaluation in 2005 to learn how well the program, the oldest and largest urban educational voucher program in the United States, is working. The maximum voucher amount in 2007-08 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used vouchers to attend secular or religious private schools.
The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in terms of longitudinal student achievement growth and grade attainment, drop-out rates and high school graduation rates. The former will be primarily accomplished by measuring and estimating student growth in achievement as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations in math and reading in grades three through eight during a five-year period.

K-12 Math: The Separate Path and the Well Travelled Road

Barry Garelick:

It explores two different approaches to math; one is representative of the fuzzy math side of things, and the other is in the traditionalist camp. I make it clear what side I’m on. I talk about how the fuzzy side uses what I call a “separate path” in which students are given open ended and ill posed problems as a means to teach them how to apply prior knowledge in new situations. I present two different problems, one representing each camp.
The math may prove challenging for some readers, though high school math teachers should have no problems with it.
Much has been written about the debate on how best to teach math to students in K-12–a debate often referred to as the “math wars”. I have written much about it myself, and since the debate shows no signs of easing, I continue to have reasons to keep writing about it. While the debate is complex, the following two math problems provide a glimpse of two opposing sides:
Problem 1: How many boxes would be needed to pack and ship one million books collected in a school-based book drive? In this problem the size of the books is unknown and varied, and the size of the boxes is not stated.
Problem 2: Two boys canoeing on a lake hit a rock where the lake joins a river. One boy is injured and it is critical to get a doctor to him as quickly as possible. Two doctors live nearby: one up-river and the other across the lake, both equidistant from the boys. The unhurt boy has to fetch a doctor and return to the spot. Is it quicker for him to row up the river and back, or go across the lake and back, assuming he rows at the same constant rate of speed in both cases?
The first problem is representative of a thought-world inhabited by education schools and much of the education establishment. The second problem is held in disdain by the same, but favored by a group of educators and math oriented people who for lack of a better term are called “traditionalists”.

Top 10 Myths in Gifted Education

Via a kind reader.

Film: A Right Denied – The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform

via a kind reader’s email:

Whitney Tilson and True South Studios present A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform. Education reformer Whitney Tilson gives the most in-depth exploration ever committed to film of the twin achievement gaps that threaten our nation’s future: between the U.S. and our economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education’s shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them. He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film. More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.

Eight questions for Wendy Kopp

The Economist:

WENDY KOPP proposed the idea for creating a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. She then did just that, creating Teach For America (TFA) shortly after graduation. Ms Kopp tells the remarkable story behind the early days of the organisation in her book “One Day, All Children…”. Today TFA attracts many of the brightest college graduates to teach in America’s neediest communities. In the most recent school year, the organisation placed some 7,300 corps members in schools across the country. They join nearly 17,000 TFA alumni, many of whom have become leaders in the education-reform movement. We close out education week by asking Ms Kopp about TFA’s success and what lessons it holds for America’s public-education system.
DiA: You have done a lot of research on the characteristics of successful TFA teachers. What is the magic formula and do you think it holds for non-TFA teachers as well?
Ms Kopp: We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.
It follows that the characteristics our research has shown to differentiate our most successful teachers are leadership characteristics–perseverance in the face of challenges, the ability to influence and motivate others, organisational ability, problem-solving ability. All of our insights around successful teaching have come from our work in the nation’s most economically disadvantaged communities so I can’t say that this is the approach or that these are the characteristics that differentiate successful teachers elsewhere.

In today’s society, teachers must fill gap

Eugene Kane:

The recent disclosure that African-American fourth-graders in Wisconsin have the worst reading skills in the entire country came as a shock to many Milwaukeeans.
Keisha Arnold wasn’t among them.
Her 10-year-old son has experienced reading problems and poor grades at his Milwaukee school for some time. Arnold has been frustrated with her inability to find a way to address the problem.
“I just don’t understand why he can’t seem to get the help he needs,” said Arnold, 28, a single parent who returned to Milwaukee a few years ago after living in Phoenix.
When she returned to her hometown, she enrolled her son in a local charter school. “I didn’t want him to go to MPS because I didn’t think he’d get a good education there,” she explained.
But it didn’t take long for Arnold to recognize that deficiencies in her son’s reading and math skills were not being addressed.
She met with his teachers and sought additional tutoring, but her son’s grades failed to improve.

How About Interdistrict Teacher Choice?

New Jersey Left Behind:

The New York Times education writer, Winnie Hu, had no trouble in Saturday’s paper distinguishing some of NJ’s wealthy and high-performing school districts from our poor, low-performing ones: Cresskill, Montclair, Ridgewood, Millburn, Westfield, West Windsor-Plainsboro and Glen Ridge, she writes, “have long attracted families because they offer some of the best public education in the state. But now many of these top school systems are preparing to reduce the academic and extracurricular opportunities that have long set them apart.”

“Have long set them apart.” It’s an irony-free description of NJ’s educational inequity despite decades of Abbott compensation and the hard line of accountability etched from No Child Left Behind legislation. Among are 591 school districts (and 566 municipalities) are intractably poor, failing schools. Leveling the playing field in NJ is a quixotic task. Sword-yielding education reformers tilt at the windmills of an inculcated culture of disparity with little appreciable difference in student achievement. We can’t cure poverty; we can’t break down district barriers unless we find the cohones to desegregate and move to county-wide districts, an unlikely scenario. School choice is an embryonic concept with a long, slow learning curve (although the DOE just received 36 charter applications, a new record).

Hong Kong Model school under threat as rolls fall

Liz Heron:

Six years ago, the then-principal of a small primary school in Sheung Wan was fired with enthusiasm for two key government policies – small-class teaching and integrated education for children with special needs.
Leung Wai-ming ploughed HK$1 million of his money into San Wui Commercial Society School to employ extra teachers and buy state-of-the-art materials and equipment for special needs teaching.

The illusion of ever-lower college acceptance rates

Valerie Strauss:

It may just be me, but I found myself getting increasingly annoyed as I read my colleague Jenna Johnson’s blogpost detailing the latest admissions statistics for some of the nation’s most elite schools.
For example, Harvard University’s 7 percent overall rate of admissions last year was apparently not low enough. This year, it dropped to 6.9 percent. Harvard received more than 30,000 applications this year, a 5 percent increase from last year, and accepted 2,110 students.
“That’s 28,000 broken hearts,” one admissions staff member said as several passed trays stuffed with rejections into a car to be mailed, according to the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson.
Duke University was down to 14.8 percent from 18 percent last year, after receiving 26,770 applications, up 11 percent from last year.

One in a Million

Seth Godin:

The chances of a high school student eventually becoming first violin for the Boston Philharmonic: one in a million.
The chances of a high school student eventually playing basketball in the NBA? About the same.
In fact, the chances of someone growing up and getting a job precisely like yours, whatever it is, are similarly slim. (Head of development at an ad agency, director of admissions for a great college… you get the idea). Every good gig is a long shot, but in the end, a lot of talented people get good gigs. The odds of being happy and productive and well compensated aren’t one in a million at all, because there are many good gigs down the road. The odds are only slim if you pick precisely one job.

Race to the Top Should Be Left Behind

Heather Kirn:

After reading aloud from an essay about the fast-food industry, I threw a typical softball question to the students of a UC Berkeley composition class:
“What’s the argument of the paragraph?”
Silence.
Written by a former student, the paragraph implied that a rise in American obesity is linked to increased dollars spent on fast food.
I called on a student. “Advertising?” she said, a word that appeared in the paragraph only once. Why did this student, a hard-working athlete, so badly misread the paragraph? Because instead of really interpreting the passage, she used a little clue. “Advertising” had been mentioned in the thesis just a paragraph earlier.
Unfortunately, strategies such as hers aren’t uncommon in the college classroom. Within the same lesson, another student made quick assumptions about a sentence’s meaning because of its first words. My colleagues and I often swap stories like these, in which our students use faulty shorthand in place of critical thinking.

Jaime Escalante didn’t just stand and deliver. He changed U.S. schools forever.

Jay Matthews:

From 1982 to 1987 I stalked Jaime Escalante, his students and his colleagues at Garfield High School, a block from the hamburger-burrito stands, body shops and bars of Atlantic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, allegedly covering the big political, social and business stories of the Western states, but I found it hard to stay away from that troubled high school.
I would show up unannounced, watch Jaime teach calculus, chat with Principal Henry Gradillas, check in with other Advanced Placement classes and in the early afternoon call my editor in Washington to say I was chasing down the latest medfly outbreak story, or whatever seemed believable at the time.
Escalante, who died Tuesday from cancer at age 79, did not become nationally famous until 1988, when the feature film about him, “Stand and Deliver,” was released, and my much-less-noticed book, “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” also came out. I had been drawn to him, as filmmakers Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca were, by the story of a 1982 cheating scandal. Eighteen Escalante students had passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam. Fourteen were accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service, based on similarities in their answers. Twelve took the test again, this time heavily proctored, and passed again.

The 3×5 Learning Revolution

Tom Vander Ark:

Twenty years after technology began transforming every other sector, there is finally enough movement on a sufficient number of fronts–15 to be precise–that, despite resilience, everything will change. New and better learning options are inevitable, but progress will be uneven by state/country and leadership dependent.
The 5 Drivers. These Web 2.0 forces are benefiting the learning sector, emerging economies, as well as every other sector:

More broadband: increasingly ubiquitous high speed Internet access is enabling a world of engaging content including video, multiplayer games, simulations, and video conferencing.
Cheap access devices: netbooks, tablets, and smart phones have dropped below the $100 per year ownership level enabling one-to-one computing solutions.
Powerful application development platforms: rapid application development and viral adoption have radically reduced cost and increased speed of bringing solutions to market.
Adaptive content: personalized news (iGoogle), networks (Facebook), purchasing (Amazon), and virtual environments (World of Warcraft) have created a ‘my way’ mindset that will eventually eliminate the common slog through print.
Platforms: Apple’s iPhone illustrates the elegant bundling of an application, purchasing, and delivery platform.

Union fails to restrict Los Angeles charter schools

Jason Song:

A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles teachers union to block the city’s school district from giving new campuses to charter schools was denied Friday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.
The suit was filed in December on behalf of United Teachers Los Angeles as a result of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s controversial school reform plan, which sought to turn over 30 campuses to bidders from inside and outside the district, including charter school organizations.
The lawsuit claimed that L.A. Unified could not allow charter operators to take over new campuses unless 50% of the district’s permanent teachers petitioned for it. Charters are independently managed public schools and are generally nonunion.
The legal process went forward, and the school board voted to give teacher-led groups control of 22 of the campuses; four were awarded to charters.

Mitch Henck & Don Severson on the Madison School District’s Budget

13.1mb mp3.
Mitch Henck & Don Severson.
Much more on the 2010-2011 Madison School District budget here.

A Madison School District Property Tax Increase Outlook (39% over the next 6 years) including 4 Year Old Kindergarten (4K)

Madison School District 102K PDF:

2009-2010 Adopted: 3.85%
2010-2011 “Projected”: 12.22%
2010-2011 “Cost to Continue”: 11.82%
2011-2012 “Projected”: 8.88%
2012-2013 “Projected”: 6.03%
2013-2014 “Projected”: 4.47%
2014-2015 “Projected”: 3.23%

The document projects that the Madison School District’s tax on a “typical” $250,000 home will increase from $2,545.00 in 2009-2010 to $3,545 in 2014-2015, a 39% increase over 6 years. Significant.
The District’s total property tax levy grew from $158,646,124 (1998-1999) to $234,240,964 (2009-2010); a 47.6% increase over that 11 year period.
The proposed 2010-2011 budget increases property taxes by 11.8% to $261,929,543
Background:

Madison School District 5 Year Budget Forecast
Madison School District Financial Overview:

1) Impact of State’s finance on MMSD finances and budget projections
We utilized two separate papers from the legislative fiscal bureau (attached) and a presentation given by Andrew Reschovsky to provide detail to the board of education. Unfortunately projections at this point in time are showing a shortfall for the 2011-13 biennial budget of approximately $2.3 million. Without knowing if there will be another stabilization type package to help ease this burden, chances are funding for education and many other State funded programs will be looked at for possible reduction.

A Summary of Research that Supports the Instructional Resource Teacher Positions (IRTs) in Madison’s Elementary Schools

Madison School District: [1.5MB PDF]

Professional development is the manner with which we all learn and grow in our profession. The needs of our students continue to grow and change. The expectations of teachers continue to develop. Larry Wilson once said, “Our options are to learn the new game, the rules, the roles of the participants, and how the rewards are distributed, or to continue practicing our present skills and become the best players in a game that is no longer being played.” Just as we expect doctors, lawyers, and other professions to be current on the latest research and methods, our teachers need to continue developing their skills through professional development.

“Professional development is the key to the success of a school.” (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
“One of the most cost-effective methods for making significant gains in student performance on standardized tests is providing teachers with better content knowledge and instructional methods to enhance the curriculum.” (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
“In the history of education, no improvement effort has ever succeeded in the absence of thoughtfully planned and well-implemented professional development.” (Guskey & Yoon, 2009)
‘A school culture that invites deep and sustained professional learning will have a powerful impact on student achievement.” (Brandt, 2003)
According to research, high-quality teaching has about five times more statistical effect than most feasible reductions in class size (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine as cited in Frank & Miles, 2007).
“We have a rich, untapped pool oftalent in the millions ofmediocre teachers that are currently in the classroom. Rather than dismiss them, we need to help them grow. If we could move two million teachers from ‘mediocre talent’ to even ‘mediocre- strong’, it would have an incredible effect on student outcomes… Rather than focusing on punishing bad schools and teachers, we need to develop a culture of development and growth.” (Scott, 2010.)

Fascinating.
Clusty search: “Instructional Resource Teacher“. Madison School District Instructional Resource Teacher Search.

What Students Do

In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, one day there was a faculty meeting during which some of my colleagues put on a skit about one of our most intractable problems: students wandering in the hallways during classes. One person played the principal, another the hall monitor, and others the guidance counselor, the vice-principal, and I can’t remember who else from the staff. One teacher played the student who had been in the halls.
They did a good job on the acting and the lines were good, but as it went on, I noticed something a bit odd. Everyone had a part and things to say, but the only passive member of the show was the student, who had nothing much to say or do.
I notice a parallel to this in the majority of discussions about education reform these days. With some exceptions, including Carol Jago, Diane Ravitch, Paul Zoch, and me, edupundits seem occupied with just about everything except what students do academically.
There is a lot of discussion of what teachers do, and what superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, financial officers, mayors, legislators, and so on, do, but the actual academic work of students gets very little attention.
This observation was reinforced for me when the TCR Institute did a study in 2002 of the assignment of serious term papers in U.S. public high schools. It was the first (and last) study of its kind, and it found that the majority of HS students are not being asked to do the sort of academic writing they need to work on to prepare themselves for college (and career).
In the last eight years, I have sought funds for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but no one seems interested. Of course, many billions have been spent since 2002 on school reinvention and reorganization, assessment plans, teacher selection, training and retention, and so on, but again, the academic work of the students (the principal mission of schools) is “more honored in the breach than the observance.”
My perspective on this is necessarily a bottom-up, Lower Education one. I publish the serious research papers of high school students of history. Most of the 20,000+ U.S. public high schools never send me one, which is not a great surprise, because most history departments, other than in IB schools, do not assign research papers.
But it gives me a curiosity over the neglect of student work which does not seem to be present in those whose focus is at a Higher Level in education. Those who live on the Public Policy level of Education Punditry can not see far enough Down or focus closely enough on the activity of schools to find out whether our HS students are reading history books and writing term papers.
I believe this is because foundation people, consultants, education professors, public policy experts, and their tribes mostly talk to each other, not to students or even to teachers, who are so far far beneath them. They hold conferences, and symposia, and they write papers and books about what needs to be done in education, but from almost none of them come suggestions that involve the academic reading and writing our students should be doing.
Of course what teachers do is vastly important, as well as very difficult to influence, but surely it cannot be that much more important than what students do.
Naturally, we should design curricula rich in knowledge, but if they don’t include serious independent academic work by students, the burden will still be on the teacher, and many too many students can slide through under it and arrive in college ready for their remedial classes in reading, math and writing, as more than a million do now each year.
Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.
We do need improvements in all the things the edupundits are working on, and the foundations and our governments are spending billions on. But if we continue to lack curiosity about and to ignore what students are doing academically, I feel sure all that money will continue to be wasted, as it has been so many many times in the past.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

What liberal arts are good for.

Rochelle Gurstein:

Why draw from the model? A number of years ago, my husband and I and some friends–all, except for me, artists who also teach at art schools here in New York–spent hours discussing this question, though without arriving at anything particularly convincing. A few of them recalled drawing from the model as undergraduates, but none had done so in graduate programs–these were the heady, experimental days of the early ’70s, when all the action took place in the seminar room; in my husband’s program, studios had been dispensed with altogether. When we turned our attention to the art world today, drawing and models seemed just as antiquated. Installation, photography, and video, more popular than ever, are mechanically derived. And though we could easily think of paintings with figures in them, all of them had been lifted from mass-media images; they had as little relation to drawing from the pose of a living person in the artist’s studio as photography.
Yet, at art schools today, freshmen are required to draw from the model, sometimes six hours at a stretch, their labors then judged by teachers who have no use for, indeed, who disdain, the practice in their own work. We spent quite a while trying to account for this odd disjuncture. The best anyone could come up with is that studio drawing focuses the eye and hand; it is an intense discipline in seeing and then translating what one sees into material form. This, it seemed to me, was another way of saying that it was good for its own sake, even if it had no relation to making art these days. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but the next morning what had eluded us the night before now appeared so ridiculously obvious that I could not believe we had missed it: The reason the Academy required students to master the painstaking practice of drawing from the model was because, until very recently, the action of figures–gods, heroes, and mere mortals–was the prime subject, the central drama, the moving force, of all the greatest paintings.

Monterey County schools Superintendent Nancy Kotowski gets veto power over Alisal district

Maria Ines Zamudio:

Nancy Kotowski, Monterey County superintendent of schools, will start overseeing the Alisal Union School District today after the state Board of Education unanimously appointed her as an interim state trustee.
Citing “the need to protect public interest,” the board decided to name Kotowski on Tuesday afternoon during an emergency meeting in Sacramento. She will have veto power over the Salinas district’s board of trustees until the state appoints a permanent trustee — and outlines his or her responsibilities and power — in May.
“My immediate goal is establish stability and prepare the District for an effective community meeting with the State Board of Education on April 14,” Kotowski said Tuesday. “This will be done by focusing all efforts on teaching and learning in the classrooms of the District.”
In March, the board assigned a state trustee to oversee two school districts in Monterey County: Greenfield Union and Alisal Union. The decision came after the districts chronically failed to meet academic standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. The state board also found that problems “managing adult relationships” were ruining the districts’ ability to improve student achievement.

Teachers fighting back in Florida

Valerie Strauss:

Even if you don’t live in Florida, you should pay attention to what is going on there.
Teachers, parents and even students in the Sunshine State call it the “Education Debacle.” And they are no longer sitting quietly, hoping that common sense will magically prevail with state legislators seemingly intent on passing legislation affectionately called a “hammer” on the teaching profession by its sponsor.
They are taking to the streets, literally and digitally, to transmit their horror over legislation that would end teacher job security, increase student testing and tie teacher pay to student test scores. It also prohibits school districts from taking into account experience, professional credentials or advanced degrees in teacher evaluation and pay.

Teachers use video, online games to help bring lessons to life

Amy Hetzner:

Sitting before a computer in the library at Wauwatosa West High School, senior Ricky Porter clicks his mouse and moves a squiggly web of multicolored lines across a computerized map speckled with red and blue dots.
Move one line wrong and an elected representative whose district he has redrawn will stand up in protest, a warning that Porter’s new map might not be able to pass an imaginary state legislature, governor and court review. But if he gets his lines just right and manages to please all the incumbents, while staying on the right side of the law, his mission is complete.
The Redistricting Game played by Porter and classmates in his American Public Policy class at West is one of a number of new online and video games that offer educational experiences for schools and teachers willing to experiment. Porter’s teacher, Chris Lazarski, who also plans to use a game named Peacemaker to teach students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said such games give students chances to interact and solve problems in a way with which they’re comfortable.
Porter agrees.

Dealing with the (School) District

Charlie Mas:

In it, Catbert, the Evil Human Resources Director, explains that leadership is the art of trading imaginary things in the future for real things today.
This is precisely the art of leadership practiced by Seattle Public Schools. Think of all of the imaginary future things they have promised in exchange for real things in the present. Then remember how few (if any) of the imaginary future things ever materialized.
When dealing with the public, the real thing they want in the present is usually your willingness to accept a change that is unacceptable and the imaginary thing in the future is some action that will mitigate the damage done by the change.
For example, if the APP community won’t kick up too much of a fuss over the split of the program, then the District will deliver an aligned, written, taught and tested curriculum concurrent with the split. The APP community didn’t oppose the split, but the District never delivered – and now clearly never will deliver – the promised curriculum.

Jaime Escalante dies at 79; math teacher who challenged East L.A. students to ‘Stand and Deliver’

Elaine Woo:

Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.
The subject of the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver,” Escalante died at his son’s home in Roseville, Calif., said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed the teacher in the film. Escalante had bladder cancer.
“Jaime didn’t just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives,” Olmos said earlier this month when he organized an appeal for funds to help pay Escalante’s mounting medical bills.
Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his Garfield High School students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam only to be accused later of cheating.

KIPP visitor’s critique, KIPP leader’s response

Jay Matthews:

A reader signing in as “suegjoyce” recently posted a comment on this blog describing her visit to a KIPP middle school “in the Delta.” KIPP is the Knowledge Is Power Program, the most successful charter school network in the country and the subject of my most recent book. I was pleased to see suegjoyce’s comment, since I have been urging readers curious about KIPP to ignore the myths they read on the Internet and instead visit a KIPP school. The vast majority of people I have encountered online with negative opinions of KIPP give no indication that they have ever been inside one of those schools, so she was setting a good example.
She had some critical things to say. She was not specific about which KIPP middle school she visited, but only one has the word “Delta” in its title, the KIPP Delta College Preparatory School in Helena-West Helena, Ark. So I asked Scott Shirey, executive director of the KIPP schools in that area, to respond. Neither Scott nor I know how to reach suegjoyce, but if she sees this and has more to say, I would be delighted to post her thoughts prominently on the blog.

DENIGRATION

Many educators greatly admire the wide range of human achievements over the millennia and want their students to know about them. However, there are those, like the Dean of the Education School at a major east coast university, who told me that: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth.” Translated, I suppose that might be rendered: “Individual greatness is a myth (squared).”
Why is it that so many of our teachers and others in education are, as it were, in the “clay feet” business, anxious to have our students know that human beings who accomplished wonderful things also had flaws, like the rest of us? As they emphasize the flaws, trying to encourage students to believe that they are just fine the way they are now, with their self-esteem and perhaps a couple of the multiple intelligences, they seem to teach that there is no need for them to seek out challenges or to emulate the great men and women who have gone before.
One of the first major problems with this, apart from its essential mendacity, is that it deprives students of the knowledge and understanding of what these people have accomplished in spite of their human failings. So that helps students remain ignorant as well as with less ambition.
It is undeniable, of course, that Washington had false teeth, sometimes lost his temper, and wanted to be a leader (sin of ambition). Jefferson, in addition to his accomplishments, including the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, the Louisiana Purchase and some other things, may or may not have been too close to his wife’s half-sister after his wife died. Hamilton, while he may have helped get the nation on its feet, loved a woman or women to whom he was not married, and it is rumored that nice old world-class scientist Benjamin Franklin was also fond of women (shocking!).
The volume of information about the large and small failings is great, almost enough to allow educators so inclined to spend enough time on them almost to exclude an equal quantity of magnificent individual achievements. Perhaps for an educator who was in the bottom of his graduating class, it may be some comfort to focus on the faults of great individuals, so that his own modest accomplishments may grow in comparison?
In any case, even the new national standards for reading include only short “informational texts” which pretty much guarantees for the students of educators who follow them that they will have very little understanding of the difficulties overcome and the greatness achieved by so many of their fellow human beings over time.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that: “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.” What Education School did he go to, I wonder?
Peter Gibbon, author of a book on heroes, regularly visits our high schools in an effort to counter this mania for the denigration of wonderful human beings, past and present.
Surely it would be worth our while to look again at the advantages of teaching our students of history about the many many people worthy of their admiration, however small their instructor may appear by comparison.
Malvolio was seriously misled in his take on the meaning of the message he was given, that: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them,” but his author, the greatest playwright in the English language, surely deserves, as do thousands of others, the attention of our students, even if he did leave the second-best bed to his wife in his will.
Let us give some thought to the motivation and competence of those among our educators who, whether they are leftovers of the American Red Guards of the 1960s or not, wish to advise our students of history especially, not to “trust anyone over thirty.”
After all, in order to serve our students well, even educators should consider growing up after a while, shouldn’t they?
==============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Sally Blount, Kellogg School of Management’s new dean, says being a middle child makes her perfect for the role

The Economist:

SALLY BLOUNT, unveiled today as the new dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, describes her appointment as a return to her intellectual home. The school was where, as a PhD student, she did much of her work in the fields of psychology and economics.
But other than a sense of going back to her roots, the main reason she was drawn to Kellogg, she says, is its reputation as a collaborative institution. “I am a middle child,” she explains. “So it’s in my DNA, this collaborative approach.”
Collaborative leadership is a model whose time appears to have come in business as well as business education. The days of the imperial CEO bestriding an organisation, browbeating the company with the force of his personality, became suddenly unfashionable at around the same time that sub-prime mortgages did. But, perhaps unusually for academia, which can be famous for its backbiting, teamwork has long been a characteristic of Kellogg.

Michigan can do more with less for our schools

Marchuk:

Michigan can harness innovation as a way to do more with less in K-12 education, even though that challenge may seem overwhelming. At a time when new investments in our K-12 system are not likely, Michigan must face the daunting task of improving student achievement and increasing graduation rates with fewer financial resources.
To date, K-12 education has yet to realize the full potential of using online learning to improve how educators teach and how students learn. Nearly every sector of our economy is now turning to information and communications technologies to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Education is not alone in its need to manage scarce resources, maintain relevance and succeed in today’s new global economy.
Research has shown online learning is academically effective and can provide meaningful alternatives for students who have a need for greater flexibility with their education due to individual learning styles, health conditions, employment responsibilities, lack of success with traditional school environments, or desire to be working early at the college level. Online learning needs to be part of the broader policy discussion related to restructuring public education during this prolonged budget crisis. Economic arguments in addition to the latest research on student learning support this position.

Traditional schools aren’t working. Let’s move learning online.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

Deep within America’s collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.
The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States — and they’re right to, as test results confirm again and again.
But just as most Americans disapprove of congressional shenanigans while harboring some affection for their own representative, parents tend to say that their child’s teacher is pretty good. Most people have mixed feelings about their own school days, but our national romance with teachers is deep and long-standing. Which is why the idea of kids staring at computers instead of teachers makes parents and politicians extremely nervous.

Poor Strategy, Muddled Efforts and Strong Opposition Killed the Doyle-Barrett plan to Overhaul Milwaukee’s Crisis Ridden Schools

Alan Borsuk:

It was an off-the-record conversation early last summer with a major figure in education politics in Wisconsin. I suggested that if a serious move was made to put the Milwaukee Public Schools under mayoral control, the outcome would be decided by a few specific people.
“Gwen Moore?” the source suggested.
No, but what an interesting thought. And it pointed to several key reasons that the proposal, when it came a couple months later from Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, faltered from the start, never picked up momentum, and soon became a dead idea walking.
When Moore, the popular congresswoman who is influential among Milwaukee’s African Americans, promptly came out against mayoral control, her decision pointed to three major flaws in the Doyle-Barrett plan:
*** There is almost no evidence that Doyle and Barrett prepared a strategy for building support for the idea before they went public. Was the fight even worth instigating if it had garnered so little support over the preceding years, and there was so little evidence anything had changed?

Swedish School Choice – 1100 schools….

BBC:

When I travelled to Sweden to report on their school system, I took some company – the Conservative party’s policy document Raising the Bar, Closing the Gap – its action plan for raising standards in schools, creating more good school places and making opportunity more equal.
It describes an educational utopia, a land where new schools can open up anywhere to meet parental demand. Even better, the increased competition for pupils forces standards up. The blueprint is based on similar reforms introduced in Sweden in 1992 as part of a sweeping New Labour-style reform programme to give more choice in public services.
I thought it was really good that I could choose the new school. I had a choice
Mimmi Kindstrom
There are now more than 1,100 such schools in Sweden, funded by the state, but operated independently.
I visited one of them. Kallskollen was one of the very first to be set up when the Swedish education system went from being one of the most centrally controlled, to being one of the most liberal.

Fascinating. Tom Vander Ark has more, with a link to Kunskapsskolan (Translation)

What can policymakers learn from happiness research?

Elizabeth Kolbert:

In 1978, a trio of psychologists curious about happiness assembled two groups of subjects. In the first were winners of the Illinois state lottery. These men and women had received jackpots of between fifty thousand and a million dollars. In the second group were victims of devastating accidents. Some had been left paralyzed from the waist down. For the others, paralysis started at the neck.
The researchers asked the members of both groups a battery of questions about their lives. On a scale of “the best and worst things that could happen,” how did the members of the first group rank becoming rich and the second wheelchair-bound? How happy had they been before these events? How about now? How happy did they expect to be in a couple of years? How much pleasure did they take in daily experiences such as talking with a friend, hearing a joke, or reading a magazine? (The lottery winners were also asked how much they enjoyed buying clothes, a question that was omitted in the case of the quadriplegics.) For a control, the psychologists assembled a third group, made up of Illinois residents selected at random from the phone book.

What does authentic learning mean, if anything?

Jay Matthews:

Those of us who wallow in educational jargon have all heard the term “authentic.” It seems to mean lessons that connect to the real world, like a physics class visiting a nuclear power plant or an English class performing a play by Edward Albee.
But like all fashionable terms, its meaning can evolve, or be distorted, depending on your point of view. I often use it to describe the powerful effect of telling Advanced Placement students in inner city schools that they are preparing for the same exam that kids in the richest school in the suburbs are taking. That makes their studies seem more authentic. Am I misusing the word?
How do you use it? Is it important in schools? Or is it just another buzz word gone bad?
I raise this intriguing issue, which had not occurred to me before, because of an email from Carl Rosin, an English and interdisciplinary/gifted class teacher at Radnor High School, 12 miles west of Philadelphia:

Advocating Online Curricular Options

Tom Vander Ark:

[Note: this unpublished paper was originally drafted in 2004 with Jim Shelton and draws heavily from the work of Paul Hill, Michael Barber, Michael Fullan, Kim Smith. Posting today, with a few updates, was inspired by a panel discussion yesterday including Paul Hill, Steve Adamowski, Garth Harries, Dacia Toll, and Andy Moffit]
The most important challenge in America today is creating systems of schools that work for all students, particularly low income and historically underserved groups. The goal of helping all students achieve at high levels is now decades old. We’ve made slow but steady progress in elementary literacy but secondary achievement levels and graduation rates remain stagnant. Hundreds of schools are helping most students achieve at high levels, but they remain largely random acts of innovation and heroic leadership. Few if any public school districts have achieved uniformly high performance and attainment levels. Building systems of schools that break the cycle of poverty and close the achievement/attainment gap remains critical to our economy, society and democracy.

Is a College Education Essential for Americans?

PBS NewsHour:

GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: Does the U.S. need more college graduates in its work force to remain competitive in the global economy? That was the central question at the kickoff of a new season of national debates hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, argued that we need more college graduates. George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richard Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University, argued that many jobs being created today don’t require college degrees.
PAUL SOLMAN: Is it not the case that the United States needs to have a more and more sophisticated work force? Isn’t it the case that, if other countries with whom we’re competing are becoming more sophisticated, that that’s a challenge to us, George?
GEORGE LEEF, director of research, John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy: Oh, it’s a challenge, but putting more people through college is not the way to meet it.
At the margin — remember, we’re not talking here about are we going to educate most of the Americans who — who have high skills and high aptitude, the high-SAT kids, the motivated students. They can — they’re going to go to college. The question is, are we going to get a few more at the margin into college?
That’s what we’re debating.

Comments on School District Budget Transparency

Melissa Westbrook:

Meg Diaz pulled together a chart (which I will post later on) that shows some of the “foundation, institutions and private donor contributions to SPS for 2009-2010”). It’s quite interesting reading to see how much some PTAs raise. There are some schools that have real money going through them like McGilvra PTA, $252,558 for a staffing grant, Laurelhurst PTA with $161,000, JSIS PTA, $280,000, Salmon Bay PTA $101,000). New School Foundation gave South Shore $1.2M.
Hey, bless all these people for raising this money and donating it.
But a lot of this says “PTA Supplemental Staffing”. Again, the PTA is not there to backfill staff or fix buildings and it is very sad that this is what is happening. (I know at least one school that does not allow this because of the worry of it being sustainable and I’m sure it is quite a heavy worry for parents to keep up this level of fundraising.) Given that this is happening, I’m a little surprised at how little engagement and respect parents receive given that kind of support and largesse.

Parents question Florida Senate education bill, say effective teachers could be lost

Katie Tammen:

Teachers aren’t the only ones talking about a proposed bill that will change the way they are evaluated and paid.
Parents talk about it when they pick up their children from school, at extracurricular activities and at church. Some of them are unfamiliar with the particulars of the bill, while others have written legislators to ask them to vote against the bill.
Few of them support it.
“I just do not feel like that is something that is going to help our kids or our education system in Florida,” said Amy Moye, who has two children at Bluewater Elementary School. “I think it’s going to hurt us in the long run. I am all for removing ineffective teachers from the classroom, but I think there are other ways to do it, and this is going to remove good teachers from the classroom.”

NJEA responds to Christie’s heavy criticism

Tom Hester, Sr.:

Under public pressure from Gov. Chris Christie to renegotiate contracts with local school boards and being accused by him as part of the problem of high education costs and not part of the solution, the 200,000-member state teachers’ union criticized him in return Friday.
New Jersey Education Association President Barbara Keshishian said Christie has chosen the welfare of residents who earn over $400,000 annually over full school funding for the benefit of children.
“The choice could not be more stark: tax cuts for millionaires, or full school funding for New Jersey kids,” Keshishian said. “Just a few weeks into his term Governor Christie has staked out his position, slashing nearly $1.5 billion from state aid to schools and higher education.
“At the same time, he has rejected out of hand any consideration of reinstating a very modest tax on the very wealthiest New Jersey residents, those making more than $400,000 per year,” she said. “Last year, that surcharge generated nearly $1 billion in revenue for the state, enough to close much of the hole that his reckless budget opened in local school budgets.”

Doubts About Diversity Training

Idea of the Day:

Today’s idea: Though diversity training has been widely embraced by corporate America, there’s little evidence so far that it works, sociologists find.
Work | In The Boston Globe, Drake Bennett reports on studies by researchers at Princeton, Yale, Columbia and elsewhere finding little empirical support for the idea that diversity training programs change attitudes or behavior. He describes one wide-ranging survey of more than 800 companies that points to what doesn’t work, and what might:
Some training programs were more effective than others: Voluntary programs were better than mandatory ones, and those that focused on the threat of bias and harassment lawsuits were worse than those that did not. But even the better programs led only to marginal changes. And those that were mandatory or discussed lawsuits — the vast majority of the programs the researchers examined — slightly reduced the number of women and minorities in management. Required training and legalistic training both make people resentful, the authors suggest, and likely to rebel against what they’ve heard.

Google Earth for Educators: 50 Exciting Ideas for the Classroom

Associate Degree:

Google Earth has opened up potential for students in classrooms around the globe with its bird’s-eye view of the world. Whether you are a veteran teacher looking for new ways to teach old topics or you are a still an education student getting ready to make your debut in the classroom, these exciting ways to use Google Earth are sure to infuse your lessons with plenty of punch. Find ideas for any age student and a handful of virtual tours that will not only help you instruct your students, but might even teach you something along the way.
Elementary
Younger students can have fun with these Google Earth lessons and ideas.

All Google users should be familiar with their privacy policies and the related controversies. More here.

5 S.F. school principals under fire

Jill Tucker:

Five principals at the helm of struggling San Francisco schools will be forced within the next few weeks to make a gut-wrenching choice: Fight for their jobs – a battle that could cost their schools millions of dollars – or leave.
Last week, the principals found out their sites had been placed on the state’s list of schools that are persistently the lowest-performing. Statewide, 188 schools are on the list, and each one can qualify for up to $2 million annually in federal grants for the next three years. But in exchange, they must undergo a major overhaul, starting with naming a new principal.
The schools have less than five months to come up with a reform plan, apply for the funding, and put everything in place by the first day of school in the fall.

Illinois State Senate OKs school vouchers

Dave McKinney:

Parents with students in the lowest-performing elementary schools in Chicago could obtain vouchers to move their children into better-performing private schools under a plan that passed the Illinois Senate on Thursday.
The voucher legislation pushed by Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) passed 33-20, with three voting present, could affect thousands of children in the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. It now moves to the House.
“By passing this bill, we’ll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they’ll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago,” Meeks said.
“Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago’s public schools,” Meeks said.

Decision makes schools chief loathed and loved

Wayne Drash:

Superintendent Frances Gallo combed the classrooms of embattled Central Falls High School. Teachers and students were gone for the day. Gallo was hunting for a particular item: an effigy of President Obama.
She hoped the rumor of its existence wasn’t true.
Gallo had fired all the high school teachers just a month earlier, igniting an educational maelstrom in Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest community while winning praise from the president.
The teachers union lampooned her; hate mail flooded her inbox. For weeks, she’d prayed every morning for the soul of the man who wrote: “I wish cancer on your children and their children and that you live long enough to see them die.”
It was one thing to take barbs from opponents — another thing altogether if the division was infecting classrooms. Teachers assured the superintendent that the school battle wasn’t seeping into lesson plans. So, when CNN asked her about the rumor of the effigy, Gallo took it upon herself to get to the bottom of it.

War on Teachers Escalates

Christopher Paslay:

Last month’s wholesale firing of 74 teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island exemplified America’s rising anti-teacher sentiment. Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo’s decision, and Newsweek writers Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert called the firings a “notable breakthrough.”
This is an excerpt from my commentary in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, “War on teachers escalates”. Please click here to read the entire article. You can respond or provide feedback by clicking on the comment button below.

Some St. Cloud students start their school day before the dawn

Tim Post:

At 6:30 or 7:00 each morning, you may just be rolling out of bed or finishing up that first cup of coffee. But some students at St. Cloud Technical and Community College have already been in their first class of the day.
Because of a demand for courses in the health sciences, the school now offers a 6:30 a.m. anatomy course.
It’s part of a nationwide trend. Because of skyrocketing enrollment, community colleges are scheduling classes at unusual times to squeeze more students in.
Things move quickly during Liz Burand’s 6:30 a.m. physiology and anatomy course. She begins her pre-dawn class with a short quiz, then moves into a brief discussion about the cross-section of cells featured on the test.
After that, Burand runs a video showing an up-close, and rather gory, throat surgery.

Test time for Madison school board candidates James Howard and Tom Farley

Lynn Welch:

Madison voters will soon be put to a test, perhaps one of the more important ones they’ve faced in recent years. On April 6, they’ll get to decide who will fill an open seat on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education during its biggest financial crisis.
It’s apt, then, that the opposing candidates — James Howard and Tom Farley — also be put to the test. We gave them a series of essay questions on a range of pertinent topics, from how they’d cut the school budget to challenges they’ve faced with their own children in Madison schools.
Their answers, lightly edited for length and style, follow.
Isthmus: What are two specific programs you would suggest cutting or policies you would suggest changing due to ongoing budget challenges, and why?
Howard: In Wisconsin, for 17 years, since 1993, we have had a school funding plan that caps a school district’s annual revenue increase at 2.1%, although the actual cost to run a school district has averaged 4% during those years. Secondly, the state of Wisconsin is supposed to pay two-thirds of the cost of schools. This has never happened. So I’d suggest lifting the revenue caps and legislating complete state funding of public education.
Farley: Certainly, the state’s funding formulas and current economic cycles have had a major effect on this current budget crisis. However, budget challenges will be “ongoing” until the district addresses our own systemic issues. Policies regarding talented and gifted students should be based on national best practices. We should also address length of school year and school day, which are far too limiting and lag other countries.

Truly a jury of their peers

Victoria Kim:

The teen court at Dorsey High School is one of 17 in Los Angeles County where students decide the cases of first-time juvenile offenders. The idea is to steer them away from more serious offenses.
The jury’s decision on the 15-year-old scofflaw was swift and unanimous: Guilty. Then the 12 jurors moved on to the question of what consequences the vandal should face for his actions.
“I kinda wanna go pretty hard,” volunteered one juror in a hooded sweat shirt and basketball shorts, gesturing with his arms. “He’s reckless!”
A fellow juror, standing with arms crossed and head cocked, was a little more sympathetic.
“He’s struggling,” she says. “He doesn’t have friends, so being the class clown is an easy way to make friends.”
The defendant was convicted of misdemeanor vandalism for turning on the emergency showers in his middle school’s science lab on a dare. The flooding did more than $2,000 in damage.

More gauzy goals for US schools

George Will:

Doubling down on dubious bets is characteristic of compulsive gamblers and federal education policy.
The nation was essentially without such policy for grades K through 12, and better off for that, until 1965. In that year of liberals living exuberantly, they produced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Now yet another president has announced yet another plan to fix education. His aspiration has a discouraging pedigree.
In 1983, three years after Jimmy Carter paid his debt to teachers’ unions by creating the Education Department, a national commission declared America “a nation at risk”: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” So in 1984, Ronald Reagan decreed improvements.

Performance Evaluations – School Board

Charlie Mas:

With all of this talk about Performance Management I thought it would be a good time to review the Performance of the Board Directors and the Board as a whole. I know that the Board does their own self-assessment, but I can’t find it. Besides, it is impossible for anyone to hold themselves accountable. I simply have no faith in self-policing.
For accountability purposes we need some objectively measurable outcomes for the Board job.
The Board job, as I have often written, has three components.
First is to serve as the elected representatives of the public. This includes:

Florida Senate kills teacher tenure pay system; raises tied to student success

Josh Hafenbrack:

In a major shift, the salaries of Florida’s 167,000 teachers could soon be tied to student test scores, rather than seniority and education level.
The state Senate on Wednesday approved a controversial bill by a 21-17 vote to dismantle teacher tenure, a decades-old system in which educators’ pay is based on years of experience and whether they earn upper-level degrees.
New teachers hired after July 1 would work on one-year contracts and face dismissal if their students did not show learning gains on end-of-year exams for two years in any five-year period. For them, job security would be based soley on two factors: standardized scores and job reviews by principals. Existing teachers would have future pay raises tied to student scores and reviews but would keep their current job security.
“It takes a sledgehammer to the teaching profession,” Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said Wednesday.

Mesofacts: slowly changing facts

Samuel Arbesman:

This shows the cost of living in the U.S. over time. More visualizations of economic quantities over time can be found at Visualizing Economics.

Related: Your Reality is Out of Date.

The Fordham Institute’s expert reviewers have analyzed the draft Common Core K-12 education standards (made public on March 10) according to rigorous criteria. Their analyses lead to a grade of A- for the draft mathematics standards and B for those in Eng

Sheila Byrd Carmichael, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Gabrielle Martino, Kathleen Porter-Magee, W. Stephen Wilson, Amber Winkler:

Two weeks ago, American education approached a possible turning point, when the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released drafts of proposed new academic standards in English language arts and math for kindergarten through high school. Already the object of much interest–and some controversy–these are standards that, once revised and finalized, will be candidates for adoption by individual states in place of those they’re now using.
For months before they were made public, the “Common Core” standards were much discussed. Between now and April 2–the end of the public comment period on this draft–there will be plenty more. That is a healthy thing, both because the more thoughtful scrutiny these drafts receive, the better the final product is apt to be, and because the only way for these standards ever to gain traction in our far- flung, highly-decentralized, and loosely-coupled public education system is if peo- ple from all walks of life–parents, educators, employers, public officials, scholars, etc.–take part in reading, commenting, and shaping the final product.
But ought they gain traction? We think so. Assuming this draft only improves in the process of revision, the Common Core represents a rare opportunity for American K-12 education to re-boot. A chance to set forth, across state lines, a clear, ambi- tious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they gradu- ate. Most big modern nations–including our allies and competitors–already have something like this for their education systems. If the U.S. does it well and if–this is a big if–the huge amount of work needed to operationalize these standards is earnestly undertaken in the months and years to follow, this country could find itself with far-better educated citizens than it has today. Many more of them will be “college- and career-ready” and that means the country as a whole will be stronger, safer, and more competitive.

Wyo education leaders not impressed with federal education law

Tom Lacock:

The proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is prompting concern from the Wyoming teachers’ union.
President Barack Obama last week announced his administration would revamp the federal education law, officially known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), during an upcoming re-authorization process. The Wyoming Education Association sees the rewrite as both promising and troubling.
“The blueprint earns a grade of incomplete,” WEA President Kathryn Valido said. “There are a lot of areas that need to be re-thought. There are some pieces in it that are a step in the right direction, but the overemphasis on one or two test scores to determine the effectiveness of a teacher or a school doesn’t make sense.”

A School District PTA Tax?

Melissa Westbrook:

Thanks to Julie for the alert about Rep. Reuven Carlyle blog thread about the so-called PTA tax that the district is levying on funds raised by PTAs (3.3%). The district hasn’t even publicly announced this but it has been confirmed by several school principals. Shame on the district for not even having the courage of their convictions to publicly say this.

Bill opens College threat assessments to public view

Tonia Moxley:

The legislation lets the public see the workings of teams that identify threats of violence at colleges and universities.
The workings of college and university threat assessment teams would be opened to the public after violent incidents under a compromise bill passed by the General Assembly.
The compromise came after weeks of negotiations between legislators and open government advocates and now goes to Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is expected to act on it before April 21. The governor may sign, veto or amend the bill.
“It’s a good outcome for everyone,” Virginia Press Association Executive Director Ginger Stanley said of the legislation.

The takeover takedown

Charlie Sykes:

Even in a year of notable failures-from the stimulus to health care reform-the collapse of efforts to reform the Milwaukee Public Schools stands out as an epic flop. As veteran education reporter Alan J. Borsuk writes in our cover story, the stars seemingly were aligned for a mayoral takeover of the dysfunctional system.
“[Y]ou had the president of the United States, the secretary of education, the governor of Wisconsin and the mayor of Milwaukee-all Democrats-coming down firmly for what they wanted to see happen in the Democratic-controlled Wisconsin Legislature.
“And they didn’t prevail.”
The debate over the mayoral takeover, writes Borsuk, “could have been a real chance to discuss how to energize the deeply troubled MPS system. It could have been a catalyst for re-energizing the whole subject of improving education in Milwaukee. “Instead, it became a plodding tour of why things don’t change easily in Milwaukee….”

Commentary: It’s change or die for the Detroit Public Schools

Nolan Finley:

Robert Bobb’s vision for radically restructuring Detroit’s failing education system is validated by the decision of Kansas City to shutter half of its schools.
Bobb intends to tear apart the Detroit Public Schools and rebuild the district on a foundation of small, nimble schools that are responsive to the needs of all children and fully accountable for how students perform. Everything will change, from how schools are managed to how teachers teach, and schools that don’t perform will be quickly shut down.
His proposals are raising howls from the special interests that benefit from keeping things as they are, as well as from some parents who aren’t willing to endure the sacrifice — closed schools and more rigorous standards — to make the changes possible.