1,416 results
NEGASSI TESFAMICHAEL : The project, “Building Equitable Inclusion of Immigrant Parents in Public Schools” conducted focus groups and one-on-one interviews with a total of 80 Latinx and Hmong parents and youth from a variety of areas in Dane County, including Madison, Sun Prairie, Fitchburg and McFarland. The project was partly funded by the School of […]
The Economist: The reforms had little time to work. Just 171,000 teachers—less than 10% of the total—were hired on merit. A further 36,000 head teachers and supervisors were promoted on ability rather than loyalty to union bosses. But even this may leave a mark. A study published this year by the Development Bank of Latin […]
Wall Street Journal: The paper’s authors, three professors of economics or education policy, explain what happened after Massachusetts raised its charter cap in 2010. The state set rules encouraging successful charter schools—deemed “proven providers”—to seed new campuses. Most follow a “no excuses” framework, with high expectations and a low tolerance for misbehavior. After the cap […]
Wall Street Journal, via a kind reader: One critique of charter schools is that while a few energetic principals show success, it’s impossible to replicate. Not so, says a new study of Boston’s charters, which doubled from 16 schools to 32 in four years, even as they maintained their effectiveness. This is great news, especially […]
Gillian Tett: This aversion to unfair influence is so deeply ingrained at some colleges that when I applied to Cambridge, three decades ago, my schoolteachers sternly warned me to avoid mentioning that my father had attended the same institution. Having a parental link was seen as a potential black mark, not a help. To US […]
Edward Luce: Making college free is one of the biggest rallying cries among Democratic White House hopefuls. Given the lengths to which many wealthy parents go to game the system that is unsurprising. Last week’s FBI arrest of dozens of parents, coaches and college administrators shows just how valuable admission to the best universities has […]
Corey DeAngelis: Regulations of school voucher programs can be well-intended. Policymakers may hope to prevent “bad” schools from operating or may limit schools’ ability to be selective in their admissions procedures in the name of establishing equal access to private options. But do top-down regulations of school voucher programs come with any unintended consequences? Our […]
Seth Litt, Katie Braude and Ben Austin: Despite the fact that parents and students were on the outside looking in when it came to the high-stakes contract negotiations in Los Angeles, the teacher strike drew much-needed attention to public education and secured small but meaningful steps toward providing schools and teachers with more resources, including […]
Fran Spielman: Bill Daley wants to turn America’s third-largest school system into what he calls the “nation’s first pre-K-through-14” system — by merging the Chicago Public Schools with the City Colleges of Chicago. By turning two giant bureaucracies into one, Daley hopes to generate as much as $50 million worth of administrative savings — enough […]
Samuel Moyn: Power players and grizzled veterans often do not understand how profoundly newcomers or outsiders to elite law schools — I count myself a little of both, but I mean first-year students — are prone to worry about why they are there. Students engage in constant self-questioning: Can I reconcile my politics with my […]
Susan Pendergrass & Nora Kern: Improving the quality of public education in our nation’s cities is a top priority for civic leaders. Beyond its impact on property values, the availability of safe, high-quality schools can have a substantial effect on the quality of life in urban neighborhoods, much like grocery stores, parks, and jobs that […]
Karen Rivedal: Independent charter schools are free to attend and open to all students, but Madison has never had any. Bennett’s office, opened in April 2016 within the UW System by state statute, has the ability to bypass local school boards and authorize charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee. Bennett said he liked the idea […]
ParentsRightsinEd : You entrust your child to the care of your district teachers and leaders each and every time they step into the halls of the school. Teaching is not an easy profession, but can be extremely rewarding; educators supporting the efforts of parents and guardians by teaching children skills and knowledge that will hopefully […]
Chris Stewart: Here comes a shocker, not everyone is on board. The Wisconsin Education Association Council have slammed the program because they say it doesn’t “meet the needs of all students,” and “elected officials should provide stable funding for public schools and include educators in developing solutions instead of fragmented approaches that siphon more from […]
Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email: History repeats itself. Unfortunately, so does irresponsible analysis. For the 20 or so years that I’ve been studying charter schools, the attacks on charters have morphed over time. Early on, it was said that charter schools were going to admit only the most advantaged students. When that […]
Sarah Karp and Becky Vevea : Chicago Public Schools has lost 32,000 students over the last five years, nearly the same enrollment drop as in the 10-year period leading up to the closures of 50 elementary schools in 2013. Those missing students could fill 53 average-sized Chicago schools. This massive enrollment decline comes as a […]
Amadou Diallo:: Although Say Yes’s allure of free college tuition was immediately obvious in a city where 54 percent of children live in poverty, many initially viewed the program with skepticism. Dedecker, who was instrumental in bringing the program to Buffalo, recalled low expectations at the outset from almost everyone. “One of the most common […]
Kim Gittleson : An unlikely consequence of Trump’s immigration policies? Declining enrollment at U.S. business schools Mention Nottingham in a conversation, and it’s pretty likely the first thing to come to mind is Robin Hood. But the story being told here is very different from the fable of old. Instead of stealing from the rich […]
Alan Borsuk: Where I really worry is the remaining portion of kids, those whose scores are described as “below basic.” In the language of the state Department of Public Instruction, that means a student “demonstrates minimal understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge and skills for their grade level that are associated with college […]
Sutton Travis: Even without ASATR, Carthage might fare the best of Panola County’s three public school districts. The other two—Gary and Beckville—could be in worse shape. Todd Greer is the superintendent of Gary, a school district just fifteen miles or so from Carthage, depending which Farm-to-Market road you take. ASATR accounted for $1.3 million of […]
Joanna Walters: When Boston public schools introduced a new standard map of the world this week, some young students’ felt their jaws drop. In an instant, their view of the world had changed. The USA was small. Europe too had suddenly shrunk. Africa and South America appeared narrower but also much larger than usual. And […]
Annysa Johnson: Pewaukee High School seniors Ryan Stoffield and Tori Johnson don’t really see themselves as school teachers. They both envision careers in business. But you never know. The two are among about 18 students who have signed up for the school’s new Pathways to Teaching strand, a collection of courses and experiences designed to […]
Emma Brown Kahlenberg said he is hopeful that the momentum will continue should Hillary Clinton be elected president. The Democratic nominee chose a running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D), who brought up the nation’s history of segregated schools during the one and only vice presidential debate. His wife — Anne Holton, Virginia’s former education secretary […]
Alan Borsuk: I once sort of believed in miracle school superintendents. If you just got a spectacular person to head a school system, there would be real improvement. I’m more jaded now. I’ve seen superintendents come and go in Milwaukee Public Schools and I’ve followed what has happened in school districts across the nation. Superintendents […]
Rachel Slade In November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) can raise the cap on the number of charter schools allowed, or increase enrollment in existing charters in underperforming districts. If the referendum is approved, the city of Boston—which currently has 27 Commonwealth charter schools that operate independently […]
Chris Cook: Few intra-governmental memos have sparked more anger than one called Circular 10/65, a memorandum sent 51 years ago by Anthony Crosland, then the education secretary, to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Only a few English counties, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, retained many. Today, […]
“I want to live in the Hamilton/Van Hise attendance area.” I’ve heard that statement many times over the years. I wondered how that desire might be reflected in real estate activity. Tap for a larger view. xlsx version. Happily, it’s easy to keep up with the market using the Bunbury, First Weber, Restaino or Shorewest […]
Ogechi Emechebe: The achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts in Dane County has been an area of concern for the past several years. In addition to what the Madison School District is doing to try and eliminate the gap, a local grassroots organization is hoping to reduce the achievement gap before […]
Kathy Boccella: This month, for the fourth time in as many years, Dollard flew to China to spend three weeks sales-talking parents. She hands out pens and magnets bearing her school’s name and all-American eagle mascot – giveaways that, she hopes, will help Conwell-Egan stand out among the hundreds of private and parochial schools crowding […]
Noah Smith: The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various U.S. states, and see whether the ones that spend more on education enjoy better outcomes. This has been done many times, with decidedly mixed results. Some studies show little state-by-state correlation between spending levels and […]
Naomi Schaefer Riley: The first comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers. According to the report, “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent […]
Linda Borg: What if students were asked to design their own high schools from the ground up? What if they had a strong voice in what they studied and how? And what if they had a say in how the school day was structured? That’s exactly what happened with two small, experimental high schools in […]
Alexander Russo: and journalism experts for their thoughts on (a) whether there has been a real decline in investigative work on local education coverage and (b) reasons why (beyond the obvious). I’ll let you know whatever responses I get. In the meantime, it’s my impression that there have been some amazing examples of local investigative […]
Peter Cunningham: America’s teachers unions probably will not put reform leaders like Newark’s Chris Cerf, Philadelphia’s William Hite, D.C’s Kaya Henderson, or Denver’s Tom Boasberg at the top of their Christmas card mailing list. But they should, because no one is working harder to improve and preserve traditional, unionized, district-run schools. Yes, these and other […]
Doug Ericsson: This year, she exceeded expectations in her relations with the board, her management of the district’s budget and operations, her management of the district’s talent pool, and her relations with the community and schools. She “met expectations” in instructional leadership and in the district’s organizational climate and culture. According to the board, highlights […]
Jennifer Medina: advertising campaign that looks as if it came from Apple’s marketing department, the initiative is meant to create high schools with new approaches to education. In essence, Ms. Powell Jobs and her team of high-profile educators and designers hope they can crowd-source a solution to a problem that has flummoxed policy makers for […]
Adam Hawf & Jamar McKneely, via a kind Deb Britt email: Adam: That makes you a great person to answer this question: what are the key changes you have seen in education in New Orleans since 2002? Jamar: In 2002, there were a lot of teachers working extremely hard for the students of Orleans. But, […]
Not Very Jolley: The small schools task force promised a more detailed report giving indicative costings and guidance for schools, with the initial hope it would be published some time prior to the implementation of UIFSM in September 2014. This was then delayed and eventually promised in November. Then it came to light that their […]
Paul T. Hill, Ashley E. Jochim People on the right and the left can readily agree with Mark Twain: “God first made idiots, but that was just for practice. Then he made school boards.” Gov. Bruce Rauner is right, Chicago Public Schools is bureaucratic and patronage-ridden. Tack on ineffective at its core mission, educating Chicago’s […]
Corey Robin: Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial […]
Maggie Ginsberg interviews Brandi Grayson: Can you give an example of what you’ve described as “intent versus impact?” The Behavior Education Plan that the [Madison Metropolitan] school district came up with. The impact is effed up, in so many words, and that’s because the voices that are most affected weren’t considered. It’s like standing outside […]
Alan Borsuk: An important thing to understand about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal for making an unlimited number of private school tuition vouchers available across Wisconsin is how unattractive, as a practical matter, his plan is to the schools that it could serve. An upcoming gusher of private school vouchers? More likely, as it stands, it […]
Bill Novak Madison property owners will soon be able to pay their taxes in four installments, beginning with the 2014 tax bill coming in December. The Mayor’s Office said on Tuesday the four-payment plan could help taxpayers avoid penalties by spreading out the taxes owed over a seven-month period. “At the height of the recession, […]
Simon Burgess: Urban areas are often associated with poor educational attainment. But London is different. Recent analysis suggests that the attainment and progress of pupils in London is the highest in the country. A leading education policy commentator argues that: “Perhaps the biggest question in education policy over the past few years is why the […]
Laura Waters Charter school opponents were in mourning this week after they failed to derail a set of amendments to a 2012 bill called the Urban Hope Act that permits the opening of hybrid district/charter schools in Camden, Trenton, and Newark. Save Our Schools-N.J., Education Law Center, and New Jersey Education Association had mounted a […]
Alan Borsuk: Gregory Thornton, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, was good at talking about the positive things underway for the schools. He’d get revved up as he rattled off initiatives and data. At the start of school a year ago, he did in a conversation with me. Then he abruptly changed tone. “I’ve […]
Edgar Mendez Chandlar Strauss and Danielle “Dani” Fleming, a couple of 16-year-olds from the suburbs, might seem an unlikely pair to be so deeply invested in the educational outcomes of Milwaukee students. But every Tuesday since the beginning of the school year, they’ve been hitting the halls of Milwaukee College Prep’s Lloyd Street Campus to […]
Alays Francis In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices. But later this month the classes will stop. Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools – which have multiplied in India […]
High school, where kids socialize, show off their clothes, use their phones–and, oh yeah, go to class.
Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama’s public agenda, as it did in during last month’s State of the Union address. Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else’s) attention: early-childhood education and access to college. But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country’s chief economic rivals.
What’s holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing. It’s a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students–the ones in AP classes bound for the nation’s most selective colleges and universities–high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world’s high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students’ achievement is scandalous.
In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement–none–in the academic proficiency of American high school students.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don’t perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers “teach for America” don’t achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs. Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools, there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It’s the only education strategy that consistently gets results.
The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likely to be classified as “high-poverty” than secondary schools. Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don’t shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on high school students than elementary school students.
Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers’ salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.
This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.
The president’s call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn’t the issue. It’s getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can’t just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.
In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children’s “non-cognitive” skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree–traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard–something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
The good news is that advances in neuroscience are revealing adolescence to be a second period of heightened brain plasticity, not unlike the first few years of life. Even better, brain regions that are important for the development of essential non-cognitive skills are among the most malleable. And one of the most important contributors to their maturation is pushing individuals beyond their intellectual comfort zones.
It’s time for us to stop squandering this opportunity. Our kids will never rise to the challenge if the challenge doesn’t come.
Laurence Steinberg is a psychology professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming Age of Opportunity: Revelations from the New Science of Adolescence.
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In Michael Gove and Andrew Adonis’s wildest dreams, the academies and free schools their policies ushered into being would be filled with bright students in spotless classrooms, being encouraged to apply to top universities.
When the failures of the Al-Madinah and Discovery free schools dominated the headlines last year, that vision seemed the stuff of a madman’s hallucination. But not in Stratford, where in the shadow of the deconstruction of the 2012 Olympic venue the free school project finally had a gold medal winner in the London Academy of Excellence.
On Monday Gove will give his stamp of approval by delivering a speech on education reform at the LAE’s unprepossessing home, a 1980s former council office block near Stratford tube station. But the reform Gove is most likely to trumpet is that of LAE itself. A sixth form college funded under the free school programme that opened two years ago, LAE had kept a low profile, thanks in the main to its unfashionable location in Newham. But it made headlines in January with the announcement that six of its first cohort of students had been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge.
Robert Wilne, LAE’s energetic headmaster, says the school should be judged not on its success at Oxbridge entry but on the route its students took to get there.
The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), a government agency in charge of the country’s internet industry, has announced plans to progressively introduce software programming classes into public schools, giving students an opportunity to write code in a classroom setting. The news was first reported on Good Morning Singapore in mandarin yesterday.
Given the rapidly changing nature of the technology industry, the agency hopes to roll out these classes quickly in the next few months with the ultimate aim of keeping the Singapore economy at the top.
“Infocomm technology is getting to be more pervasive, and we all recognize that it’s going to be a strategic catalyst for [Singapore’s] competitive advantage,” said James Kang, assistant chief executive of the government chief information office at IDA.
To be sure, topics like programming and 3D printing are already available in some schools as extra-curricular activities with IDA’s help, so it’s unclear for now how these classes differ from previous initiatives, and how the IDA works with the education ministry to introduce the field. Tech in Asia has contacted the agency for more details.
Madison School District (PDF):
This budget forecast and those that will follow are intended to keep the board informed as the budget development process unfolds. The forecasts also provide an opportunity for board discussion and input into important budget development issues.
MMSD’s Strategic Framework establishes the direction of the school district. The framework is supported by the annual budget, which is simply the resource strategy behind the Strategic Framework. The budget process begins with a thorough review of district priorities, current spending patterns, and outcomes. The zero- based budget process requires a critical examination of all budget practices and how those practices influence resource deployment.
Based upon our budget work thus far, we believe there are opportunities to make the staffing process more responsive to individual school needs, to shift non- personnel resources from central office budgets to school budgets, and to improve budget accuracy by clarifying and simplifying account structures. We’re excited to explore these and other opportunities throughout the 2014-15 budget process.
Zero-based Approach to Budget Development:
A zero-based approach is being used to develop the expenditure budget. Unlike an ‘historical cost’ budget or a ‘cost to continue’ budget, the zero-based process is intended to go beyond marginal refinements of existing budgets and existing structures.
For example, MMSD has used essentially the same staffing allocation process for over ten years under the ‘cost to continue’ approach, with only minor modifications along the way. While the existing allocation process is uniform and consistent, it can be improved by making it more responsive to the challenges presented by individual schools. The senior leadership team, with input from the principals, is assessing the staffing allocation process this month before any allocation decisions are put into motion in February.
The existing staff allocation process consists of a series of departmental layers, with separate staffing allocations for regular education, special education, Title 1, OMGE, pupil services, PBS, etc. We are hopeful that a more integrated and responsive staffing allocation process, beginning this year and refined continuously in subsequent years, will produce a more tailored fit for each school. The zero-based approach is designed to uncover such opportunities.
The zero-based process also includes in-depth reviews of each central office department. We are particularly interested in identifying inter-departmental overlaps, gaps, and even redundancies. We are optimistic that this effort will produce new efficiencies and help push resources from the district office into the schools.
Strategic Priorities Drive the Budget:
The resource decisions contained in the annual budget are subject to continuous review, either directly through the zero-based budget process, or indirectly through the SIP process, district surveys, targeted studies (such as the Principal Pipeline study [PDF] and High School Reform study), and several active advisory committees. These are the sources which inform the budget development process.
The Strategic Framework identifies five key priorities which are aimed at providing schools with the tools, processes and resources they need to serve children and their families better than ever before. The five priorities are: (1) Coherent Instruction, (2) Personalized Pathways, (3) Family and Community Engagement, (4) A Thriving Workforce, and (5) Accountability at All Levels.
Each of the priorities in the Strategic Framework includes a set of high-leverage actions that have cost implications. A preview of some of the major actions with cost implications, organized by Priority Area, will be developed and refined throughout the budget development process. A preview of the major actions will be presented to the Operations Work Group along with this Budget Forecast.
The word cloud is interesting, particularly in light of the District’s job number one, addressing its long term disastrous reading results.
Related: numerous links on the District’s 2013-2014 budget, here. Madison spends about twice the national average per student ($15k).
A reference to nuclear warheads may seem out of place at a meeting of Newark educators, but not when you consider what’s at stake.
The Newark Public School district and the city’s charter schools are considering a plan that would blow up the status quo in what they say is an effort to provide equity to the city’s schoolchildren.
School officials are creating what some say is a first-in-the-nation voluntary effort to offer universal enrollment for students citywide to all of Newark’s 71 public schools and 21 public charter schools.
Under the plan, there would be one application, one timeline and one central clearing space for information about all city schools. Essentially, it would eliminate the need for parents to go from school to school filling out applications and participating in separate lotteries in the hopes of getting a spot in a particular school.
Via Laura Waters
Related: a majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school.
The financially troubled school district here is seeking buyers for more than two dozen school buildings that it shuttered last summer in one of the country’s biggest school closing programs.
And while one prospective developer, Municipal Acquisitions, a firm based in Washington, has offered $100 million for the entire portfolio, both Drexel and Temple Universities are considering the purchase of individual schools near their campuses.
The school district published details on its website of 27 buildings, totaling about 3.7 million square feet, and the land they sit on, in the hope that the properties could be adapted and reused by buyers, who could provide the district with desperately needed cash. The public school system laid off 3,800 workers to close a $304 million budget deficit at the start of the current school year.
The properties range from the former University City High School and its associated buildings covering 611,000 square feet on a prime West Philadelphia site near Drexel University, to the building that housed Germantown High School, a 278,000-square-foot site in a low-income area of Philadelphia’s northern suburbs.
District officials said the portfolio’s overall value was being appraised. For eight properties that are subject to expedited sales because there has been a “demonstrated interest,” the appraised value should be known by Dec. 17; valuation for the remaining sites will come later.
Twenty-four schools, representing about 12 percent of the district’s total, were closed at the end of the 2012-13 academic year because dwindling student populations had left them significantly underused, and they were draining scarce resources.
Municipal Acquisitions said its offer reflected real estate prices in the area.
I called Hanks to ask her about her decision to leave Chicago. She responded by e-mail. “A great opportunity presented itself that I thought I could really grow and learn from. You know I am still pretty young, too. I don’t have kids, so it’s easier for me to move around now versus one day when I am more settled.
“I had a great experience leading Melody and I’m proud of the work that we did,” she went on. “That work prepared me to take on this role.”
A spokesperson for CPS told me in an e-mail: “We never like to see talented leaders like Nancy Hanks leave the district. We wish her success in her new role and hope she returns to CPS at some point.” He added that the district’s “extensive professional development, training, and recruiting programs . . . help ensure that we always have a pipeline of qualified leaders ready to replace principals who may move, retire, or leave the district for new opportunities.”
The Madison superintendent who recruited Hanks, Jennifer Cheatham, had herself recently left CPS. Cheatham, 41, who was chief instruction officer here, was named superintendent in Madison in February.
Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:
As I hope someone might have noticed, I have not been posting much lately. Part of the reason is that I have another outlet. I have been writing a column in the school district’s bi-weekly family newsletter.
My latest column focused on a recent School Board retreat where we learned more about the Common Core State Standards. Even though the family newsletter is a district publication, I should point out that the views I express in the column (as well as in this blog) are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, positions or policies of the Madison Metropolitan School District. But however unofficial my words may be, here is what I wrote:
On Saturday, September 28, the Madison School Board held the first of our quarterly board retreats. We get together on a Saturday for an extended discussion of a few topics of particular interest. Our focus this time was on the much-misunderstood Common Core academic standards for literacy and math.
Jennifer Cheatham doesn’t have the countenance of someone who has stepped into a maelstrom. Madison schools superintendent since April, Cheatham, 41, has already visited every school in the district and rolled out a “Strategic Framework” to tackle some of the district’s thorniest issues, including the achievement gap. So far she’s generated considerable excitement around her plans and raised hopes, even among skeptics.
Kaleem Caire has even put off plans to file a federal civil rights complaint against the district for the school board’s rejection of a charter school geared toward low-income minority students. The CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which spearheaded the proposal, says he’s now content to play a “facilitative, supportive role” and get behind Cheatham’s plan to “bring order and structure” to the district.
“Personally, I’ve been hanging back, letting her get her space,” says Caire. “The superintendent should be the leader of education. All of us should be supporting and holding that person accountable.
Where have all the students gone?
Madison School Board President Ed Hughes:
Esenberg sets out to identify the fundamental differences between voucher advocates and opponents. His thesis is that views on vouchers derive from deeper beliefs than objective assessments of how well voucher schools perform or concerns about vouchers draining funds from public schools. To him, your take on vouchers depends on how you view the world.
Esenberg asserts that voucher advocates are united by their embrace of three fundamental principles: that a centralized authority is unlikely to be able to decide what is best for all; that families should be trusted to select their children’s schools since ordinary people are capable of making choices for themselves without paternalistic direction; and that “government does not do diversity, experimentation and choice very well.”
By implication, he asserts that voucher opponents think that a centralized authority will be able to decide what’s best for all, that families shouldn’t be trusted to make choices for their children, and that government control is the best way to foster innovation.
And there you have it. Your views on school voucher expansion are entirely explained by whether you prefer individual freedom, like the voucher advocates, or stultifying government control, like the voucher opponents. In cinematic terms, voucher opponents are the legions of lifeless, gray drones in Apple’s famous 1984 commercial and voucher supporters are the colorful rebel, bravely challenging the control of Big Brother and hurling her sledgehammer to smash mindless conformity. You couldn’t ask for a more sophisticated analysis than that, could you?
While his thesis invites mockery, Esenberg’s short article does present a bit of a challenge to voucher opponents like myself. Can we set out a coherent justification for our opposition that doesn’t depend on the facts that voucher schools drain needed resources from public schools and don’t perform any better? Sweeping those fairly compelling points aside, Esenberg asks, in effect, what else you got?
Mr Hughes anti-voucher rhetoric is fascinating on several levels:
1. The Madison School District’s long term, disastrous reading results. How much time and money has been wasted on anti-voucher rhetoric? Reading has long been job one.
2. Local private schools do not have much, if any availability.
3. Madison spends double the national average per student (some of which has been spent on program explosion). Compare Milwaukee Public and Voucher Schools’ Per Student Spending.
4. Madison’s inability to address its long-term disastrous reading results will bring changes from State or Federal legislation or via litigation.
5. Superintendent Cheatham cited Long Beach and Boston as urban districts that have “narrowed the achievement gap”. Both districts offer a variety of school governance models, which is quite different than Madison’s long-time “one size fits all approach”.
I recall being astonished that previous Madison School District administrators planned to spend time lobbying at the State level for this or that change – while “Rome is burning“. Ironically, Superintendent Cheatham recently said:
“Rather than do a lot of work on opposing the voucher movement, we are going to focus on making sure our schools are the best schools possible and the schools of choice in Madison,” Cheatham said.
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
A great, salient quote. I would hope that the District would focus completely on the matter at hand, disastrous reading scores. Taking care of that problem – and we have the resources to do so – will solve lots of other atmospheric and perception issues.
In closing, I sense politics in the voucher (and anti-open enrollment) rhetoric. Two Madison School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2014 ballot. One is currently occupied by Mr. Hughes, the other by Marj Passman. In addition, local politics play a role in becoming school board President.
A second-grade teacher notices that one of her students lacks fluency when reading aloud. The first thing the teacher should do to help this student is assess whether the student also has difficulties with:
A. predicting
B. inferring
C. metacognition
D. decoding
Don’t worry if you’re not into metacognition. The correct answer is decoding — at least according to the people who put together the test teachers must pass in Massachusetts if they are going to teach children to read.
The Massachusetts test is about to become the Wisconsin test, a step that advocates see as important to increasing the quality of reading instruction statewide and, in the long term, raising the overall reading abilities of Wisconsin students. As for those who aren’t advocates (including some who are professors in schools of education), they are going along, sometimes with a more dubious attitude to what this will prove.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officially launched the era of the new test for reading licenses with a memo sent last week to heads of all teacher preparation programs in the state. The memo spelled out the details of implementing a law passed in 2011 that called for Wisconsin to use the Massachusetts test. The memo included setting the passing score, which, after a short phase-in period, will match what is regarded as the demanding Massachusetts standard.
In a nutshell, after Jan. 31, 2014, anyone who wants to get a license that allows them to teach reading in Wisconsin will have to pass this test, with 100 multiple choice questions and two essay questions, aimed at making sure they are adequately prepared to do so. (Those currently licensed will not need to pass the test.)
Why Massachusetts? Because in the 1990s, Massachusetts launched initiatives, including requiring students to pass a high school graduation test, requiring teachers to pass licensure tests specific to the subjects they teach, and increasing spending on education, especially in schools serving low-income children.
At that point, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were pretty much tied, and down the list of states a bit, when it came to how students were doing. Within a few years, scores in Massachusetts rose significantly. The state has led the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math achievement for a decade. Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Many notes and links on Wisconsin’s adoption of Massachusetts (MTEL) elementary English teacher content knowledge standards. UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s recommended Wisconsin’s adoption of MTEL.
July, 2013 Madison Schools 2013-2014 Budget Presentation (PDF). Notes:
The January, 2012 budget document mentioned “District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753” (2012-2013), yet the “baseline” for 2013-2014 mentions planned spending of $392,807,993 “a decrease of $70,235 or (0.02%) less than the 2012-13 Revised Budget” (around $15k/student). The District’s budget generally increases throughout the school year, growing 6.3% from January, 2012 to April, 2013. Follow the District’s budget changes for the past year, here.
Finally, the document includes this brief paragraph:
Work will begin on the 2014-15 early this fall. The process will be zero-based, and every line item and FTE will be carefully reviewed to ensure that resources are being used efficiently. The budget development process will also include a review of benefit programs and procurement practices, among other areas.
One hopes that programs will indeed be reviewed and efforts focused on the most urgent issues, particularly the District’s disastrous reading scores.
Ironically, the recent “expert review” found that Analysis: Madison School District has resources to close achievement gap. If this is the case (and I agree with their conclusion – making changes will be extraordinarily difficult), what are students, taxpayers and citizens getting for the annual tax & spending growth?
I took a quick look at property taxes in Middleton and Madison on a $230,000 home. A Middleton home paid $4,648.16 in 2012 while a Madison home paid 16% more, or $5,408.38.
Plenty of schools use iPads. But what if the entire education experience were offered via tablet computer? That is what several new schools in the Netherlands plan to do. There will be no blackboards or schedules. Is this the end of the classroom?
Think different. It was more than an advertising slogan. It was a manifesto, and with it, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs upended the computer industry, the music industry and the world of mobile phones. The digital visionary’s next plan was to bring radical change to schools and textbook publishers, but he died of cancer before he could do it.
Some of the ideas that may have occurred to Jobs are now on display in the Netherlands. Eleven “Steve Jobs schools” will open in August, with Amsterdam among the cities that will be hosting such a facility. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend the schools, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.
There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it’ll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.
Preparations are already underway in Breda, a town near Rotterdam where one of the schools is to be located. Gertjan Kleinpaste, the 53-year-old principal of the facility, is aware that his iPad school on Schorsmolenstraat could soon become a destination for envious — but also outraged — reformist educators from all over the world.
And there is still plenty of work to do on the pleasant, light-filled building, a former daycare center. The yard is littered with knee-deep piles of leaves. Walls urgently need a fresh coat of paint. Even the lease hasn’t been completely settled yet. But everything will be finished by Aug. 13, Kleinpaste says optimistically, although he looks as though the stress is getting to him.
Madison’s aid amount is about the same as it was in 2010-11. The district received a $15 million boost in aid last year mostly because 4-year-old kindergarten enrollment added about 2,000 students.
The Madison School Board taxed the maximum amount allowed last year, resulting in a 1.75 percent property tax increase. That amount was low compared to previous years because of the state aid increase. The additional funds allowed the district to spend more on building maintenance and a plan to raise low-income and minority student achievement.
Property tax increase coming
Cheatham said she hopes to propose a lower property tax increase than 6.8 percent when she introduces her budget on July 15. A group of local and national experts recently advised the district that it should reallocate more funding from the administration into classrooms. Cheatham expects to do a deeper review of district finances for the 2014-15 budget.
“I would not be reluctant to ask the taxpayers of Madison to support us with additional funding moving forward if I knew that we were spending every dollar in the best possible way to support the students in our school district,” Cheatham said. “I’ll know that next budget cycle.”
To reduce the budget, Cheatham said she doesn’t expect any major changes that will affect classroom learning.
Instead she could cut a 1.5 percent proposed increase in the employee salary schedule, reduce maintenance spending or make some previously recommended reductions in administrative positions.
Much more in the 2013-2014 budget, here.
Related: Up, Down & Transparency: Madison Schools Received $11.8M more in State Tax Dollars last year, Local District Forecasts a Possible Reduction of $8.7M this Year.
Madison spends significantly more per student than most districts. Property taxes were increased 9% just a few years ago.
Finally the ongoing tax increases may play a role in Madison School Board member Mary Burke’s rumored race for Governor
“If you have 10 students on vouchers in your school, are the test scores for those 10 going to be used for a report card when you’ve got 200 or 300 in your school?” Lancaster said.
The Legislature has yet to introduce a bill that would bring private voucher schools into the state’s public school accountability system, though the budget requires those schools to receive report cards a year after linking to the state’s student information system.
Walker said earlier this year he hoped to sign a bill with the details before the budget passed, which won’t happen. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said he expects legislators to make progress on a proposal this summer and pass a bill during the next fall or spring session.
Lancaster said many schools were concerned about paying $900 to sign up for the program, only to not make the top 25. Last week the Assembly addressed that concern with a budget amendment that ensures the registration fee would be reimbursed to schools that don’t make the cut.
Some schools in the rural and suburban parts of the diocese don’t expect to have large enough low-income student populations to make it into the top 25, Lancaster said.
Much more on vouchers, here.
We Californians like to think our state is the national leader in policy change and innovation, that new ideas are born here and other states follow our lead.
In one area, I am sad to say, that is not the case.
California is short-selling too many of its public school students because of education programs that inadequately prepare the next generation of teachers. A new review from the National Council on Teacher Quality that evaluates educational institutions, state by state, produced some sobering results for anyone who cares about what’s going on inside California schools of education.
Among the more disturbing findings from the institutions that provided data:
- Half of 72 programs for elementary school preparation failed the evaluation, a higher failure rate than programs in any other state.
- California’s secondary certification structure combined with inadequate coursework requirements, particularly in the sciences and social sciences, showed that only 17 percent of programs adequately prepared secondary teaching candidates in core subjects. That compared with 34 percent nationally.
- Coursework in a majority (63 percent) of California elementary programs did not mention a single strategy for teaching reading to English language learners.
- Of the 139 elementary and secondary programs that were evaluated on a four-star rating system, 33 programs earned no stars and only three earned as many as three. Not a single program earned four stars.
Related: Richard Askey: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present:
I have written about the problem in mathematics and hope that some others will use the resouces which exist to write about similar problems in other areas.
In his American Educational Research Association Presidential Address, which was published in Educational Researcher in 1986, Lee Shulman introduced the phrase “pedagogical content knowledge”. This is a mixture of content and knowing how to teach this content and is the one thing from his speech which has been picked up by the education community. However, there are a number of other points which he made which are important. Here is an early paragraph from this speech:
“To prepare young people for a more competitive economy, our school systems must have less competition.”
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers.
Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”‘ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school.
Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being.
Related: MTEL 90: Teacher Content Knowledge Licensing Requirements Coming To Wisconsin…..
Watch for the seventh edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality, releasing May 9, 2013.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been producing Hopes, Fears, & Reality since 2005, after a set of major studies showed conflicting results about charter school performance and caused quite a dustup. CRPE created this annual report and its overall research program on charter schools with two goals in mind: (1) to provide an even-handed assessment of charter school outcomes to date so that people involved in policy and practice can make sense of the research without having to rely on simplistic headlines or read complex and conflicting journal articles, and (2) to create a forum for leading thinkers to push charter sector leaders to look to the future and improve on the past.
We at CRPE are quite proud of the data and essays that have appeared in Hopes, Fears, & Reality across the years. With support from the National Charter School Resource Center at American Institutes for Research, we are excited that the report can continue to reach new audiences through this venue. If you are new to this series, please look at the past editions. I hope you will find them useful–even surprising and provocative. As a research organization, CRPE is committed to following the evidence wherever it leads. For that reason, our work points out both the beauty marks and the warts of the charter sector. Because we believe that students urgently need better public school options, CRPE commissions essays that push policymakers and charter leaders to anticipate issues that few people are thinking about now but that could greatly enhance the sector’s effectiveness and reach.
Today, I gave a brief presentation – based on our previous stories – on the performance of London schools to the excellent Centre for London. Some slides are a little mysterious without my burbling over the top, but I hope it’s understandable enough.
Three quick concepts:
1. The “FT score” – we allocate each child a score. Kids get 8 points for an A* down to one for a G. We add up the score for English, maths and their three best other subjects.
2. IDACI – an index of poverty which measures how poor the neighbourhood in which a child lives is.
3. “Regression” – we are dealing with moving populations, changing intakes etc. Think of a regression as a technique that allows us to discern the impact of any one of those things
View the complete PDF presentation, here.
Vouchers, charters, public school spending, treatment of teachers – isn’t there something we’re not fighting about when it comes to education?
Why, yes, and last week’s quiet end to a boring race for state superintendent of public instruction underscores one of the biggest examples of that: The Common Core learning standards initiative.
The Common Core is the biggest thing in Wisconsin education that you hardly ever hear about, unless you’re employed in the school world. Then you hear about it all the time. For a lot of schools, teachers and students, it’s bringing clear, significant and, let us hope, ultimately productive changes in what goes on daily.
Take a tour of a school or talk to school leaders about what they’re up to anywhere in the state and two out of every three sentences you hear include the phrase “Common Core.” At least it feels that way.
In many classrooms, each student now has explicit goals to work on daily (“Use place value understanding to round whole numbers to the nearest 10 or 100,” for example, from the third-grade math standards) and will gladly tell you what standard they’re focused on at the time you ask (I’ve asked). Or perhaps show you the standard and their work on it on their iPad. If this hasn’t come to your child’s school yet, look for something like this soon.
The Common Core movement has swept across the nation in the last five years. It arose largely from among governors, state education chiefs, corporate leaders and education advocates who believed the nation as a whole was not aiming high enough in education and that the wide variation from state to state in defining good achievement and what it takes to get a high school diploma was a problem.
The Madison School District stands to lose millions of dollars in state aid under Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal, district officials said Wednesday.
The district is projecting an $8.7 million, 15 percent reduction in state aid, Superintendent Jane Belmore said in an interview.
She cautioned that the amount is a preliminary estimate based on the governor’s 2013-15 budget proposal, which could undergo changes by the Legislature.
The district is preparing its 2013-14 budget, and it’s unclear when a proposal will be finalized. School districts typically develop spending plans for the following year before knowing exactly how much money they’ll get in state aid.
Walker’s budget calls for a 1 percent increase in state aid, but Belmore said when district staff put the amount through the state’s complicated funding formula it resulted in the reduction. State Department of Public Instruction officials couldn’t verify the district’s estimate.
This year’s $394 million school budget included $249.3 million in property taxes, a 1.75 percent increase over the previous year.
One would hope that any budget article should include changes over time, which DeFour unfortunately neglects. Madison received an increase of $11.8M in redistributed state tax dollars last year.
In addition, DeFour mentions that the current budget is 394,000,000. The most recent number I have seen is $385,886,990. where has the additional $8,113,010 come from? where is it being spent? was there a public discussion? Per student spending is now $14,541.42.
Related: Ed Hughes on School District numbers in 2005: in 2005::
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
Shortly after Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad resigned last year, School Board member Ed Hughes told me that when it comes to the Madison School District, “People want improvement, but they don’t want change.”
I thought about Hughes’ words last weekend after the school district announced it had hired Chicago Public Schools chief of instruction Jennifer Cheatham as Nerad’s replacement.
Cheatham is seen as the best bet for improvement — specifically to the long history of low-income and minority student under-achievement.
The question now is: Will people tolerate her changes?
Hughes told me Sunday he was “optimistic” they would. “I think she will earn teachers’ trust and inspire them to do their best work,” he said. “If she succeeds at that, everything else will fall into place.”
I hope he’s right, but I don’t yet share his optimism.
Back in 2011, it was the district’s long-standing inability to do anything bold about the achievement gap that left it vulnerable to the Urban League of Greater Madison’s bid to open its own charter school for minority and low-income students.
Madison Preparatory Academy brought the issue of the achievement gap to the fore. But the school’s rejection — largely due to opposition from the teachers union — left notoriously progressive Madison doing some uncomfortable soul-searching.
Related: And so it continues…..
Looking back at the school desegregation case he took as a young lawyer, Rubin Salter Jr. sees a pile of wasted money and squandered opportunities. After almost four decades in court and nearly $1 billion in public spending, little has changed for the black children whose right to a good education he had labored to defend.
They are still among the lowest-performing students in the Tucson Unified School District, still among the most likely to be suspended or to be assigned to special-education programs and still among the least likely to join groups for gifted students. They are, as Mr. Salter put it, “still getting the short end of the stick.”
A federal judge approved a plan on Wednesday intended to lift a longstanding desegregation order that has served as a reason and an excuse for a lot that has gone wrong in the district over the past decades: shrinking enrollment, sliding graduation rates and insistent dropout rates.
After all these years, Mr. Salter, whose family left Mississippi in the 1950s to escape segregation, said he no longer harbors hope for integration. One reason is that the district, overwhelmingly white when he began working on the case in 1974, is now largely made up of Latino students, who are also a party in the litigation and perform just as poorly as their black counterparts. Another is that parameters set long ago by the Supreme Court prevent the busing of students beyond a school district’s boundaries as a remedy for segregation.
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:
February 6, 2013
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Board of Education deliberates on who the next Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District will be, and as school districts in our state and across the nation wrestle with what to do to eliminate the racial achievement gap in education, while at the same time establishing world class schools that help prepare all children to learn, succeed and thrive in the 21st century, it’s important that we not lose sight of what the research continues to tell us really makes the difference in a child’s education.
More than 40 years of research on effective schools and transformational education have informed us that the key drivers for eliminating the racial achievement gap in schools and ensuring all students graduate from high school prepared for college and life continue to be:
- An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom – We must ensure every classroom is led by an effective teacher who is committed to and passionate about teaching young people, inspires all children to want to learn, has an appropriate depth of knowledge of the content they are teaching, is comfortable teaching and empowering diverse students, and coaches all of their students to high performance and expectations. Through its Race to the Top Initiative, the Obama Administration also defined an effective teacher as someone who can improve a students’ achievement by 1.0 grade levels in one school year while a highly effective teacher is someone who can improve student achievement by 1.5 grade levels annually. Schools with large numbers of students who are academically behind, therefore, should have the most effective teachers teaching them to ensure they catch up.
- High Quality, Effective Schools with Effective Leaders and Practices – Schools that are considered high quality have a combination of effective leaders, effective teachers, a rigorous curriculum, utilize data-driven instruction, frequently assess student growth and learning, offer a supportive and inspiring school culture, maintain effective governing boards and enjoy support from the broader community in which they reside. They operate with a clear vision, mission, core values and measurable goals and objectives that are monitored frequently and embraced by all in the school community. They also have principals and educators who maintain positive relationships with parents and each other and effectively catalyze and deploy resources (people, money, partnerships) to support student learning and teacher success. Schools that serve high poverty students also are most effective when they provide additional instructional support that’s aligned with what students are learning in the classroom each day, and engage their students and families in extended learning opportunities that facilitate a stronger connection to school, enable children to explore careers and other interests, and provide greater context for what students are learning in the classroom.
- Adequately Employed and Engaged Parents – The impact of parents’ socio-economic status on a child’s educational outcomes, and their emotional and social development, has been well documented by education researchers and educational psychologists since the 1960s. However, the very best way to address the issue of poverty among students in schools is to ensure that the parents of children attending a school are employed and earning wages that allow them to provide for the basic needs of their children. The most effective plans to address the persistent underachievement of low-income students, therefore, must include strategies that lead to quality job training, high school completion and higher education, and employment among parents. Parents who are employed and can provide food and shelter for their children are much more likely to be engaged in their children’s education than those who are not. Besides being employed, parents who emphasize and model the importance of learning, provide a safe, nurturing, structured and orderly living environment at home, demonstrate healthy behaviors and habits in their interactions with their children and others, expose their children to extended learning opportunities, and hold their children accountable to high standards of character and conduct generally rear children who do well in school. Presently, 74% of Black women and 72% of white women residing in Dane County are in the labor force; however, black women are much more likely to be unemployed and looking for work, unmarried and raising children by themselves, or working in low wage jobs even if they have a higher education.
- Positive Peer Relationships and Affiliations – A child’s peer group can have an extraordinarily positive, or negative, affect on their persistence and success in school. Students who spend time with other students who believe that learning and attending school is important, and who inspire and support each other, generally spend more time focused on learning in class, more time studying outside of class, and tend to place a higher value on school and learning overall. To the contrary, children who spend a lot of time with peer groups that devalue learning, or engage in bullying, are generally at a greater risk of under-performing themselves. Creating opportunities and space for positive peer relationships to form and persist within and outside of school can lead to significantly positive outcomes for student achievement.
- Community Support and Engagement – Children who are reared in safe and resourceful communities that celebrate their achievements, encourage them to excel, inform them that they are valued, hold them accountable to a high standard of character and integrity, provide them with a multitude of positive learning experiences, and work together to help them succeed rarely fail to graduate high school and are more likely to pursue higher education, regardless of their parents educational background. “It Takes A Whole Village to Raise a Child” is as true of a statement now as it was when the African proverb was written in ancient times. Unfortunately, as children encounter greater economic and social hardships, such as homelessness, joblessness, long-term poverty, poor health, poor parenting and safety concerns, the village must be stronger, more uplifting and more determined than ever to ensure these children have the opportunity to learn and remain hopeful. It is often hopelessness that brings us down, and others along with us.
If we place all of our eggs in just one of the five baskets rather than develop strategies that bring together all five areas that affect student outcomes, our efforts to improve student performance and provide quality schools where all children succeed will likely come up short. This is why the Urban League of Greater Madison is working with its partners to extend the learning time “in school” for middle schoolers who are most at-risk of failing when they reach high school, and why we’ll be engaging their parents in the process. It’s also why we’ve worked with the United Way and other partners to strengthen the Schools of Hope tutoring initiative for the 1,600 students it serves, and why we are working with local school districts to help them recruit effective, diverse educators and ensure the parents of the children they serve are employed and have access to education and job training services. Still, there is so much more to be done.
As a community, I strongly believe we can achieve the educational goals we set for our chlidren if we focus on the right work, invest in innovation, take a “no excuses” approach to setting policy and getting the work done, and hire a high potential, world-class Superintendent who can take us there.
God bless our children, families, schools and capital region.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
Related: Kaleem Caire interview, notes and links along with the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school (rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board).
On the domestic front, Gates expects his foundation to devote increasing resources to ranking colleges not by how selective or prestigious they are — the infamous U.S. News and World Report model, which Gates called a “perverse metric” — but on how aggressively they recruit underperforming students, provide them with a rigorous education, and then place them in remunerative careers. Real success in higher education, Gates, said, would mean accepting a student with “a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they’re super happy.” He also hopes to rank teachers’ colleges according to how well their graduates perform in the classroom, but warned that real “excellence” in teacher education is probably a long way off.
One of Gates’ most controversial priorities has been his attempt to encourage school districts and states to tie teacher evaluation and pay to evidence of student learning. Through the federal Race to the Top education grant competition, the Obama administration adopted this agenda, and now 33 states have passed laws overhauling the way public school teachers are evaluated.
The devil, Gates freely admits, is in the details. In his 2013 “annual letter” about his philanthropic work, released yesterday, Gates praised the Eagle County school district in Colorado, which abolished seniority-based pay and instead rewards teachers by grading them during intensive classroom observations and by factoring in their students’ scores on standardized tests in math, reading, and science. Teachers of other subjects are exempted from many of the test-score based components of this system. But Eagle County’s program could be seriously upended by SB191, the law Colorado passed three years ago in response to Race to the Top. The bill requires that every Colorado teacher — even those in currently non-tested subjects, like art and music — be evaluated according to individual students’ achievement metrics. Pencil-and-paper tests are unlikely to be the best way to measure student learning in non-traditional subjects. But because tests are “cheap,” as Gates puts it, some states and districts are extending them to music, art, and even gym classes.
This week NJ Spotlight acquired, via a formal Open Records Act request, the application from KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy to the Camden City Board of Education. The applicants hope to create up to five charter schools under the auspices of N.J.’s Urban Hope Act, a bill passed last January that allows non-profits to operate new schools in Newark, Trenton, and Camden.
The application process has not been lacking in melodrama. (See here for previous Newsworks coverage.) While Mayor Dana Reed heartily supports other options in Camden besides its dismal traditional schools, the school board initially rejected all applications and later, only begrudgingly, agreed to consider the one from KIPP, a highly-regarded program that serves 41,000 kids in the country and operates five schools in Newark.
Madison schoolboard member Ed Hughes:
11. I wish for a successful introduction of the Mondo reading program in all our elementary schools. Superintendent Jane Belmore has particular interest and expertise in literacy and she has spearheaded the school district’s decision to adopt the Mondo Bookshop Program at the K-5 level across all elementary schools, with the purchase of new curriculum materials funded through some of the unexpected state aid that came our way this fall. The Mondo program, which is said to have clearly-focused lesson guides that are aligned to the Common Core state standards, should be a significant step forward in terms of a district-wide, aligned, early literacy scope and sequence. I also wish that now that we have made a commitment to the Mondo program, we stick with it and don’t lurch towards some other approach if the improved outcomes we’re seeking take a while to arrive.
12. I realize there is initiative fatigue among our teachers and staff, but I wish for a continued push for new student-based ideas and initiatives developed at the school level, like the drive toward converting Toki Middle School to an Expeditionary Learning school. This fall, there was discussion of Toki possibly switching to a charter school structure as a way of accessing state funds that could help accelerate the conversion. I am sorry that this charter proposal has run into complications and has been withdrawn before the Board really had a chance to consider it, but I hope that principals, teachers and staff at all our schools continue to search for innovative approaches toward enhancing the engagement and learning of our students.
Two yet-to-be-determined Madison elementary schools will split a $1.2 million grant to accelerate low-income and minority student achievement, the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools announced Wednesday.
School Board member Mary Burke contributed the funding for the grant, which will be awarded in $200,000 installments over three years.
The foundation currently distributes about $400,000 a year to Madison schools, so the grant will double that amount, foundation executive director Stephanie Hayden said. The goal of the grant is to demonstrate that closing the achievement gap can be done more quickly than currently expected.
“We would hope that others in the community would step forward and fund similar things,” Hayden said. “We really view these as a demonstration project to show it can be done.”
The eligible non-charter schools must have at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Eighteen elementary schools meet that threshold this year.
The Lawrence school board hopes to finalize plans for an upcoming bond election, including plans for expanding career and technical education programs, when the board holds a special meeting this week.
The board meets at 7 p.m. Monday at the district office, 110 McDonald Drive.
Rick Henry, career and technical education specialist for the district, updated the board last week about the kinds of career and technical programs that officials would like to offer by forming partnerships with area community and technical colleges to teach classes at a facility in Lawrence.
Those programs include health sciences, machine technology, computer networking and commercial construction. Those would be in addition to the culinary arts program currently offered at the facility. Officials estimated the cost of launching those programs at about $4.4 million.
The Lawrence School District plans to spend $173,879,557 during 2012-2013 for 11,000 students or $15,807/student. PRK-12 Madison school district per student spending is $14,242 during 2012-2013.
Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states were to announce on Monday that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.
Indiana teachers frustrated by sweeping changes in the state’s education system under schools chief Tony Bennett say they hope his successor will be able to slow the pace of change, but they say they don’t expect it to stop altogether.
Democrat Glenda Ritz, a library media specialist at an Indianapolis school, defeated Bennett in the Nov. 6 election with a grassroots campaign that largely was conducted through social media and backed by teachers across the state.
Teachers have been frustrated with the changes under Bennett, which include the nation’s broadest use of school vouchers, the state’s takeover of six schools and changes that tie teacher pay to student performance. Many have said they feel that they are being blamed for failing schools.
I watched President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address four years ago with hundreds of students at Northwest Secondary School.
The truth is, the adults in the room were paying attention, but hardly any of the kids were. They were noisy and unfocused. Maintaining control was clearly a challenge and priority for the staff. Whatever anyone thinks about hope and change in terms of Obama – not my subject here – I left the Milwaukee Public Schools building near N. 76th St. and W. Silver Spring Drive that day feeling unhopeful about change there.
With barely a ripple, the Milwaukee School Board voted a couple weeks ago to make official what Superintendent Gregory Thornton’s administration effectively set in place a year ago: The school will be closed at the end of this year.
The decision comes a year after MPS leaders took the extraordinary step of pulling more than 500 eighth- and ninth-graders out of the school midyear, citing, at various times, the poor academic results, safety issues and the inability to find qualified teachers willing to work there. (My reaction, in order, is ugh, ugh and wow.)
The demise of Northwest Secondary speaks to several major issues shaping MPS and Milwaukee education in general. Among them:
Education reform film “Won’t Back Down” opened Friday to terrible reviews – and high hopes from activists who expect the movie to inspire parents everywhere to demand big changes in public schools.
The drama stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a spirited mother who teams up with a passionate teacher to seize control of their failing neighborhood school, over the opposition of a self-serving teachers union.
Reviewers called it trite and dull, but education reformers on both the left and right have hailed the film as a potential game-changer that could aid their fight to weaken teachers’ unions and inject more competition into public education.
Madison School District PDF Summary Document:
The 2005 to 2011 Strategic Plan was adopted by the School Board in June 2005. It outlines major objectives for the Arlington Public Schools for the six years covered by the plan. The Strategic Plan process was designed to result in clear direction for the school system that focuses on improved student learning for all students. For each goal of the plan, the School Board has defined specific objectives, indicators, and targets or benchmarks to measure progress over each of the 6 years. This summary provides selected findings from the results presented for 2009-10.
Links:
I hope the Madison School Board reviews additional Districts. Arlington’s demographics and tax base are substantially different than Madison.
Abby Andrietsch, via a kind email:
Happy start to the school year! Our team is more excited than ever about the transformational work being done across Milwaukee.
Today, our 24 STCM partner schools serve over 10,000 students. As I hear the “first day” stories from several of our partner schools, I am reminded of all of the work put in by our coaches and school leaders to prepare: I am reminded of the four days of leadership training STCM held with more than 80 leaders from across the city coming together to focus on excellence in their schools; I am reminded of the more than 135 new urban teachers that came together for a STCM training focused on high-impact instructional practices.
The power of this group is real and the momentum is visible – these are the leaders that will change Milwaukee’s education system and prepare our future leaders. The results we have seen in each of the three STCM pathways (described below) are an early indication of what is possible for our city.
While I am more aware of the challenges facing our students, families, teachers, leaders and schools in Milwaukee, I am more hopeful than ever about what I know is possible. However, we can’t do it alone. It takes engagement from city leaders, educators, non-profit partners, business leaders and foundations. Join us in the movement to support quality across Milwaukee.
Warmest regards,
Abby Andrietsch
Executive Director
Schools That Can Milwaukee
Sarah Koran was excited about applying for entry into the veterinary technician program at Madison College in 2010 but her application was denied. That meant hopes of starting the popular associate degree program, which often has a waiting list, was likely pushed down the road for two years.
So instead of putting her life on hold, she decided to investigate other options and was thrilled to learn that Globe University in Middleton, which is part of the burgeoning for-profit higher education industry, also offered a vet tech degree — and she could start classes almost immediately.
Although the total cost of that two-year program at Globe (about $51,000) would be more than four times the price she could expect to pay at Madison College (about $12,200), Koran was eligible for $5,500 per year in federal grant aid and figured it was worth it to take out student loans to help pay for the rest.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we know it’s expensive but you’re going to get a great education and a great-paying job,'” says Koran, noting she now realizes vet techs tend to earn between $10 and $15 per hour after first graduating, not exactly big bucks.
For some reason, my family seems to have produced more than its share of teachers. I don’t remember anyone encouraging us or discouraging us, but somehow we ended up with nine teachers in our extended family, including my husband and myself.
For many years, we were proud to be in this profession. Then Scott Walker was elected. Up to that point, I had not realized to what extent public schools across the nation were being undermined and that teachers had become targets. Governor Walker’s election opened my eyes and awakened a political activist. The recall election did not go as we planned and hoped. After much disappointment and discussion, my husband and I realized that the most important cause on which to focus our efforts was supporting strong public schools and emphasizing the benefits they give to all people in the state and nation. This led us to the Opportunity To Learn Campaign.
Through the OTL Campaign, I hope to inform others about the plight of public schools and the inequalities between districts. To that end, here are two stories about teachers in my family, the districts that employ them and how the inequalities in those districts have affected their students.
Q: What will the state’s new report cards and individual school ratings this fall mean for Madison schools?
A: We need to work together with our community members and organizations and make sure we understand what the information is going to mean to our different audiences. The conversation that took place in the school district and the community last year laid the foundation for that. People are absolutely focused on the fact that we have to do better with all of our children. It’s really a matter of making sure the strategies that we have are moving forward and are the right ones and we’re checking them along the way and making corrections, and hopefully every child will be better on every measure
Much more on Interim Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore, here.
Chris Rickert via several kind readers:
Wisconsin has a “long way to go in all our racial/ethnic groups,” said Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison.
My hope is that, given Wisconsin’s overwhelmingly white population, proficiency problems among white students will spur more people to push for policies inside and outside of school that help children — all children — learn.
“I hate to look at it that way, but I think you’re absolutely right,” said Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. “The low performance of white students in our state may just lead to the type and level of change that’s necessary in public education for black and other students of color to succeed as well.”
Indeed, Gamoran said Massachusetts’ implementation of an evaluation system similar to the one Wisconsin is adopting now has been correlated with gains in reading and math proficiency and a narrowing of the racial achievement gap in math. But he emphasized that student achievement is more than just the schools’ responsibility.
Madison has known for a while that its schools are not meeting the needs of too many students of color.
The issue of low expectations and reduced academic standards is not a new one. A few worthwhile, related links:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
Here are eight thoughts on why parents of students in top-flight schools (and parents in just about any school) should be paying attention to what is unfolding:
Rising standards for defining proficiency. Wisconsin is about to raise the bar for what it takes for a student to be labeled “proficient” or “advanced.” The idea is that the new standards will be more realistic measures of whether a student is on track for college and a career. But a lot of parents used to their kids being among the, say, 89% or so of students doing well at high-testing school will now find their kids aren’t in that category and the schoolwide figure is suddenly, say, 45%. Will parents and school leaders take this as a call for everyone to aim higher? I hope so, but brace yourself.
New school report cards. By next year, a new system for describing how each school in the state is doing will be launched. It will offer a lot more data and new types of ratings. Particularly for conscientious parents who take advantage of it, it will offer new perspectives on how to pick a school and what a child’s school is doing well – or not well.
Achievement gaps at high-performing schools. Almost all top schools, including many suburban schools, have such gaps if they have more than a handful of poor children and minority children among their students, or if special education students aren’t meeting state goals. The gaps, in terms of percentage of proficient students, are often just as wide in those schools as in Milwaukee. The decade-old No Child Left Behind system put these gaps in the spotlight without being very effective in bringing improvement. The new Wisconsin system will focus on this even more. Top schools are likely to be under even more scrutiny on these fronts.
While reviewing the results of a new student survey this year, the Sennett Middle School student council was surprised to learn about safety concerns.
After further investigation, council members discovered some students didn’t feel comfortable in a certain hallway, so Principal Colleen Lodholz ensured a security guard monitored the hallway between class periods.
Lodholz said the Gallup Student Poll, administered in grades 5-12 for the first time in the fall, was more effective than past school climate surveys because the results were available sooner.
“Typically when we did the climate surveys, you wouldn’t get the results until summer,” Lodholz said. “You could choose to use it the following year, but the kids had moved on.”
The Gallup poll asks students to rate 20 statements such as “I know I will graduate from high school” and “I feel safe in this school.” The statements correspond to the categories “hope,” “engagement” and “well-being.”
Kathleen Falk today used a closed school as a backdrop for a campaign speech touting her plans to restore school aid cuts if elected governor. The school, Phillis Wheatley Elementary, was recently shut down by the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Last month a candidate running against Milwaukee representative Jason Fields in the 11th Assembly District Democratic primary, Mandela Barnes, kicked off his campaign in front of MPS’ closed Daniel Webster Middle School. Barnes too spoke of restoring funding to public education, arguing that a closed school reflects poorly on a neighborhood:
“We chose this location because this closed school building represents the loss of hope and opportunity. Who would bring jobs to an area that closes schools?
Falk’s appearance and Barnes’ statement highlight a serious byproduct of Milwaukee’s culture of school choice. Schools close frequently in Milwaukee. They do by design.
The final set of reports from the School Choice Demonstration Project found that during the course of their five-year evaluation 36 private Milwaukee Parental Choice Program schools and 40 MPS schools closed their doors. There is evidence those schools were performing lower than schools that remain open, which on its face is a good thing for students.
Neerav Kingsland lives and breathes numbers. But when you ask the chief strategy officer of New Schools for New Orleans about this city’s remarkable efforts to rebuild its schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he starts not with statistics but with the story of Bridget Green.
A young woman whose grades earned her the distinction of valedictorian of her 2003 high school class, Green never gave the commencement speech or walked across the stage with her classmates. Despite five tries, she was unable to pass the math-competency exit exam required for graduation.
Green’s story is emblematic of the hopelessness that used to mark New Orleans’s schools. No matter how smart or hardworking or well-meaning the system’s leaders, there was no chance for sustainable improvement, given the enormity of its dysfunction. Then the levees broke and the city was devastated, and out of that destruction came the need to build a new system, one that today is accompanied by buoyant optimism. Since 2006, New Orleans students have halved the achievement gap with their state counterparts. They are on track to, in the next five years, make this the first urban city in the country to exceed its state’s average test scores. The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40 percent of students attended schools identified by the state as “academically unacceptable” in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.
Charter schools in New Orleans (NOLA) now serve over four out of five students in the city – the largest market share of any big city in the nation. As of the 2011-12 school year, most of the city’s schools (around 80 percent), charter and regular public, are overseen by the Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide agency created in 2003 to take over low-performing schools, which assumed control of most NOLA schools in Katrina’s aftermath.
Around three-quarters of these RSD schools (50 out of 66) are charters. The remainder of NOLA’s schools are overseen either by the Orleans Parish School Board (which is responsible for 11 charters and six regular public schools, and taxing authority for all parish schools) or by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (which is directly responsible for three charters, and also supervises the RSD).
New Orleans is often held up as a model for the rapid expansion of charter schools in other urban districts, based on the argument that charter proliferation since 2005-06 has generated rapid improvements in student outcomes. There are two separate claims potentially embedded in this argument. The first is that the city’s schools perform better that they did pre-Katrina. The second is that NOLA’s charters have outperformed the city’s dwindling supply of traditional public schools since the hurricane.
Rachel Louise Ensign & Melissa Korn:
So Harvard has put you–or someone you know–on its waitlist. Great news! Or maybe not.
A spot on a waitlist from an elite school doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate is closer to the finish line. Some may be waitlisted, for example, because though their grades weren’t quite good enough or they didn’t take enough advanced placement classes, they still piqued the interest of admissions officers. Others are offered spots purely out of courtesy, such as family members of alumni or children of donors who failed to make the academic cut.
Schools often pad their waitlists to protect their “yield,” or the proportion of accepted students who choose to attend. They can admit fewer students on the first pass, to maintain their aura of exclusivity, then move on to the waitlist if accepted students turn them down.
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
With one of the most competitive and expensive school board races in the history of the Madison Metropolitan School District now behind us, it is time for us to get to work on strengthening public education in our capital city and ensuring that every single one of our children have the schools and tools they need to succeed in education and in life.
We congratulate Mary Burke and Arlene Silveira for their success in securing three-year terms on the Madison Board of Education. They will bring significant experience and business acumen to the School Board. We also give great respect to their challengers, Nichelle Nichols and Michael Flores, for stepping up, taking a stand for children and ensuring that the voices of parents and children of color were front and center during the campaign. They ensured that the discussion remained focused on the alarming racial achievement gap that exists in our schools, and we deeply appreciate them for it.
As the Board of Education moves forward, we expect they will remain focused on our community’s five greatest priorities: (1) eliminating the racial achievement gap; (2) establishing world class schools that attract enrollment and prepare all children to thrive and succeed in college and work after high school; (3) empowering parents and engaging them in their children’s education; (4) developing a highly talented and skilled workforce that is more reflective of the students our school district now educates; and (5) aligning the District’s employee handbook to the priorities, needs and goals of students, staff and schools.
The Board of Education can start by focusing their efforts on hiring an outstanding new Superintendent who possesses significant leadership skill/experience and business acumen, a proven track-record of successfully leading urban schools with significantly diverse student populations; and a strong, clear and compelling vision and plan for public education and our children’s future.
Rather than deciding too quickly on approving an achievement gap plan that was rushed in its development, we hope the Board of Education will avoid getting too far ahead of the next Superintendent in implementing plans, and instead focus their attention on existing efforts where the District can make a difference in the next six months, such as:
- Implementing the Common Core Standards and related common curriculum in literacy, English/language arts and mathematics in all elementary schools in grades K-5 (to start), with additional learning support for students who are significantly behind or ahead academically;
- Re-establishing and aligning the District’s Professional Development Program for all educators and support staff to the curriculum, standards and needs/interests of students;
- Implementing Wisconsin’s new Educator Effectiveness evaluation and assessment program;
- Providing a full-time principal and adequate staffing for Badger Rock and Wright Middle Schools;
- Requiring greater collaboration and alignment between the District’s safety-net, student-support programs such as Schools of Hope, AVID/TOPS, Juventud/ASPIRA, PEOPLE/ITA Program and ACT Prep Academies to ensure more effective and seamless identification, support and progress monitoring of students who need or are enrolled in these programs;
- Partnering with local businesses, educational institutions and community organizations to recruit, hire, acclimate and retain a diverse workforce, and appropriately assign all staff to schools according to their skills and interests and the needs of students;
- Engaging parents more effectively in the education of their children through community partnerships; and
- Partnering with the United Way, Urban League, Boys & Girls Club, Centro Hispano, Hmong Education Council and other agencies to effectively build awareness and educate the community about local and national best practices for eliminating the achievement gap and preparing all youth for college and work.
We look forward to working with YOU, the Board of Education, our community partners and the leadership of our public schools to implement immediate opportunities and solutions that will benefit our children TODAY.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
Related:
An expected outcome.
Thanks to the four citizens who ran.
The Silveira/Nichols race was interesting in that it was the first competitive school board election involving an incumbent in some time. Lawrie Kobza and Lucy Mathiak defeated incumbent candidates during the mid-2000’s. Perhaps the “success recipe” requires that the insurgent candidate have a strong local network, substantive issues and the ability to get the word out, effectively.
Arlene is a different incumbent than those defeated by Kobza & Mathiak.
That said, she has been on the board for six years, a time during which little, if any progress was made on the MMSD’s core mission: reading, writing, math and science, while spending more per student than most Districts. Perhaps the Superintendent’s looming departure offers an opportunity to address the core curricular issues.
I wish the new board well and congratulate Mary and Arlene on their victories.
Paraphrasing a friend, it is never too early to run for the School Board. Three seats are up in 2013, those currently occupied by Maya Cole, James Howard and Beth Moss.
A reader emailed a link to this M.P. King photo:
As many as 20 states have considered enacting parent trigger laws, which would let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school’s families agree. The laws — which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas — have generated controversy and even inspired a movie to be released this fall. Do these laws give parents the first real power over their children’s education? Or do they put public schools in private hands and impede real improvements?
IT IS Republic Day in Mumbai, and an elderly nun addresses 1,000 silent schoolgirls gathered in the playground of Mary Immaculate Girls’ School. If the writers of India’s constitution could see the state of the country today they would weep, she cries, but this school offers hope. Local parents in the tatty surrounding district agree. They will do almost anything to get their children into the oversubscribed school, even though it charges its primary pupils $180 a year when the state school across the road is free. From the Mumbai slums to Nigerian shanty towns and Kenyan mountain villages, tens of millions of poor children are opting out of the state sector, and their number is burgeoning.
Despite a rapid rise in attendance since 2000, 72m school-age children across the world are still not in school, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa and a quarter in South and West Asia. The United Nations reckons it would cost $16 billion a year to get the remaining stragglers into class by 2015–one of its big development goals. Yet a free education is something that many parents will pay to avoid.
How can an entire state seemingly hate one school system so much? In the midst of the worst cuts to education our state has ever seen, Milwaukee Public Schools is often portrayed as a failed system filled with lazy teachers, violent classrooms and hopeless students. These misinformed views appear to be widely held beliefs.
The comments on a March 3 JSOnline article about the King/Riverside high school basketball game are just one recent example. One commenter lamented that Germantown would have to beat “teams of thugs and criminals” to win the state tournament.
These views do not reflect the MPS I know. This is not the system that delivered me to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my sisters to Harvard and Macalaster College and thousands of others to great universities and productive careers.
UW-Madison Ed School Dean Julie Underwood:
Public education currently stands under twin towers of threat — de-funding and privatization. This is consistent with a conservative agenda to eliminate many public programs — including public education.
In Wisconsin, school districts have been under strict limits on their revenues and spending since 1993. These limits have not kept pace with the natural increases in the costs of everyday things like supplies, energy and fuel. So every year, local school board members and administrators have had to cut their budgets to comply with spending limits. Throughout these years, school boards and administrators have done an admirable job of managing these annual cuts, but taken together, reductions in programs and staff have had a significant and very negative impact on our schools and the education they can provide to children.
Unfortunately this year, these same districts have received the largest single budget cut in Wisconsin history. For example, high poverty aid was cut by 10 percent during a time when poverty in children has increased in Wisconsin. As a result, schools are cutting programs and staff. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data, the cuts in 2012 are greater than the two previous years combined. These cuts will be compounded when next year’s cuts come due.
Related:
How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state’s largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That’s how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected – enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
have always been irritated by this line of reasoning, is it really that far-fetched that those who support school choice actually care about education? And who stands to gain if public education is destroyed?
One longstanding criticism of voucher programs is they are part of a plot to allow private entities to profit off of K-12 education. If true, there should be a profit seeking school sector pushing vouchers for their own benefit. But is there one in Milwaukee?
To get at this question I examined the non-profit status of private schools in Milwaukee’s voucher program. First, I put the Archdiocesan, WELS, and Missouri Synod schools tied to parishes in the non-profit column. Second, I cross-referenced the names and addresses of the non-Catholic and non-Lutheran schools in the choice program against a database of Wisconsin non-profit corporations I obtained from the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions.
The issue of violence in our schools is a gateway to explore other problems in society. For individuals who are willing to move beyond the micro discussion of blaming students and think critically about the macro phenomenon of systemic oppression, school violence provides insight into the community hopelessness with which children are left to contend.
Before delving into the social context of violence that is occurring in Milwaukee, let’s first examine the socioeconomic and instructional conditions of student learning at the local and state level:
88% of students enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools are of color, while only 26% of students enrolled at the state level are of color.
19% of MPS students have a special education classification, while only 14% of students at the state level are classified as special education.
I receive the same two questions every time I stand before an audience to talk about the year I spent chronicling one of the worst-performing schools in the state of Indiana.
“What’s the solution?” and “What did you learn?”
The solution, I argue, can be found in the failing schools themselves. Despite all of the problems I found during my year at Manual High, there were pockets of excellence that can serve as a guide. Such as:
- The 25-year-old choir teacher who worked so hard to engage his students that he was often sweating at the end of his classes. By his second year at the school, the choir program had more than tripled in size and previously at-risk students were working harder than ever.
- The Army veteran turned school police officer who spent every day trying to build relationships with students, aware that many needed a mentor and that the relationships he forged today would pay off in times of crisis later.
- The special-needs teacher who was nearing retirement age but just couldn’t imagine walking away from a group of students who suffered from the most profound learning disabilities. Her students wouldn’t go to college, but she knew that if she worked hard enough some would ultimately be able to live semi-independently.
When people ask me for a quick-hit solution to America’s education problems, I instead share the words of Earl Martin Phalen, who runs a program in Indiana that seeks to prevent low-income students from suffering a summer learning loss. Two years ago, a schools superintendent introduced Phalen at a news conference as: “The brains behind the operation.”
Searching for Hope, Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America by Matthew Tully
Seniority rules and teacher transfer rights will remain intact in Oakland Unified this year, despite the superintendent’s call for a change.
The recent debate in Oakland has centered on the transfer of displaced teachers — those whose schools have closed, whose positions have been cut, or who are returning from leave. Traditionally, those teachers have chosen their new job from a list of openings for which they are eligible, with the most senior employee having the first pick and principals having little to no say.
Superintendent Tony Smith had hoped to work out a different arrangement in Oakland, in an initiative called “mutual matching,” arguing it would lead to better placements and, ultimately, higher student achievement. Teachers would visit prospective schools and list their top choices; school principals would do the same, and the district would make the final placements based on both sets of preferences.
Some teachers welcomed the idea. Others expressed strong objections, or felt the process would be too rushed to put in place for the fall. This week, without the union support it needed, the district acknowledged that it had run out of time.
