Kenneth Chang:

Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.
As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.
The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

Stephanie Simon:

(Reuters) – With school in full swing across the United States, the littlest students are getting used to the blocks table and the dress-up corner – and that staple of American public education, the standardized test.
A national push to make public schools more rigorous and hold teachers more accountable has led to a vast expansion of testing in kindergarten. And more exams are on the way, including a test meant to determine whether 5-year-olds are on track to succeed in college and career.
Paul Weeks, a vice president at test developer ACT Inc., says he knows that particular assessment sounds a bit nutty, especially since many kindergarteners aspire to careers as superheroes. “What skills do you need for that, right? Flying is good. X-ray vision?” he said, laughing.

Daniel Akst:

Here’s a novel recipe for raising successful kids: see that they’re born overseas, but bring them to America before they hit their teens.
That, at least, is the implication of a new study by sociologists at John Hopkins University who tracked 10,795 adolescents into young adulthood.
Basically, the sociologists found that the immigrant teens beat the pants off native born children in academic achievement and, as adults, psychological well-being. American born children of immigrants also seemed to enjoy an advantage. The researchers adjusted for socioeconomic background and school conditions, so they were comparing apples to apples.

Melinda Beck:

One of the most agonizing questions that parents of children with autism ask is–why?
Now, a growing number of genetic tests are providing some answers.
Scientists say that roughly 20% of autism cases can be linked to known genetic abnormalities, and many more may be discovered.
Pinpointing a genetic explanation can help predict whether siblings are likely to have the disorder–and even point to new, targeted treatments. Last week, for example, researchers reported that an experimental drug, arbaclofen, reduced social withdrawal and challenging behaviors in children and adults with Fragile X syndrome, the single most common genetic cause of autism.

Allison Aubrey:

Yes, we love salt. It makes everything taste better. But as a society, we’re eating way too much of it. And, so are our children.
A new study from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that children in the U.S. between the ages of 8 and 18 are eating, on average, 3,387 mg per day. That’s about the same amount as adults. But it’s a lot more than the 2,300 mg daily limit recommended by the federal dietary guidelines.
And the result? Janelle Gunn, a public health analyst with the CDC, says it’s pretty clear. “We found that higher sodium intake was associated with higher blood pressure,” she says.

www.edtogether.org:

EdTogether is a nonprofit education policy and advocacy group committed to closing Wisconsin’s achievement gaps through collaborative policy design, research, and advocacy. All Wisconsin students deserve access to an excellent education that will prepare them for future success. To realize this goal, we must bring together stakeholders to design and advocate for targeted, preventative policies built on our core values of equity, inclusion, and rigor.

Related: EdTogether, an education policy and advocacy group, hosted a discussion of where Wisconsin’s public education system has been, currently is, and where it could be on September 19, 2012 in Madison.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter:

MTI’s September 14 Circuit Court victory, in which significant portions of Governor Walker’s union busting legislation (Act 10) were found to be unconstitutional, has gained world-wide attention.
Recognition has been noted twice in The Wall Street Journal, along with articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, in Great Britain, and numerous newspapers throughout Wisconsin. It has also been the subject of daily TV and radio coverage. Announcement of the decision received a standing ovation at the Fighting Bob Fest, and at the Osaka, Japan Social Forum. Public employees in Osaka are suffering from Act 10-like legislation.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews hailed Judge Colas’ decision as restoring the basic rights of collective bargaining to Wisconsin’s public employees. He said, “This is the ticket to restoring employees’ equal voice in the workplace, and the means of assuring justice for those not only represented by MTI, but by numerous other Wisconsin public sector unions.” MTI has requested that the Madison Metropolitan School District timely engage in collective bargaining with MTI to establish contract terms for MTI’s five (5) collective bargaining units, for the 2013-14 contract term.
The State has asked Judge Colas to stay (delay) implementation of his decision pending appeal.

Educators are waking up all over Madison this morn able to concentrate on students like it’s Jan 2011. It’s beautiful. #bargainingworks

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 25, 2012

Anthony Galluzzo:

We asked a former West Point professor about teaching literature at the nation’s most prestigious military academy. What he told us revealed the truth behind the country’s most elite warrior caste – and how liberal heroes like Thoreau and the Beats inspire the next generation of “Runaway Generals.”

Motoko Rich:

The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers’ unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Over the past few years, lawmakers who have previously been considered solid supporters of teachers’ unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.
As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers’ unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.
In Illinois, the top three recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association this year are Republicans, including a candidate for the State House who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.

William Leith:

There are two types of university in Britain, explains Professor Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. There are private ones, such as Buckingham and the newly opened New College of the Humanities in London, and there are those that are funded and controlled by the state. Kealey does not approve of the latter type.
If you’re a university, says Kealey, you should want to be private. Being private, you can charge whatever fees you want, teach whatever subjects you want, to whomever you want. If Britain had more private universities, says Kealey, we would be able to compete with the best in the world. As it is, we’re slipping.
Why? Well, says Kealey, “the best universities in the world are the Ivy League. The next best are the English-speaking ones that are independent but not totally.” These, says Kealey, are “in the thrall of social engineering”. And then come the universities of continental Europe. These institutions, he says, are nationalised, like Britain’s railway system used to be. So there’s no incentive for them to excel. They’re sinking in the mire of a planned economy, like 1970s commuters waiting on grotty platforms for trains that always arrive late.

Matt Miller

In 2011, Chicago’s public schools spent $7,946 per pupil for instructional (that is, classroom) purposes; the New Trier school district, a short ride up the road, spent $12,043, or 51 percent more. In a class of 25 kids, that’s a difference of more than $102,000. This explains why starting and maximum salaries for teachers in New Trier are much higher than in Chicago; and why the average teacher salary in New Trier is $103,000 compared with Chicago’s $71,000. (These figures are from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago, which tracks fiscal- equity trends.)
The point? When suburban schools pay better, have much nicer facilities and working conditions, and are filled with kids who are easier to teach (because they don’t have the many problems that come with poverty), it is no surprise that, over time, the best teachers gravitate to the best suburban schools. We are relying on the “missionary plan” to staff schools in poor neighborhoods.
The local property-tax basis of much school finance means wealthier communities can tax themselves at lower rates and still generate far more spending per pupil. New Trier has 7.5 times the property wealth per pupil that Chicago has, taxes its residents’ property at roughly half Chicago’s rate, and generates vastly more dollars per pupil.

Mr. Miller compares Chicago’s “instructional” spending, which is only a portion of spending. Chicago plans to spend $5,162,000,000 during the 2012-2013 school year for 404,151 students or $12,772/student. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the same school year.

Ron Jackson:

The Chicago teachers’ strike has sparked interest and debate far beyond the school district. Folks outside the education field are weighing in on how much teachers should earn, how much responsibility teachers should bear for declining tests scores, and the greed of unions. Some experts even predicted the nation’s union-busting eyes were on Chicago, predicting a possible ripple-effect depending upon the outcome.
For many outside the negotiations, opinions, tempers and solutions ran amok. Schools of thought ran from, teachers make too much for just nine months work to unions protect bad teachers to teachers are responsible for low test performance. Perusing the social media, it was easy to find suggestions of what the ideal and fair teacher’s compensation should be, all by nonteachers, of course.

Steve Peha:

The phrase “research-based”, or some variant thereof, appears more than 100 times in the language of No Child Left Behind. Grounding educational practice in solid science was, and still is, an important goal. But, as most people know, finding your way through the research landscape of teaching and learning isn’t exactly a walk in the park. That’s why “When Can You Trust the Experts?” is such an important book.
Written by Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, this informative and accessible book is a must-read for anyone trying to understand what works, what doesn’t, and whether or not good science is being used to support such judgments.

Kavitha Cardoza:

One in three children in the United States is overweight or obese. Significant numbers of those young people are grappling with health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Those conditions can be difficult for children to manage in any setting, but they can pose particular challenges for children during the school day.
Dr. Yolandra Hancock used to be an elementary school teacher, and it shows. She’s patient, encouraging and has an endearing way of ending her sentences with “my love” and “my sweet.”
Her patients include a 13-year-old who weighs 400 pounds; a child whose teeth are so rotted she can’t bite into carrots; and many preteens who are diabetic. Today, Hancock is examining Derek Lyles, 13. He’s 4 feet 11 inches and weighs 256 pounds.

Jeff Coen, David Heinzmann and John Chase:

Chicago Public Schools officials expect about 53,000 of the district’s roughly 400,000 students will attend charter schools this year, and the number of charters will increase to more than 100. The city is aiming to add 60 charter schools in the next five years with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is trying to expand charters across the country.
The biggest push for charter schools locally comes from some of the wealthiest backers of Emanuel, including Bruce Rauner, a venture capitalist who regularly advises the mayor. At a seminar of business and political leaders held the same day teachers voted to return to school, Rauner said the strike would only energize reform efforts that he called a “multiyear revolution.”
“I think we’re going to have a coalescing of interests that’s a focus and drive some major change. And there are some plans in the works, some charter community education innovators who are now focusing on Chicago, and I think in the coming years we can innovate,” he said.
Experts called the union’s stand against privately run networks unique in the United States, where several big cities, including New York, also have pushed charter schools.
“What’s different is this is really the first mass movement against that comprehensive strategy” for privatization, said Janelle Scott, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies school policy.

Related:

• “Presumptions of invalidity”: Closing the Window on Charters in Madison?.

• Charter Caps, Laser Pointers and SuperPACs
• Milwaukee is wisely embracing charter schools.
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
• Notes and links on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy – rejected by the Madison School Board.
• Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
  

  “Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Robert Hernandez:

That means you can bypass the j-school debates and take control over your education by taking the most important step: Be actively involved in your education. This is even more important that deciding what school you’ll attend. Don’t wait for academia to determine what you need to know for modern journalism. Be proactive and find out by using digital media to help you learn those skills.
Think DIY. Think horizontal loyalty. Think of ways to hijack your school’s assets to selfishly improve your skills.
This means more than just attending the required classes. This means more work than is assigned. This means more than a letter grade or GPA. This means meeting and engaging with more than your classmates and professors at your school.
This means using the power of the web and social media to augment your education and introduce yourself to more than just the curriculum outlined by your individual school.

Mike Antonucci:

Here’s a partial list of proposed business items currently under review by the board of directors and various committees of the California Teachers Association:
* That CTA amend the first paragraph on charter schools to read “CTA believes the role of charter schools is to provide students, parents and CTA members with educational opportunities that supplement not supplant public school offerings.”
Rationale: Current language does not deal with the reality that charter school growth is often negatively impacting school districts’ programs and forcing our members to become subject to reduction in force.
* That CTA amend by addition to policy on charter schools the following first paragraph: “CTA believes in a cap on charter schools that does not exceed 10% of school districts’ enrollment.”

Jessica Pasko:

Phyllis Greenleaf has spent much of her life working to improve education, promoting the idea of teaching to the whole child in the numerous college classes she has taught on child development and learning.
Now she hopes to take that knowledge and bring it to a new venue: the Live Oak School District Board of Trustees.
Greenleaf is vying for one of three four-year seats on the board along with current board member Heather Rhodes and Jeremy Ray, a fire captain in Santa Clara.
“I’m not running for the board — I’m walking,” Greenleaf jokes.
As part of her campaign, she and friends have been going door to door to as many residences in the district as they can to introduce herself.

Jay Matthews:

New research on the nation’s largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title — “Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools” — but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example.
No charter school network has been researched as much as KIPP, which has 125 schools and 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Most of the studies say its schools have had large and positive impacts on student achievement when compared to regular public schools. But some smart critics, including scholars Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have found a potential glitch in the analysis.
Most KIPP campuses are fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools. Students arrive far below grade level but flourish because of KIPP’s longer school days and years and careful teacher selection, training and support.
Nonetheless, some KIPP parents move away or decide KIPP is not right for their children. Kahlenberg and Miron say that inflates the average scores of students who stay, compared to regular schools: At KIPP schools, they argue, lower-performing students who leave early are not replaced by incoming low scorers as they are in regular schools.

Jay Matthews:

New research on the nation’s largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title — “Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools” — but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example.
No charter school network has been researched as much as KIPP, which has 125 schools and 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Most of the studies say its schools have had large and positive impacts on student achievement when compared to regular public schools. But some smart critics, including scholars Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have found a potential glitch in the analysis.
Most KIPP campuses are fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools. Students arrive far below grade level but flourish because of KIPP’s longer school days and years and careful teacher selection, training and support.
Nonetheless, some KIPP parents move away or decide KIPP is not right for their children. Kahlenberg and Miron say that inflates the average scores of students who stay, compared to regular schools: At KIPP schools, they argue, lower-performing students who leave early are not replaced by incoming low scorers as they are in regular schools.

Mitch Pearlstein:

Much has been written about achievement gaps in the United States, with even more energy and dollars devoted to reducing them, for decades now.
Not only has seeking to help low-income and minority children do much better academically been an essential quest — one that must continue — but it’s also fair to say it has been at the very core of our attempts to significantly improve American elementary and secondary education.
Yet it’s also fair to say that another large achievement gap has been mostly ignored over this same long period: The dangerous distance between America’s strongest students and their counterparts around the world — with top pupils elsewhere consistently coming out ahead.
Just one example: Six percent of U.S. students perform at what’s called “advanced proficiency” in math. This is a smaller proportion than in 30 other nations.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Sandy Banks:

It wasn’t about money. It was about respect.
That’s what Chicago teachers union president Karen Lewis kept reminding the public during the seven-day teachers strike that had parents scrambling and kept 350,000 children out of class.
But there was way more than respect at stake in the dispute. It was a clash between an impatient mayor and a demoralized teaching corps over competing visions of public schools — one side focused on job protection, the other on accountability.

Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Richard Baird:

Is the confrontation in Chicago symbolic of what should immediately be debated and resolved in a most profound manner nationally, benefitting all students first and foremost; underscored by a clarifying sense that professional educators, a majority of which strive to care for a nation’s ills sociologically by teaching and loving all children; and surely are one of the most valuable assets this nation possesses?
Accountability at every level of the process needs to be accomplished with diligent care and articulated for the sake of our youth, for a keen sense of what their destiny might look like; and well beyond the petty politics dividing legislators and those charged with the capacity to impact growth, development, and overall welfare of children.

Fan of #publiced in Madison? Support students & educators? Email board@Madison.k12.wi.us. Tell them to bargain on Monday.

— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 23, 2012

Historically, teachers have appeared at school board meetings to urge action on this or that matter.

Jeremy Rozansky:

The University of Chicago hit two mile-markers in its decade-long transformation this week. The first, generally celebrated by students, alumni, and their parents, is a new high-water mark in the school’s US News & World Report ranking. The University now shares the fourth spot with Columbia, rising from 12 a few years ago and leapfrogging Stanford, Penn, and MIT, among others.
The second is a reduction in the graduation requirements. Starting next quarter, graduates will not have to pass a swimming test and either pass a fitness test or take three PE classes to graduate. In an email to students, the Dean of the College cited a rationale steeped in the lingo of a marketing consultant:

The change in the College physical education requirement occurs in the context of a larger decision by the University to reimagine and expand our fitness and athletics programs to meet growing demand and the diverse needs of our community.

These may seem like unrelated incidents, but they reflect a massive paradigm shift in the way the University sees itself. Since it wants donations from trustees who prize vacuous but still prestigious measures of schooling excellence like the US News rankings, the University has goaded itself into playing the rankings game.

Associated Press:

Seeking to capitalize on the momentum of the Chicago teachers strike, unions and allied parent and community groups promised Friday to launch a nationwide fight against government-led school reform efforts that they say are only making public education worse.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten announced at a news conference in Washington that they plan workshops, town halls and other events in 11 cities to engage communities in finding their own solutions to improve public education.
For years, unions have pushed back against government interventions in education reform, including the closure of failing schools, the takeover of others by private consultants and the growth in charter schools. They say school closures put a disproportionate number of African-American teachers out of work and leave blighted communities with even fewer resources. They also decry what they say is a “top-down” reform effort by city leaders that fails to hear the opinions of local educators and parents.

The Economist:

Students in Brazil’s public universities are still whiter and richer than average, and much more likely to have been privately schooled. And taxpayers still pick up their tab, spending five times as much per university student as per schoolchild. But explosive growth in private, for-profit universities is at last opening up higher education (see chart).
In 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, there were around 2,400 universities or colleges of further education, of which only a tenth were public. Some of the rest were charitable, mostly Catholic. But three-quarters were run for profit, including the biggest five.

Jonathan Obar:

The proper place of social media in the classroom remains a mystery to most people, with Wikipedia standing as the biggest, baddest new media nemesis of them all.
Note: Earlier this month, Brian Proffitt’s post explaining Why Wikipedia Doesn’t Belong In The Classroom garnered strong reactions both pro and con. Here, guest author Jonathan Obar, PhD, like Proffitt a practicing academic, takes the opposite point of view.
In the 80s, Neil Postman wrote, “You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.” To Postman, television was a medium that privileged entertainment, whose decontextualized method of communicating the ephemeral at blazing speeds made linear argument and true learning impossible.

James Causey

Maria Lopez loves McDonald’s, but on Wednesday she was in a bustling lunchroom at Rodgers Street Academy picking at the meat of her soft shell taco.
She ate the meat, drank the low-fat milk but skipped the cheesy refried beans and cinnamon apple slices.
“I don’t like beans,” she told me, while sitting at the table with her friends.
Lopez, 13, said school lunches have gotten healthier over the past couple of years, and overall she said the quality and taste of the food has not changed much.
“It’s not that bad. I usually finish my plate, and my friends do, too.”

Alan Borsuk:

In the last state budget, almost all the new spending went to medical programs. Olsen said that Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, has ideas that are worth discussing but won’t have much of a chance if medical costs keep rising. (Not to mention the central issue of whether to increase state school aid.)
Dan Rossmiller, director of government relations for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, responded, “Can you imagine us saying to the Medicaid program, you’re only going to be able to spend 50 dollars more per patient next year than you did last year? That’s pretty much unimaginable, yet that’s what we do with education.” Rossmiller said education funding reform is needed.
That morning’s Journal Sentinel had a story that began: “Taxpayers need to chip in about $650 million more toward state health care programs for the poor and elderly during the next two-year budget cycle, Gov. Scott Walker’s administration said.”
I really want people to have access to necessary medical care, which so many people can’t afford on their own. But I read that story and thought of the impact on schools (as well as other areas of state spending).

sp-eye:

The district office has been working on a document that compiles total compensation–not benefits mind you, strictly cash-in-your-wallet compensation. We heard about this at a recent HR Committee meeting (memo to people: you just may want to find time in your busy lives to start coming to some meetings). We asked about it this week and learned that the compilation is complete and we requested a copy. This study covers all professional educators and the “cash” compensation earned during the FY2011-12 school year.
We have pulled out several nuggets from the data; there are many more.
We have also taken the liberty of sorting the data by total compensation, showing base salary and “add-ons”. A copy of this is available here:

and More, here.

I recently spoke with Chris regarding his interest and activism in the education world.
I was particularly interested in his views on the glacial pace of change in our largely monolithic education system, his education reform”scorecard”, the Edison Project (now EdisonLearning) and Chris’s latest creation: Avenues “The World School”.
Whittle’s voice of experience on the glacial pace of education reform is one of the most astute observations I’ve heard, one that is molded by an entrepreneur.
The interview is available as an 45mb mp3 audio file, or via this transcript.
I am thankful for his time and wish Chris and Avenues the best.

Peg Tyre:

New Dorp’s Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students–especially low performers–are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. It also yielded extraordinary results. By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes–cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement–from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.
The number of kids enrolling in a program that allows them to take college-level classes shot up from 148 students in 2006 to 412 students last year. Most important, although the makeup of the school has remained about the same–­roughly 40 percent of students are poor, a third are Hispanic, and 12 percent are black–a greater proportion of students who enter as freshmen leave wearing a cap and gown. This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began. New Dorp, once the black sheep of the borough, is being held up as a model of successful school turnaround. “To be able to think critically and express that thinking, it’s where we are going,” says Dennis Walcott, New York City’s schools chancellor. “We are thrilled with what has happened there.”
Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching. They watched passively as Deirdre De­Angelis got rid of the bad apples on the staff; won foundation money to break the school into smaller, more personalized learning communities; and wooed corporate partners to support after-school programs. Nothing seemed to move the dial.
Her decision in 2008 to focus on how teachers supported writing inside each classroom was not popular. “Most teachers,” said Nell Scharff, an instructional expert DeAngelis hired, “entered into the process with a strongly negative attitude.” They were doing their job, they told her hotly. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out–they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts. “It was my view that these kids didn’t want to engage their brains,” Fran Simmons, who teaches freshman English, told me. “They were lazy.”

60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use:

Andrew Rotherham:

You won’t get rich as a teacher, right? That’s no longer true for a small but growing number of educators who are making big bucks selling their lesson plans online. On a peer-to-peer site called TeachersPayTeachers (TPT), Georgia kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump has earned more than $1 million selling lesson plans — with names like “Colorful Cats Math, Science and Literacy Fun!” — for about $9 a pop. Since the site launched in 2006, 26 teachers have each made more than $100,000 on TPT, which takes a 15% commission on most sales. In August, Jump became the first on TPT to reach $1 million. Her success has been aided by the thousands of followers of her personal blog who get notified each time she retails a new lesson. Another reason she thinks her stuff sells so well: “I’ve used it in my classroom,” says Jump, who just kicked off her 16th year of teaching. “I know it works.”

Lisa Fleisher:

New city statistics are showing a steep decline in parent involvement in New York public schools, giving potential ammunition to critics who say the Department of Education under Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been unresponsive to families.
City officials attributed part of the plummet to a new data-collection system. But critics, including some possible mayoral contenders, said the numbers in the annual Mayor’s Management Report were hard evidence of long-held frustrations by public-school parents.

I wonder if Madison PTO attendance patterns have changed? During the 2000’s, most meetings that I observed or participated in typically had no more than 12 to 15 parents. Often less than 10 appeared.
One meeting sticks out. More than 50 parents attended a Thoreau PTO meeting which attempted to bring Singapore Math to the school. That was a spectacular failure, unfortunately.

Matthew Yglesias :

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it’s also frustrating when people don’t acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it’s not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it’s actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:

Matthew DeFour:

That means the district’s property tax levy would increase 3.47 percent, down from the 4.95 percent increase the board approved in June. The tax rate would be $11.71 per $1,000 of assessed value, down from $11.88. For an average $232,024 home, the difference is about $40.
The board could use the remaining $8.1 million on property tax relief, but Belmore is recommending it be used in other ways, including:
$3.7 million held in reserves, in case the state overestimated additional aid.
$1.6 million to buy iPads for use in the classroom, $650,000 to upgrade wireless bandwidth in all schools and $75,000 for an iPad coach.
$1.2 million to account for a projected increase in the district’s contribution to the Wisconsin Retirement System.
About $800,000 geared toward closing achievement gaps including: three security assistants at Black Hawk, O’Keeffe and Hamilton middle schools; an assistant principal at Stephens Elementary, where the district’s Work and Learn alternative program caused parent concerns last year; two teacher leaders to assist with the district’s literacy program; a high school math interventionist; increasing the number of unassigned positions from 13.45 to 18.45 to align with past years; and a new student agricultural program.
$100,000 to fund the chief of staff position for one year.

104K PDF Memo to the Madison School Board regarding redistribution of state tax dollars.
Madison plans to spend $376,200,000 during the 2012-2013 school year or $15,132 for each of its 24,861 students.

Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore:

3. It was moved by James Howard and seconded by Beth Moss that the pending motion to approve the preliminary 2012-2013 School District budget be amended to include specific accountability measures for all reading intervention programs receiving funding pursuant to 2012-2013 budget allocations. Specifically, in order for any reading intervention program being funded during the 2012-2013 school year to receive continued and/or increased funding in future budgets, each intervention must:
a. By November 15, 2012, submit to the Board of Education, proposed progress indicators for improved student achievement for students of color.
b. Progress indicators will be defined on a yearly basis for a minimum of 5 years and compared to the initial year of 2011-12.
c. Progress indicators will be broken down by African-American, Hispanic, special education and other non-White students affected by the program.
d. Progress indicators will include not only student achievement measures but also number of students included.
e. Data for each progress indicator will be required before continued or additional funding is approved.

Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.

Madison Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore (PDF):

1)Conduct and analyze survey of teachers, staff and administrators.
2)Taking into account survey results, Administration informs Board:
a) What legally has to change for the handbook.
b) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended to be carried forward as Board policy without change.
c) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended to be addressed as Board policy but should be reviewed and possibly changed.
d) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended not to be carried forward as Board policy.
The Administration’s recommendations are presented at a meeting of the Board’s Operational Support Committee on October 8. At a full meeting of the Board on October 29, the Board votes on the policies or practices to be submitted to designated working groups for discussion and collaborative exploration intended to culminate in consensus agreement on recommended approaches to the policies or practices.

Heather Mac Donald:

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD’s already-existing diversity infrastructure. As the campus itself acknowledges: “UC San Diego currently has many active diversity programs and initiatives.” No kidding. A partial list of those “active diversity programs and initiatives” may be accessed here.
Now UCSD has filled the position and announced the new vice chancellor’s salary. Linda Greene, a diversity bureaucrat and law professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will pull in $250,000 a year in regular salary, but that’s just the beginning: she’ll receive both a relocation allowance of $60,000 and 100 percent reimbursement of all moving expenses, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, two fully paid house-hunting trips for two to the San Diego area, and reimbursement for all business visits to the campus before her start date in January 2013. (By comparison, an internationally known expert in opto-electronics in UCSD’s engineering school, whose recent work has focused on cancer nanotechnology, received a little over $150,000 in salary from UCSD in 2011, according to state databases.) The UCSD press office did not respond to a request for the amount the university paid the “women-owned executive search firm with a diverse consulting team” it used to find Greene.

The Economist:

Over the past eight years Chicago teachers have done well, securing raises averaging 7% a year with no changes to their terms. The main sticking points now are teacher evaluations, compensation and the rehiring of teachers who have been laid off. These last two issues are the most significant hurdles (Mr Emanuel would like schools to be able to hire the best teachers, not the most recently-fired ones). But to keep the strike legal, the unions must insist that it is about nothing more than pay and benefits.

The deadline is Friday, 9/21/2012, via a kind reader’s email.

The Madison School Board recently discussed (first 15 minutes of this video) a new “charter school policy” drafted by Julie Mead, a UW-Madison School of Education Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis.
The following documents are worth reviewing:
“Using Charter School Education and Policy to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity” by Julie Mead and Preston Green [3MB PDF pages 12-44].
“Model Policy Language for Charter School Equity” by Julie Mead and Preston Green [3MB PDF pages 45-52].
Page 13 of this slide based 1.9MB PDF includes:

Rebuttable Presumptions of Invalidity
A. [A] proposed charter school that is unlikely to attract a student body whose composition of racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, students with limited English proficiency, and students from low-income families that is within 10% of the population for each of these sub-groups within the community or communities intended to be served by the charter school is presumed to be invalid;
B. The applicant can overcome this presumption by providing clear and convincing evidence that the charter school will satisfy the policy goal of providing equal educational opportunity for all students; and
C. Evidence of the support of parents for the proposed school approach may be considered but shall not be the primary evidence that the school positively serves the public’s interests and is therefore insufficient by itself to overcome this presumption of invalidity.

Related: Professor Mead along with School of Education Dean Julie Underwood published this paper: A smart ALEC threatens public education.
Via a kind reader.

The Madison School District (160K PDF)

New benchmarks for proficiency. Starting in 2012-13, the benchmark for determining proficiency on the WKCE in math and reading will increase. New cut scores are being developed based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is conducted in a sample of schools every other year in Grades 4 and 8.
This higher cut score will result in a large number of students that will no longer be identified as proficient or advanced. This will be true at the state and local level. Recent coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal indicates that using NAEP-based cut scores causes the percent of Wisconsin students identified as proficient or advanced to decline from 81.9% to 35.8% for reading and from 78.0% to 48.1% for math.
The move toward NAEP-based cut scores is in part preparation for the statewide shift to Smarter Balanced Assessment in 2014-15. Results for individual schools using this new benchmark will be released this fall.
Accountability School Report Cards. Information packets from DPI provide context and formatting examples of the report cards that each school will receive to track its performance against various criteria.
Embargoed draft versions of school report cards will be shared with districts around September 24. Report cards for individual schools for 2011-12 will be finalized and made public around October 6.
Attached is an example of a school report card for a middle school. The report cards apply to all elementary, middle and high schools. Criteria are broken out by racial/ethnic, disability, income and ELL subgroup. More detailed “technical report cards” will also be prepared for each school that will go into more detail and methodology of the calculations.
The criteria for the Accountability School Report Card follow:

Watch a Madison school board discussion, starting at about 15 minutes.

socialistworker.org:

WHY DO you support the teachers strike in Chicago?
THE MTI Board of Directors voted to support their brothers and sisters of the Chicago Teachers Union not only because of CTU’s support of those protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee legislation in early 2011, but because their strike is over very similar issues.
Like Gov. Walker, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to break the union, trying to defuse their power in bargaining and trying to weaken their political power. In Chicago, the mayor appoints the school board, so the board is responsible to him, not the public. He wants to privatize schools, and one way to justify that is to increase class size so the public schools fail. When they fail, he can move to private, for-profit charter schools.
Mayor Emanuel, like Gov. Walker, is taking the just-cause standard and due process from the Chicago teachers. This would enable termination “just because” he or a school administrator wishes, not because of a just-cause standard that can withstand due process of law.

David Bornstein:

When we think about education reform, we usually focus on teacher quality. The big battleground in education revolves around holding teachers accountable for their performance. With all the focus on teachers, however, one group that is often forgotten as a key learning resource are the students themselves.
One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology. Despite the Internet revolution, the field of K-12 education has been relatively slow to respond to digital media. That’s why I paid a visit last week to the site of a promising experiment in digital learning in New York: the Bea Fuller Rodgers Middle School in Washington Heights.
Last year, CFY, a nonprofit organization, provided home computers (and arranged for discounted broadband access) to every one of the sixth grade students in the school. (Almost all the school’s families are Hispanics who qualify for the federal government’s free or reduced lunch program. Currently, half of all Hispanics in the United States lack broadband.).

Maia Szalavitz:

Locked in cramped, windowless rooms, tied in body-restricting bags, denied food, water and bathroom access: all of this is happening not to patients in the overlooked back wards of state mental hospitals, but to children as young as 5 in American public schools.
In the 2009-10 school year, some 40,000 children were restrained or isolated as discipline for bad behavior — most of these students had physical, developmental or learning and behavioral needs — according to Department of Education data. That research was cited in a revealing op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times written by a father whose daughter was deeply traumatized by such treatment. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report also found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades,” in both public and private schools.

Wong Yat-hei:

A survey on textbooks showed a huge gap in prices between different schools’ book lists. The school with the least expensive book list for Primary One charges only HK$509, while the most expensive list costs more than six times as much, at HK$3,089.
The council said the big difference was due to the number of books that schools want students to buy. Some ask students to only buy books for Chinese, English, maths and liberal studies, while others also ask students to buy books for computer studies, music, Putonghua and religious studies, and exercise and story books. The Education Bureau said it was concerned about the difference in prices and it would continue to monitor the amounts spent at different schools.
The price for primary textbooks has gone up by 2.2 per cent, and secondary school book prices are up 2.5 per cent. The average cost for secondary textbooks this school year is HK$2,186. The increase is greatest in Forms One, Two and Five. Book costs rose for all forms except for Form Six which saw their costs drop 2 per cent. The council says this decrease was due to the fact that sixth-formers used the fewest textbooks.

Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil:

When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren’t seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Something was apparently missing in the social experience. As one LinkedIn manager put it, “It was like arriving at a conference reception and realizing you don’t know anyone. So you just stand in the corner sipping your drink–and you probably leave early.”
Goldman, a PhD in physics from Stanford, was intrigued by the linking he did see going on and by the richness of the user profiles. It all made for messy data and unwieldy analysis, but as he began exploring people’s connections, he started to see possibilities. He began forming theories, testing hunches, and finding patterns that allowed him to predict whose networks a given profile would land in. He could imagine that new features capitalizing on the heuristics he was developing might provide value to users. But LinkedIn’s engineering team, caught up in the challenges of scaling up the site, seemed uninterested. Some colleagues were openly dismissive of Goldman’s ideas. Why would users need LinkedIn to figure out their networks for them? The site already had an address book importer that could pull in all a member’s connections.
Luckily, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s cofounder and CEO at the time (now its executive chairman), had faith in the power of analytics because of his experiences at PayPal, and he had granted Goldman a high degree of autonomy. For one thing, he had given Goldman a way to circumvent the traditional product release cycle by publishing small modules in the form of ads on the site’s most popular pages.

Costas Papachlimintzos:

Among the 116,173 high-school graduates who took university entrance exams last June, Olga Koutsika came first.
She got a perfect 20 out of 20 in biology, Ancient Greek, Latin, literature and history. Modern Greek was the only exam she did not manage to get full marks: 19.3. Contrary to what you tend to think, she did not spend nights and days glued to her desk – instead she dedicated several hours each week to practising her beloved ballet.
In an interview to the Athens News, Koutsika speaks about her hopes and dreams and reveals the origins of her success.

Harriet Washington:

Boy or girl? This you can easily discover, but wouldn’t you like to know more? If you could peer into your baby’s medical future, what traits would you most want assurance about?
Most parents wouldn’t hesitate: a healthy child. Soon science will be able to help them with that more quickly, completely–and safely–than ever before.
In June, a team at the University of Washington in Seattle announced a new technique that enables the construction of a comprehensive genome sequence–a genetic “blueprint,” as they described it–of the developing fetus from as early as the first trimester (Science Translational Medicine, vol 4, p 137ra76). The test could be available in clinics in as little as five years.

Peter Hirzel:

It wasn’t one single incident that made me quit teaching in a public middle school. It was the steady, moldy accumulation of dehumanizing, lifeless, squalid misadventures of which I was a part. Like that time with “Carlos,” to pick an incident more or less at random.
I can’t even remember what it was that happened between Carlos and me. Anger, impatience, frustration, stupidity — and that was just me. Probably just another student who categorically refused to do as he was perfectly reasonably asked — open a book, pick up a pencil, hand in homework — or a teacher’s ineffectual attempts to come up with any good reason at all to learn the Pythagorean Theorem, or some such timeless knowledge. OK! Let’s say you have a ladder leaning against a wall. Suffice to say, our “conversation” ended without closure. But, evidently I said something that upset Carlos.
The next day I saw my friend the Dean of Students. He told me that he ran into Carlos’ father and a couple of his uncles; they were looking for my classroom. They had baseball bats. I am not the coach of the baseball team. There is no baseball team. In fact, there are no teams at all.

John O’Connor & Trevor Aaronson:

Seminole County teacher Amy Capelle had to make a decision.
Her supervisor at the nation’s largest online school, K12, asked her to sign a roster saying she’d taught 112 kids.
She’d only taught seven.
“If you see your name next to a student that might not be yours, it’s because you are qualified to teach that subject, and we needed to put your name there,” wrote K12 supervisor Samantha Gilormini in an e-mail.
Capelle refused, and now state officials are investigating whether K12 used improperly certified teachers and asked employees to cover it up.
Seminole County officials say this problem may reach far beyond their borders.
But many Florida school districts have no way to know whether K12 students are actually being taught by properly certified teachers, according to a review by StateImpact Florida and Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ideally, all publicly funded school organizations should be managed with high expectations.

channel3000:

Belmore told our editorial board last week one of her first priorities was to prioritize the existing list of priorities. We get it. And obviously student achievement is priority number one. But a new district employee handbook to replaces decades of negotiated contracts – which the Governor did away with, and a new teacher evaluation system that uses student performance as a measurement – look at what’s happening in Chicago – will test Belmore, the school board and teachers in ways that will effect everyone in the Madison schools and beyond. We need everybody’s best efforts right now, to protect public education and help our kids succeed. Education has to come before politics and Belmore has to lead and be allowed to lead.

USA Today:

In the latest tiff between public-employee unions and cash-strapped governments, more than 350,000 Chicago children were shut out of classrooms for a second day Tuesday by striking teachers pursuing goals that are out of step with reality.
The teachers, who make an average $76,000 a year, are spurning an offer that includes a 16% pay increase over the next four years. In times of low inflation and 8.1% unemployment, you’d think that would be enough to get a deal done.
But that’s just for starters. The teachers’ main beef is about accountability. They don’t want it, at least not the measurable kind. The school district does, and so the two are locked in a battle that’s being repeated across the country. Even if the strike is settled by the time you read this, the outcome will help shape the quality of education across the USA.

Joe Nocera:

“We have to find a way to work with teachers and unions while at the same time working to greatly raise the quality of teachers,” he told me recently. He has some clear ideas about how to go about that. His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)
What is also a given in other countries is that teaching has a status equal to other white-collar professionals. That was once true in America, but Tucker believes that a quarter-century of income inequality saw teachers lose out at the expense of lawyers and other well-paid professionals. That is a large part of the reason that teachers’ unions have become so obstreperous: It is not just that they feel underpaid, but they feel undervalued. Tucker believes that teachers should be paid more — though not exorbitantly. But making teacher education more rigorous — and imbuing the profession with more status — is just as important. “Other countries have raised their standards for getting into teachers’ colleges,” he told me. “We need to do the same.”

Related: When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That? and Wisconsin begins to adopt teacher content standards.

George Weber:

One hardly risks controversy with the statement that today English was a more influential language world-wide than Yanomami. To a child’s question why that should be so, the well-informed parental brush-off would be that English had hundreds of millions of speakers while Yanomami could with difficulty scratch together 16,000. Really difficult and well-informed off-spring could then point out that in this case, Chinese would be the most important language of the world. At this point, the experienced parent would send the brat off to annoy someone else.
Every language, including Yanomami, is the most important language of the world – to its speakers. Rather than “important” we shall here, therefore, use the world “influential” in its stead. Chinese is a very influential language, no doubt about it, but is it more so than English? Clearly not. The number of speakers is relevant but quite insufficient for a meaningful ranking of languages in order of current world-wide influence, the stress being on the word “world-wide”. There are many other factors to be taken into account and this is what we shall attempt to do in the following.
Ranking the world’s current top languages is not just an idle past-time. The world is growing closer and this historical development is matched by large-scale linguistic adjustments, the most dramatic of which being the explosive growth of the English language. It does matter how major languages stand and evolve in relation to each other. Like the weather, many developments make sense only if one looks at the world-wide picture, not just parochial bits of it.

Robert Kolker:

On Wednesday, June 13, Nayeem ­Ahsan walked into a fourth-floor classroom at Stuyvesant High School with some two dozen other students to take a physics test–one of a number of Regents Exams that many New York State high-school juniors are required to take. Small and skinny with thick black hair and a bright, shy smile, Nayeem is 16. Like many ­teenage boys, he seems to straddle two worlds: One moment you see a man, ­another a boy.
The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Nayeem was born in Flushing Hospital and raised in Jackson Heights, a 35-­minute subway ride to Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan. In the academically elite world of Stuyvesant, Nayeem maintains solid if unremarkable grades, and is a friendly, popular-enough kid known to take photographs of sports teams after school and post them on Facebook. When he walked into the exam room that morning, he seemed confident and calm. Nothing about him suggested he was about to pull off the most brazen feat of cheating in the illustrious school’s 107-year history.
Nayeem had cased the room beforehand. His iPhone had spotty service inside Stuyvesant, and he wanted to be sure he’d have a signal. He tested the device in the second seat of the first row–he’d assumed he would be seated alphabetically–and it worked. He tried out the second seat counting from the other side of the room just to be safe–also good. Then he examined the sight lines to both seats from the teacher’s desk–what could the proctor see and not see?–and checked out the seats where he thought some of his friends would be sitting. One was right in front of the teacher. He made a note of that. That kid was out.

Richard Whitmire:

The fight to upgrade the quality of the nation’s teaching force has just begun. Years from now, the Chicago strike most likely will be viewed as a canary-in-the-coal-mine incident.
The awkward fact is that teaching in America has become a quasi blue-collar profession mostly shunned by top college graduates. The countries with the best education systems recruit from top graduates. What about our top graduates? A good barometer is Teach for America (TFA), which in 2011 drew nearly 48,000 applicants for 5,200 teaching positions. Those applicants included 12% of the seniors at Ivy League schools.
Here’s the question that never gets asked: What happens to the 43,000 top graduates who wanted to teach but didn’t get an offer from TFA? Nearly all seek other careers.
For the best and brightest college graduates in this country, jobs offered by regular school districts lack prestige. Their accountability-free practices give the best teachers no way to stand out. These young TFA applicants rose to the top of their high schools classes and won admittance to the top tier colleges. They want a shot at shining on the job as well.

Patrick Marley:

Gov. Scott Walker’s curbs on collective bargaining were overturned even before they took effect last year, quickly reinstated by the state Supreme Court, scaled back in March by a federal judge and, on Friday, dealt a major blow by a Dane County judge.
Expect nothing but more court decisions in the months ahead as appeals on those last two cases are heard and others are sorted out by the court system.
Defending those cases has cost taxpayers about $675,000 so far, and those expenses will only increase.
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Monday he will seek a stay on Tuesday of the latest ruling and will soon appeal the case.
Meanwhile, two challenges to the law are pending in the federal courts. William Conley, a federal judge in the western district of Wisconsin, in March struck down parts of Walker’s law, and his decision will be reviewed Sept. 24 during oral arguments before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. That appeals court could rule before the end of the year.
Conley has yet to rule on a separate case before him that makes arguments similar to the ones that resulted in Friday’s decision by Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas. If Conley sides with the unions, Walker would have to overcome two sets of rulings; if Conley sides with Walker, the unions may have a tougher time defending their position in state court.

Matthew DeFour

The Madison School Board on Monday approved using an employee survey as part of its potential process for devising new employee work rules, although such a tool would be illegal if the state’s collective bargaining law is overturned, district lawyer Matt Bell said.
The School Board agreed not to issue the survey until the legal uncertainties related to last week’s court ruling overturning key parts of the state’s new collective bargaining law, known as Act 10, are resolved.
Prior to Friday’s ruling, Superintendent Jane Belmore told the board the survey results would be collected and analyzed by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards at a cost of $1,000.
The survey would ask respondents whether they “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” “strongly agree” or have “no opinion” about questions such as “The hours I work are reasonable” and “Layoffs should be based on seniority.”
Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews said the union is opposed to the district using an employee survey.
“Let’s have people who teachers already trust providing that input,” Matthews said.

Gregory Ferenstein:

The United States has never ranked at the top of international education tests, since we began comparing countries in 1964, yet has been the dominant economic and innovative force in the world the entire time. Despite this fact, a popular annual education report has once again stoked fears of America’s impending economic mediocrity with fresh stats on how far the U.S. “lags” behind the world in college attainment, pre-school enrollment, and high school graduation.
The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don’t prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.

Erin Richards:

The latest actuarial valuation of the district’s nonpension benefit obligation was conducted by consultants Gabriel Roeder Smith & Co. If the conditions upon which the report is framed stay in place, MPS is predicted to face a $1.8 billion liability by the year 2019 instead of a $4.9 billion liability.
“This is an important step upon which we will continue to build,” Milwaukee Public School Board President Michael Bonds said in a statement provided by MPS.
The road to lower long-term health care costs started in late 2010, when the district finalized contracts with unions that called for a new health care plan administrator.
Under Act 10, the School Board in November 2011 approved increasing the health care premium contributions from employees, increasing the age and years of service needed to be eligible for the district’s retiree health benefits and increasing the amount of sick leave that needed to be accumulated in order for the board to subsidize the benefit.

Jeremy Zawodny:

Ten years from now a “college education” is going to look radically different from when I went to school. And I think that’s a good thing, especially when you consider the skyrocketing costs of “higher education” and the miserable job market that recent graduates have faced.
This all started for me when I first saw MIT’s Open Courseware and then when Standford offered a few Computer Science courses on-line. I had actually signed up for Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning class but never made time in my schedule to participate. Since then, Andrew and Daphne Koller have kicked things up a notch by starting Coursera. They’ve built a platform that allows instructors to distribute their courses to many, many people on-line at a very low cost.
If you haven’t seen it, take a minute and browse the list of courses. There are 124 at the time of this writing, and that’s up from just a few weeks ago. I’ve already signed up for several (check my Coursera Profile), one of which starts tomorrow.

Richard Vedder:

Universities are in the knowledge business, and the creation and dissemination of it is at the very core of what colleges do. Yet some forms of knowledge about higher education itself are either unknown, or hidden from the public. Why? Release of the information would prove embarrassing and possibly even costly to the school.
1. What Are the Teaching Loads?
This is prompted by an email I received from Bill Armstrong, President of Colorado Christian College and former two-term U.S. Senator. He is looking for data on faculty teaching loads and cannot find it. Going to the latest Digest of Education Statistics, I learn that there were 7,500 faculty members teaching agricultural or home economics courses in 2003 between the ages of 35 and 39, or that there were 1,959 full-time equivalent faculty teaching in Delaware in 2009. But in over 20 tables on staffing, there is not a word on teaching loads.
Why? I suspect the reason is simple: faculty don’t teach very much, and far less than they used to. I have been around higher education for over 50 years, and my recollection is that at middling quality state schools in the early 1960s, most faculty taught around 12 hours a week. At those same schools today, the average load is almost certainly not more than 9 hours. At top-flight universities, faculty taught about six hours a week in the 1960s, and often 3 hours or 4.5 hours (one semester, one course, the second semester, two courses) now. On average, we have seen at least a 25 percent reduction in loads.

.xls file.

Thanks to Jeff Henriques for compiling and presenting this information.
Related: Wisconsin’s National Merit Scholar Cut Scores

Dear WYSO Members and Families,
For the past 30 years, Mr. Tom Buchhauser has served as an exemplary music educator for over 1700 students who have played in WYSO’s Philharmonia Orchestra. At the end of the 2012-2013 season, Mr. Buchhauser will bring his productive and inspiring career at WYSO to a close.
In addition to his 30 seasons with WYSO, Mr. Buchhauser taught at Madison Memorial High School from 1966-1999, played cello for Madison Symphony Orchestra for nearly 20 years, served on the faculty of the National String Workshop for ten years and directed ensembles for the UW School of Music Pre-College Institute, the Madison Community Orchestra and the Madison Symphony Steenbock Young Artist Concerto Concerts.
He has received numerous awards for his excellence in teaching, including the Wisconsin Music Educators Conference Distinguished Service Award (1983), the National School Orchestra Association Director of the Year Award (1993), the American String Teachers Association Outstanding Service Award (1993), the Rabin Youth Arts Award (2001), and has scholarships named in his honor by the WSMA Honors Project, WYSO, and Madison Memorial High School. In 1999, Madison Metropolitan School District named the Memorial High School auditorium the “Thomas E. Buchhauser Auditorium.”
Mr. Buchhauser recently shared, “I have had many teachers and experiences that have shaped my life as a musician, teacher and conductor but none so profound as Marvin Rabin’s coming to Madison in 1966 to start WYSO and David Nelson asking me to be Associate Music Director of WYSO in 1983. It has been an honor to be part of such a great organization and I will be forever grateful to WYSO for all that it has given to me.”
We will treasure this final season with Mr. Buchhauser and applaud his tremendous efforts to embody the WYSO mission of enriching lives by providing transformational music experiences and opportunities.
Bridget Fraser
Bridget Fraser, Executive Director
Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras
455 No. Park Street
Humanities Building, Room 1625
Madison, WI 53706
608-263-3320 Ext 14
bfraser@wyso.music.wisc.edu
http://wyso.music.wisc.edu

Verna Yu:

If not for his heart attack in 2005, Chen Pingfu would still be a maths teacher, leading an ordinary life in Lanzhou, Gansu province.
That misfortune was followed by several more. Having no medical insurance from the state or his college, the 55-year-old fell into debt paying for his operation. Then he lost his job when his state factory-affiliated college closed in 2008.
Without an income, he turned to playing violin on the street for money – an act regarded as begging on the mainland. Police and officials would rough him up. But the experience opened Chen’s eyes to how people at the bottom of society are often abused.

The Wall Street Journal:

In recent years, the number of children in the U.S. being treated with prescription medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has grown dramatically.
That trend has led to concern among some doctors, parents and child advocates that many children are taking ADHD medication unnecessarily.
These critics suggest that in many cases ADHD is a mistaken diagnosis for children who are simply immature or undisciplined. And even when the diagnosis is correct, they say, many children who are taking medication for ADHD could do as well or better with alternative treatments, including dietary and behavioral therapies, that have fewer side effects.

The Economist:

For a long time, there did not seem to be any limit to the amount democracies could borrow. Creditors have been more patient with democratic governments than with other regimes, probably because the risk of abrupt changes of policy (like the repudiation of Tsarist debts by Russia in 1917) are reduced. But this has postponed the crunch point, rather than eliminated it–and allowed stable democracies to accumulate higher debt, relative to their GDP, than many, more volatile countries ever achieved. Governments can, as Madison suggested, confiscate the wealth of domestic creditors via inflation, taxes or default. But however often they vote, democracies cannot make foreign lenders extend credit. That harsh truth is now being discovered.

wetakeyourclass.com:

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Henry Hitchings:

The language wars date from the beginning of language–the beginning, one suspects, of every language. A language is invented, new words added, a grammar devised, an approved syntax established, and in one of countless possible ways it proves inadequate, opponents gather, snipers fire verbal shots, polemical grenades are flung, canons lined up, and war is underway. The reigning rule of language is change, endless bloody change; it was forever thus, and always will be. Case–far from closed–permanently open.
In his richly informative book Henry Hitchings chronicles the language wars of English, its continuous skirmishes, its controversies, its often rancorous disputes. The Language Wars is impressively comprehensive, its author immensely knowledgeable. He takes up the subjects of spelling, grammar, punctuation, pronunciation, metaphor, regional speech, jargon, the influence on language of the internet, and profanity, both lyrical and gross. One cannot but admire his learning and high spirits as he makes his way through material that in a less deft hand would have drooped into pedantry or become inflamed with bad temper.
In writing about language one must prove that one can oneself manipulate language. Hitchings passes this test. His prose is lucid, nicely dappled with irony, and if not elegant then attractively virile. The only complaint I have against his prose style is that he tends to overuse the word “intriguing,” and uses it to mean interesting, sometimes fascinating, thereby ignoring what for me is the word’s root sense of making secret plans to do something illicit or harmful to someone. Spies have traditionally been thought to be intriguing, not authors of books on grammar and spelling. Many contemporary dictionaries approve Hitchings’s use of the word, often these days according it primary position in their numerical list of definitions. But dictionaries, as we know, are cowardly institutions, which tend to go along with the changed meaning of words, and hence are not to be trusted.

David Feith;

Rahm Emanuel is his generation’s most noted political pugilist, the guy who once mailed a dead fish to a fellow Democratic operative whose work had disappointed him. In 1992 he celebrated Bill Clinton’s presidential victory with a steak knife and an enemies list, stabbing a table and screaming “dead” as he recited each name. Over time Mr. Emanuel’s drive has made him a leader in Congress, chief of staff to President Obama and now the mayor of Chicago.
So you’d think that “Rahmbo” would be the perfect leader–a popular, bona fide progressive reformer unafraid to speak his mind–to stand up for students and parents by facing down the Chicago Teachers Union’s first strike in 25 years. But when the teachers walked off the job on Monday and the strike wore on, the political force of nature seemed hesitant to brawl.
Sitting for an interview on Tuesday in a reception room overlooking Chicago’s Millennium Park, with union members marching in the street, Mr. Emanuel presents himself as a man looking to make a deal. According to news reports at press time, he’s likely to sign one this weekend.

Radio National:

Are we getting smarter? Moral philosopher James Flynn discovered in the 1980s that our IQ scores have been steadily rising since we began measuring intelligence. This became known as the Flynn Effect. Now he’s making some interesting observations about intelligence and IQ in relation to the controversial questions of race, gender and class.

Wisconsin State Journal, via a kind reader

Seventy-eight students in the Dane County area and 330 students statewide are among about 16,000 high school seniors named 2013 National Merit Semifinalists, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Wednesday.
Semifinalists represent the top 1 percent of the approximately 1.5 million students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test last year. About 90 percent of semifinalists become finalists who are eligible to receive one of 8,300 college scholarships totaling more than $32 million next spring.
Dane County area semifinalists include:
Belleville: Michelle V. Chalupnik.
Edgerton: Casey N. Grittner.
Lodi: Samuel J. Taylor.
Madison (home school): Peter C. Walker.
Madison Edgewood: Cassidy McDonald, John C. Merfeld, Matthew R. Molina and Kathleen S. Wall.
Madison La Follette: Sarah E. Juhlin.
Madison East: Grace A. Coleman, Theodore D. Huwe, Patrick J. McCarthy, Scout M. Slava-Ross and Amelia L. Soth.
Madison Memorial: Srikar N. Adibhatla, Joel G. Cryer, Leah M. Fulmer, Sophia L. Gerdes, Ogden R. Greene, Charles Z. He, Caroline E. Hornung, Laurel J. Hunt, Matthew J. Lee, Daniel L. Li, Isaiah P. Mitchell, Owen S. Monsma, Rachel A. Mortensen, Aaron T. Senson, Kelly Shen, Thejas S. Wesley, Bethany N. Wolkoff, Edwin Y. Wu and William Xiang.
Madison West: Luella R. Allen-Waller, Madeline M. Batzli, Micah Y. Baum, Cindy T. Cai, Colin E. Davis, Rachel G. Feldman, Zuodian Hu, Amy H. Hua, Colin P. Keating, Rowan R. Meara, Stephen N. Petty Valenzuela, Ari S. Pollack, Oliver S. Redsten, Elizabeth M. Scholz, Ansa E. Seppalainen, Yang Song, Margaret M. Stanger, Claire M. Wang and Joel Q. Weng.
McFarland: Nicholas J. Perkl and Daniel E. Reschke.
Middleton-Cross Plains: Evan L. Bauch, Christie F. Cheng, Elizabeth J. Couser, Christopher J. Eom, Alexander T. Goodsett, Michael P. Hoot, Casey O. Hutchison, Rebecca C. Jin, Suzy Kim, Laura L. Knutsen, Megan A. Phillips, Victoria T. Wang and Kimberli R. Ward.
Monona Grove: Mitchell D. Paull, Karlyn C. Russell, Grant W. Smith and Amelia M. Speight.
Mount Horeb: Laura B. Meeker and Lucy M. Wallitsch.
Portage: Michelle M. Larson.
Reedsburg: James R. Urban.
Stoughton: Timothy A. Tyson.
Sun Prairie: Thomas A. Plagge.
Waterloo: Desiree J. Klein.

Janesville Gazette:

The Madison teachers union will be demanding that the district begin new collective bargaining contract negotiations in light of a court ruling overturning parts of a state law that previously forbid it.
John Matthews, head of the Madison teachers union, said Monday that the request is likely to be sent to the district on Tuesday. District spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson had no immediate comment.
Madison school employees are currently covered under a union contract that ends on June 30, 2012. Typically, talks for the next two-year contract wouldn’t begin until February.

More, here.

via a kind reader’s email.

Madison Teachers’, Inc. Solidarity enewsletter 80K PDF, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:

Major changes to the manner in which teachers are evaluated in Wisconsin are on the horizon. The criteria for teacher evaluation which was first negotiated by MTI during a 1976 strike will be replaced effective with the 2014-15 school year by a state-mandated system and criteria. Driven by President Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative, teacher evaluation procedures are changing from those which relied primarily upon locally-developed evaluation procedures based on principal observations to state-mandated procedures requiring the inclusion of student test scores in the evaluation of teaching staff. The “Wisconsin Framework for Educational Effectiveness” is the new process required to be utilized by Wisconsin schools commencing with the 2014-15 school year. This new evaluation model will base teacher evaluations 50% on “models of practice” and 50% on “student outcomes”. A summary of this model can be found at the DPI website at http://www.dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/edueff.html.
In preparation for the 2014-15 implementation of the new evaluation model, DPI will be piloting the program with select school districts during the 2012-13 school year. Feedback from that pilot will then be utilized for modifications for a state-wide pilot in 2013-14. Feedback from that effort will then be used to tweak some more before full implementation.
The MMSD and MTI have agreed to have Madison participate as one of the pilot districts this school year. This does not mean that MTI is supportive of the model as currently designed. There are elements to the plan which certainly present concerns to many educators, especially in light of dramatic eliminations of contractual protections caused by Act 10. However, given the current political landscape, both at the State and Federal level, this may very well be the plan we will have to work with in the foreseeable future. The MTI Board of Directors concluded that it was better to participate in the pilot and offer feedback than leave that to others, provided: 1) that MTI had a say in selecting which schools participate in the pilot; 2) that teacher participation in the pilot be entirely voluntary; and 3) that the pilot will only be used to provide feedback to DPI, the MMSD and MTI and will not be utilized to evaluate staff during the pilot period. The District agreed to these provisions (the latter two of which are also mandated by DPI as part of the pilot).
The school selected to participate in the pilot is Black Hawk Middle School. The Principal has been notified and volunteers have been selected to participate. The school team will include two to three teachers who have agreed to be “evaluated” (one of whom is required to be an initial educator); one peer mentor to do informal observations and offer coaching and feedback to teachers (whose work is essentially to support the development and expertise of the teacher without doing any formal observation); and the principal who will be conducting the formal observations and the evaluation . The participants will be required to attend a three (3) day DPI training October 8-10, with two more training days to be scheduled later in the year. Participants will also be asked to attend a couple of meetings with MMSD and MTI staff along the way to provide feedback to MMSD/MTI as well.
By participating, we are hopeful that the experience and feedback provided by the participants will be utilized to make any necessary modifications to the planned evaluation system so that it can deliver on its promise to fairly and accurately measure teacher effectiveness. If not, the experience will inform our concerns and critiques.

Amanda Ripley:

Making sense of the Chicago teachers’ strike (where the two sides were reportedly moving toward resolution on Friday) is like trying to understand the failure of a friend’s marriage. You can’t help speculating about who’s to blame, but you’ll never really know. In truth, it doesn’t matter. Many countries have revolutionized their education systems in recent years, but not one of them has done it through strikes, walkouts or righteous indignation.
Just about every country in the developed world has a teachers’ union, so the mere presence of a union doesn’t determine the quality of a country’s schools. There is, however, a significant relationship between the professionalism of the union and the health of an education system. The all-important issue is not how easy it is to fire the worst teachers; it’s how to elevate the entire craft without going to war with teachers.

Alan Borsuk:

After many months of difficult negotiations, the teachers’ union and school system announced last week agreement on a new contract making student performance a factor in teachers’ evaluations, giving school leaders more latitude in selecting teachers and keeping class sizes in middle grades in check.
In Chicago? Of course not.
So where? Boston.
While the Chicago teachers’ strike, which closed public schools for the week, got huge national attention, the Boston settlement, after more than two years of negotiations (and no strike), got minimal notice. Everybody loves a fight, I suppose. But I would argue that what happened in Boston was at least as important as the grand battle in Chicago.
Why? Because I doubt much good is going to emerge from Chicago. It sounded at week’s end as if negotiators were headed toward an agreement that won’t really change the status quo very much – and the status quo for Chicago kids is about as happy as it is for Milwaukee kids.
Boston is much more in line with what is happening nationwide, including growing interest, even among many union leaders, in striving for improvements in teaching. It’s a very complex and tricky path, but the willingness to explore it is, in itself, a positive thing. Wisconsin education leaders have been acting more in line with the Boston agreement than the Chicago brawl.

Annie Murphy Paul:

Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point — the summer of 1997 — he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind — attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist?
Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist’s tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. She asked lots of questions and probed her student’s answers. She came up with examples based on the student’s own experiences. She began sentences, and her student completed them. Their dialogue was anything but formulaic.
Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed?
Student: I think so, but I forget.
Lindquist: Well, average speed — as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time?

I’ve had a great opportunity to watch a number of fall sporting events recently. I am very thankful for the time and effort coaches devote to our young people.

Richard Kahlenberg:

In 1960, when Albert Shanker and other members of New York City’s teachers union sought collective bargaining rights, they set a strike date for Monday November 7, the day prior to the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The timing would provide maximum leverage, they reasoned, because the Democratic mayor, Robert Wagner, would not want to come down hard on striking teachers the day before the election. This strategy was vindicated when teachers won an agreement that led to bargaining rights after just a single day on strike.
The same logic surely crossed the mind of the shrewd president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, who knew that calling a strike this week would be highly disruptive to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. At a time when Obama is trying to rally his base, the strike reminded teachers across the country of his support for merit pay and nonunion charter schools–policies also backed by Obama’s former chief of staff and the current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. And at a time when Obama is struggling in the campaign money chase, the strike negotiations have distracted Emanuel from helping the president raise dollars from wealthy donors. Both factors may help explain why the strike now appears close to settling.
But if the strike has been bad for Democratic presidential politics, it may ultimately be good for Democratic education policy, which for too long has aped right-wing rhetoric in the name of education reform. It can’t hurt to force a leading Democrat like Emanuel to spend a little more time negotiating with actual teachers and a little less time wooing hedge fund managers, many of whom passionately back the education policies that rank-and-file teachers despise.

Caspar Melville:

“I believe that a mature civilised society ought to be funding universities properly through tax. Students should go to university for nothing because it’s an investment that society’s making in itself.” The words belong to Professor Anthony Grayling, Master of New College of the Humanities (NCH). This unashamedly elite private university – student fees £18,000 a year – is housed in an 18th-century mansion in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, where its first students will be unpacking their suitcases and sticking up their Radiohead posters right about now.

David Weinberger:

In May, 2007, Facebook was generating over 40 billion page views a month by providing its users with carefully constructed and controlled services. Yet on May 24, 2007 Mark Zuckerberg took the company in a new direction: developers outside of the company would be given access to many of the services and data at the heart of the work done by Facebook’s own development team. These external developers would be empowered to build whatever independent applications they wanted. The result was an outburst of creativity resulting in thousands and then hundreds of thousands of non-Facebook applications that expanded Facebook’s services and integrated it into other sites — each app potentially making Facebook more valuable to its users.
Facebook is in many ways an anti-model for libraries, but from this one action libraries can learn much. On May 24, 2007, Facebook became a platform: a set of resources — services, data, tools — that enable independent developers to create applications. Interesting possibilities open up if we think of libraries as platforms…open platforms.

A funny thing happened on the way to its predicted obsolescence. The library became more popular than ever. by Mark Lamster.

Mike Ford:

Say an enterprising kid in your neighborhood offers to mow your lawn for $50. Say he turns around and pays another kid $35 to mow your lawn. The lawn gets mowed, the kid who actually mows the lawn makes $35 and the enterprising kid makes $15.
Should you be upset that you paid $50 for a job that someone did for $35 or satisfied that the job you paid for was completed?
The way you answer that question probably explains how you feel about the Milwaukee Public Schools’ increasing willingness to authorize charter schools. The insiders call them non-instrumentality charter schools, which means they are freed from many bureaucratic regulations and are staffed with nonunion teachers.
In the eyes of the state, an MPS nonunion charter student is just like any other MPS student. Last year, the district received $9,799 in state aid and local property tax for each MPS pupil, including those in nonunion charter schools. The School Board, however, sends only $7,775 per pupil to nonunion charter schools. Meaning, nonunion charter students generate over $2,000 more per-pupil in revenue than the district spends to educate them.

Milwaukee Public Schoos are making tough choices to improve education.

Matthew DeFour:

District officials say the dinner program will improve student nutrition, encourage more participation in after-school academic programs and eventually lead to community dinners that will welcome more parents into the schools.
“What’s kind of unique about it is these are creative ways to help districts close the achievement gap,” food services director Steve Youngbauer said.
Unlike the lunch program, eligibility for a free dinner is based on whether the school qualifies for the program based on school poverty rates, rather than the income level of an individual student. So any student participating in an eligible after-school program can eat the dinner meal for free.
The program, starting at Falk, Black Hawk Middle School and Memorial High School this year, will eventually include hot meals and a salad bar. It’s projected to cost $65,000 for the three schools this year, with the cost covered by a $2.86 per-meal federal subsidy.

Matthew DeFour:

Randall Elementary School has one of the lowest poverty rates and some of the highest test scores in Madison. It also has the most experienced teaching staff in the district.
By contrast, Sandburg Elementary has one of the higher poverty rates and some of the lowest test scores. It also has the least experienced teaching staff.
Across the district, schools with higher concentrations of poverty are more likely to have teachers with less experience, according to a State Journal analysis of Madison School District data.
Experts say that while more experience doesn’t guarantee higher quality, teachers often need five to 10 years to reach their peak effectiveness.
“To consistently and disproportionately give the kids who need the most help people who aren’t at their best yet just disadvantages them,” said Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality for the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that advocates for raising student achievement.

I quickly compiled the following charts (PDF version) from the 2011-2012 Madison School District’s MAP (Measurement of Academic Progress) math and reading results for Randall and Sandburg Elementary along with the District-wide results.

I added Randall, Sandburg’s and the Madison school district’s 3rd Friday, 2011 enrollment to the charts via the green rectangles. For example, the report states that 30 Sandburg 3rd grader’s took the MAP assessment while the District’s enrollment counts report 44 students in that class.

Joanne Barkan via a kind email:

Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education “reform” movement geared to undermine teachers’ unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of ill-conceived and failing policy “innovations”; they are victims of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which turned inner-city public schools into boot camps for standardized test prep; they are victims of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, which paid states to use student test scores–a highly unreliable tool–for teacher evaluations and to lift caps on the number of privately managed charter schools, thus draining resources from public schools. Chicago’s children are victims of “mayoral control,” which allows Rahm Emanuel to run the school system, bully parents and teachers, and appoint a Board of Education dominated by corporate executives and political donors.

Douglas Haven, via a kind reader:

The best way to learn is to teach. Now a classroom robot that helps Japanese children learn English has put that old maxim to the test.
Shizuko Matsuzoe and Fumihide Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, set up an experiment to find out how different levels of competence in a robot teacher affected children’s success in learning English words for shapes.
They observed how 19 children aged between 4 and 8 interacted with a humanoid Nao robot in a learning game in which each child had to draw the shape that corresponded to an English word such as ‘circle’, ‘square’, ‘crescent’, or ‘heart’.
The researchers operated the robot from a room next to the classroom so that it appeared weak and feeble, and the children were encouraged to take on the role of carers. The robot could then either act as an instructor, drawing the correct shape for the child, or make mistakes and act as if it didn’t know the answer.

Todd Finkelmeyer:

Nearly 30,000 public school teachers and support staff went on strike in Chicago this past week in a move that left some 350,000 students without classes to attend.
And while this contentious battle between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union blew up due to a range of issues — including compensation, health care benefits and job security concerns — one of the key sticking points reportedly was over the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system.
That’s noteworthy locally because researchers with UW-Madison’s Value Added Research Center (VARC) have been collaborating with the Chicago Public Schools for more than five years now in an effort to develop a comprehensive program to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of schools and teachers in that district.
But Rob Meyer, the director of VARC, says his center has stayed above the fray in this showdown between the Chicago teachers and the district, which appears close to being resolved.
“The controversy isn’t really about the merits of value-added and what we do,” says Meyer. “So we’ve simply tried to provide all the stakeholders in this discussion the best scientific information we can so everybody knows what they’re talking about.”

Much more on “value added assessment”, here.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Teaching is a difficult job that deserves fair pay, good benefits and high respect.
Let’s start with and emphasize that important point.
But let’s also stick up for the students, parents and taxpayers who deserve accountability for results.
That’s what President Barack Obama, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have done.
Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/editorial/school-accountability-here-to-stay/article_153c0ac0-fd9e-11e1-a1ea-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz26P7BTY8e

Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance:

Total school district surpluses in Wisconsin reached $1.86 billion at the end of the 2010-11 school year, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX).
This continues an upward trend that began in 2003, when those combined “fund balances” stood at $1.20 billion. Since then, districts have increased their combined reserves an average of 5.6% per year. They rose 6.1%, from $1.76 billion to $1.86 billion, during 2011.
Looked at a second way, total fund balances equaled 17.9% of school spending in 2011. However, this percentage ranged widely by district, an indication that Wisconsin school health varies considerably. Of 423 districts, 144 had reserves that were 25% or more of expenditures, a sign of fiscal strength, caution, or both.

John Cook:

It’s an oft-noted irony of the confrontation in Chicago that Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to the private, $20,000-a-year University of Chicago Lab School, which means his family doesn’t really have much of a personal stake in what happens to the school system he is trying to reform. This is pretty routine behavior for rich people in Chicago, and there’s a pretty good reason for it: Chicago’s public schools are terrible. If you care about your children’s education, and can afford to buy your way out of public schools, as Emanuel can, it’s perfectly reasonable to do so. Barack and Michelle Obama made a similar decision, opting to purchase a quality education for their daughters at Sidwell Friends rather than send them to one of Washington, D.C.’s, deeply troubled public schools.
A lot of Chicago parents with the resources to do so have followed Emanuel’s lead: 17% of schoolchildren in Chicago attend private schools, and so don’t have to trouble themselves with whether or not their local public school has air conditioning, or a library (160 do not), or classes with 45 students. Those kids that don’t attend private schools tend overwhelmingly to be from families with less political power and resources than Emanuel’s: 87% of them are from low-income families, and 86% are black or hispanic.

Christine Armario, Associated Press

Just a quarter of eighth and 12th grade students in the United States have solid writing skills, even when allowed to use spell-check and other computer word-processing tools, according to results of a national exam [NAEP} released Friday.
Twenty-seven percent of students at each grade level were able to write essays that were well-developed, organized, and had proper language and grammar-3 percent were advanced and 24 percent were proficient. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.
“It is important to remember this is first draft writing,” said Cornelia Orr, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation’s Report Card tests. “They did have some time to edit, but it wasn’t extensive editing.”
Students who took the writing test in 2011 had an advantage that previous test takers did not: a computer with spell-check and thesaurus. Previously, students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test had to use pencil and paper, but with changes in technology, and the need to write across electronic formats, the decision was made to switch to computers.
Orr said students use technology and tools like spell-check on a daily basis. “It’s as if we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser,” she said.
She said word processing tools alone wouldn’t result in significantly better writing scores if students didn’t have the core skills of being able to organize ideas and present them in a clear and grammatical fashion.
Still, students in both grades who used the thesaurus and the backspace more frequently had higher scores than those who used them less often. Students in the 12th grade who had to write four or five pages a week for English homework also had higher scores.
Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, 33 percent of eighth grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.
The results at both grade levels showed a continued achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students.
There was also a gender gap, with girls scoring 20 points higher on average than boys in the eighth grade and 14 points higher in 12th grade. Those who qualified for free and reduced price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, also had lower scores than those who did not; there was a 27 point difference between the two at the eighth grade.
For the 2011 exam, laptops were brought into public and private schools across the country and more than 50,000 students were tested to get a nationally representative sample. Students were given prompts that required them to write essays that explained, persuaded, or conveyed an experience.
Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor at Florida State University who served on the advisory panel for the test, said one factor is that research show most students in the United States don’t compose at the keyboard.
“What they do is sort of type already written documents into the machine, much as we used to do with typewriters four decades ago,” she said.
Yancey said for this reason there was some concern about having students write on the computer as opposed to by hand.
Likewise, having the advantage of spell-check assumes student know how to use it. And in some schools and neighborhoods, computers are still not easily accessible.
“There are not so many students that actually learn to write composing at the keyboard,” she said.
Yancey added that many students who do have access to computers are not necessarily using them to write at school, but to take standardized tests and filling in bubbles.
“Digital technology is a technology,” she said. “Paper and pencil is a technology. If technology were the answer, that would be pretty simple.”

————————
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sp-eye:

The professional educators that spoke out this week in an attempt to cajole the school board into giving them not just a 2%, but a 3.1% raise were not providing full disclosure.
While their pleas are certain have touched a few hearts, we wonder if their pleas would have had any effect at all had they shared a little more information about their positions.
We heard very clear that they feel that they are undervalued…that they do not earn enough.

Jenna Ross:

Concordia University is pairing two words that don’t often come in contact — “tuition” and “cut.”
The St. Paul school will announce Wednesday that it is lowering its undergraduate tuition and fees by $10,000, or 33.7 percent, to $19,700 for the next school year. It will become the first college in Minnesota to slash its sticker price. But it joins a few others across the country who have responded to growing concern about the rising price of college with a similar dramatic move.
Just a handful of Concordia undergrads now pay the full $29,700 in tuition and fees. But Concordia hopes to attract families who are being scared off by the published price.

Stephanie Simon:

(Reuters) – The Chicago teachers strike, which appeared headed toward a resolution Friday, has underscored a fundamental split over the biggest issue confronting America’s public schools: how to provide a decent education to children mired in poverty.
Across the U.S., poverty is irrefutably linked to poor academic performance. On last year’s national reading exam, nine-year-olds from low-income families scored nearly three full grade levels below their wealthier peers. The gap was nearly as large in math.

Ted Fishman:

According to census data, 39 percent of Kalamazoo’s students are white, and 44 percent are African-American. One of every three students in the Kalamazoo district falls below the national poverty level. One in 12 is homeless. Many of them are the first in their families to finish high school; many come from single-parent homes. Some are young parents themselves: Kalamazoo has one of the highest pregnancy rates among black teenagers in the state.
And yet, for the vast majority of the 500-plus students who graduate each year in Kalamazoo, a better future really does await after they collect their diplomas. The high-school degrees come with the biggest present most of them will ever receive: free college.
Back in November 2005, when this year’s graduates were in sixth grade, the superintendent of Kalamazoo’s public schools, Janice M. Brown, shocked the community by announcing that unnamed donors were pledging to pay the tuition at Michigan’s public colleges, universities and community colleges for every student who graduated from the district’s high schools. All of a sudden, students who had little hope of higher education saw college in their future. Called the Kalamazoo Promise, the program — blind to family income levels, to pupils’ grades and even to disciplinary and criminal records — would be the most inclusive, most generous scholarship program in America.
It would also mark the start of an important social experiment. From the very beginning, Brown, the only person in town who communicates directly with the Promise donors, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills. It’s primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy. The few restrictions — among them, children must reside in the Kalamazoo public-school district and graduate from one of its high schools — seem designed to encourage families to stay and work in the region for a long time. The program tests how place-based development might work when education is the first investment.