Lawrence Wittner:

Americans committed to better living for bosses can take heart at the fact that college and university administrators — unlike their faculty (increasingly reduced to rootless adjuncts) and students (saddled with ever more debt) — are thriving.

In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, 42 private college and university presidents received more than a million dollars each for their work. Robert Zimmer (University of Chicago) was the best-paid, at $3,358,723. At public colleges and universities, nine top administrators garnered more than $1 million each in 2012-2013, with the best-paid, E. Gordon Gee (Ohio State University), receiving $6,057,615.

Since then, it’s likely that the number of millionaire campus presidents has increased, for their numbers have been growing rapidly. Indeed, in 2012-13, the number of public university presidents receiving at least $1 million for their services more than doubled over the previous year.

In addition to their formal compensation, college and university presidents receive some very lavish perks. These at times include not only free luxury cars and country club memberships, but free university housing. James Milliken, the chancellor of the City University of New York, attended by some of the nation’s most impoverished students, lives rent-free in an $18,000-a-month luxury apartment on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side. From 2000 to 2007, when Gordon Gee was chancellor at Vanderbilt University, he benefited from a $6 million renovation of the university mansion in which he and his wife resided. According to a New York Times article, after Gee moved on to his multi-million dollar job at Ohio State, he was known for “the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”

Kyle Spencer:

When Michelle Arvelo returned to her prekindergarten classroom on June 30 after a weeklong vacation in the Dominican Republic, 18 exhilarated 4-year-olds sprinted to the door to greet her, wrapping their arms around her thin frame and inquiring about her tan, her haircut and whether her plane had a co-pilot in the cockpit.

Her boss at Cypress Hills Childcare Center in Brooklyn, which runs a year-round preschool, was thrilled to see her, too. But she was also worried that Ms. Arvelo might soon be departing again, this time permanently.

Ms. Arvelo has applied to the city in the hope of getting one of the new prekindergarten teaching jobs opening up in public schools. Directors who oversee dozens of independently run programs like Cypress Hills say that they cannot compete with the salary and benefits offered by the Education Department, so a program that promises to be a boon for families of young children may end up being a loss for them, an unintended consequence of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s prekindergarten expansion.

Simon Kuper

I especially see apartheid in the US. True, the country has made racist speech taboo. Use a racial epithet in public and your career combusts. That’s lovely. However, American school taxes are usually raised locally, and many neighbourhoods are segregated, and so most poor black children attend underfunded schools where they learn just enough to do lowly jobs for whites. The US later tries to airlift a few victims out of the ghetto through “affirmative action”, but by then the damage is done. Like apartheid South Africa, the US ensures through schooling that most black people won’t succeed. It just doesn’t call this “Bantu education”.

My instinctive measure of a society is how closely it resembles South African apartheid. On that score the Netherlands – despite ample racist speech – arguably beats the US, because the Dutch give so-called “black schools” more funding than white suburban schools. Similarly, ethnically mixed-up London has less apartheid than segregated Paris.

South African apartheid determined people’s life paths from before birth. If you were a white embryo, you’d be fine. A black embryo wouldn’t. I remember, aged about 16, sitting on the porch of some ridiculous white adult fraud, listening to him preach about the stupidity of his black servants, and realising: this guy needs to believe he made his own success. Few people at the top can think, “Luckily, I chose the right parents.” Instead they tell themselves a story about work and talent – even though their maid probably outworks them, and nobody ever cared whether she had talent.

Inequality is the new apartheid. Your life path is largely determined before birth. The ruling classes pass on their status by sending their children to exclusive schools, much like in apartheid Johannesburg.

Happily, ethnicity is no longer always decisive. Still, today’s apartheid delivers outcomes as unequal as the old apartheid did. One measure of a society’s inequality is its Gini coefficient. South Africa’s Gini in 1995, just after apartheid, was a shocking 0.59 (where 0 is perfect equality, and 1 is perfect inequality). But Manhattan today has almost exactly the same Gini: 0.6, according to the US Census Bureau. Amazingly, South Africa itself has become less equal since apartheid: by 2009 the country’s Gini had risen to 0.63, says the World Bank.

From the comments:

There are several key errors regarding school funding- many of the poorest performing schools spend the most per pupil. Schools and taxes are funded at the local AND state level, as well as directed by school boards elected locally and state DOE’s … these have been run almost exclusively by one philosophical perspective for more than 50 years, with the corruption and lack of accountability that comes with it … and results have gotten worse, not better. Maybe time for a change of concept!?!

Madison spends about double the national average per student yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results. Money may be a factor, but as the Kansas City experiment reveled, it is hardly decisive.

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital’s lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state’s largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers—young and old, black and white, old money and no money—crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South’s signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city’s two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent’s daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa’s daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central’s homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby black elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

More: Share Six Words on Race & Education.

Related: Madison has long supported a wide variation in school demographics. The chart above, created from 2013-2014 Madison School District middle school demographic data, illustrates the present reality, with the largest middle school – near west side Hamilton – also featuring the smallest percentage (18.3%) low income population. Nearby Cherokee Middle School’s low income population exceeds 60%!

Ashley Jochim:

Lyndon B. Johnson once quipped, “Good politics is good government.” Johnson realized that whether a given public policy achieves its intended objectives is rarely a matter solely of technical design. Rather, success depends both on the quality of the plan and whether it is implemented fully enough to stand the chance of having an impact—a process that may take years.

It has been more than a decade since my colleagues at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill and Christine Campbell, wrote It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform along with James Harvey. But its lessons about urban school reform are as relevant now as they were then. In analyzing systemic education reform in six cities, the authors posed a question of enormous consequence: How can city leaders construct reform strategies that promise to be powerful enough and last long enough to make a difference?

Fixing urban schools, they argued, requires more than lofty goals or incomplete strategies. The reform plans in the studied cities too often relied on “zones of wishful thinking”—assuming that teachers, principals, and district administrators would do what was right, rather than creating a plan that provided the incentives, freedom, and capacity for them to do so. Combining the best elements of each, the authors put forth three new reform models, including one option that would provide community oversight of a system of autonomous schools, much like the portfolio strategy does today.

Arun Gupta::

Public school teachers in Portland, Ore., and their students are doing a victory lap. Nearly a year after unveiling a contract proposal that would have put the squeeze on the 2,900-member Portland Association of Teachers (PAT), the Portland School Board on March 3 approved a contract that acceded to virtually every demand from the teachers’ union.

The board was acting as a stalking horse for corporate attacks on unions and public education nationwide. It initially wanted to saddle teachers with higher health care costs, fewer retirement benefits, more students and a greater workload in a city where 40 percent of teachers already work more than 50 hours a week (PDF). The board also demanded expansive management rights (PDF) and allegedly wished to link teacher evaluation more closely to standardized testing. The PAT opposed the board, arguing that low-income and minority students would pay the heaviest price as their classes grew larger, more time was devoted to testing and resources for curriculum preparation and teacher development got slashed.

Only after 98 percent of the PAT voted to strike starting Feb. 20 — and students vowed to join the picket line — did the board blink. Alexia Garcia, an organizer with the Portland Student Union who graduated last year, says students held walkouts and rallies at many of the city’s high schools in support of teachers’ demands because “teachers’ working conditions are our learning conditions.”

The deal is a big victory for the teachers’ union in a state where business interests, led by the Portland Business Alliance, call the shots on education policy. The school board had brought out the big guns, authorizing payments of up to $360,000 to a consultant for contract negotiations and $800,000 to a law firm, despite already having a full-time lawyer on its payroll. But, emulating Chicago teachers who prevailed in an eight-day strike in 2012, the PAT went beyond contract numbers, winning community support by focusing on student needs and rallying to stop school closures in underserved communities.

Most significant, the teachers helped expose the role of education reform in gentrifying the city, making it nearly impossible for every neighborhood to have a strong school. This is a process playing out nationwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Milwaukee to Washington, D.C. But it is particularly striking in Portland, so noted for quirkiness and tolerance it has spawned a hit television show, “Portlandia,” During a public forum on the contract negotiations, one teacher observed that the show was a reflection of how “we march to our own beat in Portland.” This has held true for the teachers’ approach to education.

Dennis Punzel:

Martius Bautista’s goal heading into the Madison All-City Spelling Bee, was a simple one.
“Just try my best,” said Martius, a fourth-grader at Edgewood Campus School.
His best turned out to be even better than the best.
In capturing the trophy at the Mitby Theatre of Madison Area Technical College, Martius had to outduel two-time All-City champion and reigning Badger State champion Aisha Khan, an eighth-grader at Spring Harbor Middle School.
Those two emerged as the finalists after Marissa Stewart, a seventh-grader at Black Hawk Middle School bowed out in the 24th round.
Aisha and Martius each got their first seven words in the finals correct before Aisha was confronted with “bolivar,” the currency of Venezuela.

Johnny Tam and Stuart Lau:

An article on the Education Bureau’s website claiming “Cantonese is not an official language” has been removed after criticism.
The article was posted on the website’s Language Learning Support section on January 24.
It aimed to promote the importance of bilingualism and trilingualism as the city “develops alongside the rapidly growing China” and “the daily usage of Mandarin [in Hong Kong] becomes common”.
It said: “Although the Basic Law stipulates that Chinese and English are the two official languages in Hong Kong, nearly 97 per cent of the local population learn Cantonese (a Chinese dialect that is not an official language) as their commonly used daily language.”
The article was removed yesterday. The webpage is now “being updated”.
Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen said the bureau had “done wrong” because it was not its business to define what language was official. But he commended it for quickly removing the article and apologising.

Laura Waters:

This is not Jersey’s best week. Revelations from Bridgegate, along with the peculiar backroom statecraft that spawned the scandal over the Hudson, seem to splatter daily across the front page. Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon get a second Christmas while Chris Christie appears pale and oddly flat.
As I’m writing this, the Bergen Record breaks the story that the Governor’s brother Todd bought and sold properties near the PATH station in Harrison which, coincidentally, had been just been awarded renovation funding to the tasty tune of $256 million.
And here’s another fresh Jersey lowlight: in Newark Tuesday night, state-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson was booed off the stage during a rancorous meeting where 500 people, including the president of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted with disdain to her “One Newark” plan that would restructure the city’s school system. This plan includes universal enrollment procedures for both charters and traditional schools, expansion of charter schools, and closings of poorly-utilized school buildings.

Ashley Jochim, Patrick J. Murphy , via a kind Deb Britt email:

The push to raise standards and increase student outcomes has placed state education agencies (SEAs) at the center of efforts to improve the performance of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, but few are well positioned to deliver on that imperative. Federal and state initiatives like Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and Common Core State Standards pose challenges that most agencies are not prepared to meet.
Seeking to understand what SEAs are doing to meet new and existing obligations, researchers conducted interviews with state chiefs and analyzed agency initiatives and budgets in 10 states with varied approaches to school and district improvement. They found no evidence that those with the most money had better data systems or more comprehensive accountability systems. And few SEAs engage in the type of budget analysis that would enable them to assess whether their investments align with their priorities or are paying off.
While the lack of legal authority to intervene in failing schools sometimes limited the ability of states to act on their school improvement strategies, the researchers found that states that had such authority rarely used it.

tressiemc:

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to “disrupt” higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses.So what went wrong?
After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The “godfather of free online education” says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,”were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.” It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.
Thrun has the right to fail. That’s just business. But he shouldn’t have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.

Sarah Blaskey and Phil Gasper:

MADISON, WIS., has a reputation as one of the most liberal cities in the country. It is also possibly the most racially unequal.
In early October, Race to Equity–a Madison-based initiative started by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families–released a report detailing racial disparities in Madison, and more broadly in Dane County, Wis. The findings are staggering.
The Race to Equity researchers expected the numbers compiled for racial disparities in Dane County to be similar or slightly better than the national averages. After all, Madison has long prided itself on having quality public education, good jobs, access to health care and human services programs, a relatively high standard of living and, in general, a progressive outlook on social, economic and political questions.
But while living standards for the white population in Dane County are higher than the national average, for the Black population, the opposite is true. On every indicator, with only two exceptions out of 40 measures, statistics collected in Dane County demonstrated equal or higher racial disparities between whites and Blacks than the national averages.

Related: The failed battle over the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school and our disastrous reading scores.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeanie (Bettner) Kamholtz email (PDF):

Collective bargaining was restored for all city, county and school district employees by a Court ruling last week through application of an earlier (9/14/12) Court decision achieved by MTI. Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas found that Governor Walker’s appointees to the WERC, James Scott and Rodney Pasch, were in contempt of court “for implementing” those parts of Act 10 which he (Colas) previously declared unconstitutional, which made them “a law which does not exist”, as Colas put it.
The Judge told Scott & Pasch to comply with his finding of unconstitutionality or be punished for their contempt. They agreed to comply.
Judge Colas made his ruling on unconstitutionality on September 14, 2012. MTI was represented by its legal counsel, Lester Pines.
In the contempt claim, in addition to MTI, Pines represented the Kenosha Education Association and WEAC. The latter was also represented by Milwaukee attorney Tim Hawks, who also represented AFSCME Council 40, AFT Wisconsin, AFT nurses and SEIU Healthcare, in last week’s case. Also appearing was Nick Padway, who partnered with Pines in representing Milwaukee Public Employees Union Local 61 in the original case.
Judge Colas specifically ordered the WERC to cease proceeding with union recertification elections, which in his earlier ruling were found to be unconstitutional. Act 10 mandated all public sector unions to hold annual elections to determine whether union members wished to continue with representation by the union. Act 10 prescribed that to win a union had to achieve 50% plus one of all eligible voters, not 50% plus one of those voting like all other elections. The elections were to occur November 1.

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Both stories, citing research by the real estate brokerage Redfin, maintained that over the last decade a net 1 million boomers (born born between 1945 and 1964) have moved into the city core from the surrounding area. “Aging boomers,” the Post gushed, now “opt for the city life.” It’s enough to warm the cockles of a downtown real-estate speculator’s heart, and perhaps nudge some subsidies from city officials anxious to secure their downtown dreams.
But there’s a problem here: a look at Census data shows the story is based on flawed analysis, something that the Journal subsequently acknowledged. Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier.
If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers.
Only one city, Miami, recorded a net gain in the boomer population within five miles of the center, roughly 1%. Much ballyhooed back to city markets including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco suffered double-digit percentage losses within the five-mile zone.

Jacqui Cheng:

Teenagers know a lot more about privacy than we think, so what are they trying to tell us when they post?
I know which of my teenage students smokes weed in the park after class on Fridays, and which other students are with him. I know which ones are struggling with making friends in their first few weeks at college, and which ones aren’t. I know which of my students chafe against overly strict parents on a regular basis. I know which one spends every weekend in the hospital due to a chronic condition. I know which ones got arrested last night.
I know all these things because I follow them all on various social media services. And they know I know; this isn’t some kind of stolen glance into the online life of teenagers that no one is supposed to see. Contrary to popular belief among adults, these teenagers are not oblivious to privacy settings and do care a good amount about who can see what online. If anything, most of them have consciously chosen what they want to show to me and the rest of the world through social media. And what they’re telling us is who they are and what they need from us as mentors.

Andy Fox:

Aidan’s father, Tim Clark, told WAVY.com what happened next lacks commons sense. The children were suspended for possession, handling and use of a firearm. On Tuesday, that offense was changed by school officials to possession, handling and use of an airsoft gun.
Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, thinks it is ridiculous the Virginia Beach City Public School System suspended her 13-year-old son and his friends because they were firing a spring-driven airsoft gun on the Caraballo’s private property.
“My son is my private property,” she said. “He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”
The bus stop in question is 70 yards from the Caraballo’s front yard.
Solangel Caraballo was not at home when this incident occurred. She was taking her younger son to a Head Start class. She left her 16-year -old daughter in charge.

Samantha Pearson:

The residents of Belmonte, a poor neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of Brazilian mining city Belo Horizonte, have heard and seen it all. Between May and July, police arrested 14 gang members suspected of operating a “dial-a-drug” delivery business in the region. One of the gang was a military police officer, who allegedly used the code word “barbecue” to warn the others when his colleagues were planning a raid.
But when workers started erecting a “flat-pack” school among the neighbourhood’s makeshift houses early this year, curiosity got the better of even the most world-weary of locals, says Danilo Andrade, the project’s chief engineer. “Many people came to see what was going on,” he says, casting his eye over the angular red and turquoise structure, topped with a distinctive cone spire.
The building is the first of 32 state nursery schools, known by the abbreviation Umei (municipal infant education units), to be delivered over the next 16 months under a new public-private partnership (PPP) scheme.

Stephanie Simon:

It was just a primary — and the results aren’t even final yet, with mail-in ballots still being counted to determine if there will be a runoff.
But advocates for traditional public education are jubilant that Bill de Blasio came out on top Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral race in New York City after a campaign in which he promised to yank support from charter schools, scale back high-stakes standardized testing and tax the wealthy to pay for universal preschool and more arts education.
De Blasio’s education platform boiled down, in effect, to a pledge to dismantle the policies that Mayor Michael Bloomberg enacted over the past decade in the nation’s largest school district.
Those policies, emphasizing the need to inject more free-market competition into public education and weaken the power of teachers unions, are not unique to New York City; they’re the backbone of a national education reform movement that has won broad bipartisan support. Yet the reform movement has also triggered a backlash from parents and teachers who see it as a threat to their schools, their jobs and the traditional concept of public education as a public trust.

Molly Knefel:

As students in New York City return to school for the fall, a coalition of youth and legal advocacy groups, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, has launched a campaign to address disciplinary policies that they argue criminalize students, making them less likely to graduate and more likely to end up ensnared in the criminal justice system. The “New Vision for School Safety” presented by the campaign calls for a citywide reduction of the use of police and NYPD school safety officers in schools and an increase in the power of educators, parents and students to shape the safety policies in their school communities.
Advocates argue that strict disciplinary practices, including police presence, metal detectors and “zero tolerance” policies, disproportionately target students of color, especially black and Latino youth. Although only a third of students in New York City are black, they received over half (53 percent) of the suspensions over the past decade, according to the Dignity in Schools Campaign. Of the students suspended for “profanity,” 51 percent were black, and 57 percent of those suspended for “insubordination” were black. Students with disabilities are also four times as likely to be suspended than their non-disabled peers. (A representative for New York’s Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.) The creeping criminalization of school spaces targeting already marginalized populations is not limited to the city of New York – as The New York Times reported earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of students around the country face criminal charges, as opposed to school-based disciplinary measures, each year. A civil suit filed earlier this year in Texas alleges that misdemeanor ticketing disproportionately targeted African American students.

Madison leaders say trimming city workers’ pay might be necessary:

Scheduled pay raises for union-represented city employees may need to be trimmed to help balance the 2014 city budget, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin and City Council President Chris Schmidt said Friday.
Schmidt said he didn’t relish the step — calling city workers “already underpaid for the jobs they do” — but he argued there could be no other choice.
Revenue limits under state law, rising city costs for fuel and health insurance, and a steadfast goal to protect funding for basic city services increasingly tie the city’s hands, he said.
“It’s understandable why it’s on the table, why we’re discussing it,” he said about the possible action, in which a 3 percent raise scheduled to start in the last pay period in December could be scaled back or eliminated for many employees in March.

Andrea Anderson:

Contract talks for Madison School District employees set to start this month, letter says contract negotiations for Madison School District employees are set to begin later this month, according to a letter sent Friday to district staff by superintendent Jennifer Cheatham and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.
Cheatham said in a phone interview that she and employee unions will be negotiating “as soon as we can” in order to create collective bargaining agreements that will take effect after the current contracts end in June 2014.
MTI asked the district to begin collective bargaining in May, but the new superintendent wanted to adjust to her role, become acquainted with the staff and hear their requests before bargaining with the teachers union and other employee unions.
Although the timeline is unclear, Cheatham said she expects to complete the contracts “fairly quickly” while also taking time to ensure the process is done correctly and has an outcome acceptable to all parties.

Much more on the Madison School District’s 2013-2014 budget (including a 4.5 property tax increase, after 9% two years ago), here.

Nick Novak:

On Thursday, Chris Rickert – writer for the Wisconsin State Journal – thankfully reminded us about Madison’s dirty little secret. The district has a huge problem when it comes to the achievement gap – how students from different races are learning – and little in terms of a plan to fix it.
Indeed, Madison has one of the largest achievement gaps in Wisconsin. While 86.7 percent of white students in the district graduated in 2012, only 53.1 percent of their African American classmates could say the same. That’s a graduation difference of nearly 34 percent. Even Milwaukee, the state’s most embattled district, beats Madison on this very important issue. African American students in Milwaukee Public Schools were six percent more likely to graduate than their counterparts in MMSD.
For a city that goes out of its way to preach utopian equality and the great successes of union-run public schools, Madison’s lack of an answer for the achievement gap should come as a shock.
Here’s how the district stacked up, in terms of graduation rates, with the state’s other large districts:

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Fabius Maximus:

To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines. To realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen. To be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father. To know these things is to understand what American labor means.
— Adlai Stevenson, in a speech to the American Federation of Labor, New York City on 22 September 1952

Yin & Yang:

“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).

Javier Hernandez:

The results released on Wednesday showed that even some of the country’s most prestigious programs have room for improvement. For example, one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia University and New York University were given low marks for how much they were able to improve student test scores; by contrast, 1 in 10 teachers who graduated from City College of New York received poor marks.
City officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the data, saying the numbers were meant to provoke conversation, not rivalry. They noted that sample sizes were small; that test scores were available only in certain grades, in math and English; and that the data reflected only information from the past four years.
But in New York City, where competitive streaks are widespread, education leaders could not resist a little jockeying.
David M. Steiner, dean of Hunter College School of Education, said the results would prompt schools like Columbia and N.Y.U. to rethink elements of their program.
“These are places that are very well known for their research and scholarship,” Dr. Steiner, a former state education commissioner, said. “Is it possible that they need to pay more attention to their clinical preparation of teachers?”
Thomas James, provost of Teachers College at Columbia, said the reports prompted the school to examine how closely its curriculum aligned with city academic standards. He said the data also spurred interest in increasing the number of teachers who pursue certification in special education, where city data showed the school lagged behind its peers.

Related: National Council on Teacher Quality.

David Kaplan:

It’s now even easier and cheaper for local high school students to get a college education.
At a joint meeting between City Council, The Roanoke City School Board and Virginia Western the community college talked about it’s newest program.
Back in March, Virginia Western announced it’s waiving tuition for students taking dual enrollment classes.
Those are classes students can take in high school and earn college credit, but many students weren’t.
They can now.

Related: Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challenge. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison’s non-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflicts numerous costs, from one size fits all curricula to growth in the ‘burbs accompanied by ever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.

Peter Cookson, Jr., via a kind reader’s email

ES: What are your thoughts about evaluating teachers by their students’ standardized test scores? What’s missing from the public debate?
LD-H: Teacher-bashing infuriates me. The commitment of individuals who go into teaching in this country is extraordinary. And many teachers are highly able. We do have a wide range of access to knowledge for teachers, just like we have a wide range of access to knowledge for students. That means that teachers are left with one hand tied behind their backs if they aren’t given the knowledge and the skills they need.
Evaluation has to begin at the very beginning of the career. Finland’s rise to the top of the international rankings is typically attributed by the Finns to the deep training of teachers in a highly professionalized master’s degree program. [In Finland education] students have strong content background, and they study teaching methods while they spend a year in a model school, pursuing a clinically supported internship. In addition, there is a lot of attention to learning how to teach special education students and to personalize teaching for all students. The idea is if you can teach kids who struggle to learn, then you can teach anyone. It really pays off. Finally, teachers learn how to use and conduct research, and [each writes] a thesis in which he or she researches an educational issue as part of the master’s degree.
In Finland there is very little formal evaluation that happens after teachers get into the profession because the bar is so high at the beginning, and there are so many supports to get better. There are some analysts who have claimed, “Oh, if you fire the bottom 10 percent of teachers every year, you’ll get educational outcomes like those in Finland.” In fact, that is not how Finland gets high educational outcomes. You can’t fire your way to Finland. You actually have to build the capacity of teachers.
We ought to be having a conversation about performance assessments for entering the field. [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten has called for a “bar exam” for teachers. I’ve been involved in building teacher performance assessments in which beginning teachers demonstrate that they can plan a curriculum, teach it, produce and evaluate student learning. We find that these assessments improve teaching and improve the quality of teacher education.

Related: Wisconsin adopts its first teacher content knowledge licensing requirement – for elementary English candidates, from Massachusetts (MTEL).

Rachel Metz:

San Jose State University is suspending courses it has been offering through Udacity that involved both high school and San Jose State students, due to low course-passing rates as compared to traditional classes, and plans to start things up again in the spring. How do you feel about this?
We felt we got these kids, they worked really hard, and they stayed with it, but they didn’t get the skills they needed to be proficient. We asked them why, and they said they needed more time. Literally, this is a truly joint decision; I’m totally behind it because I feel the objective must be to give students a great education.
How has online learning changed since you started Udacity?
We’ve evolved the MOOC concept into one that really helps people throughout the course to complete the course. The most recent completion rates in pilots we’ve been running have been 85 percent, as opposed to 5 percent or 4 percent, which is common in MOOC-land.

udacity

Jim Rutenberg:

As he walked the East Hampton High School campus on the last day of classes last week, Adam S. Fine seemed to be one satisfied principal. Graduating seniors were moving on to colleges including Brown and Cornell Universities; class-cutting was down; and Newsweek had ranked the school among the 2,000 best public schools in the nation, all to be expected in a ZIP code synonymous with success.
But, asked to reflect on the year that was, he sighed and moved his hand up and down, suggesting a roller coaster. “Resiliency,” he said. “That’s my theme word for graduation.”
This has been a year like none other for East Hampton High, which faced an uncomfortable ethnic integration problem that had been festering in the background for years but was thrust to the foreground by a tragedy at the opening of the school year.
A 16-year-old junior from Ecuador, David Hernandez, hanged himself just a few days after homecoming in September; it was the second student suicide in three years. Two months later, a student who was about to transfer to the school committed suicide. Three suicides in three years in a school community of about 900 students is far above the regional average. And all of the students who killed themselves were Hispanic.

Chris Walker:

The Monona City Council passed the measure last month (PDF), which levies fines on parents of bullies if they continually harass their peers.
It’s an unprecedented move that, so far as anyone can tell, hasn’t been adopted anywhere else in the nation.
The law wouldn’t target parents of first-time bullyers, but rather those whose children are consistent offenders. Before receiving a ticket, parents would have to be informed of a bullying incident that had occurred within the past 90 days. If the child continued to bully after the initial warning, the parents could then be fined.

Ry Rivard:

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s plan to offer a low-cost online master’s degree to 10,000 students at once creates what may be a first-of-its-kind template for the evolving role of public universities and corporations.
When it agreed to work with Udacity to offer the online master’s degree in computer science, Georgia Tech expected to make millions of dollars in coming years, negotiated student-staff interaction down to the minute, promised to pay professors who create new online courses $30,000 or more, and created two new categories of educators — corporate “course assistants” tasked with handling student issues and a corps of teaching assistants hired by Georgia Tech who will be professionals rather than graduate students.
New details about the internal decision making and fine print of Georgia Tech’s revolutionary effort are based on interviews and documents, including some that the university provided to Inside Higher Ed following an open records request.
Georgia Tech this month announced its plans to offer a $6,630 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. Georgia Tech and Udacity, a Silicon Valley-based startup, will work with AT&T, which is putting up $2 million to heavily subsidize the program’s first year. The effort, if it succeeds, will allow one of the country’s top computer science programs to enroll 20 times as many students as it does now in its online master’s degree program, and to offer the degree to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its existing program.
A contract between Georgia Tech’s research corporation and Udacity spells out the time that Udacity staff members are to spend helping students, though representatives of both the company and the university say their understanding of how much time students will need is likely to evolve.

Stephen Carter:

Members of the Class of 2013, I salute you.
As everyone keeps telling you, you are graduating at a difficult and even frightening time. I wish it were otherwise — that my generation was bequeathing you a finer world. We aren’t. The world into which you are entering is rich with challenges. Many are scary.
This does not make your generation unique. Through the nation’s history, America’s colleges and universities have sent forth graduates in times of war, of fear, of economic risk. Eighty years ago, the world was mired in a four-year-old economic depression. Seventy years ago, many schools skipped commencement exercises entirely because their graduates were all heading off to World War II. Fifty years ago, Bull Connor was setting fire hoses and police dogs on civil-rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama. And 45 years ago, today’s exercises would have been sandwiched between the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
In short, there was never a golden age — a period when new graduates could step into the world and simply start building careers and families without worry.
So what is the great challenge of your generation? Protecting the environment? Increasing equality? Abating poverty? Achieving world peace?

Pat Schnieder:

The rumor that a national school reform effort moving through Madison would wipe out treasured class electives at West High School has been buzzing in that community for years.
Parents and students got a chance to bring their concerns about the implementation of Common Core standards to the top Thursday evening, during a conversation with new Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, held in the school library after her day-long visit to West High.
It was the second in a series of four public meetings being held at the city’s public high schools this spring to allow Cheatham, who started work in the district on April 1, to hear community concerns.
Cheatham told the crowd of 150 or more that she had heard a lot that day from students and staff about the “amazing potpourri” of elective courses at West.
“They think they are a major asset of the school. I think so too,” she said.
West High School’s elective courses are so popular among students that speculation the Common Core standards would be their death knell fueled a sit-in of some 500 students in fall 2010, the year the state adopted the standards. Today, many of Madison’s public schools are still figuring out a way to incorporate the standards, about which confusion reigns among students, parents and teachers.
Lynn Glueck, a school improvement coordinator at Memorial High School, said this week that Common Core focuses on developing key skills needed for college and career readiness. The standards related to English language arts, for example, are about “close reading, critical thinking and argumentative writing where students pull evidence out of the text,” Glueck said.
In the instances where Common Core has been used at Memorial, which some say is leading the district in implementing the standards, “students are really engaging in it,” she said.

Fascinating. 2006: The movement toward one size fits all via English 10. 2013: “West High School’s elective courses are so popular among students”.
Additional and informative background here.

Jenny Anderson:

Parenting in a pathologically competitive, information-saturated city can make anyone crazy, even those parents lucky enough to be worried about fennel burgers in school lunches. And while Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks.
As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.
And so Avenues students may run to their “Empire State of Mind: Thinking About Jay-Z in a New Way” “mini-mester” while passing a Chuck Close self portrait, but they do so with the intent of being “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit,” as the school’s mission statement puts it. “We wanted a school that was innovative and wouldn’t force our kids into any particular mold,” says Sheree Carter-Galvan, an Avenues parent and a general counsel at Yale University. Or, as Ella Kim, mother of a 4-year old, explains, Avenues took the anxiety of a New York parent — albeit of a certain type — “and designed a school around that.”
Last winter, a group of Avenues 4-year-olds ventured out to the 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea to view the work of John A. Parks, an English painter, who fingerpainted his childhood memories. Schulman thought it segued seamlessly with a unit they were doing on abstract art, which included studies of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Schulman, who always seems to be brimming with excitement, explained how the subject matter and the field trip were perfect for the immersion classes. “You can use the vocabulary in both languages,” she said, to learn about the art.

Much more on Avenues, here.

Mary Beth Faller:

Harold Begay drives around Tuba City, on the Navajo Reservation, showing a visitor boarded-up buildings and ramshackle houses abandoned by the federal government and left to rot.
Begay, who is superintendent of Tuba City Unified School District, tells his visitor about high unemployment on the reservation and the sense of alienation in many young people who feel cut off from their culture and the traditional Arizona classroom. Like most Arizona districts on American Indian reservations, Tuba City’s is struggling.
Begay is familiar with the disconnect between the traditional values of the Navajos and modern education.
A quiet man whose soft speech is inflected with the tones of his native Navajo language, Begay spent his childhood tending his family’s corn and sheep a few miles from where his Tuba City office now stands. He greeted the sunrise with prayers and ended evenings with a family meal and stories about what it means to be Navajo, or “Dine” as they call themselves.
After enduring troubles in school on the reservation, Begay joined the Marines and, after leaving the military, drove a school bus. He eventually went back to school, earned a doctorate and traveled the world before being drawn back to Tuba City, a few square miles of modest homes on the mesas of the Painted Desert, 75 miles north of Flagstaff.

USA Today Editorial:

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers’ unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they’re siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There’s little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.
That doesn’t mean all charters are automatically good. They’re not. But it’s indisputable that the good ones — most prominently, KIPP — are onto something. The non-profit company, which now has 125 schools, operates on a model that demands much more of students, parents and teachers than the typical school does. School days are longer, sometimes including Saturday classes. Homework burdens are higher, typically two hours a night. Grading is tougher. Expectations are high, as is the quality of teachers and principals, and so are the results.
KIPP’s eighth-grade graduates go to college at twice the national rate for low-income students, according to its own tracking. After three years, scores on math tests rise as if students had four years of schooling, according to an independent study.

Related: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”
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A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.
Minneapolis teacher’s union approved to authorize charter schools
.

Jack Craver:

The city, he says, needs to help by providing kids with access to out-of-school programs in the evenings and during the summer. It needs to do more to fight hunger and address violence-induced trauma in children. And it needs to help parents get engaged in their kids’ education.
“We as a community, for all of the bragging about being so progressive, are way behind the rest of the nation in these areas,” he says.
The mayor’s stated plans for addressing those issues, however, are in their infancy.
Soglin says he is researching ways to get low-cost Internet access to the many households throughout the city that currently lack computers or broadband connections.
A serious effort to provide low-cost or even free Internet access to city residents is hampered by a 2003 state law that sought to discourage cities from setting up their own broadband networks. The bill, which was pushed by the telecommunications industry, forbids municipalities from funding a broadband system with taxpayer dollars; only subscriber fees can be used.
Ald. Scott Resnick, who runs a software company and plans to be involved in Soglin’s efforts, says the city will likely look to broker a deal with existing Internet providers, such as Charter or AT&T, and perhaps seek funding from private donors.

Related: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools” – Madison Mayor Paul Soglin.
Job one locally is to make sure all students can read.
Madison, 2004 Madison schools distort reading data by UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg:

Rainwater’s explanation also emphasized the fact that 80 percent of Madison children score at or above grade level. But the funds were targeted for students who do not score at these levels. Current practices are clearly not working for these children, and the Reading First funds would have supported activities designed to help them.
Madison’s reading curriculum undoubtedly works well in many settings. For whatever reasons, many chil dren at the five targeted schools had fallen seriously behind. It is not an indictment of the district to acknowledge that these children might have benefited from additional resources and intervention strategies.
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It’s true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 – bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.

Madison, 2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before by Ruth Robarts:

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.
“All students” meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.
“Able to read at or beyond grade level” meant scoring at the “proficient” or “advanced” level on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRC) administered during the third grade. “Proficient” scores were equated with being able to read at grade level. “Advanced” scores were equated with being able to read beyond grade level. The other possible scores on this statewide test (basic and minimal) were equated with reading below grade level.

Madison, 2009: 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
Madison, 2012: Madison’s “Achievement Gap Plan”:

The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don’t present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print.

Alan Borsuk:

The youth was on his way to class at the start of the day at Milwaukee South Division High School. But first he stopped to leave his headphones with Paola Felix Encarnacion.
That was one small victory for the education of this young man who is in ninth grade for the second year – and one small accomplishment for Paola and the organization she works for, City Year.
I spent much of the spring of 2006 visiting large Milwaukee Public Schools high schools for a series of stories in this newspaper. At most of the schools, I spent a day following a specific student. Not surprisingly, schools generally matched me with one of their stars.
At South, I was paired with Paola. She was a junior then, the kind of kid you hope goes on to do good things for herself and others. Every time I passed near South Division in the last few years, I wondered what she was up to.
Last fall, I was invited to meet with the 50 or so young adults who are City Year “corps members” in Milwaukee this year. A nationwide program, City Year members work in eight MPS schools. The red jackets make them highly visible. They don’t teach, but do lots of things to help students get engaged constructively in school. They run programs and clubs, mentor and tutor “at-risk” students, promote attendance and good behavior. A key to the work is just staying in touch daily with specific students. City Year is funded by AmeriCorps and by private money, including support from some of the most prominent donors in Milwaukee.

Amy Barrilleaux:

After paying an Iowa-based headhunting firm $30,975 to develop a candidate profile and launch a three-month nationwide recruitment effort, and after screening 65 applications, the Madison school board has narrowed its superintendent search down to two finalists. Dr. Jenifer Cheatham is chief of instruction for Chicago Public Schools, and Dr. Walter Milton, Jr., is superintendent of Springfield Public Schools in Illinois.
Parents and community members will get a chance to meet both finalists at a forum at Monona Terrace starting at 5:45 p.m. Thursday night. But despite the exhaustive and expensive search, the finalists aren’t without flaws.
Cheatham was appointed to her current post as chief of instruction in June of 2011 by Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, who has since resigned. According to her Chicago district bio, Cheatham’s focus is improving urban school districts by “developing instructional alignment and coherence at every level of a school system aimed at achieving breakthrough results in student learning.” Cheatham received a master’s and doctorate in education from Harvard and began her career as an 8th grade English teacher. But she found herself in a harsh spotlight as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and district officials pushed for a contentious 7.5 hour school day last year, which became one of many big issues that led to the Chicago teachers strike in September.
“It was handled horribly in terms of how it was rolled out,” says Chicago attorney Matt Farmer, who also blogs about Chicago school issues for The Huffington Post.
Farmer says pressure was mounting last spring for the district to explain how the longer day would work and how it would be paid for. Cheatham was sent to a community meeting he attended on the city’s south side to explain the district’s position.

Some of candidate Walter Milton Jr.’s history a surprise to School Board president

Madison School Board president James Howard said Monday he wasn’t aware of some of the controversial aspects of Walter Milton Jr.’s history until after the board named him a finalist to be Madison’s next superintendent.
Prior to becoming superintendent in Springfield, Ill., Milton was criticized for hiring without a background check a colleague who had been convicted of child molestation in Georgia. The colleague, Julius B. Anthony, was forced to resign from a $110,000 job in Flint, Mich., after a background check uncovered the case, according to the Springfield State Journal-Register.
Milton and Anthony were former business partners and worked together in Fallsburg, N.Y., where Milton was superintendent before moving to Flint, according to news reports.

Steven Verburg: Jennifer Cheatham fought for big changes in Chicago schools:

“Jennifer Cheatham will be the third person in the last two years from our administration who I’ve been a reference for who has taken over a fairly significant school district,” Vitale said. “Chicago is a pretty good breeding place for leaders.”

Matthew DeFour:

A Springfield School District spokesman said Milton is declining interviews until a community forum in Madison on Thursday.
Prior to Fallsburg, Milton was a teacher and principal in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree in African history and African-American studies from Albany State University, a master’s degree in education from the State University of New York College at Brockport and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Buffalo.
Milton’s contract in Springfield expires at the end of the 2013-14 school year. His current salary is $220,000 plus about $71,000 in benefits.

School Board members want a superintendent with vision, passion and a thick hide

Madison School Board member Marj Passman says she was looking for superintendent candidates who have had experience working in contentious communities. “That’s important, considering what we’ve gone through here,” she told me Monday.
And what Madison schools are going through now.
The Madison Metropolitan School District had scarcely released the names of the two finalist candidates — Jennifer Cheatham, a top administrator in the Chicago Public School System and Walter Milton Jr., superintendent of the schools in Springfield, Ill. — before the online background checks began and comments questioning the competency of the candidates were posted. So the new Madison superintendent has to be someone who can stand up to public scrutiny, Passman reasoned.
And the issues that provoked the combative debate of the last couple of years — a race-based achievement gap and charter school proposal meant to address it that proved so divisive that former Superintendent Dan Nerad left the district — remain unresolved.
So, Passman figured, any new superintendent would need experience working with diverse student populations. Both Cheatham and Milton fit that bill, Passman says.

What are the odds that the traditional governance approach will substantively address Madison’s number one, long term challenge? Reading….
Much more on the latest Madison Superintendent search, here along with a history of Madison Superintendent experiences, here.

Paul Fanlund:

During 2011, Kaleem Caire became a household name in local public affairs by leading a passionate but ultimately unsuccessful fight to create the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.
When I mentioned it in an interview at his Park Street office last week, Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, instantly recited the date of the Madison School Board’s 5-2 rejection (Dec. 19, 2011).
Madison Prep was to be an academically rigorous school of mostly minority students who would dress in uniforms and be divided by gender. The school day would be longer and parental involvement required. Teachers would also serve as mentors, role models and coaches. The goal was to lessen the city’s achievement gap between white and minority students.
But the board voted no, citing unanswered questions and worries about costs. Also in play were teacher union trepidations and widespread skepticism about the charter school concept, a favorite of conservatives, in liberal Madison.

Related: Achievement gap exists for both longtime, new Madison students.
Madison School district must solve problems no matter where they originate.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (November, 2005).
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: “We are not interested in the development of new charter schools”.

Al Baker:

A day after New York City’s failure to create a new teacher evaluation system cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid, an exasperated state education official on Friday threatened to withhold more than $1 billion more from the city, including its share of federal Race to the Top grants.
John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, said Obama administration officials had expressed such concern over the breakdown in the state’s largest school system that the state’s entire $700 million Race to the Top grant was also in danger.
Plans for evaluating teachers had to be in place by midnight Thursday for nearly 700 school districts in New York. When many of them were lagging behind a year ago, Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, warned that the state could be a “national leader” or lose money from sliding back on commitments for reform. The city was one of only four districts to fail to submit a plan that is envisioned as an informed way to identify superior teachers and rid schools of ineffective ones.

Fiona Tam:

How much are you willing to pay to have a second child with Hong Kong residency rights or American citizenship? That’s the question Shenzhen authorities asked the city’s residents when they introduced heavy fines this year for those who exploit loopholes in the mainland’s one-child policy and give birth overseas.
Since Tuesday, Shenzhen permanent residents have faced fines of at least 219,000 yuan (HK$270,000) for giving birth to a second baby, whether in Hong Kong, the US or another foreign country. The amount is six times the city’s average annual income last year but it can increase sharply if the parents’ annual income is higher.
Rich couples earning more than 73,000 yuan a year will be required to pay an extra amount equal to twice the difference. For example, a couple earning 500,000 yuan a year could be fined 1.07 million yuan for their second child, including the basic 219,000 yuan fine and 854,000 yuan in additional fines.

Associated Press:

Eberhard van der Laan’s introduction of a law that in other countries either already exists or seems so obvious it wouldn’t even require a rule is the result of the Netherlands’ unique drugs policy. Under the “tolerance” principle, marijuana is technically illegal here, but police can’t prosecute people for possession of small amounts.
That’s the loophole that made possible Amsterdam’s famed “coffee shops” – cafes where marijuana is sold openly. But it has also had the unwanted side effect that Dutch children are frequently exposed to the drug in public areas.
City spokeswoman Iris Reshef says schools have always forbidden pot, but found it difficult to enforce the policy when students smoked on or near campus and challenged administrators to do anything about it.
“It’s not really what you have in mind as an educator, that children would be turning up for class stoned, or drunk either for that matter,” she said. “But it has been a problem for some schools.”

Laura Waters:

Earlier this month Jersey City Education Association President Ron Greco refused to sign off on the district’s $40 million Race to the Top application (see coverage here) and wrote a letter to JCEA members explaining that he vetoed the grant because “not one cent is dedicated to negotiation of a new contract. Diane Ravitch then blogged about Mr. Greco’s decision, noting his “courage, insight, wisdom, and conviction.”
A reader who calls herself Jersey Mom, a parent of a Jersey City public school student, responded to Dr. Ravitch and also posted her rebuttal on NJLB’s comment section. (See here.) In addition to pointing out various factual errors in Dr. Ravitch’s blog, she also references Jersey City Superintendent Marcia Lyle’s recent presentation, “Mind the Gap,” which details some of the district’s challenges:

Steve Huffman:

This past spring I had the pleasure of teaching a course for Udacity, an online education company putting high quality college level courses online for free. I was recruited to Udacity by a former college professor and friend of mine, Dave Evans, Udacity’s VP of Education.
When I was a Computer Science student at the University of Virginia, I was fortunate to take a cryptology course taught by Professor Evans. He presented us two ways to get an A in this course. We could either do it the old fashioned way–do well on tests and homeworks as well as completing a course-long project of our choosing; or, we could break into his computer and set our grade to an A. Naturally, we pretended to do the former, while spending our evenings huddled outside Professor Evans’ house working on the latter. My team received A’s.
It was one of the first times where I felt I was not just completing course objectives as a student, but thinking about real-world problems as a computer scientist. When Professor Evans emailed me early this year inquiring whether I’d be interested in teaching a course on Web Developement, I said, “Yes!” long before my brain had a chance to remind me that I already had a full-time job.

Micah Landau:

Roughly 225,000 — or nearly a quarter of the New York City school system’s students — spent part or all of their first days in school in overcrowded classes, according to a UFT survey released on Sept. 25.
Dino Sferazza, the chapter leader at Queens’ Cardozo HS, which had 266 oversize classes, the most of any school in the city, described the situation at his school as “absurd.” One teacher had 58 students in a class, Sferazza said; another had five classes, none of which had fewer than 43 students.
“Kids are standing in the hallway, sitting on the floor, sitting on windowsills,” Sferazza said. “There’s not enough anxiety in these kids’ lives already? And now they have to worry about getting a seat in class?”

Kurt Streeter:

Kent Taylor, superintendent of education in southern Kern County, was selected Wednesday to lead the Inglewood school district — the first major move by the state after its takeover of the financially troubled district.
Before his Kern County stint, Taylor worked as a teacher, principal, administrator and school board member in several Southern California districts, mostly in the San Bernardino area. He grew up in Inglewood and graduated from Inglewood High in 1982, facts he emphasized repeatedly during a Wednesday news conference.
The appointment is about “coming back to the community that I love, the community that produced me,” he said, recalling several teachers who mentored him as a youngster. “This is a great district, a wonderful district, and we have great things happening here…. Do we need to figure out some fiscal things? Yes, we do. But I’m the guy who is going to come and work with everyone and listen to everyone…. We’re going to continue to move forward.”

The Wall Street Journal:

The unions are blaming Inglewood’s shortfall on education cuts, but per-pupil spending is about the same as it was five years ago. The real problem (other than too generous benefits, which are an issue in most districts) is that enrollment has declined by more than 20% since 2006, which has shrunk the total pot of available money. Many of the city’s working class families have left. Meanwhile, about 10% of students have fled to charter schools–and for that the unions have only themselves to blame.
Seven charters have sprouted up within the last five years as alternatives to Inglewood’s failing schools, which are among the worst in the state. Only 30% of seventh graders meet state math standards while merely a quarter of 11th graders are proficient in English. The charters outperform traditional schools by 100 to 200 points on the state Academic Performance Index (which ranges from 200 to 1000). Most charters also operate at lower cost.
The district intends to float bonds to renovate facilities in order to draw back students, but energy efficient buildings and a spiffy, new athletic center won’t make up for a poor education. And they sure won’t help close the district’s $10 million structural deficit.

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.

Ezra Klein:

Chicago performs quite poorly on national assessments of educational quality. As Reuters notes, fourth-graders in Chicago performed an average of nine points worse than the big city average and sixteen points worse than the national average on the math section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the national gold standard for measuring learning. On reading, they were eight and seventeen points worse than big city and national averages, respectively. That’s a bit better than Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. but worse than New York.
Chicago also has shorter than average school years and school days. Many students are only in class for 170 days a year as of a few years ago, below the state minimum of 176 days and the national average of 180 days; under Emanuel, the year was lengthened to 180 days. The school day in Chicago averages five hours and forty five minutes in elementary schools (as opposed to the national average of six hours and forty-two minutes) and seven hours for secondary schools, above the national average of 6.6 hours. Emanuel and teachers recently negotiated a deal to hire 500 new teachers to allow for a 90 minute school day extension without increasing hours for current teachers.

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones:

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of “good jobs” in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy.

Ashley Gebb:

The future of education and its role in economic development will be featured in a town hall meeting on Saturday hosted by the Yuba City Unified School District.
As part of the review and discussion of the district’s strategic plan, officials want feedback on what residents value about students’ preparation for the future and workforce, and how to prioritize the budget to achieve those goals. With a $100 million budget and as one of the largest employers in Yuba-Sutter, the district wants to ensure it can continue to provide quality education with its dwindling resources, said Superintendent Nancy Aaberg.
“It’s about keeping our students competitive and the community competitive,” she said.

Bob Sutton:

He isn’t exaggerating. I was shocked to see, for example, that (according to the article) the State of California is currently providing less than $6000 per pupil each year; in contrast, New York City provides $13,500. Ouch. I know that government wastes lots of money, and certainly there are inefficiencies in education. But can we afford to do this our kids and our future? As Tony suggested, California has degenerated to the point where all they can do is support a teacher for every 30 kids or so, a tired old classroom and school, and little else.
I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad. There is plenty of blame to go around — we all have our own pet targets — but perhaps it is time to put our differences aside and do the right things.

Terrence McDonald:

“I’m not going to tell you that she’s going to come up there and everybody’s going to like her,” he said “But I’ve never seen her make a spiteful decision about a teacher or an educator.”
A group of local officials, teachers and parents have objected to Lyles’ appointment, arguing that they see acting state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf’s influence in the selection. Both Cerf and Lyles are graduates of the controversial Broad Superintendents Academy.
Young said he is “no friend of corporate educational reform,” calling the academy’s founder, billionaire Eli Broad, “meddlesome.” But he added that Lyles only cares for reforms that improve education for children in her district.
“If she didn’t like something Christopher Cerf tried to do, I think she would tell him and I think she would resist him,” he said.

Eric Nadelstern, via a kind Deb Britt email:

A growing number of districts have begun to understand that changing the role of the central office and giving principals more control over their schools’ money can yield dividends in improving student achievement. These districts don’t think the central office or any single organization can meet the needs of a diverse set of schools. They therefore allow schools to use their money to buy services from any vendor they choose, and encourage formation of a rich supply of independent support providers.
This paper is a personal account by Eric Nadelstern, a co-architect and collaborator to then-chancellor Joel Klein, about the effort in New York City to change the central office and create a system of support organizations to oversee networks of autonomous schools. The story of New York City shows how early investments in local outside organizations can lay the groundwork for this evolution, as well as how strongly political and community interests may resist this effort.

Kyle Spencer:

Ellen Goldstein, the mother of first-grade twins at Public School 130 in Brooklyn, recalls with a twinge of nostalgia certain items that came home from school this year. There was the all-about-fish book, the Popsicle picture frames and two tissue-paper roses for Mother’s Day — all made by her sons.
What Ms. Goldstein, 46, will not miss plucking from her children’s backpacks are the seemingly endless requests for money and supplies that also came home from their small school on the border of Kensington and Windsor Terrace.
It began in September, Ms. Goldstein said, when she and her 6-year-olds lugged in $300 worth of construction paper, index cards, markers and crayons requested by their teachers. Soon, she was regularly receiving Scholastic booklets and permission slips for trips to bowling alleys and pizza parlors that required $5, $6 and $7 to be stuffed into envelopes. The school also organized two photo drives, including one in which she was sent key chains and bookmarks with images of her children on them.

Alan Borsuk:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in his education plan, unveiled recently, that if he is elected, he will push for policies that will allow low-income and special-needs students “to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them.”
This is part of a broader Romney plan to expand school choice, including promoting charter schools, voucher programs for private schools and virtual schools.
The idea caught my eye because we already have open enrollment, as we call it around here, on a large scale. And not much attention has been paid to its impact.
Milwaukee has gotten a lot of attention since the early 1990s for its private school voucher program, arguably the most important and far-reaching such effort in the country, at least until now. But the Milwaukee area can also been seen as an important laboratory for open enrollment.

Notes and links: Open Enrollment & Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys.

Ron Matus:

Last fall, Arlene Ackerman, the former schools superintendent in Philadelphia, made a stunning announcement for someone of her status. In a newspaper op-ed, she forcefully came out in favor of expanded school choice options, including more charter schools and yes, even vouchers. “I’ve come to a sad realization,” she wrote. “Real reform will never come from within the system.”
In this redefinED podcast, Ackerman talks more about her evolution.
For years, she pushed change from the highest perches in K-12 education. Before Philly, she headed the school districts in Washington D.C. and San Francisco. She led the latter when it became a finalist for the prestigious Broad Prize, annually awarded to the best urban school district in the country, in 2005. But the kinds of sweeping reform needed to help poor and minority kids, she said, too often met with resistance from unions, politicians, vendors and others who benefited from not budging.

Mike Antonucci:

But in researching the history of this battle over the surveys, I came across something much more illuminating and – let’s face it – entertaining.
When the governor first began making his claims of improved schools last fall, WEAC reacted in the traditional manner – by drawing up talking points. One memo, dated November 29, is still posted on the web site of the West Allis-West Milwaukee Education Association. It’s not unusual, until you get to the sample statement/press release that locals were supposed to use as a model. I repost it here in its entirety – warts and all:

Joey Garrison:

Duplicating a Metro strategy, the Tennessee Department of Education is challenging the three school districts with the state’s lowest-performing schools to create so-called “offices of innovation” to find creative ways to spur turnarounds.
The plan, including its terminology, is identical to an approach Director of Schools Jesse Register unveiled for Metro in July when he announced the district’s 10 weakest achieving schools would be isolated into a special innovation cluster.
Now, Metro Nashville Public Schools, Memphis City Schools and Hamilton Schools are all in the process of drafting formal plans for innovation zones that require state approval, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told reporters at an inaugural “brown bag” lunch gathering Thursday.
“Metro Nashville was already going to do this,” Huffman said. “It seemed like an interesting model, so we tried to sketch out some parameters.”
The three districts are required to turn in Office of Innovation proposals by March 31. At stake is $35 million in federal school improvement grants to be spread out among the districts over three years

Nicolas Pottier:

This brings us to Udacity, which takes all the best parts of the above approaches and marries them into an incredible teaching tool.  Audacity combines the personal, approachable first person teaching style of Kahn Academy, but then backs it up with interactive programming in Python, all right in the browser.  
The teachers are ex-Stanford professors, so they have decades of experience teaching this material, which really shows in how they present it. So far in the first week of class, they have done a great job of covering fundamentals without getting bogged down in details, getting students to start learning intuitively, by doing, while still giving them the founding blocks to know why things work the way they do.
Perhaps most importantly, Udacity has structured their CS101 course around a brilliant concept, building a search engine in eight weeks. That single act makes the course not about learning, but about doing. The class never has to answer the question ‘why are we doing this?’, because each topic is directly tied to the overall goal of building your own little Google, every piece is practical.

David Blaska:

Previously on Bring It!, we reported on the Left’s campaign of vilification directed at Kaleem Caire.
The Left must discredit Mr. Caire for daring to disrupt the comfortable “Madison Way” by proposing a non-union charter school catering to students of color. He must be politically neutered for pointing out this liberal bastion’s failure to graduate even half of its black students.
But how to disparage the president of the Madison Urban League, the founder of One Hundred Black Men of Madison, and the 2001 recipient of the city of Madison’s Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award?
By the usual and convenient method of tying him to that Great Right-Wing Conspiracy in the Sky. The man for that job is one Allen Ruff. In comments before the school board and on his blog, avidly picked up and repeated by other liberal/progressive outlets, the Madison-based historian and social activist has been spinning an intricate web of guilt by association and seven degrees of separation in order to out Mr. Caire as a closet conservative, a secret tea partier, and a suspect capitalist.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.

Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

Madison school chief Dan Nerad’s plan to close the district’s achievement gap is certainly bold about spending money.
It seeks an estimated $105 million over five years for a slew of ideas — many of them already in place or attempted, just not to the degree Nerad envisions.
The school superintendent argues a comprehensive approach is needed to boost the academic performance of struggling minority and low-income students. No one approach will magically lift the district’s terrible graduation rates of just 48 percent for black students and 57 percent for Latinos.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
Related:

• What Impact do High School Mathematics Curricula have on College (PDF)?
• Wisconsin Property Tax Growth: 1984-2012 (!)
• 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
• Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
• Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad releases plan to address achievement gap @ Isthmus

Listen to most of the speech via this 25mb .mp3 file.

Well worth reading: Money And School Performance:
Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

And, In Kansas City, tackling education’s status quo “We’re not an Employment Agency, We’re a School District”

Sam Dillon:

New York has the most effective school-choice system of any of the nation’s largest school districts, allowing students and parents the most freedom and providing them with the most relevant information on educational performance, according to a new Brookings Institution report scheduled for publication online Wednesday.
But even New York got a B under the report’s A-to-F grading system, with Brookings saying the city provided the least useful online information for comparing schools and giving it low scores in several other categories.
The Chicago public school district, which has the nation’s third-largest student population, after New York and Los Angeles, ranked second in choice, with a B. Los Angeles was 21st, with a C, and the Orange County district in Florida, which includes Orlando, came in last, with the report’s lone D.

The Economist:

WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, right at the start of the school year, thousands of students across Orleans Parish saw their classes delayed. Teachers were displaced, and so were parents; the schools themselves were festering, where they were not destroyed. Even before the levees broke the schools were struggling, as the city was. More than two-thirds of pupils in the public system attended schools that were officially failing. In the high schools, fewer than half could pass their graduating exams.

Six years on, it appears that Katrina was catalytic. Reformers had been fretting over New Orleans schools for years. In 2003, for example, the state created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over failing schools. In July 2005 the Knowledge Is Power Programme, a national network of charter schools, opened its first outpost in Orleans Parish. But after the storm these efforts had a new urgency.