College Preparation, Community Partners, Curriculum, Events, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Wendy Kopp: Marquette University 2010 Commencement Address

Video @ Marquette University:

Wendy Kopp is founder and chief executive of Teach For America. She proposed the creation of Teach For America in her 1989 undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University and has spent the past 20 years working to sustain and grow the organization. Today, 7,300 corps members teach in 35 urban and rural regions across the country. The organization expanded to Milwaukee in 2009, and Marquette is one of two area universities that provides course work for corps members.
Kopp gave the Commencement address to Marquette’s Class of 2010 on May 23, 2010 at the Bradley Center. More than 2,000 graduating students, their family and friends, and members of the Marquette community attended.

Clusty Search: Wendy Kopp.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

The Way of the Future: Carpe Diem

Matthew Ladner:

Last week I visited the Carpe Diem charter school in Yuma Arizona. Yuma is off the beaten path, in far western Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico.
Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova.
Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction. Their building is laid out with one large computer lab, with classroom space in the back. They had 240 students working on computers when I walked in, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Carpe Diem has successfully substituted technology for labor. With 6 grade levels and 240 students they have only 1 math teacher and one aide who focuses on math. Covering 6-12 and 240 students and getting the best results with a demographically challenging student body = no problem for Carpe Diem. Their founder, Rick Ogston, told me they use less staff than a typical model, and have cash reserves in the bank despite relatively low per pupil funding in AZ. They have never received support from philanthropic foundations, making due with state funding, but their model seems like it could be brought to scale with the right investment.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Towns Challenge New Jersey Voters’ Wishes

Winnie Hu:

After years of frustration over school taxes, New Jersey residents turned out in record numbers last month to reject 58 percent of their school districts’ budget proposals — sounding an unmistakable call to arms that echoed across the country.
But in the weeks since, many of the 316 defeated budgets have been adopted with few, if any, changes by town councils, where members risked thwarting the will of voters — and incurring their wrath — rather than cut sports, lay off teachers or increase class sizes.
In Ridgewood, an affluent village in Bergen County known for its schools, the Council whittled $100,000 from the proposed $84.9 million budget, or 0.1 percent. Average savings to taxpayers: $12 per year.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

A Financial Audit of the Seattle Public Schools

Linda Shaw:

If Seattle Public Schools didn’t have enough financial problems already, it now has a few of its own making.
The latest audit of the state’s largest school district says the district overpaid employees by at least $335,000 in the 2008-09 school year, made several mistakes in its financial statements, and continues to claim more Native American students than it can document.
District officials called the errors unacceptable and pledged to fix them, while at the same time saying that it brought most of them to the auditor’s attention and that they are a very small part of the district’s budget.
The overpayment of salaries, for example, represents a small fraction of 1 percent of the district’s $558 million budget, said Duggan Harmon, the district’s executive director of finance.
Harmon also said none of the problems will add to the $27 million in expenses that the district already is planning to cut from its budget for the 2010-11 school year.

College Preparation, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

In college admission process, tough choices

Jay Matthews:

I once interviewed Alyson Barker, a former student at Annandale High School in Fairfax County, about her attempt to use the college admission process to drive her relationship with her parents into a ditch.
Barker’s parents wanted her to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a fine state school with lower tuition for Virginia residents. Barker told them, with a 17-year-old’s irritating certitude, that instead she would attend a small, expensive private school in Ohio.
Because so many area families are starting their college searches, I am going to write a few columns on the hidden pitfalls of the process. I started last week warning against overlooking the quality of campus extracurricular activities. That was important but, I realize now, not the right place to begin.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Teachers’ Strike in Paradise

Reason TV:

South Orange County is a suburban paradise is southern California. The climate is unbeatable, the surfing is great and the public schools are performing well. But not everything is perfect in the Capistrano Unified School District.
In April 2010, 2,200 teachers went on strike for three days after the school board imposed a 10 percent pay cut. The children who attended school during the strike had to walk past their teachers who, instead of preparing for class, were marching in front of the school with picket signs reading “It’s not about the money” and “We’d rather be teaching.”
Some parents honked in support of the union as they drove by. Other parents were frustrated by union members who were unwilling to work out a compromise with a district that is facing a $34 million budget deficit. Lots of parents talked about using the strike as “a teaching moment.”

Board Meeting Archives, Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, What Can I Do?

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Easy Money, Hard Truths & Local Maintenance Referendum Audit?

David Einhorn:

Are you worried that we are passing our debt on to future generations? Well, you need not worry.
Before this recession it appeared that absent action, the government’s long-term commitments would become a problem in a few decades. I believe the government response to the recession has created budgetary stress sufficient to bring about the crisis much sooner. Our generation — not our grandchildren’s — will have to deal with the consequences.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, the United States’ structural deficit — the amount of our deficit adjusted for the economic cycle — has increased from 3.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2007 to 9.2 percent in 2010. This does not take into account the very large liabilities the government has taken on by socializing losses in the housing market. We have not seen the bills for bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and even more so the Federal Housing Administration, which is issuing government-guaranteed loans to non-creditworthy borrowers on terms easier than anything offered during the housing bubble. Government accounting is done on a cash basis, so promises to pay in the future — whether Social Security benefits or loan guarantees — do not count in the budget until the money goes out the door.
A good percentage of the structural increase in the deficit is because last year’s “stimulus” was not stimulus in the traditional sense. Rather than a one-time injection of spending to replace a cyclical reduction in private demand, the vast majority of the stimulus has been a permanent increase in the base level of government spending — including spending on federal jobs. How different is the government today from what General Motors was a decade ago? Government employees are expensive and difficult to fire. Bloomberg News reported that from the last peak businesses have let go 8.5 million people, or 7.4 percent of the work force, while local governments have cut only 141,000 workers, or less than 1 percent.

Locally, the Madison School Board meets Tuesday evening, 6/1 to discuss the 2010-2011 budget, which looks like it will raise property taxes at least 10%. A number of issues have arisen around the District’s numbers, including expenditures from the 2005 maintenance referendum.
I’ve not seen any updates on Susan Troller’s April, 12, 2010 question: “Where did the money go?” It would seem that proper resolution of this matter would inform the public with respect to future spending and tax increases.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Seattle Schools Chief Maria Goodloe-Johnson Heads into Board Evaluation on the Heels of Scathing Surveys

Nina Shapiro:

Is Seattle Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson in for a drubbing tomorrow?
The school board will hear a report from a local consulting company that summarizes what individual board members have said about the superintendent in one-on-one interviews, as well as what Goodloe-Johnson has said about herself.
The report will be used for a formal evaluation of the superintendent and will help determine whether she gets a raise and an additional bonus. It will also influence whether her contract, which runs through 2012, is extended.
If the report is anything like a recent community group’s survey, Goodloe-Johnson is in trouble.

Melissa Westbrook has more.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate

Is the public turning against teachers unions?

Jo-Ann Armao:

Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore who helped broker the contract agreement between D.C. schools and its teachers union, had strong words for those who wanting to improve education. “Stop demonizing the unions,” he told an education roundtable convened Wednesday at the Aspen Institute. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan quickly seconded his message. I couldn’t help wondering if the two had happened to catch Monday night’s final episode of “Law & Order.”
The program, centered on a frantic search to find a blogger threatening to assault a New York City high school, deals with some of the thorny issues of school management and reform. The program’s title, “The Rubber Room,” comes from the real-life temporary reassignment centers where New York City teachers who are facing disciplinary action are sent. For those who are less avid “Law & Order” fans and missed the show, detectives first suspect a deranged student, but it turns out the blogger, called Moot, is a teacher who had been sent to a rubber room after he was falsely accused of molesting a student.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Gove invites every UK state school to bid for academy status

Richard Garner:

Academy status will become the norm for state secondary schools, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, forecast yesterday.
Mr Gove revealed he had written to every state school head in England – primary, secondary and special – urging them to consider putting in a bid for academy status.
If they take up his offer, it would bring to an end 108 years of local authorities running the vast majority of state schools. Mr Gove predicted that secondary schools would initially be more interested in taking up the offer than primaries. “I anticipate that’s likely to be the case [for academy status to be the norm for secondary schools],” he added. “However, I’m not putting a time limit on it. It’s up to the schools to decide.”

More here.

Athletics, School Climate, Sports, Student Support

NCAA cracks down on correspondence courses

Alan Scher Zagier:

The NCAA has a message for would-be college athletes hoping to use online courses to bolster their high school transcripts: proceed with caution.
The organization announced Tuesday that it will stop accepting course credit from two virtual schools based in Utah and Illinois as part of a move to strengthen high school eligibility standards in Division I.
That means no more high school credit from Brigham Young University’s independent study program. The school in Provo, Utah, has previously been targeted by NCAA investigators and federal prosecutors pursuing claims of academic fraud at Missouri, Kansas, Mississippi, Nicholls State and Barton County Community College in Kansas.
Also on the prohibited list is the American School, a correspondence program based in Lansing, Ill.
New NCAA rules approved last month require “regular access and interaction” between teachers and students in the 16 core courses required to establish initial eligibility for new college athletes.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: New York Is Almost Out of Cash

Betsy McCaughey:

Guess how long it is before the state of New York runs out of cash? Less than a week, according to the state’s comptroller.
On June 1, New York is due to send $3.8 billion in aid to local school districts, including $2.1 billion that was supposed to be paid in March but not sent for lack of funds. Yet New York is still $1 billion short. This could affect school operations, the solvency of any business that sells goods or services to the state, the paychecks of state workers, and ultimately home values.
At the state capitol in Albany, you wouldn’t sense there’s a crisis. The state senate still meets only half a work-week, Monday evening through Wednesday. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators (in the majority) are shuttling back and forth between Albany and the Democratic Party’s state nominating convention at the Rye Town Hilton in Westchester County, 150 miles away.
The crowded meeting rooms and festooned ballrooms are where you’ll find the action. Legislators are securing their nominations for another two-year term. Never mind that legislative malpractice is to blame for the cash running out.a

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

The Swedish module: Overhauling England’s Education System with Privately Run schools

David Turner:

Lesley Surman, a 42-year-old housewife and mother of three – “working class and proud of it” – wants to set up a new secondary school in the west Yorkshire village of Birkenshaw.
Mrs Surman is no fantasist. She is part of a group of about 60 activists trying to establish the school in 2013 because she harbours doubts about the alternatives available to local parents. “We want to get back to core values, pastoral care and a school where you celebrate winning.” Instead of offering “beauty therapy and mechanics” – vocational subjects increasingly offered in the state sector – she would prefer a focus on nine or so academic subjects, including science and history.
The answer to her problems could lie several hundred miles across the North Sea. Tomorrow’s Queen’s Speech, outlining the ruling coalition’s legislative priorities, is expected to use Sweden’s “free schools” as a model for an overhaul of the English education system, making it easier for parents and teachers to create privately run but state-funded primary and secondary schools.
“Free” in the sense of independent, these private establishments were introduced in 1995 to provide greater choice for parents unable to afford the fees for Sweden’s tiny (now even tinier) privately funded sector. Underpinning the policy of the country’s centre-right government was the free-market principle that competition would raise standards in all schools as state institutions were forced to work harder to keep up.
The government has similar hopes for England (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own education policies) – where, in spite of large numbers of private, fee-charging, schools, 93 per cent of children are state educated.

Related Links: The Guardian’s Editorial.
The Prime Minister’s Office:

“Legislation will be introduced to…give teachers greater freedom over the curriculum and allow new providers to run state schools.”
The purpose of the Bill is to:
Give full effect to the range of programmes envisaged in the Coalition agreement.
The main benefits of the Bill will be:

  • To give all schools greater freedom over the curriculum
  • To improve school accountability
  • To take action to tackle bureaucracy
  • To improve behaviour in schools

The main elements of the Bill are:

  • To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit.
  • To reform Ofsted and other accountability frameworks to ensure that head teachers are held properly accountable for the core educational goals of attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
  • To introduce a slimmer curriculum giving more space for teachers to decide how to teach.
  • To introduce a reading test for 6 year olds to make sure that young children are learning and to identify problems early.
  • To give teachers and head teachers the powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying.
  • We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more Academies and giving more freedom to head teachers and teachers. We will also ensure that money follows pupils, and introduce a ‘pupil premium’ so that more money follows the poorest pupils.

Lifelong Learning, Parenting, Student Support, Wellness

No Benefit in Delayed Immunization

Jennifer Corbett Dooren:

With young children receiving twice as many vaccines as they did 25 years ago, many parents are seeking to postpone at least some shots. A new study, though, finds no benefit to a child’s development in delaying vaccines, and doctors warn that waiting can expose kids to possible disease.
One of the researchers, Michael J. Smith, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky, says some parents request alternative immunization schedules out of concern that getting so many vaccines in such a short time period might lead to health problems later on.
Dr. Smith and Charles R. Woods, also a pediatric infectious-disease specialist, looked at results of intelligence, speech and behavior tests conducted on children several years after receiving their infant vaccines and found few differences between children who were vaccinated on schedule and those who waited. “This study suggests that delaying vaccines does not give infants any advantage in terms of brain development,” Dr. Smith said. Published online Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics, the study is believed to be the first to address the issue of delayed vaccination.

College Preparation, School Climate, Student Support

Entering the U.S. Market

Jennifer Epstein:

The law of supply and demand drove SKEMA, a French business school, to open campuses in the emerging markets of China and Morocco, and to start planning for expansion into India, Brazil and possibly Russia.
But the decision to set up shop in the United States was driven by something a bit more emotional. “For European students, this is a dream; America is a dream for them,” says Alice Guilhon, the school’s dean. “And it is a dream for us, to be known in the U.S.”
While Harvard Business School, the Wharton School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business might not be the kind of competition that most institutions would willingly seek out, well-regarded European business schools like SKEMA have in the last few years ratcheted up their efforts to be known and respected in the United States.
SKEMA — created last year by the merger of ESC Lille School of Management and CERAM Business School – is hoping to build its global reputation by situating its new campuses near hubs of the technology industry, and saw a venture in the United States as key to that strategy. “To be in America is to be close to the headquarters of all the big firms, to be where the story began,” Guilhon says. “To be well-known in America, it is leverage for the visibility of the school in the world.”

School Climate

Comedian Not Laughing at Graduate’s Speech

Dave Itzkoff:

The congratulations offered by the comedian Patton Oswalt to Brian Corman, the Columbia University 2010 School of General Studies valedictorian, in a Twitter message on Tuesday were hardly heartfelt. The message linked to an online video showing that Mr. Corman’s valedictory speech had appropriated material from Mr. Oswalt’s stand-up routine. The Twitter message drew an apology from the student and a statement by the university that it was “deeply distressed.” On his Twitter account Mr. Oswalt, right, a star of “The King of Queens” and “Ratatouille,” wrote: “Congrats to Columbia University valedictorian Brian Corman! Great speech.”

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, School Climate

Online or Bust: An Educational Manifesto

Steve Isaac:

In this postrecession, digital era, colleges must reevaluate how accessible they are–or, often, how inaccessible they really are–to their potential customers, or, as you call them, “college students.” Schools must change their business models to attract more students if they have any hope of surviving in the current competitive economic environment.
Over the past 10 years, we have seen a definitive shift from brick-and-mortar to online offerings across most industries. If 20 years ago you were told that shopping malls would be cannibalized by online shopping sites like eBay (EBAY) and Amazon.com (AMZN), and that movies would be accessed online through Netflix (NFLX) instead of at the movie theater, many of us would have found that difficult to believe. Yet the companies that failed to adapt to the digital consumer’s demand for instant, online access struggled or failed. And for the companies actively marketing online to consumers with infinite options at their fingertips, competition has never been tougher. Online consumers today are looking for the best, most reliable bargain.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Voters face tough choice: pay up or shutdown

Carolyn Jones:

Alameda voters embark today on a monthlong, mail-only election to decide whether taxes will be raised to support public schools. Both sides describe the outcome as Armageddon for the quiet island city.
Measure E is a parcel tax that would give Alameda some of the highest school taxes in the Bay Area: Homeowners would pay $659 a year and business owners would owe up to $9,500 annually per parcel.
If it passes, many small business owners, already struggling with the recession, say they’ll be forced to close, stripping Alameda of its mom-and-pop charm. If the measure fails, the district’s superintendent warns that half the schools in town would close.
“If this doesn’t pass, all bets are off in Alameda,” said Encinal High School Principal Mike Cooper, a fifth-generation Alamedan. “We’re watching the collapse of public education. We’ve been trying to make this work, but something’s got to give.”

Athletics, College Preparation, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, Sports, Student Support

On runoff scholarships and college hoops

Eamonn Brenna:

You know what would be, like, a total buzzkill? Signing a scholarship to play collegiate basketball at a major institution, making good on your end of the commitment, and then finding out after a year — or two or three — that, hey, thanks for coming, but we kind of need that scholarship for someone vastly more talented now. Would you mind transferring? This is where we the school will kindly remind you that your scholarship is a one-year, merit-based, renewable document, and we are under no obligation to extend it for another year should we choose not to. Any questions?
Harsh, bro. Harsh. The practice of sending players away via transfer to make room for scholarships is called a runoff, and it happens more frequently than it should — which is to say it shouldn’t happen at all.
Typically, runoff players transfer quietly, moving on from their schools with little protest. Sometimes, though, a player or a player’s family gets angry about what they see as a raw deal. Sometimes they talk to the media. These are important moments; they draw the curtain back on one of college basketball’s most unfair, exploitative policies, and they’re worth discussing when they arrive.
Last year’s biggest such moment came when Kentucky coach John Calipari oversaw the transfer of seven players leftover from Billy Gillispie’s tenure at the school. Several of those players publicly claimed they forced out of the program, while Calipari insisted that he merely told those players they likely wouldn’t get much playing time if they decided to stay at UK.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Events, School Climate

Wisconsin DPI Receives $13.8M in Federal Tax Funds for “an interoperable data system that supports the exchange of data and ad hoc research requests”

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:

State Superintendent Tony Evers issued a statement today on the $13.8 million, four-year longitudinal data system (LDS) grant Wisconsin won to support accountability. Wisconsin was among 20 states sharing $250 million in competitive funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
“Receiving this U.S. Department of Education grant is very good news for Wisconsin and will allow us to expand our data system beyond its current PK-16 capacity. Through this grant, the Department of Public Instruction will work with the University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin Technical College System, and the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to develop an interoperable data system that supports the exchange of data and ad hoc research requests.
“Teacher quality, training, and professional development are key factors in improving student achievement. However, Wisconsin’s aging teacher licensing and certification system is insufficient for today’s accountability demands. This grant will allow us to improve our teacher licensing system and incorporate licensing data into the LDS, which will drive improvement in classroom instruction and teacher education.

2. Post-graduation Information Available to Wisconsin Schools

Public schools in Wisconsin can now obtain, at no cost, post-graduation student data for local analysis.
The Department of Public Instruction recently signed a contract with the National Student Clearinghouse, a non-profit organization which works with more than 3,300 postsecondary institutions nationwide to maintain a repository of information on enrollment, degrees, diplomas, certificates, and other educational achievements.
The NSC data can answer questions such as
Where in the country, and when, do our high school graduates enroll in college?
How long do their education efforts persist?
Do they graduate from college?
What degrees do they earn?
The DPI will integrate information about graduates from Wisconsin high schools into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Data System (LDS). In addition, any public high school or district in Wisconsin can use the NSC StudentTracker service to request similar data for local analysis.

Athletics, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Sports

Prep Profile: John Martin, Madison East

Dennis Semrau:

Year: senior
Sports: swimming, tennis, soccer
Swimming highlights: John is a four-time letterwinner and two-year captain at East. He was a member of three state-qualifying relays his senior year. He earned All-State honorable mention for the 200 freestyle relay, which tied for seventh at the WIAA Division 1 state meet. He also swam on the 200 medley relay (16th) and 400 freestyle relay (13th). He earned Wisconsin Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association Academic All-State honors and the team’s Purgolder Award for leadership his senior year. He was an alternate at state as a junior and named the team’s Most Improved Swimmer his freshman year.
Other sports highlights: John is a four-year member of the Purgolders’ JV tennis team as a doubles player. As a senior, he is playing No. 1 doubles with Aaron Lickel and they have a 15-4 record. He earned a varsity letter as a sophomore when was an alternate for East at the state tournament. He played soccer as a freshman and on the JV team as a senior.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Student Support

The Disproportionate Impact of Seniority-Based Layoffs on Poor, Minority Students

1 Comment

Cristina Sepe and Marguerite Roza via a Deb Britt email:

K-12 school districts that lay off teachers by seniority, a policy known as “last in, first out,” disproportionately affect the programs and students in their poorer and more minority schools than in their wealthier, less minority counterparts.
Looking at the 15 largest districts in California, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that teachers at risk of layoffs are indeed concentrated in schools with more poor and minority students.
In these districts, if seniority-based layoffs are applied for teachers with up to two years’ experience, highest-poverty schools would lose some 30 percent more teachers than wealthier schools, and highest-minority schools would lose 60 percent more teachers than would schools with the fewest minority students.

Complete report: 354K PDF.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

We’re Firing the Wrong Teachers

Joel Klein:

Thousands of New York City’s strongest teachers are in danger of losing their jobs–with no consideration given to their talent, only how long they’ve been teaching. And the real losers will be children, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
When the principal at P.S. 40 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, talks about the impact on students of one of her best teachers, Malvola Lewis, her eyes fill with tears.
After growing up in homeless shelters, Lewis earned an education degree from Brooklyn College and returned to her old neighborhood to teach at P.S. 40, a historically hard-to-staff school. Now she’s one of the school’s strongest teachers; her students are making more progress than almost any other class in the school. And they love her.
Lewis is a terrific teacher. Despite her exceptional work, though, she (and thousands of teachers like her) may be laid off shortly because of antiquated seniority rules in New York City. The real losers will be children.
Teachers are professionals, and they deserve to be treated the way professionals in almost every other line of work are: evaluated based upon their work.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, Legal Rights, School Climate

Seattle School District Files Appeal in “Discovery Math” Lawsuit Loss

Martha McLaren:

The District’s Appeal Brief is in — A link to the appeal is shown on the lower left.
The Seattle School District’s first brief in its appeal of Judge Spector’s decision was filed on Friday. To me, it is not surprising that its arguments are weak. I don’t think we could ever have scored this unprecedented victory had our case not been extremely well founded. Nonetheless, one can’t predict what the appeals panel will rule.
Basically, the brief restates the district’s original contention that, because the specified process was followed, any decision made by the board, (I might add — regardless of how it flouted overwhelming evidence) must stand. Also, the brief misstates and misinterprets many aspects of our case. One of the most egregious examples is the contention that the court overstepped its authority by making a decision on curriculum. Not so – the court simply remanded the board’s decision back to the board on the basis of the lack of evidence to support the decision.
We have 30 days to file our response brief (by June 21), and SPS has 15 days after (by July 6) to file its rebuttal. Our attorney tells me that a hearing will be scheduled after all briefs have been filed.

Much more on the initial, successful rollback of Seattle’s Discovery Math program here

Curriculum, Curriculum - Bilingual Education, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

An Apology from a Teacher Who, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Know Everything

1 Comment

Mr. Foteah:

Today, when you were supposed to be reading your book, and while I was meeting with another student, I saw you writing something furiously. You are one of the few students in the class who regularly and dutifully records your thoughts on post-its, and, when I excused myself from my conference to come see what you were doing, I expected to see just that. However, when I asked you what you were doing, you told me about your book. I listened, but continued to glance at what you were trying to hide under your arm. When I saw it, I was less than happy. You were doing last night’s homework, and I was livid.
I did not react as I should have. Taking your paper and crumpling it was inappropriate. Had I thought for a moment, instead of reacting instantly, I would have remembered that you are one of the most diligent, hard-working students in the class. I would have realized something was amiss.
I should have asked you why you didn’t do your homework, rather than make rash assumptions. But I didn’t. Instead, I tossed your paper in the trash and returned to the other student, without a word to you or even a glance back, thinking that you’d receive the message of disappointment and disdain I sought to deliver. (Maybe I didn’t want to see the horror that had surely set upon your face).
When I finished with the other student, I called you over to my desk and told you to sit. Again, I seethed, and let my emotions get the best of me. I continued to lecture you and said I was upset with two things: you didn’t do your homework, and you lied to me.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Once struggling to learn English, student now heads for Harvard med

Jim Stingl:

When he moved to Milwaukee from a tiny town in Mexico, Carlos Torres couldn’t speak a word of English. Not even hello or goodbye.
He was a frightened kid, plunked into fifth grade at a south side Milwaukee school. His family – he’s the youngest of 10 children – rented a place near 14th and Lincoln.
Now, a mere dozen years later, Carlos is a standout graduate of Marquette High School and, as of last weekend, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Faced with an enviable choice among four medical schools that accepted him, he has chosen Harvard on a full-tuition scholarship. He’s the first member of his family to graduate from college.
As American dreams go, this one’s pretty vivid.
Carlos became an American citizen, by the way. You may already be wondering about that. We’re living in sensitive times when it comes to immigration issues. Carlos admits he was tempted to wear a shirt to UW graduation saying, “Do I look legal? Want to see my papers?” but he thought better of it.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

N.J. taxpayers question school administrators’ pay

James Osborne:

Lately, when Cheryl Gismonde logs onto her Facebook account, she often finds messages that veer wildly from the usual array of restaurant recommendations and photos of other people’s children.
A recent post from one of her friends reads: “Burlington County has 39 school districts!! So let’s figure the average Super makes $150K, maybe an assistant at $100K, and a Business Administrator at $90K. That’s approx. $13 million and some of these Supers have districts with just 2-3 schools. Entirely too much $$ wasted on positions that arent hands-on with the ki. . .ds.”
Similar messages are being posted by friends and fellow parents from around South Jersey on an almost daily basis, said Gismonde, a mother of three living in Cherry Hill.
“People are starting to get angry. They’re asking why we need to give up teachers when we’re floating another $50,000 to an administrator,” she said. “People are posting this person’s salary and that person’s salary. It’s getting pretty crazy.”
With public schools across New Jersey facing historic budget cuts next school year, taxpayers – and the governor’s office – are turning their attention to the matter of school administrator pay.
The average salary for a superintendent in New Jersey is $154,409, about $9,000 above the national average but below that of other states in the region, according a 2008 report commissioned by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators (NJASA).

Parenting, School Climate, Student Support, Wellness

Student Sues School for Damages in Sexting Case

Kim Zetter:

A former Pennsylvania high school student has sued school and county officials for damages in a controversial sexting case.
The student alleges a violation of her constitutional rights, in a civil suit filed last week that could serve as a cautionary tale to other officials considering punishing students over risque self-portraits.
In the complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania, the former student — identified only as “N.N.” — accuses former District Attorney George P. Skumanick, Jr., principal Gregory Ellsworth, the Tunkhannock School District and Wyoming County of violating her constitutional rights (.pdf). The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
The complaint alleges that officials had no probable cause to seize and search her phone, and violated her privacy and her right to free expression by punishing her for storing nude and semi-nude photos of herself on her phone.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, History - Madison Schools, School Climate

KidGrid iPod app tracks local students’ progress

Gayle Worland:

To track how well Johnny could read last week — and the week before that — Gina Tortorice can now drag her finger across the front of an iPod Touch and watch her student’s progress.
The first-grade teacher is one of 11 educators at the adjacent Black Hawk Middle and Gompers Elementary schools using KidGrid, an experimental iPod application designed by UW-Madison researchers to make documenting student progress frequent, instantaneous and high-tech.
“It’s been very powerful for teachers, because they can keep track of data over time to see trends, and they can see specific growth in student learning,” said Anne Schoenemann, an instructional resource teacher at Gompers. “What we really need to be doing is moving into the technology age and supporting teachers with the tools they need to collect data in an efficient manner – and paper and pencil doesn’t always do it.”

Budget/Financing, School Climate

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: California’s budget crisis – The largest state is in the largest hole

The Economist:

COMPARISONS between California and the land of Socrates have become frequent recently. They are different, of course. California is nowhere near defaulting on its debts (though rating agencies consider that risk greater in California than in the other 49 states). But California has become America’s symbol of fiscal mismanagement as Greece is now Europe’s.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s lame-duck governor, conceded as much on May 14th, when he updated his budget proposal to the legislature. After several rounds of painful spending cuts, California is now contemplating a budget that is, when adjusted for inflation and population growth, smaller than it was a decade ago. And yet the state still confronts a budget hole estimated at $17.9 billion in the current and coming fiscal years. Mr Schwarzenegger, a Republican in a high-tax state, wants to plug that hole without raising taxes, with more cuts and some federal aid.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Cuts spare highest ranks of central office school staffs

Maureen Downey:

The AJC examined the oft-made charge that schools are not cutting many high-salaried central office while they slash and burn their way through the teacher ranks. Turns out it’s true.
The AJC analysis found that while metro school districts have laid off “central office staff,” most of those cuts are lower-salaried jobs, not high-paid administrators. (Many of these folks function as cabinets to the superintendents, and I think few leaders ever want to get rid of their personal posses.)
In the story, central office staffs are defended as behind-the-scenes lifelines, who help and support schools. But are these folks in “adviser” and “expert” roles any real help to teachers and students? Or do a lot of people at the top only put more pressure on the bottom?
According to the AJC analysis: (This is only an excerpt. Please, read the whole piece.)

More than 1,000 public school administrators in metro Atlanta earn more than $100,000 a year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of school salary data shows.
The review shows that Atlanta Public Schools, the smallest of metro Atlanta’s major school districts, has the highest administrative costs. Cobb County, while having the second-largest student population in the state, has one of the smallest central-office staffs and some of the lowest costs. DeKalb schools have more people making $100,000-plus a year than any district.
The AJC analysis comes as metro school districts are laying off more than 1,500 teachers, increasing class sizes and cutting budgets by tens of millions of dollars. While districts say they are also cutting “central office staff,” most of those cuts are lower-salaried jobs, not high-paid administrators.
Stuart Bennett, executive director of the Georgia Association of Educational Leaders, says central office pay is not out of line.
“I don’t think they’ve just pulled these salaries out of thin air,” he said. “A lot of districts have done salary studies with private industry. It looks like a lot of people are making those salaries, but we have a couple of districts whose budgets are around a billion dollars.”
On average in Georgia, the central office accounts for 5 percent of a district’s operating budget. In metro Atlanta, that average increases to 6 percent. But Atlanta Public Schools spends nearly 10 percent of its budget on administration.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Polk County Superintendent of Schools: Let the Selection Proceed

The Ledger:

And then there were two. Friday’s abrupt withdrawal by Robert Schiller from consideration as Polk County school superintendent leaves two candidates to replace Gail McKinzie, who will retire near year’s end.
It also leaves in its wake a big divide between Polk Businesses for World Class Education – which pledged $50,000 to assure a nationwide search for a replacement – and the School Board. The board meets Tuesday to make a selection and to hear a plea from Polk Businesses’ Hunt Berryman, who said the entire process should begin anew.
“The whole thing is a sham and a shame,” Berryman said. He’s particularly upset at School Board member Frank O’Reilly, who asked Schiller if he’d ever applied for another superintendent’s position in Florida.
KEY QUESTION
When Schiller said yes (15 years ago in Palm Beach County), O’Reilly asked a follow-up: “Never applied in Pinellas County?”
Schiller replied, “No, not that I can recall.” Caught by an Internet search (the information was on the St. Petersburg Times’ website), Schiller later told O’Reilly he should have asked the question “in private.”

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Curriculum - Fine Arts, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

School hopes to restore music in Afghanistan

Jerry Harmer:

From the outside, it looks like any other school in Kabul. A red two-story building is sealed off from the street by a high wall. A few trees stand in the front yard. Children constantly go in and out.
But listen carefully. When the noise of the traffic dies down, you can hear the gentle sounds of violins being played and the patter of drums. In this city where music was illegal less than a decade ago, a new generation of children is being raised to understand its joys.
“This school is unique in Afghanistan,” said Muhammad Aziz, a 19-year-old student who dreams of becoming one of the world’s greatest players of the tabla, a South Asian drum. “It’s the only professional music school and there are so many good teachers here.”
The new National Institute of Music has been offering some courses for the past several months, but the formal opening will be later in May.

Discipline / Violence, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Students tell of a violent side of life

Serinah Ho:

Shocking findings about violence and abuse at schools have been revealed in a survey of secondary students.
About seven in 10 students questioned by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said they have been victims of physical violence and verbal abuse, while a third have been sexually harassed.
More than half of the 1,800 respondents to the survey, which was conducted between December and February, admitted they have bullied schoolmates, though this sort of bad behavior lessens as they grow more mature.
On that, Chen Ji-kang, an assistant professor at the university’s department of social work, said there is a higher incidence of violence among juniors, particularly Form One students, and boys are usually the aggressors.
On positive interaction between students, Chen said support from friends is crucial for victims.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, School Climate

Moonshine or the Kids?

Nicholas Kristof:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)

Curriculum, Events, School Climate

Three puzzles from Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

Philip Yam:

News of Martin Gardner’s death began circulating on Saturday night. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, here’s a taste of the kinds of puzzles he was famous for bringing to the world. Of course, he did much more: 15 years ago, I had the great honor of meeting him and his wife for a profile of him, which you can read here.
I still have the trick pen he gave me as a souvenir, one that I’ll show anyone who comes by my desk. (I’ll try to post a video of the pen.) It brings back fond memories of being shown his stash of magic tricks and gag gifts, his thoughtful comments on irrational beliefs, his experiences with mathematicians like Paul Erdős and the Gardners’ feeding of feral kittens that came to the back deck of the house every afternoon.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Saturation point: Teachers unions must stop trying to hamstring charter schools

New York Daily News Editorial:

The future of charter schools in New York hangs on negotiations between City Hall and teachers union President Michael Mulgrew. This is perverse.
The United Federation of Teachers is fighting to limit the growth of charters even as the state’s application for as much as $700 million in federal Race to the Top money demands letting the number of schools expand.
Mulgrew’s strategy has been to give the nod to upping the charter cap while trying to make it all but impossible for a sponsor to open one of these privately run, publicly funded academies. For example, by creating barriers to moving a charter into unused space in a public school building.
Although the city’s charter schools have almost universally racked up amazing achievement gains, the UFT resists them because most are not unionized. And the more successful charters have become, the greater the resistance has grown

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Houston School District Wants Input on Strategic Direction for the District’s Future

Houston Independent School District:

The Houston Independent School District is in the midst of developing a long-term strategic plan that will provide a road map for the future as the district strives to become the best public school system in the nation. To ensure that all key stakeholders are engaged and involved in this process, HISD is inviting any member of the Houston community to give their input at an open discussion on Monday, May 24, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center’s board auditorium (4440 West 18th Street).
To develop a long-term Strategic Direction, HISD is working with the Apollo Consulting Group in a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.
Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from members of Team HISD, as well as from parents and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, non-profit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, supporting the principal as the CEO, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action.
“True transformation cannot happen overnight and it cannot happen without the input from everyone at Team HISD and those in our community who hold a stake in the education of Houston’s children,” says Superintendent of Schools Terry B. Grier. “In order for it to be meaningful, we need everyone to lend their voice to the process and help us shape the future direction of HISD.”

Related: Madison School District Strategic Planning Process.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Program helps ex-foster youth navigate college

Nanette Asimov:

Sokhom Mao will do something today that few like him ever do: He’ll graduate from college.
Little about Mao appears unusual, except maybe his waist-length black hair. He’s 23, like many students who will walk the stage today at San Francisco State University. He majored in criminal justice, has applied for the usual summer internships and wants to become a politician.
What’s rare about this graduating senior is that he was raised in a group home since age 12. His mother had died, leaving him in the care of abusive relatives. Just 2 percent of foster youth earn a bachelor’s degree, research shows.
Mao is in that small club because of the Guardian Scholars, a program at San Francisco State that mimics, to the extent possible, the role of parents for students who have none.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Financial Manager Bobb, Detroit school board duke it out in court

Chastity Pratt Dawsey:

The Detroit school board and its emergency financial manager battled over money and power in two Wayne County Circuit Court cases on Friday.
Irene Nordé, a math administrator for the Detroit Public Schools, testified Friday that state appointee Robert Bobb made changes to the curriculum that put students in jeopardy of not being able to pass standardized tests.
That’s because, she said, teachers have been instructed to focus on remediation, rather than moving students forward.
Nordé was subpoenaed by attorneys for the school board, which alleges that Bobb is violating state law by making academic decisions and not consulting with the board on financial plans as required by law.
Bobb refuted Nordé’s claim. “We’ll let the data speak for itself,” he said, referring to test scores.
The case, which will continue for another six to eight weeks, could determine who has authority over much-needed reform in a school district where students received the lowest scores on 2009 national math and reading tests.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Events, School Climate

Colorado gets millions for education data system

Jeremy Meyer:

Colorado won a $17.4 million federal grant to build a statewide data system that will link information about public school students from the time they enter preschool to when they graduate from college.
The grant was announced at noon by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Colorado was one of 20 states to share $250 million in stimulus funds intended to support the development of systems that link data across time and databases, from early childhood into careers, including matching teachers to students, according to the Institute of Education Sciences.
The student data will be kept private.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands applied for the grants. Colorado’s was the fourth largest grant.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Discipline / Violence, Events, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Madison Police Department expands gang unit: 40 Gangs in Madison

Sandy Cullen:

Police estimate there are now more than 1,100 confirmed gang members in Madison and about 40 gangs, about 12 of which are the main Latino gangs.
The Dane County Enhanced Youth Gang Prevention Task Force recommended in August 2007 that a countywide gang coordinator’s position be considered. That group’s co-chairman, former Madison police Capt. Luis Yudice, who’s also security coordinator for the Madison School District, first called for a “comprehensive strategy so we can all work in unison” to address gang violence in September 2005.
Since then, Yudice said, staff in Madison schools are recognizing more issues involving gangs among students, which he attributes in part to greater awareness and training.
“We have gang-involved kids in probably most of our high schools and middle schools and some of our elementary schools,” he said. Staff do a good job of keeping gang activity out of the schools, he said, and work closely with students, families, police and social workers in an effort to keep students out of gangs.
Locally, the gang issue is not unique to Madison schools. “We’re seeing more gang activity in the suburban school districts,” Yudice said, as well as the emergence of hate groups targeting blacks and Latinos in Madison, Deerfield, Cottage Grove and DeForest.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio, video & links.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Hawaii’s Race to the Bottom

New York Times Editorial:

Summer vacation for Hawaii’s schoolchildren starts on Wednesday. About 170,000 young people will be hitting the beach, the mall, grandma’s house, the sofa — all the places they have already been spending most Fridays for nearly the entire school year. Seventeen school days were sliced out of their educations by a series of school-closing teacher furloughs to help close a nearly $1 billion state budget gap.
The furloughs were rightly deplored by parents and denounced by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and showed Hawaii’s political and education establishment at its worst. When the first “furlough Friday” happened last October, we didn’t imagine that Hawaii — which has one statewide school district with a lackluster record of achievement — would slouch through the rest of the school year without getting its kids back in their seats.

Athletics, Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Know Your Madisonian: Mike Lipp on the teachers’ union, educating and coaching sports in Madison

Ken Singletary:

Mike Lipp is athletic director at Madison’s West High School. Previously, he was a science teacher at the school for 20 years, and coached swimming, soccer and baseball. He also was a science teacher in DeForest for 15 years.
Lipp, 59, this month began a one-year term as president of the teacher unit of Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents teachers, related professionals and school support personnel. His grandmother and father-in-law were union members and he was in the United Auto Workers during a summer when he was a graduate student.
In your personal finances, what would you do if your expenses exceeded your revenue?
That happens in several levels, when you get a mortgage or when you get a car loan. I have never bought a car with cash. … Personally, you can operate in the red but governments have to operate in the black. It’s a funny system.

Board Meeting Archives, Community Partners, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Legal Rights, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

Some 2009 Email Messages to Comments @ the Madison School District

These two documents [1MB .txt or 2MB PDF] include some email messages sent to “comments@madison.k12.wi.us” from 1/1/2009 through September, 2009.
I requested the messages via an open records request out of concerns expressed to me that public communications to this email address were not always making their way to our elected representatives on the Madison Board of Education. Another email address has since been created for direct public communication to the Board of education: board@madison.k12.wi.us
There has been extensive back and forth on the scope of the District’s response along with the time, effort and expense required to comply with this request. I am thankful for the extensive assistance I received with this request.
I finally am appreciative of Attorney Dan Mallin’s fulfillment (a few items remain to be vetted) and response, included below:

As we last discussed, attached are several hundreds of pages of e-mails (with non-MMSD emails shortened for privacy purposes) that:
(1) Are not SPAM / commercial solicitations / organizational messages directed to “school districts” generally
(2) Are not Pupil Records
(3) Are not auto-generated system messages (out of office; undeliverable, etc.)
(4) Are not inquiries from MMSD employees about how to access their work email via the web when the web site changed (which e-mails typically contained their home email address)
(5) Are not technical web-site related inquiries (e.g., this link is broken, etc.)
(6) Are not random employment inquiries / applications from people who didn’t know to contact the Human Resources department and instead used the comments address (e.g., I’m a teacher and will be moving to Madison, what job’s are open?).
(7) Are not geneology-related inquiries about relatives and/or long-lost friends/teachers/etc.
(8) Are not messages that seek basic and routine information that would be handled clerically(e.g., please tell me where I can find this form; how do I get a flyer approved for distribution; what school is ____ address assigned to; when is summer school enrollment, etc.)
Some of the above may have still slipped in, but the goal was to keep copying costs as low as possible. Once all of the e-mails within your original request were read to determine content, it took over 2 hours to isolate the attached messages electronically from the larger pool that also included obvious pupil records, but you’ve been more than patient with this process and you have made reasonable concessions that saved time for the District in other ways, and there will be no additional copying charge assessed.

It would be good public policy to post all communications sent to the District. Such a simple effort may answer many questions and provide a useful look at our K-12 environment.
I am indebted to Chan Stroman Roll for her never ending assistance on this and other matters.
Related: Vivek Wadhwa: The Open Gov Initiative: Enabling Techies to Solve Government Problems
Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/22/the-open-government-initiative-enabling-techies-to-solve-problems/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29#ixzz0ohshEHIG

While grandma flips through photo albums on her sleek iPad, government agencies (and most corporations) process mission-critical transactions on cumbersome web-based front ends that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to CRT terminals. These systems are written in computer languages like Assembler and COBOL, and cost a fortune to maintain. I’ve written about California’s legacy systems and the billions of dollars that are wasted on maintaining these. Given the short tenure of government officials, lobbying by entrenched government contractors, and slow pace of change in the enterprise-computing world, I’m not optimistic that much will change – even in the next decade. But there is hope on another front: the Open Government Initiative. This provides entrepreneurs with the data and with the APIs they need to solve problems themselves. They don’t need to wait for the government to modernize its legacy systems; they can simply build their own apps.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Sports, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Dumbing Down the US Military Academies?

Bruce Fleming:

Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they’ve entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that “people die if you do X” (like, “leave mold on your shower curtain,” a favorite claim of one recent administrator). We’re a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference.
In my experience, the students who find this most demoralizing are those who have already served as Marines and sailors (usually more than 5 percent of each incoming class), who know how the fleet works and realize that what we do on the military-training side of things is largely make-work. Academics, too, are compromised by the huge time commitment these exercises require. Yes, we still produce some Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholars. But mediocrity is the norm.
Meanwhile, the academy’s former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself.

Bruce Fleming website

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, Parenting, School Climate

Parent Survey of Seattle’s Superintendent

Melissa Westbrook:

One absolutely great thing that the folks at CPPS did was to include every single comment. There are pages of them so it takes awhile to read. But it is valuable reading because you start seeing a theme to them even as each one differs somewhat in its issue.
What did people say? If I had to sum it up, it would be two things. One, there is almost zero feeling that Dr. Goodloe-Johnson listens to parents. There were several comments that applauded her strong stance (which many others thought autocratic) or the changes she has made in the district . I didn’t see one comment saying she was approachable or was someone who collaborates well with the community.
Two, is the overwhelming sense that she is hurting the district, either through her lack of ability to engage/motivate/inspire and/or the amount of churn that she has caused in the district with not a lot to show for it in terms of results.

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

National Assessments Based on Weak “College and Career Readiness Standards”

Sandra Stotsky & Ze’ev Wurman [PDF]:

During the past year, academic experts, educators, and policy makers have waged a confusing and largely invisible war over the content and quality of Common Core’s proposed high school exit and grade-level standards. Some critics see little or no value to national standards, explaining why local or state control is necessary for real innovations in education and why “one size doesn’t fit all” applies as strongly to the school curriculum as it does to the clothing industry. On the other hand, some supporters believe so strongly in the idea of national standards that they appear willing to accept Common Core’s standards no matter how inferior they may be to the best sets of state or international standards so long as they are better than most states’ standards. In contrast, others who believe that national standards may have value have found earlier drafts incapable of making American students competitive with those in the highest-achieving countries. No one knows whether Common Core’s standards will raise student achievement in all performance categories, simply preserve an unacceptable academic status quo, or actually reduce the percentage of high-achieving high school students in states that adopt them.
All these alternatives are possible because of the lack of clarity about what readiness for college and workplace means – the key concept driving the current movement for national standards – and what the implications of this concept are for high school graduation requirements in each state and for current admission and/or placement requirements in its post-secondary institutions. There has been a striking lack of public discussion about the definition of college readiness (e.g., for what kind of college, for what majors, for what kind of credit-bearing freshman courses) and whether workplace readiness is similar to college readiness. According to Common Core’s own draft writers, these college readiness standards are aimed at community colleges, trade schools, and other non-selective colleges, although Common Core hasn’t said so explicitly.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

New reading results put MPS near bottom among urban districts

Erin Richards & Amy Hetzner:

A new study comparing reading skills of fourth- and eighth-grade children in 18 urban school systems once again places Milwaukee Public Schools near the bottom of the ladder, a pattern of underachievement that gave voice to worries Thursday about the future of Milwaukee’s children and calls – yet again – for a greater sense of urgency to improve.
In a set of national reading tests, Milwaukee’s fourth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, while its eighth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and Washington, D.C., according to the results of the Trial Urban District Assessment, a special project of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a periodic national assessment, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, that allows for state-to-state comparisons in core academic subjects. The urban district study isolates scores among a number of the country’s high-minority, high-poverty school systems to better compare how those students are doing.
All of the voluntary participants in the program are from cities with populations of at least 250,000, ranging from districts serving Fresno, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., to those in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
This is the first time that Milwaukee Public Schools participated in the reading tests for the urban districts. Last year, results from the math tests also carried bad news for MPS, which did better than only Detroit at the eighth-grade level.

Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Student Support

New curriculum: Math anxiety for students, teachers

Aileen Dodd & John Perry:

Under the state’s new math curriculum, lower scores plus a quicker pace of instruction equal greater anxiety for both students and their teachers.
“In my classes, I have 60 kids and only 17 are passing. You know how stressful that is on me?” said Donna Aker, a veteran math teacher at South Gwinnett High School.
It’s a problem common to many metro Atlanta schools. Nearly one in five ninth-graders in metro Atlanta last year got an F in Math I — the first year of the state’s new math curriculum in high school.
The math failure rate was more than double that experienced by the same group of kids in the eighth grade the year before.

Books, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Books in the home ‘boost children’s education’

Graeme Paton:

Keeping just 20 books in the home can boost children’s chances of doing well at school, according to a major study.
Regular access to books has a direct impact on pupils’ results, irrespective of parents’ own education, occupation and social class, it was claimed.
Researchers said that children coming from a “bookish home” remained in education for around three years longer than young people born into families with empty bookshelves.
The study, led by Nevada University, in the United States, comes despite continuing concerns over a decline in reading at school.
It is feared that some teachers are being forced to dump books – and teach children using basic worksheets – to boost their performance in literacy tests.
Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate, has said that many pupils now go all the way through their formative years at school without reading a single novel.

College Preparation, Legal Rights, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Ethics of UC Berkeley’s gene testing questioned

Victoria Colliver:

Genetic watchdog groups want UC Berkeley to suspend plans to ask incoming freshmen and transfer students to supply a DNA sample to participate in what is considered the first mass genetic testing by a university.
Next month, about 5,500 first-year students will receive testing kits in the mail and be asked to submit DNA swabs to test three genes. The genes include those related to the ability to break down lactose, metabolize alcohol and absorb folates.
Berkeley officials said the university has followed appropriate privacy and consent procedures and has no intent to changes its plans.
But the Center for Genetics and Society, a Berkeley public interest organization, and the Council for Responsible Genetics, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., say the project disregards the potential harmful use of the information.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Events, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, Student Support

2010 Grads on the Job Chase

Tom Ashbrook:

We’re in graduation days for the Class of 2010. 1.6 million bright-faced young men and women getting undergraduate degrees, college diplomas, across the country.
And the job market? Brutal. It was brutal last year, of course. Now it’s brutal stacked on brutal. 19.6 percent unemployment for Americans under 25. The highest since 1948.
Just one in four new college grads who applied for a job has one. Twenty five percent. And many have applied for scores of jobs.
This Hour, On Point: we talk to the Class of 2010 about the job hunt – and survival strategies in the economy of 2010.

Ashbrook included a segment from media “star” Anderson Cooper’s commencement address at Tulane in his show. While not a fan of the generally thin coverage provided by the “Mainstream Media”, Cooper’s story of determination, risk and luck is worth a look:

When I graduated there were hiring freezes at most TV news networks. I tried for months to get an entry-level job at ABC news, answering phones, xeroxing, whatever, but I couldn’t get hired. At the time it was crushing. But in retrospect, not getting that entry-level job, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
After months of waiting, I decided if no one would give me a chance as a reporter, I should take a chance. If no one would give me an opportunity, I would have to make my own opportunity.
I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I decided to just start going to wars. As you can imagine, my mom was thrilled about the plan. I had a friend make a fake press pass for me on a mac, and I borrowed a home video camera… and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government… then I moved onto Somalia in the early days of the famine and fighting there.
I figured if I went places that were dangerous, I wouldn’t have as much competition, and because I was willing to sleep on the roofs of buildings, and live on just a few dollars a day, I was able to charge very little for my stories. As ridiculous as it sounds, my plan worked, and after two years on my own shooting stories in war zones, I was hired by ABC news as a correspondent. I was the youngest correspondent they had hired in many years. Had I gotten the entry-level job I’d wanted, I would have never become a network correspondent so quickly, I probably would never have even become one at all. The things which seem like heartbreaking setbacks, sometimes turn out to be lucky breaks.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Colorado District Revolutionizes Salary Schedule, Or Does It?

Rob Manwaring:

For virtually every school district in the country teacher pay depends upon a teacher’s years of experience (steps) and some measure of educational attainment (columns). Harrison School District Two in Colorado made national news when it announced their new salary schedule which moves away from the step and column approach. There proposal appears to be a perfectly rational and balanced approach. See the charts below for more details. The district will conduct evaluations, incorporate outcomes, and consider level of educational experience. This data will annually be assessed to determine whether a teacher advances to the next pay level gets a raise, or advances to the next job description (gets a promotion). Presumably over time, teachers would receive a cost of living adjustment even if they stay at the same salary tier. Teachers will initially be placed on thin the new salary tiers with plenty of room to grow. If a teacher receives three consecutive poor evaluations, the teacher can go down a level.
What is shocking to anyone who doesn’t work in education, is that this a major innovation in teacher compensation. Prior to working for Education Sector, I worked for state government ( for the Legislature in California), and had basically the same type of salary structure being implemented by Harrison. Annually, I was reviewed, and based on the review of the work that I had done that year and an evaluation of my superior, I would either advance a tier or two (we had a few more tiers than this system). Over time, the super stars advanced a little faster than others, the generally effective staff advanced, but more slowly, and a few would remain at the same pay level for several years, and then many of them would decide this was not the profession for them.

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Grammatical mistakes

Jeff Bell:

The progressive decline of students’ ability in English worries me as a secondary school teacher. Do people know students are no longer formally tested in grammar?
Instead, it would appear that our curriculum is leaning toward encouraging students to be more creative and expressive. I would argue that this can be beneficial as long as students have a basic understanding of the foundation in the language.
A glaringly clear example of this going wrong is when Chinese medium of instruction students, who cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of the tenses, are asked to have a group discussion about a book or film.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Governance Matters

Chad Alderman:

Nevada has recently been considering whether to change the way its state education agency is run. The governor has asked for the state superintendent to be part of the cabinet and for the power to name the state school chief. The legislature has turned down this request with a political argument, arguing the governor would have too much power under such an arrangement.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Finally — a school funding lawsuit is filed against California

Rachel Norton:

Today is a pretty big day for anyone who cares about school funding in California. This morning a broad coalition of people and organizations–individual students and parents, nine school districts (including SFUSD!), the state PTA, the California School Boards Association (CSBA) and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)–announced that a school funding adequacy lawsuit has been filed against the state.
The lawsuit, Robles-Wong v. California, requests that the current education finance system be declared unconstitutional and that the state be required to establish a school finance system that provides all students an equal opportunity to meet the academic goals set by the State.
In a press release, the plaintiffs said:

Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, What Can I Do?

Speak Up and Celebrate “Eliza Doolittle Day”

Marc Acito
In Act 1 of “My Fair Lady”, Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl learning to speak like a lady, fantasizes about meeting the king. Of course, because it’s a musical, she sings:
One evening the king will say, ‘Oh, Liza, old thing — I want all of England your praises to sing. Next week on the twentieth of May, I proclaim Liza Doolittle Day.

Since I’m not Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn — or Marni Nixon, who sang for Audrey Hepburn in the movie, I’ll spare you the rest. But suffice it to say, Eliza envisions all of England celebrating her glory. The only ones who recognize Eliza Doolittle Day, however, are music theater geeks like me. And while an evening of cocktails and show tunes sounds like fun, it’s insufficient to mark the occasion because Eliza’s message is all too relevant today.
You see, “My Fair Lady” is based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”, and both pieces explore the ramifications of learning how to speak properly at a time when elocution was valued as a symbol of education and upward mobility.
Emphasis on the was.
Listen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt say, “The only thing we have to feah is feah itself,” and it’s almost inconceivable that ordinary Americans trusted someone who sounded like Thurston Howell III. We are now in an age when Sarah Palin speaks to a quarter of the electorate, even though she talks like she’s translating into Korean and back again. Even the rhetorically gifted President Obama has felt compelled to drop his g’s while tryin’ to sell health care reform.
Nowadays, soundin’ folksy has become more important than sounding educated. As Eliza’s teacher Henry Higgins says, “Use proper English, you’re regarded as a freak.” But our country’s biggest competitors are learning proper English and, judging from all the Indian call centers, learning it quite well. Our country was built by people striving to move up, not dumbing down. So on this Eliza Doolittle Day, perhaps we should all take a moment to think before we speak.
Marc Acito is the author of How I Paid for College and Attack of the Theater People.

Discipline / Violence, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

School attacks cut deep at China’s soul

Francesco Sisci:

They are no longer rare, random acts of one or two nutcases far from the rest of the country. A series of knife attacks in kindergartens has become the symptom of a virus lurking deep in the soul of the new China.
Premier Wen Jiabao said as much on May 13, a day after the fifth attack and as the death toll among children as young as three reached 16, with dozens also wounded since the first attack two months ago. “We need to resolve the deep-seated causes that have resulted in these problems,” Wen said in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television. “This includes handling social contradictions, resolving disputes and strengthening mediation at the grassroots level.”
According to The Global Times, a popular newspaper published by the official People’s Daily, police have foiled seven attacks at schools since the first killings. That was at the hands of Zheng Minsheng, an apparently deranged 42-year-old man who hacked eight children to death with a cleaver in the coastal province of Fujian on March 23 [1]. Zheng was convicted and executed on April 28, the day of the second successful attack, when 16 children were stabbed in a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong. The next day, 29 children and three teachers were wounded a kindergarten in Taixing, Jiangsu province, by another cleaver-wielding madman.

Books, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate

Investing in the Poor

Alex Tabarrok:

The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person’s income stream can be bought and sold. (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%–there are no other taxes–and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)
The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about “liberty” and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel. The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system. In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord’s time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Government as Innovation Catalyst The $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” education program is showing how government can successfully drive systemwide innovation

Saul Kaplan:

The best use of government is as a catalyst for social system innovation. Yes, that’s right: “Innovation bureaucrat” need not be an oxymoron. Leaders should get the innovation reaction started–and then get out of the way.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is showing how it can be done. The “Race to the Top” program offers $4 billion in grants to states committed to reforming their education systems. Duncan outlined a clear goal of restoring the U.S. as a world leader in preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and announced the first grants on Mar. 29, 2010–$100 million for Delaware and $500 million for Tennessee.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Public Schools Need a Bailout Washington didn’t let Wall Street fail. Why should we do less for our kids?

Randi Weingarten:

A number of sectors of the economy appear to be bouncing back. Housing starts, home foreclosures and job creation all show movement in the right direction. But the fiscal situation in most states will not improve for quite some time. And, for public schools, the coming year promises to be the worst yet of the economic downturn.
Years of budget cuts in the vast majority of school districts already have taken their toll, with sharp reductions in after-school programs, academic enrichment and other so-called extras. Most states have exhausted their federal stimulus funds, and many states long ago tapped out their financial reserves. School districts now are cutting into bone, eliminating classroom teachers and core academic offerings like foreign languages.
According to a survey of more than 80% of school districts by the American Association of School Administrators, 275,000 teachers and other school staff will receive pink slips. It’s not that these schools will educate fewer children, or that students won’t need the personnel and programs that will be cut. But the cuts could rob an entire generation of students of the well-rounded education they need and deserve. Class sizes will swell, and students will lose important classes and programs, such as art, music, physical education, Advanced Placement classes, and counseling and intervention programs for those who need the most help.

Budget/Financing, School Climate

Too Cool for School: What the Valley Is Missing in Online Education

Sarah Lacy:

I always tell entrepreneurs outside of the Valley–whether they are in the middle of my country or a developing one–if they want to build the next great social media darling aimed at a Western audience, they’re probably better off moving to the Valley.
It’s not that you can’t do it elsewhere: The right entrepreneur at the right time with the right opportunity can largely build a great company anywhere. But in the Valley it’s easier to get funded, find the right talent and get acquired–which are three things most high-growth startups are going to need. In this new media game, connections matter at least as much as the best features and technology.
So with that in mind, I get excited when I see other countries exploiting holes that the Valley just isn’t going to tackle. One of those is mobile apps for non-smart-phones, as I’ve written about at length. Another is online education.
Online education was tried and mostly failed in the Valley in the late 1990s, with University of Phoenix a rare billion-dollar-plus win. Rosetta Stone is one of a few examples that’s made it big since, and despite some awesome software that approaches language learning in a new way, the company has still floundered since going public in 2009. Its stock is off its lows, but hardly soaring.

Special Education, TAG

Autism’s effect on the ‘normal siblings’

1 Comment

SACHI FUJIMORI
When Gabby Abramowitz was younger, she was cautious about inviting new friends to the house. She wasn’t sure how they would react to her younger brother, Ben, who is autistic. And she didn’t want a repeat of the Simpsons incident. That was the time she had a friend over for dinner, and Ben sat at the table reciting the entire “Treehouse of Horror” Simpsons Halloween special.
Gabby pleaded with him to stop, but he persisted.
“My friend was like, ‘What’s going on?’ and then started laughing,” she said.
At that time, she was in elementary school and lacked the words and understanding to explain her brother’s condition. But with the help of her parents and through her own study, Gabby, now 16 and a sophomore at Tenafly High School, has grown to understand the nuances of autism and often speaks out to teach her peers while growing closer to Ben, 14.
Through her research, she found that her experiences, and those of others like her, often are overlooked. “I think the effect on siblings is underestimated. We get pushed into the background.”

Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, School Climate

Group links 4th-grade reading proficiency, national success

Greg Toppo:

If educators want to shrink the number of students who drop out of high school each year, they must greatly increase the number who can read proficiently by the time they’re in fourth grade, a key non-profit children’s advocacy group says in a new report.
The findings, out today from the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, echoes research on reading proficiency going back decades, but it’s the first to draw a direct line between reading and the nation’s long-term economic well-being.
“The bottom line is that if we don’t get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty,” the authors say.
Ralph Smith, the foundation’s executive vice president, says recent research shows that dropouts “don’t just happen in high school” but that students give clear indications as early as elementary school that they’re on a “glide path” to dropping out. Among the clearest signs: difficulty reading and understanding basic work that becomes more detail-oriented around fourth grade.

Valerie Strauss has more.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

Waukesha Offers Teachers 0.8% and 1.51% Increases over the Next Two Years, Union Counters with 3.52 and 4.66%

Chris Lufter:

In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would say that it is time for this community to support the Waukesha School Board. Currently, the Waukesha School Board and the Education Association of Waukesha are seeking arbitration over the latest contract negotiations due to a $5.7 million dollar discrepancy in salary and benefits between the two sides.
A little history is in order here. The qualified economic offer and revenue caps passed the state Legislature back in the early ’90s due to the ever increasing burden of salaries and Cadillac benefits placed on school district budgets and taxpayers. The QEO was designed to limit salary and benefit increases to 3.8 percent to avoid arbitration. Acknowledging that the QEO and revenue caps (the control on school spending) were out of line, the state Legislature eliminated the QEO. This was to help school boards limit or eliminate budget reductions seen every year.
There are several items in dispute between the EAW and the Waukesha School Board: restoring the insurance back to the WEA Trust (the state teachers-owned health insurance), reinstating and making permanent early retirement language and total compensation calculations.
First, the insurance. Traditionally the district has had to use WEA Trust for the teacher’s Cadillac insurance plan. There were minimal outof-pocket expenses to the employee, no contribution to the cost and a whopping $21,000-plus price tag (family plan). For the 2007-09 contract, the board successfully worked in a premium contribution of $20 for a single plan and $40 for a family plan per month from the employee. In addition, a $250/500 outof-pocket was added. The current school board proposal is looking to change this in the new contract to $500 single/$1000 family and a 10 percent premium contribution. These changes reflect what is really happening in the private sector today.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

The DNA Assignment

Jennifer Epstein:

The University of California at Berkeley is an experimental place, and sometimes those experiments start as early as the summer before new students set foot on campus.
This summer, the university’s College of Letters and Science — home to three quarters of Berkeley’s 25,000 undergraduates — will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.
Like so many other institutions, the college usually asks students to read a specific book or watch an assigned movie in the weeks before classes start, to inform discussion during orientation and throughout the fall. But a reading assignment didn’t make sense for something as cutting-edge and personalized as genetic analysis.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Need More Union Members? Legislate Them

Jo Egelhoff:

How to increase union membership among non-government workers? Legislate it – and include it as a non-fiscal policy item in your state’s massive budget bill.
Just what the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its supporters did in 2008. And just what the SEIU did in earlier years, first establishing a pilot referral program in Dane County.
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign provides the “follow-the-money” history: In 2002,”four SEIU locals made over $750,000 in independent expenditures, mostly on behalf of Dem primary candidate (and not coincidentally, Dane County Executive) Kathleen Falk. Eight SEIU locals inside and outside Wisconsin contributed another $190,000+, with “most of the contributions” going to Falk.
In 2004, SEIU locals contributed $17,500 to Governor Jim Doyle, not up for reelection that year. In 2006, the SEIU Political Education and Action Fund (SEIU PEA) made independent expenditures of $36,651 on behalf of Doyle. They also joined with AFSCME in sponsoring issue ads targeting Doyle opponent Mark Green, with plans to spend about $500,000.

Budget/Financing, School Climate

Inquiry uncovers Head Start fraud

Greg Toppo:

Undercover investigators trying to enroll a handful of fictitious children in federally funded Head Start child care centers found that in about half of the cases, workers fraudulently misrepresented parents’ incomes, addresses and other information to allow kids to qualify for a slot.
In one instance, according to the investigators’ report, a Head Start worker in New Jersey handed back one of two pay stubs and told an investigator posing as a parent, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”
Prompted by anonymous tips to a fraud hotline, investigators with the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at centers in six states — California, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin — and the District of Columbia. In 13 of 15 cases, they tried to enroll children whose family incomes made them ineligible. In two more, families qualified but GAO wanted to find out if Head Start would count children as enrolled even if they never attended the program. In all, investigators found fraud in eight cases.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

How Schools Can Achieve Obama’s Lofty Education Goals

Richard Whitmire , Andrew J. Rotherham:

Finding depressing education news is easy. The recession, combined with the waning of federal stimulus money, is about to trigger hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs–an “education catastrophe,” warns Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The layoffs will play out against a background of flat national reading scores and mediocre showings on international education rankings. Looming behind everything: the country’s much-debated school reform law, No Child Left Behind, has fallen into disrepute.
None of this can be sugarcoated; yet dwelling on the negatives masks some significant education breakthroughs that promise to pay dividends for years to come. Together they represent the country’s best shot at achieving President Obama’s ambitious goal of pushing the country back to the top of international education rankings–measured by college graduations by 2020.
These developments include breakthroughs on answering these questions:

College Preparation, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, History - Madison Schools, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support, What Can I Do?

A Very Bright Idea: What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?

2 Comments

Bob Herbert:

We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?
That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city’s Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.

Related: Credit for Non-Madison School District Courses.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

On Teachers’ Unions, Accountability and School Reform

KATHERINE SCHULTEN AND HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO:

Education reform is “moving into prime time,” writes Steven Brill in the Times Magazine article “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand.” He looks at how Race to the Top, the charter-school movement and other factors are coming together to overhaul public education in the United States — and why teachers’ unions are resisting many of these reforms.
…[Race to the Top] has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled [the school-reform network New Leaders for New Schools] to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers’ unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn’t failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Florida’s Class Size Amendment: Did it help students learn?

Paul Peterson:

If a state mandates that every school reduce class sizes, will students learn more? Since reducing class size is very expensive, that is a question state legislatures are asking themselves at a time when fiscal deficits are looming nearly everywhere. To that question, a just released study of the Florida Class Size Amendment says “No.” Telling schools they must reduce class size yields no benefit, it reports.
Florida is an interesting place to explore this issue, because students there have been improving at a faster rate than any other state in the union, according to Matt Ladner at the Goldwater Institute. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Ladner shows that student performance in 4th and 8th grade reading and math has leaped forward in Florida while it has remained stagnant in many other states.
Some have attributed the spectacular Florida gains to the state’s accountability system, its Just Read initiative, or the state’s school choice programs. But others have attributed the Florida gains to an amendment to the Florida Constitution, adopted by the voters in 2002, which requires every school district to reduce its average class size. To fulfill the purposes of the amendment, the Florida state legislature has in recent years allocated state funds that must be used for class size reduction in those districts not yet at the limit. The remaining districts have received comparable amounts to be used for any educational purpose they see fit.

Curriculum, School Climate

Is education research all dreck

Daniel Willingham:

Sharon Begley, science editor at Newsweek, doesn’t have anything nice to say about education research. In a recent article, she refers to it as “second-class science” and “so flimsy as to be a national scandal.”
I agree that there is a problem, but I don’t think she’s diagnosed it correctly.
There is a lot of excellent research in education. I spend most of my time reading basic scientific work and trying to understand what it means for classrooms and for policy, and much of what I draw on is education research.
There is, however, also a good deal of dreck.
There is a certain amount of poor science in other fields as well. Go to the psychology section of a large book store and you’ll see plenty of nonsense. Books with crazy suggestions on dieting, love, self-actualization, and so on.
The difference between psychology and education is that psychology, as a field, is more vigilant in its self-regulation, particularly through its professional societies.

College Preparation, Elections, Events, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate

How Student Loans Helped Destroy America

1 Comment

ZenCollege Life:

On March 30 2010, President Obama signed “historic student loan legislation” into law. The Education Reconciliation Act is intended to generate $61 billion in savings, by streamlining the student loan program and reinvesting the money to make college more affordable. Sadly, it is too little, too late.
Once a Great Nation
The student loan burden on today´s working population has already destroyed the economy, practically removed any last semblance of freedom in our workplace and just served to fatten the wallets of the bankers, lawyers and corporate suits that now run the country. The virtues that once made America a great nation have been abused by those entrusted with its care, and even $61 billion will not reverse the situation that we now find ourselves in.
The History
In 1944, the GI Bill (“Servicemen´s Readjustment Act”) was enacted to help war veterans further their educations and, in turn, increase the number of employable persons in order to strengthen the U.S. economy. Throughout the next twenty years, improvements were made to this system through the National Defence Student Loan Program (1958 – aka Perkins Loan Program) and the Higher Education Act of 1965 – creating the Guaranteed Student Loan Program.
Sallie Mae
Although it would be easy to say that the rot set in with the founding of Sallie Mae in 1972, you have to acknowledge that they only exasperated later problems through their incompetence and greed. In 1972, people still worked their way through college, and Sallie Mae was established to simply facilitate loans to those who needed them, rather than lend any funds themselves.
No. The cause of all today´s problems are those pillars of education – the colleges.

Legal Rights, School Climate

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy

Robbie Brown:

Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to a Georgia sheriff on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing.
Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her for providing a false address to the police.
The case has become a flash point in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted.
“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”

Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Did you cheat in high school?

Amy Graff:

I can remember once when my eyes started to wander, ever so slightly, over to my neighboring classmate’s desk in a high school math class.
“Amy Graff keep your eyes on your own paper, and go sit in the back of the class,” my teacher screamed.
The school’s football coach was also my math teacher so you can only imagine the harsh tone he used when he said those words.
I was humiliated and my eyes never wandered again.

Curriculum, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Student Support

Citing Individualism, Arizona Tries to Rein in Ethnic Studies in School

Tamar Lewin:

Less than a month after signing the nation’s toughest law on illegal immigration, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has again upset the state’s large Hispanic population, signing a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.
Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.
“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday.
Judy Burns, president of the governing board of the Tucson schools, said the district’s ethnic studies courses did not violate any of the provisions of the new law and would be continued because they were valuable to the students.

Budget/Financing, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

Salaries of N.J. school superintendents may be next on chopping block

Lisa Fleisher, Claire Heininger & Sean Esposito:

During the angry debate over teacher pay, little has been said about the higher salaries of New Jersey school administrators. On the contrary, Gov. Chris Christie praises many of them for taking wage freezes while most teachers are refusing.
Don’t expect that to last long.
“I’m sure that at some point the governor is going to push obviously with administrators as well,” said Boonton superintendent Christine Johnson, singled out by Christie for freezing her salary. “I would think that writing is on the wall.”
One reason: six-figure salaries are common among administrators, who include superintendents, assistant superintendents and principals. A Star-Ledger analysis of data from the state Department of Education for 2008-09 found:

  • The median salary for full-time school administrators in New Jersey — the salary figure that half of them exceed, and half do not — was $113,083.
  • In more than 425 districts, the median salary for an administrator was at least $100,000. Less than 2 percent of teachers — 1.6 percent — made $100,000 or more.
  • Christie’s $175,000 salary is less than the pay of 235 school administrators from 184 districts.

A 2008 report commissioned by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators found the average superintendent salary in New Jersey was $154,409, about $9,000 higher than the national average. That compared with $152,782 in New York and $146,906 in Connecticut.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

RI school district agrees to rehire fired teachers

Eric Tucker:

A school district that gained the support of President Barack Obama for promoting accountability after it fired all its teachers from a struggling school announced on Sunday it had reached an agreement with the union to return the current staffers to their jobs.
The two sides said a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the coming school year would allow the roughly 87 teachers, guidance counselors, librarians and other staffers who were to lose their jobs at the end of this year to return without having to reapply. More than 700 people had already applied for the positions.
The agreement calls for a longer school day, more after-school tutoring and other changes.
“What this means is that they have come to an agreement about a reform effort and that will change the quality” of the education program at Central Falls, said Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, who applauded both sides for working together.

Budget/Financing, College Preparation, Parenting, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Plan B: Skip College

Jacques Steinberg:

WHAT’S the key to success in the United States?
Short of becoming a reality TV star, the answer is rote and, some would argue, rather knee-jerk: Earn a college degree.
The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)
For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree.

Community Partners, Events, History - Madison Schools, School Climate

Know Your Madisonian: Richard Scott Retires as minority services coordinator at Madison’s East High School

Ken Singletary:

Richard Scott, 58, has been minority services coordinator at Madison’s East High School for 34 years. He retires in June and will focus more on his artistic endeavors, including playwrighting, performing in musical groups and coordinating a step-dance group.
Will you miss the students?
Absolutely. I’m going to miss their energy. I’m going to miss their spontaneity. I’m going to miss their youthfulness. I receive their energy.
What do students want?
They need attention. They need respect. They need opportunities to express themselves … Not all minority students come from one point of reference. I look at them individually. I tell them ‘I love you all, but I love you all differently.’
You focus a lot on conflict resolution. How do you do that?
I try to initiate a discussion based on commonalities … If you have a conflict with someone, you have a commonality, something to build on. … I try not to solve problems for students but give them the tools by which they can transform conflicts into something positive. I’m not saying ‘You’re going to forget what happened, but you’re going to go beyond what happened.’… A lot of young people are very emotional, very reactive in their processes, and I want them to think about it. … I truly enjoy when students who are very, very angry see a situation differently. If they can be something else, something else than what people have told them they are, then we’ve done our job.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, School Climate

Milwaukee Public Schools makes the most of data sessions

Alan Borsuk:

the intensive use of data to guide decisions on daily policing – is a hot strategy when it comes to law enforcement, including in Milwaukee.
If used well, data can make police work more precise and effective and leaders can be more effective in determining what works and even in determining who is getting the job done.
This is education’s version of CrimeStat: Rooms filled with round tables, each table surrounded by a team of people from one school poring over data to try to figure out what they can do to get better results at their school.
In fact, Milwaukee Public Schools calls its program EdStat. Two-day “data retreats” are becoming centerpieces of how to run an MPS school, and the wealth of data available at the click of a mouse at any time to principals and others is growing quickly. A variety of test scores, attendance records, discipline records, and information on what teaching techniques are being used in each classroom, some of it updated every day – it’s impressive.
The concept is simple: Find out all you can about what is going on in a school and put it to the smartest, best use you can in moving forward. The mountain of information can be just an impenetrable mass or a gold mine of insight.
The burst of interest in data use may be one of the less exciting, but most important trends in American education. Good data use is high on the list of priorities of education advocates who might otherwise differ on just about everything.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

School district adding 5th grade to middle school

Erin Snelgrove:

Itzie Duarte is glad her children are enrolled in the West Valley School District. But she is far from happy with the school board’s decision to move fifth-graders to the middle school this fall.
“A fifth-grader isn’t mentally capable of being in a school where there is no recess,” said Duarte, who will have one child entering kindergarten and another entering third grade. “If we need the space, turn the middle school into an elementary school.”
But district officials say next year’s grade reconfiguration – which includes sending ninth-graders to the old high school – is needed to help with overcrowding.
Much of the growth is in the elementary schools. In the past three years, about 300 additional students – including about 60 this year – have entered the district.
The middle school, officials added, is built to accommodate students traveling throughout the building and is not designed for instructing young children.

Budget/Financing, Curriculum, Elections, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

Obama’s education czar charters a course to Brooklyn

Carl Campanile & David Seifman:

In a dramatic show of White House support, President Obama’s education czar will visit a Brooklyn charter school Tuesday to help persuade the foot-dragging state Assembly to lift the cap on the number of charters, The Post has learned.
The timing of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s trip is significant since New York has just two weeks to revamp its charter-school law ahead of the June 1 deadline for the state to submit its application for $700 million in federal education funds.
“I hope the Legislature will do the right thing by children,” Duncan told The Post yesterday.

Athletics, Events, Health Care, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, Sports, Student Support, Wellness

Bud Selig Wins Award for PED Education, Destroys Concept of Irony

Andy Hutchins:

If I were looking for people who had done much to curb the use of performance-enhancing drugs, I think I might take Arnold Schwarzenegger over Bud Selig. Apparently, the Taylor Hooton Foundation thinks differently.

NEW YORK — Commissioner Bud Selig was named the first recipient of Taylor’s Award, presented by the Taylor Hooton Foundation to an individual who has made a major impact on efforts to educate and protect American youth from the dangers of using performance-enhancing drugs.
…

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Student Support, Teacher Support

“The key impediment to improving public education is not lack of money, but the organizational structure of public schools”

Liv Finne:

As an education policy analyst, I am very concerned about the quality of education our children are receiving. My research has led me to conclude that the key impediment to improving public education is not lack of money, but the organizational structure of public schools. Private schools in Washington and public charter schools in other states are given the advantage of operating free of public education’s centralized and highly regulated superstructure. As a result, private and public charter schools can better direct resources to the classroom, more reliably place effective teachers in every classroom, and offer better life prospects to children through higher-quality education. Cutting central bureaucracies and putting qualified principals in charge of their schools would help make sure that education dollars actually reach the classroom.
Recently, I turned my attention to a restrictive policy that applies to public schools but not to private or public charter schools: mandatory collective bargaining agreements. Here is a link to our full study of Seattle’s current collective bargaining agreement [563K PDF], and below is a summary of our findings.
School district salaries and benefits

  • Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 in total salary (base pay and other pay), plus average insurance benefits of $9,855. These figures apply to a ten-month work year.
  • Teachers in Seattle public schools can earn up to $88,463 in total base and other pay for a ten-month work year, or $98,318 including benefits.
  • Seattle Schools employ 371 people as “educational staff associates,” who receive an average of $76,339 for a ten-month year, or $86,194 including benefits.
  • Seattle Schools employs 193 non-teachers, mostly senior administrators, who each receive more than $100,000 in total pay.

Budget/Financing, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, Health Care, History - Madison Schools, School Climate

Milwaukee School District Seeks Health Care Changes to Save Jobs

Erin Richards:

Though shrouded in the overly formal language of district documents, new amendments to the proposed 2010-’11 Milwaukee Public Schools budget signal an ultimatum to unions from the Milwaukee School Board: Accept changes to your health care and be open to a furlough, or watch your colleagues be laid off next year.
In a Strategic Planning and Budget Committee meeting Thursday night that carried into Friday morning, the board got its first chance to discuss and act on amendments to the administration’s proposed $1.3 billion budget, which calls for an estimated 150 to 200 teacher layoffs and hundreds of other staff job eliminations.
Amendments that direct changes to the health-care plan and the implementation of furloughs would require an agreement with labor unions that represent certain employees. But the board’s amendments could set the ball in motion for those discussions.
One of those included restoring about a third of the positions set to be eliminated for teachers, paraprofessionals and general education aides, but only if those bargaining units – namely, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association – agree to accept the less expensive health care plan.

This is not a new topic. Some elements of the Madison School District have sought similar changes.

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Staff Support, Teacher Support

School officials question early-retirement deal for Michigan teachers

Paula Davis:

Despite Lansing politicians touting projected savings through the school employee retirement incentive plan that passed the Legislature Friday, some area school officials say the measure leaves unanswered questions and they wonder how much of a savings it truly will hold for their districts.
“We’ve just taken a major step in the right direction to provide support for schools around the state,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop of Rochester. The bill passed the Republican-led Senate by a 21-14 vote and the Democratic House, 56-45.
Proponents of the legislation, which the governor says she will sign, contend it could save school systems more than $670 million in the next fiscal year.
But that will depend on how many of the 57,000 school employees eligible to retire actually choose to do so. They must decide by Sept. 1.

Lifelong Learning, Parenting, Student Support, Wellness

Bye-bye baby face

Jan Uebelherr:

It’s a question that can make most any mom stop in her tracks: “Can I wear makeup?”
In a world where little girls of 5 or 6 get spa treatments and mega-birthday parties, can lip gloss and mascara be such a leap?
What’s the right age? What’s the right “starter makeup”? Why can’t she wait just a little while?
It’s a question that’s popping up sooner than it once did. Little girls whose ages have not yet reached the double-digits are wanting to wear makeup more and more.
A new report by the NPD Group, which researches consumer trends, finds that makeup usage is going up in the fresh-faced group known as tweens (ages 8 to 12).

College Preparation, Curriculum, Lifelong Learning, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

Why Liberal Education Matters

Peter Berkowitz:

The true aim of the humanities is to prepare citizens for exercising their freedom responsibly.
In 1867, when he discharged his main responsibility as honorary rector of St. Andrews University by delivering an address on liberal education to the students, the philosopher and civil servant John Stuart Mill felt compelled to defend the place of the sciences alongside the humanities. Today it is the connection of the humanities to a free mind and citizenship in a free society that requires defense.
For years, an array of influential voices has been calling for our nation’s schools and universities to improve science and math education. Given the globalized and high-tech world, the prize, pundits everywhere argue, goes to the nations that summon the foresight and discipline to educate scientists and engineers capable of developing tomorrow’s ideas.
No doubt science and math are vital. But all of the attention being paid to these disciplines obscures a more serious problem: the urgent need to reform liberal education.

College Preparation, Elections, Events, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

US Education Secretary Duncan Addresses UW-Madison Graduates

Nick Penzenstadler:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he’s taller than Barack Obama and has a better jump shot than Sen. John McCain but stopped short of challenging the commander-in-chief’s own skills on the court.
Duncan, speaking Saturday to University of Wisconsin-Madison spring graduates at the Kohl Center, joked about his credentials over other notable speakers, referencing a student newspaper article chiding officials for taking so long to invite someone with “somewhat” the same speaking prowess as the president, who spoke at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor two weeks ago.
Like most graduation speeches this spring, Duncan referenced the tough job market facing graduates but offered advice for adapting to the new age of employment. He spoke at one of UW’s five ceremonies that add up to about 6,000 graduates this spring.
“Rather than telling you about time-honored truths, I want to talk about skillfully managing uncertainty and serendipity as the defining elements of the 21st century education,” Duncan said. “It’s not just knowledge and subject mastery; your ability to adapt, be creative and pursue your passion will determine how you fare in the job market.”
Citing the “hallmarks of a great progressive education,” Duncan told graduates they need to focus on their ability to work both independently and in teams and be creative in a global job market.

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate, Student Support

Can schools be free and accountable?

Mike Baker:

Welcome to the new age of school autonomy and teacher freedom.
At least that is what has been promised: fewer directives and targets, less guidance and prescription.
However, there are conflicting messages on English education policy from the new coalition government.
They can be summed up by two consecutive sentences in the “coalition agreement”, which has become the working handbook for the new government.
First, it promises that all schools will have “greater freedom over the curriculum”. Then, it adds that all schools will be held “properly accountable”.

Athletics, Lifelong Learning, School Climate, Sports, Student Support

No Tackling, but a Girls’ Sport Takes Some Hits

Katie Thomas:

Flag football, long relegated to family picnics and gym class, has quietly become one of the fastest-growing varsity sports for high school girls in Florida. A decade after it was introduced, nearly 5,000 girls play statewide — a welcome development in a state that, like others, has struggled to close the gender gap in high school athletics.
Jupiter High School’s Megan Higgins facing Dwyer High School in a game in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. Flag football has become one of the fastest-growing varsity sports in Florida.
But rather than applaud the new opportunities, some women’s sports advocates call it a dead-end activity. Flag football is played only at the club and intramural level in colleges, and unless one counts the Lingerie Football League, no professional outlets exist. Alaska is the only other state that considers it a varsity sport.
“No one is saying flag football isn’t a great sport to play,” said Neena Chaudhry, the senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, which has brought several cases against high schools alleging violations of Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equity in education. “But I do think it’s relevant to ask questions about whether girls are getting the same kind of educational opportunities as boys.”

Budget/Financing, Community Partners, Curriculum, Parenting, School Climate, Student Support

‘Everything for the children’

Tatiana Pina:

The moment of truth for Ivan and Olga Rojas came in 2008, when their son Esteban finished his sophomore year at the Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket and told his parents he wanted to transfer to Central Falls High School. The thought alarmed them. The high school had been under-performing for years, and Esteban’s mother feared there were gangs and drugs at the school.
For Blanca Giraldo the reckoning came in February 2009, when Central Falls High School Principal Elizabeth Legault sent a letter asking her to come to the school. Legault told Giraldo that her daughter Valerie Florez was failing: she was frequently late, skipping class and not doing her work.
For Jackie Wilson, a random act of violence forced her to uproot her daughter Sakira during her junior year at Central Falls High.

College Preparation, Curriculum, Curriculum - Languages, School Climate, Student Support

Literacy kudzu

Will Fitzhugh via Valerie Strauss:

Kudzu, (Pueraria lobata), I learn from Wikipedia, was “… introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant.
From 1935 to the early 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion…. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years.
It was subsequently discovered that the southeastern United States has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control–hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, and temperate winters with few hard freezes…As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953.”
We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of “the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, K-12.”
At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as “guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students’ absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned.”

Budget/Financing, Elections, Governance/Board Decision Making, School Climate

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: California Shortfall Now $19.1 Billion

1 Comment

Stu Woo:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a revised spending plan Friday that pegged the state’s budget shortfall at $19.1 billion and called for deep cuts to welfare and health programs–but no tax increases–to close the gap.
The new shortfall estimate is higher than the previous projection of $18.6 billion partly because the state collected less tax revenue than expected in April for the 2009 tax year. Court decisions challenging some of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s cuts also added to the budget gap.
This will be the third straight year that Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed deep spending cuts. Tax revenue in California has plunged because of the collapse of the real-estate and financial markets. Legislators closed a $60 billion budget gap last year, but not before state officials had to issue IOUs to creditors to keep the state solvent.

Curated Education Information