School Spotlight: DeForest students spread their study of genocides

Pamela Cotant:

Students in the New Reflections program of DeForest High School not only tackled the wrenching subject of genocide, they put on a symposium to let others know about the atrocities they researched.
The 20 juniors and seniors in DeForest’s alternative high school program set up informational booths in the basement of the DeForest Public Library, where their classes are held. They invited parents, school staff members, School Board members and others to view their displays and multimedia presentations.
“Most high schoolers are never in that position where they are the experts,” said alternative school teacher Jen McGorray. “They took this project and ran with it and made it their own.”

“Hand in Hand: Academic & Social Success”

Wisconsin Center for Education Research, via a kind reader’s email:

Recent developments in social and emotional learning (SEL) have pointed to the reciprocal relations between children’s academic functioning and their socio-emotional health. Professional literature in this field points to the need for including students’ academic skills and competencies as part of mental health intervention research.
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist and professor Thomas R. Kratochwill says educators cannot afford to continue offering mental health services for K-12 students in isolation. These services need to be reframed, mainstreamed, and folded into schools’ broader academic mission.
The good news is that schools already have resources, supports, and opportunities that may provide entry points for delivery of expanded mental health services. Virtually all elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. have school psychologists and provide mental health services, Kratochwill says. The bad news is that the proportion of students needing services continues to outpace supply, and mental health services often remain separate from academic programs. Knowledge about mental health programs and educational achievement have developed in isolation from each other.
To identify research directions for future studies of school-based mental health services, Tom Kratochwill and colleagues reviewed scholarly literature to identify evidence- based interventions that target a combination of students’ academic-educational functioning and their mental health functioning.
They studied 2000 articles published between 1990 and 2006; only 64 studies met the methodological criteria for inclusion in this review. Of those 64 studies, 24 tested the effects of a program on both academic and mental health outcomes, while 40 examined mental health outcomes only.
Schools are increasingly held accountable for achieving academic outcomes. Given that, Kratochwill says he was surprised that most of the mental health studies did not include academically relevant outcomes. That means that the impact of school-based mental health interventions on educationally relevant behaviors is under researched and may be poorly understood.
Many children receive mental health services in school settings. Although studies of social and emotional learning have linked social and academic competence, the impacts of mental health interventions on academics, and of academic interventions on mental health, are understudied.
Kratochwill argues for a multi-tiered intervention approach in schools. Varying levels of service intensity are available over time and in different grades for students, especially during transitional periods.
Because schools and districts have tight budgets, it’s important to know which students might benefit most from different types of intervention. And to streamline or adapt effective interventions for dissemination on a larger scale, it’s important to understand how various interventions produce positive outcomes.

Charter Schools Always Face a Financial Struggle

Kevin Ferris:

As I walked the halls of First Philadelphia Charter School for Literacy recently with the school’s CEO Stacey Cruise-Clarke, I was struck as she reprimanded a student for “yelling.” I hadn’t heard a thing.
In the school’s cavernous facility there are 30 classrooms, a performance art center, a gym, a literacy center, and nearly 700 students in uniform. It is an oasis in a city that witnesses thousands of assaults in its public schools each year and has engaged in a running debate over whether to arm school security guards. The charter school was founded nearly seven years ago, and is very lucky to own its facilities.
Typically, banks are reluctant to lend to charters because they have little collateral, no long-term funding, and a five-year license to operate that may not be renewed. That is the reality that will confront President Barack Obama if he tries to make good on his promise to expand charter schools. These schools serve a public good, but they are also risky borrowers.
What’s more, while charters receive per-pupil funding from the state, they aren’t given start-up money to buy or lease classroom space — one of the misguided restrictions put on charters that hamper their growth. The president may want more charters — see, for example, his March 10 speech, where he called for increasing the number of charters in states that imposed limits — but is he willing to do more to help charters cover capital costs? At the moment, private organizations step in to fill the void in public funding for these public schools.

Eli Broad dangles a carrot in front of Los Angeles Unified

Howard Blume:

Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad will help pay for a New York-based arts program that benefits poor and minority students — and he said Friday that he and other donors would provide similar funding here if the Los Angeles school district can better manage its own arts programs, especially the new downtown arts high school.
The Broad Foundation has pledged to contribute $425,000 so the Juilliard School can allow dozens of public school students to receive up to four years of free musical training. Broad said he decided to make the gift after reading a newspaper article about the program canceling auditions in a tight budget year.
“It really moved me,” Broad said. “I was saddened they were going to cut out these minority kids.”
But Broad also made a point about problem-plagued Central L.A. Area High School No. 9, the high-concept arts specialty school that is scheduled to open in the fall even though it still lacks an executive director, a permanent principal, a staff and an arts curriculum.
“It’s clear that if you have a quality arts high school, especially one that is educating kids from minority communities, there will be philanthropic funds forthcoming, as evidenced from our willingness to give money to Juilliard,” Broad said.
Such funding will be crucial for the new campus, he said, adding that it will cost more to run than other public high schools. “It will need some philanthropic support, not only from us but from others,” he said.

Do Video Games Give Boys an Advantage in Later Life?

Chris Sweeney:

A new study conducted by researchers at Michigan State University suggests that playing video games helps foster the development of visual-spatial skills among middle school students. Cultivating the ability to think visually is crucial to excelling in fields like engineering and surgery, and the hand-eye coordination attained through gaming is increasingly important in our digital world. But the total lack of games tailored to girls could be providing boys with an academic advantage over their female counterparts.
“Girls are at a disadvantage by not having that three-dimensional experience,” according to a statement by professor Linda Jackson, who led the three-year long study. “So when they get to medical school and they’re doing surgery in the virtual world, they’re not used to it.”
It’s hard to argue with Jackson’s point. If you had to run out and buy a 12-year-old girl a game for Xbox 360, what title would you purchase? It can be argued that games like Halo 3 are not gender-specific, but they clearly attract a predominantly male audience, and are marketed accordingly. Phone calls to six video game retailers around the country to ask about games designed specifically for girls yielded nothing more than a handful of confused clerks.

In the recession, does advanced education really pay off?

Education pays. That’s the lesson of study after study on the income effects of going to college and graduate school. In general, you make more money if you get a higher degree. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have written that since 1980, “[t]he increase in the relative earnings of college graduates and those with advanced degrees has been particularly large.”
The studies that show this finding typically crunch broad swaths of data. They look at the census, or other large population samples, and show a positive correlation between income and years of education. This means that college and graduate school are generally a good bet. But it doesn’t tell you that every single degree pays off financially at every single point in time.

Advertising Campaign for the Washington, DC Schools

David Nakamura:

It’s the rarest of species: a good-news advertisement about D.C. public schools.
“Did you know,” the announcer intones on the ads, which aired last month on WPGC (95.5 FM) and are scheduled to run again next month, “that the only school in D.C. to earn a national ribbon for excellence last year was a D.C. public school? Go public and get a great free education!”
Those terms — describing Key Elementary — aren’t usually associated with a system that ranks among the bottom in test scores nationwide. But the campaign, titled “Rediscover DCPS,” has been launched by Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee as one step toward stemming the decline in public confidence in a system whose enrollment has plummeted from 80,000 students three decades ago to 45,000 this year.
In addition to the radio spots, the $9,000 campaign, which makes a particular push for special education students, includes a section on the school system’s Web site featuring 13 elementary and middle schools, and earlier school registration dates, officials said at a news conference yesterday.

Comments on the New SAT Policy Regarding Lower scores

Michael Birnbaum:

Legions of high school students equipped with No. 2 pencils have done battle with the SAT, but a new policy is easing the stress for college-bound teenagers. If they take the test more than once, they can send their favorite set of scores with applications and ignore the rest.
Before the policy took effect last month, students had no option: All their SAT scores were reported when they applied to college.
The first time Gabby Ubilla took the test, she said, she fared well on the verbal section but was dissatisfied with her math score. The College Board’s “score choice” policy will allow her to push the reset button with most colleges. “Now that I know what I need to study and what’s on the test, I can study different types of math questions” without worrying about the old score, said Ubilla, 16, an 11th-grader at Dominion High School in Sterling.

Washington DC Schools Chancellor Rhee Works to Overhaul Teacher Evaluations

Bill Turque:

While talks between D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers’ Union remain stalemated over salary and job security issues, one critical question is not even on the bargaining table: how the District’s educators will be evaluated.
For months, Rhee and her chief “human capital” assistant, Jason Kamras, have been working on an overhaul of the evaluation system that would expand the ways teachers are assessed. In addition to a system of classroom observations and conferences, it is likely to include methods to track how students’ standardized test scores grow over time. Several major school systems, including those in Houston, Chicago and Milwaukee, have started limited use of this new “value-added” approach.
Rhee is under no obligation to bargain with the union on evaluations, though the union wants to see it on the table and said so in the contract proposal it delivered a few weeks ago. Congress gave the school system sole authority over the issue in the mid-1990s after the WTU refused to renegotiate the then-existing evaluation system with the District.

Which Is Epidemic — Sexting or Worrying About It?

Carl Bialik:

It seemed like more troubling evidence that kids these days engage in behavior they wouldn’t want to write home about. Researchers recently found that one in five teenagers have shared nude or semi-nude photos of themselves by cellphone or online. That statistic has become a fixture in articles about “sexting” and its social and legal implications.
But that number may be inflated, because the same teenagers who have engaged in such behavior could be the ones most likely to say they have done so in an online poll. To find out how many teenagers are sharing personal information over new media, researchers last year asked teenagers personal questions using one of those new media, skewing the sample.
“These kinds of samples select Internet cowboys and cowgirls,” says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, who has used the telephone for his studies of teens and online behavior. “These are more likely to be the kind of people who engage in this kind of activity.” He guesses that online poll-takers might be two to four times more likely to send nude photos of themselves than the average teen.

Many Skeptical That Milwaukee Public Schools Will Change

Erin Richards:

Several Milwaukee School Board members bristled at not receiving or being briefed in advance on a consultants’ report that claims the city’s public schools could be saving more than $100 million per year if its bureaucracy was run more efficiently.
Some said they had already pushed for reform on many of the reported problem spots: streamlining purchasing, selling unused land and curtailing large salaries.
Outside the system, many wanted to know what makes this report – another in a long line of analyses that paint a dismal picture of MPS – different from the others. What, if anything, will be done about the wasteful spending practices the report outlines? And how soon?
Tim Sheehy, president of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce, called the report “eye-popping, but not unexpected.”

The Money Myth in Improving Schools

Jay Matthews:

Hard battles lost long ago leave a mark. (The worst for me was the 1973 Super Bowl.) University of California at Berkeley professor W. Norton Grubb, for instance, still replays the 1971 Serrano v. Priest decision by the California Supreme Court. It threw out the state’s education financing system based on property taxes. He thought the decision was going to make heroes of school financing experts like him who would, he hoped, “improve the minutiae of finance formulas, and equitable and powerful schooling would spread to all children.”
Except that didn’t happen. Federal courts and the property-tax-limiting ballot Proposition 13 got in the way, and Grubb eventually learned his dream was based on a misunderstanding, what he calls the money myth, which he uses as the title of a very detailed and enlightening new book.
The myth, he says, is “the idea that more money leads to improved outcomes, that the solution to any educational problem requires increased spending.”
The Money Myth,” published by the Russell Sage Foundation, has a subtitle, “School Resources, Outcomes and Equity,” which sounds like a really bad homework assignment. But once you get into it, it is hard to put down. Grubb makes a daring attempt to identify exactly which approaches will improve our children’s academic performance, and by how much.

Providence, RI School District to End Teacher Bumping; Plans to Fill Vacancies Based on Qualifications.

AP:

Providence schools are set to phase out so-called “bumping” by filling teaching vacancies based on instructors’ qualifications instead of their senior status.
Superintendant Tom Brady said in a letter Wednesday to staff that six schools in the district will end the practice of seniority-based staffing decisions.
The change goes into effect in the next school year. The rest of the district is to use the new plan beginning in the 2010-2011 academic year.

Documents:

School of Second Chances

Kevin Houppert:

he six teenage boys, incarcerated at the District’s Oak Hill juvenile detention facility in Laurel file into their classroom after lunch one late January afternoon. They are surprised to see strangers — five women and two men — sitting in the chairs that the boys typically occupy.



The students find some empty seats and shrug out of their matching brown coats and mismatched scarves. They are curious about the visitors in a lean-back, fold-your-arms, prove-it kind of way.



“I’m James Forman,” begins a 40-something man. “I’m a professor at Georgetown Law School and — ”



“You related to the James Forman?” interrupts 17-year-old Carleto Bailey.



“I’m James Forman Jr.”



“That your father? James Forman your dad?” Carleto demands.

Student Strip Search Case Heads to US Supreme Court

Robert Barnes:

April Redding was waiting in the parking lot of the middle school when she heard news she could hardly understand: Her 13-year-old daughter, Savana, had been strip-searched by school officials in a futile hunt for drugs.


It’s a story that amazes and enrages her still, more than six years later, though she has relived it many times since.


Savana Redding was forced to strip to her underwear in the school nurse’s office. She was made to expose her breasts and pubic area to prove she was not hiding pills. And the drugs being sought were prescription-strength ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.



“I guess it’s the fact that they think they were not wrong, they’re not remorseful, never said they were sorry,” April Redding said this week, as she and Savana talked about the legal fight over that search, which has now reached the Supreme Court.

More on the Obama Administration’s Opposition to Washington, DC Vouchers

Russ Whitehurst:

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within U.S. Department of Education released a study on April 3 of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to a $7,500 annual voucher for students from low-income families in the District of Columbia to attend private schools. Notably, the study found that students who won the lottery to receive the limited number of available vouchers had significantly higher reading achievement after three years than students who lost the lottery.
Yet last month Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, accompanied by the blogosphere, have alleged that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sat on the evidence of the program’s success. The WSJ writes that, “… in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.” The Denver Post questions the Secretary’s denial of having known the results of the study prior to congressional action, asserting that he was, “at best … willfully ignorant.”
As director of IES through November 2008, I was responsible for the evaluation that is at the center of the controversy. Given the established procedures of IES it is extremely unlikely that Secretary Duncan would have known the results of the study until recently.

David Harsanyi:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is “good for the kids.”
Well then, one wonders, why did his Department of Education bury a politically inconvenient study regarding education reform? And why, now that the evidence is public, does the administration continue to ignore it and allow reform to be killed?
When Congress effectively shut down the Washington, D.C., voucher program last month, snatching $7,500 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers from disadvantaged kids, it failed to conduct substantive debate (as is rapidly becoming tradition).
Then The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board reported that the Department of Education had buried a study that illustrated unquestionable and pervasive improvement among kids who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn’t. The Department of Education not only disregarded the report but also issued a gag order on any discussion about it.

Nation’s top educator warn states against taking money from their youngest students

WBIR.com:

The nation’s top educator headed back to class Wednesday warning states against taking money from their youngest students.
“We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of our young children. We just can’t afford to do this,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
All but 12 states pay for pre-k programs.
The federal government also funds head start, for low-income kids.
Last year, states added more than 100,000 new preschoolers and spent a billion more on them than the year before.
But with five billion in federal stimulus money on the way at least nine states may cut their own funding so there’s little if any net benefit.
Advocates say that would hurt the middle class.
“Children whose families are just above the poverty line all the way up to the median income have less chance of being in a good preschool program than children in poverty. And for children in poverty, it’s less than 50 percent,” said Steve Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research

An Interview with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Science:

What do we know works to improve student achievement in K-12 STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education?
A.D.: I’d say great teachers, who know the content.
How do we know that?
A.D.: I think that’s true in any subject area. If you get outstanding teachers, kids learn.
What’s the evidence for that?
A.D.: Lots of evidence points to the fact that great teachers have an impact.
What is it about effective teachers that makes a difference?
A.D.: Lots of factors. It’s not one. In this area, it sounds like common sense, but still, having teachers that truly know the content is critically important. You can’t teach what you don’t know. So that’s a starting point. Beyond that, what do great teachers look like? They are passionate, they have high expectations–this is a calling, not a job. They go way beyond the call of duty to make sure that students are getting what they need. And they are really able to differentiate instruction, to work with kids who are struggling and those who are on track to becoming the next generation of chemists and physicists.
You mentioned content. But there are studies that have found what teachers majored in in college doesn’t necessarily affect their ability to improve student achievement.
A.D.: You’re right. I’m not talking about what you major in. I’m saying that you can’t teach physics if you don’t know physics. You don’t have to have majored in physics. Maybe you come out of industry, or out of some other place. I worry a lot about how many folks are teaching classes in which they are not experts in the content. To me, that’s a big part of the problem. We don’t have enough teachers today who are experts in math and science. This is not just high school, it’s also fifth, sixth, seventh grade.

Intel Invests in Vietnam e-Learning

Nhan Dan:

Intel has pledged to help accelerate Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training’s e-learning initiative which aims to modernise Vietnam’s education system by 2011 and provide opportunities for the country’s teachers and students, especially those in remote and rural areas.
An agreement to this effect was signed in Hanoi on April 9 by representatives from Intel Semiconductor Ltd. Vietnam and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) under the witness by Prof. Dr. Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and MOET Minister and Dr. Craig Barrett, Intel Corporation Chairman.
Under the terms of the agreement, Intel and local technology companies will make available one million affordable PCs during the next two years. The “Education PC” program’s objective is to provide all Vietnamese teachers with a PC with educational software and broadband Internet connectivity.

Nobel laureate John Nash shares with students his love of a puzzle

Albert Wong:

More than 800 students gathered yesterday to hear Nobel prize-winning mathematician, John F. Nash, Jr. (American mathematician), share stories about his early life.
Professor Nash, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1994 and whose life was dramatised in an Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, told a hall packed with students at the Polytechnic University yesterday how problem-solving fascinated him from an early age.
“From a very young age, when we would start working with addition and subtraction calculations … when the standard kids were working with two digits, I was working with three or four digits …
“I got some pleasure from that,” the professor said.
Professor Nash is in Hong Kong for a week-long speaking tour. Yesterday’s talk, organised by the university and the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, was designed to give students an opportunity to pose questions.

Fascinating.

Math Performance Anxiety

Debra Saunders:

n the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards – that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by “drill and kill” exercises.
When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on. New-new math was quickly dubbed “fuzzy crap.” By the end of the decade, repentant educators passed solid math standards.
Yet the Math Wars continue in California, as well as in New Jersey, Oregon and elsewhere. In Palo Alto, parent and former Bush education official Ze’ev Wurman is one of a group of parents who oppose the Palo Alto Unified School District Board’s April 14 vote to use “Everyday Mathematics” in grades K-5. Wurman recognizes that the “fuzzies” aren’t as fuzzy as they used to be, but also believes that state educators who approve math texts “fell asleep at the switch” when they approved the “Everyday” series in 2007.
The “Everyday” approach supports “spiraling” what students learn over as long as two or more years. As an Everyday teacher guide explained, “If we can, as a matter of principle and practice, avoid anxiety about children ‘getting’ something the first time around, then children will be more relaxed and pick up part or all of what they need. They may not initially remember it, but with appropriate reminders, they will very likely recall, recognize, and get a better grip on the skill or concept when it comes around again in a new format or application-as it will!” Those are my italics – to highlight the “fuzzies’ ” performance anxiety.

Related: Math Forum.

US schools chief says kids need more class time

Kristen Wyatt:

American schoolchildren need to be in class more — six days a week, at least 11 months a year — if they are to compete with students abroad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.
“Go ahead and boo me,” Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. “I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short.”
“You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year,” he said.
Instead of boos, Duncan’s remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.
The former Chicago schools superintendent praised Denver schools for allowing schools to apply for almost complete autonomy, which allows them to waive union contracts so teachers can stay for after-school tutoring or Saturday school.

It is indeed, time to move away from the current, 19th century agrarian model.

Do Study Sites Make the Grade?

Anne Marie Chaker:

At 10 p.m. on a recent night, high-school senior Scott Landers was having trouble figuring out differential calculus in order to compare rates of change.
With his professor unreachable and the exam set for the next day, he sent a shot in the dark to Cramster, an “online study community” recommended by classmates.
Within two hours, Mr. Landers was surprised to find his answer pop up in his email, followed by a few more responses the next morning, all pointing in the same direction. “I thought it was cool that there were people out there actually willing to help me,” he says.
Web sites such as Cramster aim to revolutionize the way students study, much the way that networking sites like Facebook have changed the way people socialize.
Course Hero, launched last year primarily for college students, already holds a library of more than two million course documents, including homework, class notes and graded essays, uploaded by students enrolled at 3,000 different colleges. Koofers (a nickname at Virginia Tech for old tests passed around at fraternities) allows students from about 25 state universities to submit posts about the difficulty of courses taught by different instructors at their schools. It also offers average semester grades from instructors. Enotes, geared mainly to high-school students, allows peers to form discussion groups and pose questions to experts — usually teachers — who are paid by the Web site.

Online charter school rings bell with parents, students

Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:

Learning at home in her pajamas before a computer screen, Emily Brown’s youngest daughter is picking up things in 6th grade that her older daughter is attempting as a freshman at a Catholic school.
For the former teacher, that’s evidence enough that Chicago Virtual Charter School is working.
“The curriculum is better here,” Brown said. “It’s a grade level higher.”
The school, the city’s only online program for kindergarten through high school, has become an alternative to traditional public schools for parents such as Brown who believe regular schools often don’t challenge children enough or don’t give slow learners the extra time they need.

Almost 1 of 2 new Americans in 2008 was Latino

Suzanne Gamboa:

Hispanics made up nearly half of the more than 1 million people who became U.S. citizens last year, according to a Hispanic advocacy group.
The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials said the number of Latinos who became Americans in fiscal year 2008 more than doubled over the previous year, to 461,317. That’s nearly half of the record 1,046,539 new citizens overall in 2008, a 58 percent increase from 2007.
“Latinos who naturalize are eager to demonstrate their commitment to America by becoming full participants in our nation’s civic life,” said NALEO president Arturo Vargas, whose nonpartisan group works to improve the citizenship process and increase Latino participation in civic activities.
NALEO based its findings on Homeland Security Department data on the number of new citizens last year who immigrated from predominantly Spanish-speaking countries.

Newark schools, Rutgers unveil research collaboration

Steve Chambers:

s one of the state’s poorest school districts, Newark has long known it has some severe problems. Quantifying them has been another matter.
Now, the district may be one step closer to getting some answers as Superintendent Clifford Janey joined officials at Rutgers University in Newark today to announce an ambitious research collaboration.
Modeled after a 20-year relationship between the University of Chicago and that city’s public schools, the project seeks to join a growing trend of universities helping public schools use technology to better track student performance. The relationships are particularly prevalent in cities where impoverished students have long struggled and are the focus of growing national concern.

Study Finds Millions in Waste in the Milwaukee Public Schools

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools could save as much as $103 million a year if it operated like a well-run business, according to a much-anticipated report that has Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett taking steps that could lead to a takeover of the system.
The report, released Thursday, concludes that MPS does not have a culture aimed at achieving good results, and is in tenuous financial shape that will worsen without systemic changes.
The report mostly sidesteps the academic side of MPS, concentrating instead on business operations, from busing to lunch programs to purchasing practices to health insurance policies. It found waste in every area – inefficient payroll processing, overqualified maintenance teams, even pencil sharpeners that cost more than $100. The report also found more than five dozen central office jobs with six-figure salaries.
Spending outside the classroom is about a third of total MPS spending.
“To free up funds needed to close its worrisome academic achievement gaps, MPS must first get its financial house in order,” the report says.
Invoking powers granted the state by federal law, Doyle and Barrett said they will move within several weeks to create a council of community leaders to pursue major changes in the way MPS conducts business – and, ultimately, how well it educates children.

Playing Nice: Teachers Learn to Help Kids Behave in School

Sue Shellenbarger:

When teacher Deena Randle took over a Portland, Ore., preschool class three years ago, behavior problems were so bad that “kids were bouncing off the walls, pushing and shoving, not listening — it was wild,” she says.
You’d never know it now. When Ms. Randle calls out, “Eyes up here! I need your attention,” one recent day, all 16 pairs of eyes in her class of 3- to 5-year-olds turn toward her. Beyond Ms. Randle’s considerable teaching skill, she and school officials credit a fast-growing curriculum that builds deliberate training in self-control right into the daily routine.
Behavior problems among small children are a growing issue. The possible causes are many: pressure on teachers to stress math and reading over emotional skills; family instability; a decline in playtime; heavy use of child care; or a rise in learning problems such as attention-deficit disorder. Based on preliminary findings from a federal child-care study, discussed last week at a conference for the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver, the slight increase in behavior problems found in children who spent lots of early time in child care persists all the way to age 15, in the form of more impulsivity and risk-taking.

Triumphing Over Long Odds to Succeed at School

Sharon Otterman:

Before the economy collapsed and thrift became a national watchword, a high school senior named Wei Huang was already scouring New York City for bargains, determined to support herself on the $10 a month she had left after she paid her rent.
Ms. Huang, 20, one of 12 high school seniors named New York Times Scholars this year, immigrated to New York from China with her parents in 2007. But when her parents found the transition to American life too hard and returned to China last year, she decided to stay here alone, entranced by the city’s streetscapes and the thought of attending college here one day.
She found a job at a florist paying $560 a month, and a house to share in Ridgewood, Queens, for $550. That leaves $10 a month, which she spends carefully on large bags of rice, chicken leg quarters at 49 cents a pound, and whatever vegetables are cheapest. Throw in the two free meals a day at school, a student MetroCard and the unexpected kind act — her English teacher, for instance, gave her $100 — and she manages to get by.

High School Dropouts: A Scandal More Shameful than AIG and Just as Costly for Taxpayers

Keli Goff:

They say there are two things you should never discuss on a first date or at a dinner party: religion and politics. But there has always been another subject that is so taboo that most people would rather arm wrestle over the other two than dare mention it.
That subject is class.
Americans have never liked discussing class status. Unlike our founding cousins over in England where your status is something bestowed upon you by birth, here we believe in a little something called the American Dream; the idea that any person regardless of race, religion or socio-economic background can become anything they want to be, including president.
But unfortunately that Dream is becoming increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.
Though Madoff and the Wall Street meltdown have forced some of us to finally become more aware of the world beyond our comfortable middle and upper-middle class bubbles, another issue has been lurking for years that threatens to bring about even greater financial Armageddon for our country down the road: America’s burgeoning dropout epidemic. Before you decide that this issue has nothing to do with you (and therefore decide to move on from this blog post) consider these facts for a moment:

Big Tax Jumps Loom in 10 States, including Wisconsin

Leslie Eaton:

A free fall in tax revenue is driving more state lawmakers to turn to broad-based tax increases in a bid to close widening budget gaps.
At least 10 states are considering some kind of major increase in sales or income taxes: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. California and New York lawmakers already have agreed on multibillion-dollar tax increases that went into effect earlier this year.
Fiscal experts say more states are likely to try to raise tax revenue in coming months, especially once they tally the latest shortfalls from April 15 income-tax filings, often the biggest single source of funds for the 43 states that levy them.
The squeeze is especially severe in states hit hardest by the recession, such as Arizona, where sales-tax revenue has fallen by 10.5%, income-tax collections are down 15.7% this fiscal year, and the government faces a $3.4 billion budget gap next year. But such shortfalls are likely to be widespread; federal income-tax receipts from individuals have dropped more than 15% in the past six months, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Juilliard Curtails Program That Serves Poor Children

Daniel Wakin:

The Juilliard School’s music-training program for poor minority schoolchildren — a rigorous curriculum that the conservatory holds up as a national model — has been slashed, disappointing dozens of children preparing to audition.
The Music Advancement Program will take back about 50 children in the fall to finish the second year of their two-year course. But it has canceled auditions next month for the incoming class, said Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard’s president. About 50 are admitted each year.
Mr. Polisi said that the school could not raise the $400,000 necessary to finance the whole program, and that across-the-board budget cuts meant there was no money elsewhere for it. “I was the guy who started it 20 years ago, and I believe deeply in it,” Mr. Polisi said. “It’s an extremely important part of me and Juilliard.” But the likelihood of raising enough money was “exceedingly low,” he said. Mr. Polisi said he hoped to raise money to restart the program, on a smaller scale, in two years.
“It’s like cutting down the bush, but it’s going to bloom with fresh growth in a few years,” he said. “It’s not going out of business by any stretch.”

A Look at Textbook Prices in Hong Kong

:

The cost of textbooks under the new senior academic structure has risen, with some publishers nearly doubling the prices for certain subjects.
The fewer subjects required to qualify for the future Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination, which will replace the HKCEE, meant longer lesson times per subject, which would translate into thicker textbooks, the Educational Publishers Association said.



Compulsory Form Four subjects under the new system, including Chinese, English language and mathematics, registered an average increase of 8 per cent – with prices for English-language textbooks rising 12.3 per cent.



The average prices in elective subjects such as geography (HK$401), physics (HK$510) and economics (HK$414) have also gone up. Biology textbooks will cost an average of HK$476 – an increase of 87 per cent on last year’s HK$255.



The Education Bureau released the prices of books for senior secondary subjects yesterday after assessing 152 sets of textbooks submitted by publishers.

The Hong Kong dollar is worth .129025 US Dollars at this writing.

Teachers union sent scripted questions to New York City Council members

Elizabeth Green:

At today’s education committee hearing, City Council members took turns questioning Department of Education officials on the rise of charters schools. Their questions were passionate, specific, and universally accusatory. They may have also been scripted.
Just before the hearing began, a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools, discreetly passed out a set of index cards to Council members, each printed with a pre-written question.
One batch of cards offered questions for the Department of Education, all of them challenging the proliferation of charter schools. “Doesn’t the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?” one card suggested members ask school officials. “Isn’t the fundamental problem here the Department’s abdication of its most important responsibility to provide quality district public schools in all parts of the city?” another card said. (View more of the cards in the slideshow above.)
Several council members picked up on the line of thought. “Shouldn’t we aspire to have every school in the city good enough for parents to feel comfortable sending their children?” Melinda Katz, a Council member from Queens, said in questioning school officials. “I remember when Joel Klein became the chancellor,” the committee chair, Robert Jackson, said. “Back then, he used to talk about making every neighborhood school a good school where every parent would want to send their children. I don’t hear him talk about that anymore.”
Asked about the cards, union president Randi Weingarten provided a statement saying that she regretted the tactic. “We are often asked by the council for information and ideas about various issues. Additionally, when I am available, I often respond to what others testify to. In this instance, I was in Washington and couldn’t be at City Hall,” she said in the statement. “I am proud of the testimony we gave today, but I regret the manner in which our other concerns were shared.”

Evers Wins Wisconsin Education Post

Amy Hetzner:

Staving off a spirited run by a political newcomer, Tony Evers went from understudy to Wisconsin’s next schools chief Tuesday with the backing of the state’s largest teachers union and other professional educators throughout the state.



In doing so, he beat back a challenge from Rose Fernandez, a parent advocate and former pediatric trauma nurse who tried to capitalize on discontent with the educational status quo.



Evers won with the significant help of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and its affiliates throughout the state, which contributed nearly $700,000 toward his campaign.



Evers credited his victory to people’s trust in his ability to help improve state schools.



“People recognize that in order to make the changes necessary, we need a candidate with a broad base of support behind him, and we need a candidate with experience behind him,” he said.



Evers, 57, was considered the front-runner in the race ever since he declared his candidacy in October.

UC Berkeley professor takes on school spending
In his book, “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity,” W. Norton Grubb argues that how much is spent is less important than how it is spent

Mitchell Landsberg:

SDo we spend enough on public education? What does it mean that California has fallen from near the top of per-pupil spending in the United States to very near the bottom?
Money has long been at the center of debates over education. Now a book from a UC Berkeley professor argues that the entire debate is wrongheaded.
In “The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), W. Norton Grubb argues that how much we spend is less important than how we spend it. For decades, Grubb says, school spending has inexorably risen, while student achievement has stayed relatively stagnant. Maybe it’s time to look at which expenditures actually improve education, he argues, and which are a waste. The Times’ Mitchell Landsberg spoke to Grubb about his book.
Let me try to boil down the message in your book: Money matters, but only if it’s spent well. Is that right?
That’s certainly one of the conclusions, absolutely. And again, this phrase that I use constantly in the book is, “It’s often necessary, but it’s not sufficient.” So it’s finding what the necessary resources are in the school and then directing money and other resources — like leadership, vision, cooperation, collaboration — to them that makes a difference. And part of the point is an attempt to move the debates away from money to resources, because a lot of the debates in school finance have just been about money.

Serve America Lets Congress Take Another Bow

Gene Healy:

Last week, the House passed the Serve America Act (SAA), which will triple the number of federally funded “volunteer” positions, create a “Clean Energy Corps” to weatherize homes, and make September 11th a “National Day of Service.”
Like many federal assaults on the taxpayer, the SAA is a bipartisan offense: It passed by huge margins in both houses. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, the primary sponsor, got a standing ovation after the vote was in, and co-sponsor Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, gushed that “the whole Kennedy family has been a service family.”
Hatch’s statement neatly captures the fallacy behind the act – the notion that service to America is principally service to the American state.
The SAA is more carrot than stick, subsidizing volunteerism rather than mandating it. But the Obama administration prefers a more coercive approach if and when they can get away with it. Obama’s campaign-trail plan would have forced schools to require 50 hours of community service a year, making charity as popular among teens as study hall and mandatory pep rallies.

Denver Public Schools’ eager to prove its renewal

Jeremy Meyer:

By taking the nation’s education secretary to visit two Denver schools undertaking significant reforms, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet aims to demonstrate why Colorado’s innovation should be rewarded with government cash.
But while Denver schools showed some encouraging improvement when Bennet was superintendent, there remains a question whether there is substance behind the buzz at Denver Public Schools.
The two schools Secretary Arne Duncan will visit today — Montclair Elementary and Bruce Randolph schools — have made intentional moves to free themselves from district and union rules. Duncan will be watching that kind of innovation as his department decides how to divide $5 billion in stimulus funds nationwide through a program called “Race to the Top.”
“This allows the secretary to point to something tangible that should be rewarded in this new world order,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. “People watched (President Barack) Obama run on a campaign of change. This is kind of an attempt to show people what that looks like on the ground.”
But at both schools, the reforms are in their infancy. One has had some modest success, but scores are still low.

Alternative British exam details released

BBC:

A group of Catholic grammar schools has released details of an alternative to the 11-plus transfer test.
Pupils will sit the tests in English and mathematics on Saturday 21 November at 28 schools across Northern Ireland.
Many state-run schools have already signed up to tests in November run by the Association of Quality Education.
Catholic Heads Association chairman Dermot Mullan said it was not just Catholic schools which had signed up for the exam.
“The schools involved are right across Northern Ireland – we are in discussion with a number of other schools as well,” he said.
The tests will be set and marked by the England-based National Foundation for Education Research. Children will receive their results at the end of January.

What is Discovery Learning?

Barry Garelick, via email:

By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have one class and a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”–to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.

Democrats and Poor Kids

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, read to first graders at Doswell Brooks Elementary School in Capitol Heights, Md. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.
President Obama’s stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation’s school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. “I’m looking at the data here in front of me,” Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. “Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That’s real progress.”

A Kentucky View of the “Nation’s Report Card” (NAEP)

Freedom Kentucky, via a kind reader’s email:

The NAEP is a federally administered academic testing program for school systems throughout the nation. NAEP documents often refer to the assessments as “The Nation’s Report Card”.
The NAEP has been of considerable interest in many states, including Kentucky, as it generally offers the only state-to-state comparisions available for fourth and eighth grade academic performance. However, there are often considerable problems involved with making these comparisons, as discussed below.
The NAEP is operated by the US Department of Education at the direction of the Congress. It is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. Since 1988, NAEP policy has been determined by the congressionally created non-partisan National Assessment Governing Board.
Over the years the NAEP has periodically assessed various academic areas.
The NAEP began in 1969 as a strictly nation-wide test, prohibited by law from producing scores for either individual states or local school jurisdictions. The testing samples were drawn from across the entire nation in such a way that the results would actually provide invalid scores even if the students from each state could be separately identified. In succeeding years, more testing has been added to cover both state level results and, most recently, results for some of the nation’s largest urban school districts.

Wikipedia’s Old-Fashioned Revolution

Grodon Crovitz:

In 1993, Microsoft launched an innovative multimedia encyclopedia, Encarta, delivered through CD-ROM. It nearly put the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business. Last week, Microsoft announced that it will close Encarta down.
Encarta could not compete with Wikipedia, which plays by different rules, using the online medium to beat earlier encyclopedias at their own mission. Created and maintained by anonymous people around the world, Wikipedia is by far the biggest and most popular encyclopedia ever. Despite being created by amateurs, it has the potential to become the most professional.
This may be a startling claim. There are infamous inaccuracies, such as the mischief-maker who edited the profile of a well-known journalist to say he’d been accused of assassinating the Kennedys. There have been drawn-out battles about whether the city is Gdansk or Danzig. (And whoever created the entry about me incorrectly listed my ex-wife as my current wife. My actual wife was not amused.)
But Wikipedia is quietly transforming itself into a hybrid of amateurs and professionals. Anyone can create entries — it has 10 million articles in 253 languages — but the ultimate editing is increasingly done by well-trained researchers. This trend is important because by some measures Wikipedia is in the top five Web sites, it is often the top result on Google searches, and it gets 97% of traffic to online encyclopedias.

An Update on the Madison School Board Election

Royston Sim:

One of the most striking things about Tuesday’s contested Madison School Board race is that challenger Donald Gors does not cite any policy differences he has with incumbent Arlene Silveira, who is the board’s president.



“I don’t disagree with anything,” Gors said in an interview after a candidate forum Saturday morning. “It’s just that there are differences in people and what they offer.”



That sentiment showed at the forum attended by about 10 people at the Lakeview Branch of the Madison Public Library, where the candidates presented their positions on a range of issues. For the most part, Gors did not disagree with Silveira, although he did emphasize different things.



“School safety is job one,” said Gors, 58, reiterating a theme that he has raised in what has been limited coverage of a quiet race. He runs two businesses out of his home. He is a distributor for Eco Friendly Indoor Solutions and owns ClearViewCleanWindows.


Gors, who has a daughter at Memorial High School, said schools could install automatic sensors and door locks for security. More importantly, he added, all staff in school buildings should develop a culture of promoting a safe environment at all times.


Silveira, meanwhile, called for a multi-faceted approach toward safety, encompassing facilities, school programs and students.

Waitlisted? Here’s What You Do

Jay Matthews:

Are you stuck on a college waiting list? Frustrating, isn’t it? You feel disrespected, unlucky. But you are not alone. Some selective schools send more wait-list letters than acceptance letters. This year’s economic uncertainties might produce the largest number of wait-listed applicants ever.



What can you do about it? I have some ideas. There is only one job other than newspapering that I would be even remotely qualified for: college admissions consultant. I have written a lot on the subject, including a guidebook. My clients would be careerist, overinvolved parents just like me. In truth, I couldn’t take the pressure, but for fun, let’s pretend that you are paying me $300 an hour to get you off that waiting list. Here’s the plan:



Winning the wait-list game, like getting to the Final Four, is all about commitment. You must decide if a college that wait-listed you is still your first choice. If so, then go after it. (Pick just one school. No others allowed. Otherwise, someone will tell on you, and you will be dead.)

Discord builds over new downtown Los Angeles arts school

Mitchell Landsberg:

A tug of war erupted last week over L.A.’s new downtown arts high school, with some of its biggest supporters declaring that they had given up on the Los Angeles Unified School District and wanted the $242-million campus turned over to a charter school organization. In response to the critics, who included philanthropist Eli Broad, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines shot back: “There is not a for-sale sign on it.”



The tension had been building for months, fueled in part by the district’s plan to reserve most of the school’s seats for students from the surrounding neighborhood rather than open it up to the most talented students districtwide. It bubbled over after two star principals from the East Coast turned down offers to take charge, leaving the school leaderless less than six months before it opens in September.



“This pace is so slow that we have lost total confidence that the district could open this school in September as a really excellent place for students,” said Maria Casillas, president of Families in Schools, a nonprofit organization that encourages parental involvement in education. She is on the board of Discovering the Arts, an organization created to support the downtown arts school, and was on a design team for the school until she recently resigned in frustration.



Casillas and others have reached out to Judy Burton, the president and chief executive of the Alliance for College Ready Public Schools, a successful charter organization, in hopes that she could run the arts school with Board of Education approval. Burton, a former top official at L.A. Unified, said she would do so only in partnership with the district, and with the blessing of Cortines and board President Monica Garcia.

The Orwellian language of Wall Street finds its way to the Treasury Department.

Daniel Gross:

In his timeless 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell condemned political rhetoric as a tool used “to make lies sound truthful” and “to give an appear­ance of solidity to pure wind.” Were he alive today, Orwell might well be moved to pen a com­panion piece on the use of financial lingo. Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly exe­crable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank rescue plan, they’ve been transformed into “legacy loans” and “lega­cy securities”–safe for professional in­vestors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit.
It’s as if some thoughtful person had amassed, through decades of careful hus­bandry, a valuable collection that’s now being left as a blessing for posterity. Using the word legacy to describe phenomena that are causing financial car­nage is “crazy,” according to George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics, because “legacy typically suggests something positive.” More insidiously, the word is frequently deployed to deflect blame. Legacy finan­cial issues are, by definition, holdovers from prior regimes. Word sleuths advise me that legacy derives from an ancient In­do-Aryan root meaning, “It wasn’t my fault, and I should still get a bonus this year even though we lost billions of dollars.”

Boston Teacher’s Union vs. Teach for America

James Vaznis:

But the Boston Teachers Union has a message for those eager Teach for America recruits: Thanks, but no thanks.
With the first batch of 20 corps members scheduled to arrive in the fall, just months after probable teacher layoffs, the union has sent a letter to the popular program objecting to its help.
“We already have hundreds of good, ‘surplus’ teachers; we don’t need [Teach for America] to provide us any additional help,” Richard Stutman, the union’s president, wrote in a letter sent this week. “By coming here, you will only make matters worse.”
While public service is a key mission of Teach for America, the program does not provide free help. Participating school districts must pay the recruits the same salary as a beginning teacher in the district, which in Boston would be $46,291.
Recruits must make a two-year commitment and are allowed to run their own classrooms after completing a five-week training program.

School districts have nearly $1 billion in reserve

Tim Pugmire:

At a time when many Minnesota school boards have been cutting programs and laying off teachers, school districts as a whole are sitting on record budget reserves.
Total general fund reserves for the state’s 340 school districts and 153 charter schools grew last year to nearly $1 billion.
Some state lawmakers have noticed the money. And they say schools are well positioned to absorb a financial hit to help erase the state’s $4.6 billion budget deficit.
St. Paul, Minn. — Gov. Tim Pawlenty and House Democrats want to delay payments to school districts as part of their budget plans. Lawmakers have used the accounting shift before to help balance the books.
Holding back some of the promised funding until the second year of the two-year budget cycle comes at a cost.
Some school districts would be forced to take out loans to pay their bills. But some lawmakers say many districts could handle the shift by tapping into budget reserves.

The Sudden Charm of Public School

Terry Karush Rogers:

FOR some young families who bought during the housing boom, having it all meant an affordable brood-sized apartment in possession of a good public school zone. But other parents in pursuit of real estate never even thought about schools. They assumed they would send their children to private school, often because they too had followed that route.
That was before the economic crisis. Now, as many would-be private school parents scramble for a good public school, there is a despairing recognition that in this respect, geography is destiny: With odds of being accepted into a popular school in another zone slimmer than ever, they either live in a neighborhood with a decent elementary or they don’t.
Renters and first-time buyers are in the best position to light out for better school zones with their young offspring. Meanwhile, landlocked owners — unable or unwilling to sell in a down market or to spend around $33,000 a year to send their child to private school — are panicking.
Trapped by their real estate, these parents are swallowing a bitter pill: had they sold their apartments a year ago, their profits might have financed an entire private school education.

On Music Education

Bob Lefsetz:

First we met Seth Godin at Maison du Chocolat. It was fascinating to hear him riff on music education, Felice’s world. He lamented teachers married to excellence, performance of material that most people were not enamored of. He boiled it down to a sense of mastery. That by learning how to play an instrument, a child experienced a sense of accomplishment. That’s the message of music education, not exposing people to the classics or some extrapolation about IQ improvement. That’s Seth’s gift, the ability to execute an insightful surgical strike, right to the heart of the matter.
Are people ready for it?

Social Media Course Defended on Twitter

Jessica Shepherd, via a kind reader’s email:

Lecturers criticised for setting up £4,000 social media degree are fighting back on Twitter

Academics criticised for offering a masters degree covering Twitter and other social networking websites are defending themselves against the media onslaught – where else, but on Twitter.

Students on the £4,000 one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing.

Other modules on the course will teach students how to start a blog and podcasting techniques. The course is being advertised through a video on the university’s website.

The course convenor, Jon Hickman, who is posting regularly today on his Twitter feed, responded to media coverage of the course, saying it was not for “IT geeks”.

Study Supports Washington, DC School Vouchers

Maria Glod:

A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.

Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.

An Update on the April 7, 2009 Madison School Board Race

Royston Sim:

Mathiak said the district needs to restructure how it approaches school funding.


“We will not cut something for another,” Mathiak said. “We need to change the way we use resources and find other ways to manage them without hurting people. We have to make things more efficient.”


The candidates agreed that schools need to reach out to parents of minorities and form more community partnerships with businesses and groups.


Silveira said schools need to cultivate trust, understand what works for parents and how to make them comfortable. She cited south-side Franklin Elementary, which has parent engagement groups, as a positive example that other schools should emulate.



“It’s very important to remember there isn’t one model, we have to develop trust and understanding between schools and parents,” Silveira said.



One area where Gors and Silveira differed greatly was on the need for continuity in leadership.

Adolescent Literacy Flim-Flam

The Concord Review
3 April 2009
There is no question that lots of people around the nation are concerned about the literacy of American adolescents. They must be worried about the ability of our students to read and write, one would assume. It might also seem reasonable to take for granted that professionals interested in teen skills in reading books and writing papers would give close attention to those students who are now reading a fair amount of nonfiction and writing really exemplary research papers at the high school level.
At this point, expectations need to be altered a bit. Surely coaches of Adolescent Sports have a tremendous fascination with the best teen athletes in the country. There are lots of prizes and even scholarships for high school students who perform very well in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, etc., and there are even college scholarships for good teen cheerleaders. We might think it odd if all high school coaches cared about was physical education classes and even in those, only those student/athletes who were most un-coordinated and incompetent. Not that it is unimportant to worry about teens who are overweight and cannot take part in sports, but nevertheless, coaches tend to focus on the best athletes, and colleges and the society at large seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their job, some would say.
But when it comes to students who read well and write good term papers, the Literacy Community has no interest in them. It is only able to focus on the illiterate and incompetent among Adolescents, and their professional peers seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their real job. And it surely is important for them to help those who need help. They should do research and develop curricula and programs to help teens become more literate. They have been doing this for many decades, and yet more than a million of our high school graduates each and every year are in remedial (non-credit) courses when they are “admitted” (conditionally) to colleges around the country.
Perhaps the current approach to literacy training for young people might deserve a second look. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors, 90% of whom reported that they thought the freshmen in their classes were not well prepared in reading, doing research, or writing term papers. Their high school teachers had thought they were well prepared, but college professors didn’t see it that way.
No doubt many of those students had the benefit of the Adolescent Literacy Initiatives of AdLit.org, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Alliance for Excellent Education, Partnership for Reading, National Adolescent Literacy Coalition, Learning Point Associates, Education Development Center, Council of Chief State School Officers, Scholastic, Adolescent Literacy Coaching Project (ALCP), National Governors’ Association, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Adolescent Literacy Research Network, Adolescent Literacy Support Project, WGBH Adolescent Literacy website, and the International Reading Association, not to mention the many state and local literacy programs, and yet our students’ literacy still leaves a lot to be desired, even if they can graduate from high school.
To me it seems that, unlike coaches, the literacy pros are almost allergic to good academic work in reading and writing by our teens. I am not really sure why that would be the case, but in the last 20 years of working with exemplary secondary students of history from 44 states and 35 other countries, I have not found one single Literacy Organization or Literacy Program which had the slightest interest in their first-rate work, which I have been privileged to publish in 77 issues of The Concord Review so far. They have heard about it, but they don’t want to know about it, as far as I can tell.
It does seem foolish to me, that if they truly want to improve the reading and writing of adolescents, they don’t take a tiny bit of interest in exemplary reading and writing at the high school level, not only in the students’ work, but even perhaps in the work of the teachers who guided them to that level of excellence, just as high school coaches are interested in the best athletes and perhaps their coaches as well.
They could still spend the bulk of their time on grants given them to do “meta-analyses” of Literacy Strategies and the like, but it seems really stupid not to glance once or twice at very good written work by our most diligent teens (the Literate Adolescents).
Of course, I am biased. I believe that showing teachers and students the best term papers I can find will inspire them to try to reach for more success in literacy, and some of my authors agree with me: e.g. “When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports…As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task…In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.” Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, Columbia Class of 2009; North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005……”The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college.” Pamela Ban, Harvard Class of 2012; Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008…
But what do they know? They are just some of those literate adolescents in whom the professional adolescent literacy community seems to have no interest.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

THE AGE OF COMMODIFIED INTELLIGENCE

More Intelligent Life:

The commute is just long enough to be useful. Over the speakers comes the reflective voice of Harold Bloom, telling the businessman as he sits in traffic about the “The Art of Reading a Poem”. Across town on the subway, a student spends the first day of spring break on a visit to the Guggenheim. And overhead, as a plane clears the skyline, a woman unpacks her Oprah edition of “Light in August”.
As a still life, the “Age of Mass Intelligence” is compelling. No one doubts that reality TV and gossip journalism increasingly share mental space with Joyce and Ravel. But intelligence is not a matter of pressing more pieces of culture into the great jigsaw puzzle of the mind. Unless operas and concerts are prophylactics against a churlish existence, we are not wising up. We are merely trying to buy wisdom.
This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.
Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.

Nothing to Think About

Intelligent Life:

There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of “The Sopranos”–the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:
Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: F____’ internet!
Melfi: No, no, no. It’s a European philosophy.
Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus’s novel “L’Etranger” in class. It also doesn’t help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him “in the end, you die in your own arms… It’s all a big Nothing.”
Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.

A Discussion of New York City School Reforms

Jennifer Medina:

This week brought their latest display of strange bedfellows, as the couple, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, co-sponsored a conference of the Education Equality Project, at which the audience included the left-leaning mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker.


The pair is not lacking for shtick — rarely do they conclude a public performance without referring to themselves as looking something akin to a before-and-after advertisement for hair transplants. (Mr. Klein has a rather sparse scalp next to Mr. Sharpton’s signature bouffant.)


Since forming the alliance nearly a year ago, Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton have raised more than $1 million to promote school improvement across the country.


With a coalition that includes several black and Hispanic elected Democratic officials at all levels, the group has embraced many policies once anathema to the Democratic Party — including increasing the number of charter schools, providing performance pay for teachers and expanding the use of data to measure performance at every level of the schools.

Treating Autism as if Vaccines Caused ItThe theory may be dead, but the treatments live on.

Arthur Allen:

A federal court may have changed the public discourse about the safety of vaccines in February, when it dismissed the theory that they cause autism. But vaccine damage is still the reigning paradigm for a rump caucus of thousands of parents who turn to physicians with a remarkable set of beliefs and practices in hope of finding recourse for their children’s ills.


To sift through the 15,000-page record of the Autism Omnibus hearings and the decisions by the three special masters who considered the evidence is to peek into a medical universe where autism is considered a disease of environmental toxicity, rather than an inherited disorder, and where doctors expose children to hundreds of tests simply to justify the decision to “detoxify” them. In some cases, the judges found, doctors simply ignored data that didn’t fit the diagnosis.


The court came down hard on the alternative medical practitioners who tailor their treatments to fit theories of vaccine damage. Among the doctors criticized was Jeff Bradstreet, a former Christian preacher in Melbourne, Fla., who has treated 4,000 children with neurological disorders. Among the children was Colten Snyder, whose case was one of those considered by the court.

The Peter Principle Lives On

Leigh Buchanan & Robert Sutton:

Forty years ago, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull invented business satire with the publication of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. The principle posits that employees are rewarded for competence by being shoved up hierarchies until they reach a position that overwhelms their skills. At that point, they stick. Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties,” the authors wrote. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan discussed the idea’s enduring relevance with Stanford management professor Robert Sutton, who wrote an introduction to the 40th-anniversary edition. (Peter and Hull died in 1990 and 1985, respectively.)

Get Smart: INTELLIGENCE AND HOW TO GET IT Why Schools and Culture Count

Jim Holt:

Success in life depends on intelligence, which is measured by I.Q. tests. Intelligence is mostly a matter of heredity, as we know from studies of identical twins reared apart. Since I.Q. differences between individuals are mainly genetic, the same must be true for I.Q. differences between groups. So the I.Q. ranking of racial/ethnic groups — Ashkenazi Jews on top, followed by East Asians, whites in general, and then blacks — is fixed by nature, not culture. Social programs that seek to raise I.Q. are bound to be futile. Cognitive inequalities, being written in the genes, are here to stay, and so are the social inequalities that arise from them.
What I have just summarized, with only a hint of caricature, is the hereditarian view of intelligence. This is the view endorsed, for instance, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve” (1994), and by Arthur R. Jensen in “The g Factor” (1998). Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned. Critics often found it easier to impugn the authors’ motives than to refute their conclusions.

Intelligence and How to Get It.

Religious education in Germany

The Economist:

BY AMERICAN standards, German culture wars are mild affairs. A spat in Berlin over teaching religion in schools may be an exception. Next month the city will vote on whether schools should teach the subject as an alternative to an ethics course. The debate is only partly about how God fits into the classroom; it is also about how Muslims fit into Berlin.
In most of Germany, the constitution already makes religious instruction part of the curriculum (secular students can opt out). But Berlin and two other states are exempt. The city’s godlessness was shaken in 2005 by the “honour killing” of a young Turkish woman. As an antidote, Berlin’s government brought in a non-religious ethics course a year later.
Click here!
For Berlin’s beleaguered believers, this was both threat and opportunity. Enrolment in (voluntary) religious classes outside school hours dropped. But some religious folk spotted a chance to sneak in more traditional teaching. Thus was born Pro-Reli, a movement that has festooned Berlin with red-and-white posters demanding “free choice between ethics and religion” and collected 270,000 signatures to force a referendum.
The debate is over whether religious teaching fosters or hinders tolerance. Pro-Reli’s critics fear that separating schoolchildren by religion may undermine social peace. Supporters retort that people with strong religious convictions respect faith, whatever its form. Christoph Lehmann, Pro-Reli’s leader, defines tolerance as “accepting everyone as he is”. The left, he says, belittles religious differences and calls that tolerance.

Eleminate the Education Major at UDC?

Susan Kinzie:

The University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its struggling undergraduate education department, which, officials say, is out of touch with current thinking on how to train teachers and fails to graduate the vast majority of its students.
Usually, 7 or 8 percent of the students who enroll in the department have graduated from it within six years, according to UDC data. Professors said that is primarily because many cannot pass a national standardized test of basic high school-level reading, writing and math skills.

Michigan State Test Scores Released

Michigan Department of Education:

Scores on the statewide math tests have risen for the fourth consecutive year, the Michigan Department of Education announced today. Students’ scores in social studies and writing rose overall, as well.
Over 75 percent of students in grades 3-8 tested as “proficient or above” on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) math tests given in the Fall of 2008, including 91 percent of third graders. The greatest improvement was among seventh graders, where 83 percent scored proficient or above, compared to 73 percent the year before.
“There is a direct connection between our kids learning more in the classroom and getting the jobs we need in Michigan’s economy,” said Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. “We are glad to see these signs of success but we know we have a lot of work to do to give Michigan the best educated workforce in the nation and that must be our goal.”
Michigan students were tested in October 2008 on skills learned through the end of the previous year. Students’ MEAP scores are divided into four performance levels: Not Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Students who place in either the Proficient or Advanced levels are considered to be “proficient or above” in that subject.

Academic March Madness

Lindsey Luebchow:

There haven’t been many upsets in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you’ll find that most of the top teams wouldn’t even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.


Higher Ed Watch’s third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn’t on anyone’s radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue’s 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova’s 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.

On Milwaukee’s Voucher Schools

Eugene Kane:

Over the years, I’ve often expressed my reluctance to join Howard Fuller in embracing the private school voucher program.


Fuller is a longtime Milwaukee educator and a nationally known leader of the school choice movement. He’s been involved in efforts to improve the education of black children since long before the program’s inception in 1990.



I have tremendous respect for Fuller but never really agreed with his advocacy of this particular educational policy due to my suspicions of where it would ultimately lead. There are a handful of solid private voucher schools in town, but I’ve seen too many examples of failed schools run by well-meaning adults – and in some cases by charlatans and hustlers – that eventually have left students with their studies temporarily interrupted.



There’s also the corrosive political atmosphere that has turned support for school choice into a partisan litmus test – Republicans for, Democrats against. I’ve often wondered why this community spends millions of dollars in taxpayer money to fund two separate school systems when it’s clear there’s not enough money to fund one properly.


Fuller always had a ready answer. For him, the main issue was giving low-income children a quality education. If the public schools couldn’t do that, he reasoned, why not give voucher schools a chance?



Last week, the debate over school choice reached another level after a long-awaited report – based on several studies of Milwaukee’s parental choice program and Milwaukee public schools – found essentially no major difference in the academic success of students in both systems. Fuller said those conclusions, along with recent proposals by Gov. Jim Doyle to increase accountability of choice schools, represented a significant moment for his movement.

Walter Payton Prep publishes Cabrini-Green issue

Michael Miner:

To their credit, it occurred to the student journalists of Walter Payton College Prep that an important question to ask about nearby Cabrini-Green was whether their own fancy new school sticks in the residents’ craw.
For as the Payton student paper, the Pawprint, reports in its most recent issue, the story of Cabrini-Green is now about demolition, gentrification, and displacement. “The people and the culture of Cabrini-Green are slowly being phased out,” write Julian Antos and Danielle Bennon, “leaving the few thousand remaining residents struggling to make do with what’s left of their homes. . . . The poster child of the transition from a ghetto to a Gold Coast neighborhood is inarguably Walter Payton College Prep, a school filled with good intentions . . . but a school that Edna Morris, a security guard at Schiller [Elementary], thinks of as an outfit that sits in the community but doesn’t make an effort to be a part of it.”
Antos (a junior) and Bennon (a senior) draw a contrast between Payton, just northeast of Cabrini at 1034 N. Wells, and Schiller, in the heart of the project. “CPS thinks of a school with 35 kids to a classroom, no library or special ed. classes, and no art programs as a well-run institution,” Schiller vice principal Brian Billings is quoted as saying. Payton is another world. Someone from the Department of Children and Family Services comments, “You should see the look on a kid’s face when he sees a new school going up in his neighborhood and he realizes that they won’t let him in”; and Antos and Bennon add, on their own authority, “For better or worse, Payton is part of a movement to phase Cabrini-Green out, making the building all the more frightening to local students.”

High School Debate Lacking in Madison

Nick Bubb, via Isthmus:

ast week’s Isthmus reminded me that school board elections are happening this April. The lack of discussion this time around stands in stark contrast to the amount of discussion that occurred in 2007. Some of the 2007 issues stick out in my memory, because many of the candidates chose to highlight the value of speech and debate. Two year’s later, I wonder if the rhetoric of praising the value of speech and debate has translated into supporting the activity.
In the Spring of 2007, as an assistant forensics coach preparing for the state championship, it was nice to hear that members of the community had taken notice of James Madison Memorial’s success. (Memorial won state forensics championships in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. JMM also won last year and they’ve taken individual championships each year). Back then, we were just about the only game in town. Since then, Madison West, Sun Prairie, and Middleton have developed quality forensic teams. At last year’s state forensics tournament, Memorial went home with the championship, West placed eighth, and Sun Praire placed fourth.
Debate, however, is a different story. Madison West has lost most of their debate team; while Middleton has developed one. Madison East and LaFollette, are no where to be found for either debate or forensics. Sure, they have teams. But their teams do not compete in the same way that Memorial/West/Sun Prairie/Middleton do.

Education Secretary Says Aid Hinges on New Data

Sam Dillon:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
aSam Dillon:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
Robert Tomsho has more.
Robert Tomsho has more.

Cynicism We Can Believe In

Simon Critchley:

SOME 2,300 years after his death, Diogenes the Cynic dramatically interrupted a recent New York State Senate committee meeting. Wearing a long, white beard and carrying his trademark lamp in broad daylight, the ancient philosopher — who once described himself as “a Socrates gone mad” — claimed to be looking for an honest man in politics. Considering the never-ending allegations of financial corruption that flow from the sump of Albany, it’s no surprise that he was unsuccessful.
This resurrected Diogenes was, in fact, Randy Credico, a comedian who says he is considering challenging Senator Charles Schumer in the 2010 Democratic primary. Whatever boost Mr. Credico’s prank provides his campaign, it might also cause us to reflect a little on the meaning of cynicism — and how greatly we still need Diogenes.
Cynicism is actually not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word. It bears no real resemblance to that attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness that sees the worst of intentions behind the apparent good motives of others.

Oprah Winfrey school in South Africa faces second sex scandal

Caroline Hedley:

The girls were suspended last week for the alleged sexual harassment of fellow pupils at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy School For Girls in Henley-on-Clip, near Johannesburg.
According to the Afrikaans on Sunday newspaper, one 15-year-old “preyed” on a schoolmate and coerced others into lying to officials investigating the alleged incidents.
Six other pupils have been excluded from the $46 million (£32 million) girls-only boarding school after being alleged to have touched each other intimately, or “intimidating others into partaking of inappropriate behaviours”.
A letter sent to one of the suspended girls’ parents is said to have read: “You have been found guilty of physical contact of a sexual nature with another pupil on campus, harassment, bullying other girls on campus and of being dishonest by not telling investigators the whole truth”.
The girl claims the accusations are false and has blamed other girls.

Wisconsin Lags in Closing the Education Gap – Education Trust

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.

As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.

But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups – and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.

Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, “What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education – fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation – Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state’s young people, communities or the economy as a whole.”

For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.

Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.

This pdf chart compares the 50 States and the District of Columbia.


Related: Tony Evers and Rose Fernandez are running for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent in the April 7, 2009 spring election. Capital Newspapers’ Capital Times Editorial Board endorsed Tony Evers today.

Watch or listen to a recent debate here. SIS links on the race.

Milwaukee’s Howard Fuller & School Vouchers

Bruce Murphy:

c Schools, he was seen by some liberal critics as a right wing-toady who had betrayed his old ideology by getting in bed with conservative school choice supporters. That view was always simplistic, as his bold call for reform of school choice, announced last week, proved once again. His new position – which could greatly alter the politics of school choice – raises many questions.

For starters, why the seeming flip-flop by Fuller? The answer is that he’s never been an ideologue. The old Fuller, after all, was a Democrat. He worked to get Democrat Tony Earl elected in 1982 and was rewarded with a position running the state’s Department of Employment Relations. And his commitment to public schools was personified by his work as MPS superintendent from 1991-1995, which included championing an über-liberal referendum to spend some $400 million to construct new schools, which was defeated by the taxpayers.

But Fuller was more often a critic of MPS, among other things proposing (in the late 1980s) to create an all-black school district that would be carved out of MPS. (That idea, too, went down in flames.) Fuller was always a supporter of alternative schools – or any schools, really – that would provide a good education for minority and low-income students. And he was always willing to work with business leaders and politicians of either party to accomplish his ends. For at least the last 10 years, that has meant mostly Republicans, as he embraced school choice as the solution to urban education in Milwaukee.

But the latest results of the five-year study on school choice, reported last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed there is no statistically significant difference in achievement between MPS and voucher schools. The schools are cheaper, but because of the partisan legislation battles over voucher funding, the program’s complicated funding formula awards most of the savings (some $82 million a year) to every place in the state but Milwaukee. This city’s property taxpayers are paying $45 million more annually for a program that appears to be having little positive impact on education.

Some schools are cutting back on homework

Seema Mehta:

Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.
“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”
Bennett is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years but increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.

Reforming Education in America

Jay MacDonough:

According to a 2005 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student in public schooling. Each of the two countries spends more than $11,000 per student per year, while the average spending in developed countries at $7343. The United States spends 7% of it’s GDP on education, second in the world.
Sadly, that doesn’t mean U.S. students are roughly 50% better educated than the students in these other countries. In fact, (given the topic it seems appropriate to award it with a grade) American education would most likely earn a sold “C”.
The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) showed U.S. student’s science and mathematics scores in the middle of the pack:

Lead on Education

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Just how desperate must public schools get before Texas lawmakers find the gumption to fix the flawed system they created in the first place?
From the perspective of new House Speaker Joe Straus, it isn’t enough that superintendents across the state are pleading that their districts will have to deplete savings, slash programs or increase local tax rates substantially — all of which some have already done — if the Legislature doesn’t repair the funding mechanism adopted in a 2006 special session.
“We tend not to address situations until we absolutely have to, and we don’t have to this session,” Straus said during a wide-ranging meeting with the Star-Telegram Editorial Board last week.
“The political will doesn’t exist to do anything major” on school finance this session, he said.
Straus brings a welcome open-mindedness to the speaker’s chair, something missing during the autocratic reign of his predecessor, Tom Craddick.

Jay Cross Wants No More Learners

David Gurteen:

Take a look and see what you think of this three-and-a-half minute rant about leveling the preacher-and-congregation model of learning from Jay Cross. I of course love it as you will recognize that is what my knowledge cafes are about. You can hear the story here of how I started the knowledge cafes in response to death-by-powerpoint presentations.
But also read the comments on Jays post. Some people do not agree with him. But note Jay is not saying that we need to get totally away from the teacher-student model of learning more that we need to shift the balance. Jay himself is in preach mode in delivering the rant and I am sure he was well aware of it. My Knowledge cafes also have a chalk-and-talk component.

Education Chief Urges Mayoral Control Of Schools

AP:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says big city mayors should take control of their school systems.

Duncan said Tuesday that there’s too much turnover among superintendents in cities where the mayor is not in charge of the schools. He says strong leadership is needed to carry out reform in big cities, where children are struggling the most.

Currently, mayors control the public schools in only a few cities while most others are run by school boards. Duncan told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that if the number doesn’t rise, he will have failed as secretary.

Fascinating: Duncan is a former Chicago Public Schools CEO. His governance point is well worth discussin.

Third Party Group Leafletting for Wisconsin DPI Candidate Tony Evers

Advancing Wisconsin is leafletting (and profiling voters with handheld devices) for Wisconsin DPI Candidate Tony Evers (opposed by Ruth Fernandez) (watch a recent debate), Supreme Court Candidate Shirley Abrahamson (opposed by Randy Koschnick) and Dane County Incumbent Executive Kathleen Falk (opposed by Nancy Mistele).

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

Brandon Keim:

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.
The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.

“Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

US Library of Congress Joins iTunes

Jeff Gamet:

The U.S. Library of Congress audio archives are becoming even more accessible now that the recordings are being added to Apple’s iTunes Store. The move is part of an effort to bring some 15.3 million digital recordings to the public in an easy to access manner.

Matt Raymond, the Library of Congress director of communications, said “Our broad strategy is to ‘fish where the fish are,’ and to use the sites that give our content added value — in the case of iTunes, ubiquity, portability, etc.”

So far, there are about 39 podcasts available, and more files are on the way, according to Macworld. The Library of Congress is also adding its video library to YouTube.

“These services are a place to start learning, but our agreements are not exclusive, so other services are certainly possible in the future,” said Michelle Springer, Library Web Service Division digital initiatives project manager.

Greens in cafe – culture call for school lunc

Timothy Chui:

Schools with cafeterias can reduce food wastage and save about 2.14 million disposable lunch boxes heading for landfills every year, Greeners Action project officer Yip Chui-man said yesterday.

Roughly 380,000 primary school students take lunch everyday, according to Yip, who said over one-third of 13,000 disposable lunch boxes went straight into the garbage, a February to March survey of 212 primary schools showed.

The survey suggested most primary schools want more funding to introduce canteens in a bid to cut down on waste.

With a mere 5 percent drop in the amount of disposable lunch boxes being junked, compared to seven years ago, Yip is calling on the Education Bureau and the Environmental Protection Department to set up regulations to control lunch-time garbage.

A resounding 95 percent of primary schools want public money to outfit them with a cafeteria.

Clever boys dumb down to avoid bullying in school

Jessica Shepherd:

Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.

Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.

The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may “try to fall behind” or “dumb down”.

One boy told researchers: “It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally … then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn’t come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling.” This may in part explain boys’ perceived underachievement, Francis said.

Planting the Seeds of Life Skills

Michael Alison Chandler:

By the first week of spring, a crowd of shivering daffodils offered a lonely spray of color to a still-dormant garden outside Hollin Meadows Elementary School. But the bright blooms were not safe for long amid the prying fingers of two dozen curious fourth-graders.
Winter coats guarded the children against a chilly breeze, but their mittens came off as they pulled leaf after buttery leaf from the flower and gave names to each of its parts.
“It’s breathtaking,” said Nikos Booth, 9, as he rubbed the golden pollen from the stamen onto his finger.
Lots of elementary students learn plant anatomy by studying a diagram and labeling the parts or circling terms on a worksheet. At Hollin Meadows in Fairfax County, they get their hands dirty.

Some Happy D.C. 8th-Graders Moving Up Without Moving On

Jay Matthews:

Christian Carter’s conversation with his mother began last fall just before dinner. The eighth-grader said he didn’t like any of next year’s D.C. high school choices. The places were too scary or too disorganized, he said. He wanted to stay at Shaw Middle School, a former educational disaster area suddenly doing well. Other classmates had similar chats with their parents, their principal and eventually the chancellor of the city schools.
Now, to the astonishment of nearly every adult involved, class president Christian and his friends have become, as far as historians can determine, the first eighth-graders ever to lobby successfully for a ninth grade at their middle school so they could have an extra year to prepare for the jarring realities of urban high school.
Shelontae Carter, Christian’s mother, said he and his co-conspirators, Trevon Brown, Daamontae Brown, Ronald Bryant, Marc Jones, Davaughn Taylor and Velinzo Williams-Hines, were spoiled. They ought to grow up, she said, and adjust to ninth grade in a high school just as she did. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was startled to find the seven boys from Shaw in her conference room, wearing suits and ties and armed with data. She is still not quite sure how they pulled it off.

Dallas-Fort Worth school districts struggle as need for bilingual classes grows

Holly Yan:

Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages – such as Vietnamese and Arabic – but many school districts can’t find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.
“The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages,” said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD’s director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education.
Area districts are recruiting for next school year, searching for tough-to-staff areas such as math and science. But bilingual teachers are also in high demand.
The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language.
In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification expanded the bilingual program to include Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. But that doesn’t mean more diverse teachers are lining up for jobs.
“It’s not common knowledge,” said Terry. “The universities aren’t designing programs necessarily yet to support teachers in securing those credentials.”

The Madison School District, in response to Nuestro Mundo’s desire for a middle school charter, plans to implement dual immersion across the District.

Connecticut Special-Education Advocates Dislike Plan To Change Complaint Process

Jodie Mozdzer:

Parents and special education advocates fear that a proposal before the legislature could make it harder for special-education students to get “free, appropriate, public education” in the state.
Under a current regulation, parents who are unable to resolve a problem with their child’s special-education plan through the school district can appeal to the state Department of Education. The appeal can lead to a state-mediated hearing at which the school district must demonstrate that the education plan adheres to federal law.
But a bill proposed by the legislature’s education committee would shift that burden of proof to the party filing the complaint — which in most cases is the parents.
Supporters of the bill say it would save school districts money and shorten hearings, which can last anywhere from a week to 40 days.

Teach the Kids, and the Parents Will Follow

Jay Matthews:

Like most principals, Dave Levin believed that parental support was essential to a school’s success. So when many families pulled their kids out of his struggling South Bronx charter school after its first year, he thought he was in trouble.
Some parents called him and his teaching partner, Frank Corcoran, “crazy white boys.” The two had recruited 46 fifth-graders, barely enough to start the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy, and 12 failed to return for sixth grade. Test scores were somewhat better than at other local schools, but Levin’s discipline methods weren’t working. By March of his second year he believed that he had no choice but to close the school.
That was 1997. Twelve years later, the academy, saved by a last-minute change of mind, is considered a great success and a model for the 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District. Together, they have produced the largest achievement gains for impoverished children ever seen in a single school network.

Rendell, Nutter fill out Pennsylvania school reform panel

Martha Woodall:

Saying it was time “for a fresh look” at the Philadelphia School District, Gov. Rendell and Mayor Nutter yesterday named two lawyers and an educator who was trained as an artist to the School Reform Commission.
With the appointments, Rendell and Nutter have remade the five-member commission – established after the 2001 state takeover of the schools – signaling a new era in leadership of the 167,000-student district.
They announced their selections at a briefing packed with politicians and educational activists at the High School of the Future in West Philadelphia.
Rendell also announced he had nominated Sandra Dungee Glenn, the former commission chairwoman, to the state Board of Education.
“Your work is not done,” Rendell told Dungee Glenn, who had been part of the district’s governance for nearly a decade and attended the briefing.
Nutter named Robert L. Archie Jr., a partner at Duane Morris L.L.P., and Johnny Irizarry, director of the Center for Hispanic Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania, to four-year terms.

Lower property values hurt schools

Greg Toppo & Jack Gillum:

Way back when times were good — last April — builders showed up one day at Forest Grove Middle School and gutted a little-used classroom off the gym.
Four months and a half-million dollars later, they had transformed the space into a bubbling mini-marine biology laboratory, with five huge, blue plastic tanks for local marine life and a refrigerated tank that replicates the cold-water ecosystem off Maine.
For the first time, teacher Kevin Stinnette said, his students could do hands-on lessons with cold-water species such as frilled anemones and Acadia hermit crabs.
Then the mortgage meltdown hit central Florida, and the crabs and anemones weren’t the only ones hit with cold water. Here as elsewhere across America, hard times have forced schools to trim budgets, freeze hiring and, in a few cases, make substantial job cuts, raising doubts about the future of a range of programs, including the new marine lab.
Already, St. Lucie schools have lost $22 million in tax revenue from lower property values, and the district is staring at a 25% budget cut in the fall. It has frozen salaries and put central office employees on a four-day workweek. Enrollment is down only slightly but if things get much worse, schools in St. Lucie may cut athletics, after-school activities and summer school to the bone — or even consider a four-day week for students.

Surrogacy makes for a perilous path to parenthood

Alan Zarembo and Kimi Yoshino :

Not even jail could keep Nanette Delp out of the surrogacy business.
In 2006, she was arrested on allegations that she stole tens of thousands of dollars from couples who had paid her to find women to carry their babies, according to court records.
While she was behind bars awaiting trial in Sacramento, she continued to sign up more couples, using a new business name and a new website, state records show. Ultimately, she was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading no contest to seven counts of grand theft.
In the surrogacy industry, there are no consumer guarantees. A website is not a professional license — in fact, there is no such thing. Even in California, widely considered the friendliest place in the world for people seeking surrogates, contracts tend to favor the broker agencies, not the clients.
Signing with an agency is frequently an act of faith, sometimes with bitter results. Often, aspiring parents must pay the entire bill — $50,000 or more — in advance. The money is nonrefundable, placing them at the mercy of the agency.
In recent days, Modesto-based SurroGenesis and Beverly Hills-based B Coming have been accused by attorneys or through lawsuits of misusing more than $2.5 million in clients’ funds — in some cases without ever helping couples choose a surrogate or conceive a child.

The Impact of Dropping the SAT

Scott Jaschik:

A new research study — based on simulations using actual student applications at competitive colleges that require the SAT or ACT for admission — has found that ending the requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.
The finding is consistent with what admissions officers have reported at many colleges that have gone SAT-optional. But the basis of this new research goes well beyond the anecdotal information reported by colleges pleased with their shifts. Scholars at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research obtained actual admissions data from seven selective colleges that require the SAT or ACT. Using the actual admissions patterns for these colleges, the scholars then ran statistical models showing the impact of either going SAT-optional or adopting what they called the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach in which a college says that it won’t look at standardized test scores.
These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution — Sarah Lawrence College — has taken that step.)
In terms of other measures of academic competitiveness, the study found that going SAT optional would result in classes of students with higher grade point averages. Dropping testing entirely, on the other hand, would result in higher levels of academic achievement in the entering classes at the public institutions studied, but not the privates. The research will be formally presented next month at a conference at Wake Forest University about college admissions, but the Princeton researchers released the findings Wednesday.

Teacher Unions vs. Poor Kids

Nat Hentoff:

The “education president” remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.



Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.



First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.



A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin’s concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation’s capital?



Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: “Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base.”

Bioscience, genetics, ecology revolutionizing ‘Ag Ed’ class

Erin Richards:

In Craig Kohn’s classroom at Waterford Union High School, students use traditional Punnett square diagrams to study animal genetics.

But they also use 80-pound Foster, the living, breathing class Holstein calf, and talk about his genetics and which of those traits they can predict his offspring may have generations from now.

Using Foster requires more post-lesson cleanup in the school’s agriculture education classroom, but students say Kohn’s lessons bring science alive. It is fun, real and far more engaging than memorizing facts and formulas.

The approach represents part of a revolution in agriculture education that is under way across Wisconsin and the United States.

The so-called “cows and plows” high school curriculum – animal science, plant science and mechanics – once dominated by farm kids in Carhartt jackets and Wranglers has morphed into courses that cover turf management, wildlife ecology, landscape design, biotechnology, organic farming, genetic engineering, sustainable water, biodiesel production and meat science.

The developments have exciting implications, from a wave of new student interest in agri-science to ample post-secondary career prospects.

Many school leaders are harnessing the potential of the programs. The Hartland-Lakeside School District is designing an organic farming charter school; state agriculture officials hope a similar urban agriculture school could take root in Milwaukee.

Curated Education Information