Madison Edgewood High School Wins English Award

National Council of Teachers of English:

The National Council of Teachers of English awarded the “highest award” for literary excellence to a magazine from Edgewood High School.
The Wayfarer has earned the highest rating in three of the last four years. According to Edgewood Public Information Associate Kate Ripple, the school is the only one in Wisconsin to receive this honor this year, and only one of 50 schools nationally.
Diane Mertens, head of the Edgewood English Department, has led students for the magazine’s entire 23 years of production.

Reforming schools starts with audits

School district audits need to be independent

Dennis Willard:

In one of his more significant, although slightly flawed, education reform initiatives, Gov. Ted Strickland wants school districts to undergo annual financial and operational performance audits.
”Just as we provide an academic report card for our schools, we will provide parents, public officials and taxpayers an annual fiscal and operational report card for every school district. That means that when we send districts funding to help students who need additional attention and instruction, we will now be able to track our dollars to see that they directly reach those students,” Strickland said in his third State of the State address.
This is a great idea on a number of levels.
Parents and homeowners would be able to determine whether their district is making the grade on spending. For years, the Ohio Department of Education has issued academic report cards for districts.
Yes, at times, woeful news in the audits would make it more difficult for superintendents and school board members to ask voters to pass levies.
On the other hand, fiscal and operational performance audits would help districts identify and correct spending problems.

On School Consolidation

The Daily Item:

It is troubling that Gov. Ed Rendell’s budget-related proposal to reduce the number of school districts from 500 to fewer than 100 came as a surprise to educators.
Local administrators described it as a “bolt from the blue,” and one local superintendent said he was “shocked and awed” by the scope of the proposal, for which the governor, apparently with little or no comment from educators, is now seeking taxpayer funding for a commission to study and plan the consolidations.
Interviewed this week, several local school district administrators questioned whether school consolidations would actually save money and raised concerns about how the changes would affect educational programs and family involvement in the schools. Some of those same questions were addressed in a 2001 study by the Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Researchers at Syracuse studied the impacts of consolidation in rural school districts in New York state from 1985 to 1997 and found operating cost savings of around 20 percent in the consolidation of two 300-pupil school districts, savings of 7 to 9 percent in the consolidation of two 900-pupil school districts and “little, if any, impact on the costs of two 1,500-pupil districts.”

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

John Siracusa:

I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet’s nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of “the world’s largest e-book store.”
Unfortunately, despite starting the company near the peak of the original dot-com bubble, the founders of Peanut Press lost control of the company very early on. In retrospect, this signaled an important truth that persists to this day: people don’t get e-books.
A succession of increasingly disengaged and (later) incompetent owners effectively killed Peanut Press, first flattening its growth curve, then abandoning all of the original employees by moving the company several hundred miles away. In January of 2008, what remained of the once-proud e-book store (now called eReader.com) was scraped up off the floor and acquired by a competitor, Fictionwise.com.
Unlike previous owners, Fictionwise has some actual knowledge of and interest in e-books. But though the “world’s largest e-book store” appellation still adorns the eReader.com website, larger fish have long since entered the pond.
And so, a sad end for the eReader that I knew (née Palm Digital Media, née Peanut Press). But this story is not just about them, or me. Notice that I used the present tense earlier: “people don’t get e-books.” This is as true today as it was ten years ago. Venture capitalists didn’t get it then, nor did the series of owners that killed Peanut Press, nor do many of the players in the e-book market today. And then there are the consumers, their own notions about e-books left to solidify in the absence of any clear vision from the industry.

China’s high school reform proposal triggers debate

Xinhua:

Tens of thousands of Chinese have joined a debate on whether students should be separated into science and liberal arts classes in high school, a practice that allows them to stay competitive in college entrance exam by choosing preferred subjects.
The debate came after the Ministry of Education began to solicit opinions from the public on Friday on whether it was necessary and feasible to abolish the classification system, which have been adopted for decades.
In a survey launched by www.qq.com, a Chinese portal, more than 260,000 people cast their votes as of Saturday with 54 percent of those polled voted for the abolishment and 40 percent against.
More than 87,000 netizens have made also their voice heard as of 10 a.m. Sunday morning in the website’s forum.
A netizen from Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan Province, who identified himself as a high school math teacher, said “students should study both arts and science so they could have comprehensive development and become more flexible in using their knowledge.”
“Sciences can activate the mind, while arts could strengthen their learning capability,” he added.

Will Clem has more.

How US Students Stack Up

Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?:

Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.
• The U.S. ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.
• In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the U.S., 13 percent of high school students study calculus.
• For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.
• The average American youth annually spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.

Time for that ‘sextortion’ talk with your teen

Jim Stingl:

As a parent, I thought I knew a few things about teenagers. And as a male, I figured I understood how guys think.
After hearing last week about the New Berlin Facebook sextortionist, I’m not so sure.
It made me wonder:
Did Anthony Stancl, the 18-year-old defendant, just one day dream up this scheme he’s charged with and decide to prey on his classmates at Eisenhower High and risk going to prison? Was sex by blackmail really his best hookup option?
Could he have dreamed that 31 guys, tricked into believing he was a female classmate on Facebook, would send along a naked photo or video of themselves? How many said no is not clear, but 31 thought, yeah, where’s my camera?
Do guys now have a good reason to believe that a girl at school truly wants naked pictures of them? And that she’ll send one of herself back to them? And that it’s perfectly safe to swap pics on the Internet where nothing ever falls into the wrong hands?
Isn’t everyone who approaches you online potentially someone other than who they say they are? Kids are adults. Boys are girls. Girls are cops.
Isn’t the Internet both the most fantastic and most monstrous invention in our lifetime?

Madison Math Task Force Report Public Session: February 11, 2009 @ Cherokee Middle School

The Cherokee PTO [Map] is hosting a discussion of the Madison School District’s Math Task Force Report this Wednesday evening, February 11, 2009 in the Library.
Much more on the Math Task Force report here.

Waunakee parents in ‘an uproar’ over teaching social studies in Spanish

Gena Kittner:

Being taught about famous people and events in Wisconsin history in Spanish is not how some Waunakee parents want their fourth-graders learning social studies at school.
“We as parents have been in such an uproar over this,” said Keith Wilke about the district’s elementary language program in which students learn Spanish by having the language integrated into social studies lessons for 30 minutes three days a week in first through fourth grades. “They’re force-fed Spanish.”
This is the third year for the program, which has added one grade a year since 2006 and is designed to continue until fifth grade.
“A fair amount of (social studies instruction) has been in Spanish,” said Wilke, who has a daughter in fourth grade. “The kids are to the point where they don’t understand it.”

Is it ‘merit pay’ if nearly all teachers get it?

Emily Johns:

A state program meant to give only effective Minnesota teachers merit pay raises instead appears to be rewarding nearly all the teachers participating in it with more money.
The program, called “Q Comp,” is one of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s top initiatives to improve schools, and many educators say it is strengthening teacher evaluations and training. But others are questioning whether Q Comp has just become a cash handout.
In 22 school districts whose Q Comp practices were examined by the Star Tribune, more than 99 percent of teachers in the program received merit raises during the most recent school year.
Only 27 of the roughly 4,200 teachers eligible did not get a pay raise.
The state gave schools $64 million to spend on Q Comp, which stands for quality compensation, during the 2007-08 school year. Pawlenty is now proposing to increase spending on the program by $41 million next year. But some lawmakers are questioning that step.
“Why should we expand it statewide when there is no evidence that it’s improving anything?” asked Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan.
“Let’s quit the charade, let’s give every district another $300 per pupil, and quit bluffing.”
Pawlenty’s spokesman Brian McClung defended the program Friday as “a move towards greater emphasis on student achievement and the measures that lead to [it].” He added, “Ideally Q Comp would demand more, but we had to compromise with a Legislature that was uncomfortable going further.”
Test data suggest that, so far, students in school districts in at least their third year of Q Comp have not shown more improvement in reading and math than students in schools not participating in the program.
The Minnesota Department of Education asserts that it is too early in the program’s life to make substantive comparisons about how Q Comp is affecting student achievement. In a statement Friday, Education Commissioner Alice Seagren said the department has faith in the program.
“We believe that Q Comp will lead to higher levels of student achievement, students who are college-and-work ready upon graduation, and a larger supply of qualified workers for our state’s employers,” she said.
School superintendents, meanwhile, say the money involved–up to $260 per pupil this year–has been a major draw in an era of budget cuts.

Continue reading Is it ‘merit pay’ if nearly all teachers get it?

Smaller school districts looking to consolidation

Gena Kittner:

Three area school districts in need of building renovation or expansion are taking very tentative steps toward consolidation — a touchy topic for residents worried about losing a community’s identity.
The Belleville, Monticello and New Glarus school districts, located in Dane and Green counties, are asking the state Department of Public Instruction for $10,000 to study the idea of combining their programs and student populations.
“I think it’s just a case of having a nice discussion and getting solid, objective information,” said Randy Freese, superintendent for the Belleville School District.
Facing continued tight budgets, districts around the state will be looking at options to save money, and “investigating consolidation is definitely one of those options,” said Patrick Gasper, DPI spokesman. “I think we’ll see more people looking into it.”
Using money approved as part of the 2007-09 state budget, the DPI has funded grants for at least eight other district groups, including Pecatonica and Argyle in Lafayette and Iowa counties.

Daley Says Charter Schools Keep the System Honest

Collin Levy interviews Chicago Mayor Richard Daley:

Mayor Daley also sees an important role for charter schools. “You can’t have a monopoly and think a monopoly works. Slowly it dissolves. And I think that charter schools are good to compete with public schools.” Nobody says there’s something wrong with public universities facing competition from private ones. “I think the more competition we have, the better off we are in Chicago.”
But the mayor won’t support vouchers. “School choice is hard. You’re going back to arguing,” he says, trailing off without making clear whether he means the politics. But he does think it’s notable that, while federal money and Pell grants can be used to finance an education at a private college, federal money can’t be used to help students get a private education at the K-12 level.
Ron Huberman, Mr. Daley’s former chief of staff and head of the Chicago Transit Authority, is anything but an education bureaucrat, and that’s just what the mayor wants in the man he named to replace Mr. Duncan as chief of Chicago schools. Too often in the past, before the mayor took over, the city would bring in schools chiefs who seemed to be riding an education lazy-susan from school to school. “We’d give them big bonuses to come here and then when we’d fire them they’d go to other school systems.”

Reduced Prices Affect School Spending Authority

Jason Stein:

Schools would also be affected, since the per pupil limits on how much money schools can raise through property taxes and state aid are also linked to changes in consumer prices. Currently schools are limited to a statewide average of about $9,835 dollars per pupil, Schmiedicke said.
Normally schools’ roughly $270 annual increase in the per pupil limits would go up to reflect the rise in consumer prices. Because of deflation, that $270 increase may stay as it is or be slightly smaller, Schmiedicke said.

Senate Version of the “Splurge / Stimulus”

US Senate HR1 736 Page 1.3MB PDF. Much more on the splurge here. The word education is mentioned 259 times, while school is mentioned 90 times.
Meanwhile, it appears improved PR is on offer by the new Administration:

To improve the bailout’s poor public image, the administration is considering renaming the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program and making it independent of the Treasury. It is also going to announce new terms and conditions for companies that receive or have already taken government aid — in addition to the new executive-compensation limits announced this week — including a demand that they report how the money is being spent.

Related: Cicero & Plato on how republics die.

On Milwaukee’s Education Splurge: “Money for Unneeded Schools”

Wall Street Journal:

To understand the problem with the stimulus bill, it helps to focus on specific parts. Take the $142 billion for schools, which is nearly double the total outlays of the Department of Education in 2007. Now consider that much of this cash would go to public-school systems that don’t even need the money for its earmarked purposes.
The Milwaukee Public School system, for example, would receive $88.6 million over two years for new construction projects under the House version of the stimulus — even though the district currently has 15 vacant school buildings and declining enrollment. Between 1990 and 2008, inflation-adjusted MPS spending rose by 35%, per-pupil spending increased by 36% and state aid grew by 58%. Over the same period, enrollment fell by a percentage point and is projected to continue falling, leaving the system with enough excess capacity for some 22,000 students.
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“In general, MPS facilities have been described by school officials as being in good to better-than-good condition,” reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The kind of situations that create urgent needs for renovation or new construction in some cities have not been on the priority list for MPS officials in recent years.”

Much more on the splurge here.

Did Rap, Crack or TV Kill Reading?

Jay Matthews:

People my age are prone to what I call geezerisms, such as: What’s the matter with kids these days? Why aren’t schools good like they used to be? Where can I get a really thick milkshake? Stuff like that.
You don’t often run into these outbreaks of cranky nostalgia in educational research, but one has surfaced recently. Several prominent scholars have suggested that teenage reading for pleasure, and verbal test scores, plummeted after 1988 because of the rise of rap and hip-hop music and an increase in television watching.
Changes in youthful cultural tastes and habits always push us senior citizens into rants about declining values, so I wondered whether the researchers — many of them in my age group — were giving into one of those recurring bromides that the new music is terrible and will turn our society into a garbage dump.
I couldn’t sustain that argument because the scholars involved (including Ronald Ferguson, David Grissmer and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom) are brilliant people whose work always meets the highest standards of professional inquiry. I was trying to decide how to sort this out when University of California at Los Angeles sociologist Meredith Phillips, one of my favorite writers on student achievement, came to the rescue with an intriguing take in a chapter of a new book, “Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap,” edited by Katherine Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University and published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

A Boost in Online Money Courses

Alina Dizik:

ince September’s financial meltdown, community colleges and universities offering free personal-finance courses online have seen a sharp increase in enrollment.
Many people are turning to the more than 180 business courses offered through the OpenCourseWare Consortium — a group of about 250 universities world-wide, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California-Irvine. These courses aren’t exactly classes, but they offer free access to online syllabi and study materials, along with lecture notes and exams.
An MIT initiative called OpenCourseWare offers business courses online.
One course, “Fundamentals of Financial Planning,” has seen a 27% increase in traffic since September, according to the school. With 48,000 viewers, it has become the most popular of the University of California-Irvine’s OpenCourseWare offerings, the school says. Class takers are given worksheets and assessments to help them negotiate topics like college planning and retirement savings, says Gary Matkin, dean of continuing education. “It’s a cross between a reference and a learning experience,” says Mr. Matkin. As more people are affected by the downturn, he expects the number of course takers to grow.

5th Annual AP Report to the Nation

1MB PDF The College Board:

Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the sort of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 5th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful, data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.

Many links here.
Wisconsin ranked 14th in the percentage of seniors scoring 3+ on an AP exam.
Related: Dane County AP Course offering comparison.
Daniel de Vise has more.
Three California schools recognized for role in boosting Latino performance on AP tests by Carla Rivera:

Three public schools in California led the nation in helping Latino students outperform their counterparts in other states on Advanced Placement exams in Spanish language, Spanish literature and world history, according to a report released Wednesday by the College Board.
Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach was cited as the public school with the largest number of Latino students from the class of 2008 earning a 3 or better in AP world history. Exams are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, and many colleges and universities give students course credit for scores of 3 or higher. Advanced Placement courses offer college-level material in a variety of subjects.
Latino students at Fontana High School outpaced their peers on the AP Spanish-language exam, and San Ysidro High School in San Diego had the most Latino students who succeeded on the AP Spanish literature exam.

The “tension” between increased academic opportunities for all students as exemplified in this report versus curriculum reduction for all, in an effort by some to address the achievement gap was much discussed during last week’s Madison School District Strategic Planning Process meetings. Background here, here, here, here and here.

New Berlin teen accused of using Facebook for sexual blackmail

Jacqui Seibel and Mark Johnson:

A former New Berlin Eisenhower student was accused Wednesday of a pattern of manipulation and deception using the social networking site Facebook to coerce male schoolmates into sexual encounters.
Anthony R. Stancl, 18, posing as a female on Facebook, persuaded at least 31 boys to send him naked pictures of themselves and then blackmailed some of the boys into performing sex acts under the threat that the pictures would be released to the rest of the high school, according a criminal complaint.
All 31 boys attend New Berlin Eisenhower Middle/High School, said Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel.
The sexual assaults occurred in a bathroom at the high school, the school parking lot, a New Berlin Public Library restroom, Valley View Park, Malone Park, Minooka Park and at some of the victims’ homes.
At least seven boys, 15 to 17, were forced into performing sex acts, Schimel said. The incidents occurred from spring 2008 until the time of Stancl’s arrest in November. Stancl had 300 photos and movie clips on his computer of boys from the school, ages 13 to 19, Schimel said.

The Great College Hoax

Kathy Kristof:

Higher education can be a financial disaster. Especially with the return on degrees down and student loan sharks on the prowl.
As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.
Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history.
Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn’t swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.
Kellum’s law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

THE WISCONSIN BUDGET DEFICIT: A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND

Christian Schneider:

How did the state budget end up in shambles? Governor Doyle and supportive legislators lay the budgetary imbalance at the feet of the poor economy. State Senator Bob Jauch went so far as to call the budget shortfall “a natural disaster,” saying it was a “Katrina-style collapse.”
Yet despite these declarations that the budget shortfall is outside the control of Wisconsin’s elected officials, several questionable budget practices allow Wisconsin to continually spend more than it takes in. First, the state has been filling budget holes in the general fund by pouring in one-time revenues from segregated state accounts, paid for with various user fees. According to state government’s own financial records, from fiscal years 2001 through 2008, a total of $2.373 billion of these one time, non-routine, revenues was used to help the general fund show positive ending balances. Much of this came from the transportation fund, which was then made whole by issuing debt to backfill the hole left by the transfer.
With regard to the spending side of the ledger, the state can appear to spend less from the general fund by “offloading” spending to accounts funded with user fees. For instance, in the 2003-05 budget, $100 million was shifted out of the transportation fund and into the school aids equalization formula ($40 million in 2004 and $60 million in 2005). By replacing $100 million of spending previously paid from general purpose revenue with segregated transportation funds, the Governor and Legislature sought to create the appearance that general fund spending was being held in check.

High school hoops coach told to stop hypnotizing team

AP:

A high school basketball coach has been told he can’t hypnotize his players anymore because it sends the wrong message to other schools and could get the students hooked on hypnosis.
The St. John High School boys team — the same team that won state two years ago and finished second last year — was just 7-6 through last week when coach Clint Kinnamon decided to bring in a hypnotist.
He chose Carl Feril, a Church of Christ minister who also is a clinical family and marriage therapist.

Technology not the panacea for education

Todd Oppenheimer:

Now that Arne Duncan, President Obama’s new education secretary, has presented the administration’s $150 billion plan for reviving our education system, it’s time to start separating Obama’s smart ideas for schools from his dumb ones. The first folly Duncan could dispense with – at an enormous cost saving – would be Obama’s desire to outfit the nation’s classrooms with new computers. His big push for this idea occurred in December, when he said, “Every child should have the chance to get online,” Obama said, “and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”
Really?
Educators have been trying to improve schools with every technology we’ve ever invented, beginning with Thomas Edison’s promise, in 1912, to create “100 percent efficiency” in the classroom through the medium of “the motion picture.” Since personal computers and the Internet first arrived in classrooms, in the early 1990s, schools have spent approximately $100 billion on technology. Throughout this campaign, educators and the technology industry have been searching madly for solid evidence of whether the computers were boosting achievement. So little has been found that this data has become education’s WMD.

The Global Achievement Muddle

Sandra Stotsky:

Wagner promotes seven “21st century” skills that he claims are not taught in our schools. These “survival” skills are also being promoted by advocacy groups like the National Educational Association.
Wagner’s list seems plausible. Who can argue against teaching students “agility and adaptability” or how to “ask good questions?” Yet these “skills” are largely unsupported by actual scientific research. Wagner presents nothing to justify his list except glib language and a virtually endless string of anecdotes about his conversations with high-tech CEOs.
Even where Wagner does use research, it’s not clear that we can trust what he reports as fact. On page 92, to discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a “study” of MIT graduates that he claims found only a few mentioning anything “more than arithmetic, statistics and probability” as useful to their work. Curious, I checked out the “study” using the URL provided in an end note for Chapter 3. It consisted of 17, yes 17, MIT graduates, and, according to my count, 11 of the 17 explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/ or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses as vital to their work – exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports! Perhaps exposure to higher mathematics is not the worst problem facing American students!

Seniority-Based Layoffs Will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education

Marguerite Roza:

K-12 school districts that lay off personnel according to seniority cause disproportionate damage to their programs and students than if layoffs were determined on a seniority-neutral basis.
School districts face severe budget challenges with state funding at risk in this perilous economy. In this four-page analysis of K-12 district layoff issues, Marguerite Roza, a senior scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, calculates that if a district is required to use layoffs to cut its budget by 10 percent and cuts the most junior employees, it will need to axe 14.3 percent of its workforce (including teachers) to meet the 10 percent budget reduction.
On the other hand, if that district followed a seniority-neutral layoff policy–say by a standard of employee effectiveness–only 10 percent of the workforce would lose their jobs.
Nationwide, if all districts followed a seniority-neutral layoff policy to save 10 percent, 612,256 jobs would be lost compared with 874,623 lost under a seniority-based policy.

Face of space Tyson laments Americans’ scientific illiteracy



PJ Slinger:

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one in a million.
He said so himself.
“There are six-and-half billion people on this planet, and there are 6,500 astrophysicists, so that makes each of us (astrophysicists) one in a million,” Tyson said Monday night at the Wisconsin Union Theater as part of the UW’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
It’s too bad there aren’t a lot more like Tyson, who kept the packed house enthralled with his charisma, knowledge and off-the-cuff humor for more than two hours.
Tyson is the 21st century face of space, a mantle previously held by the late, great Carl Sagan. Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium and the host of PBS’ “NOVA ScienceNOW” program, aimed at educating a new generation of Americans in science.
And that is no small task.
Tyson pointed out numerous examples of scientific illiteracy in the U.S., including a general lack of understanding and a belief in silly superstitions.
On the screen behind him he showed a photo of the inside of an elevator in a tall building, and how there was no button for the 13th floor.
“We are supposedly a technologically advanced country, and yet people are afraid of the number 13?” he said.

UW’s Delta Teaching Program

Kiera Wiatrak:

In its first five years on campus, Delta has made a profound impact on UW-Madison’s teaching and learning culture. A fall 2008 review found that more than 400 faculty and instructional staff enhanced their teaching practices in some way as a direct result of Delta workshops.
As Delta grows, it continues to receive recognition for its efforts. On Monday, Feb. 9, Delta will be presented with the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education’s Award for Leveraging Excellence.
Delta members are encouraged to take Delta courses and small-group-facilitated programs, attend roundtable dinners and seminars, and participate in the Delta internship program to learn how to implement Delta’s three pillars — teaching-as-research, learning community and learning-through-diversity — into the classroom.

Wisconsin Governor Stumps for Mandatory Autism Insurance Coverage

Channel3000:

Gov. Jim Doyle is stumping for a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism.
Most insurance companies don’t cover autism because it is classified as an emotional disorder rather than a neurological condition.
A host of lawmakers and Drew Goldsmith, a 12-year-old autistic boy from Middleton, backed Doyle at a press conference in his office Tuesday.
Doyle is proposing strengthening current legislation to include minimum coverage levels of $60,000 for intensive treatment and $30,000 for post-intensive services. He said it would cut the waiting list to join a state-run program for autism services by a third.
Lawmakers on Tuesday said they hope to win support for the bill in the Legislature.

The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On

Stephen Downes:

In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. “We want a plan,” said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would – and should – unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year’s experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper – time has done that – but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.

Madison School District Departing Parent Surveys

Via a kind reader’s email. Three surveys for families that have left the Madison School District for the following destinations [PDF]:

Related Links:

The Madison School District’s tax and spending authority is based on its enrollment.

Google and Nasa back ‘singularity’ school for when technology overtakes humans

Caroline Gammell:

The Singularity University will be based at the space programme’s Ames campus in Silicon Valley, USA.
Its chancellor will be the controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose 2005 book The Singularity is Near inspired the name of the school.
He believes that the rapid rise of technology will enable machines in the near future to use artificial intelligence to make themselves cleverer than humans.
Critics of singularity believe such sophisticated technology could end up being a threat to man.
But Mr Kurzweil said it was important to realise the potential of technological development: “The law of accelerating returns means technology eventually will be a million more times powerful than it is today and cause profound transformation.”
Singularity University will accept 30 graduate students in its first intake this summer, increasing to 120 next year.
Despite its name, the college is not an accredited university but will offer nine-week courses exploring ways to ensure technology improves mankind’s plight instead of harming it.

UWM online psych students outperform those in lecture hall class

Erica Perez:

Most sections of Psychology 101 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee fit the popular image of a college class: Hundreds of students pack into a lecture hall twice a week and attend regular discussion sections.
With four 100-point exams making up most of the grade, it is the kind of course an academically weak student might struggle to pass.
But as the university faces pressure to improve success rates for underprepared college students, one professor’s markedly different approach to the introductory psychology course is turning heads.
Professor Diane Reddy has replaced the traditional lecture format with an online version of Psych 101. Students learn at their own pace but also have to obtain mastery, demonstrated by passing a quiz on each unit, before they can move on to the next.
Along the way, students get help from teaching assistants who monitor their online activity, identifying weak spots and providing advice – even if the students don’t seek it.
Initial evidence says it works: In a study of 5,000 students over two years, U-Pace students performed 12% better on the same cumulative test than students who took traditional Psych 101 with the same textbook and course content, even though U-Pace students had lower average grades than those in the conventional course.
The online model, the study found, was particularly successful for disadvantaged or underprepared students – low-income students, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with low grades or ACT scores. And students in general do better in the class, too, earning a higher percentage of As and Bs than students earn in traditional Psych 101.

In Cutting Sports Funding, Everyone Loses

Jay Matthews:

Times are tough, particularly in our schools. We don’t have the money, beleaguered education officials say, for every student who wants to play games after class. Some school sports have to go. Loudoun County is talking about cutting junior varsity lacrosse and all freshman sports. Fairfax County’s proposed budget would end girls’ gymnastics. Other teams are in jeopardy. The public high schools can’t afford them anymore.
And yet many people who reflect for a moment will remember their own school days and see this kind of financial austerity as shortsighted, like cutting back on English classes because most kids already speak that language. Many of us remember some competitive activity, usually in high school, that became a vital force in our adolescence. It gave us a self-awareness and self-confidence that changed us forever.
None of us read all of the 481,563 articles published last year on the early life and struggles of the soon-to-be president of the United States, but most of us know that if Barack Obama had not discovered basketball he would not have become the leader he is today. On the opposite end of that scale of significance, I compiled the worst record ever at my high school, 0-14, in league play as the tennis team’s No. 1 singles player. I didn’t care much about winning. I got some exercise, and something even better. I was a total nerd, but I could strut around with my very own varsity letter, just like the football players. I still carry that morale boost.

School segregation at highest level in decades

Shawn Garcia:

The legal segregation of U.S. public schools was supposedly halted in 1954 by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. But according to a January report released by the Civil Rights Project, school segregation is now at the highest level in four decades.
The study, titled “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,” [960K PDF] concludes that the election of the first African American president does not indicate that the United States has become a “post-racial” society. Rather, it argues against the notion that things are progressing in the right direction, especially in light of the harsh reality of race relations in public education.
The 1954 Supreme Court decision concluded that Southern segregation was “inherently unequal” and did “irreversible” harm to Black students. In an education system segregated by race, poverty and language, most Black and Latino students do not receive opportunities equal to their white counterparts. The U.S. Department of Education states, “Poverty poses a serious challenge to children’s access to quality learning opportunities and their potential to succeed in school.”
Institutionalized racism has effectively replaced the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction period as the basis for continued segregation. Although there have been significant reforms, mostly won during the Civil Rights movement, these victories have been eroded by reactionary court decisions and racist political leadership from elected officials.

Starting Out: The story of Stephen Sebro

Julian Guthrie:

ebro, who had never been to America before arriving in Palo Alto in late September 2005, had dreams of earning a degree in economics and going to work for a venerable bank, either in finance or computer systems.
Now, the 21-year-old Sebro is months shy of graduating. Financial markets have convulsed and unemployment is climbing. And Sebro, who interned at Goldman Sachs in New York in September, had a front row, white-knuckle seat as Lehman – once the nation’s fourth-largest investment bank – went bankrupt.
Sebro, who listens to friends talk about job offers rescinded and about the possibility of taking a fifth year of school in hopes the market will recover, is rethinking his own strategy as he prepares to leave the cocoon of college and make it on his own.
“I learned a lot from this crisis,” says Sebro, an economics major. “We do not know who will fail next. There is a total change in what is considered risky.”
Sebro added, “Nobody knows if a job offer is real these days. I’ve realized I can’t tie my fortune to a big bank. My thinking now is that starting my own business is going to be less risky than going to work for someone else.”

Rochester’s $100K Calculus Teacher: 5 Students…..

Michael Winerip:

But while this generation of baby-boom teachers has witnessed remarkable transformations in their lifetime — in women’s rights, in civil rights — the waves of education reforms aimed at remaking our urban schools that they have been dispatched to implement have repeatedly fallen short.
Ms. Huff has taught both basic math and calculus at East High, a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law, considered by many here to be the city’s most troubled. As I walked in the front door one frigid day last month, ambulance attendants were rolling out a young man on a gurney and wearing a neck brace.
MS. HUFF’S eighth period has just five calculus students — normally not enough to justify a class — but the administration keeps it going so these children have a shot at competing with top students elsewhere. No sooner had they sat down and finished their daily warm-up quiz, than there was a loud clanging. “A pull,” Ms. Huff said. “Let’s go.” Someone had yanked the fire alarm. Ms. Huff led her students through halls that were chaotic. Several times when she tried to quiet students from other classes, they swore at her.
For 15 minutes she and her calculus students — none of them with coats — stood in a parking lot battered by a fierce wind off Lake Ontario. Everywhere, kids could be seen leaving school for the day, but all the calculus students returned, took their seats, and just as Ms. Huff started teaching, there was another false alarm and they had to march out again.

What is School For?

Seth Godin:

Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it’s hard to figure out what to do.
So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:

  1. Become an informed citizen
  2. Be able to read for pleasure
  3. Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
  4. Do well on standardized tests
  5. Homogenize society, at least a bit
  6. Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
  7. Give kids something to do while parents work
  8. Teach future citizens how to conform
  9. Teach future consumers how to desire….

The consumption aspects of this list are useful to consider, particularly in light of some reform textbooks.

More on the Splurge: Federal Spending Largess Could Leave Wisconsin Budget Worse Off

Mark Pitsch:

The giant economic stimulus bill working its way through Congress should deliver enough money to Wisconsin to keep the state from taking such draconian measures to close its $5.7 billion budget shortfall as furloughing prisoners, knocking poor children off Medicaid rolls and slashing school aids.
But the federal largesse — up to $4 billion or more for Wisconsin alone — carries the potential of leaving the state budget worse off in the future if the economy doesn’t recover and lawmakers don’t do a better job than they have in the past of making sure the state lives within its means.
“In two years this money won’t be there,” Sen. Mike Ellis, R-Neenah, said of the stimulus. “The programs will be there, the costs will be there, but the money will be gone.”
“(It’s as if) your uncle died and left you a few bucks,” Ellis said. “And did you take your wife out for a beer and a burger? No. . .You’ve spent the inheritance, and therein lies the problem.”

Jason Stein on Wisconsin’s lack of prudent budgeting:

Instead, they’ve pushed today’s bills off until tomorrow, creating some of the shakiest budgets in the nation and jeopardizing future commitments to safe roads, good schools and aid to the poor, according to a Wisconsin State Journal review of past budget practices.
“We’ve met the enemy and it’s us,” said Mark Bugher, a former Administration secretary who helped write state budgets when Republican Tommy Thompson was governor. “On both sides of the spectrum … politicians have just demonstrated a lack of ability to face the public and say, ‘We’re not going to be able to afford this.’ ”
Showing such leadership now is more difficult than it has been in decades. The recession has struck tens of thousands of families, leaving many workers without jobs or health coverage, and pinching businesses and local governments. Aging roads, dams and bridges require massive investments. The global economy calls for better schools and smarter graduates. The demand to hold the line on taxes is high.

In Black History Month, One-Room School Opens to Offer Lessons

Jennifer Buske:

A 19th-century school that served Prince William County’s African American population opens for public tours today in honor of Black History Month.
The Lucasville School, at 10516 Godwin Dr. in the Manassas area, will be open every weekend this month from noon to 4 p.m. The one-room school was the only one in the county solely for African Americans, said Robert Orrison, a historic site manager for the county. A few one-room schools that served whites remain, but most have been converted into homes.
“We opened the school up last February,” Orrison said. “It’s a great place to learn about segregated schools and how education was done in the 19th and early 20th century.”
Built in 1885, the Lucasville School served children in grades one through six until 1926, Orrison said. About 20 to 25 students of different ages would pack into the building each year to learn from a single instructor. The school was filled with benches, not desks, Orrison said, and blackboards were made of pieces of plywood painted black, unlike at white schools, where students had blackboard slates.

Madison School District Survey for Parents Who Have Left

via a kind reader’s email:

Superintendent Dan Nerad is conducting a survey of families who left the MMSD and invites your participation.
If you opted to not enroll your child/children in their MMSD school — if they attend private school, you home school or you moved out of the District — or you are strongly considering the same and you are willing to participate in this survey, please let Superintendent Nerad know. Send your contact information to his assistant, Ann Wilson (awilson@madison.k12.wi.us or 608 663-1607).

Related: Wisconsin Open Enrollment begins February 2, 2009.

Abolishing the Apostrophe in Birmingham

William Langley:

The problem child of English grammar is a tiny, tadpole-shaped bundle of trouble that makes no sound, but spells chaos. Three centuries after it invaded our language (almost certainly sneaked in by the French), the apostrophe continues to defeat, confuse and humiliate large numbers of people, and, in retaliation, they want to abolish it.
Then we wont have to worry about where its supposed to go.
Last week Birmingham city council announced that it would no longer use apostrophes on street signs . Councillor Martin Mullaney, the Liberal Democrat chairman of its transport scrutiny committee, claimed that dropping them would make the city’s signage policy “more consistent”, and easier for users of computer databases and satellite navigation systems. Apparently, if you have the misfortune to be a Mr O’Dowd, needing a minicab from the King’s Arms in D’Arcy Avenue, drivers can’t find you.
So, St Paul’s Square, an elegant, late-Georgian landmark in Jewellery Quarter, will become St Pauls Square. We’ll have the fashionably de-apostrophised Druids Heath and Acocks Green, but things are unlikely to stop there. Once they start to slide they slide quickly, and it surely won’t be long before Great Charles Street, in the shopping district, becomes GR8 Chas St.

Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else

Haya El Nasser:

City dwellers want out
“City residents disproportionately are more likely than people living in other types of communities to say they would prefer to live in a place other than a city,” Morin says. “Fewer than half of all city residents say there is no better place to live than in a city.”
A smaller proportion of women express the desire to live in the nation’s largest cities. “Women are less drawn to big cities,” says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. “It could be safety.”
Wanting to live outside cities doesn’t necessarily mean people reject urban lifestyles, however. The appeal of developments with an urban flair — ones that combine housing, stores and offices in a neighborhood setting — is growing.

The complete report can be found here.

Students, Teachers Praise Janesville’s Single-Gender Classrooms

Channel3000:

Marshall Middle School in Janesville is in its second year of offering single-gender classrooms, and students and teachers said the program has made a positive difference in their education.
Currently, more than 200 school districts around the country are testing out the teaching method, and about 10 schools in Wisconsin offer a single-gender classroom program.
Marshall Middle School teacher Charles Smith said getting eighth-grade boys and girls to agree on music isn’t easy. But his social studies class is girls only, and Smith said the class prefers to study to the music of Beyonce.
“If the kids are comfortable, they feel better about it. Then this is a good place for them,” said Smith.
Smith said the single-gender classroom is about making students feel comfortable.
While his students learn, he said he’s also learning how to better tailor his lessons.

Houston School Board Retreat Summary: “Differentiated Compensation Strategy”

Ericka Mellon:

*The administration has been developing a differentiated compensation strategy. Saavedra has hinted at this before, but the bottom line is he wants to pay the highest-performing teachers significantly more money. Some proposed details: The district would identify the teachers who rank among the top 10 percent of value-added student test data for at least two consecutive years. Those top performers would get a 10 percent salary increase, and they would have the option — Saavedra emphasized this would be a choice — to transfer to a low-performing school and get another 15 percent salary increase. These top teachers also could get even more money if they agree to teach summer school; rather than the usual $25-an-hour rate, they would get 125 percent of their full daily rate of pay. And there’s more: These teachers could choose to serve as master teachers and share their best practices across the district for 15 days, at a rate of $500 per day.
*Mission and vision for human capital, from Best’s PowerPoint (I’ll try to get an electronic copy and post later):
Mission: HISD’s most important resource in helping our students become college- and career-ready is our employees. Our success to move our organization to its next level of achievement depends on our ability to attract and cultivate human capital and provide the support for our employees to excel in their work.
Vision: HISD seeks to create a culture that values employees who are talented, innovative thinkers who are reuslts-oriented; individuals who strive to increase student achievement and revolutionize the field of education. We know that a wise investment in human capital in each individual at every level will yield success for our students.
*On the recruiting strategy, it sounds like Best wants the central HR department to have a bigger central office role in the recruiting process. Basically, the department would take the lead in identifying talent, wherever it is. Best is proposing a pilot where principals would agree to hire some of the centrally recruited teachers.

Madison School District’s Strategic Planning Process, An Update



I was honored to be part of the Madison School District’sStrategic Planning Process” this weekend. More than 60 community members, students, parents, board members and district employees participated.
The process, which included meetings Thursday (1/29/2009) from 8 to 6 Friday (1/30/2009) from 8 to 5 and Saturday (1/31/2009) from 8 to 12, thus far, resulted in the following words:
MMSD Mission Statement (1/30/2009):

Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.

Draft Strategic Priorities
1. Student:
We will eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring that all students reach their highest potential. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates. (see also student outcomes)
2. Resource/Capacity:
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and vigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
3. Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retent ion of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
4. Curriculum
We will revolutionize the educational model to engage and support all students in a comprehensive participatory educational experience defined by rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities where authentic assessment is paired with flexible instruction.

5. Organization/Systems:

We will proudly leverage our rich diversity as our greatest strength and provide a learning environment in which all our children experience what we want for each of our children. We will:

  • Provide a safe, welcoming learn ing environment
  • Coordinate and cooperate across the district
  • Build and sustain meaningful partnerships throughout our community
  • Invite and incorporate (require) inclusive decision-making
  • Remain accountable to all stakeholders
  • Engage community in dialogue around diversity confront fears and misunderstandings

New way urged for gauging schools
Lawmakers: Measure using college-readiness

Pat Kossan; The Arizona Republic 7:25 am | 55°:

Half of Maricopa County’s high-school graduates who enter Arizona universities or colleges must take a remedial math class. And just under a quarter must take a remedial English class.
The new findings are helping legislators push for a change in how Arizona decides if its high schools are excelling or failing, a move that would topple AIMS test scores as the main measurement.
Two key House leaders are proposing a pilot program that could lead to making the percentage of students who graduate “college-ready” the prime indicator of how well a high school performs.
Rating schools by AIMS scores sets the bar too low because the state’s standardized student tests are based on 10th-grade skills, said Reps. Rich Crandall, a Mesa Republican, and David Lujan, a Phoenix Democrat.
Some educators fear that the new approach would put too much emphasis on college-bound students and not enough on marginal students who need extra help or students who don’t want to attend college.
The findings come from an Arizona Community Foundation study released this week that aimed to measure how well high schools prepared their college-bound students.
The College Readiness Report calculated how many 2006 high-school graduates could directly enter freshman-level English and algebra classes and how many had to take remedial classes first.

Continue reading New way urged for gauging schools
Lawmakers: Measure using college-readiness

Why Easy Grading Is Good for Your Career

Jay Matthews:

New Jersey high school teacher Peter Hibbard flunked 55 percent of the students in his regular biology class the year before he retired. There were no failures in his honors classes, he said, but many of his regular students refused to do the work. They did not show up for tests and did not take makeups. They did not turn in lab reports. Homework was often ignored.
“Still, the principal told me that the failure rate was unacceptable, and I needed to fix it,” Hibbard said. “The pressure to give grades instead of actually teaching increased. A colleague told me that he had no problem. If students showed up, they got a C. If they did some work, they got a B. If they did fair or better on tests, they got an A. No one ever complained, and his paycheck was the same. He was teacher of the year, and a finalist for a principal’s job.”
I often get helpful letters from teachers. They are fine people who assume I am educable, despite evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, as in Hibbard’s case, teachers are so candid and wise I am compelled to quote them, and see if readers share their view of reality.
Here is what Hibbard told me:

Well-Connected Parents Take On School Boards

Michael Alison Chandler:

For a new generation of well-wired activists in the Washington region, it’s not enough to speak at Parent-Teacher Association or late-night school board meetings. They are going head-to-head with superintendents through e-mail blitzes, social networking Web sites, online petitions, partnerships with business and student groups, and research that mines a mountain of electronic data on school performance.
In recent weeks, parent-led campaigns helped bring down a long-established grading policy in Fairfax County and scale back the unpopular practice of charging fees for courses in Montgomery County. They have also stoked debates over math education in Frederick and Prince William counties.

Links:

Duncan: Incentive Grants May Be Used to Reward Rigor

Alyson Klein:

Arne Duncan, the brand-new Secretary of Education, said today that he would consider using $15 billion in proposed federal incentive grants to reward states for setting more “rigorous” standards. The money would be available to him under a broad $819 billion stimulus package that passed the House, with no GOP support, last night.
“There’s a series of things we’re looking for,” in allocating those funds, Duncan told me, in the first of a round of one-on-one interviews he gave to reporters. He indicated that the Department would want states that receive the funds to have a comprehensive data system, strong assessments, and rigorous standards. “With this fund, we really have a chance to drive dramatic changes, to take to scale what works, invest in what works.”
Given his emphasis on standards, I asked him whether he might use the fund to push for national or more uniform, rigorous standards. He left the door open for that. “Sure, absolutely,” he told me (though without committing himself.) “Lots of folks are already thinking this way. We want to reward rigor and challenge the status quo.”
I asked him about some of the reform-oriented programs in the stimulus package. He wasn’t specific about which items the administration had pushed for until I brought up the $200 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund in one version of the bill, which doles out grants to districts for alternative pay programs, the $25 million for charter school facilities, and the $250 million state data systems.

Building hope for financial literacy

Sean Rush:

Rarely in our history have two more critical and incredible moments collided – the Inauguration of Barack Obama and the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We feel the excitement of change no matter what our party affiliation may be, and yet our enthusiasm is tempered by what we know lies ahead.
In Sept. of 2008, our financial illiteracy as a nation dramatically revealed itself and the unraveling continues today. The propensity of many to spend beyond their means and make unwise financial decisions demonstrates that many of us don’t even know the basics of budgeting or handling debt.
But we have an opportunity to turn this crisis into the ultimate learning experience. Our new leaders, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, fresh from Chicago Public Schools, can help make sure future generations don’t repeat our mistakes.

Wauwatosa’s Trade Charter School

Lori Weiss via a kind reader’s email:

Wauwatosa School District officials have found a home for the trade charter school that will be opening for the 2009-10 school year.
For the first year, the School of the Trades will be housed in the basement of the Fisher Building, 12121 W. North Ave.
Superintendent Phil Ertl said the district is looking at the location for one year as it evaluates the viability and efficiency of the building.
It was determined that the Fisher Building would be the best place to house the district’s second trade charter school because it doesn’t need major renovations.
“It’s all there right now,” Jason Zurawik, West associate principal who has been working with the trade charter school committee, told the School Board on Jan. 26.

Middle School Report Cards Continues

Several parents from Jefferson Middle School have been meeting with Dr. Nerad and administrators to discuss the evolution of the standards based report cards in Middle School.
After much research on my part, it is clear standard based report cards are the “new” thing and a result of NCLB. It is easily adaptable at the elementary school, but very FEW school districts have implemented these changes in the middle school and in the high school it is almost nonexistent due to the difficulty adapting them for college entrance. It seems the goal of standard based report cards from the NCLB legistation is to make sure teachers teach the standards. It is kind of backwards that way but many teachers feel it makes sure they cover all the required standards.
Our local concerns and response from district include:

  1. Infinite Campus, which was up and running last year is no longer functioning for middle school students.
    Their response: Yes there are problems and we have provided training but the staff have not taking us up on the paid training made available.
    My response: If you are going to implement a change, since when is it optional to learn a new system the district is implementing. My daughter has no grades, assignments, or anything on IC accept the final grade. When asked if this will be mandatory in the future I was told we have no idea and we can’t promise that it will be. It is clear after two meetings and several discussion with Lisa Wachtel that IC will not accommodate standards based grading. Basically elementary students will never be up. She projected 5 years and the middle school while up it is not easy to use the grade book for a program designed for 100% grading. I am only left to believe 2/3 of MMSD students will not benefit from a potentially good way for parents to stay informed about their students progress, grades, test, assignments, etc…..

  2. While some areas are better (Language Arts, Spanish, PE) evaluation includes written, oral,as well as comprehension for the languages, and for PE it includes evaluation for knowledge, skill, and effort.
    In Math my child made a 4 on Content 1, 2 on Content 2, 1 on Content 3, and a 3 on Content 4. She received a cummulitative grade of D. When I add 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 and divide by 4 it equals 2.5 which is not a D. After much research I found out each area is weighted different which is not explained on the report card. I also asked and it required much investigation to find out what each content area (1,2,3,4) was evaluating. She clearly understands one of them and has poor understanding in the one weighed higher but I had no idea what they were as they were only labelled by a number.
    Administration response: Math is a problem we are working on.

I accept with many reservations that we are doing standards based reporting for middle school students. I am angry that the district picked Infinite Campus at about the same time they were discussing going to Standards Based Report cards and did not realize 2/3 of the students will not benefit from IC. I am also upset that a pilot of the middle school report card was not conducted with staff, parents and student input. At Jefferson the staff feel under trained, overwhelmed and as though this was pushed down their throats. It says to me the staff were not consulted. When the staff person that was in charge of training the rest of the staff at Jefferson is not even using the I.C. it says a lot about the implementation of the middle school reporting. As far as standards based report cards moving to high school for MMSD, this would be very difficult. Not just due to college entrance but because MMSD high schools do not have standards to base the report cards upon.

Do You Want An Internship? It’ll Cost You

Sue Shellenbarger:

Faced with a dismal market for college summer internships, a growing number of anxious parents are pitching in to help — by buying their kids a foot in the door.
Some are paying for-profit companies to place their college students in internships that are mostly unpaid. Others are hiring marketing consultants to create direct-mail campaigns promoting their children’s workplace potential. Still other parents are buying internships outright in online charity auctions.
Even as the economy slows, internship-placement programs are seeing demand rise by 15% to 25% over a year ago. Critics of the programs say they deepen the divide between the haves and have-nots by giving students from more affluent families an advantage. But parents say the fees are a small price for giving their children a toehold in a treacherous job market. And operators of the programs claim they actually broaden access to internships by opening them to students who lack personal or political connections to big employers.
The whole idea of paying cash so your kid can work is sometimes jarring at first to parents accustomed to finding jobs the old-fashioned way — by pounding the pavement. Susan and Raymond Sommer of tiny St. Libory, Ill., were dismayed when their daughter Megan, then a junior at a Kentucky university, asked them to spend $8,000 so she could get an unpaid sports-marketing internship last summer in New York City. Paying to work “was something people don’t do around here,” says Ms. Sommer, a retired concrete-company office worker; her husband, a retired electrical superintendent, objected that if “you work for a company, you should be getting paid.”

Loudon School Board Freezes Teacher Pay

Michael Birnbaum:

The School Board in Loudoun County, where the recession might be having a greater effect on teachers’ wallets than in any other Washington area jurisdiction, late last night approved a budget of $747. million that would freeze teacher salaries.
The spending plan, which passed by an 8 to 1 vote, would omit cost-of-living and seniority raises to save $31. million. It would be the second straight year that Loudoun teachers have gone without a cost-of-living increase. The other type of raise, for rising seniority, is also known as a step increase. The no vote came from John Stevens (Potomac).
Last week, Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III proposed forgoing the step increase, a move he said would align Loudoun schools with others in the state. Some of the savings would preserve jobs that had been in jeopardy.
“We’ve been weighing this against the positions that were disappearing in order to keep the step alive,” Hatrick said before the board meeting in Ashburn. “We’re cognizant that there’s a lot of economic strife out there.”

Private Schools Feel the Pinch Amid Recession

Mary Pilon:

Trinity Episcopal School survived Hurricane Ike last fall. But then another storm hit — the economy.
The Galveston, Texas, school, where tuition is between $5,000 and $8,000 a year, has seen its enrollment drop 12%, says David Dearman, the head of the school. Many parents of its students were among the 3,000 workers laid off by the area’s largest employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch. At the end of 2008, the school’s endowment was $800,000, down about 20% from July.
The school has ramped up donation efforts through its Web site, and held car washes and bake sales. It stopped using substitute teachers — other staff members now step in when a teacher is out sick. “Our school will survive, but it will take years to recover,” Mr. Dearman says.
Trinity Episcopal School is one of many kindergarten-through-12th-grade private schools caught in the middle of an economic tempest: anemic endowments, dwindling donations, financially strapped parents slashing tuition from the family budget, and an exodus to suburbs with more appealing public schools where costs are lower.
“The discourse has shifting from sustainability to survivability,” says Myra McGovern, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Independent Schools.

Obama Should Acknowledge His Catholic School Roots

William McGurn:

Of the many parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, one has eluded all coverage: Both attended Catholic school as children. In fact, while JFK may have been the Irish Catholic from Boston, he spent less time at the Canterbury School in Connecticut than did young Barry (as he was then called) at St. Francis of Assisi in Indonesia.
At a time when America’s 6,165 Catholic elementary and 1,213 secondary schools are celebrating Catholic Schools Week, President Obama’s first-hand experience here opens the door to a provocative opportunity. In his inaugural address, the president rightly scored a U.S. school system that “fail[s] too many” of our young people. How refreshing it would be if he followed up by giving voice to a corollary truth: For tens of thousands of inner-city families, the local parochial school is often the only lifeline of hope.
“When an inner-city public school does what most Catholic schools do every day, it makes the headlines,” says Patrick J. McCloskey, author of a new book called “The Street Stops Here,” about the year he spent at Rice High — an Irish Christian Brothers school in Harlem. “President Obama has a chance to rise above the ideological divide simply by giving credit where credit is due, by focusing on results, and the reason for those results.”

Ohio Governor Strickland’s K-12 Finance Proposal

Seth Roy & Kent Mallett:

At least one local school administrator is encouraged by Gov. Ted Strickland’s education plan unveiled during Wednesday’s State of the State address.
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The plan includes the elimination of phantom revenue and a new conversion-levy option that would allow tax revenue to grow with inflation, Newark City Schools Superintendent Keith Richards said.
“House Bill 920 has been one of my pet peeves since I’ve become an administrator,” he said of the 1976 bill that freezes levy revenues at the amount of money they’re originally passed for. “I believe conversion is the way schools should be funded.”
The other funding portion Strickland addressed — the phantom revenue — means that the state will fund districts at the 20-mill floor, instead of funding them as if they were taxing at 23 mills.
Those funding ideas, however, didn’t hold weight with state Rep. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, who said the solution was nowhere to be found.
“There was no new formula, no significant change. I’m flabbergasted and really underwhelmed,” he said.

Reporting the Stimulus/Splurge: Notes on Education Spending

Ryan Chittum:

‘ve lost count of how many trillions of bailout money have been laid out (fortunately for all of us, Bloomberg keeps track: $8.5 trillion and counting). Layoffs are being announced in the tens of thousands in a single day. The housing market continues to collapse, as does the banking industry. We have a new administration, which has created a huge appetite for any shred of news from the White House. Those two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still drone on. The news industry is collapsing. And Oklahoma is 20-1 in basketball (Beg pardon on this last one.)
But today, the heavy guns are out for the approaching-trillion-dollar stimulus package Obama is pushing through Congress. And it’s an impressive performance.
First, The New York Times has a double-barreled effort with its lead stories on page one today, one about the unprecedented education spending in the bill and the other on the massive health-care expenditures it contains.
The Times is excellent on both counts. On education, it reports that fully $150 billion of the stimulus package is allocated for learnin’. It puts the numbers in great context:
…a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget…
…would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II…
…New York would be among the biggest beneficiaries, at $760 per student, while New Jersey and Connecticut would fall near the bottom, with $427 and $409 per student, respectively. The District of Columbia would get the most per student, $1,289, according to the foundation’s analysis…
And it clearly explains the potential ramifications of implementing such an enormous plan:
Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government…
The bill would, for the first time, involve the federal government in a significant fashion in the building and renovation of schools, which has been the responsibility of states and districts…

Much more on the stimulus/splurge here.

2009 Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Questionnaire

1.2MB PDF File. This document includes responses from Madison School Board seat 1 candidates Arlene Silveira and Donald Gors, Seat 2 candidate Lucy Mathiak and a number of other local and statewide candidates for office in the upcoming April, 2009 election. Via a kind reader’s email.

4 Year Old Kindergarten Again Discussed in Madison

Tamira Madsen:

But there is controversy with 4K, and not just because of the cost. In other districts that have started programs, operators of private centers that stand to lose tuition dollars have emerged as opponents.
That’s unlikely to be true for Renee Zaman, director of Orchard Ridge Nursery School on Madison’s west side, who said last week that her center would be in a good position to participate with a 4K program because they already teach 84 4-year-olds and because all of their early childhood teachers are state certified.
But Zaman also said she hopes that the district doesn’t push a 4K program through too quickly. She is particularly worried that the curriculum might focus too heavily on academics.
One sticking point in past 4K discussions in Madison was concern from the teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., that preschool teachers at off-site programming centers might not be employees of the school district.
But Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews have had many discussions about 4K over the past several months, and Matthews said as long as no district teachers are displaced, he is in favor of the program.

Related: Marc Eisen on “Missed Opportunities for 4K and High School Redesign”.

The Obama Splurge / Stimulus: “A 40 Year Wish List”

Via a kind reader’s email: The Wall Street Journal:

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart.
And don’t forget education, which would get $66 billion more. That’s more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush. Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects. If you think the intention here is to help kids learn, the House declares on page 257 that “No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools.” Horrors: Some money might go to nonunion teachers.”

Jeffrey Sachs:

The US debate over the fiscal stimulus is remarkable in its neglect of the medium term – that is, the budgetary challenges over a period of five to 10 years. Neither the White House nor Congress has offered the public a scenario of how the proposed mega-deficits will affect the budget and government programmes beyond the next 12 to 24 months. Without a sound medium-term fiscal framework, the stimulus package can easily do more harm than good, since the prospect of trillion-dollar-plus deficits as far as the eye can see will weigh heavily on the confidence of consumers and businesses, and thereby undermine even the short-term benefits of the stimulus package.
We are told that we have to rush without thinking lest the entire economy collapse. This is belied by recent events. The spring 2008 stimulus package of $100bn (€76bn, £71bn) in tax rebates was rushed into effect in a similar way and we now know it had little stimulus effect. The rebates were largely saved or used to pay down credit card debt, rather than spent. The $700bn troubled asset relief programme bail-out was also rushed into effect and its results have been notoriously poor.
The Tarp has not revived the banks or their lending, but it has supported a massive transfer of taxpayer wealth to the management and owners of well-connected financial institutions. Some of those transfers – as in the case of Merrill Lynch using its government-financed sale to Bank of America to enable $4bn in bonuses last month – are beyond egregious. Yet the US is now inured to corruption and in such a rush that even billions of dollars of public funds shovelled into Merrill’s private pockets in broad daylight barely merited a day’s news cycle.

More from Victor Davis Hanson and Greg Mankiw on the Congressional Budget Office:

So only 8 percent of this spending occurs in budget year 2009, and only 41 percent occurs in first two years. Note that spending on transfer payments and tax relief occurs much faster than this: click through to the above link for details.

Mario Rizzo quotes Keynes:

“Organized public works, at home and abroad, may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organisation (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle.”

Finally, a look at the origins of the Madison School District’s $18M slice of the splurge. Long time Wisconsin Congressman David Obey is chair of the House Appropriations Committee, a position that gives him a prime seat for earmarks.
Finally, Nanette Asimove notes the proposed borrowing and printing money for California.

World Chess Queen is a Model Player

Evan Benn:

The best women’s chess player in the world flipped a dirty diaper into the trash as she pondered her next move after a dominating year.
“I want to open a chess academy online, keep training, doing the podcast,” says south Floridian Alexandra Kosteniuk. “But right now, my priority is being a mother.”
Kosteniuk, 24, won the Women’s World Chess Championship in her homeland, Russia, in September. After several months of travelling the globe, Kosteniuk, her husband, Diego Garces, and their 20-month-old daughter Francesca are home.
About 3,000 people subscribe to her podcast at chessiscool.com, and about 10,000 others log on each month to her website, where they can see photos of Kosteniuk in bikinis and buy her instructional DVDs. “It’s the most popular chess site out there,” says her husband, 49, who is also her webmaster and publicist.

Obama Stimulus/Splurge K-12 Reform Initiatives Gone?

Mike Petrelli:

I’m writing about the Democrats’ intra-party squabbles on schools, the kind that exploded during the campaign and grew more vociferous in the election’s aftermath but quieted down somewhat with President Obama’s appointment of (consensus candidate) Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Well, they’ve returned. Word is that Senate Democrats have stripped virtually all of the reform-friendly provisions out of the House stimulus bill (a bill that was not terribly reform-friendly to begin with ). The Teacher Incentive Fund (which supports merit pay programs): gone. Charter school facilities dollars: gone. Money for data infrastructure projects: gone. Language ensuring that charter schools have equitable access to the money: gone. The teachers unions firmly in control of the Democratic Party: back with a vengeance.

Related: Carl Hulse talks with the Splurge’s author: 40 year congressional veteran David Obey (D-Wisconsin):

Indeed, it was Mr. Obey, the third-most-senior member of the House, who, in large measure, shaped the bill, in concert with other House Democratic leaders. And though Mr. Obama has embraced the bill, not a single House Republican has lent it support. The president himself is scheduled to visit Capitol Hill on Tuesday to try to address Republican concerns that Mr. Obey and others are using the legislation to push vast amounts of money into health care and other favored initiatives.
Mr. Obey’s impatience, temper and occasionally cutting tone are well known. Even as he outlined the economic plan before Mr. Obama’s inauguration, he flippantly referred to the new president as “the crown prince.” The remark was evidence that Mr. Obey, like other veteran chairmen involved in writing the stimulus package, might not be entirely deferential to the new president until he proved he could exert his influence.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California placed Mr. Obey in charge of producing the economic measure and shares his view that the spending for health, nutrition and unemployment programs is justified and a quicker way than tax breaks to pump money into the economy. Ms. Pelosi is very loyal to the chairman, who was a top ally in her 2001 race for Democratic whip.
Putting the economic bill together turned out to be challenging. Mr. Obey and a contingent of Democratic staff members worked over the holidays, meeting with other lawmakers. They were in talks with Rahm Emanuel, who was soon to be the White House chief of staff, and Rob Nabors, a former staff director of the Appropriations Committee who had left to join the Obama team as a budget official.

More here:

For some House Democrats, the problem is less a matter of balancing the short and long term than a shortage of focus and will on the part of the administration. Their disappointment centers on the relatively small amount devoted to long-lasting infrastructure investments in favor of spending on a long list of government programs. While each serves a purpose, the critics say, they add up to less than the sum of their parts, and fall far short of the transformative New Deal-like vision many of them had entertained.
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The bill to be voted on today includes $30 billion for roads and bridges, $9 billion for public transit and $1 billion for inter-city rail — less than 5 percent of the package’s total spending. Administration officials have said they did not push for more infrastructure spending because of concerns about how many projects are “shovel ready” — a view that House members say is held most strongly by Lawrence H. Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser.

Gates Advocates Charter School Growth

Bill Gates 2009 Letter:

These successes and failures have underscored the need to aim high and embrace change in America’s schools. Our goal as a nation should be to ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025. This goal will probably be more difficult to achieve than anything else the foundation works on, because change comes so slowly and is so hard to measure. Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. And as the successes show, some schools are making real progress.
Based on what the foundation has learned so far, we have refined our strategy. We will continue to invest in replicating the school models that worked the best. Almost all of these schools are charter schools. Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.
One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students.

California Plans to Reduce Education Spending

Jordan Rau & Evan Halper:

Although lawmakers continue to argue over how to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis, they already have endorsed $6 billion in spending cuts that provide a painful preview of what is likely to be in store for Californians.
The proposed cuts would mean that money for the state’s university systems would decrease. Transportation and schools would take a hit. Funds for regional centers that help treat developmental disabilities in babies and toddlers would decline. Cash to help the elderly, blind and disabled keep up with rising food costs would be slashed.
None of these cuts has been enacted. But the fact that they were included in the fiscal plan that Democrats passed last month — and have been separately backed by Republicans — ensures that they will be at the top of the list when lawmakers finally decide how to bridge a budget gap projected to exceed $40 billion within a year and a half.

School Spotlight: McFarland School Forest becomes classroom outside the classroom

Pamela Cotant:

Indian Mound Middle School students are spending study halls in an outdoor classroom right next to their school.
Two groups of sixth-graders trek weekly through the McFarland School Forest adjacent to their school during their study hall period. They participate in various activities such as the recent scavenger hunt to look for and photograph things like deer tracks and evidence of animals eating.
“It’s just a good way to get outdoors (and) shed off the extra energy we have,” said sixth-grader Dayne Mickelson. “We just have one recess.”
The field trips are part of an effort to have students spend more time in the immense natural resource in the school’s backyard.
“I would love to take every child in this school out in the woods as much as possible,” said Janet Moore, community outreach/school forest coordinator in the McFarland School District. “It is good to kind of get an ongoing relationship with the place.”

Obama Stimulus/Splurge: School money will be hard to cut later

Libby Quaid & Justin Pope:

Democrats want to use the big spending package designed to jump-start the staggering economy to send billions to long-term programs to help poor and disabled school children.
President Barack Obama’s recovery plan amounts to the biggest increase ever in federal money for schools. Many Republicans say it is not a short-term boost but an immense expansion that will be impossible to roll back.
“What will happen two years from now when the Democrat spending spree comes to an end?” asked California Rep. Buck McKeon, top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee.
“It’ll never go away,” said Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “You’re talking about a permanent increase at a time when we are in the worst financial shape we’ve ever been in.”
The measure making its way through Congress would achieve a long-sought goal of Obama and other Democrats. For the first time, it would fully fund No Child Left Behind, former President George W. Bush’s education program. Democrats complain Bush never provided enough money for the kindergarten-through-12th grade program.
Not a coincidence, critics said.

Related: Democrats dispute the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the stimulus/splurge.

Minnesota’s Shared School Services Proposal

Joe Kimball, via a kind reader’s email:

Some details emerged today from the proposal by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and several lawmakers for what they call a bipartisan effort to require Minnesota school districts and charter schools to combine efforts to reduce costs.
Under their Minnesota K-12 Shared Service proposal, school districts and charter schools will be able to pool their purchasing power for information technology, food services, supplies and equipment, operations, transportation and other goods and services. All Minnesota public school districts and charter schools will be required to participate in shared services.
The proposal calls for the Minnesota Department of Education to create and maintain a list of preferred vendors for various shared services. Once the list was compiled, the ed department would create contracts with the preferred vendors on behalf of the state and work with school administrators, educators and other stakeholders on a two-year shared-services plan to best realize cost savings.

Discussion here:

he bill would require (note the “require” part) all public K-12 and charter schools to purchase services in the following areas from a list of approved vendors: all school materials, supplies, tools, and equipment for school facilities operations and maintenance; technology equipment and communication services; food services; and transportation services. MDE would be responsible for approving the vendors and maintaining the list. The bill would be effective July 1, 2009. A consultant would be hired for the first two years to help the department implement the program. The consultant would be paid on a percentage of realized savings not to exceed 5%. The consultant’s fee would be paid from the savings realized by individual school districts, so each district would have to calculate how much their participation in the shared services program had saved them. MDE would reduce their state funding by a certain amount to recover the funds to pay the consultant. Each district’s savings would be required to be allocated to “classroom education.”
The senators quickly moved to the heart of the matter, and Sen. Bonoff introduced a Mr. Dahl from Deloitte, the accounting firm. Apparently Deloitte had done some work on shared services in schools in Pennsylvania. He shared a PowerPoint with the committee describing the benefits and anticipated savings. He estimated a potential savings for MN schools of $1M/week. The questions starting coming right after he was done.
Sen. Hann (R-Eden Prairie) wondered how the new bureaucracy would not consume all of the potential savings. Dahl recognized the work of the OET and existing service coops and said that their work would be made more effective.
Sen. Hann asked if it was possible that some schools in the state would see an increase in their costs because they had already negotiated very favorable contracts. Dahl said possible, but not likely.
Sen. Hann asked what constitutes “classroom use” for the allocation of savings. Sen. Bonoff said that the intent of the legislation is to be “loose” with the classroom use restriction.
Sen. Saltzman (DFL-Woodbury) asked if the bill would have curriculum implications for textbooks, etc. Bonoff said no.

Dubuque’s School Referendum

Telegraph Herald:

When voters on Feb. 3 decide on the Dubuque Community School District’s tax proposal, the decision comes down to one thing: trust.

Do they trust school officials when they say this is a revenue-neutral proposition?

Basically, the school district is cash-strapped in one account and adequately funded in another — but money from those funds cannot be commingled.

So, the proposal is that voters double the Instructional Support Levy and the school board promises to reduce the Cash Reserve Levy an equivalent amount. That way, taxpayers will pay the same but the district has the authority to spend dollars where they are most needed.

Voters should support the change.

However, taxing issues are never that simple. Taxpayers might vote against the Instructional Support Levy if they don’t trust the school district to keep its word. It’s a matter of trust. During this past decade, especially, the Dubuque Community School District has worked hard to earn and retain citizens’ trust.

In School for the First Time, Teenage Immigrants Struggle

Jennifer Medina:

Fanta Konneh is the first girl in her family to go to school. Not the first to go to college, or to graduate from high school. Fanta, 18, who grew up in Guinea after her family fled Liberia, became the first to walk into a classroom of any kind last year.
“Just the boys go to school, so I always knew I was left out,” said Fanta, a student at Ellis Preparatory Academy in the South Bronx. “But here, I am trying. I can say many things I did not know before. I can learn things more.”
New York City classrooms have long been filled with children from all over the world, and the education challenges they bring with them. But hidden among the nearly 150,000 students across the city still struggling to learn English are an estimated 15,100 who, like Fanta, have had little or no formal schooling and are often illiterate in their native languages.
More than half of these arrive as older teenagers and land in the city’s high schools, where they must learn how to learn even as their peers prepare for state subject exams required for a diploma.

Schools debate: Is cursive writing worth teaching?

Megan Downs:

Are the flowing curves and fancy loops of cursive writing disappearing from elementary school classrooms?
Some fear classic penmanship has been left behind as preparation for state assessment tests dominates class time. Others blame the rise of the Internet, combined with a push to ensure that children are technologically literate, for rendering delicate handwriting an art of yesteryear.
“With all the other subjects we must teach, we just don’t have the time to spend a lot of effort on cursive,” said Carl Brown, principal of Manatee Elementary in Viera, Fla.
That’s a big change from years past. Brown recalled that he had to attend a summertime handwriting camp in Brevard County, Fla., about 25 years ago because of his illegible scrawl.

Success, Learned and Taught

Joyce Roche CEO of Girls, Inc.:

I WAS born in Iberville, La. My mom moved to New Orleans after my dad died in an accident. I have seven sisters and three brothers; all but one brother are still living. At the time we moved, I was the baby of the family. My mom had two other children after she remarried.
When I was growing up, segregation was real. When we rode the bus, there was something we called the screen. African-Americans, or Negroes as we were called then, were expected to sit behind a piece of wood. Since where we lived had movie theaters and grocery stores, it was only when we traveled to Canal Street to department stores that segregation was most noticeable.
One of my older sisters moved in with my Aunt Rose, my mother’s sister, who was married but had no children of her own. Soon I lived there almost permanently, too. She made sure I was doing well in everything at school. As a black female, I expected to be a nurse, a teacher or a social worker. I had an English teacher in high school who made me feel like an A student, even though I was a strong B student. She became the person I could see myself being.

Girls Inc website.

Professor wants ‘risk literacy’ on the curriculum

Mark Henderson:

Pupils in every secondary school should be taught the statistical skills they need to make sensible life decisions, one of Britain’s leading mathematicians says.
A basic grasp of statistics and probability — “risk literacy” – is critical to making choices about health, money and even education, yet it is largely ignored by the national curriculum, according to the UK’s only Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk.
David Spiegelhalter, of the University of Cambridge, told The Times that as the internet transformed access to information, it was becoming more important than ever to teach people how best to interpret data.
Familiarity with statistical thinking and the principles of risk could help people to make sense of claims about health hazards and the merits of new drugs, to invest money more wisely, and to choose their children’s schools.

Give All You Can: My New “Spread the Wealth” Grading Policy

Mike S. Adams, Townhall.com 26 January 2009:

Good afternoon students! I’m writing you this email to announce that I’m making some changes in the grading policies I announced two weeks ago when I sent an email with an attached course syllabus. As you know, we now have a new president and I thought it would be nice to align our class policies with some of the policies he will be implementing over the next four years. These will be changes you can believe in and, I hope, changes that will inspire hope, which is our most important American value.
Previously, I announced that I would use a ten-point grading scale, which means that 90% of 100 is an “A,” 80% is a “B,” 70% is a “C,” and 60% is enough for a passing grade of “D.” I also announced that I will refrain from using a “plus/minus” system – even though the faculty handbook gives me that option.
The new policy I am announcing today is that those who score above 90 on the first exam will have points deducted and given to students at the bottom of the grade distribution. For example, if a student gets a 99, I will then deduct nine points and give them to the person with the lowest grade. If a person scores 95 I will then deduct five points and give them to the person with the second lowest grade. If someone scores 93 I will then deduct three points and give them to the next lowest person. And so on.
My point, rather obviously, is that any points above 90 are really not needed since you have an “A” regardless of whether you score 90 or 99. Nor am I convinced that you need to “save” those points for a rainy day. Those who are failing, however, need the points–not unlike the failing banks and automakers that need money to avoid the danger of bankruptcy.
After our second examination, I intend to take a more complex approach to the practice of grade redistribution. I will not be looking at your second test scores but, instead, at the average of your first two test scores. In the process, I may well decide to start taking some points from students in the “B” range. For example, if someone has an average of 85 after two tests I may take a few points and give them away to someone who is failing or who is in danger of failing. I think this is fair because the person with an 85 average is probably unlikely to climb up to an “A” or fall down to a “C.” I may be wrong in some individual cases but, of course, my principal concern is not the individual.

Continue reading Give All You Can: My New “Spread the Wealth” Grading Policy

Wisconsin school open enrollment starts February 2, 2009

AP:

Wisconsin parents who want to send their children to a school outside the district in which they live can start applying Feb. 2.
The open enrollment period for next school year ends three weeks later on Feb. 20.
The program has grown in popularity since it started in the fall of 1998. Only about 2,400 students participated that school year. But last year, nearly 26,000 did.
Parents interested in enrolling their children are encouraged to do so online at the Department of Public Instruction’s Web site. Parents will be notified April 10 about whether their request has been approved or denied.

Informational Community Sessions on the Madison Fine Arts Task Force

Tuesday March 10, 2009 6 to 8p.m.
Memorial High School – Wisconsin Neighborhood Center [Map]
Thursday March 12, 2009 6 to 8p.m.
LaFollette High School in the LMC [Map]
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) will be sharing the recommendations of the Fine Arts Task Force. We are cordially inviting you to attend one or both of these sessions.
The focus of each session will be a presentation of the findings and recommendations of the Fine Arts Task Force followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete Fine Arts Task Force Report can be found at http://www.mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
We are looking forward to sharing this information with you and hearing your thoughts about the research and recommendations provided by the Fine Arts Task Force.
Feedback from sessions and the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force will assist in improving the MMSD K-12 Fine Arts program and opportunities for our students,
If you have any questions or comments, please contact Julie Palkowski at jpalkowski@madison.k12.wi.us
Lisa Wachtel
Executive Director of Teaching and Learning
Julie Palkowski
Coordinator of Fine Arts
Please share this information with others that may be interested in attending these sessions and/or sharing their comments.

DC Discipline Code Under Review As Suspensions Lose Impact

Bill Turque:

Senior class president Christopher Jolly says suspensions are so common at Anacostia High School — where eight students were injured, including three who were stabbed, in a melee two months ago — that they have become meaningless as a form of discipline.
“The fact that everyone knows someone who has been suspended before often causes kids not to respect the suspension process,” Jolly said at a community forum this month on D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s proposal to revise the District’s student behavior code.
Rhee’s changes would move the system in a direction that makes sense to Jolly: away from out-of-school suspension as the disciplinary method of choice and toward counseling, peer influence and more options for keeping suspended students in school.
Officials said reliable data on suspensions are hard to come by because recordkeeping has been slipshod. But the available numbers suggest a dramatic surge. According to District figures, suspensions grew 72 percent between the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years, from 1,303 to 2,245. That represents 4.5 percent of total enrollment. Numbers through November, the latest available for the current academic year, show suspensions running slightly behind last year.

Challenging Assumptions About Online Predators

Mike Musgrove:

Are your kids safe online? A recent report about this sensitive subject is stirring up controversy.
The study, released by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, finds that it’s far more likely that children will be bullied by their peers than approached by an adult predator online.
The 278-page document cites studies showing that sexual solicitation of minors by adults via the Web appears to be on the decline. “The image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture,” reads one of document’s conclusions. “The risks minors face online are complex and multifaceted and are in most cases not significantly different than those they face offline.”
In other words, children are about as savvy online as they are offline, said Ernie Allen, president of the Alexandria-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which contributed to the report.
“The vast majority of kids in this country have heard the messages about the risks online and are basically dealing with them as a nuisance, as a fact of life, and aren’t particularly vulnerable,” he said. “This report should not be read as saying there are not adults out there doing this.”

Fairfax County to Ease Grading Policy

Michael Alison Chandler:

he Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously late last night to abandon a strict grading policy it has long upheld as a hallmark of high standards, after a year of intense pressure from parents who have argued that the policy hurts students’ chances for college admission or scholarships.
The School Board decided to move toward a more commonly used grading scale that parents have championed. The board also approved a plan to add extra points to the grade-point averages of students who take college level or honors classes.
Two board members, Kaye Kory (Mason) and Martina A. Hone (At Large), were absent for the 10 to 0 vote.
At issue is what it means to earn an A or to pass. Currently, Fairfax students must score 94 percent to earn an A and 64 percent to pass. In most school systems, including those in Montgomery and Arlington counties, 90 percent is an A and 60 percent is a passing grade. Many school systems also add points to the GPAs of students who take more challenging classes.

Gates on Small Learning Communities (SLC): “small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way”

Nicholas Kristof:

In the letter, Mr. Gates goes out of his way to acknowledge setbacks. For example, the Gates Foundation made a major push for smaller high schools in the United States, often helping to pay for the creation of small schools within larger buildings.
“Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way,” he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. “In most cases,” he says, “we fell short.”
Mr. Gates comes across as a strong education reformer, focusing on supporting charter schools and improving teacher quality. He suggested that when he has nailed down the evidence more firmly, he will wade into the education debates.
“It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one,” Mr. Gates writes in his letter. “Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.”

I could not agree more. Rather than add coaches and layers of support staff, I’d prefer simply hiring the best teachers (and paying them) and getting out of the way. Of course, this means that not all teachers (like the population) are perfect, or above average!
Much more on Small Learning Communities here.
On Toledo’s SLC initiative.

Proposed House “Stimulus” / Splurge Bill: Nearly $18M for the Madison School District, borrowed from our Grandkids


Click for a larger version of this very simple illustration

Mark Pitsch:

The House version of a federal economic stimulus bill would deliver more than $4.3 billion to Wisconsin over the next two years, under details of the bill released Friday.
That figure includes nearly $18 million for Madison schools and millions more for other local districts.
“I’m very pleased by this. We know this is a difficult time, but at the same time there are needs that our children have that can’t go unmet,” said Dan Nerad, Madison schools superintendent. “I’m very hopeful. I’m very optimistic and we’ll see what comes.”
Under bill descriptions released by Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, and an analysis of Medicaid by a Washington, D.C. think tank, the House version would also provide:

$1.2 billion to help the state fill its $5.4 billion budget hole, with at least 61 percent being spent on schools and colleges.

Related:

  • Wistax:

    Total taxes collected from Wisconsin averaged $12,281 per person in 2007-08. The $69.4 billion in annual collections was up 3.4%. Relative to personal income, however, taxes were down slightly, from 34.9% in 2007 to 34.2% in 2008.

  • United States Government outstanding debt ($32,795 per citizen).
  • US Population
  • Major foreign holders of US Treasuries.
  • The Congressional Research Service produced the school funding information.
  • “Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”. An interview with Gao Xiqing, a man who oversees many of China’s US holdings, by James Fallows (more from Fallows). Related:
    • The economic crisis hits China – Video.
    • US Senate Finance Committee Q & A with Tim Geithner 284K PDF, David Kotok comments:

      One telling example is found in the following quote that has already created international consternation. Geithner twice answered questions about currency and China. In so doing he has placed the Obama administration squarely in the middle of the tension between the United States and the largest international buyer and holder of US debt: China. This happened as the same Obama administration is unveiling a package that will add to the TARP financing needs and the cyclical deficit financing needs and cause the United States to borrow about $2 trillion this year. Two trillion dollars of newly issued Treasury debt – and this is how the question was answered. Not once but twice.
      Geithner (on page 81 and again on page 95) answered: “President Obama – backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists – believes that China is manipulating its currency. President Obama has pledged as President to use aggressively all the diplomatic avenues open to him to seek change in China’s currency practices.”
      “Manipulation?” “Aggressively?” This is strong language. Geithner did not do this on his own authority. These are prepared answers. He is citing the new President, not once but twice.
      China’s response was fast and direct. China’s commerce ministry said in Beijing that China “has never used so-called currency manipulation to gain benefits in its international trade. Directing unsubstantiated criticism at China on the exchange-rate issue will only help US protectionism and will not help towards a real solution to the issue.”
      Are we seeing the world’s largest and third largest economies calling each other names in the middle of a global economic and financial meltdown?

      And, the $150,000,000 inauguration party.

  • Peter Peterson Foundation:

    To increase public awareness of the nature and urgency of key economic challenges threatening America’s future and accelerate action on them. To meet these challenges successfully, we work to bring Americans together to find sensible, sustainable solutions that transcend age, party lines and ideological divides in order to achieve real results.

  • Related with respect to printing money: Zimbabwe’s central banker defends policies:

    Your critics blame your monetary policies for Zimbabwe’s economic problems. I’ve been condemned by traditional economists who said that printing money is responsible for inflation. Out of the necessity to exist, to ensure my people survive, I had to find myself printing money. I found myself doing extraordinary things that aren’t in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the U.S. to please print money. I began to see the whole world now in a mode of practicing what they have been saying I should not. I decided that God had been on my side and had come to vindicate me.

  • Clusty Search: Lobbyist

It will be interesting to see how this money, assuming it is authorized and borrowed, is spent. Will it be spent in a way that grows the District’s operating costs and therefore increases the local property tax burden once the stimulus/splurge is exhausted?
If we must borrow these funds from our grandchildren, then I would like to see it spent in a way that has long term benefits. Superintendent Nerad spoke of children whose needs are going unmet; well, those kids will be paying for these borrowed funds.
Finally, it appears that someone is spreading the love, as it were. The Congressional Research Service (whose work is not publicly available) wrote a report on stimulus/splurge funding for all US school districts. Have a look at all of the Google News references. Defense programs are known for spreading jobs around key congressional districts as a means of self preservation.

Wisconsin Governor Doyle Plans to Keep K-12 Funding Flat in the 2009-2011 Budget

Amy Hetzner:

“Not getting cut is the new increase in this budget,” Doyle said in a speech at the State Education Convention in the Milwaukee Hilton Hotel.
The annual event is sponsored by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators and the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials.
In his speech, Doyle called education his No. 1 priority. But, he said, with increasing unemployment and a looming budget deficit, it would be a challenge to even maintain funding.
“We cannot allow our children to be the ones who pay the cost for this recession,” Doyle said. “The decisions we make today have consequences that last decades and decades to come.”
Doyle did not give details of his budget plans.
If the state keeps its revenue cap system for schools, a level that increases each year to reflect inflation, the effect of flat state funding could mean massive property tax increases by local school boards, which may turn to that source of money instead.

Related:

Chicago Public League to ban cheering at basketball games

Ethel Fenig:

ell that didn’t take long; the glow from the inauguration of the first African-American president is rapidly dimming. In President Barack Hussein Obama’s (D) Chicago, the school system, recently under the superintendency of new Education Secretary Arne Duncan,
issued the following directives for high school sports competitions.
The Public League is taking drastic measures to curb a rash of violence that has erupted at its basketball games in the last week.

Marquette sorority sisters pledge to log off Facebook

Erica Perez:

Marquette sorority members have to deactivate their Facebook pages until Bid Day this Sunday, part of a growing number of sororities hoping to avoid decisions – about where to pledge and who to allow in – being made based on preconceptions and stereotypes.
Instead, they’re reverting to old-fashioned, face-to-face contact.
“It’s not about the purse you carry, the shoes you wear or what your parents do . . . it’s about being yourself,” Profita said. “We want to know you for you.”
These days, for most college students, getting-to-know-you is incomplete without requisite Facebook research. Who are your friends? How many do you have? What do your photos say about you?
But despite their reliance on the social networking site, sorority members say they still think real contact is the best way to decide who your true friends are.

Update on the Harlem Children’s Zone

Bear Market for Charities
Mike Spector
Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK — Geoffrey Canada has spent decades building a strategy for saving poor children from crime-ridden streets and crumbling public schools.
His “Harlem Children’s Zone” now serves thousands of kids, some of whom are showing impressive test scores. He has attracted the attention of the new White House because of his charity’s model: Instead of tackling problems here and there, the program envelops an entire neighborhood, with services ranging from parenting classes to health clinics to charter schools.
But Wall Street’s meltdown and money manager Bernard Madoff’s alleged financial fraud threaten the donor base that bankrolls Mr. Canada’s work. Facing declining revenues, he’s had to lay off staff and cancel plans to expand. He says he doesn’t yet “have a Plan B” for replacing his Wall Street support, which had reached upwards of $15 million annually.
Mr. Canada’s difficulties show how dependent nonprofits can become on certain steady donors, and how their plans can be derailed when those revenues dry up. It underscores the challenges facing nonprofits, which grew and proliferated amid the bull-market earlier this decade.
Today, the U.S. boasts more than one million nonprofits, up from about 774,000 ten years ago. Their biggest donations come from corporations, foundations and the ultra-wealthy. Many have been hit hard by the deepening recession. A drop in charitable contributions could shutter as many as 100,000 nonprofits over the next year, says Paul Light, a professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.
Mr. Canada, a 57-year-old social worker, calls his strategy the “conveyor belt,” because it aims to give children an intensive experience in a succession of programs until they graduate from college. Children in pre-kindergarten are taught foreign languages, for instance. From there, children enter Mr. Canada’s charter schools with longer school days and a calendar lasting until the first week of August.
The approach is starting to deliver results. Last year, nearly all the third-graders in Mr. Canada’s charter schools scored at or above grade-level in math, better than recent citywide averages. Eighth-graders outperformed the average New York student in math, according to New York state data.
“The math thing is just so far above anything I’ve ever seen,” says Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who heads a new education lab. “The real hard work is to figure out why it’s working and whether that kind of thing can be exported so we can help more kids.”
President Barack Obama’s advisers met with Mr. Canada recently to learn more about his approach. Mr. Obama said during the campaign that he wants to create “promise neighborhoods” modeled on Mr. Canada’s charity in 20 cities across the U.S. Today, that initiative remains part of the White House’s publicized agenda.

Read more …

Breaks my heart to post this.

Is educational success, key to global competition, a matter of time, money or choice?

Investors Business Daily:

The argument over what to do about America’s struggling schools is still raging. Programs such as No Child Left Behind have achieved some success by introducing a measure of accountability into the process. But American students continue to get clobbered on international tests by other countries whose school systems spend less money per student and have larger average class sizes.
Facing budget realities in a down economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed shortening the school year by five days to contribute $1.1 billion in savings toward the state’s $42 billion budget shortfall.
State school superintendent Jack O’Donnell vehemently disagreed, saying a longer school year was needed to prepare students for “the competitive global economy.”
The operative word here is “competitive.” Success in the marketplace depends on being able to produce the best product at the lowest cost. Competition in the business world produces a better product at less cost. Why shouldn’t it be so in education? Well, it is.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 70% of the countries that outperformed the U.S. in combined math and science literacy among 15-year-olds had more schools competing for students. Countries ranging from Japan to Latvia all had more education options than American students.

Fascinating: The Hidden Flaws in China and India Schools

Jay Matthews:

Memphis high-tech entrepreneur Bob Compton, producer of the stirring documentary “Two Million Minutes,” has been suggesting, in his genial way, that I am a head-in-the-sand ignoramus. This is because I panned his film as alarmist nonsense for suggesting, based on profiles of a grand total of six teenagers, that the Indian and Chinese education systems were superior to what we have here in the much-beleaguered United States. When we debated the issue on CNBC, Bob told me I should get on a plane and see for myself instead of relying on my memories of living in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s and my reading of recent work by other reporters.
Sadly, even in the days when The Washington Post was flush with cash, there was no money to send the education columnist abroad. But I am happy to report I don’t have to go because an upcoming book from education scholar James Tooley goes much deeper into the Chinese and Indian school systems than Bob or I ever have, and takes my side. Tooley shows that India and China, despite their economic successes, have public education systems that are, in many ways, a sham.
Tooley’s book, “The Beautiful Tree,” reveals him to be the kind of traveler who often strays off the main roads, driving official escorts crazy. He covers not only China and India, but also Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. He wants to discover how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, and surprises himself repeatedly.

State urged to fund Covenant

Erica Perez:

A new report from a higher education research center says Gov. Jim Doyle’s Wisconsin Covenant program needs to fund the initiative with state money for financial aid if it truly wants to boost enrollment of low-income students.
The program currently guarantees a spot in college for students who maintain good grades and take the right classes in high school, but it doesn’t promise automatic funding.
The privately funded Wisconsin Covenant endowment and Fund for Wisconsin Scholars will use their combined $215 million to offer scholarships that complement the covenant pledge, but that’s not likely enough to cover all the Covenant Scholars’ full need.
“First and foremost, we’d like to see some money, some public money, put toward this goal because up to this point there hasn’t been any sort of state-managed funds,” said Beth Stransky, who co-authored the report by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.
The policy brief, issued this week, does not suggest a specific amount for the state to invest. The push comes at a time when Wisconsin faces a two-year, $5.4 billion deficit that is certain to mean cuts for the UW System.
Doyle said he was committed to funding higher education and providing scholarships and financial aid to students who are eligible and do the work, but he wouldn’t give a firm commitment to a dollar figure, or to an increase in Covenant funding for scholarships.

A Look at the New US Secretary of Education

Teachers College @ Columbia University:

TC faculty member Jeffrey Henig was a guest on The Brian Lehrer Sho (WNYC) on January 15, where he discussed what we can expect from Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education.
Henig noted that as superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, Duncan has kept the pressure on for reform inside the classroom, but has managed to do it without antagonizing teachers unions.

Oregon Supreme Court rejects school funding case

Portland Business Journal:

he Oregon Supreme Court has largely rejected a suit demanding the Legislature substantially increase K-12 school funding.
In a ruling today, the state Supreme Court largely affirmed a lower court ruling in Pendleton School District v. State of Oregon, a much-watched suit brought on behalf of 18 school districts and seven students. The suit alleged the state is in violation of a 2000 voter-approved ballot measure that requires the Legislature to fund schools at “a level sufficient to meet certain quality educational goals established by law.”
The suit sought an injunction to direct the Legislature to appropriate the “necessary” funds.
Writing for the court, Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz agreed the Legislature has failed to fully fund public schools. However, he said the court concluded that Oregon voters did not intend for the courts to enforce funding requirements when they passed Ballot Measure 1 in 2000, a constitutional amendment that became Article VIII, section 8, of the state Constitution.

Studies Examine Major Influences on Freshmen’s Academic Success

By PETER SCHMIDT
Three new studies of college freshmen suggest that even the most promising among them can run into academic difficulties as a long-term consequence of experiences like attending a violence-plagued high school or being raised by parents who never went to college.
And two of the studies call into question a large body of research on the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity on campuses, concluding that most first-year students do not reap any gains that can be measured objectively.
Taken together, the reports not only challenge many of the assumptions colleges make in admitting and educating freshmen, but could also influence discussions of how to improve the nation’s high schools to promote college preparation.
In one of the studies, Mark E. Engberg, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago, and Gregory C. Wolniak, a research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, looked at how high-school experiences influenced the academic success of students at several highly selective colleges.
Using data on 2,500 students from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, the two researchers found that freshmen who entered college with comparable academic records and family backgrounds had levels of success that depended on their high-school environments. Those from schools with high levels of violence tended to have lower grades. Having attended a well-maintained and well-equipped school seemed to offer many freshmen advantages over their peers.
A study published in the University of Arkansas’s Education Working Paper Archive also considered high-school quality in analyzing the records of 2,800 students at an unnamed midsize, moderately selective public university.
Serge Herzog, the study’s author and director of institutional analysis at the University of Nevada at Reno, found that, even after controlling for differences in background and academic preparation, low-income freshmen tended to post lower grades if their high schools had high levels of violence or disorder. The same was true if the schools had enrollments that were heavily black or Hispanic, or had a high percentage of students with limited proficiency in English.
Mr. Herzog found little evidence of a link between the number of courses students took from part-time instructors and the likelihood of their dropping out. That finding runs counter to other recent research on adjuncts.
And, in a finding that contradicts much available research on racial and ethnic diversity in higher education, Mr. Herzog found no evidence that being exposed to diversity in their classrooms, or taking classes intended to promote appreciation of diversity, fostered students’ cognitive growth. He did, however, find that black, Hispanic, and American Indian students appeared to benefit, in terms of college completion, from frequent exposure to members of their own racial or ethnic group.
In the third study, two doctoral students in higher education at the University of Iowa, Ryan D. Padgett and Megan P. Johnson, examined data on about 3,100 students from 19 colleges, collected in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. The Iowa researchers found that the educational benefits of taking part in various programs promoting diversity were “minimal and inconsistent.”
The researchers also concluded that students who were the first in their families to attend college did not necessarily benefit from educational practices shown to help students whose parents did attend college. For example, while students on the whole appeared to benefit from interactions with faculty members, first-generation students who experienced the most contact with faculty members generally had the worst educational outcomes. The findings, the researchers concluded, suggest that those students “have not been conditioned to the positive benefits of interacting with instructors.”
http://chronicle.com
Section: Students
Volume 55, Issue 14, Page A21
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fixing our schools in a weak economy

Marketplace:

KAI RYSSDAL: Like so many presidents before him, President Obama has talked a lot about the importance of education. He’s talked about the need for arts in schools. The need for teacher training. Good ideas, but ones that cost money — money that we’re in short supply of these days.
Harvard researcher Susan Eaton’s most recent book is called “The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial.” We got her on the line to talk about education, the Obama administration, and the economy. Welcome to the program.
SUSAN EATON: Hi, great to be here.
RYSSDAL: You, in the course of writing your book, spent a lot of time in and out of public school classrooms in the United States. What’s your take on the biggest problems that are out there?
EATON: Well, I think that the biggest problem is the fact that huge shares of our children in the United States — disproportionately, children of color; Latino and African American children — are simply not connected to mainstream opportunities. And our schools are really . . . have not, at least in the last eight years or so — and probably even more than that — been trying to connect them to those opportunities.
RYSSDAL: But it does, in a lot of measure, come down to money. Doesn’t it?

What’s It All About, Alfie?

In many books, more articles, and perhaps 200 appearances a year, Alfie Kohn does what he can to spare United States students the evils of competition. While he can’t do much about athletic competition, or economic competition or the unfairness of love and war, he tries hard and successfully to persuade educators that making academic distinctions among students hurts them.
A story is told of an unpopular officer at the U.S Naval Academy who knew he was disliked (his nickname was “The Wedge” as “the simplest tool known to man”) and he was always on the lookout for ways to assert his dominance. Once he berated a formation of midshipman for being unsatisfactory by pointing out that while their toes were all lined up, their heels were as much as two or three inches out of line! The officer candidate in charge of the formation replied that he recognized the problem, and would try to see that all midshipmen in future could be issued the same size shoes!
Of course, Mr. Kohn would not, I believe, argue that having different size feet should be corrected to prevent some students from feeling inferior, but he does object to anything in school which might reveal that some are brighter and some more diligent than others. It is not clear how he thinks students can be prevented from noticing this for themselves, but he is insistent that testing and other forms of academic competition should not be allowed to reveal such differences.
Some people feel that in law, for instance, competition among arguments makes arriving at the facts of a case more likely. Competition among the producers of goods and services are thought by some to make improvements in quality and reduction in price more likely. It is even claimed that some works of art and literature are better than others, although serious efforts have of course been made to make such judgments less common.

Continue reading What’s It All About, Alfie?

Curated Education Information