The UW Math dept has decided to offer a section of Math 234 (3rd semester Calculus) at 7:45 am in the fall of 2008. This course will be taught by Professor Andreas Seeger and will meet at 7:45 – 8:35 on MWF for 3 credits. The UW has chosen this time as being somewhat convenient for high school students, as many students can take this course and return to their high school in time for 2nd period. Madison Schools have 26 students in grades 11 or below that will be completing Calculus II this year. Combined with students in neighboring school districts, there is a possibility that a large percentage of the class will be made of area high school students.
For those students that plan to elect this course, each District has a deadline for accessing the Youth Options [Clusty | Google] program. In Madison, that deadline is March 1. Therefore, I would encourage you to speak with students and parents in your building and make them aware of this opportunity. Also, please pass on this info to other key people in your building such as guidance counselors, math department chairs and Calculus teachers.
If you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact me.
Ted Widerski
Talented and Gifted Resource Teacher
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 W Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53703
(608)442-2152
Alisha Berns ‘ enthusiasm for the Sun Prairie Scholar Society speaks volumes.
“I really get excited. I don ‘t sleep well the night before, ” said the Sun Prairie High School junior. “It ‘s a nice getaway. I ‘m very comfortable being here. ”
Sarah Benish, a school counselor at Sun Prairie High School, wanted to increase black students ‘ participation in advanced level courses, so she did some research and started the Sun Prairie Scholar Society last year. The student members are selected on academic success.
The society, which is called S Cubed for short, supports the academic success of high-achieving black students through group advising, supporting individual student goals, providing a space for students to connect, assisting students in reaching their highest academic potential and helping students find purpose in their learning.
“I really wanted to support these students and help them access opportunities, ” said Benish, who is in her third year at the high school. “This group has been a highlight of my work here and I have learned so much from the students. “
IT’S Monday morning, and you’re having trouble waking your teenagers. You’re not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country’s 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 a.m. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to.
Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.
Many of our presidential candidates have been relatively silent on how they plan to save our troubled education system. For those still searching for a policy that might have a positive impact, here’s an idea: stop focusing on testing and instead support changing the hours of the school day, starting it later for teenagers and ending it later for all children.
At $6,000 per child that’s about $16 million per year. At $9,000 per child, that’s about $23 million per year. If we kept 332, that would be $2-3 million more per year.
Also, MMSD not only lost students, which has a negative effect on what the district gets under revenue caps, we’ve increased our low-income population, which means that for every dollar the district gets, more of those dollars need to be spent on non-instructional services.
If the district does not consider the economic development implications of its decisions, we’re likely to
see more go to school outside MMSD, or
for the non-low income students who go to school here increased family dollars will be spent on private aspects of education- lessons, tutoring, etc.
Here’s the point: administrators either respect their teachers and staff as professionals, or they don’t. Professionals are given the tools they need to succeed by their management. Time, support and responsibility are three of the most important tools managers give to those they supervise. Administrators, you are managers for your teachers and staff. You would think I wouldn’t have to say that, either, but I DO.
As you make your selection for the next Superintendent of MMSD, we ask you to choose a candidate that will be able to address the needs of all students, including those of gifted and talented (GT) students. We strongly urge you to hire a candidate that is knowledgeable of and open to the special needs of gifted learners.
The following are reasons this is necessary. References for these points are attached.
Approximately 1 out of every 5 drop-outs is gifted.
Giftedness occurs in all racial and socioeconomic groups. It is short-sighted to ignore the needs of the gifted as we increase in low-income enrollment, and creates even more disparity as those who have resources have other choices.
The statistics for Madison’s gifted low-income and minority student drop-outs may be significantly higher than 1 out of 5.
GT students may learn poorly when taught at standard grade level and rate.
It may be thought that the experience of gifted in heterogeneous classrooms is that of the pleasure of excelling above everyone. However, as one GT teacher at Appleton’s gifted school observed, it is the experience of a 5th grader whose teacher inexplicably teaches 1st grade curriculum.
This site is about literacy–basic reading and writing and numeracy, and other “literacies:” celestial, geographic, economic, biological, nutritional, etc.
I am a retired resident of San Francisco with a long-time interest in child and adult literacy. I am offering my free program on the Web to help parents and tutors teach children to read, write, spell, and reckon. I have also included a program on English grammar and composition for good measure. In addition I have Web pages reflecting my interest in other subjects in which I want to be “literate.”
If you have an interest in any these subjects, I invite you to check them out:
Tutoring for Mastery of Reading and Writing and Arithmetic
Tutoring English Grammar and Composition
Finding and Reading eBooks
Beginning Urban Skywatching
Physical Geography of the U.S.
Economic Literacy
Global Warming and Warning
Approaching the Bible
Islam: One American’s Findings
DNA: Life’s Common Denominator
Nutrition: What should we eat?
Help for Microsoft Windows XP
Bread Machine Baking
Tips for No-Knead Bread Baked in a Pot
Links to Video Performances of Great Arias
The Home Library, an electronic home reference library
Recollections of an Old Farm Boy
Slender and smiling, Emma Geer bounces into an interview in the offices of Madison Repertory Theatre wearing jeans, wool clogs and a turtleneck sweater the same smoky color as her deep gray eyes.
The Madison eighth-grader is on a break from rehearsals for the Rep ‘s “The Diary of Anne Frank, ” in which she plays the title role. And if that job ‘s not ambitious enough for a 13-year-old, Emma also knows what a lot of audience members will have in the back of their minds when the play continues tonight at Overture Center ‘s Playhouse: That this Anne Frank is also the daughter of Richard Corley, the Rep ‘s artistic director.
When Corley hired Madison native Jennifer Uphoff Gray, a 12-year veteran of the New York theater scene, to direct “The Diary of Anne Frank, ” he told her “The casting is in your hands, ” says Gray.
So Gray contacted drama teachers across the area asking for names of talented actresses who might play Anne. She saw a slew of local spring school plays, scouting for talent. Finally she went to Chicago to find the right girl for the part, auditioning some 16-, 17- and 18-year-old actresses in the process.
An enterprising teacher at Stephens Elementary School on Madison’s west side wrote a prize-winning essay that will bring her school $60,000 worth of laptop computers, digital camera/camcorders, computer monitors and software from Samsung Electronics and Microsoft.
Allison Milley, who is a special education teacher for fourth- and fifth-grade students, wrote a 100-word essay describing how her students would benefit from the high tech products. Over 8,200 schools entered the contest.
“The kids were really excited when they found out we were chosen,” Milley said. She said that she heard about the contest through a listserve for parents, students and teachers who are involved with special education.
Milley explained that special education students often find it especially helpful to use computers in learning to read and write.
We updated and ranked this list of the top 100 colleges in early 2008. Sort the overall rankings for both in-state students and out-of-state students, cost, quality measures or financial aid measures (how we scored the schools). Then select All States or any number of individual states (hold down the control key as you click to choose more than one), or select All Schools or any number of individual colleges. Clicking on the college names in the table will take you to their Web sites. Most of our data come from Petersons, a Nelnet company
Some in a big Madison neighborhood are outraged over the latest plan to change West Side school boundaries to make way for a new school opening near Hawk’s Landing next fall.
Residents in the Valley Ridge neighborhood are pledging to start a petition drive and to do whatever it takes to stop the proposal.
The new, yet-to-be-named school on the far West Side has prompted officials to try to rearrange boundary lines on the West Side. But, the boundary lines are different than initially proposed and some in Valley Ridge said they are in shock.
“I feel very deceived,” said parent and homeowner Beth Todd, vice president of the Glenn Stephens PTO.
Todd, her husband and other parents said they were always told their children would not be affected by the new boundary changes in meetings with school officials before the referendum for the new school passed.
Currently, Valley Ridge children go to Stephens school as well as Jefferson Middle School. But under a new proposal, that would all drastically change, and, some contend, for no good reason.
A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation’s leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn’t a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.
To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate. Our survey covered the nation’s top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren’t among the top 50—a total of 71 education schools.
The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16.
Move over Melville — comic-style books are popping up in classrooms throughout Dane County, giving educators a new tool to teach literature.
Graphic novels, a literary form that marries bold art and often edgy text, have persuaded reluctant students to open books and are providing a new way to teach visual learning, area educators and librarians say.
Libraries have long been aware of the value of such “sequential art” in helping students become better readers, said Hollis Rudiger, a former librarian at UW-Madison’s School of Education. “It’s the classroom teachers that are finally starting to see the value,” she said.
This fall, students at Monona Grove and DeForest high schools studied graphic novels in English classes. Next year, if there’s enough interest, Monona Grove plans to offer an art class focusing on the novels and cartooning.
“I’m very, very excited about teaching this class because it’s a step in a different direction,” said Judith Durley, a Monona Grove High School art teacher who proposed the class.
Key Republican and Democratic leaders launched competing efforts on Thursday to rewrite Wisconsin ‘s laws for online schools, just weeks before families begin filling out applications to transfer from their traditional home school districts.
Their proposals, described as attempts to clarify confusion after a recent court ruling, quickly came under attack from the opposing party.
Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, proposed that online schools, also known as virtual schools, be allowed to continue operating with few restrictions. About 3,000 Wisconsin students attend online schools.
Sen. John Lehman, D-Racine, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he ‘s introducing a measure restricting online schools to half of the approximately $6,000 in state aid they currently receive for each student who transfers from a home district.
“I really believe it ‘s important to wring the profits out of these operations, ” said Lehman, who contends that Davis ‘ approach forces taxpayers to pay too much to online schools such as the Northern Ozaukee School District ‘s Wisconsin Virtual Academy. The district north of Milwaukee, with curriculum from a Virginia-based firm, K12 Inc., operates the online school that was the focus of the recent court ruling.
istrict officials said they will install 60 cameras by the end of January as part of its effort to update its safety and emergency plan.
Five of the six district schools will get one indoor camera and eight outdoor cameras. Stoughton High School will get three indoor cameras and 11 outdoor cameras, WISC-TV reported.
“Adding cameras is not something that is occurring because of any one particular incident here. It’s part of wanting to be more fully prepared,” said Mary Gavigan, superintendent of the Stoughton Area School District.
“It’s ultimately not about what color you are. Everybody brings something to the university community.”
Cydny Black was reflecting on her first semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after starting out last fall with a scholarship from the Pre-college Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE) program, which recruits, readies and funds tuition for minority and low-income students for the university.
One of three PEOPLE students from Madison high schools interviewed by The Capital Times at the start of the fall semester, the 18-year-old African-American said she has really enjoyed herself on a campus that is more than 80 percent white.
She is also succeeding in school. She achieved a 3.75 grade point during the semester, higher than her 3.3 average in high school.
“Anyone who says you can’t do it if you didn’t in high school is wrong,” she said.
The PEOPLE program was established because UW-Madison has struggled for years to attract and retain minority students through graduation. But all three students interviewed last semester — Black, Aaron Olson and Summer Becker — are adapting well so far.
Three local educational institutions have discovered they are sitting on the telecommunications equivalent of beachfront property, and they’re about to cash in – to the tune of more than $100 million over 30 years.
In the 1970s, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools and Milwaukee Area Technical College each got licenses for a set of frequencies to broadcast televised lessons in their classrooms. But by the mid-1990s, they had switched almost completely to the Internet, leaving these frequencies virtually unused for more than a decade.
Now, new rules from the Federal Communications Commission have cleared the way for these channels to be converted to wireless broadband. And commercial providers, eager to expand their wireless reach, have been racing to lease the frequencies from their owners.
Together, UWM, MPS and MATC plan to lease a dozen channels of educational broadband to Kirkland, Wash.-based Clearwire Corp. Under the deal, each institution will get $4.2 million up-front and monthly payments of $55,000 that increase annually, for a total estimated payout of about $36 million each over three decades.
The agreement could also bring Milwaukee Public Schools one step closer to bridging the digital divide. Clearwire spokeswoman Helen Chung would not comment on the company’s future business plans. But Todd Gray, an attorney with Washington, D.C.-based firm Dow Lohnes, who helped negotiate the deal, said Clearwire will likely use the spectrum to expand its wireless broadband network into the greater Milwaukee area.
Schools’ physical footprint lends themselves to this sort of wireless / fiber internet service. This is another way that the school systems can “bind” themselves to more of the population.
The School Board sacrificed administrative staff for teaching positions as part of nearly $1.3 million in program reductions approved Wednesday night for the 2008-’09 year.
The savings generated by eliminating the School District’s last staff member dedicated to implementing its gifted-and-talented program, as well as the equivalent of one-third of its department chairmen, helped keep the staff needed to preserve an eight-period day at the middle schools.
The board also voted to reduce the amount of money it distributes to building sites for discretionary spending by $200,000, or 3%, to cover some of the costs of a middle-school program that gives students one period every day for enrichment or extra help.
“None of us wants to make these cuts,” board member Kurt O’Bryan said. But he said the district paid its department chairmen more and gave them more time than did other school districts, and that administrative reductions would hurt students less than teacher layoffs.
Since they were young, Christian and Georgina McKee have been able to learn what ever they wanted at their own pace.
And although reading came natural to Christian- Georgina didn’t pick up the skill until she was eight.
“We knew if we sat her down and forced her to read, we would have had a very unhappy child and probably a child who probably would think that she couldn’t rather than she could,” says mother Alison McKee.
It’s called “unschooling.”
Mckee says unlike other home schooling methods- it gives children complete educational freedom.
When Jay Schalin asserted in his Jan. 1 Point of View article “Misguided agenda for universities” that “the presence of disengaged students will only lessen a high school’s ability to focus on students who are interested in learning,” he skimmed over the larger problem of the falling educational standards caused by such policy initiatives.
When schools cater to business and popular demands to increase graduation rates and college attendance rates, they are forced to pass less intelligent and less productive students simply to meet the new quotas, usually by curving tests or lowering expectations for the same grade. This demeans and devalues a high school diploma or bachelor’s degree in the job market due to the ease of obtaining one as well as the higher number of potential employees with such degrees. In such cases, the best students are punished, suffering through a dull curriculum for little payoff without postgraduate education.
Eden Prairie High School administrators have reprimanded more than 100 students and suspended some from sports and other extracurricular activities after obtaining Facebook photos of students partying, several students said Tuesday.
School administrators and the district’s spokeswoman didn’t return phone calls, but students called in by their deans over the past two days said they were being reprimanded for the Facebook party photos, which administrators had printed out. It’s likely, they said, that other students among the 3,300 who attend Eden Prairie will be questioned throughout the week.
A 10-year-old Mexican boy dreaded returning to school after Christmas break so much that he glued his hand to his bed. Sandra Palacios spent nearly two hours Monday morning trying to free her son Diego’s hand with water, oil and nail polish remover before calling authorities, police chief Jorge Camacho told The Associated Press from outside the northern city of Monterrey.
“I didn’t want to go to school because vacation was so much fun,” Reforma newspaper quoted the boy as saying.
While this might be typical work for a graduate student in the life sciences, Ballard is a senior at Madison West High School who is still shy of his 18th birthday. His work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics is part of the Youth Apprenticeship Program (YAP), an innovative project that gives exceptional high-school students an opportunity to get exposure and experience in their desired careers.
Created in 1991, the program is run by Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development, with collaboration from universities, schools and businesses. Statewide, more than 10,000 students have participated in 22 different program areas. This year, Ballard is one of nine Dane County students enrolled in YAP’s biotechnology focus, which offers a taste of working science that they can’t get in high school.
“Working in the research lab is amazing,” says Ballard, who plans to pursue both an M.D. and Ph.D. after college. “It’s meaningful. There is a point (to it). In high school, you do your labs and it’s not contributing to human knowledge in any way.”
The surge in the number of Asian Americans the past four decades has affected many sectors of society, particularly public schools. On the whole, Asian American students tend to perform well on standardized tests and have a high rate of acceptance into some of the most selective high schools and colleges. The energy and ambition shown by many of these students has both improved our schools and fueled stereotypes. For example: All those hard-working Asian kids, some people say, are raising the grading curve and putting too much pressure on the rest of us.
I have often wondered what Asian American students think about this. Fortunately, one of them has just completed a very small but intriguing study that shines a surprising light on this often overlooked issue.
The study, ” ‘Too Many Asians at this School’: Racialized Perceptions and Identity Formation,” was written by Jenny Tsai as her senior college thesis for the social studies department at Harvard last year. If you e-mail Tsai at jenny.tsai@post.harvard.edu, she will send you a copy. What she describes is not a cabal of brainiacs trying to steal all the academic glory from their non-Asian competitors, but a collection of industrious and ambitious American teenagers trying to emulate their equally achievement-oriented white classmates, while society and government shove them into an artificial group called “Asians and Pacific Islanders” on the census forms.
State-mandated bonuses to help recruit tough-to-find teachers and reward great ones will look different from district to district in Tennessee.
Much-awaited guidelines out last month from the state Board of Education are broad — basically, they direct districts to put in place some sort of plan and launch it by the start of the 2008-09 school year.
That differs from other states experimenting with pay-for-performance. In Texas, for instance, some rewards are tied to specific student achievement on standardized tests. Those behind the Tennessee law say there’s good reason to keep it flexible enough for districts to explore options.
“The best chance for it to have a positive impact is to have those plans bubble up from the system level,” said Gary Nixon, executive director of the state Board of Education. “They’ll have to work with their teachers’ associations to come up with a plan that works for them. It’s better than it coming from the state.”
Teachers unions, which will have to approve the plans in districts where they have bargaining power, opposed the measure in the legislature last year. They said it didn’t address the underlying issue of low teacher pay and may not be fair.
Sen. Joe Haynes, D-Goodlettsville, who serves on the state legislature’s education committee, said pay incentives have merit if they’re distributed correctly.
The 12th annual edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts continues the cradle-to-career framework launched in last year’s report. But it also reintroduces some of the categories in which we have graded states in the past, though some of the indicators and the grading have changed. The cradle-to-career perspective emphasizes the connections between K-12 education and other systems with which it intersects: preschool education, other social and economic institutions, and further education and training.
To emphasize this approach, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center last year created two new state-performance measures: the Chance-for-Success Index and the K-12 Achievement Index. These indicators, respectively, capture key learning foundations and outcomes at various stages in a person’s life and the performance of the states’ public schools. Coupled with that heightened attention to outcomes, the 2007 edition of Quality Counts examined a series of policies that states could pursue to better align public education from preschool to postsecondary education and into the workplace.
6) “There’s a group out there that thinks all you need to be a teacher is a bachelor’s degree, a background check and to pass a computerized test, but you know they’re not going to send them to teach where the wealthy folks are. They’re going to send them to teach where Ray-Ray, Little Willie, Little Man, Too-Sweet, and Chiquita are in the classroom.” – National Education Association President Reg Weaver, delivering the keynote speech before the Oklahoma Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence in Tulsa. (November 2 Tulsa World)
4) “Too often, union leaders like to have unquestioning, uninformed members who don’t raise too many questions about what they’re doing.” – Deborah Lynch, candidate for president of the Chicago Teachers Union. (April 26 YouTube video interview)
1) “People take money every day for things I would not do… there are people that are paid to be assassins. Sometimes it’s just not worth the sacrifice you would have to make for the money.” – Metro Nashville Education Association President Jamye Merritt, explaining why her union opposes performance pay. (January 7 Tennessean)
America’s schools have fallen into a giant trap. This trap is epic in its dimensions, because the people capable of leading us out of it have been silenced, and the initiative that could help us is being systematically squashed.
Policymakers and the public have been seduced by a simple formulation. No Child Left Behind posits that we have troubled schools because they have not been accountable. If we make teachers and schools pay a price for the failure of their students, they will bring those students up to speed.
But schools are NOT the only factor determining student success. Urban neighborhoods are plagued by poverty and violence and recent reports in The Chronicle show that as many as 30 percent of the children in these neighborhoods suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fully 40 percent of our students are English learners, but these students must take the same tests as native English speakers. Moreover, a recent study provides strong evidence that family-based factors such as the quality of day care, the home vocabulary and the amount of time spent reading and watching television at home account for two-thirds of the difference in academic success for students. Nonetheless, NCLB holds only the schools accountable.
Teachers are realizing that this is a raw deal. We can’t single-handedly solve these problems, and we can’t bring 100 percent of our students to proficiency in the next six years, no matter how “accountable” the law makes us, and no matter the punishments it metes out. But if we speak up to point out the injustice and unreasonableness of the demands on our schools, we are shouted down, accused of making excuses for ourselves and not having high expectations for our students. Thus, teachers have been silenced, our expertise squandered.
Early childhood experts and parents expressed support yesterday for a measure before the D.C. Council that would extend pre-kindergarten programs to 2,000 more 3- and 4-year-olds in the city.
Although researchers and education advocates at the council hearing agreed that pre-K can boost academic achievement in later years, debate centered on what constitutes a high-quality program for D.C. students.
A provision in the measure, introduced last month by council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D), would require pre-K teachers in traditional public schools, charters and new community-based programs funded through the proposal to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, child development or family studies immediately. Teachers in existing community-based programs would not be required to have their bachelor’s degrees until 2014.
That point drew opposition.
“Pre-K teachers with BA degrees achieve better results,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, which is advocating for expanded early childhood programs in the city. “Permitting some classrooms to do it one way and others to do it another way is the wrong approach,” she added.
Prof Nguyen Lan Dung, a National Assembly Deputy who has devoted himself to Vietnam’s education system for the last 51 years, while chatting with a VTC News reporter on the New Year, said that he is unhappy with poor curriculums and outdated and unremarkable textbooks
I failed to persuade the National Assembly and the Ministry of Education and Training that the currently applied curriculum and textbooks are greatly different from all others in the world. I do not intend to stop addressing this issue and will still try my best to persuade relevant ministries that it is necessary to make changes. You have a strong attachment to and interest in the national education system. You may well know that Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan has been taking drastic measures to solve various problems. Do you think he will bring about change?
I well understand that Mr. Nhan is also adamant about addressing education and training shortcomings. That explains why he has started the “say ‘no’ to exam fraud and wrongdoing. Resultantly, 400,000 pupils failed the high school final exam. If you drive too fast, and then you put on the emergency brake, you will crash your motorbike. The consequence of drastic action was that 400,000 students have no degree, and a bleak future ahead.
As a journalist, you may well know that a lot of students dropped out after this movement was implemented I’ve never in my life seen so many give up school; its downright dangerous.
In August 2002, when he was named superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools on a 5-4 vote, William Andrekopoulos said he wanted to serve five years in the job.
It seemed an iffy proposition, given his narrow support and the fact that five superintendents before him hadn’t lasted that long.
A couple of years later, with a majority of the School Board behind him and a firm grip on the job, Andrekopoulos said he was aiming for six years, which would take him close to his 60th birthday.
Now, as the six-year mark looms, as rumors swirl that he will leave soon, and as the School Board begins the process that usually leads to a decision on a superintendent’s contract, Andrekopoulos says he wants to stay in the job for an undetermined length beyond six years.
“I’m in it for the long haul,” he said. “I feel energized.”
Reinventing high school
The extent of the change can be seen in figures included in the annual “report card” for MPS being presented to a board committee tonight. In 1998-’99, 91% of all MPS high school students were enrolled in 15 large schools and 2% in small high schools. In 2007-’08, 42% were enrolled in nine large high schools and 44% in 30 small high schools or in buildings with several schools within one building. (Other students were enrolled in alternative and “partnership” schools that are part of the MPS system.)
Andrekopoulos also has pushed in recent years to return to more centralized power in MPS, especially when it comes to low-performing schools. Those schools are now being given much more specific directions from the central office about what and how to teach.
Andrekopoulos’ salary is $171,376.80 a year, plus a variety of benefits, including payments to a retirement fund of $19,000 a year above the base benefit of MPS employees. His financial package, however, is considerably less than that of many other superintendents of large districts around the country and not much higher than those offered by many Milwaukee-area suburban districts.
Since my forced resignation from the High Council of Education, I have received hundreds of testimonials from teachers, parents, students and plain citizens of all social groups. Among these messages I have been particularly struck by those parents who have written me, in substance, “We have been so deceived, and we are so appalled, by what has become of the schools that we have decided to remove our children from there, and to teach them ourselves.” Or, “We have joined with other parents and are pooling our talents to form our own classes for our children”. Or, again, “Despite the financial sacrifice it represents, we have placed our children into private schools.” And finally, those most numerous messages which say: “Our children go to school, yes, but every evening we put them to work using old textbooks, and do what we can to give them the kind of rigorous instruction that is no longer given in their classes. But what a labor for them, and what a responsibility for us!”
That parents should go so far as to remove their children from school, to teach them themselves, at home, or to form parallel classes for them in which they, themselves, are the teachers, to prefer a school to which they must pay the fee to the free public school, or to impose on their children and themselves the burden of a night school added to the day school they consider to be nothing but a holding pen, all this became and remains for me a theme of profound dismay. And I notice as well that these are surely the parents who enjoy a high level of education and – for those who can pay the fees of a private school – of income. And then I think of the other children, who do not have the benefits of having been born into families similarly favored.
Students, all the students, are the primary victims of the destruction of the school. This destruction has resulted from educational policies of all the governments of the last few decades. It is not the teachers who are responsible for it, for they are victims themselves: firstly in that they have been prevented from teaching correctly, by the publication of national curricula which are increasingly disorganized, incoherent and emptied of content; then because the knowledge gaps accumulated by their students over the course of years have made the conditions of teaching ever more difficult, and have exposed them to incidents of increasing incivility and violence on the part of adolescents who have never been taught either the elementary understandings, the habits of work, or the self-control which are indispensable to the progress of their studies; and finally because the younger generation of teachers has suffered from an already degraded educational program, so that their own understanding is less certain than that of their elders, and, with the exception of some well tempered characters, has been disoriented by the absurd training so prodigally distributed by the teachers colleges.
My daughter sat in her creaky, wooden high chair last week, blissfully happy in her chubby 2-year-old frame, and I worried.
I worried because in a few years this toddler will stand at the edge of the nation’s body-image vortex, swirling with size 00 jeans, underfed celebrities glorified in gossip magazines, the latest “America’s Next Top Model” and an unrelenting marketing drumbeat that skinnier is better.
How do I keep her from falling in?
My New Year’s resolution is to help my daughter prepare for the mind-numbingly complex, sometimes fictitious image of the female body. Unfortunately, I am out of my element.
Today, involved dads are entering unfamiliar territory, such as body-image anxiety. They want to help, but don’t always know how, says Harvard Medical University researcher Dr. Nancy Etcoff. When Etcoff gives a speech these days, dads ask a lot of the questions.
“They don’t know what to say to their daughters, how to help them,” said Etcoff, who also runs Massachusetts General Hospital’s aesthetics and well-being program. “Right now there is a really troubled body image. It is really hard to feel confident.”
New Hampshire and Iowa have historically been the first states to make their choice in the state-by-state battle to pick presidential candidates in November’s election. Iowa voters decide today and New Hampshire next Tuesday. Kids may not be able to vote but every politician knows the value of a picture with a cute baby. And in New Hampshire, many parents seem determined to get their children involved in the election process. Some children are already veterans of the candidate meet-and-greet. “I used to hate it when I was little but not any more, I like going now,” said 14-year-old Bjarna O’Brien after meeting Republican presidential hopeful John McCain at a diner in the town of Derry. By now, Bjarna has developed opinions which she says are only partly shaped by her mother, who home schools the sisters. She says McCain is not tough enough on illegal immigration and that abortion is “worse than murder.” John Kelly, an 11-year-old who met McCain by chance at another New Hampshire diner on Tuesday, talks fluently about the need to do more for the middle class and about Republican hopeful Mitt Romney’s record of raising taxes.
Daniel Geschwind reaches up to his office bookshelf, takes down a three-dimensional puzzle of the human brain, and begins trying to snap the plastic pieces together. A neurogeneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Geschwind hopes the puzzle will help him describe the parts of the brain that control speech and language. But for the life of him, he can’t figure out how the left and right hemispheres attach. “I’m really bad spatially, so don’t make fun of me,” he pleads. “It’s like I’m having a little stroke or something. I’ll get it together, and then I’ll figure it out.”
The plastic model may have momentarily flummoxed Geschwind, but when it comes to the genes that govern the brain’s development and functions, he excels at putting the pieces together. Over the past few years, he has emerged as one of the leading geneticists in a nascent field that aims to spell out which genes are related to speech and language development–and how our intelligence and communication skills evolved beyond those of our ape relatives, giving us the unique ability to speak.
Research like Geschwind’s sits at the intersection of two fields: behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology. Each field depends on the other to make sense of the flood of studies on the genetics of language now pouring out of labs around the world. To peer into the human brain and see how it typically stores, uses, and comprehends words, Geschwind investigates not only normal human brains but also those where the process goes awry, studying the genes of families afflicted by autism, dyslexia, schizophrenia, and other conditions that can involve speech and language disorders. This research may help make diagnosis and treatment of language-related disorders more precise, but it also has a more basic purpose. “Studying disease is really a fundamental way to understand normal function,” says Geschwind. “Disease has given us extraordinary insight to understand how the brain works or might not work.”
Props to the Madison School Board for a process that has resulted in five interesting candidates. We’ll see how it plays out. Susan Troller on the current process:
The pool of five candidates for Madison’s top school district job includes two superintendents and high-level administrators from some of the largest and oldest school districts in America.
The candidates — four men and one woman — all have experience working in urban school districts. All have doctoral degrees, two are minorities, and three come from out of state. The out-of-staters have administrative experience in the Boston Public Schools in Massachusetts, the Miami/Dade school system in Florida and a combined district that includes schools in Columbus, Ohio.
The two candidates from Wisconsin include Green Bay’s current superintendent and the chief academic officer of the Racine Unified School District.
The semifinalists, chosen by the Hazard, Young and Attea national executive search firm, come from an original pool of 25 candidates from 11 states.
The districts where the candidates are currently working range in size from Green Bay and Racine, which have about 20,000 students, to districts like Miami/Dade, which has about 350,000 students.
The way is almost clear for Art Rainwater to be the nextsuperintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Rainwater was the only applicant for the permanent post at the head of theMadison schools as of 11 a.m. today. The application deadline is 4:15 p.m.today.The School Board will meet tonight to discuss the applicants, but membershave said they will make no hiring decisions because one of their number,JoAnn Elder, is out of town. The board planned to interview the superintendentcandidates on Feb. 1 and possibly make a decision that night.
“Of course, one could make the case that we’ve been interviewing Art forthe past five years, but another few questions probably won’t bother him atall,” said School Board member Deborah Lawson. She is one of three boardmembers who have been pushing to hire Rainwater since this summer withoutconducting a nationwide search.
The board reached a compromise last month in which only employees would beeligible to apply for the job. About a dozen district employees have thecertification to be a superintendent.
Rafael Gomez is hosting a discussion of school models (traditional, charter, magnet) with Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater. When: 6:30p.m. Tuesday January 8, 2008. Where:
Covenant Presbyterian Church
318 South Segoe Rd
Madison, WI 53705 [Map] Background:
Many communities offer a growing number of K-12 educational options. Learn about Madison’s current offerings and the climate for future charter/magnet initiatives. Format:
Question and Answer
Rafael has hosted a number of previous forums, including those that address:
Following their meeting this evening with Superintendent search consultants from Hazard, Young and Attea & Associates, Ltd., the Board of Education has selected five applicants as semifinalists for the position of Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
In alphabetical order, the five applicants are:
The semifinalists were chosen from among 25 persons who sought the position currently held by Art Rainwater. Rainwater will retire on June 30, 2008, with the new Superintendent scheduled to begin on July 1.
At age 9, Korey Davis came home from school with gang writing on his arm. At 10, he jacked his first car. At 13, he and some buddies got guns, used them to relieve a man of his Jeep, and later, while trying to outrun a police helicopter, smacked their hot wheels into a fire hydrant.
For his exploits, the tough-talking teen pulled not only a 15-year sentence (the police subsequently connected him to three previous car thefts) but got “certified” as an adult offender and shipped off to the St. Louis City workhouse to inspire a change of heart.
It didn’t have the desired effect.
“I wasn’t wanting to listen to nobody. If you wasn’t my momma, or anybody in my family, I wasn’t gonna listen to you, period,” says Korey, now 19. “I was very rebellious.”
At that stage, most states would have written Korey off and begun shuttling him from one adult prison to the next, where he likely would have sat in sterile cells, joined a gang, and spent his days and nights plotting his next crime.
Kathy Hennings [Hennings teaches at the Wisconsin Virtual Academy]:
Imagine if you were a member of a union whose actions hurt children and cost you your job.
Welcome to my world.
I am a teacher with the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, one of Wisconsin’s most successful public virtual schools. Prior to working at WIVA, I spent 30 years employed in traditional brick-and-mortar public schools. I am also a dues-paying member of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
Public virtual schools offer students a unique opportunity within the public school realm. A rigorous and rich curriculum, which meets Wisconsin standards, is provided for each child enrolled. In my school, licensed, experienced teachers instruct students and partner with parents (who strongly value their child’s education) to ensure the curriculum is carried out. Online scripted lessons, written by professionals in the field, are presented to the students at their own pace. Because a student does not need to move along with the masses in a classroom of 25 to 30, individualized attention can be given.
……….
That WEAC, my union, doesn’t care that these schools successfully educate kids at a substantial savings to taxpayers is a disgrace.
I hope the Supreme Court and lawmakers who may address this situation will agree with parents and teachers and not with WEAC. Otherwise, 3,000 kids in a half-dozen schools across the state will be forced out of the public schools that work best for them.
The Saturday Enrichment Program provides a student-centered environment to explore a wide range of interests and new academic areas to empower 5th-8th graders to ask and learn about career options, interests, and choices. Students utilize state-of-the-art campus resources and interact with UW-Madison faculty, staff and community professionals in this pre-college program sponsored by the School of Education. This program has open enrollment with course registrations on a first come, first served basis.
Bright children are being failed by teachers who do not stretch them enough or give them the individual attention they need, Government research has found.
Gifted pupils are routinely put in the wrong ability groups and are set targets that are too low, a study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families discovered. In many schools, young people who show early promise are left to fall behind.
Almost a quarter of the 140,000 children who achieve an above-average level 3 in assessments at the age of seven do not go on to score high marks in tests at 11.
The results are a significant blow to the Government, which has spent almost £400 million in the past decade on gifted and talented programmes in an attempt to convince many middle-class parents that bright children will be nurtured in the state sector.
The report, Able Pupils Who Lose Momentum, found shortcomings in the 37 primaries across England visited by Government advisers.
An old Chinese proverb sums up the three months I spent studying Mandarin in Beijing: To suffer and learn, one pays a high price, but a fool can’t learn any other way.
The famously difficult Chinese language could make a fool out of anyone. Standard Chinese, known as Mandarin or Putonghua, has tens of thousands of characters, many taking more than 20 strokes to write, and a transliteration system called Pinyin that expresses Chinese words in the 26-letter Latin alphabet of English.
Further complicating matters, Mandarin is a tonal language, meaning that the same Pinyin word has four definitions depending on the intonation.
More than 20% of the world’s population speaks Chinese. But while studying it last year at Beijing Language and Culture University, I often wondered how Chinese children ever learn it. Generally, I felt like a child, or at least deeply humbled. But on those rare occasions when I could read a sign or tell a cashier I didn’t have any small change, I felt like Alexander the Great at the gates of Persepolis.
The 2008 FIRST Championship will take place April 17-19 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.
The FIRST Championship is the culmination of the season’s programs, including the FIRST Robotics Competition, the FIRST Tech Challenge, and the FIRST LEGO League.
There was a time when Presidents and presidential candidates took bold and principled steps on critical issues of the day. Candidate John Kennedy helped free the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from jail on a ludicrous charge during the 1960 campaign. President Dwight Eisenhower used federal troops to protect the right of the Little Rock Nine to attend an integrated school. Some wonder if we may ever see such leadership again, particularly on issues we care about.
Next week, Mayor Bloomberg is attending a bipartisan meeting in Oklahoma hosted by former Sen. David Boren that is intended, as Boren puts it, to be “shock therapy” for all presidential candidates to grapple with the issues rather than each other, and, if they don’t, perhaps Bloomberg will run.
As one who has employed shock therapy on occasion to get the system to work, I support such a meeting – and am keenly interested in what a Bloomberg candidacy would mean for America. If I were his adviser (which I am not), I would urge him to base the core of his domestic platform on the notion that education is the civil rights issue for the 21st century, because without it, one cannot pursue the American Dream.
This focus on education would not be new to the mayor. He demanded – and received – control of the city’s unwieldy education system so that one person could be held accountable. He has challenged all of us, including me, to reevaluate our notions of what constitutes a sound and basic education, and he has made progress, however imperfect. Innovative programs like new small schools have improved graduation rates, while the achievement gap between white students and students of color has narrowed. And now city public schools receive report cards as well as their students.
Art and Maria Guelis are well-educated Russians who speak their native language at home, read Tolstoy and Dostoevski and watch Internet TV programs out of Moscow. But their 7-year-old son, George, always answers his parents in English.
Determined to pass on their linguistic heritage, the Guelises recently adopted a time-honored immigrant strategy that is burgeoning in Chicago’s suburbs. They enrolled him in Saturday language classes in addition to his public schooling.
George attends a Russian school in Naperville, one of scores of weekend foreign language schools springing up in houses of worship and cultural centers as migration from Chicago and the high-tech industry in DuPage County bring a polyglot populace to the suburbs.
The new 2006-07 California Report Card: The State of the State’s Children identifies critical issues affecting children’s well-being and threatening to compromise public health and the economy. This nonpartisan report assigns letter grades to individual issues, such as a “C-” in early care and education, a “C-” in K-12 education, and a “B-” in health insurance. Recommendations are provided for how policymakers can better address children’s basic needs for growing into productive adults.
The report presents the most current data available on the status of California’s children, who represent 27% of all Californians and 13% of the nation’s kids:
760,000 California children, ages 0-18, don’t have health insurance.
One in three of California’s 6- to 17-year-olds is obese or overweight.
About 58% of California’s 3- and 4-year-olds do not attend preschool.
About 60% of California’s 2nd- to 11th-graders did not meet state goals for math and reading proficiency in 2006.
As many as 30% of the state’s children live in an economically-struggling family, able to pay for only the most basic needs.
California received its annual State of the State’s Children report card Thursday, bringing home grades few parents would view with pride.
The state posted a C average on the health and education of California’s 9.5 million children, according to the report’s authors at Children Now, an Oakland advocacy group.
But raising its marks will be a challenge with the state facing a budget deficit of $14 billion over the next 18 months. Across-the-board cuts are expected for all state services, including health care and education.
The annual Children Now assessment judged the state’s performance on a range of issues, including health insurance, asthma, child care, public education, infant and adolescent health and obesity.
The highest mark was for after school programs, which earned a B+. Obesity received the lowest mark, of D+.
Overall, the grades changed little this year from the past two report cards – and that’s not good enough, said Children Now President Ted Lempert, a former state legislator.
“Policymakers have to stop saying kids are their priority when we have a long, long way to go,” he said.
How about a really, really smart eighth-grader?
Here’s your chance to find out. We’ve built a game that allows users to go head to head on middle school level math problems. Here’s the game. The problems are primarily contributed by the folks at MATHCOUNTS, which is the starting point in challenging math studies for many of the top students today (as it was for me over 20 years ago). MATHCOUNTS is a national contest that brings together many of the top students from across the US.
Because of the audience of our site, students (and you) get a chance to participate with some of the best students in the world. Right now, for example, there is a past National MATHCOUNTS champion and an International Math Olympiad gold medalist playing the game. (Yes, they’re probably better at the game than I am!) This audience is an example of one of the many great benefits of the internet—just 10-15 years ago, a bright student could easily get all the way to college believing he or she is the smartest person in the world.
Demetrius Sims’ quest to become an entrepreneur began one day after school, when he joined 36 other middle school students — triple the number expected — for a workshop aimed at helping them land jobs during this winter’s holiday break.
“Babysit. Shovel. Melt ice. Christmas gift wrapping,” Demetrius, 11, wrote as instructor Sara Winter, career development specialist for the Urban League of Greater Madison’s Careers Program, told the students to list jobs they could perform.
“What else can I do?” Demetrius said softly to himself as Winter pressed the students to come up with as many types of jobs as possible.
If there ‘s one institution in Madison that needs strong leaders to tackle huge challenges, it ‘s the city ‘s school district.
Unfortunately, only two people are seeking two open School Board seats in the coming spring election. The deadline for declaring a candidacy was Wednesday.
That means voters won ‘t have any choice in who will serve, barring any late write-in campaigns.
That ‘s a shame — one that Madison can ‘t afford to repeat.
he rigors of a campaign test potential board members and help the community choose which direction to take the district.
Competitive School Board campaigns also draw considerable and much-needed attention to huge local issues, such as the increasing number of children who show up for kindergarten unprepared, rising health insurance costs for school employees, shifting demographics, school security and tight limits on spending.
Wisconsin Wrights was created in fall 2006 through a partnership between the UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies in Theatre, the UW-Madison University Theatre, and the Madison Repertory Theatre. Support for our inaugural year was also provided by Edenfred/Terry Family Foundation and the UW-Madison Anonymous Fund. Three finalists received a one week workshop and residency through Edenfred and University Theatre and received public readings in June 2007. The Madison Repertory Theatre selected one of the three works, “Recovering the Real Me” by Kurt McGinnis Brown, for further development through the 2007 Madison New Play Festival which will take place October 20-21 and October 27-28, 2007. For more details on the Madison New Play Festival click here. (Please note that the name of “Recovering the Real Me” has been changed to “Accent Adios.”) .
The deadline for submissions for Wisconsin Wrights 2008 has been extended to January 14, 2008 with the selection process taking place from January through early April 2008. Finalists will be announced in mid-April 2008 with finalists eligible for several play development opportunities. Three finalists will receive a one week workshop coordinated by University Theatre with a director, dramaturg and full cast and will be featured with public readings June 5, 6 & 7, 2008. These workshops provide an extraordinary opportunity for the expansion and exercise of the playwriting craft, exploration of characters, and constructive critique by caring, invested artists. One finalist will be selected by the Madison Repertory Theatre to take part in their Fall 2008 Madison New Play Festival and one finalist will be selected by the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre for a staged reading in March 2009.
So while it might surprise a visitor to this small city in Walworth County that Latino children are just shy of 40% of the district enrollment, longtime residents know the stories of families drawn to the area by a range of jobs, including work at nearby farms, canneries and resorts.
But despite the rich ethnic diversity, youths in this district of a little more than 2,700 students often found themselves on different academic tracks for years, based on how quickly they could grasp the difference between scene and seen or wade through vocabulary words specific to a chemistry class.
That’s changing this year as the district pushes to better integrate English language learners into mainstream classrooms, pairing up content-area teachers with those who previously specialized in English as a Second Language or bilingual education.
The implications for the schools and the community as a whole could be far-reaching.
“Now that they’re all in the room together, they’re really seeing the commonalities,” said Carole Schroth, who along with fellow veteran teacher Sonia Lee is leading the change. “And hopefully that will feed into the cafeteria and the hallways.”
Ed Hughes, a Madison attorney, and Marj Passman, a retired local teacher, will fill two Madison School Board seats in the spring election on April 1. They are running unopposed for seats now held by Lawrie Kobza, a single-term board member, and Carol Carstensen, who has served since 1990 and is by far the most senior member of the board.
In fact, when Hughes and Passman join the board, only Johnny Winston Jr. will have served more than one three-year term.
James Ely, an East High School custodian who had filed papers Dec. 27 with the City Clerk’s Office to register as a candidate for Carstensen’s Seat 7, decided to withdraw from the race because he was unable to complete the necessary filing information to change his candidacy to a run for Kobza’s Seat 6.
Hughes is running for Seat 7, and Passman is the candidate for Seat 6. Neither Hughes nor Passman has previously served on the board, although Passman lost a race last year against Maya Cole.
When we last spoke to Sade Daniels, the 18-year-old former foster youth was making nervous preparations for her first semester at Clark Atlanta University. The nervousness would be familiar to any parent who’s ever sent a child to a new school: She was full of questions like, Will I make any friends? Will I like my teachers? Will I like going to a new place? The difference, of course, is that for most of her life Daniels has had to offer the comforting responses to her own questions. The stakes were even higher this time: Daniels was leaving behind everything and everyone she knew in Oakland to pursue a big dream in a new, unknown city. Nationwide, less than 5 percent of former foster children finish college.
Daniels’ first semester proved to be a rough transition. She struggled to negotiate her own class schedule and financial arrangements. “I didn’t feel like [Clark Atlanta University officials] had a lot of sympathy for my situation,” she said. She looked for someone to help guide her on things like class selection but found no one – “There’s not a lot of guidance counselors there, or if there are, they’re hiding,” she said.
Havoc was the order of the day at Bladensburg High School in Prince George’s County.
Students were fighting, skipping classes and stealing cars from the parking lot.
Officials were stymied until they sought help two years ago from a national program designed to help schools by reaching out to troubled youths. Enter the youth advisers of the Violence-Free Zone, a program of the District-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, who let the students know that they were there to help them. The advisers also brought a stronger message: Control of Bladensburg was going to return to the adults.
“Kids can’t be controlled by cameras, curfews and cops,” said Robert L. Woodson, president and founder of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “Those are threats, and they won’t respond to that. . . . The Violence-Free Zone inspires them to obey the rules by providing life witnesses to them [who show] that just because you are from a dysfunctional household or a troubled neighborhood, you don’t have to be a troubled person.”
2) Secondly, who runs “The Write Connection?”
I oversee The Write Connection.
3) What does it try to Accomplish?
In the beginning, the main goal of The Write Connection was to teach students how to write essays. But now, schools are accrediting the program with dramatic gains in their API test scores. Dr. Douglas Reeves, a renowned educational researcher, states, “No matter how the writing variable has been measured, the results are the same: as emphasis on classroom nonfiction writing grows, student achievement improves. We have evidence not only of reading and writing score improvement but of scores in math, science, and social studies improving as well.” Consequently, when schools use the program with fidelity, they have seen a continuous dramatic increase in their state test scores.
4) When you say “enhancing the state mandated curriculum” who exactly does this and how do they go about it?
The Write Connection actually fills a gap in the state mandated language arts curriculum. The writing portion is either unrealistic and or lacking. The Write Connection provides a realistic approach to writing that incorporates the state standards and frameworks while writing in the content areas such as science and social studies. Furthermore, most of the curriculum used in schools still focus on a narrative approach to writing which has proven to be far less effective than non-fiction writing.
Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.
Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.
Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.
And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.
Berkeley’s on YouTube. American University’s hoping to get on iTunes. George Mason professors have created an online research tool, a virtual filing cabinet for scholars. And with a few clicks on Yale’s Web site, anyone can watch one of the school’s most popular philosophy professors sitting cross-legged on his desk, talking about death.
Studying on YouTube won’t get you a college degree, but many universities are using technology to offer online classes and open up archives. Sure, some schools have been charging for distance-learning classes for a long time, but this is different: These classes are free. At a time when many top schools are expensive and difficult to get into, some say it’s a return to the broader mission of higher education: to offer knowledge to everyone.
And tens of millions are reaching for it.
For schools, the courses can bring benefits, luring applicants, spreading the university’s name, impressing donors, keeping alumni engaged. Virginia Tech, for example, offers some online classes free to its graduates.
Three good things, possibly more, happened to 6-year-old Fiona McLaughlin one fall day, and at dinner that night she took a deep breath and recounted them. The first was “right now,” which often tops her list. Then there was going to school and making a color wheel there in the morning.
Her younger sister, Molly, who is 4, went next. “When you cuddle with me at night,” she said, looking at her mother. “Right now and having homework.”
It’s not that bad things failed to happen. They did. Fiona’s favorite friend was sick and didn’t go to school. Molly, who actually didn’t have homework but was attempting to do her sister’s, said no one wanted to play with her when she got to school. But each night at their suburban Piedmont home, the girls are asked to stop and recall positive aspects of the day. The scene at dinner did not just fall into place. All of it – the well-set table, cloth napkins, candlelight, pointed questions about the best parts of the day – is a ritual rooted in the growing field of positive psychology, the scientific study of well-being. Kids tumble into the world with their own set of inherited traits and tendencies, researchers in the field say, but positive emotions can be nurtured.
Marcy Newberger grew up in Montgomery County and attended Churchill High School. Then she moved to Fairfax County and had children, who attended McLean High School. Both were fine schools in good systems, with one irritating difference.
Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.
Parents nationwide are increasingly frustrated with wild variations in grading systems that, they say, are costing their children thousands of dollars in merit-based scholarships and leaving them disadvantaged in college admissions.
Sensitivity to grading is particularly acute in Fairfax and Montgomery — large, affluent counties that send more students to college each year than other local school systems. But grading disparities also have enraged students and parents elsewhere.
Next week, Waukesha School District leaders plan to take an unusual step, one they contend is necessary after cutting $9.4 million worth of services over the past seven years: They will sit down with their teachers union to hash out a contract with help from a mediator.
What’s more unusual is the culprit that Waukesha Superintendent David Schmidt blames in part for the district’s financial woes: the state law intended to help school districts keep down teacher compensation costs.
“To some degree, we’d like to say we can control our labor costs,” Schmidt said. “The QEO makes that harder.”
Schmidt has company in other state school officials who contend the QEO, known more formally as the qualified economic offer law, has created fiscal problems for them. After 15 years with the law, considered one leg of the state’s so-called three-legged stool for school funding, calls for change are coming from many quarters.
At issue is what some have called the cap gap that exists between the roughly 2% increase in school revenue allowed annually under current law and the 3.8% boost in salaries and benefits practically guaranteed by the QEO, which says school boards can avoid arbitration if they offer teachers compensation increases in that amount.
“That’s probably the core issue right now within our system that’s causing some frustration from school district administrators,” said state Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon).
Although Waukesha school officials have not revealed the details of talks with the teachers union, indications are that their unusual move this year toward mediation and possible arbitration is to seek less than a 3.8% package increase for their teachers.
In addition to school leaders who complain the law’s conflict with revenue caps has forced staff cuts, teachers say the QEO increase has suppressed salaries. Critics contend it has helped educators keep inflated benefits.
The publication this year of U.S. News & World Report’s first ranking of high schools has parents in a twitter, worrying that their property taxes are too high (or too low), or that public education has failed them entirely. But leaving aside the merits and methodology of these particular rankings, we might wonder whether rankings matter at all and, more importantly, if they should.
In fact, there are some numbers that really matter. Getting them is the rub.
To understand this problem, consider another set of rankings, released about the same time as the high-school rankings, that didn’t garner as much attention: bar-exam passage rates. The school at which I teach — New York Law School — jumped to fifth on the list of New York area law schools (with an all-time high passage rate of 90%), while Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University leapfrogged to third, behind only NYU and Columbia.
Cardozo, however, is ranked 52nd by U.S. News among all law schools (fourth in New York), while New York Law School is ranked in the “third tier” of law schools (along with Albany, Hofstra, Pace and Syracuse). So which ranking matters?
On the one hand, the U.S. News ranking would seem to be more comprehensive, because bar passage rate is only one of many factors it considers. On the other hand, what good is a law degree if a graduate can’t practice because he doesn’t pass the licensing exam?
Moreover, if the bar exam measures a student’s fitness to practice law (as the bar examiners claim), a school’s bar passage rate should be a pretty good indication of how the school is doing in turning out graduates who know how to practice law.
Adam Nystrom remembers being taunted by classmates in middle school for needing so many special-education courses.
“They’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the retard class,’ and everybody would laugh,” recalls Adam, who suffers from a learning disorder that impedes reading ability. “I wouldn’t really say anything because there isn’t anything funny about it.”
Adam, now 20 years old, spent a tumultuous 13 years in the local public-school system. He played pranks on teachers and disrupted lectures with a talking pen that delivered punch lines from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite.” At Choctawhatchee High School, he struggled to pass Florida’s mandatory graduation test, taking the exam six times. Once, he drew a suspension.
But Adam’s academic journey ended in success. He became a varsity wrestler and was selected three times to be a part of the homecoming king and queen’s royal court. After graduating in 2006, he joined the Army, fulfilling a childhood dream.
A major force behind his turnabout: the school district’s program for mainstreaming special-education students into regular classrooms.
As the momentum for such programs has accelerated across the country, many have faced serious obstacles. Special-education students account for a disproportionate amount of discipline problems and sometimes commit violent acts. Teachers say they often lack the training and resources to handle them. Many parents have fought to keep schools and classrooms segregated, saying school administrators have used mainstreaming, also known as “inclusion,” as a pretext for cost cutting.
To free up funds for his special-education overhaul — which initially focused on elementary-school reading — Mr. Gaetz began by making deep cuts in central-office spending. He eliminated more than 40 administrative positions, saving the district about $6 million a year. Some displaced personnel took special-education positions in the schools, which were given additional funds and broad latitude to hire more psychologists, social workers and special-ed teachers as they saw fit. Educators say such site-based management of mainstreaming programs was rare at the time.
If mathematics is like a foreign language, then those who teach the subject ought to be fluent.
That is the goal of an intensive pilot program by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Intel that aims to improve the math skills of students in underperforming Bay Area elementary and middle schools.
Helping students means helping their teachers first – and that includes some veteran educators.
Take Marivic Walch of Bishop Elementary School in Sunnyvale, who has been teaching for seven years and describes herself as a “math queen.”
“I had many aha moments,” she said.
Modeled after a successful program in Vermont, the 80-hour pilot course taught 38 Bay Area teachers in the past four months how to improve their skills from basic math all the way to algebra. The program is set to expand in 2008, more than doubling its scope, training 100 teachers in 20 schools in San Jose, Gilroy, Redwood City, Foster City, Newark and San Francisco.
“The idea is to turn this into a fluency training in the language of math,” said Mark Pettinger, external affairs manager for Intel. “This is meant for teachers who are good teachers.”
It won’t exactly be a jolly post-Christmas gift that each principal in Milwaukee Public Schools will receive Jan. 9.
What they will get are packets of information on the budget forecast for next year and the numbers they are to use in putting together a spending plan for their schools.
Good luck, principals – the information in most every case is going to be grim, so much so that some schools may ask to close or merge with others.
The planning assumptions put together by MPS administrators and approved by the Milwaukee School Board include:
• Another major decline in enrollment, 4.7% in the main roster of MPS schools, 4.1% when alternative schools and charter schools not staffed by MPS employees are included.
If the forecast proves true, there will be 77,546 students in September 2008 in that main roster, which is to say, the schools you normally think of when you think of MPS, compared with 96,942 in September 1998, a decline of more than 20% in a decade. The decline from a year ago to this year was 3.8%.
Including the alternative and charter schools, the forecast is for 83,787 for next fall, down from 87,360 this year.
Lost in the hubbub over a home-school educator’s election to chair of the S.C. Board of Education in 2009 is the man who will precede her in the post — Al Simpson of Lancaster.
Simpson takes over the gavel as state school board chairman from John Tindal of Manning when the panel convenes for its next meeting in mid-January. State board members follow a policy of picking their future leader a year in advance.
Simpson cast a critical preliminary vote Dec. 12 that enabled Kristin Maguire of Clemson to defeat Fred “Trip” DuBard, a Florence businessman.
“We had two good candidates,” he said. “I don’t think this vote is going to cause any problems with the board.”
Maguire, he said, “has a whole year to prepare to move up. She’ll do a fine job. She’s shown me she’s dedicated to public schools.”
So is Simpson.
A product of South Carolina public schools, Simpson’s three children attend Lancaster County public schools, where he said he has seen choice work for families.
he teachers union in Wisconsin wants all public schools to spend more time teaching students about organized labor.
Here ‘s a better idea with much greater need:
Require the leaders of the teachers union to enroll in a remedial civics class.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council showed how badly it needs a refresher course in the basic framework of American government when it lobbied against a sensible limit on the governor ‘s out-of-control veto powers.
WEAC suffers the dubious distinction of being the only organization in the state to register this year with the state Ethics Board to lobby against Senate Joint Resolution 5. The resolution, heading to voters for final approval this spring, will rein in the most outlandish veto power in the nation — the notorious “Frankenstein ” veto.
Modern governors, Republicans and Democrats, have used this veto trick with increasing gall. They cross out all but a handful of unrelated words and figures across long passages of spending bills. The remaining bits and pieces of sentences can then be stitched together to create law completely unrelated to the original text.
It ‘s a lot like the way literature ‘s Dr. Frankenstein stitched together his monster.
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once,” wrote English essayist Charles Lamb.
Now, it seems, the lawyers are children. Well, maybe not quite. But here in Gotham, a handful of law-themed high schools and middle schools are teaching student the ropes of legislation and litigation. Law-themed high schools? Yep, you heard that right.
The curricula at the public schools, some of which are part of the New Century Initiative, a decade-long effort to improve schools in the inner-cities, isn’t all-law-all-the-time. Students are expected to follow the curriculum outlined by the Department of Education, so reading, writing and ‘rithmetic stay on the agenda.
But much of the curricula relates directly to law. At the Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for instance, freshmen take U.S Government for two semesters. By their sophomore year, students begin taking an American law course taught by a former attorney.
Freshmen at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn preside over a hypothetical case involving injury suffered from Fluffy, a ferocious dog, and an apartment building owner that is sued as a result.
Global economic growth has brought “hundreds of millions” of people out of abject poverty, particularly in Asia, the former Fed chief pointed out, and that has been the result of market forces at work.
“The most extraordinary example is China. China is moving towards capitalism. that’s precisely what it’s doing,” Greenspan said. Nevertheless, Greenspan argued, rising inequality of income is creating new problems, and declining U.S. education standards, especially in math and science, are doing harm to the historic “balancing” of income levels.
While Iowa’s school system continues to rank high nationwide, it is no longer at the top in reading or math as it was in the early 1990s, according to results from a highly regarded exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
“We’re not competitive,” said Des Moines businessman Marvin Pomerantz, a longtime education advocate who has criticized the results produced on Jeffrey’s watch. Pomerantz even threatened to sue the state last fall over what he called a failure to provide an adequate education for all children.
“We don’t win when we compete with other kids and countries,” he said. “We used to win. We were best in the nation. Now we’re not the best.”
Results from the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, published last fall, showed that seven states had children who ranked above Iowans in fourth-grade math, four did better in fourth-grade reading, seven ranked higher in eighth-grade math and three scored better in eighth-grade reading. Nearly half the nation’s students recorded average scores similar to Iowa’s, according to the report.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, using public school military academies to teach leadership and boost test scores in low-income urban neighborhoods. NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW-Chicago has our report.
ELIZABETH BRACKETT, NewsHour Correspondent: The cadets at the Marine Military Academy in Chicago listen up as commands are given. One hundred and twenty eight students attend the new school, the fifth in the Chicago public school system to adopt a military model.
The program is led by Retired Lieutenant Colonel Rick Mills.
RICK MILLS, Chicago Public Schools: The purpose of the military academy programs is to offer our cadets and parents an educational choice among many choices in Chicago public schools and to provide an educational experience that has a college prep curriculum, combined with a military curriculum.
ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Over 10,000 Chicago high school students now wear a military uniform to class.
James Ely of Madison has made a late December entrance to the 2008 Madison School Board race.
On Friday, an official in the City Clerk’s Office said Ely is a registered candidate for Seat 7, which will be open next spring when veteran School Board member Carol Carstensen retires from the board.
Ely has until 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 2, to turn in his nomination papers, which had not been filed as of Friday.
Ely will take on Ed Hughes, a Madison attorney whose children have attended east side schools and who declared his candidacy for the Carstensen seat over six months ago.
There’s still time to complete the MMSD Board of Education Community Fine Arts Task Force’s Arts Education Survey.
Access to the on-line surveys will remain open through December 31, 2007. Input from the community is very important and will help inform and strengthen the Task Force?s recommendations on arts education (dance, music, theater, visual arts). The results of this work will be compiled and presented to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education next spring and shared with the public. All individual answers will be kept confidential. In appreciation of your time in completing the on-line survey, your name, if provided at the end of the survey, will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a pair of complimentary tickets to a Madison performance or admission to local arts venues.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact task force members at fineartstaskforce@madison.k12.wi.us.
here are three distinct surveys. Please select the one on-line survey that best represents you. Click here for the survey, available in English, Spanish, and Hmong: http://mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Long after the final bell at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Anaheim, more than 100 students from first through sixth grade sit quietly at their desks. The only sounds are of pencils moving, chairs squeaking and the occasional whisper.
This is homework time for one of the 46 schools where 4,800 students are enrolled in Anaheim Achieves, an after-school program operated by the Anaheim Family YMCA.
In room 16, first-graders have finished their homework assignments and are drawing a picture of a cat from a book. Some glance at others’ work. Some giggle. Some are fully absorbed. Once done, students must write a sentence describing what is happening in the picture.
“It helps them with their comprehension skills,” said Julia Turchek, a first-grade teacher who volunteers every Monday and Wednesday.
Now in its ninth year, the program works closely with several Orange County school districts, such as Magnolia, Savanna, Centralia and Anaheim, and collaborates with other support groups, including the city of Anaheim, Orange County Department of Education, Boys and Girls Clubs of America and AmeriCorps. Together they help address the academic and mentoring needs of children.
Science teacher Rod Ziolkowski is spending his winter break working, just as he did Thanksgiving and practically every evening and weekend since the fall. Ziolkowski, dedicated as he is, is not preparing lesson plans but writing college recommendations for his students at Whitney High School in Cerritos. He expects to crank out 100 or more letters by the time admissions deadlines arrive in January.
He has plenty of company. At public and private schools from coast to coast, teachers are engaged in one of the most time-honored but overlooked aspects of the admissions process.
A strong teacher recommendation can add flesh, bones and personality to a packet of test scores and grade point averages and convince a college admissions director that a particular student would be a valuable asset on campus.
Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.
Parents nationwide are increasingly frustrated with wild variations in grading systems that, they say, are costing their children thousands of dollars in merit-based scholarships and leaving them disadvantaged in college admissions.
Sensitivity to grading is particularly acute in Fairfax and Montgomery — large, affluent counties that send more students to college each year than other local school systems. But grading disparities also have enraged students and parents elsewhere.
I asked readers how to fix Coolidge High. They quickly filled my e-mail basket with suggestions. Interestingly, this varied group of people agreed on so many points I can summarize their recipe for turning around Coolidge — and schools like it — in just seven steps:
1. Train teachers better. Greg Prudich, president of the Mercer County (W.Va.) Board of Education, said training must be “intense, disciplined, research-based, and result-directed. Require it, and a lot of it. We do a lot of teacher training, and it does benefit everyone.” But it has to fit with whatever the individual school is doing, and include follow-up sessions by the trainer and the principal. Too many school districts schedule big training sessions that are little more than the fad of the month, delivered by a high-priced speaker. Susan Sandler, president of the Justice Matters Institute in San Francisco, notes her group and others have just produced a study, “High Schools for Equity,” focusing on five urban public high schools that are having success. The study was conducted by Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford University and recommends more investment in teacher preparation and development.
ad_icon
2. Let principals hire and fire staff. One math teacher at another D.C. high school said, “Principals need the ability to clean house and hire teachers that will continually strive for progress and not give up hope on our children.” Barry Fitzpatrick, principal of Mount Saint Joseph High School in Baltimore, said, “It seems to me this would allow for the creation of a motivated core of teachers.” I have examined closely some charter high schools that are raising student achievement in low-income neighborhoods. Their ability to recruit the best teachers they can find, and dismiss those who are not productive, is among their greatest advantages over schools like Coolidge.
3. Remove disruptive students. This seems obvious to many readers. One reader who favors giving good, serious students their own classes acknowledged the idea has a significant flaw. This reader, with 34 years of experience in urban public education, said: “The most common argument against my proposal was always, ‘Would YOU want to work in the place where the OTHER students were grouped?’ ” The reader said: “I would be willing to work in both. Both groups of students are important and valuable, but they cannot be approached in the same manner.” A Montgomery County teacher who specializes in helping disruptive and at-risk youth had three practical solutions for dealing with such students: Get them into more extracurricular activities, upgrade cafeteria food and require school uniforms. Several readers said that was fine, but if troubled students interfered with the learning of conscientious kids, they had to be put somewhere else.
Our nation’s classrooms no longer emphasize substantive expository and persuasive writing built upon strong foundational knowledge. This dumbing down of students’ writing and reading is one of the main reasons that students are not ready for college after graduating from our high schools.
During this last decade, public-school teachers have been forced to teach the personal victimization narrative (with an emphasis on “voice”) to get their students ready for the state-mandated tests which contain writing prompts such as “the importance of understanding your heritage,” “a time you made an important choice,” “the importance of accepting others as they are,” “the affect someone you admire can have on your life,” “whether it is important to seek friendships with people who are different from you,” or “the importance of participating in an activity you enjoy.”
Students have been taught that they will get a higher score on these writing prompts if they will build up a dramatic social injustice, victimization essay even if the personal references are bogus. Correct grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation, and capitalization are not factored into the final score so long as they do not “disrupt” communication; and if the student makes a high enough score on his essay, the questions on the multiple-choice editing/revising section count very little.
Parents at an elementary school here gathered last Thursday afternoon with a holiday mission: to prepare boxes of food for needy families fleeing some of the world’s horrific civil wars.
The community effort to help refugees resembled countless others at this time of year, with an exception. The recipients were not many thousands of miles away. They were students in the school and their families.
More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in Decatur, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.
“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school.
Tom Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has been making trouble again. His latest report asks, “How Well Are American Students Learning?” It upends hitherto highly regarded research based on data from several countries that says more time for instruction and homework has a negative correlation with achievement — in other words, the more teaching at school and more homework at home, the less you learn.
Loveless thought that didn’t make much sense, given other research that associates more time on task with more learning. In the report, he comes at the international data from a different direction, focusing on changes in instructional and homework time rather than on static measures. He finds that class time strongly correlates with achievement and that the apparent negative effect of homework disappears.
I was thinking: uh-oh. New data on homework, anything on homework, is always going to get mixed reviews. The pro- and anti-homework camps are dug in, their artillery lined up, their troops heavily armed. Loveless is a conscientious researcher, but I suspect he will pay for his attempt to clarify the issue.
School’s out for the holidays, and it’s probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. But in the marginalized world of music education, a good deal of serious thinking needs to be done. Now that Charles Dickens’s Christmas ghosts have made their rounds for the year, perhaps they might be enlisted to provide perspective and encourage some soul-searching.
The crisis of the moment has partly to do with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s announcement last summer that New York City schools would be required to teach the arts, and that principals would be rated annually on their success, much as they are in other subjects. In theory this could put some muscle behind the adventurous curriculum (or blueprint, as it is called) that the city’s Department of Education and a panel of arts consultants drew up in 2004: a kindergarten-through-12th-grade program that envisions choral and instrumental performance, the fostering of musical literacy and the consideration of the role music plays in communities and the world at large. The music proposed for this course was admirably boundary-free, cutting a swath from Beethoven and Puccini through folk songs, spirituals, jazz and pop.
The problem is that the 2004 blueprint is recommended rather than required. Given the paucity of music teachers in the system — there was one music teacher for every 1,200 students in 2006, Education Department officials have said — schools that could execute it in all its glory were few. Exactly how (and how quickly) that can change is unclear.
I took an Introduction to American Politics honors class with Professor John J. Pitney this past semester. He is a masterful teacher and this post will capture the lessons I drew on how to effectively engage a class. I hope it’s useful for other teachers reading this.
Be respected as an authority on the material: In any place where students are intellectually curious, they first want to be assured that you know your stuff. At most good high schools or colleges, it’s assumed teachers know the material. But effective teachers will provide background on how and why they know what they’re talking about. As students, we’re trained to be skeptical, so convince us.
Tell stories. This is a universal Good Thing for effective communicating, no less in formal teaching. His stories are all the more vivid since he was there (earlier in his career) — in D.C., in Albany, in the back room, wherever. 1) Make a statement, 2) Illustrate with a story, 3) Repeat.
Be weird and wacky. Pitney stomped and jumped all over the classroom. He did weird impersonations. He raised his voice, lowered his voice. He laughed. He showed odd videos. All this made him memorable. Weird is good.
Teach for America, a high-profile organization that recruits college graduates to work at least two years as teachers in low-performing schools, might be coming to Milwaukee.
Wendy Kopp, the founder and chief executive officer of the New York-based organization, visited recently, primarily in an effort to raise money but also to talk about the organization adding Milwaukee to the list of more than two dozen locations nationwide where it places teachers.
There would be substantial hurdles to clear before the idea could go forward. At minimum, there wouldn’t be Teach for America people in Milwaukee classrooms until September 2010.
“We’re at such the beginning stages of even thinking about this – the conversation around whether it would ever make sense to build a Teach for America presence here in Milwaukee,” Kopp said in an interview. But she said the idea had appeal.
Jim Rahn, education program officer for the Kern Family Foundation, based in Waukesha, said: “I’ve felt for a long time . . . that it would be a benefit, a blessing to Milwaukee, and you could add Racine and Kenosha, if we could find a way to work with Teach for America to provide another vehicle for talented, committed youth to enter the field of education, serving particularly in high-needs schools.”
The Kern foundation has emerged as a major force in local philanthropy and was one of two destinations for Kopp during her visit. The other was the Bradley Foundation.
“It’s an exciting year in D.C. public schools!” Burton told the Back to School Night crowd, and there were nods and murmurs of assent.
He ticked off an impressive list of Coolidge’s new and improved. A renovated teachers’ lounge; a new community resource center; $1.3 million in paint, plumbing and roofing; almost $3 million for a new track-and-field area. Six Advanced Placement classes were added, and $15,000 was found to send almost 20 percent of the teachers to AP training. Zero tolerance was the new law — no phones or iPods — and for the first time, Coolidge required uniforms.
“Our kids look like ladies and gentlemen when they come to school,” said Terry Goings, president of the Parent Teacher Student Organization.
Yes, yes they do, the crowd responded.
“Thank you for your faith in public schools,” said Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education.
“This is going to be the best high school in the District!” said Greg Roberts, a 1975 Coolidge alum whose D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust donated funds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (search for “stripper school”) A schoolboy had a 16th birthday to remember after a stripper ordered by his mother turned up at his drama class.
The boy’s mother apparently booked a “gorilla” to mark her son’s big day through an agency, but a stripper turned up instead.
The woman even asked her son’s teacher at Nottingham’s Arnold Hill School and Technology College to film the event so the family could see the boy’s reaction.
The stripper, who arrived halfway through the lesson, first walked the unnamed boy around the class on all fours like a dog.
She then spanked him 16 times – once for each year – to the sound of Britney Spears, before stripping down to her bra and knickers.
Boy, do I miss the good ‘ol days.
An understanding of basic math and reading is a better indicator of future academic success than behavior is in preschool and kindergarten students, according to a recent study led by a Northwestern professor.
SESP professor Greg Duncan led an 11-person team in a four-year study researching factors affecting how well students do in school.
“We were interested in assessing the relational predictive power of various skills … kids had when they entered school,” Duncan said.
The researchers studied students entering school, looking at their academic performance, sociability and the number of fights they were involved in. They looked at data for students, in some cases up to seventh grade, and found that those who mastered elementary math and literacy skills early on were more likely to succeed in school, regardless of behavior, than those who were well-behaved but didn’t master academics. The study controlled for economic and family factors.
Judged by the Australian Labor Party’s education policy and subsequent comments by Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard, the answer is straightforward. In a recent interview in this paper, Gillard, on being asked the core purpose of her portfolio, replied: “So while my portfolio can be a mouthful, I’ll be happy to be referred to simply as ‘the minister for productivity’.”
Such a utilitarian view of education is mirrored by Labor’s policy document entitled Establishing a National Curriculum to Improve Our Children’s Educational Outcomes, released last February.
The opening paragraph, in justifying the need for a nationally consistent curriculum in core areas such as mathematics, the sciences, English and history, argues: “For Australia to succeed in a highly competitive global economy, our children need to have the best education possible.
“Better education outcomes deliver a real and tangible benefit to our nation’s economy, lifting productivity and allowing people to get better jobs that pay more.”
Referring to a speech by Productivity Commission head Gary Banks, Labor’s national curriculum paper justifies investing more in education by linking raised standards to increased productivity and building human capital. Another paper released early this year, Federalist Paper 2: The Future of Schooling in Australia, written on behalf of state and territory governments, also justifies the needto strengthen standards by linking education to higher economic efficiency and workforce participation.
It has been 11 years since Olivia and Juan Francisco Casteñeda left the poverty of Zacatecas, Mexico, for the poverty of the Quad Cities.
Despite their struggles, they have no doubt that they made the right decision.
Back home, they said, they would be lucky to find jobs at all, while the cost of food would be even higher. Though the family often runs short of money in Rock Island–needing help to pay bills or feed the five kids and two grandkids–Juan Francisco Casteñeda said life in America is better by reason of simple arithmetic.
“In Mexico, the pay is much less than here,” he said in Spanish. “There, for eight hours of work they pay 100 pesos”–about $9.
Castaneda, 47, pulls down about $24,000 annually from his job in a scrap yard, cutting up John Deere tractors and other old machinery with a torch. It’s a decent salary for someone with little education and no English skills, and it has allowed the family to buy an aging, drafty three-bedroom house. But it’s not nearly enough to meet the family’s needs.
The kids get their clothing secondhand, and five girls share a single bedroom. Food often comes from a church pantry. In the winter, their monthly gas bill–about $480–is higher than their $420 mortgage payment. Even in a land of relative plenty, it’s a hard way to live.
Georgia’s new Special Needs Scholarship program was built on the promise that public school families of disabled children would get more schooling options. It was, nonetheless, a disappointment for most first-year applicants. According to state Department of Education figures, of 5,750 families who applied for a tuition voucher, 85 percent either couldn’t find a campus to accept their children, couldn’t afford the additional private school costs or didn’t meet all of the scholarship’s eligibility criteria. Nearly 900 families are getting financial aid, however, and supporters are convinced more children will be helped next year if more schools are willing to accept the vouchers. State lawmakers narrowly passed Georgia’s first K-12 school voucher program in the spring. Modeled after a Florida program, the plan was to give families of public special-education students more educational choices by offering them tuition vouchers to use at participating private schools. When the program opened this summer, education department and school officials were flooded with telephone calls, e-mails and applications. By the September deadline, thousands had applied. Late last month, 899, or 15 percent, of them received tuition checks. Families looking for vouchers were stymied partly by timing. Still, families, special education advocates and private school administrators say one of the biggest obstacles to finding a new school was the cost. Parents are expected to pick up the tab for any tuition the voucher does not cover, as well as expenses such as transportation and physical therapy.
Kuss Middle School serves students in Fall River, Mass., a former mill town that has struggled economically for decades. Students at Kuss have struggled, too, usually falling short of making the academic progress required under the No Child Left Behind law.
Then, last year, the school received a grant to experiment with extending the school day. Teachers got paid at a higher hourly rate.
Students weren’t thrilled at first with leaving school at 4:15 p.m. instead of at 2:20 p.m. But the added hours gave them more time for physical education and let them select special interest classes, in which teachers bolstered student skill deficits as revealed by testing. By the end of the year, student scores had risen by enough to enable Kuss to make the progress required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The only surprise is that more districts haven’t lengthened school schedules set decades ago to accommodate a farm economy rather the information economy of today.
Local school districts continued to turn to the unrestricted community service levy this school year, boosting taxes paid to the fund by 10%, almost twice the increase in their total property tax income.
For the 2007-’08 school year, the 60 public school districts in the five-county metro Milwaukee area plan to raise nearly $22.6 million through the community service levy, which has grown rapidly since the state Legislature removed it from under revenue caps seven years ago.
Statewide, school systems will receive about $66.6 million in community service funds through property tax increases this school year, according to information from the state Department of Public Instruction. That compares with just over $17 million raised by Wisconsin school districts for community service activities in 2000-’01, the first year the fund came out from under the state revenue controls.
When legislators first removed community service activities from under the strictures of revenue caps, they said they did so because school districts that run recreational departments for their communities should not be forced to cut educational services to fund outside activities.
Freedom to Learn (FTL) is a statewide initiative aimed at improving student achievement and engagement in our Michigan schools. FTL is the catalyst for changing the way students learn and teachers teach. The demands of a 21st century educational system make this change necessary.
FTL empowers teachers to individualize instruction for every child — truly to leave no child behind. FTL creates an environment where every child can have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), where learning occurs anytime and anywhere, where students are motivated by their own medium of expression. FTL accomplishes this new educational vision through a one-to-one learning environment, in which every student and teacher has access to his or her own wireless laptop in a wireless environment.
6. One-to-One Education Is Accepted As the Global Goal. Three-quarters of U.S. school superintendents are planning for it. Maine, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Utah; England, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Nigeria, India, and China are implementing it. If your state or country is not planning for this, you will be left behind in the 21st century. Using global digitized knowledge to teach and learn will become the only obvious solution in education; the goal becomes connecting every child to this knowledge via the Net.
When Daniel Barenboim returns to the Royal Festival Hall in the new year, where he made his London debut at the age of 13, he is planning to launch an impassioned plea to educate young people about music.
It will be the first time in more than 40 years that Barenboim has performed all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in London; the last time he played them in their entirety was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967.
But as well as performing eight concerts, the legendary pianist and conductor is using his return to the Southbank next month to warn that in many countries, music has disappeared from the education curriculum, making it appear elitist and depriving people of a life-enriching experience.
Barenboim will deliver a series of lectures, as the first speaker in the Southbank Centre’s “Artist as Leader” programme, looking at the role of the artist in society.
He said: “Music has disappeared from the education curriculum and this has far-reaching consequences. It means there are billions of people who have no contact with music, and I believe their lives are all the poorer for that.”
In the Southbank Centre members’ magazine, he said: “The problem is that music now appears only to a small quantity of the population and therefore it is too expensive, which in turn makes music look elitist, which of course it isn’t.”
To evaluate the adequacy and efficiency of preschool education, the RAND Corporation has undertaken the California Preschool Study to improve understanding of achievement gaps in the early elementary grades, the adequacy of preschool education currently given, and what efficiencies or additional resources might be brought to bear in early care and education. Despite rising achievement levels in recent years, a substantial percentage of second- and third-graders do not meet state education standards in English-language arts and mathematics. Some groups of students are falling short by larger margins than others. English learners and students whose parents did not graduate from high school have the highest proportion who fall short of proficiency in second and third grade. Percentages of black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students falling short of proficiency in the same grades are also high. Measures of student performance in kindergarten and first grade show similar patterns of who is ahead and who is behind. Preschool appears to be a promising strategy for narrowing achievement differences. The size of the achievement gaps that currently exist and the strength of the evidence of favorable education benefits from well-designed preschool programs make a solid case for considering preschool as a component of a multi-pronged strategy for closing achievement gaps in California.
Beginning teachers have better academic credentials than their predecessors did a decade ago, suggesting that tougher requirements at all levels — from the federal government to the local teacher’s college — have forced teachers’ colleges to improve offerings while luring more qualified candidates into teaching.
A new study, released today by the Educational Testing Service, which designs the Praxis test taken by most new teachers, finds that qualifications have risen rapidly, with candidates’ verbal SAT scores rising 13 points and math scores rising 17 points. The percentage of candidates reporting a 3.5 GPA or higher rose from 27% to 40%.
The gains hold across gender, racial and ethnic lines.
WCVB Boston Officials Give School One Year Extension BOSTON — State officials are allowing a controversial special education school to use electric shock treatments on students for another year.
But the state’s Office of Health and Human Services said the extension for the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center comes with conditions.
The decision comes after an August incident in which two emotionally disturbed students were wrongly given dozens of shocks after a prank call from a person posing as a supervisor.
After the Aug. 26 call, the teens, ages 16 and 19, were awakened in the middle of the night and given the shock treatments, at times while their legs and arms were bound. One teen received 77 shocks and the other received 29. One boy was treated for two first-degree burns.
I’M KIND OF EMBARRASSED to see this happen in Tennessee: “According to the Williamson County School System, self defense is no defense when it comes to getting suspended for fighting. ” In that case, I think she should sue the school system and principal for failing to protect her.
They are bored — so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration.
Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don’t know how to study.
They are the nation’s gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don’t serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation’s most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.
Two of the most popular — and most insidious — myths about academically gifted kids is that “they’re all rich, white kids” and that, no matter what they experience in school, “they’ll do just fine.” Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.
When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:
Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved
This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.
“I see it as a social justice issue–I want them all to be in excellent schools. The kids in Tenleytown are getting a wildly different educational experience than the kids in Anacostia, so our schools are not serving their purpose.”
So says D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has brought an unusual sense of urgency to her new job. One of her first decisions was to get rid of the furniture. When she arrived last summer, she says, there was a whole area, complete with couch and chair and TV for lounging in her sprawling, pink-carpeted office. Wasted space, she thought, “When am I ever going to have time to sit?”
That was a pretty good prediction for a woman whose first five months on the job have been a whirlwind of jousting with the dinosaurs in the city’s education bureaucracy. So far, in her quest to turn around the public school system, she’s taken on the unions, the city council and, most recently, hundreds of angry central-office workers.
This week, the city council gave preliminary approval to Chancellor Rhee’s request for authority to fire nonunion employees in the central office. She knew it was going to be a political firestorm, but she’s worked hard to convince her skeptics that protecting an ossified bureaucracy isn’t in anyone’s best interests. “I think it’s a critical piece of this equation,” she says of the personnel legislation, “and if someone like me can come in, guns blazing, and make all the hard calls . . . we can actually see how much progress we can make for the kids.”
