US Chamber of Commerce:

The United States in the 21st century faces unprecedented economic and social challenges, ranging from the forces of global competition to the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers. Succeeding in this new era will require our children to be prepared for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace and a far more complex society. Yet the evidence indicates that our country is not ready. Despite decades of reform efforts and many trillions of dollars in public investment, U.S. schools are not equipping our children with the skills and knowledge they-and the nation-so badly need.
It has been nearly a quarter century since the seminal report A Nation at Risk was issued in 1983. Since that time, a knowledge-based economy has emerged, the Internet has reshaped commerce and communication, exemplars of creative commerce like Microsoft, eBay, and Southwest Airlines have revolutionized the way we live, and the global economy has undergone wrenching change. Throughout that period, education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K-12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged-preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.

Audrey Soglin & Char Gearing respond to Marc Eisen’s recent words:

I think we have learned and the research supports that kids need a balanced literacy approach. The “whole language vs. phonics” wars should really be put to rest. It is an old fight. Kids don’t learn the same way so a variety of instructional methods should be available. It is not unusual for districts to offer both direct instruction to identified students and reading recovery to others. The problems that kids have are different so the instructional interventions should be different as well. In terms of kids in heterogeneous classrooms receiving instruction – all kids need to be taught at their level. The challenge for teachers in diverse reading and math classrooms is to figure out how to meet those very different needs. It is difficult but not impossible.
The author seems to be saying that we should be segregating our classrooms and our schools. If you look at the scores of low-income students in low income schools-where the demographics are 90% low income, 90% African American or Hispanic – the scores are generally low. It is not like segregating the kids will automatically raise the scores.

http://www.madisonamps.org/

The Center for Public Education:

Few education stories get as much attention as the periodic ranking of U.S. students on international tests. The headlines are by now familiar: “U.S. Kids Mediocre in Math and Science”1; “4th and 8th Graders in U.S. Still Lag Many Peers”2. Surely, the media fascination with these stories is partly driven by our national desire to be number one. But according to many policymakers, business leaders, and analysts, more is at stake than American boasting rights. These individuals argue that the nation’s economic future depends directly on our ability to raise our present academic standing, particularly in math and science (Business Roundtable 2005; National Research Council 2005; White House 2006).
Others aren’t so sure. These observers assert that the reported failure of American students is exaggerated, claiming that the differences among countries aren’t so large. Besides, they say, our top students do just fine compared with their top-scoring peers in other countries (Bracey 1998).
Still others point to inherent difficulties in trying to make apples-to-apples comparisons across countries and argue that international rankings are not meaningful (Rotberg 1995).

Jay Matthews:

The report, “More Than a Horse Race,” was written by Jim Hull, policy analyst at the center, which is affiliated with the National School Boards Association. I sent a copy to a top U.S. expert on international educational comparisons, author and columnist Gerald W. Bracey. There were parts of the report Bracey did not like.
But I have found several points on which Hull and Bracey seem to agree. The Hull report at www.centerforpubliceducation.org, released on Jan. 17, should be read in its entirety because it is the best summary yet of the four major studies that compare our achievement rates to those abroad. (You can also get Bracey’s response if you e-mail him at gbracey1@verizon.net.)
5. Those who say our economy is doomed unless our schools get better appear to be ignoring recent history.
Hull introduced this topic in his report by noting that none of the international comparative studies include data from China or India. “Given the rapidly rising position these nations are taking in the global economy,” he said, he hoped they would be included in the future. Bracey interpreted this as a reflection of “the common, but perhaps erroneous assumption that how well 13-year-olds bubble in answer sheets has something to do with the economic health of a nation.”

Teacher Voices:

In Philadelphia last week a teacher named Frank Burd, wound up in the hospital after two students assaulted him, apparently because he had confiscated an iPod during class. After class, according to a report on NBC news, the two students were waiting for Burd. One punched him and the other pushed him. As of Friday night (February 23), he was still in intensive care with two broken bones in his neck.
Mr. Burd’s experience may seem like an aberration, but actually, it is only a slightly more extreme example of the kind of violence, crime, and general incivility that teachers and students confront in schools all over the nation. Here in NY, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s Preliminary Management Report showed a 21-percent increase in felony crimes committed in the city’s schools between July and October 2006 compared with the same period the previous year. And according a February 23 article in The Chief, “Major crimes rose from 287 to 348, other criminal reports increased from 820 to 983, and additional safety incidents climbed from 1,614 to 1,926, according to the Mayor’s report.

is online here.

Jay Matthews:

But the more I read these well-intended documents, the more I wonder. Haven’t we had enough of this stuff? Are we really going to get significant improvement in our lowest-performing schools through more reports telling us how to fix the federal rules?
I share the view of the majority of Congress, and the leaders of both major parties, that No Child Left Behind was a good idea. It forced the states to pay attention to the poor teaching in our low-income neighborhood schools. That was something many of those states failed to do under an earlier law that asked them nicely but had no serious penalties if they told Washington to mind its own business. Nearly everybody in education applauds No Child Left Behind’s insistence on measuring the progress each school and district is making in helping low-income students, learning-disabled students, students from immigrant families and students from the most neglected minority groups.

Educational Testing Service:

A report from ETS’s Policy Information Center, America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future, looks at the convergence of three powerful sociological and economical forces that are changing our nation’s future:

• substantial disparities in skill levels (reading and math)
• seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps)
• sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills)

There is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem. National test results show no evidence of improvement over the last 20 years. Scores are flat and achievement gaps persist. Hope for a better life — with decent jobs and livable wages — will vanish unless we act now.

2.4MB PDF Report.

Andy Hall:

A drop in Hispanic children’s scores is largely responsible for fewer students beginning kindergarten with the skills needed to succeed in Madison schools.
Just 26 percent of Hispanic children in this year’s kindergarten class passed a screening test designed to show whether they were ready to start school, down from 29 percent four years ago, according to Madison School District data.
That drop led to a decline in the overall percentage of Madison students ready for kindergarten – from 62 percent to 58 percent.
While educators across the country focus on helping such children catch up with their classmates, two emerging efforts in Dane County will aim to get at the root of the problem by helping children be ready to enter kindergarten:

Gena Kittner:

The Oregon Police Department has reopened an investigation into an alleged threat in a writing assignment against an Oregon Middle School teacher after the teacher provided police with additional information about the incident.
The teacher went to police early Thursday with more information, said Oregon Police Chief Doug Pettit.
“We are now in the process of further investigating the perceived threat,” he said.

April Castro:

In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.
“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.
“Apple just lost some business in this state, I’m sure,” Jobs said.
Dell responded that unions were created because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.
“So now you have these enterprises where they take good care of their people. The employees won, they do really well and succeed.”

Former computer science teacher Alfred Thompson:

Today’s rash of quick fix answers started with Steve Jobs telling us the teacher unions are broken in the worst possible way. Principals can’t get rid of poorly performing teachers. Plus Jobs says we need online books that are updated like Wikipedia. Brilliant job of stating the obvious and repeating things everyone in education knows. Yes, teacher unions help protect the jobs of poor teachers and yes textbooks are not being updated fast enough. I have yet to meet a teacher, a principal or a school board member who doesn’t agree with those statements.
Don Dodge jumps in to support Jobs and to add that the other part of the problem is that principals have no way to reward top performers. Is there someone in education who doesn’t know that this is a problem? It is a problem hardly anyone wants to fix though because it depends on people being fair and no one respects principals enough to give them a job like that. Robert Scoble agrees with both Jobs and Dodge and suggests that teachers need to be paid more. And he should know because he used to be married to someone who used to be a teacher. They all mean well but the problem is bigger than they think it is. In fact it is much too large to cover in a blog post. One of these days I’ll write a book.
Heaven save us from experts. They all seem to have one thing in common – they think that teachers are, if not the only problem, the largest problem with American education. By my reckoning there are several groups that are a much larger problem. They are:

• Government officials and the rules they lay down
• Parents and the lack of support they give education
• Students and their lack of willingness to do their part
• Voters for not supporting the needs of good education.

Amit R. Paley:

A commission proposed a wide-reaching expansion of the No Child Left Behind law yesterday that would for the first time require schools to ensure that all seniors are proficient in reading and math and hold schools accountable for raising test scores in science by 2014.
The 230-page bipartisan report [2.5MB PDF], perhaps the most detailed blueprint sent to Congress thus far as it considers renewal of the federal education law, also proposes sanctions for teachers with poorly performing students and the creation of new national standards and tests.
The recommendations from the Commission on No Child Left Behind underscore that the emerging debate over the law is not over whether it will continue, but rather over how much it will be expanded and modified. Even the panel’s leaders acknowledged that their proposal is more sweeping than many politicians had expected or wanted.
“You’re never going to hit a home run unless you swing for the fences, and this is swinging for the fences” said Tommy G. Thompson, a former secretary of health and human services in the Bush administration and a former governor of Wisconsin. Thompson, a Republican who is weighing a run for president, co-chaired the commission with former Georgia governor Roy E. Barnes, a Democrat.

Jay Matthews:

Why am I wandering into this ethereal topic? I can’t stop thinking about the three op-ed pieces on education and intelligence that Charles Murray had in the Wall Street Journal last month.
Murray is one of the most interesting bad boys of the American intelligentsia. He regularly tweaks conventional views of social and educational progress. His three “On Education” pieces in the Journal are worth discussing not only because parts of them are infuriating, a Murray trademark, but also because they point toward new ways of thinking about schools that even Murray’s many adversaries might embrace.

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin:

Denise Jackson may be on the road to fame, but there is another important story about this potential American Idol. She represents thousands of youngsters who entered the Madison Public Schools in the past twenty years after a less that promising future in another city.
Denise’s story is not finished, but we hope the best for her and her contemporaries. Here are the salient points form the Wisconsin State Journal story on Sunday. Denise’s road to ‘Idol’

Yolanda Woodlee:

Students from D.C. public and charter schools crammed into the chambers of the city’s John A. Wilson Building yesterday, clutching sheets of paper with stories of crumbling buildings, a textbook shortage and absent athletic and arts programs.
And they expressed fear that little will change, even if Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) succeeds in taking control of schools.
Donnell Kie, a sophomore at Ballou Senior High School, said it should not be too much for students to want safe buildings, up-to-date libraries, books when school opens in the fall and music, arts and foreign language programs.

AP:

Dee Hall:

Now that the lakes have finally frozen over, longtime Madison residents may gaze (if their eyes don’t tear up too badly) over the bleak landscape of Lake Mendota and reminisce about that fateful February 28 years ago when the Statue of Liberty came to town.
Of course it wasn’t the real statue (which is still firmly planted in Upper New York Bay) but an elaborate prank that came at a time when the city was still feeling the effects of anti-war riots and a fatal bombing nearly a decade earlier.
Leading the march toward levity – literally – was a scruffy UW-Madison student named Leon Varjian. The New Jersey native organized boom- box parades and toga parties on State Street and was one of the architects of the Statue of Liberty ruse, which has been named one of the top college pranks of all time.
Varjian, who already held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from other universities in mathematics, came to the city in the fall of 1977 with the goal of studying in “the graduate school of fun.”

Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Canada’s other key innovation: Think big. What good is it to save one child and send him into a neighborhood where every other child is failing? “Well, after a while, it has an impact on your child. That kid either never goes outside again or they learn to adjust in that environment.”
He calls that a ”negative contagion.” And, he asked, ”What if we could create a positive contagious effect?” Meaning, what if we could send that child out into a peer group of other children who were also doing well? As he sees it, it’s not enough to save a child here and there. We have to save the children.
So overall, the zone serves more than 9,000 kids. They have smaller classes, a longer school day and a longer school year than their peers. Their teachers are paid more and given more classroom freedom, but are also held more accountable. After school, the kids take karate and yoga classes, get tutored, paint murals, practice plays, dance, write.

From a good friend.

Brigid Schulte, via a reader:

We are a white, middle-class family. Our children attend our neighborhood public school, Mount Vernon Community School, two blocks from our house in Alexandria. The student body is 55 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black and 19 percent white. More than 60 percent of the children are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. More than 40 percent speak a language other than English at home. And the test scores, while passable, aren’t among the school district’s best.
It’s a school with the kind of statistics that can so unnerve some white, middle-class parents that they move to mostly white areas — or spend tens of thousands of dollars on private schools.
Last week, I held the PTA open house for parents of prospective students. I posted the announcement on our neighborhood e-mail group list. I received some enthusiastic responses from people who know parents with children already at the school. And I also got this one: “We are in the process of starting the research. I am plowing through the state website with the test results now so I will see how this school compares.” The writer mentioned two other schools she was considering, schools with more white kids and higher test scores.

The Civil Rights Project.

Amy Waldman:

The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance. That system had begun with great promise, in 1841, as one of the first in the Deep South. It had effectively ended, in 2005, in disaster—and not just the natural kind. Its defining characteristics were financial high jinks and low academic performance. On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth-graders had failed to demonstrate “basic” skills in English/Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below “basic” in math. The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city’s schools, was $450 million in debt. Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them.

Scott Elliott:

And seventh graders knew that the square Coral drew was a rhombus because it had four sides.
The question is, how did they know?
In each case the students had seen these questions — or questions that were nearly identical — on practice tests they took the week before the school administered the Ohio Achievement Tests.
In all, a Dayton Daily News investigation found 44 questions on practice tests taken by City Day students that were identical or substantially the same as questions that appeared on the actual state exam they took just days later.
And when state report cards came out last year, huge gains in the percentage of students who passed the test helped propel the chronically underperforming school out of the state’s lowest rating category of “academic emergency.”