School Information System – Page 520 – Curated Education Information

The Frugal Teenager, Ready or Not

WHEN Wendy Postle’s two children were younger, saying “yes” gave her great joy. Yes to all those toys. The music lessons. The blowout birthday parties.
ut as her son and daughter approached adolescence, yes turned into a weary default. “Sometimes it was just easier to say, ‘O.K., whatever,’ than to have the battle of ‘no,’ ” said Mrs. Postle, a working mother who lives in Hilliard, Ohio, a middle-class suburb of Columbus.
This year her husband’s 401(k) savings are evaporating. Medical bills are nipping at the couple’s heels. Gas prices are still taking a toll. Mrs. Postle recently decided that although she and her husband had always sacrificed their own luxuries for Zach, 13, and Kaitlyn, 15, the teenagers would now have to cut back as well.
“No” could no longer be the starting gun of family fights. It would have to be an absolute.

Bringing Special-Needs Schools Closer to Home

Winnie Hu:

Tom Holohan, a 16-year-old with autistic symptoms, grew up paralyzed by fear and anxiety about leaving his family’s home. But for the last two years, Tom has had to commute to a Connecticut boarding school that specializes in treating his disability, returning on weekends to his home in Farmingdale, N.Y., about nine miles from here.
“There’s always this thing inside you that you want to be home,” said Tom, who attended five day schools on Long Island and tried home schooling before his local school district sent him to the Connecticut school, Devereux Glenholme. “I mean, I got used to living there, but every day I think about what’s going on at home. It’s really difficult.”
Next year, Tom is hoping to attend Westbrook Preparatory School, a $2.5 million institution that will be New York State’s first residential school for students with high-functioning autism and that was founded after intense lobbying by parents, including Tom’s mother, Maureen Holohan, 48, who is on the school’s governing board. The new school, serving 24 middle and high school students with average or above-average intelligence but in need of significant emotional and social support, is part of a statewide push to bring special education students back from out-of-state private schools by creating publicly financed alternatives closer to home.

Sun Prairie Acadamic Decathlon team plans road trip

Pamela Cotant:

This year the theme for the Academic Decathlon curriculum is Latin America with a focus on Mexico and two area teams plan to go right to the source to study it.
About a dozen members from each of the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon teams at the high schools in Sun Prairie and McFarland will visit Mexico City from Oct. 29 to Nov. 3.
Participants agree that the trip is about more than just a great way to gather information outside of their regular meetings.
“It’s a really good team bonding time,” said Scott LaWall, a senior at Sun Prairie High School. “During the school year, just (meeting) after school, it’s difficult to really get to know your teammates.”

Parents upset that Arlington school sex assault case wasn’t reported earlier

Chris Hawes:

A suspect was put in custody Friday but many parents of children at Coble Middle School say that’s not the issue. They’re outraged they weren’t told an assault had taken place on campus.
Parents lining up to pick up their children Friday received something else – a letter. The more they read, the more disturbed they became: A young girl reported she was sexually assaulted at school.
But two weeks passed before the children were told what was going on. The school says they had to protect the investigation.
Counselors handed out the letter in the car lane. The letter detailed the reported the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl on campus, during school.
“He had a valid reason to be on campus and chose to pull this girl into a locker room and sexually assault her,” said Lt. Blake Miller from Arlington police.
But even more disturbing to one father was the date of the crime, Sept. 26.

Interactive whiteboards bring technology to students’ fingertips

Andy Hall:

Dane County school districts with interactive whiteboards include Madison, Sun Prairie, Waunakee, Middleton-Cross Plains, Verona, Oregon, McFarland, Stoughton, Cambridge, Mount Horeb and Monona Grove.
Many students have a natural affinity for interactive whiteboards, which are a hybrid between an old-fashioned chalkboard and a computer.
Whatever can be shown on a computer can be projected onto the whiteboard, about six feet wide and four feet tall.
“It’s got that technological kind of buzz to it that really attracts them,” said Jeff Horney, learning coordinator at Cherokee on the city’s West Side. The school has four interactive whiteboards and more are on the way, thanks to help from foundation grants and the school’s Parent Teacher Organization.
And West High School has received a $91,000 grant from the California-based Tosa Foundation to replace dusty chalkboards with interactive whiteboards.
In Aegerter’s classroom, seventh-grader Clayton Zimmerman showed his classmates every step of a science experiment, tapping his finger on the screen’s images to remove a stopper from the top of a bottle and drag it off to the side.

Governor & Mayor Plan Review of Milwaukee Public Schools

Dani McClain:

Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett plan to hire a consultant to analyze Milwaukee Public Schools’ finances and operations, and the study is to be finished in time for Doyle to make recommendations to the Legislature in January.
Doyle said he expects the next steps to include changing the state funding formula, changing practices in MPS or some combination of the two.
The consultant, who will be hired in the next 10 days, will be paid by local donors and will have national experience in restructuring and strategic planning, Barrett said in a conference call Saturday.
“We have to have a very solid understanding of the financial underpinnings of this district so we can decide as a community what steps are necessary to move the district forward,” he said.
Both officials expressed support for teachers and students in MPS and a desire to know whether the district is using its funds efficiently.

Referendum Climate: Tax-cutting questions appear on ballots next month

Steve LeBlanc:

For years, Massachusetts was known derisively as “Taxachusetts.” But voters could help shed that label in November by completely eliminating the state’s income tax in a single stroke.
If approved, the ballot initiative would wipe out 40 percent of state revenues and give back to each taxpayer an average of $3,600.
The Massachusetts proposal is the most notable of several tax-cutting questions that will appear next month on ballots around the nation.
Others include a North Dakota initiative to cut individual income tax rates in half and trim corporate rates by 15 percent; an Arizona measure to mandate that any initiatives requiring spending or tax increases be approved by majority of all registered voters, not just those casting ballots; and a Maine plan to repeal new taxes on beer, wine and soda.
In Massachusetts, critics say there’s no way to chop $11 billion out of a $28 billion budget without decimating services, which could include closing schools and fire stations. Aid to cities and towns would also decline, placing enormous pressure on property taxes.

Massachusetts, is of course, home of the “Boston Tea Party“.

School chief: Strike up the band again to keep students engaged

James Vaznis:

Boston high school students may soon be marching to the beat of their own drums. Or the oompah of their own tubas. Literally.
Tucked into Superintendent Carol R. Johnson’s ambitious plan to reorganize the school system is a small but splashy proposal: revive the tradition of a high school marching band in a city bereft of one for about four decades.
“I think it would be pretty exciting,” Johnson said. “In a city where we have a lot of great historical celebrations and athletic celebrations, it would make us proud to have BPS students marching down the street. I believe there is enough talent in this city to make it happen.”
The city would have to find just a few dozen students – out of more than 18,000 high school students districtwide – suit them up and make sure they can play their instruments while marching in synchronized steps. Sounds simple enough, but prior attempts have flopped.
In the mid-1980s, the district proposed a 200-piece citywide marching band with much fanfare and later unveiled a uniform inscribed with the words “Pride of Boston.” But rehearsals were never held, and newly purchased drums, cymbals, and horns ultimately collected dust in a school closet.

Teachers Sue Over Right to Politic

Jennifer Medina:

The New York City teachers’ union filed a federal lawsuit on Friday claiming that a policy banning political pins and signs in schools violates teachers’ First Amendment rights by blocking them from political expression.
The lawsuit comes nearly two weeks after the Department of Education sent a memo to principals directing them to enforce the longstanding regulation, which requires that all school staff members show “complete neutrality” while on duty. The policy also prohibits teachers from using school property to promote a candidate.
Randi Weingarten, president of the union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that while the policy has been on the books for more than two decades, it has rarely been enforced, and that teachers have routinely worn political buttons as recently as this year’s presidential primaries.
But in the lawsuit, the union — which has endorsed Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee — states that the principal of Community School 134 in the Bronx removed an Obama poster that a teacher placed on the union bulletin board, and that a teacher at another school who wore political buttons was warned against it.

Arts Complementing the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme

Christina Shunnarah:

This past weekend my colleagues and I gave a presentation at the Performing the World conference in Manhattan, which brought together educators, artists, therapists, scholars and activists from dozens of countries who are interested in using performance and drama in a variety of ways. Our presentation was on the role of the arts and performance at our school and how it complements and expands the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP), an enriched curriculum that we have been using in our classrooms.
The IBPYP model is based on inquiry, participation in the process of learning, and exploration. It is learner-driven, not-teacher dominated. Teachers act as facilitators in the learning process and children’s questions and interests are at the center of the classroom. The program originates with the International Baccalaureate Organization, founded in 1968 and based in Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of schools around the world have adopted IB frameworks.
For the children at our school, some of whom face difficult issues at home — poverty, isolation, domestic violence, trauma and stress, to name a few — learning that emphasizes performance, inquiry, and artistic exploration is vital. That is why on any given day at I.C.S., you will see a multitude of creative projects going on: storytelling, puppetry, drama, dance, music, movement, role-playing, book clubs, chess, painting, cooking, yoga, writing, gardening, and active inquiries all around. In the current national climate of testing, we have to make time for creative expression. It is urgent. Children need some constructive form of release.

Can the candidates fix America’s decidedly mediocre schools?

The Economist:

“OUR nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” So reported an education commission in 1983. That report was a turning point for American schools, helping spur a wave of reform. But 25 years later the state of American education is in a muddle.
In some ways its public schools have improved. America’s nine-year-olds scored 22 points higher on a national maths test in 2004 than they had in 1982. But in many areas America still languishes, as described in a recent report by Ed in ’08, an advocacy group. The percentage of 17-year-olds with basic reading skills has dropped, from 80% in 1992, when the current test was introduced, to 73% in 2005. On the international stage, American students are doodling while others scribble ahead. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has a glum statistic: in the most recent ranking of 15-year-olds’ skill in maths, America ranked 25th out of 30. Though America’s universities remain pre-eminent in the world, they have grown increasingly unaffordable. Barack Obama notes that between 2001 and 2010, 2m qualified students will not go to university because they cannot afford it.

Janet Mertz Study: Math Skills Suffer in US, Study Finds

Carolyn Johnson:

It’s been nearly four years since Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, made his controversial comments about the source of the gender gap in math and science careers. Still, the ripple effect continues – most recently in a study made public today on the world’s top female math competitors.
The study, to be published in next month’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society, identifies women of extraordinary math ability by sifting through the winners of the world’s most elite math competitions. It found that small nations that nurtured female mathematicians often produced more top competitors than far larger and wealthier nations.
The message: Cultural or environmental factors, not intellect, are what really limit women’s math achievements.

Sara Rimer:

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.
The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
“We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math — that’s telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math,” said the study’s lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world’s most-demanding math competitions. “Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”
Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Dr. Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Dr. Mertz and others say.
Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.

Complete report 650K PDF.
Related: Math Forum.
Much more on Janet Mertz here.

Students take a step for safety in surveying their walks to school

Tony Barboza:

Garfield Elementary pupils note broken sidewalks, speeding motorists and other hazards in hopes that Santa Ana will correct them.
n the first day of class, Chris Marx asks his fifth-grade students how they get to school and what they encounter along the way.
Even though most students at Garfield Elementary in Santa Ana walk only a few blocks to class, they often trudge over broken sidewalks and through littered alleyways, rub up against graffiti-covered walls and step over rubble from construction sites. Some dodge roving dogs, homeless people or gang members.
“You ask the kids how many times they’ve heard gunshots and there are some hands raised,” Marx said.
Students at thousands of schools nationwide walked en masse to school Wednesday in events timed for International Walk to School Day, meant to encourage physical fitness and to reduce carbon emissions.

Great Kids Books About Financial Ruin

Erica Perl:

Mom, What’s a Credit Default Swap?
The first time I heard the word recession, I was 10 years old. It was 1978, and my parents, like everyone we knew, were cranky and stressed out about gas shortages and rising food prices. One of the ways I coped was by burying my nose in books and discovering kids who had it worse than I did. Like Ramona Quimby, whose dad got fired and took up residence on the couch. And Laura Ingalls, whose dad kept hitching up the wagon to drag his bonneted brood to the middle of nowhere. Many of the books I discovered during the late ’70s featured themes of economic hardship that made my circumstances seem manageable by comparison–a happy coincidence, I thought at the time. Looking back, I’m not so sure this was an accident.

Status of Girls in Wisconsin

Alverno College [PDF Report]:

The Alverno College Research Center for Women and Girls, in collaboration with the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee, the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Women’s Council, is pleased to present our collaborative exploration of the status of girls (ages 10 to 19) in Wisconsin. After the Status of Women in Wisconsin reports were issued in 2002 and 2004, these organizations and others that serve girls in the State raised awareness for the need for companion research on girls as a natural next step. Since a great deal of information about Wisconsin girls is scattered in many different and often difficult-to-find places and documents, a primary goal of this project has been to centralize the information and to make it accessible, not only in print but also via the internet, to a variety of agencies, groups and institutions who have the needs and interests of Wisconsin’s girls in mind.

Duston Block has more.

Computer data breach at South Tahoe High School

AP:

A South Tahoe High School student has been arrested on suspicion of hacking into the school’s computer system, school officials said.
District administrators said they found a security breach in one of the computers last week, and the 17-year-old boy may have accessed sensitive information regarding staff and students.
The student was suspended after the discovery and arrested Wednesday after a follow-up investigation by police.
The exposure appears to be limited to the school’s internal student information system, according to a district news release.

Wisconsin Districts had some warnings about risky investments, documents show

Amy Hetzner:

Five Wisconsin school districts suing over millions of borrowed dollars they invested to help pay retiree benefits were given some warnings of the risks involved in the transactions, documents show.
At least one document appears to contradict one contention in the lawsuit filed Sept. 29.
But it remains unclear how much school officials were told about transactions they undertook in 2006 in which they poured $200 million into collateralized debt obligations, financial instruments at the center of the global economic meltdown.
The districts — Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay — allege they were misled by two financial institutions that promoted the investments: Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. of St. Louis and Royal Bank of Canada.

Out of the Ordinary: Historical Fiction for Middle Grade Readers

Michelle Barone:

Excerpt from Chapter 1: The Crime
“Woosh! Splat!’ A gooshy, white spitball whizzed past Julia’s ear. It smushed onto the blackboard and stuck. Julia watched a wet stream travel down from the wad. It left a shiny black trail on the board. There was only one person in the room who would do such a thing. Julia knew who it was.
Julia knew what would happen next. It was the same thing that happened every time Teddy Parker misbehaved.
Miss Crawford, the teacher, spun around and faced the class like a fighter squaring off against an opponent. “Who made this spitball?” she demanded.
Julia clamped her skinny legs together and froze in her seat. Her knobby knees bumped each other.
“Who made this spitball?” Miss Crawford repeated.
“It wasn’t any of the sixth graders,” said Frank O’Malley, a blond haired, Irish boy. He stood, as was the custom, to speak for his age group.
Julia knew she was expected to answer. She was the only fifth grader in the room who spoke English. The other fifth grade girl sat wide-eyed with sealed lips.
Julia wished they didn’t have to go through this ritual every time Teddy Parker acted up. Teddy’s family came to Phippsburg long before Julia’s. Teddy lived in a real house. Julia’s family lived in an old boxcar that had been taken off of the rails. There were other families from Italy, Ireland, and Greece living in the boxcar section of town.
Julia didn’t know why Teddy was a trouble maker. He was luckier than all of the other kids. Teddy’s father ran the coal mine where everyone else’s father worked.
The fourth graders didn’t do it,” said a girl popping up and down in one motion.
Julia had missed her turn to answer.
“It wasn’t any of the third graders, Miss Crawford,” said another girl.
“The second graders didn’t do it,” said Teddy’s sister, Paulina.
A small boy stood. “It wasn’t the first grade, Teacher,” he said.
There will be a punishment for this, “Miss Crawford Said.
“Whoever made this spitball will have to come to the front of the room.”
Julia watched Miss Crawford focus on Teddy. He shifted in his wooden seat at the end of the sixth grade row.
“What do you have to say, Teddy?” asked Miss Crawford.
Julia looked at Teddy sitting in his new clothes from Denver. He wore a new shirt under a new sweater, new knickers, and new knee socks. Julia guessed his underwear was new, too. Teddy’s clothes were the right size, not patched and baggy hand-me-downs like Julia’s. Most of the kids were dressed like her, in clothes that had once been worn by their parents.
Julia watched Teddy slowly rise. He stepped out to the side of his desk. Julia waited for Teddy to make his confession. It was his chance to show off every day. She knew in a moment he would proudly walk to the front of the room, stand on tip toe, and place his nose on a chalk dot Miss Crawford drew on the board. The class would watch him stand there on pointed toe while he took his punishment. Miss Crawford wouldn’t make Teddy stand at the board for a whole hour like she would any other student. Teddy was her pet. She’d call off his punishment after five or ten minutes.
It was the same every time. Nothing exciting ever happened in Phippsburg. Why couldn’t it be a little bit different this once?
Julia reached up and felt a rag curl in her hair. Mama tied the rags into her hair last night. Julia liked how the curls made a soft half circle around her plain face.
Julia closed her eyes and made one silent wish. “Please let something exciting happen today for a change.”
She opened her eyes and blinked three times for good luck.
Miss Crawford was waiting for an answer. Teddy straightened his shoulders and drew in a long, deep breath.
“Miss Crawford, I must tell the truth,” he said.
“Yes, you must,” said Miss Crawford.
All eyes were glued on Teddy Parker.
“It was…Julia!” he announced.

Madison School District 2008-2009 Enrollment

The Madison School District has published it’s “Third Friday September” 2008 enrollment counts. Total enrollment is 24,189; down slightly from 24,268 in 2007. The District’s newest school: Olson Elementary, opened with 273 students.
45% of MMSD students are classified as low income (43% in 2007; 39% in 2005).
Related: a look at enrollment changes in suburban Dane County schools.
The two schools slated to close in 2007 (but later reversed): Lapham and Marquette elementary have the following enrollments:

	2008	2007	2006	2005
Lapham	229	219	231	219
Marquette	221	207	232	225

School Buses: Still Vehicles for Change
High Transportation Costs Are Forcing Kids Back To Neighborhood Schools, Limiting Diversity

Robert Thomsho:

A generation ago, the yellow school bus became a symbol of school desegregation, with thousands of the iconic vehicles ferrying minority children away from schools in their own neighborhoods to others in higher-income white areas.
Although the Supreme Court has tightly restricted such overt racial integration efforts in recent years, buses are still crucial to many magnet schools, open-enrollment programs and other school-choice strategies designed to encourage diversity and provide options for students in low-performing schools, as is required under the No Child Left Behind law.
But more and more school districts are curtailing bus service for such programs as a result of higher fuel costs and other financial pressures. That has sparked fears that the only choice for many students will be neighborhood schools attended by classmates of their own race and economic background, which has the unintended effect of re-segregating schools.
“Basically, you can’t have racial and class diversity of any sort if you don’t provide transportation,” says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, a research group at the University of California at Los Angeles. “This is kind of closing the last door for urgently needed opportunities for kids who are in schools that are really dysfunctional and inadequate.”

Arrested Development: Online training is the norm in other professions. Why not in K-12 education?

Michael Petrilli:

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing the way the world works, plays, and connects. Yet its most powerful applications only seem obvious after some entrepreneur has brought them to life. Of course the web is a great way to distribute books, but it took Amazon to make this clear. Of course the Internet is a smart way to distribute movies, but it took Netflix to make it happen.
So it is with adult learning. Most professionals would rather develop their skills online, on their own schedule, at their own pace, than sit in daylong, mind-numbing “workshops” that bring a lot of boredom and frustration but little intellectual stimulation. So it’s not surprising that as long ago as 2006 (eons in Internet time) the American Society for Training and Development reported that across all sectors almost 40 percent of professional development (PD) was delivered via technology (See figure 1). (Surely the numbers are even higher now.)

Do It Yourself Transcripts?

Scott Jaschik:

An admissions change announced at Rutgers University this week is being called the “honor system” for college admissions (even if it’s got too much verification to be a true honor system).
Starting with those applying this fall for admission to all three Rutgers campuses, high schools will no longer be asked to submit applicants’ transcripts. Instead, applicants will themselves enter all of their grades and high school courses in an online application form. An official transcript will eventually be reviewed for every applicant who is admitted and indicates a plan to enroll.
As New Jersey high schools learned of the change, the question everyone has been asking is: Will this lead to a new variety of grade inflation, as applicants (accidentally of course…) somehow transcribe themselves into honors students? Rutgers officials say that won’t happen because the transcript checks of accepted applicants who plan to enroll will cover every single student. If you inflate your grades, your admission offer will be revoked — period.
There is evidence that some combination of honesty and fear can in fact work to keep the self-reported transcripts accurate. The University of California, the pioneer in this type of admissions system, reports extremely low rates of transcript errors. This year, the university admitted 60,000 students to enroll as freshmen at its 9 undergraduate campuses and — as has been typical in recent years — campuses don’t have more than 5 admitted students each where there is a discrepancy between the reported grades and those verified after the admissions decisions. Applicants are required to sign a statement indicating that admissions offers may be revoked based on false information provided in the process, including high school grades.

California boarding schools? It’s not an oxymoron

Carla Rivera:

As a young woman living in Southern California, Kelly Boss never thought much about boarding schools. They were a mystery or at most a cinematic fancy embodied by Brookfield of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” or the Welton Academy of “Dead Poets Society.”
That changed when her daughter Mackenzie learned about the Thacher School in Ojai and its horse and outdoor program. Although she would never have imagined her daughter there, the Bosses came to view it as the perfect fit.
But Kelly Boss understood the reactions of other parents who appeared aghast at the idea.
“Other mothers look at you like how can you possibly send your daughter away, and I’ve had parents say, you two don’t look like you don’t get along,” said Boss, a Santa Barbara resident.
Although boarding schools have a long tradition in Europe and the Northeast, Californians are still apt to equate them with troubled youths or disinterested parents.

Alabama’s State Budget & Education Spending Forecast looks “Grim”

The Birmingham News:

Hubbert said he expects Education Trust Fund revenues to fall short at least 5 percent, or at least $318 million, of what the Legislature budgeted for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. As bad as that sounds, it could get worse. Hubbert said if the economy continues to slide, the shortfall could top $400 million.
Trust fund revenues already are more than $200 million below what lawmakers expected. That’s mainly because tax collections for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 grew $146 million less than forecast, and Riley last year drained a $440 million reserve to avoid education spending cuts. Lawmakers had expected to have from $64 million to $109 million left in the reserve fund to spend this year. Instead, that money is gone.
The Legislature didn’t help matters by passing a $6.36 billion education budget for 2009. That amount exceeds by $102 million the average revenue forecasts of the state finance director and the Legislative Fiscal Office. Essentially, lawmakers decided that cutting almost $370 million from the $6.7 billion education budget from 2008 was hard enough, and they didn’t want to carve another $100 million-plus for 2009.

Tax base growth is certainly not a given at the moment. Related: November 2008 Madison School District referendum notes and links.

A Public Hearing on Madison’s November, 2008 Referendum

Channel3000:

Taxpayers got a chance to ask the questions Tuesday night about the upcoming multimillion dollar Madison school referendum.
More than a dozen people turned out to Sherman Middle School for the first of four public hearings across the city.
Superintendent Dan Nerad gave a brief presentation before opening the forum up for questions.
Voters questioned everything from Fund 80 to the Capital Expansion Fund and student achievement.
Active Citizens for Education said they would like to have seen the referendum scheduled for the spring in order to give the district time to re-evaluate programs that they say are not working – programs that could be cut or changed.
“Where they’re talking about maintaining current programs and services it’s not getting good results,” said ACE’s Don Severson. “You look at the achievement gap, look at increased truancy, look an an increased drop-out rate, decreased attendance rates, more money isn’t going to get different results.”
Referendum supporters, Communities And Schools Together, know the $13 million referendum will be a tough sell, but worth it.
“I think it is going to be a hard sell,” said CAST member and first-grade teacher Troy Dassler. “We really need to get people out there who are interested still in investing in infrastructure. I can think of no greater an investment — even in the most difficult tough times that we’re facing that we wouldn’t invest in the future of Madison.”

Tamira Madsen:

School Board President Arlene Silveira was pleased with the dialogue and questions asked at the forum and said she hasn’t been overwhelmed with questions from constituents about the referendum.
“It’s been fairly quiet, and I think it’s been overshadowed by the presidential election and (downturn with) the economy,” Silveira said. “People are very interested, but it does take an explanation.
“People ask a lot of questions just because it’s different (with the tax components). Their initial reaction is: Tell me what this is again and what this means? They realize a lot of thought and work has gone into this and certainly this is something they will support or consider supporting after they go back and look at their own personal needs.”
Superintendent Dan Nerad has already formulated a plan for program and service cuts in the 2009-2010 budget if voters do not pass the referendum. Those include increasing class sizes at elementary and high schools, trimming services for at-risk students, reducing high school support staff, decreasing special education staffing, and eliminating some maintenance projects.
Nerad said outlining potential budget cuts by general categories as opposed to specific programs was the best route for the district at this juncture.

Texas Proposes to Standardize GPA Calculation

Stella Chavez:

Texas school districts say a state proposal to standardize the way they calculate high school grade point averages will “dumb down” public education and discourage students from taking rigorous courses.
Later this month, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will consider approval of a new regulation designed to help Texas colleges and universities better assess the academic records of high school students.
Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said the current system for calculating GPAs is not consistent. A 4.0 in one district, for example, could vary greatly from a 4.0 in another district.
“There’s no uniformity in the way GPA is calculated,” said Dr. Paredes. “It’s very difficult for universities to know what grade points mean.”

Related: Madison’s “standards based” report cards.

“The Bomber As School Reformer”

Sol Stern:

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education–a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”
As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.

A Marshall Plan for Reading

Sol Stern:

In the new paper, however, they concluded that “systematic differences in school quality appear much less important in explaining the differences in test-score trajectories by race, once the data are extended through third grade; Blacks lose substantial ground relative to Whites within the same school and even in the same classrooms. That is, including school- or teacher-fixed effects [does] little to explain the divergent trajectories of Black and White students between kindergarten and third grade. . . . By the end of third grade, even after controlling for observables, the Black-White test-score gap is evident in every skill tested in reading and math except for the most basic tasks such as counting and letter recognition, which virtually all students have mastered.”
How to narrow this yawning gap? Start by thinking more concretely about the cognitive deficits of those Harlem ten-year-olds Fryer mentioned. Inner-city black children, research shows, begin school with only half the vocabulary of white middle-class children. Typically, they soon fall behind in trying to decode how the written English language blends the sounds made by letter combinations into words. “Difficulties in decoding unfamiliar words rapidly are at the core of most reading problems,” says Reid Lyon, former head of reading research at the National Institutes of Health.

Homework Anxiety in Madison

Doug Erickson:

This parental approach — providing a consistent, supportive environment — is a good way to lessen the stress that can accompany homework, said Dr. Marcia Slattery, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with UW Health.
Each year, Slattery said she and her colleagues treat hundreds of children who are anxious about school-related issues, including homework. For some, the problem is limited to homework. For others, homework exacerbates an existing anxiety disorder or indicates other problems, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or an underlying learning problem.
“There’s an inherent quality to homework that evokes a certain amount of stress, and that can be good, because it pushes us to learn,” Slattery said. “But for some children, the anxiety is so pronounced it basically freezes them.”

Burmaster Won’t Seek 3rd Term as Wisconsin Education Superintendent, Tony Evers Announces Run

Tamira Madsen:

There had been some speculation Burmaster was interested in running for governor if Gov. Jim Doyle didn’t seek re-election in 2010, but she said that type of campaign is not in her plans.
She would not elaborate on her future career endeavors except to say, “I’m an education leader and I want to continue to serve in that capacity.” She also said she will get back to working in community schools with students in a “hands-on” role.

Interviews with 2005 Candidates for the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent position can be seen here.
WisPolitics interview with Burmaster.

Milwaukee District’s financial hole makes everything harder

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Milwaukee Public Schools’ biggest problem may be financial, but the district must not lose sight of a key goal: giving students a quality education and restoring confidence in parents.
The thought of Milwaukee Public Schools going bankrupt is scary, but like some of those big financial institutions in the headlines lately, MPS also must be considered too big to fail.
The public isn’t in any mood to hear that a big part of the system’s problems are financial. But it is inescapable.
We’d support thoughtful change to the state’s funding formula that acknowledges the special needs and challenges facing urban districts such as MPS. And we encourage MPS administrators, the School Board and the teachers union to face up to the legacy costs that are weighing the district down.
But no one should support just throwing more money at MPS — not until we know for certain how well the district is using the money it has. To say that the public lacks confidence in the district’s abilities is a vast understatement.

Montgomery County School System Cannot Afford Teacher Raises

Daniel de Vise & Ann Marimow:

Montgomery County’s schools chief has told principals that the system cannot afford to fund scheduled pay raises for the coming budget year, underscoring grim economic conditions that could also have repercussions for thousands of other local government workers.
School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast has said that labor contracts will have to be renegotiated, and Board of Education President Nancy Navarro said yesterday that planned raises of 5.3 percent for teachers are probably unrealistic when the county faces a projected $250 million shortfall for fiscal 2010.
“The financial situation is such that everything is on the table,” Navarro said. “Obviously, what we have in place right now looks like it will not be viable.”
Weast’s chief of staff, Brian Edwards, confirmed the superintendent’s private warnings to school principals. “Dr. Weast is having very frank conversations with staff, with union leadership, with parent leadership that next year’s budget situation is a dire one,” he said.

Korea to Raise Spending on English Education

Kang Shin-who:

The government said Sunday it will expand the education budget to develop training programs for English teachers and recruit more native English-speaking teachers. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced Sunday that it will spend a total of 19.5 billion won ($15.9 million) next year, up 12.2 billion won from a year earlier, for English education programs at elementary and secondary schools.
Under the plan, the ministry will recruit more native English speakers as well as ethnic Koreans for the “Teach and Learn in Korea (TaLK)” program, which was introduced last April to give opportunities for students in rural areas to learn English from native English speakers.
Also, the ministry will introduce intensive English training programs for state-run universities specialized in fostering elementary school teachers across the country and distributing English teaching manuals to school teachers.

Breaking up the Milwaukee School District would foster needed change

Ted Kanavas:

It’s time. The Milwaukee Public Schools system, crumbling for years under the weight of financial non-management and academic breakdown, cannot be allowed to fail another generation of Wisconsin children. The future of our entire state is put at risk by the status quo, and the time to address this crisis is now.
The problems of the district are vast and well-documented. New money is spent on remodeling buildings that now sit vacant. Union contacts are negotiated to favor job security and benefits, pushing academic performance aside. Graduation rates hover around 50% (with many graduates needing remedial help before even thinking about a college class). School Board members fly around the country but are not seen inside of the schools.
The fact of the matter is that, over time, MPS evolved into a system to provide jobs for adults instead of one that focused on educating students. It’s poorly managed, with more than 200 principals reporting to one superintendent, creating a bureaucracy built to fail. I urge you to visit some of the schools and ask yourself: Would I allow my child to attend this school? I have, and I would not.

Cash for Test Scores: The impact of the Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program

C. Kirabo Jackson:

Cash incentives for high school students to perform better in school are growing in popularity, but we understand very little about them. Does paying students for better Advanced Placement (AP) test scores encourage enrollment in AP classes? Does it lead to more students taking the tests and achieving passing scores? Do cash incentives lead to more students going to college?
I set out to determine the impact of a cash incentive program operating in a number of Texas high schools. The Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP) is a novel initiative that includes cash incentives for both teachers and students for each passing score earned on an Advanced Placement exam. The program is targeted to schools serving predominantly minority and low-income students with the aim of improving college readiness. The APIP was first implemented in 10 Dallas schools in 1996 and has been expanded to include more than 40 schools in Texas. The National Math and Science Initiative awarded grants to Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington to replicate the APIP and plans to expand these programs to 150 districts across 20 states.
Using data from the Texas Education Agency, I evaluated how the APIP affected education outcomes in participating schools in the years following implementation. I studied whether the program increased AP course enrollment and the share of students sitting for AP (or International Baccalaureate [IB]) examinations. Since improved AP outcomes may not necessarily reflect increased learning and could come at the expense of other academic outcomes, I also looked beyond these immediate effects to the broader set of outcomes, such as high school graduation rates, SAT and ACT performance, and the percentage of students attending college.

Madison’s “Standards Based” Report Card Example

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4.
Related links:

Fine Arts Task Force Report Available On-line

Last night, Fine Arts Task Force co-chairs Barb Schrank and Anne Katz presented the committee’s report at the regular school board meeting. It is a fine document and a reminder of how fortunate we are to have a community that is rich in arts resources and people with a clear understanding of the importance of the arts in educational programs. We all owe this group a significant debt for their diligence in putting together a comprehensive document and set of recommendations.
The report and committee minutes and meeting materials are available on-line at:
http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/finearts/
Last night the board voted to receive the report and turn it over to administration and staff for analysis and comment. Later this school year, the superintendent and board will hold input sessions to give the community a chance to weigh in on the report and on priorities. I am not sure if this will be done as part of the strategic planning process that the new superintendent has in mind or as a separate process, but I am confident that there will be opportunities to weigh in.
For now, this group deserves a big THANK YOU for their work.

Let Them be Themselves:
Seminar offers help, advice to parents raising gifted children

Doug Carroll, via a kind reader’s email:

Jim Delisle tells the story of a bright little girl who went with her parents to buy a bicycle.
After the bike had been selected, the parents presented their credit card to complete the purchase.
“Don’t you know the interest rate they charge on credit cards?” the girl said in a scolding tone. “If we wait until Christmas, Santa will bring it — and it won’t cost anything!”
The anecdote illustrates the challenges that can be involved in parenting a gifted child, who may be light-years ahead of the pack intellectually but all too typical in other respects.
A two-day seminar at Blue Harbor Resort and Conference Center, which concluded Friday, addressed issues specific to the development and education of gifted children and was attended by more than 300 schoolteachers, administrators, parents and students.

Referendum Climate: Madison Mayor Proposes 6% City Budget Spending Increase

Dean Mosiman:

Cieslewicz today will propose a $237.9 million “share the pain” operating budget that raises city taxes $53 on the average $247,974 home.
The proposed budget, a 6 percent spending increase — the largest Cieslewicz has ever offered — delivers new money for police, fire, the library and Metro Transit, but freezes or cuts spending in many areas.
“You’ll find no extreme cuts to any one agency, but many small cuts,” Cieslewicz said. “We did manage to keep long-term commitments.”
The 2.9 percent increase in taxes on the average home is among the fifth-lowest in 30 years, but overall tax collections are up 8 percent, the biggest increase since 1993.
“I was focused primarily on taxes on the average home,” Cieslewicz said. “That is what people experience.”

Much more on the 2008 Madison School District referendum here.

How NCLB Ignored the Elephant in America’s Classroom — POVERTY

Jim Trelease:

A politician after politician and CEO after CEO have pontificated for 20 years about what is wrong in American schools, all the while offering simple-minded solutions (higher expectations girded by more high-stakes testing), nearly all have ignored the great elephant in the classroom: poverty. Their behavior said, “If we pretend it isn’t there, either it will go away or cease to exist.”
Before looking at the single most intelligent approach to urban school woes (see Harlem solution below), let’s look at what most impacts the classroom from outside the classroom. It is the weight of poverty that rides the at-risk child like a six-ton elephant. Consider the observations of Pulitzer-winning reporter David K. Shipler:

About 35 million Americans live below the federal poverty line. Their opportunities are defined by forces that may look unrelated, but decades of research have mapped the web of connections. A 1987 study of 215 children attributed differences in I.Q. in part to ‘social risk factors’ like maternal anxiety and stress, which are common features of impoverished households. Research in the 1990’s demonstrated how the paint and pipes of slum housing — major sources of lead — damage the developing brains of children. Youngsters with elevated lead levels have lower I.Q.’s and attention deficits, and — according to a 1990 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine — were seven times more likely to drop out of school.
Take the case of an 8-year-old boy in Boston. He was frequently missing school because of asthma attacks, and his mother was missing work so often for doctors’ appointments that she was in danger of losing her low-wage job. It was a case typical of poor neighborhoods, where asthma runs rampant among children who live amid the mold, dust mites, roaches and other triggers of the disease.”1

The inherent suggestion in NCLB is that all of that will go away if we just expect more of our teachers and students. That is an insult to both of them and it diminishes the enormity of the problem while doing nothing to solve it.

Related: “Limit Low Income Housing“.

High School Taps Institute on Ethics

Leonel Sanchez:

East County’s largest school district has introduced a character education program that aims to reduce cheating and other bad conduct by promoting ethical behavior.
“What you allow, you encourage,” said ethics expert Michael Josephson, who is working with the Grossmont Union High School District on the Character Counts program. “It’s about helping kids form better values, make better choices.”
The Josephson Institute of Ethics plans to release in a few weeks its 2008 national survey of student attitudes and behavior.
Two years ago, the institute’s survey of more than 30,000 students showed alarming rates of cheating, lying and theft at schools across the United States.
Six out of 10 high school students said they had cheated at least once during a test during the past year.

Colorado Amendment 59: Education Funding and TABOR Rebates

Fort Collins Coloradoan:

1. Without raising taxes, Amendment 59 provides a future source of money for educating Colorado’s children. This money may be used to increase per-student funding and for preschool through 12th-grade, or P-12, education improvements, including expanding preschool and full-day kindergarten programs, reducing class size, expanding technology education and providing performance pay for teachers. Providing new sources of money to invest in P-12 education helps schools teach children the skills needed for the jobs of the future. A well-educated work force is necessary to attract new businesses, generate new jobs and keep existing jobs in Colorado.
1. Amendment 59 permanently eliminates all future TABOR rebates to Colorado taxpayers. It is effectively a tax increase that will grow the size of state government. In addition, while the TABOR rebates are supposed to be spent on education, the money could instead replace existing education spending, allowing growth in other state programs. Amendment 59 also allows the only major source of money that is spent on the state’s buildings to be transferred for spending on P-12 education at a time when the state is currently unable to keep up with building maintenance and construction needs.

Maya Angelou Public Charter School offers hope and an education to kids in trouble

James Forman:

The job of a juvenile public defender is as much social worker as lawyer. In Washington, D.C., the juvenile court still operates, at least on paper, as the founders of the system envisioned over a century ago. Judges are supposed to provide for the care and rehabilitation of the child, as well as protect the safety of the community. In practice, this means that if a lawyer can find a program in the community that meets a client’s needs, there is a decent chance that the judge will put the child there instead of locking him up (see Figure 1).
The more I learned about Eddie’s life, the more depressed I became. When he was eight, he was physically abused by his stepfather, who resented the competition for Eddie’s mother’s attention. When he was 10 he began to act out in school, picking fights with other kids and refusing to do his homework. Eventually, he was forced to repeat two grades. At age 13, he was kicked out of school and referred to an “alternative” school for troubled kids. He wandered in and out of this school–nobody really kept track of his attendance–for a few years, until he was arrested and sent to Oak Hill. And now, at maybe the lowest point in an unremittingly dismal life, Eddie was asking me to get him “a program” so that he could go home. As I struggled to respond to Eddie’s request, my depression turned to hopelessness. I knew that the city was throwing all kinds of resources into this case. There was money to pay the police who had arrested Eddie, money for the prosecutor who charged him, money for the expert witness who came to court and testified that Eddie’s fingerprints were found in the house. There was money to pay me, the public defender. And there would be money for the state–on behalf of we the people–to incarcerate Eddie in a juvenile prison, at a cost of more than $50,000 a year.

What’s in a Grade & An Update on Madison’s Standards Based Report Card Scheme

Stafford Palmieri:

The red pen. In our still largely decentralized public school system, it’s no big surprise that this old-fashioned instrument of ill repute gets starkly different treatment from district to district and state to state. Three locales, in fact, have recently reopened the question, “what’s in a grade”–and come up with very different answers. Perhaps by evaluating these recent conversations, we can imagine what standard GPAs might look like.
Fairfax County, Virginia, parents are outraged that their children must score a 94 to receive an A. Neighboring counties give As for a mere 90, they argue, and they and their kids are being unfairly penalized when competing for college admission, national merit awards, even a lower car insurance bill. Parents have taken up arms in hopes that extended pressure on the district to follow the example of nearby school systems will lead to a lower bar; Fairfax is contemplating doing so.
Fairfax’s one-county crusade against grade inflation is probably sacrificing its students on the altar of its ideals, as parents allege, and remedying that problem is not difficult. Despite cries of the old “slippery slope,” shifting the letter-number ratio to match neighboring counties will ultimately benefit Fairfax students (in the short term at least) when it comes to college admissions and the like.
Pittsburgh has tackled the other end of the grading spectrum. All failing grades (those of 50 or below) will henceforth be marked down as 50 percent credit in grade books. Long on the books but only recently enforced, this policy, the district claims, is simply giving students a better chance to “catch up” in the next quarter since quarters are averaged into semester and yearlong grades. “A failing grade is still a failing grade,” explains district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh. Seems not to matter if it’s a 14 or a 49. Round up to 50.

Locally, the Madison School District is implementing “Standards Based Report Cards” in the middle schools.
I’ve wondered what the implementation of this initiative tells parents, citizens and taxpayers, not to mention students about the new Superintendent? See his memo on the subject here. More here.
The State of Wisconsin’s standards are changing, according to this Department of Public Instruction. Peter Sobol’s post on the WKCE’s suitability for tracking student progress is illuminating:

… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.

Much more on report cards here.

Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining Agreements: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed

Emily Cohen, Kate Walsh & RiShawn Biddle [305K PDF]:

NCTQ takes a close look at the governance of the teaching profession and finds that state legislators and other state-level policymakers crafting state laws and regulation, not those bargaining at the local level, decide some of the most important rules governing the teaching profession.
As a number of big school districts around the country such as San Diego, Broward County, and Philadelphia hammer out new teacher contracts over the next few months, both sides will no doubt bring laundry lists of “must-haves” to the bargaining table. The common assumption is that the important action happens when district administrators and union representatives sit down at the bargaining table. Yet the reality is that well before anyone meets to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, many issues will have already been decided.
State legislators and other state-level policymakers crafting state laws and regulation, not those bargaining at the local level, decide some of the most important rules governing the teaching profession. Though the teacher contract still figures prominently on such issues as teacher pay and the schedule of the school day, it is by no means the monolithic authority that many presume it to be. In fact, on the most critical issues of the teaching profession, the state is the real powerhouse. State law dictates how often teachers must be evaluated, when teachers can earn tenure, the benefits they’ll receive, and even the rules for firing a teacher.
A recent example out of New York State illustrates the growing authority of the state legislature in shaping rules that were traditionally in the purview of the local school district. Last year New York City Public Schools sought to change the process for awarding teachers tenure by factoring in student data. The local teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers protested the district’s new policy, not through a local grievance (because the union, by state law, had no say on tenure issues), but by lobbying state legislatures to pass a bill that would effectively make the district’s action illegal.1 Guided by the heavy hand of the state teachers’ union and the UFT, the New York State Legislature blocked New York City’s tenure changes by embedding a provision in the 2008-2009 budget that made it illegal to consider a teacher’s job performance as a factor in the tenure process.2 The placement of the provision in the large, unwieldy budget virtually assured the union of a win, as few legislators or the governor would have been prepared to have the budget go down on the basis of a single provision.

SAT’s Matter if You Are in High School

Arthur McCann:

Those of us who help students and their families prepare college applications know how much more competitive the process has become in the last several years. Students are getting rejected from colleges that older and less accomplished siblings are now attending.
This is because the current crop of seniors is part of the “echo boom,” which is expected to peak with 3.3 million children of baby boomers graduating in 2009 and to remain near this level for another seven years. Many more students will be vying for spaces in college.
Teenagers are working harder than ever at challenging themselves with honors and AP courses and filling after-school hours with extracurricular activities, community service programs and SAT prep courses. But it seems like a cruel joke that coinciding with this increased competitiveness, they are required to take a longer and more rigorous Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Chicago Parents Seek More Public School Input

Chicago Tribune:

Parents of Chicago public school students living on the West Side overwhelmingly want to have more of a say on school decisions and want better communication from the district when it comes to school-restructuring efforts, according to the findings of a five-month survey released Friday.
The survey conducted by the Parents & Residents Invested in School & Education Reform (PRISE Reform), queried 504 households of students in the 6th through 12th grades in the Humboldt Park, Garfield Park and Austin neighborhoods.

Cash Incentives for Students and Teachers Boosts Performance on SAT and Advanced Placement Tests

Kirabo Jackson:

A cash incentive program that rewards both teachers and students for each passing score earned on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam has been shown to increase the percentage of high ACT and SAT scores earned by participating students, and increase the number of students enrolling in college, according to new research by Cornell University economist Kirabo Jackson published in the fall issue of Education Next. The program appears to have the biggest impact on African American and Hispanic students, boosting participation in AP courses and exams.
The Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP) is targeted to Texas schools serving predominantly minority and low-income students. On average, there is a 22 percent increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT in schools with the APIP. The increase rises each year the program is in place so that by the third year there is roughly a 33 percent increase.
The percentage increases in students achieving higher SAT and ACT exam scores are similar among white, African American, and Hispanics students–about 5 percentage points from the third year on. However, the differences in impact relative to the prior performance of each group are sizable, notes Jackson. While there is about a 12 percent relative increase in white students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT, there is a 50 percent relative increase for Hispanics and an 80 percent relative increase for black students.

Academic Fitness

The NACAC Testing Commission has just released its report [PDF]on the benefits of, and problems with, current standardized admission tests. The Commission says that “a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation’s many and varied colleges and universities.”
It might be pointed out, by an outside observer, that standardized tests not only do not reflect the realities of acceptance for high school students receiving athletic scholarships, but such tests have nothing whatever to do with whether high school athletes are recruited or not and nothing to do with whether they receive college athletic scholarships or not.
Athletic scholarships are based on athletic performance in particular athletic activities, not on tests of the athletic or physical fitness of high school athletes. The cost of failure for college coaches is too high for them to think of relying on any standardized test of sports knowledge or of anything else in their efforts to recruit the best high school athletes they can.
The NACAC Testing Commission also says that standardized tests may not do a good enough job of telling whether applicants to college are academically fit. They recommend the development and use of good subject matter tests which are “more closely linked to the high school curriculum” than the SAT and ACT exams.
This suggestion begins to approach the rigor of assessment in the recruiting and selection of high school athletes, but there are still important differences. The high school athletic curriculum includes such subjects as football, basketball, soccer, baseball, etc., but college coaches do not rely on tests of athletes’ knowledge of these sports as determined by sport-specific tests. They need to know a lot about the actual performance of candidates in those sports in which they have competed.
The parallel is not perfect, because of course students who can demonstrate knowledge of history, biology, literature, math, chemistry, and so on, are clearly more likely to manage the demands of college history, biology, literature, math and chemistry courses when they get there, while athletes who know a lot about their sport may still perform poorly in it.
But college academic work does not just consist of taking courses and passing tests. In math there are problem sets. In biology, chemistry, etc., there is lab work to do. And in history courses there are history books to read and research papers to write. Such performance tasks are not yet part of the recommended tests for college admission.
It is now possible, for example, for a student who can do well on a subject matter test in history to graduate from high school without ever having read a complete history book or written a real history research paper in high school. That student may indeed do well in history courses in college, but it seems likely that they will have a steep learning curve in their mastery of the reading lists and paper requirements they will face in those courses.
New standard college admissions tests in specific academic subjects will no doubt bring more emphasis on academic knowledge for the high school students who are preparing for them, but a standard independent assessment of their research papers would surely make it more likely that they would not plan to enter college without ever having done one in high school.
The reading of complete nonfiction books is still an unknown for college admissions officers. Interviewers may ask what books students have read, but there is no actual standard expectation for the content, difficulty and number of nonfiction books high school students are expected to have read before college.
The increased emphasis on subject matter tests is surely a good step closer to the seriousness routinely seen in the assessments for college athletic scholarships, but it seems to me that some regular examination of the reading of nonfiction books and an external assessment of at least one serious research paper by high school students would help in their preparation for college, as well as in the assessment of their actual demonstrated academic fitness which, as the Commission points out, is not now provided by the SAT and ACT tests.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

What Do College Students Know? By this professor’s calculations, math skills have plummeted

Stephen Wilson:

Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. I conducted an experiment to try to answer that question for one group of students.
For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I administered the same final exam I had used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical, and the classes contained approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshman class.
The content of the calculus I course had not changed and, from a math standpoint, using the old exam was completely appropriate.
The average exam score for my 2006 calculus I class was significantly lower than for my 1989 class. Comparing the effects of scaling in the two years reveals the extent of the decline. In my 1989 class, 27 percent of students received As on the test and 23 percent Bs. When I graded my 2006 class on my 2006 scale, 32 percent received As and 37 percent Bs. But if I instead graded my 2006 class on the 1989 scale, only 6 percent would have received As and 21 percent Bs. If I graded the 1989 class on the 2006 scale, 52 percent would have received As and 26 percent Bs.
Why did my 2006 class perform so poorly? With the proliferation of AP calculus in high school, one might think that the good students of 2006 place out of calculus I more frequently than did their 1989 counterparts. However, in 1989, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences freshmen either took the harder engineering calculus course or a higher level mathematics course (calculus II or III, linear algebra, or differential equations). The percentage in 2006 is only 24 percent.

No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools

Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, National Council on Teacher Quality1.5MB PDF:

American students’ chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.

Gubernatorial Candidates on Education

Rita Truschel:

Lee only just emerged as an active campaigner since the Sept. 9 primary elections. He was a late and reluctant draftee in May, after former Happy Harry’s drugstore executive Alan Levin unexpectedly backed out in January. Since then, Lee’s strategy was more about freezing out Republican primary opponent Mike Protack than honing his own positions.
So here we are a month before election day, with Lee finally on the spot to explain himself. The University of Delaware’s Clayton Hall auditorium was full of hundreds of people knowledgeable and focused on education. And Lee declared he wouldn’t deviate from the Vision 2015 plan in which many of them had had a hand.
So why was there laughter?
The trouble is Lee didn’t seem to have a sense that there is serious dissent even among the framers of Vision 2015 about elements such as consolidated purchasing and changing teacher compensation. There are political fights in all corners.

Under Pressure

Matthew Futterman:

Intense, highly involved parenting can create star children like golf prodigies Josh and Zach Martin. But it can also come at a cost. What’s driving hard-driving parents?
Bowie and Julie Martin shuttled their sons for five years to a never-ending series of practices, lessons and games in a half-dozen sports before finally suggesting the boys focus on a single pursuit, golf, the game where the children showed the most promise.
Josh and Zach Martin were 6 and 8.
“I just wanted them to be great at something,” Mr. Martin explains.
So far, so good. Today, the Martin family’s single-minded pursuit has produced perhaps the two best young golfers living under the same roof anywhere. Their two-bedroom townhouse beside the 17th hole of a golf course in Pinehurst, N.C., is an exhibit space for dozens of oversized silver and crystal trophies that Josh and Zach have won, including 11 at international tournaments.

Adolescent Anxiety: The Musical

Bruce Weber:

He was never much of a student, but Jason Robert Brown was a precocious kid. Growing up in Monsey, N.Y., about an hour north of Manhattan, he became enthralled by music at age 4, was taking lessons at 5. At his first recital — age 6 — he not only outplayed his teacher’s other students, he also supplied the verbal patter of a natural entertainer.
“He just started chatting with the audience,” his mother, Deborah Brown, recalled. “I was floored. Nobody knew where it came from.”
Once, before he could write in script, he filched a checkbook from one of his parents, wrote out a check and sent it to a mail-order record club. Fortunately he didn’t get all the particulars right, and the check was returned because it was unsigned. Teachers plucked him from third grade and plopped him into the fourth, not because of straight A’s but because he wasn’t paying attention.
“He was good in everything, but if it wasn’t music, he didn’t do the work,” said Mrs. Brown, a former English teacher.

Starting Over (Again) in New Orleans

Caitlin Corrigan:

Aug. 29, 2008, marked the end of the second week of my second year teaching at Craig Elementary school, one of nearly 35 public schools that make up the Recovery School District, a state run system created in 2005 to reform New Orleans’ failing schools.
The date had a much greater significance for my students and our city, of course — it was both the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall, and the day before Mayor C. Ray Nagin would declare a mandatory evacuation in preparation for what could be “the storm of the century,” Hurricane Gustav.
As we neared dismissal that day, my students buzzed around the wooden shelves that housed their binders of classwork.

Merit & The Washington, DC School System

NY Times Editorial:

Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington has moved at warp speed to make reforms since lawmakers gave him direct control of the city’s corrupt and dysfunctional school system a little more than a year ago. He named a hard-nosed schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who has replaced dozens of inept principals and reined in a rapacious central bureaucracy that was infamous for wasting money and thwarting reform.
The mayor and his chancellor are now hoping to negotiate an innovative new teachers’ contract that, if ratified, could become a model for underperforming school systems throughout the country.
Like many other cities, Washington wants to relax seniority rules that make it difficult to remove underperforming teachers and to reward high performers with fewer years of service.
Ms. Rhee has proposed a new approach in which teachers could choose between two employment options. The first would continue the traditional tenure arrangement, under which teachers would be compensated based on their years of experience and educational attainment. Or teachers could choose to give up tenure protection — for the first year of the new contract — and would have to agree to an evaluation of their teaching skills. The teachers who temporarily relinquished tenure, and passed the review, would be rewarded with higher salaries and bonuses that could push their earnings to as high as $130,000 a year. At present, a teacher with a Ph.D. and 21 years of experience makes $87,500 a year. Those who received lower ratings, however, would risk being fired during a probationary year.

On Firing Teachers

Jay Matthews:

The Internet arrived late in my career. Its annoyances are far outweighed by its joys. One of the best things about the new era is that I can converse with far more readers and at much greater depth than I ever could with just a phone and a typewriter.
ne example is the energetic response to my column Monday on the second page of The Post’s Metro section. The headline summed it up well: “For Kids’ Sake, Power to Fire Teachers Crucial.”
I explained why I thought D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was right to try to find the best possible principals, who understand great teaching because they were once great teachers themselves, and give them the power to hire and fire the people who work for them. My prime example was the success of the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a public charter school in the District. I described how that school’s principal, Sarah Hayes, removed quickly two teachers who failed to respond to her efforts to train them, and how that saved their students from months, and perhaps years, of mediocre teaching.

DC Schools Chancellor Imposes Teacher Dismissal Policy

Bill Turque:

“The goal and responsibility and moral imperative of this administration is to make sure that each child gets an excellent education,” said Rhee, who had hinted broadly in recent weeks that she was ready to invoke what she has dubbed “Plan B.”
The blueprint includes a new teacher evaluation system based primarily on student test scores and other achievement benchmarks. She has also decided to employ rules that are on the books but seldom used, including one that allows her to deemphasize the importance of seniority in deciding which teachers would lose jobs in the event of declining enrollment or school closures. Seniority would become one of multiple factors taken into account.
Exactly how teachers will be evaluated on the basis of test scores is still under review, Rhee said. The provision allowing a 90-day review of teacher performance, however, could have a more immediate impact.

Leopold fifth-graders would go to two middle schools under district plan to reduce crowding

Click to view a map displaying Leopold and nearby schools.

Tamira Madsen:

Five days after Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison School Board officials learn if voters approved a referendum to help finance the district budget, they’re expected to vote on options to ease overcrowding at Leopold Elementary.

Wisconsin State Journal & The Madison School District:

A long-term plan for coping with Leopold Elementary’s crowded classrooms would be delayed until June, and the school’s fifth graders would be shuttled to two middle schools for two years under a proposal released today by Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
In a report to the Madison School Board, Nerad acknowledged that residents living in the Leopold area on Madison’s South Side would prefer that a new school be built in the area.
However, he recommended the stopgap measures while delaying the long-term plan, which had been expected to be announced this fall. District officials have been studying the problem since April.
Under Nerad’s plan, Leopold’s fifth graders would attend Cherokee and Wright middle schools in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years. About three-fourths of the fifth graders would be sent to Cherokee.

Distance from Leopold Elementary to:

Lincoln Elementary 2.1 Miles
Wright Middle School 2.0 Miles
Stoner Prairie Elementary 2.7 Miles
Franklin Elementary 3.4 Miles
Thoreau Elementary 3.2 Miles
Cherokee Middle School 2.8 miles
Olson Elementary School 8.9 miles

Much more on Leopold here.

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McCain & Obama’s Art Policy Statements

Salt Lake City Tribune:

Here are the arts policy statements of John McCain and Barack Obama:
John McCain
“John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.”
Barack Obama Reinvest in Arts Education: To remain competitive in the global economy, America needs to reinvigorate the kind of creativity and innovation that has made this country great. To do so, we must nourish our children’s creative skills. In addition to giving our children the science and math skills they need to compete in the new global context, we should also encourage the ability to think creatively that comes from a meaningful arts education. Unfortunately, many school districts are cutting instructional time for art and music education. Barack Obama believes that the arts should be a central part of effective teaching and learning

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The Milwaukee School Board: “A Very Sad Scandal”

http://www.wpri.org/Commentary/2008/10.08/Li10.3.08/Li10.3.08.htmlGeorge Lightbourn:

Since 1984 I have been following issues in and around Milwaukee Public Schools. That means that, since 1984 I have been searching for who is responsible for the pitiful state of education in Milwaukee. At long last I found the culprit; it is the Milwaukee School Board. That board has proven itself to be self-serving, insular and overtly political.
Their high crime is that this body, entrusted to care for Milwaukee’s children, has been caught stealing money that should have been put into the classrooms of schools throughout the city.
Like the scandals that brought down huge corporations, from Enron to Fannie Mae, the evidence of the crime was assembled by accountants. Last week the WPRI released a report, authored by Christian Schneider, showing that the MPS board has racked up $2.2 billion of unfunded liabilities to pay the health care cost of retired employees. That means that the board committed to pay $2.2 billion it does not have. That also means that for years, while begging for more money to address the all-to-real challenges of urban education, the MPS board had already decided that their top priority was to pay for retiree health care costs.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

The Milwaukee School Board should censure member Charlene Hardin and forbid her from taking any more trips after records revealed she racked up bills of more than $8,500 while jetting around the country on the school district’s dime. For one trip, she billed Milwaukee Public Schools more than $400 to rent a Chrysler 300 Touring car for two days.
In a column Thursday, the Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice revealed that Hardin was hit in March with a nearly $300 penalty for smoking cigarettes while staying at a smoke-free Marriott in Washington

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The Spellings Plan for College Student Aid Simplification

Doug Lederman:

In a speech tonight at Harvard University, the U.S. education secretary will unveil a proposal to greatly simplify the process by which students apply for federal financial aid. Under the plan, which flows from a set of ideas floated by Under Secretary Sara Martinez Tucker at an Education Department summit in July, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid would shrink from more than 100 questions to 26, and students would find out before their senior year of high school how much federal financial aid they would qualify for.
“This all flies under the rubric of needing to make this process much much less burdensome,” Spellings said in an interview in her office Monday. “Right now, it’s like we’re trying to keep people out of college, not get them in…. The whole thing is, ‘You want to go to college? Here are seven pages of bureaucracy, and here’s what you’re going to have to do to get it.’ As opposed to, ‘Here’s a simple way to do it, and here’s what we’re going to do for you, so you can get it.’ It’s the whole psychology.”

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“Limit Low Income Housing” – Madison Police Official

Patricia Simms:

A top Madison Police Department official says the city should reduce or freeze building low-income housing because the tenants are overwhelming police services.
In addition, Jay Lengfeld, captain of the West District, wrote an e-mail to Madison Alderman Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, on Monday in which he suggested the city should license landlords to “weed out the bad ones” and give landlords more leeway to reject applicants with a history of bad behavior.
“The city needs to reduce or freeze the number of subsidized housing units in the city,” he wrote. “The at-risk population in Madison has exceeded the ability of service providers to service them.”
Lengfeld’s comments, part of an exchange of e-mails between Lengfeld and Pham-Remmele over quality of life issues on the West Side, sparked the wrath of at least one affordable housing advocate.

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A Broader Definition of Merit: The Trouble With College Entry Exams

Brent Staples:

Imagine yourself an admissions director of a status-seeking college that wants desperately to move up in the rankings. With next year’s freshman class nearly filled, you are choosing between two applicants. The first has very high SAT scores, but little else to recommend him. The second is an aspiring doctor who tests poorly but graduated near the top of his high school class while volunteering as an emergency medical technician in his rural county.
This applicant has the kind of background that higher education has always claimed to covet. But the pressures that are driving colleges — and the country as a whole — to give college entry exams more weight than they were ever intended to have would clearly work against him. Those same pressures are distorting the admissions process, corrupting education generally and slanting the field toward students whose families can afford test preparation classes.
Consider the admissions director at our hypothetical college. He knows that college ranking systems take SAT’s and ACT’s into account. He knows that bond-rating companies look at the same scores when judging a college’s credit worthiness. And in lean times like these, he would be especially eager for a share of the so-called merit scholarship money that state legislators give students who test well.

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KIPP’s Dave Levin on The Colbert Report

Video, about 15 minutes into the show.

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Parents Give Up Youths Under Law Meant for Babies

Erik Eckholm:

The abandonments began on Sept. 1, when a mother left her 14-year-old son in a police station here.
y Sept. 23, two more boys and one girl, ages 11 to 14, had been abandoned in hospitals in Omaha and Lincoln. Then a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl were left.
The biggest shock to public officials came last week, when a single father walked into an Omaha hospital and surrendered nine of his 10 children, ages 1 to 17, saying that his wife had died and he could no longer cope with the burden of raising them.
In total last month, 15 older children in Nebraska were dropped off by a beleaguered parent or custodial aunt or grandmother who said the children were unmanageable.

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Hartland Arrowhead Honored for Best High School Musical

Channel3000:

A Wisconsin high school will receive an award Thursday for producing the best high school musical in the nation.
Arrowhead High School about 30 miles west of Milwaukee is being honored for last year’s production of “Cats.”
The school has spent the past decade developing a musical theater program so strong students joke the Broadway Company is a varsity sport. Its graduates have gone on to major in music at Harvard University, Lawrence University and the Chicago College of the Performing Arts.

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American Math Chuckleheads

Rich Karlgaard:

I got an e-mail titled “An Angry American With An Idea.” This e-mail must have gone viral, because I received it a half-dozen times. You probably got it too. Here is what it said:

“I’m against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG. Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a ‘We Deserve It Dividend.’ To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bona fide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/-, counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up. So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion. That equals $425,000. My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a ‘We Deserve It Dividend.’ “

The letter goes on and describes the many wonderful things that could happen in America if each adult had an extra $425,000.
Now the funny part. Friends and colleagues–they shall remain anonymous–who passed this e-mail along would append a note: “You should read this.” “This actually makes sense.”
Not once did anyone point out the Angry American’s wee calculation flaw. Eighty-five billion dollars divided by 200 million people is $425, not $425,000.

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Madison School District Facing Class-Action Lawsuit Over Open Enrollment

Channel3000:

he Madison Metropolitan School District is facing a federal class-action lawsuit.
An East High School parent claims a request to transfer her daughter out of the district was been denied based on race.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in federal court on Wednesday, claims the Madison school district discriminated against a white, female student who wanted to transfer from East High School using open enrollment.
At the time, in the 2006-2007 school year, the transfer request was denied because it would increase the racial imbalance in the district. It was the district’s policy at the time, but that policy was changed earlier this year after a Supreme Court ruling involving school districts in Seattle and Louisville, WISC-TV reported.
“I believe this district had a policy that was absolutely consistent with state law,” Madison Schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. “When there was a legal decision by the highest court of the land… that was no longer a factor. I believe the district responded very responsibly in making a change in the policy.”

Much more on open enrollment here.
More:

Madison Schools’ Using race to deny white student transfers to be topic for the School Board
Race out as reason to deny Madison school transfers

Andy Hall has more:

In the 2006-07 school year, Madison was the only one of the state’s 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students’ applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools, records show.

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Arts Task Force to present findings and recommendations to Madison School Board: Presentation at 6 pm, Monday, October 6, 2008

Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison [Map]

“The arts are not a luxury; they are essential”. State Supt. of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster
Being concerned about the effect of cuts to funding, staffing and instruction time on arts education and the effect of these cuts on low-income students and students of color, the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) Board of Education formed the district’s Fine Arts Task Force in January 2007 to respond to three charges:

Identify community goals for Madison Metropolitan School District K-12 Fine Arts education including curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular.
Recommend up to five ways to increase minority student participation and participation of low-income students in Fine Arts at elementary, middle and high school levels.
Make recommendations regarding priorities for district funding of Fine Arts.

Members of the Task Force will present the findings and recommendations to the MMSD School Board on Monday, October, 6, 2008, at 6:15 pm, in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison.
Students, parents and the general public are encouraged to attend to show support for the role of the arts in ensuring a quality education for every MMSD student. Attendees can register in support of the report at the meeting.
Nineteen community members, including 5 MMSD students, were appointed by the School Board to the Task Force, which met numerous times from February 2007 through June 2008. The Task Force received a great deal of supportive assistance from the Madison community and many individuals throughout the 16 month information gathering and , deliberation process. More than 1,000 on-line surveys were completed by community members, parents, artists, arts organizations, students, administrators and teachers, providing a wealth of information to inform the task force?s discussions and recommendations.
The full Task Force report and appendices, and a list of Task Force members, can be found at http://mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Fine Arts Task Force Report [1.62MB PDF] and appendices:

Workplan-1
Survey Instruments [22.3MB PDF]
Survey Tabulation [141K .xls]
Open Ended Summaries [400K PDF]
Arts Financial Analysis [153K .xls]
Madison School District Budget History Request [124K .xls]
Enrollment Data [2MB]

For more information, contact Anne Katz, Task Force co-chair, 608 335 7909 | annedave@chorus.net.

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More Online Education Options: Now from Wharton High School @ U of Pennsylvania

Knowledge @ Wharton High School, via a kind reader email:

Knowledge@Wharton High School is an interactive site for high school students interested in finding out more about the world of business. It’s a subject that touches your lives in many ways — from the malls you shop and the plastics you recycle to the entrepreneurs, sports managers, fashion designers, stock brokers, artists and other leaders that you might become. At KWHS, you will find features about the companies you know and the people who run them, games to improve your financial skills and test your commitment to a greener marketplace, tools to explain how business works, and podcasts and videos that spotlight the world’s most creative and colorful people. As part of a network of global online business publications published by The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, KWHS will show you how your ideas can change the world.

Related: Credit for non-Madison School District courses:

In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.

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3 Madison schools offer free fresh fruit, veggies

The Capital Times:

The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program has expanded to 56 schools in Wisconsin this year, including three Madison elementary schools, providing free fresh fruit and vegetables during the school day to all students wanting a quick nutritious snack.
The state received $870,994 in the national farm bill for the program, which works out to $51 per student for the 17,000 state students served.
The program started in 2002 as a way to combat obesity in kids. Funding is geared to schools with a higher incidence of students from economically disadvantaged families.
Madison schools getting funding through the program for fresh fruits and vegetables include Falk Elementary ($15,700), Glendale Elementary ($20,696) and Hawthorne Elementary ($16,312).

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Contentless Writing

Mr. Fitzhugh [fitzhugh@tcr.org] is Editor and Publisher of The Concord Review and Founder of the National Writing Board and the TCR Institute [www.tcr.org].
Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg was short. Indeed, the President had spoken and taken his seat before many in that large crowd gathered outdoors even realized that he had spoken. Fortunately, an alert reporter took down his words. Short as the speech was, it began with a date and a fact–the sort of factual content that is being drained away from student writing today.
The very idea of writing without content takes some getting used to. I was taken aback not long ago to read the comments of a young woman who had been asked how she felt about having a computer grade the essays that she wrote on the Graduate Management Admission Test (Mathews, 2004). She replied that she didn’t mind, noting that the test givers were more interested in her “ability to communicate” than in what she actually said.
Although style, fluency, tone, and correct grammar are certainly important in writing, folks like me think that content has value as well. The guidelines for scoring the new writing section on the SAT seem to say otherwise, however. Readers evaluating the essays are told not to take points off for factual mistakes, and they must score the essays “holistically”–at the rate of 30 an hour (Winerip, 2005).
Earlier this year, Linda Shaw of the Seattle Times (2006), reported that the the rules for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) do not allow dictionaries, but “when it comes to the writing section, there’s one rule they can break: They can make things up. Statistics. Experts. Quotes. Whatever helps them make their point.” According to Shaw, the state’s education office announced that “making up facts is acceptable when writing nonfiction, persuasive essays on the WASL.”
Lest you conclude that writing without content, or writing nonfiction with fictional content–think James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces–is limited to the Left Coast, think again. Across the United States, even the most prestigious writing workshops for teachers generally bypass the what to focus on the how.
All writing has to have some content, of course. So what are students encouraged to put down on the page? In its 2003 report, The Neglected ‘R’, The National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, gave us a clue. According to the report, the following passage by a high school student about the September 11 terrorist attacks shows “how powerfully children can express their emotions.”
“The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us.”
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored “Basic” or “Below Basic,” NAEP scored the following student response “Excellent.” The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse’s Demian, in which the main character grows up and awakens to himself, the student wrote,

(more…)

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Curriculum Compacting: One way to help advanced students move ahead and learn at their own level.

Tamara Fisher:

Professional development. What thoughts and feelings do those words conjure up for you? Excitement? Boredom? A chance to improve your skills and learn new, interesting teaching strategies? Or a painful time of listening to someone talk about a topic you already know?
We’ve all been there–sitting in a required in-service class listening to someone go over Bloom’s Taxonomy or some other concept or strategy that we’ve been using effortlessly for years. We grumble our way through the session, irritated that we have to sit on our butts “re-learning” a topic we could have taught just as well ourselves, if not better. Partly we’re irritated because we have so much else to do! Many teachers would categorize a situation like this as wasted time.
Of course, not all professional development is like that. But I use the example because it is a great way to help teachers relate to what a gifted kid experiences when the material being taught in class is not at the right readiness-level for him or her. We don’t like it when someone else puts us into that kind of a situation, yet we routinely do the same to the gifted students.

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Owl Creek neighborhood raises red flags for city, schools

Sandy Cullen:

The first thing the school principal noticed was the large number of new students coming from a tiny, isolated neighborhood that didn’t exist two years ago.
Then it was the repeated fights — which would begin on the bus ride home, fester in the neighborhood, then come back to school the next day, said Glendale Elementary School Principal Mickey Buhl.
And there were other troubling signs — youngsters shaving their eyebrows and cutting their hair in ways that Buhl said indicated flirtation with the idea of gangs. Glendale staff who went to the Owl Creek neighborhood, off Voges Road on the southeast side near McFarland, saw an unfinished development sandwiched between two industrial parks and far from stores, social services and bus lines.
Madison police also noticed problems. From March 1 to June 30 of this year, police responded to 81 calls for service, ranging from theft to battery, in the tiny development, said Lt. Carl Strasburg.

Related: Police calls near Madison area high schools: 1996-2006.

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Autonomy “Key to School Success”

BBC:

Independent schools get better results than state schools because they have the freedom to tailor teaching to the needs of their pupils, researchers say.
A University of Buckingham report found social background and ability were not the only factors behind higher grades in private schools.
The study said autonomy meant decisions were made close to the classroom.
The findings showed how the quality of education could be improved in the state school sector, the report added.

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Wisconsin “School Lawsuit Facts” Site Posted by PR Firm

“School Lawsuit Facts”:

MILWAUKEE, WI, September 30, 2008 . . . Five Wisconsin school districts (the “Districts”) filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court yesterday seeking to rescind their $200 million investment with Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc. (“Stifel”) and the Royal Bank of Canada (“RBC”). They allege $150 million in losses to date.
The Districts contend Stifel and RBC either knowingly or negligently misrepresented and omitted crucial details in transactions made by the Districts to secure funding for their Other Post-Employment Benefit (OPEB) liabilities by failing to disclose or concealing their true risks. The Districts contend such investments were unsuitable for a public trust fund. They further allege Stifel and RBC collected large fees and realized massive cost savings while effectively positioning the Districts as guarantors of an ultra-risky portfolio of assets.
The school districts include: Kenosha Unified School District; Kimberly Area School District; School District of Waukesha; West Allis – West Milwaukee School District and Whitefish Bay School District. In addition to Stifel Nicolaus and RBC, the school districts have also included James M. Zemlyak of Elm Grove in the complaint. During the time of the transaction Zemlyak was the Chief Financial Officer and Co-Chief Operations Officer for Stifel.

Madison Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Erik Kass was most recently with the Waukesha School District. Amy Hetzner and Paul Soglin have more.
Roger Frank Bass on Two Crises: Wall Street & Education:

One, $700 billion is peanuts. Low-end estimates of educational outlays are more than $400 billion per year — that’s $5.2 trillion during a child’s K-12 education, more than seven times what the government will spend to prop up “free” enterprise. (The Global Movement for Children, using United Nations data, states that the 80 million children not receiving education could be schooled for about $15 billion per year.) And, like our financial institutions, U.S. education performs less well than in virtually all developed countries despite per-student outlays that are some of the highest anywhere. In military terms, this is a clear and present danger.
Along with bankrolling failures, the parallels include lax oversight. Just as Wall Street was craftily packaging collateralized debt obligations and hedge funds, state- and local-education agencies were bundling worthless test scores into triple-A public relations.
Just as the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies failed to monitor their charges, Departments of Public Instruction and those responsible for our children’s education never demanded the transparency needed to evaluate the substandard data behind ever riskier instructional methods. When a stock market falls apart, at least we can pick ourselves up and keep going. When education falls apart, we won’t have the intellectual capital to move forward. Economic growth begins with knowledge, not money. Ask India.

These events provide timely and useful dinner conversation fodder with our children:

“What do you think happened to the baby-sitting money deposited into the bank yesterday?”
“What will you do one day if the money is not there?”
“Where does the money come from?”

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Education funding and bureaucracy

“The Punch:

A recent World Bank report on the Federal Government’s funding of the education sector has revealed a disproportionate allocation of funds to the payment of salaries and wages. The report titled “A Review of the Cost and Financing of Public Education” states that while funding levels increased from N30.6 billion in 1999 to N205.2 billion in 2007, public expenditure on education declined in real terms as the increase in funding did not translate into a commensurate improvement in the provision of facilities, equipment, infrastructure and services.
Giving the breakdown of the total sum of N738 billion the FG allocated to the sector between 1999 and 2007, the report revealed that the Federal Ministry of Education and its four key agencies spent about N472 billion on salaries and wages, leaving a paltry sum of N265 billion for infrastructure development. For the 2008 budget, the FG devoted N210 billion or 13 per cent of the total budget to education, apart from another N39.7 billion earmarked as intervention fund for the UBE programme.
It is claimed that the funds the National Universities Commission and the federal universities devoted to salaries and wages alone peaked at 83 per cent of the FG’s university funding in 2007. Other streams of education, including colleges of education, similarly recorded high percentages in personnel costs.

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Lost Cause: Why do My Children Lose Everything?

Emily Bazelon:

ere must be a hidden graveyard for them or a coach who picks them up after practice and cuts them up to make leather jackets. Two Fridays ago, we had four soccer balls: two for 8-year-old Eli to practice with; a slightly smaller one for his younger brother, Simon; and a special, pristine ball that Eli’s teammates in Washington, D.C., signed for him when he left the team last summer because we were moving to a new city. Last Friday, five minutes before Simon’s soccer practice, we had only one ball. The unblemished one with the signatures. Understandably, Eli didn’t want Simon to take it to practice. But where had all the other ones gone? Neither of my boys knew. I tore around the house and the garage. Well, actually, Eli allowed, one or maybe two of the balls had somehow failed to make it home from practice the previous week. What to do now? Fume.
“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./ The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote. Yet I can’t accept the fluster. My children’s penchant for leaving their belongings strewn behind them–a long tail of balls and toys and lunchboxes and socks and shoes and sweatshirts–makes me fear that they are heedless prima donnas who will never be ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. And then, of course, I’m forced to concede that I seem to have raised them to be this way. The ritual of losing things makes me wonder about the line between taking good care of your kids and impossibly coddling them. Have middle-class American parents like us forever blurred the distinction?

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SAT: If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Scott Jaschik:

For decades, critics of standardized testing — and especially of the SAT – have said that these examinations fail to capture important qualities, resulting in admissions systems that favor certain groups over others, while failing to represent test takers’ full identities. And generally, these critics have said, the qualities that the SAT is best at identifying are those that wealthy white students are more likely than others to possess.
On Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the College Board — the creator and defender of the SAT — said pretty much what critics have been saying all along. The board presented the most detailed results yet of new approaches to standardized tests that would measure non-cognitive qualities and could become what some have called the “SAT III.”
Thus far, the board has found that there are specific non-cognitive qualities that relate to college success, and that these qualities can be measured. Further, board research suggests that if the admissions process included these qualities in addition to traditional measures, black and Latino enrollments would increase significantly while white and Asian enrollments would drop — the latter significantly at the most competitive colleges.

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To School or Not to School: Parents Skip Lesson Plans

John Edwards, III:

It’s safe to say my wife and I considered keeping our kids out of school about as much as we considered not feeding and clothing them.
Joanne Rendell, a New York City novelist and mother of a near-5-year-old, is taking a very different approach. She wrote recently on the Babble parenting Web site about a philosophy she and some other parents are adhering to: unschooling. Ms. Rendell’s son, Benny, by age would be starting kindergarten around now, but instead she and her partner are keeping him at home for a much more loosely structured experience.
So, rather than wake up early to rush to regimented lessons in a big building, Benny wakes up at midday and heads with his mother to Brooklyn for a playgroup with other unschooled kids. Ms. Rendell writes: “[U]n-kindergarten for us … means we don’t have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. He can read a book on sharks when he feels like it. He can experiment with bungee cords while eating his breakfast at noon.”

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Arizona AG: “Virtual Meetings OK

Paul Davenport:

Arizona school boards, city councils and other public bodies can meet online to discuss public business but that they still need to accommodate the public, Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday.
Telecommunications technology offers the promise of widening public access to meetings held through webcasts and other means, Goddard said. “This promise, however, is counterbalanced by the potential for abuse or technical obstacles for some citizens to access the meeting.”
Goddard discussed the issue in a legal opinion that reviewed a plan by the Camp Verde Unified School District’s governing board to meet online to discuss a document.

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Referendum Climate: Wisconsin Property Tax Ranking

The Tax Foundation, Via TaxProf. Much more on the November, 2008 referendum here.

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Education: One size does not fit all

John Carey:

During deliberations on House Bill 119 – the state budget bill for fiscal years 2009-10 – the Strickland administration worked with the Legislature to invest an unprecedented amount of money in higher education, recognizing its importance to Ohio’s future success.
A major player in these discussions was former state senator and current Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, who was appointed by Strickland in 2007 to help expand access to Ohio’s higher education institutions, increase the number of Ohioans with college degrees and help attract and retain talented students that will strengthen the state’s workforce and grow our economy.
I believe the governor made the right decision in choosing Fingerhut. In more than a year on the job, he has done many good things and has broadened support for higher education. In fact, in March, the chancellor unveiled a 10-year strategic plan for higher education, which includes the goal of enrolling 230,000 more students in Ohio’s colleges and universities by 2017.

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The New Paternalism in Urban Schools

David Whitman:

By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.
Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.

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Sun Prairie teacher with creative approach to reading honored

Pamela Cotant:

Sandra Kowalczyk’s creative approach to helping students read is evident when you walk into her classroom at Patrick Marsh Middle School in Sun Prairie.
Kowalczyk, who has traveled to 55 countries in five continents, decorated her room with a variety of artifacts such as wood carvings and masks from Ghana, batik sarongs from Malaysia and Indonesia, mud paintings from the Ivory Coast, mola cloth from Panama, puppets from India and books from around the world.
“My philosophy is build interest, give them background,” said Kowalczyk, who was named the Wisconsin Middle/Junior High School Teacher of the Year.
As Teacher of the Year, she received $3,000 from Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., through the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation. She was recognized by state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster along with the other three 2008-09 Teachers of the Year during the recent State of Education speech and awards ceremony at the Capitol.

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Urban school superintendents hard to hang onto

Betsy Taylor:

t. Louis is looking for its eighth school superintendent since 2003. Kansas City is on its 25th superintendent in 39 years.
Despite good salaries and plenty of perks, a recent study found that the average urban superintendent nationwide stays on the job only about three years — which educators say isn’t enough time to enact meaningful, long-lasting reform.
“Would you buy Coca-Cola if they changed CEOs every year?” asked Diana Bourisaw, who left as St. Louis superintendent in July after two years in the top job. “The answer is no. I wouldn’t.”
On Friday, Kelvin Adams signed a three-year contract with the St. Louis district worth $225,000 annually plus bonus incentives, a day after his hiring was approved by a state-appointed board that oversees the district.
Adams figures he can buck the trend of superintendent turnover.
“I am absolutely focused on one thing — student achievement,” Adams said.

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Buffett’s Chinese Investment: Seeking Engineers

Keith Bradsher:

MidAmerican also sees promise in BYD’s battery technologies for storing wind energy and solar energy, Mr. Sokol said. Difficulties in storing energy for when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining have limited the deployment of these renewable energy technologies.
More broadly, Berkshire Hathaway wants to tap into China’s engineering talent and is doing so through BYD, which has 11,000 engineers and technicians among its 130,000 employees.
Mr. Buffett did not attend the news conference, but said in a statement that he was impressed with Mr. Wang’s record as a manager.

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Evaluating Charter School Impact on Educational Attainment in Chicago and Florida

Kevin Booker, Tim R. Sass, Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer:

Unlike past charter school studies, which focus on student achievement, the authors analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment. They find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, they find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, their estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.

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India’s Cram-School Confidential: Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students

Eric Bellman:

Town Fills With Teens Studying Full-Time For a College Entrance Exam; ‘Bansalites Rock’
KOTA, India — Hoping to boost his chances of getting into a top college, Rohit Agarwal quit his high school and left home.
The 16-year-old moved from the far northeast corner of India in June, with two suitcases and a shoulder bag. He took a two-hour flight and a six-hour train ride to the dusty town of Kota, India’s cram-school capital.
More than 40,000 students show up in the arid state of Rajasthan every year, looking to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools here. These intensive programs, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams. In Kota, most of the schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.
The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota’s cramming regimen.

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For Kids’ Sake, Power to Fire Teachers Crucial

Jay Matthews:

Sarah Hayes, principal of the KIPP DC:KEY Academy, realized that two new teachers were not working out. Their résumés and recommendations had been good. They were nice people. But their classes were disorganized, their standards low. Efforts to help them improve had little effect.
If KEY were a traditional school, Hayes’s only reasonable option would have been to mentor the teachers, note her dissatisfaction on their evaluations and recommend that they not be kept after a two-year probation. That is the way it goes in most school systems. Staffing rules, tenure agreements and low expectations tend to favor weak teachers unless they do something awful.
But KEY is a public charter school, one of many in the District that do not have such rules. Hayes was able to get the teachers out of her middle school by Christmas and replace them with proven talents, who were freed from other duties at KEY because of flexibility allowed such schools.

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Carol Ann Tomlinson explains how differentiated instruction works and why we need it now.

Anthony Rebora:

Differentiated instruction–the theory that teachers should work to accomodate and build on students’ diverse learning needs–is not new. But it’s unlikely that anyone has done more to systematize it and explicate its classroom applications than University of Virginia education professor Carol Ann Tomlinson.
A former elementary school teacher of 21 years (and Virginia Teacher of the Year in 1974), Carol Ann Tomlinson has written more than 200 articles, chapters, and books, including The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners and Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching. Characterized by a rigorous professionalism and a strong underlying belief in both teachers’ and students’ potential, her work has given many educators both practical and philosophical frameworks for modifying instruction to meet the individual needs of all students.

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Schools Sans Sodas

Jennifer Huget:

Substantial headway has been made lately in getting sugary (and high-fructose corn syrup-laden) sodas out of schools.
But that might not make much difference in kids’ overall soda consumption.
Both pieces of news came across my desk as I was writing today’s “Eat, Drink and Be Healthy” column about school lunch nutrition. Together they demonstrate how daunting a goal it is to try to change eating and drinking habits — other people’s and our own.
The good news, coming from the American Beverage Association, is that sweetened soft drinks accounted for less than 25 percent of beverages sold in schools last year; that’s down from 40 percent in 2004. The ABA has been working with the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation (as in former President Bill) to affect a shift toward healthier drinks — those with fewer calories and offered in smaller portions than your standard can of pop — in schools. Bottled water has filled much of the gap, moving from 13 percent of the beverages sold in schools in 2004 to almost 28 percent last year.

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Student Incentive Bank

Bill Turque:

Brian Betts, principal of Shaw at Garnet-Patterson Middle School, said he knew that the experimental program to pay cash for good grades and behavior, which began yesterday at 15 D.C. schools, had captured his students’ imaginations when they began asking about the economic crisis.
” ‘I heard about this banking stuff,’ ” Betts recalled one saying the other day. ” ‘Are we still going to have this money?’ ”
The answer is yes. The Northwest Washington school’s 307 students are among the roughly 3,000 middle-schoolers eligible to earn as much as $100 every two weeks — to a maximum of $1,500 for the academic year — for showing up on time, not disrupting class and getting high grades.
Students have been buzzing about the pilot program, called Capital Gains, since they learned in late August that their school had been selected. The school now includes students from Shaw, which closed in June.

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Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire

Christine Campbell & Betheny Gross, via a kind reader’s email:

When charter school directors step into the job, they step onto a high wire with no safety net below them. Though they take on a broader set of responsibilities than traditional public school leaders, charter directors rarely have the “back office” administrative support of a district central office. Instead, it is up to them to secure and manage facilities, recruit students and teachers, raise and manage funds, and coordinate curriculum and instruction.
How are charter school leaders facing this challenge? In Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire, authors Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross explain that today’s charter school directors, though deeply motivated by their school’s mission and the students they serve, can have their confidence shaken by many of the extras they face.
Drawing from a six-state survey, the authors find that, like traditional public school principals, today’s charter school directors often come to their positions from other jobs in education and with training from schools of education. However, charter school leaders tend to be younger and newer to leadership positions; many have only a couple years of experience in school administration.

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Clarke Street School is focus of new college-going effort

Alan Borsuk:

About eighty first- and second-graders at Clarke Street School are being offered a deal that could shape their lives.
Mayor Tom Barrett and a group of local philanthropists will be at the school today to say they will pay for extra help for the children, both in and out of school, and will guarantee that the children will be able to pay for college, provided the kids and their families follow through and make it that far.
It is the first Milwaukee effort of the I Have a Dream Foundation, an effort that grew out of a businessman’s impulsive decision in 1981 to offer to pay for college when he spoke to a group of sixth-graders in New York’s Harlem. I Have a Dream efforts are under way in 29 cities.
Barrett, who has been closely involved in putting together the effort, announced in his “state of the city” address in February that Ted and Mary Kellner, major figures on Milwaukee’s charitable scene, would be the lead sponsors for the first-graders at Clarke. Barrett will announce today that the Brady Corp. Foundation will be the lead sponsor for the second grade. Other area organizations and charities, including Milwaukee Public Schools itself, also will support the effort.
The guarantee of affordable higher education is based on donors providing “the last dollar” students would need, beyond other financial help, to carry their educations beyond high school, with in-state tuition as the minimum total amount.

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2008 Education Next-PEPG Public Opinion Survey

William G. Howell, Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson:

Americans think less of their schools than of their police departments and post offices
Americans clearly have had their fill of a sluggish economy and an unpopular war. Their frustration now may also extend to public education. In this, the second annual national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University, we observe a public that takes an increasingly critical view both of public schools as they exist today and, perhaps ironically, of many prominent reforms designed to improve them.
Local public schools receive lower marks than they did a year ago. More significantly, perhaps, survey respondents claim that their local post offices and police forces outperform their local schools. Meanwhile, support for the most far-reaching federal effort to reform public schools–the No Child Left Behind Act–has slipped. A considerable portion of the public remains undecided about charter schools. And the poll found no enthusiasm for the use of income rather than race as a basis for assigning students to schools.
This does not mean that Americans are unwilling to explore alternate ways of educating young people. A large majority of Americans would let their child take some high school courses for credit over the Internet. An equally large majority favor the education of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in separate classrooms rather than “mainstreaming” them, as is common practice. A plurality support giving parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls public school. And a rising number of Americans know someone who is home schooling a child.

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Madison School Referendum Training 10/2/2008

Via a Matt Calvert email:

Community and Schools Together

Referendum Training
Thursday, October 2, 2008
7:00 PM (We’ll be done at 8 so you can catch most of the v.p. debate)
MTI Conference Room
821 Williamson St. (parking available)
Familiarize yourself with the details of the referendum.
Get information to share with others.
Sign up for opportunities to meet with groups or staff tables before the November election.
RSVP to Matt Calvert at 255-9417 or calvert.matthew@gmail.com

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Wilmette Agrees to a 5 Year Teacher’s Contract

Chicago Tribune:

The contract includes average salary increases of 5 percent the first two years and 5.5 percent the last three, according to the release. It also adds 20 minutes per day to the schedule for kindergarten through 4th-grade teachers.

Wilmette Education Association and Wilmette Public Schools.

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Bilingual Debate: English Immersion

Lance Izumi & Bruce Fuller:

In this installment of Education Watch, Bruce Fuller and Lance T. Izumi discuss the candidates’ positions on bilingual education. Go to Mr. Fuller’s post.
Lance T. Izumi, a senior fellow in California studies and the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, is the co-author of the book “Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.” (Full biography.)
Making effective appeals to Hispanic voters is a tricky business. Barack Obama’s education proposals are a case in point.
Mr. Obama’s campaign notes that, “African-American and Latino students are significantly less likely to graduate than white students,” which is true. To combat such achievement gaps, Mr. Obama’s education plan specifically advocates, among other things, “transitional bilingual education” for English-learners. Yet, the question for Mr. Obama is whether his commitment to bilingual education, which emphasizes classroom instruction in languages other than English, overrides his interest in closing achievement gaps.

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