Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

That is why Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater was right last week when he said a recent flurry of violence in Madison schools merited attention by families and the community, as well as educators.
School violence is not just a school problem. It is a community problem.
Rainwater also said something that was wrong, however: “Our schools are absolutely safe.”
To be sure, Madison schools deserve high marks for safety. But the evidence shows that safety is far from absolute.

Learning Matters:

The Broad Foundation awards $1 million to the top urban school district in the nation. But what is the measure of success? And what are the ways that urban superintendents can lead their schools toward success in the long-term? John Merrow moderates a symposium with the five finalists. Superintendents from Boston; Bridgeport, CT; Jersey City, N.J.; Miami-Dade County; and New York City joined last year’s winner from Norfolk, VA to discuss and debate the best practices of urban education.
Reforming our urban educational systems is a daunting task and a national necessity, particularly as America’s urban centers become more diverse. The lively exchanges among these experienced superintendents about everything from union negotiation and parental expectations to state-takeovers and the merits and short-comings of the controversial No Child Left Behind legislation are sure to inform–and entertain–you.

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Peter Whoriskey:

This election season may be the first in which the growing use of high-stakes school testing, embodied in the No Child Left Behind legislation, has reached this level of political prominence.
A similar exam revolt has become a key issue in the race for governor in Texas, another state in the vanguard of the testing movement, and the issue has roiled the Ohio gubernatorial contest as well.
High-stakes testing — using standardized test scores to impose consequences affecting teachers and students — has been embraced widely in recent years as a way to hold educators and students accountable for their performance. Experts say the movement is one of the most significant shifts in U.S. education in decades.

Mike Antonucci has more.

I’ve been very impressed with the way that Madison School District staff have communicated with parents during several recent unfortunate events and incidents.

Reader Steven Ralser emails this article by Wendy Cole:

Twenty pairs of eyes eagerly converge on Jennifer Larcey as the afternoon science lesson gets under way at Bassett Elementary in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. Sure, the transfixed first-graders are salivating at the prospect of examining–and tasting–the physical properties of peanuts, raisins and M&Ms. But something else is riveting the kids, even as Larcey stands to the side of the room issuing directions: the breathtaking clarity of her voice. “Feel the peanuts, and try to describe the texture,” she instructs.
Larcey is one of seven teachers at Bassett who are, in effect, wired for sound. Nearly every word to her students is amplified through speakers wirelessly linked to a small blue transmitter dangling from her neck. Because she began using the technology three years ago, Larcey barely notices the device, except for the rare instances when she forgets to switch it on. “It’s obvious. The kids just don’t pay attention in the same way,” she says. Bassett has joined the growing ranks of schools embracing a deceptively simple technology at a time when federal No Child Left Behind accountability standards are compelling districts to find new ways to boost academic performance. Although amplification systems have long been used to help hearing-impaired students, recent research has shown that enhanced audio benefits all students by helping a teacher’s voice get through loud and clear, even at the back of the classroom.

Tom Hester, Jr.:

New Jersey voters would decide whether the state should create 21 county school districts under a plan considered Wednesday by legislators looking to cut the nation’s highest property taxes.
A referendum question would ask voters to approve the shift next year, a massive undertaking for a state with 616 school districts spread across 566 municipalities.

Madison’s East and West High Schools were locked down Monday. The Daily Page linked to the two police reports:

• Fifteen-year-old detained following threats and lockdown at East High
• Two men arrested after shooting scare in front of West High

Channel3000 has more here and here.

Shavar Jeffries:

This Article challenges the failure of courts and advocates considering remedies in school cases to assess whether public schools, as currently constituted, are institutionally aligned with stigmatized minorities’ particular educational needs. Numerous legal scholars have written about the longstanding failure of public schools to effectively educate racial minorities; but they have overlooked the relationship of public schools’ institutional context to the educational consequences of racial stigma. This Article does so, claiming that because stigma attacks the very capacities enabling education, services must specifically account for stigma’s noxious effects on racial minorities’ educability. Stigma distinctively affects minorities’ educational fortunes both categorically and individually. As a class, the ontological challenge posed by stigma, obviously, affects only the stigmatized; individually, children have different levels of access to resources contradicting stigma and also cope variably with stigma. Schools therefore need flexibility to respond not only to the unique class-wide harms engendered by stigma but also its specific manifestations in individual children.
Despite this need for flexibility, traditional public schools are highly bureaucratic and rule-bound, preempting the flexibility stigmatized minorities require. This disposition toward uniformity, moreover, is not coincidental but is central to political accountability, especially in urban districts disproportionately serving racial minorities. Finally, because they are minorities, relatively poor, and stigmatized, stigmatized minorities cannot politically realize bureaucratic rules consistently responsive to their educational needs.

Jay Matthews:

In many ways, parents are the most important teachers children will ever have. But drawing them into schools is often difficult. So is forging a constructive parent-school relationship. Teachers complain about parents who meddle too much and those who can’t be found. Parents say that educators claim to want more involvement but that they belittle their suggestions.
Here are 10 recommendations for better relations from educators and school-savvy parents.

Andy Hall:

tudents, parents, police and educators throughout Madison were rattled Monday but no significant injuries were reported in three unrelated incidents that included a lockdown at East High School, a pellet gun attack outside West High School and a car crash triggered by two O’Keeffe Middle School students.
Tensions were high because of recent violence and threats in schools in Wisconsin, Colorado and Pennsylvania, officials acknowledged. Monday’s chaos ended peacefully, they said, because of an unnamed community tipster, good security planning and quick police work.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater said about 1,800 students at East High School were restricted to their third-period classrooms, except for a quick trip to the cafeteria and bathroom breaks, from 11 a.m. until classes were dismissed at 3:30 p.m. because of a “credible threat” against a student.

From madison.com:

Madison school officials locked down East High School this morning after “serious” threats were made by one student to another.
The school’s safety procedures call for the doors, which were secured at 11 a.m., to remain locked until the end of the school day at 3:30 p.m. Students were not to be released until that time.
The threat was made to one student who was at the school by another who was off school grounds.
“The danger is outside the school, not inside,” said school district spokesman Ken Syke. “That’s why we went into lockdown.”
Officials said the threats stemmed from fights between East High students over the weekend, with the disputes remaining unresolved today.
Syke said rumors circulating among students that someone was spotted with a gun are simply “not true.”
But he added, “It was a legitimate enough notice that we have taken it seriously.”
Also at West High School this morning, pellet gun shots were reportedly fired from a vehicle passing the school. The shots were reported by a witness who heard the shots and saw the vehicle.
Police had the alleged perpetrator in custody by 1 p.m. District security coordinator Luis Yudice, West High administrators, central office staff and Madison police worked together to initiate the district’s safety and security procedures to respond to the situation at West, which included limiting access to the school until early this afternoon.

Jeff Carlton:

Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth school district are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit him with everything they got – books, pencils, legs and arms.
“Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a recipe for success,” said Robin Browne, a major in the British Army reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing the training to the Burleson schools.
That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and some fear it will get children killed.
But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania last week.

via Joanne.

Marie Gryphon:

Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn’t actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement: A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades’ worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much. Parents and kids, it seems, have been right all along to care whether they were assigned to Mrs. Smith or Mr. Brown.
Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don’t always hire the best.
Many ingredients of good teaching are difficult to ascertain in advance–charisma and diligence come to mind–but research shows a teacher’s own ability on standardized tests reliably predicts good performance in the classroom. You would think, then, that top-scoring teachers would be swimming in job offers, right? Not so, says Vanderbilt University professor Dale Ballou. High-scoring teaching applicants “do not fare better than others in the job market,” he writes. “Indeed, remarkably, they do somewhat worse.”
Even more surprising, given the national shortage of highly skilled math and science teachers, school administrators are more keen to hire education majors than applicants who have math or science degrees.

(more…)

William J. Mathis [16.1MB PDF]:

Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is the key element of the accountability system mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This report reveals that AYP in its 2006 form as the prime indicator of academic achievement is not supported by reliable evidence. Expecting all children to reach mastery level on their state’s standardized tests by 2014, the fundamental requirement of AYP, is unrealistic. The growth model and other improvement proposals now on the table do not have sufficient power to resolve the underlying problems of the system. In addition, the program, whether conceived as implementation costs or remedial costs, is significantly underfunded in a way that will disproportionately penalize schools attended by the neediest children. Further, the curriculum is being narrowed to focus on tested areas at the cost of other vital educational purposes.

Channel3000:

One year after LaFollette students complained of having to drop out of extra-curricular activities becasue of busing problems, the situation is fixed. More buses are running and WISC-TV went back to see if it has made a difference.

Susan Troller:

When publications like the New York Times want an expert to comment on the big issues facing public schools like testing or immigration, it’s a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor they’re likely to call.
Relatively unknown in his adopted hometown, history and educational policy studies professor William Reese is able offer a long view on these kinds of perennial hot-button issues that resonate across the country, and provoke local debate, too.
In one recent New York Times story about schools cutting back on other subjects to concentrate on math and reading so their students will perform better on nationally mandated testing, Reese explained that President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act has leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts in education history.
…….
But when asked to apply his knowledge to how our Madison schools work, and how the public responds to them, he shrugs off the questions, saying he is only an outside observer. He and his wife, Carol, do not have children; he says any knowledge he has about local school affairs comes only from living in the city and having friends who are teachers in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
“I suspect Madison can be seen as a microcosm of what is going on throughout the rest of the country,” Reese said in a recent interview in his book-lined Bascom Hill office. “There are many extraordinarily well educated people here, and they have very high expectations of what kind of education their children are receiving.”

Reese’s website.

Eric Bangeman:

s parents of two children, the older of which is in the first grade, one of the decisions we’ve had to make is how much screen time—TV and computer—the kids get. A new study appearing in the October 2006 issue of Pediatrics suggests that any amount of video gaming and TV is too much, if it happens on a school night.
The results come from a survey of 4,500 midle-school students in New Hampshire and Vermont. Researchers asked the students to rate their own performance in school on a scale ranging from “below average” to “excellent,” instead of looking directly at their grades or other metrics of academic performance. The study also took different parenting styles into account, but did not look at specific household rules covering homework, gaming, and watching TV.

Chester Finn, Jr:

Charter schools have taught us much. Since Minnesota enacted America’s first charter law in 1991, 39 states have followed suit and eager school reformers have created some 4,000 of these independent public schools. About 3,600 are still operating today, enrolling approximately a million kids, 2 percent of all U.S. elementary and secondary pupils. More than a dozen cities–including Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee–now have charter sectors that serve at least one in every six children. These numbers rise annually–and would balloon if the market were able to operate freely, unconstrained by legislative compromises, funding and facilities shortfalls, and local pushback from the school establishment and its political allies.
The first lesson is that the demand for alternative school options for children is intense–and plenty of people and organizations are eager to meet it wherever policy and politics allow them to. In Dayton, Ohio, today, more than a quarter of all kids attend charter schools; in New Orleans (a special case, to be sure) it’s seven out of ten children. Many schools across the nation have waiting lists.
Lesson Two: Though critics warned that charters would “cream” the best-parented, ablest, and most fortunate youngsters, actual enrollments are dominated by poor and minority kids, ex-dropouts, and others with huge education deficits unmet by regular school systems–most often the urban school systems whose residents most urgently need decent alternatives.

UW Grad Thomas Barnett:

“For Afghan Girls, Learning Goes On, In the Shadows: Home classes proliferate as insurgents attack schools,” schools,” by Pamela Constable, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 2-8 October 2006, p. 17. 17.

It all starts with educating young girls, the one great predictor of development.
Naturally, in Afghanistan, it is the great consistent target of the Taliban, who have “targeted dozens of schools in the past year, especially those teaching girls.”
The resurrection of schooling, especially that for girls, was heralded as the great advance in post-Taliban Afghanistan. From nowhere, five million kids were in school. Now that tide is receding in areas threatened by the Taliban and across much of the rest of the country–just too dangerous:

Theola Labbe:

President Bush said today that the No Child Left Behind education requirements he signed into law four years ago have helped to close the achievement gap and he proposed several changes to the law aimed at assisting teachers and giving parents more school choice.
Speaking at Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle School in Northeast Washington, Bush said that the federal law has been successful because the annual testing in reading and math hold schools accountable for how they teach and what students learn. The law, which is scheduled to be reauthorized next year, requires all students, including special education and learning disabled populations, to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

Gillian Gillers:

Kopp didn’t listen. Traveling around the county that summer, she met with potential funders, nonprofit leaders, and school system officials. After securing a seed grant from Exxon Mobil and office space from Morgan Stanley, Kopp hired nearly 20 recent college graduates to help run the program and recruit teachers. By the spring of 1990, the team had selected 500 college seniors and convinced six school districts to hire them. Then Texas billionaire Ross Perot offered Kopp a challenge grant of $500,000, which she had to match three to one. The grant gave Teach For America credibility, and other donors soon emerged with the remaining $1.5 million. The organization trained and placed its first corps class by the fall of 1990.
Today, Teach For America has grown into a hugely successful non-profit organization. This fall, they won a “Social Capitalist Award” sponsored by Fast Company magazine and the Monitor Group. The annual award honors 25 non-profits that use creativity and business smarts to solve social problems.

Jay Matthews:

“I just never figured out how on earth to teach sitting down,” said Dorman, 58, a veteran teacher at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington County. She calls herself “a walker and a stalker.” She carries what she needs in her pockets and keeps students in what she considers a useful state of alertness because they are never quite sure where she is going to be.
Here and there, a small but growing number of teachers is following Dorman’s example, educators say, abandoning the traditional classroom power center. To them, a desk is really a ball and chain, distancing them from students.

Matthew Matera:

Like most K-12 teachers in America, I work in a world of standardized tests these days. I analyze state standards and study breakdowns of my students’ test performance. I think about the expectations of the state as I plan lessons, and I spend time explicitly teaching test-taking strategies.
So, yes, I admit it. I teach to the test.
The more important question then becomes, is that a problem?
I don’t think it is, but the issue is hardly uncontroversial.
Michael Winerip, the former New York Times education columnist, registered a typical complaint recently about the No Child Left Behind Act: “Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.” Jonathan Kozol, a best-selling writer, sent a mass e-mail earlier this year calling on educators “to resist the testing mania.”

Carla Johnson:

Parents now have science to back them up when they say, “Turn off the TV. It’s a school night.”
Middle school students who watch TV or play video games during the week do worse in school, a new study finds, but weekend viewing and gaming does not affect school performance much.
“On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did,” said study co-author Dr. Iman Sharif of Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. “They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn’t seem to correlate with doing worse in school.”
Children whose parents allowed them to watch R-rated movies also did worse in class, and for boys, that effect was especially strong. The findings are based on a survey of 4,500 students in 15 New Hampshire and Vermont middle schools. The study appears in the October issue of Pediatrics.