Interesting words from the Cato Institute:

For decades, conservatives stood against big-government intrusions into American education. They defended local control of schooling, championed parental choice, and pushed to abolish the federal Department of Education. But then, tragedy struck: Republicans took power in Washington, and conservatives suddenly learned to love big government. Indeed, some are now so enamored of it that they are proposing what was once unthinkable: having the federal government set curricular standards for every …

Morning Edition:

A commission assembled by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings finds that college is too expensive. The panel says students and parents would benefit from a common database that explains what different schools offer.

One day, I hope that a similar searchable database is available for parents seeking K-12 information locally.

Kathryn Newmark & Veronique De Rugy:

According to the plan’s “educational network model,” the school system would include a mix of charter, contract, and system-run schools, organized in small “networks” of similar schools. The Algiers Charter School Association, for example, could be one network within the larger school system.
All schools will have considerable autonomy—including control over staffing, the authority to set their own budgets, and the freedom to offer extended school days or longer school years—but will be held accountable for results, and funds will follow students as they choose the schools that best meet their needs. A network manager will provide support and accountability for each network of schools. A “lean” district office will focus on policymaking instead of top-down operational decisions, including a small “strategy group” that will set learning standards and ensure the equitable allocation of resources, but will not mandate teaching methods or control school spending. The other major component of the district organization will be a new central support-services office that will provide optional assistance to help schools obtain services such as food preparation and transportation. One superintendent will direct the network managers, strategy group, and services office and report to the school board, whose role will be oversight, not execution.
The plan explicitly rejects an all-charter-school system, but preserves many of the advantages of such a system, such as flexibility and decentralization. The plan also provides enough structure and support to help school leaders be successful without impinging on their autonomy. In fact, it seems that, within this framework, even the system-run schools will be indistinguishable from charter schools.

Joanne has more.

Sharda Prashad:

Who says cheaters never prosper?
MBA students in Canada and the United States are more likely to cheat than students in other disciplines because they believe it is how the business world operates — and because they believe their peers cheat, according to a new study.
The study found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the last year, compared with 47 per cent of non-business students. More than 5,000 MBA students from 11 graduate business schools in Canada and 21 schools in the U.S. took part.
Jim Fisher, vice-dean of MBA programs at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said he wasn’t surprised by the results, since MBA students are highly competitive and have a high need for achievement. “There is a propensity for those types of behaviour.”

Susan Troller:

Anonymous donors have pledged up to $5 million to a private school group to purchase and preserve Dudgeon School on Monroe Street.
The plan initially gives $1 million to Wingra School to purchase and begin renovations on the building it has rented for 34 years. The building is owned by the city of Madison, and its sale price is $750,000.
Up to $4 million more would be available as part of a matching contribution program spanning 10 years, and is designed to help preserve and upgrade the building for its continued use as an education center in the neighborhood.
The gift comes with a set of conditions that must be fulfilled to help preserve the building’s historic presence and personality. Those conditions include keeping the former public school as a neighborhood polling place and ensuring that the grounds in front of and behind the building remain open to the public as a neighborhood athletic field and playground.

More from Dean Mosiman, Channel3000 and NBC15.

Lori Aratani & Ernesto Londono:

In a 77-page report [5.2MB PDF]commissioned by the Montgomery County Council, the Office of Legislative Oversight examined the school system’s method for tracking fights, bomb threats and other serious incidents. It found that although the district has tracked the incidents since 1973, the figures are not released publicly and the information is not detailed enough to allow school officials to identify trends or even the number of times a student has been in trouble.
The report also said that by November, the school system, police department and state’s attorney’s office should develop guidelines for what types of incidents school officials must report to authorities.
Police officers and prosecutors are seeking the guidelines because they believe principals sometimes deal with criminal activity internally. But negotiations over the guidelines have been contentious, and reaching an agreement has been difficult, said council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), chairman of the council’s public safety committee.

A small study and I confess I haven’t looked at the study itself, but a reminder that some important aspects of education aren’t measured by standardized tests.
TJM
Research: School diversity may ease racial prejudice
More bias seen in kids in mostly white setting
By Shankar Vedantam
The Washington Post
Published September 19, 2006
White children in 1st and 4th grades who live in areas and attend schools with little ethnic diversity are more likely to blame a black child than a white child when presented with ambiguous information involving potential misbehavior, according to a study released last week that explores the origins of bias.
Researchers showed 138 white children attending a rural Middle Atlantic school a number of pictures and then asked them what they thought was happening.
One set of pictures, for example, showed a child sitting on the ground with a pained expression, while another child stood behind a swing–suggesting that the child on the ground might have been pushed. Another interpretation would be that the child on the ground had fallen off.
In every case, the pictures showed children of different races. In some, a white child stood behind the swing and a black child was on the ground. In other pictures, a black child was the potential perpetrator, and the white child the potential victim.
While 71 percent of the 7- and 10-year-old children said the pictures showed evidence of wrongdoing when the child behind the swing was black, only 60 percent guessed that the white child had pushed the black child when the roles were reversed, University of Maryland researchers Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen reported last week in the journal Child Development.
The paper noted that white children at a more diverse school had not shown such a bias in a previous experiment, suggesting that greater social contact among children of different ethnicities may prevent or reduce bias among youngsters.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Arthur Levine:

most education schools are engaged in a “pursuit of irrelevance,” with curriculums in disarray and faculty disconnected from classrooms and colleagues. These schools have “not kept pace with changing demographics, technology, global competition, and pressures to raise student achievement,” the study says.
A majority of teacher education alumni (61 percent) reported that schools of education did not prepare graduates well to cope with the realities of today’s classrooms, according to a national survey conducted for the study. School principals also gave teacher education programs low grades, with fewer than one-third of those surveyed reporting that schools of education prepare teachers very well or moderately well to address the needs of students with disabilities (30 percent), a diverse cultural background (28 percent) or limited English proficiency (16 percent).

Full Report. Joanne has more.

Susan Troller:

The backers of the Studio School were given permission by the Madison school board last year to pursue the planning grant.
Donahue said the proposed Studio School will focus on providing a school-wide, arts rich curriculum for elementary school students. It would be chartered with the Madison school district in a way similar to the district’s very successful dual immersion Spanish language school, Nuestro Mundo Inc., or its other charter school, Wright Middle School. Both schools focus on issues of multi-culturalism and integrating social action into the curriculum.

More on the Studio School.

Danah Boyd:

Facebook implemented a new feature called “News Feeds” that displays every action you take on the site to your friends. You see who added who, who commented where, who removed their relationship status, who joined what group, etc. This is on your front page when you login to Facebook. This upset many Facebook members who responded with outrage. Groups emerged out of protest. Students Against Facebook News Feeds is the largest with over 700,000 members. Facebook issued various press statements that nothing was going to change. On September 5, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder) told everyone to calm down. They didn’t. On September 8, he apologized and offered privacy options as an olive branch. Zuckerberg invited everyone to join him live on the Free Flow of Information on the Internet group where hundreds of messages wizzed by in the hour making it hard to follow any thread; the goal was for Facebook to explain its decision. In short, they explained that this is to help people keep tabs on their friends but only their friends and all of this information is public anyhow.

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:

Twenty-two year old Louisa Brayton stepped before her class of 12 students to begin the first day of school. It was not only her first day but also the first day for all of her students and more importantly the first day of school in Madison Wisconsin. It’s March, 1838 and school will be in session for only two months.
How times have changed! School now operates all year.
After school ended last June, over 4,000 children continued in school for the following six weeks. Some attended because they needed extended time to learn and to reach a level where they will be successful next year; others took courses to extend their knowledge in their area of interest. Many of the students who attended our morning summer program continued at school in the afternoon in recreation programs conducted by our own Madison School & Community Recreation (MSCR) department.

Linda Shaw:

Washington’s two newest online schools didn’t know how many students to expect when they announced they would open their virtual doors this fall. Leaders cautiously hoped for 250, maybe 300 as a start.
They were low — way low. As school starts, the two public schools are happily struggling to handle double and triple that number.
Insight School of Washington, the state’s first fully online high school, stopped accepting students after 650, and has 1,000 more who’ve expressed interest. The Washington Virtual Academy, a K-8 based in Steilacoom, has 652 students registered, and another 500 in the application pipeline.
It’s another spurt in the growth of online learning in Washington state, where more than 9,000 students took one or more online classes last year.
Going to school via computer is “not for most kids,” said Bill Finkbeiner, executive director of Insight School, a partnership between a Portland company and the small Quillayute Valley School District in Forks. “Most students are going to do better in traditional high schools. But there are a significant percentage of students who don’t fit in to a regular high school and, for many of them, this is a good option.”

Maria Sacchetti:

One Needham teacher gushed about the time a student worried that Australia would fall off the planet — and how that led to a lesson on gravity. A Brookline teacher banned the word “stuff” from her fourth-graders’ vocabulary. A young teacher, also from Needham, got personal, thanking parents for their support after her husband died.
Meet the newest group of bloggers drawing audiences online: teachers.
Teacher-generated blogs have been increasingly popping up from Needham to Martha’s Vineyard, many in the past year. Teachers at all grade levels reveal glimpses of themselves as well as the magical moments — and at times, difficult ones — that can happen in a classroom. Parents, in turn, scour the blogs, post comments, or borrow snippets to use as dinner conversation with their children.
As students head back to school this week, teachers are again typing dispatches during breaks at school, or from home in their pajamas.

Jon Hurdle:

Philadelphia on Thursday opened a public high school where students work on wireless laptops, teachers eschew traditional subjects for real-world topics and parents can track their child’s work on the Internet.
Called “The School of the Future” and created with help from software giant Microsoft, it is believed to be the first in the world to combine innovative teaching methods with the latest technology, all housed in an environmentally friendly building.
The school, which cost the school district $63 million to build, is free and has no entrance exams. The 170 students in the inaugural ninth-grade class were selected by lottery from 1,500 applicants.

Joanne says it’s New Tech with the same old curriculum.

Robert Samuelson:

If you’re looking for the action in education, forget the Ivy League. Talk instead to Anthony Zeiss, president of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. It has six campuses and 70,000 students taking classes in everything from remedial English to computer networking. With about 12 million students, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges help answer this riddle: Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?
At this back-to-school moment, the riddle is worth pondering. Those dismal comparisons aren’t new. In 1970, tests of high school seniors in seven industrial countries found that Americans ranked last in math and science. Today’s young Americans sometimes do well on these international tests, but U.S. rankings drop as students get older. Here’s a 2003 study of 15-year-olds in 39 countries: In math, 23 countries did better; in science, 18. Or consider a 2003 study of adults 16 to 65 in six advanced nations: Americans ranked fifth in both literacy and math.

Steve Dutch:

This Course Covered Too Much Material…
Great! You got your money’s worth! At over $100 a credit, you should complain about not getting a lot of information. If you take a three credit course and get $200 worth of information, you have a right to complain. If you get $500 worth, you got a bargain.

A story from Susan Troller and The Capital Times:

(more…)

Jay Matthews:

I read Stanford University educational historian David F. Labaree’s new book, “The Trouble With Ed Schools,” shortly after last week’s column scorching those same education schools. You would think his wonderfully insightful book, which is even harder on ed schools than I was, would make me feel good. Here is a distinguished education school professor who knows that world so well, and he is validating my opinions.
Instead, the book made me ashamed of myself. It was similar to the feeling of loathsome guilt I had when I was eight years old and beat up a five-year-old with a lisp next door who had annoyed me for reasons I no longer recall. Labaree succeeds in making American education schools such objects of pity, suffering from decades of low status and professional abuse, that you want to give the next ed school professor you meet a big hug and promise to bake her a plate of cookies.
That is not the worst part. In last week’s online column, and in a column in The Washington Post Magazine Aug. 6, I fussed over the failure of education schools to pass on tips from the real world of expert teachers working in inner city schools. I cited several methods used by famous teachers who have raised student achievement significantly. I decried the response from many ed school people: We can’t teach that until we subject it to thorough research.
But Labaree has gone a long way toward convincing me that ed schools are doing no such thing. He concludes, after an exhaustive examination of the birth and evolution of teacher training in the United States, that education schools have about as much impact on what happens in U.S. classrooms as my beloved but woeful Washington Nationals are having this season on the pennant race.
Teachers in training, he shows, are far more influenced by their memories of how their own school teachers behaved, and by orders and advice they get from supervisors and colleagues in the schools that eventually employ them. Rookie teachers are happy for the credential they get from ed schools that allow them to start earning a paycheck, but they don’t use very much of what they learn there, Labaree says.
At the heart of the book is a Frankie and Johnnie romance between two losers, ed schools and child-centered progressive education. Labaree notes several books that have decried the effect on public schools of progressive education, including the thoughts of theorist John Dewey. Then he asks a simple question: What evidence is there that many classroom teachers are actually doing anything that Dewey would want them to do? As the faculty lounge saying goes, Dewey advocates are supposed to act like a guide on the side, letting each student follow his or her natural instincts and curiosity, rather than a sage on the stage, dispensing wisdom which everyone must write down and memorize.

Alan Borsuk:

If your children are elementary school students in Milwaukee Public Schools, there’s a strong chance that Lisa Chatman or Mildred McDowell will be their librarian this year.
Don’t expect Chatman or McDowell to read stories to your kids. Don’t expect them to check out books, keep the shelves orderly or choose new books or other materials to purchase. In fact, don’t expect Chatman or McDowell to set foot in the building more than occasionally.
That’s because Chatman and McDowell work in central administration. To meet state regulations, they are listed officially as the certified supervising librarians at more than 60 elementary schools this year. But the hands-on work in the libraries will be done by paraprofessionals, aides, teachers or volunteers, often with limited hours and limited background in library work.

Marketplace:

As schools return to session, we get sent to the principal’s office to find out how hard his job really is.

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