Referendum soundly defeated in Phillips School District
Greendale voters support $14 million tax levy
North Carolina will use lottery proceeds for schools
Slot machine revenue not best bet for public schools
What’s new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
School-funding reform calendar
The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) is a statewide network of educators, school board members, parents, community leaders, and researchers. Its Wisconsin Adequacy Plan — a proposal for school-finance reform — is the result of research into the cost of educating children to meet state proficiency standards.

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Carol Carstensen provided updated information on the people selected by the Board of Education to serve on the attendance task forces:

West-Memorial
– Prasanna Raman (nominated by Ruth Robarts to fill a position as an Asian member of the task force)
– Tim Otis (nominated by Bill Keys to fill a position as a resident with no children in the district)
– Brenda Gonzalez (nominated by Juan Lopez to fill a position as an Hispanic/Latino member of the task force)
– Charlie Daniel (to fill a positon as an African American member of the task force)
East
– James Howard (nominated by Lawrie Kobza to fill a position as an African American member of the task force)
– Pat Mooney (nominated by Carol Carstensen to fill a position as a resident without children in the district)
– Ramon Natera (nominated by Juan Lopez to fill a position as an Hispanic/Latino member of the task force)
– A represenative of the Asian community has notyet been named

Carol Carstensen says that the district may soon release the names of the members selected by the principals and PTOs.

THURSDAY, SEPTEBMER 22, 2005
6:30 p.m. Special Meeting of the Madison School Board and the East
Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
Sherman Middle School
Library Media Center
1610 Ruskin Street
Madison, WI

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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2005
6:30 p.m. Special Meeting of the Madison School Board and the Memorial and West Attendance Areas Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
Toki Middle School
Library Media Center
5606 Russett Road
Madison, WI 53711

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Sophos writing at IT Toolbox:

Government is still in the old broadcast mode of press conferences and press releases and talking at you rather than with you. Government only seems to have time to converse with lobby groups, mass media reporters and interests that are going to make them or their friends money. Money from the government.
The conversations are growing – mass media is at a loss to understand how to deal with or contend with the number of blogs, cross-linking of blogs and the sheer volume of people getting involved in the conversation. It is no holds barred and far more interesting than the scripted Q&A being spouted from press conferences. Mass media is so flabbergasted, that they have resorted to reading blogs on their broadcasts! How crazy is that – broadcasting elements of the conversations from the blogosphere on TV. Media is stunned. The administration is stunned. It is only going to get worse for all of them.

For more than a week, I’ve been trying to get the names of the people appointed to the East and West/Memorial task forces on attendance and facilities.
I have the following partial list of the names of people who were nominated by board members and the board member who nominated each.

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Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater is beginning to write a series of monthly articles which he will use as his Superintendent’s Report. Listen to this month’s report by watching this 5 minute video clip. I looked around the District’s site and did not immediately see a text version of this report. UPDATE: The message was circulated via email Tuesday morning, 9/13/2005. Click the link below to read a text version:

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I wanted to clarify (via the Board President) the reason for the equity policy meeting tonight. If you remember last winter a majority of the Board indicated it wanted to set up a task force to look at the equity policy – but did not give any further directions. Tonight’s meeting is to bringing the issue back to the Board for further discussion and to get more direction from the members about a possible composition and charge to a task force. In President’s defense, she gave her commitment to the community that the board would have a citizen group work on this issue and she’s following through.

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Two gubernatorial candidates endorse school-funding reform
Check out the school-funding reform calendar
What’s new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
School-funding reform calendar
The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) is a statewide network of educators, school board members, parents, community leaders, and researchers. Its Wisconsin Adequacy Plan — a proposal for school-finance reform — is the result of research into the cost of educating children to meet state proficiency standards.
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On Monday, September 12, the Madison Board of Education will vote on proposed revisions to the district’s Equity Resource Policy. The revisions gut the current policy and replace it with an already existing formula for allocating staff to schools based on socioeconomic factors. The meeting is a Special Board meeting called by President Carol Carstensen. At the meeting administrators will recommend this change and the full Board will vote on the recommendation. Not much notice to the public, not much opportunity to hear public opinion and analysis, no analysis by any Board committee. Only very savvy people who closely watch the Board agendas will know that this vote is coming.

What’s at stake?

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Carol Carstensen sent me the following about the task forces:

Because not all schools have named representatives yet, the first meetings of the task forces has been moved back a week – Sept. 20 for West/Memorial and Sept. 22 for East.

A person who was apparently appointed to one of the task forces to study attenance and facilities on the east and west sides says that the task forces have been scheduled to meet next week.
The MMSD has released no information about the task forces.
Does anyone know what’s going on?

David M. Herszenhorn: Representative Charles B. Rangel and Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, urged the Bloomberg administration and the teachers’ union yesterday to create pay incentives of $10,000 a year or more to entice educators to work in some of city’s lowest-performing schools.

Mayor Dave issued the following message on how he hopes city residents can help shape Madison’s next budget. I hope that the Board of Education uses a similar approach during the district’s budgt process next spring.

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Matthew Tully:

“We have to turn things around right away,” he said. “They didn’t bring me in to be safe. They brought me in to be a change maker.”
So he has tossed out troublemaking students and offered ambitious plans for historic schools Crispus Attucks and Shortridge. He’s demanded more from all, from teachers to students to janitors.
White has been the city’s top newsmaker since becoming superintendent of the state’s largest school system July 1. He seems to have commandeered space on the front page.

More on Eugene G. White, Indianapolis’s new Superintendent. Via Eduwonk.

The first paragraph of the link recommended by Barb Schrank says:

An effective school board plays an important watchdog role in keeping your local school on track, and setting policies that affect your child and your school. The school board sets the vision and goals for the school district, and holds the district accountable for results. One school board member cannot do the job alone. Effective school board members contribute their unique talents while collaborating and working as a team with other board members.

I find the Madison Board of Education and superintendent do well on collaboration, except for attacking Ruth Robarts, but I’d like to see the board improve dramatically on being a watchdog, setting policy, setting the vision and goals for the district, and holding the district accountable for results.

Great Schools a non-profit California organization writes about what it means to be a great school board member.
A North Carolina school board looked out 10 years asking where they wanted to be and set annual goals accordingly: “Griffin [a school board member in a North Carolina school district] began his first term on the board by asking the tough question: “Where do we want our schools to be in 2010 and how will we know that we have gotten there?” He then worked with his board and superintendent to set the vision and goals for their district. When a new superintendent was hired, he insisted that the adopted school district goals be written into his contract, and that the superintendent be evaluated annually based on the goals.”

By mid-December of 2005, a task force appointed by the Madison School Board will make recommendations about future school construction and possible school boundary changes in the West and Memorial High School areas of the district. In the following article from The Capital Times, August 30, writer Cliff Miller reports that developer Gary Gorman has withdrawn from his role in the redevelopment of a large apartment complex adjacent to Leopold Elementary School. The complex—Ridgewood Country Club Estates—has housed low-income families whose children have attended Leopold and Chavez Elementary Schools. The nature of the new housing and the timing of the redevelopment could have significant implications for west side elementary school enrollments, particularly the future enrollment at Leopold School.

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Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has made good on his nearly 5-month-old threat to sue the U.S. Department of Education over the No Child Left Behind Act, making his state the first to take its objections about the law to the federal courts.
Filed Aug. 22 in U.S. District Court in Hartford, the state’s complaint in Connecticut v. Spellings argues that federal funding to the state for the No Child Left Behind law falls far short of what is needed to meet the law’s testing and accountability requirements. The suit contends the failure to fully fund the law violates a provision in the nearly 4-year-old education statute itself that says states will not be required “to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this act.”
From Education Week, August 22, 2005
By Jeff Archer

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Susan Lampert-Smith:

At Memorial, Athletic Director Tim Ritchie said he hopes kids who get cut will find a team in an expanded intramural basketball league through Madison School Community Recreation.
“You hope that you have a good intramural program that keeps kids working towards making the team next year,” he said.
I worry about the kids for whom basketball or volleyball would have been their only school activity. And I’m even more worried about the kids who won’t try out because they fear not making the grade.
Those are the missing kids that Joe Frontier worries about.
Sometimes, there’s no real way to know the true cost of saving money.

Lampert-Smith mischaracterizes this decision as a “cost of saving money.” The Madison School District’s budget grows annually (including the generation of grant funds, which is to be commended), this year to $320M+. Rather, the Madison School Board’s decision to eliminate no-cut freshman sports reflects choices made, or not made, such as:

• Ongoing reductions in Fine Arts Curriculum
• Controversial growth in health care spending (WPS costs far more than the Group Health Care alternative)
• Growing administrative budgets ($1.5M more this year than last)
• Shifting programs to MSCR, which is funded by Fund 80. Fund 80 is a growing, controversial source of local property tax revenue that is not constrained by state spending caps.

Loehrke’s recent speech to the Florence schools provides a roadmap for such decision making: putting students first.

What can you do? Send your thoughts on these matters to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us and ask 2006 Madison School Board Candidates about these issues. Two seats are up for election in April, 2006; those currently held by Bill Keys and Juan Jose Lopez.

Isthmus featured a story on the concerns of Juan Lopez about MMSD hiring of people of color.
I sent Juan the following e-mail telling him that I shared his concern:

Juan,
I agree completely with your concerns about minority hiring in the district, as reported in Isthmus. When I attended committee and board meetings in the past, Valencia Douglas was the only district staff of color (unless Clarence attended). Now that she’s gone, we’ll only have a sea of white faces! So sad.
Ed Blume

As an afterthought in a second e-mail, I said:

He responded in the following e-mail:

And I responded:

The Dallas School Board has approved a policy that will require some school administrators to learn Spanish. The new policy, approved by a 5-4 vote on Aug. 25, now requires that all elementary school principals who work in schools in which at least half of the students are English-language learners, or formerly carried that designation, must learn the native language of those students.
From Education Week, August 26, 2005
By Mary Ann Zehr

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The Performance and Achievement Blog contains a new posting describing a rubric for school improvement. The rubrics allow one to estimate the current status of the schools and District with regard to the following: Student Achievement, Quality Planning, Professional Development, School Leadership, Partnerships with Community and Parents, Continuous Improvement and Evaluation.

Representative Spencer Black will introduce a constitutional amendment that would limit the power and scope of the Governor’s veto.

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Since 1999, the Madison School Board has had a written employment contract with Superintendent Art Rainwater. It contains a job evaluation process that is fair to the superintendent and that requires the Board to perform its most important function, setting clear goals for the district.
Before the first day of each school year, the Board must set performance goals that are “measurable to the extent possible”. By July 30 of the next year, the Board must meet with the superintendent, review his progress toward meeting the performance goals, review his self-evaluation, and review confidential evaluations by other administrators in the district.
If the Board followed the contract, the superintendent and the public would know what’s expected of the most powerful employee in terms of “improvement in programs, projects and activities to be undertaken” during the upcoming year.
According to the MMSD Human Resources department, the last time the Board evaluated the superintendent was in 2002. It did not follow all of the requirements of the contract in that evaluation.
The first day of the school year is September 1. The Board has not set measurable performance goals for the superintendent for 2005-06, although it has had two discussions on the subject.
When the evaluation does occur, I suggest that we all compare the provisions of the contract with the evaluation. If the Board does not set measurable performance goals for the superintendent in 2005-06, it will again fail in its duty under the contract.It will again fail to inform the public about its priorities for our children and fail to hold the superintendent accoutable under the priorities.

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No doubt that the Madison Schools would benefit from revenues that might come through increased advertising, as recently proposed by Johnny Winston Jr., chair of the Board of Education’s Finance and Operations Committee.
On the other hand, increasing advertising to our students is undesirable for many reasons. Schools should not treat students as consumers, but as learners. Our students already live in an environment saturated with encouragements to consume. In addition, many of the advertisers with strong incentives to advertise to young people sell food products that are not in the kids’ best interest.
My hope is that the Finance and Operations Committee will consider limiting any expansion of advertising opportunities to ads that target adults, not students.
Below is my proposal to this committee.

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Since May I’ve been asking the administration and board members, collectively and individually, whether the budget for this school year includes funding for a promising middle school remedial reading program called Read 180. The headline on a State Journal story on January 29, 2005, read: District Eyes Reading Program For Expansion. The subheadline said: Teachers Want More Students In The Read 180 Program, Which Has Raised Reading Levels Quickly.
But NO ONE seems to know whether the program received any funding at all in the budget!

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According to a story in the Capital Times, the University of Wisconsin may scrap software that the MMSD is attempting to use. Like the UW, which spent 6 years and millions beyond the budget for the software, the MMSD devoted “16 hours a day” to get the software to generate a budget for the board to consider in the spring of 2005.