Juvenile courts can confuse kids, parents, report says

Hans Laetz:

Two years in the making, a report on California's juvenile courts warns that children and parents are often bewildered by what happens in courtrooms, and judges and attorneys don't always have access to all the information they need to make decisions.

The California Judicial Council's stem-to-stern inspection is the first full-scale examination of court procedures and effectiveness. Juvenile courts were established statewide in 1961.

Many courts are failing in their basic responsibility to make sure children and parents know what is happening to them, according to the report, which was released in April.

"A lot of it is as basic as a kid who doesn't understand what the word allegation' means," said Judge Brian John Back, who headed the examination. "And when we have a room full of prosecutors, defense lawyers all using numbers from penal codes, shorthand and jargon, the kids just cannot comprehend what has just happened to them," said Back, who spent six years as presiding judge at Ventura County's Juvenile Court. "Juveniles uniformly said, We have no idea what just happened in court.' There is an inability for them to know what judges and attorneys do."

Welcome to Max's World

Mary Carmichael:

Bipolar disorder is a mystery and a subject of medical debate. But for the Blakes, it's just reality.

Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don't really know what death is, as the last page of Max's will made clear: "If I'm still alive when I have grandchildren," it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer. On a recent Monday afternoon, Max, now 10, was supposed to come home on the schoolbus, but a counselor summoned his mother at 2:15. When Amy Blake arrived at school, her son gave her the note that had prompted the call. "Dear Mommy & Daddy," it read, "I am really feeling sad and depressed and lousy about myself. I love you but I still feel like I want to kill myself. I am really sad but I just want help to feel happy again. The reason I feel so bad is because I can't sleep at night. And dad yells at me to just sleep at night. But, I can't control it. It is not me that does control it. I don't know what controls it, but it is not me. I really really need some help, love Max!!!!! I Love you Mommy I Love you Daddy."

The Third World Challenge

Bob Compton, via a kind reader's email:

ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.

The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.

While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.

This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.

Quiz: Which Is a Greater Distraction For Milwaukee Students?

Democrats for Education Reform.

Superintendent: Bad tenured teachers hard to fire

Frank Eltman:

Few people know better than school superintendent Allan Gerstenlauer that disciplining a tenured teacher can be a long and expensive process.

An English teacher in his Long Island district remains on the payroll, earning an annual salary of $113,559, even after pleading guilty earlier this month to drunken driving charges _ her fifth DWI arrest in seven years.

The teacher will remain on paid leave at least until a disciplinary hearing in August, and it will be up to an impartial arbitrator to decide whether she needs to be fired as she faces a likely prison sentence.

"It is very frustrating that the process takes so long," Gerstenlauer conceded.

State funding helps fuel preschool boom

Greg Toppo:

Lisa Downs Henry's father and stepmother opened Downs Preschool in 1984 as a private day care center in Watkinsville, Ga. Business was good, but it really took off in 1995 after the state approved state lottery receipts to pay for pre-kindergarten classes.
The family converted the day care center into a preschool, which has since become a kind of institution in Oconee County, an hour's drive east of Atlanta. Of 12 preschool classes countywide, Downs boasts seven.

Each fall, Henry, the school's director, welcomes a new class of 140 children, all 4-year-olds, all attending tuition-free.

"Since it's state-funded, you just don't have to hound parents about money," she says.

Related: Missed opportunity for 4K. I've heard that there has been some discussion regarding 4K and a potential fall, 2008 Madison School spending referendum. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the short amount of time between now and November.

Swedish school cites discrimination in seizing birthday party invitations

AP:

Officials at a school in Sweden have confiscated birthday invitations handed out in class by an eight-year-old boy.

The reason: they see it as a matter of discrimination.

A Swedish newspaper says the school in Lund, southern Sweden, seized the invitations because the boy failed to invited two boys because they were not his friends.

The newspaper Sydsvenskan quotes officials as saying they had a duty to prevent discrimination.

Education board swings into action after 900 schools record less than 30% results

Shubhlakshmi Shukla:

Committees comprising DEOs inspect schools to find out the exact reason behind poor performance.

For the first time, the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary School Education Board (GSHSEB) has initiated a third party inspection of its schools in every districts. The move comes after 900-odd granted secondary schools reported 0 to 30 per cent results in the recent board exams.

To ensure fairness, committees comprising district education officers are checking on the schools of other districts to find out the exact reason for their poor performance. The lack of infrastructure, bad teaching quality and economic background of the students are being seen as the possible reasons for the poor results. The committee will submit its report to the GSHSEB.

Education formula helps rich schools get richer

Lynn Moore:

She wakes up in her suburban home, has breakfast and jumps into her mom's car for a ride to school each morning.

He struggles to rouse himself off a bed of blankets on the floor, grabs the same clothes he wore yesterday and, with an empty stomach, starts his walk to school.

When she sits in her seat in her third-grade classroom, she brings a wealth of life experiences: soccer games and ballet; spring breaks in Florida; summers at a cottage on the lake; weekends spent at the zoo or museum.

He brings experiences, too: baby-sitting for his siblings; worrying about whether this will be the night the landlord kicks his family out; dreading the summer when he can't rely on regular meals like the ones his school provides.
Two children. Two different worlds.

And two entirely different schools. Hers gets more than $12,000 per student in funding. His gets $5,000 per student less.

This is a powerful issue. Incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's former district, Green Bay spends $11,269 per student while Madison spends $13,201 according to a recent Isthmus article. More here.

Sent home: The suspension gap

James Walsh:

Black students are far more likely to be suspended from school than are their white classmates -- and Minnesota's disparity in suspensions is twice the national average. Why? What are the consequences?

Keenan Hooper likes to joke around and admits he has a motormouth. He also admits to getting into trouble again and again with teachers weary of his antics. School officials have sent him home more times than Keenan or his mom can count. ¶ So often, in fact, during his past couple years at Jackson Middle School in Champlin that he was referred to special education for a "behavioral disability" and saw his grades plummet.

This is not what Keisha Hooper wants for her son, who is black. She said she has asked how sending him away is helping.

"Teachers need order in the classroom, I agree," Keisha Hooper said. "I think where we part ways is that they seem to lose patience with the black kids more than they do the white."

An Interview with Janie Feinberg and Delia Stafford: On-going research stresses that the single most important factor in the classroom is ....

Michael Shaughnessy:

On-going research stresses that the single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the teacher. Teachers being the most important variable, have a major impact on a student's success or their failure. Delia Stafford and Janie Feinberg have spent the majority of their professional lives ensuring that students get the best teachers.Ms. Stafford, president of the Haberman Educational Foundation, teaches research-based strategies to assist school districts identify teachers and principals of excellence. Ms. Feinberg, president of JP Associates,provides ongoing staff support in classrooms to assist teachers via her exemplary coaching strategies.In this interview, they respond to a number of questions about teacher quality, teacher evaluation and alternative certification.

Bringing Potential Dropouts Back From the Brink

Juli Charkes:

ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.

Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.

Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.

Related: a look at Madison dropout data, including those with advanced abilities.

Marquette’s new engineering school will focus on creating a collaborative culture and produce grads and marketable ideas.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

The spark plug igniting this creative combustion is engineering school Dean Stan Jaskolski, who returned to his alma mater five years ago after retiring as chief technology officer at Eaton Corp. and a stint on the board of the National Science Foundation.

Jaskolski is re-engineering the engineering program with money, innovation and collaboration. The new engineering complex will link up faculty and students from all levels and disciplines, along with sales and marketing students and labs. Out of this intellectual stew, Jaskolski believes, will come a better prepared, more innovative engineering graduate. The school has raised $60 million out of the $100 million needed to build the complex.

Wisconsin’s improved performance on a noted ranking of science and technology is a plus. But the state still must work harder to turn good ideas into jobs.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial:

Wisconsin is far better positioned in the knowledge economy than it was four years ago, with larger pools of risk capital and better coordination of the state’s best research.

That's one way to read a new report from the well-respected Milken Institute. The state finished five spots higher at No. 22 in Milken's State Technology and Science Index (www.jsonline.com/765102).

But the state's policy-makers and business leaders must figure out how to turn more of the state's best ideas into jobs across the state, not just in Madison. And perhaps how better to tap the wealth of intellectual property in southeastern Wisconsin.

While Wisconsin moved up five notches, it still ranks only middling overall and still lags far behind on some of the measures. Furthermore, it's arguable how much such state-by-state rankings tell us in a world where the competitor as easily could be in Bangalore as in Buffalo.

A $53 trillion problem
The nation’s failure to address runaway spending on Medicare and Social Security is threatening our standard of living.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Imagine taking out a mortgage for a whopping $455,000 but getting no house in exchange. Just a monthly payment.

Who would do such a thing? The federal government would -- to you.

Federal commitments -- mostly for Medicare and Social Security -- totaled $53 trillion as of Sept. 30, or $455,000 for every U.S. household, and those commitments will grow rapidly over the next few years as more baby boomers retire and begin to draw benefits.

In 20 years, all of the government’s revenues will be needed just to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the national debt. Unchecked, government profligacy will put more pressure on the slumping dollar, could lead to sharply higher interest rates and could result in higher prices for oil and food. As our debt grows -- half of it now is held by foreign creditors such as China -- the nation’s fiscal defenses are weakened.

John Schmid has more:

"Congress does not require itself to tell you what the long-term picture is," said Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Butler and three other think tank analysts from across the ideological spectrum appeared in Milwaukee on Monday on the latest leg of their Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, addressing a crowd of over 200 business leaders and students. Their message: America is accumulating a dangerous level of national debt with little debate by its elected leaders on its consequences.

The tour started more than two years ago and has visited 40 cities. The stop in Milwaukee was meant to bring the message to a key battleground state in the 2008 presidential election.

......

An uninformed populace makes it easy to blame scapegoats and create distractions, with candidates saying they’ll eliminate budget waste and make the problem go away, Butler said. All concur that the U.S. mathematically cannot grow its way out of difficult budget choices.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama are well aware of the numbers even if neither addresses the underlying problems, the speakers agreed.

Stats show alarming growth in violent racial and girl-on-girl incidents, including Blair’s ‘Day of Six Fights’

Andre Coleman:

The expulsion of four elementary school students for bringing knives onto campus and a rise in violence involving female African-American students have left city and school officials scrambling for solutions.

Records obtained by the Pasadena Weekly show that more than half of the 31 students expelled from the start of the school year through March were African American, and 11 of those 17 kids were girls, including five former students of Blair International Baccalaureate Magnet School who were involved in what has come to be known by teachers, students and administrators as “The Day of Six Fights” on Feb 18.

Although all those incidents involved weapons or violence or both, and a multijurisdictional board had been working since October on combating instances of youth- and gang-related violence, that information was not shared with the former 14-member Committee on Youth Development and Violence Prevention — even though that board included two sitting members of the Board
of Education, which ultimately approved all of the expulsions.

Further, the Pasadena Unified School District has few programs in place to address the rise in violence and no facilities available to help with the increase in expulsions from the district’s elementary schools.

The Madison School District's Security Coordinator, Luis Yudice mentioned increased school violence involving girls during meeting on West High School / Regent area neighborhood crime last fall.

School Questions Rarely Answered, or Even Asked

David Kirkpatrick:

WHY is it that significant reform is opposed with the claim that research is needed, yet proposals to conduct such research are also opposed?

WHY does the present system not only lack a research base but much of it functions in direct contradiction to research findings?

WHY, for example, do we educate students by building a box called a school, inside of which are little boxes called classrooms, occupied by students in rows facing the front of the room, where an adult talks 75-80% of the time;
that is, the adult talks three to four times as much as all of the students combined?

WHY does secondary schooling use arbitrary time blocks after each of which students move to another room for a separate subject of instruction?

Schools Promote Students Despite Widespread Failure

Arizona Daily Star:

Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County's largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.

In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.

The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson's schools.

The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region's economy.

The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.

The Star's analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.

Audit: Praise for Minnesota charter schools' finances but pause on academics

Norman Draper:

A report from the Minnesota legislative auditor's office says test scores are lower than average and the schools can use more oversight. It urged legislators to tighten the controls.

Minnesota's charter schools need more oversight and post poorer test scores than their regular district school brethren, but have made big strides toward financial health, according to a report released Monday by the office of the legislative auditor.

The report offered a mixed bag of pluses and minuses for Minnesota's 143 charter schools, which have higher turnover and much higher populations of minority and low-income students than regular schools. The report's authors termed oversight of charter school operations and finances "unclear and often quite complicated," and called for legislation to tighten controls.

Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor:

We evaluated the performance, oversight, and accountability of charter schools. We found that, in general, charter schools do not perform as well as district schools; however, after accounting for relevant demographic factors and student mobility rates, the differences in student performance were minimal. Additionally, we found that charter school oversight responsibilities are not clear, leading to duplication and gaps in oversight. We recommend the Legislature clarify the roles of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and sponsors (organizations that authorize, monitor, and evaluate charter schools) and that MDE implement standards for sponsors. We also recommend that the Legislature strengthen conflict of interest laws for charter school boards.

American High Schools “Not Properly Preparing Kids For Life”

Nicolette Kuff:

A poll conducted by the Associated Press has found that more than half of people polled claim that U.S. high schools are falling short when it comes to readying students for adulthood. In addition, the same number of American’s polled believe that schools are focusing too much on some subjects and neglecting others, leading to an unbalanced education and a lack of “survival skills” needed for life after high school.

“When you get out of high school, what are you educated to do?” Mused California firefighter Jamie Norton. “A lot of kids, when they get out of school, are kind of lost.”

The AP poll revealed that parents from a minority group tend to believe that their children are receiving an education than they actually are. Three-fourths of adults polled also claimed that their children’s schools were emphasizing the wrong subjects – music, art, English – and not spending enough time on “important” subjects, such as math or biology. Parents are also frustrated by the seeming lack of assistance available during school hours for children who may be struggling with math, and are often unwilling to dedicate time at home to work on their children’s math homework.

Most individuals polled claimed that the U.S. is far behind other world countries when it comes to education. In reality, U.S. students fall somewhere in the middle when compared to students from other countries.

Art Rainwater Retires

Channel3000:

Madison school Superintendent Art Rainwater is officially off the clock. After 14 years of work in Madison, Rainwater stepped down from his post at noon on Monday.

"This will be the first year that I haven't been involved with school since 1948, so it's been my whole life," Rainwater told WISC-TV.

Rainwater came to Madison in 1994 as deputy Superintendent.

He said all it took was a visit to the farmers' market on the Saturday before his interview for him to realize he was home.

He took the helm as superintendent in 1999.

"I always felt it was a position that I could do the most, with the most children," said Rainwater. "I think that's certainly what drove me to be a superintendent."

Much more on Art Rainwater here.

School system retirees 'double dip' with waiver

Tracy Jan:

Nearly 100 retired educators in the Commonwealth were allowed to earn their full salaries while collecting full pensions in the past school year, a growing practice critics call state-sanctioned "double dipping."

The retirees collectively made more than $5 million on the job while taking home $5.5 million in pension payments, according to information obtained by the Globe.

The Globe review found that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education routinely approved these special arrangements and frequently ignored its own guidelines that require school districts to provide proof that they advertised for the position and were unable to find other qualified candidates.

Critics say the practice, which was designed to make it easier for districts to fill hard-to-staff positions, leaves the door open for abuse, enticing a pool of well-connected retirees to move from one job to the next or stay indefinitely in a position that should have been filled by a nonretiree. In some cases, school districts have been allowed to continue rehiring the same retiree rather than readvertising for the position each year and providing fresh proof that they could find no one else to fill the spot, another state requirement.

Education Reform: How to learn the right lessons from other countries' schools

The Economist:

THE children at Kulosaari primary school, in a suburb of Helsinki, seem unfazed by the stream of foreign visitors wandering through their classrooms. The head teacher and her staff find it commonplace too—and no wonder. The world is beating a path to Finland to find out what made this unostentatious Nordic country top of international education league tables. Finland’s education ministry has three full-time staff handling school visits by foreign politicians, officials and journalists. The schools in the shop window rotate each year; currently, Kulosaari is on call, along with around 15 others. Pirkko Kotilainen, one of the three officials, says her busiest period was during Finland’s European Union presidency, when she had to arrange school visits for 300 foreign journalists in just six months of 2006.

Finland’s status as an education-tourism hot spot is a result of the hot fashion in education policy: to look abroad for lessons in schooling. Some destinations appeal to niche markets: Sweden’s “voucher” system draws school choice aficionados; New Zealand’s skinny education bureaucracy appeals to decentralisers. Policymakers who regard the stick as mightier than the carrot admire the hard-hitting schools inspectorate and high-stakes mandatory tests in England (other bits of Britain have different systems).

Ho-Chunk Miss Gambling Payment to the State of Wisconsin

Wisconsin State Journal:

The Ho-Chunk tribe missed an initial deadline Monday to pay an estimated $72 million in gambling money that state officials are counting on to help balance an already stressed state budget.

It's now been more than two years since the tribe, locked in a legal battle with the state over its gambling compact, has made any payments on its casino operations.

The lingering dispute raises the question of whether the state will receive nearly $100 million in estimated payments expected by June 2009 in time to prevent a gaping hole in a budget that could force lawmakers to raise taxes, cut services or borrow money to make up the difference.

Patrick Marley & Stacy Forster:

The tribe continues to offer expanded games such as poker and roulette that were agreed to in the 2003 compact, but it has stopped making the payments that were also required under that deal.

Doyle said the tribe owes the payments and that state officials will continue to pursue enforcement efforts in federal court — the only recourse available to Wisconsin under federal Indian gaming laws.

“Every other tribe in the state has paid it, and the fact (is) the Ho-Chunk just haven’t, but we believe it’s owed,” Doyle said.

Thomas Springer, a lobbyist for the tribe, said the Ho-Chunk have been trying to resolve the matter ever since the Supreme Court ruled on another tribe’s casino agreement. That decision in effect invalidated the Ho-Chunk’s agreement with the state, he said.

Another item to ponder with respect to potential changes in redistributed state tax dollars for education.

Ted Widerski

All,

The Board received the following sad news today. I am sorry to inform you that Ted Widerski, an Instructional Resource Teacher-Secondary in the Talented and Gifted area, passed away unexpectedly this past weekend.

I apologize for the informal way of notifying all of you of Ted's passing but I know many of you have worked with Ted and I wanted to make sure you were aware of this sad news. My understanding is that there will be an obituary in the paper on Tuesday.

Sadly,
Arlene Silveira

$2.6 million drives unique Boys & Girls Club, MMSD partnership
New joint program aims to double minority/low-income student college enrollment

Via the Madison School District [Press Release | AVID - TOPS Fact Sheet]:

The Boys & Girls Club (BGC) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced today a new joint initiative that intends to double the number of minority and low-income students who plan to pursue four-year college and technical college degrees upon high school graduation. The launch of the initiative is made possible through private commitments of $2.6 million to the Boys & Girls Club covering 50% of the first five years of the programs cost.

"We are so excited to partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District on this groundbreaking initiative, said Mary Burke, President of the Board of Directors for the Boys & Girls Club. "combining the school district’s AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program with the Boys & Girls Club Teens Of Promise program (TOPs) we will make a difference, not only in the lives of the students involved in the program but also in the community at large. The health of our community is closely tied to having an educated, skilled workforce. This initiative is designed to do just that."

The AVID program is a rigorous in-school elective that students take throughout high school to their improve study skills, grades, time management, reading and writing skills to better prepare them for college. The TOPs program offers summer job internships, mentors, scholarships, field trips, career exploration and financial support for tutoring. Students commit to staying on the college track, maintaining a 2.5 GPA, taking courses that will prepare them for college and having a good attendance record.

Kevin Murphy:

Impressed with the success of the 28 East High students enrolled in the program last year, the Boys and Girls Club of Madison has committed to raising $2.6 million, half the funding needed to increase enrollment to 100 students districtwide this fall and to add 100 each year until an 800-student cap is reached.

"This will fund college preparation for students not currently getting that opportunity," said Boys and Girls Club board President Mary Burke.

Developed in California and based partly on a similar Milwaukee program, AVID is aimed at students from low-income households who want to develop the motivation to succeed in school. It is a daily elective students take throughout high school to improve their study skills, grades and time management.

Karen Rivedal:

Madison School District leaders on Monday announced a partnership with Boys and Girls Club of Dane County aimed at doubling the number of minority and low-income students who will be ready to enter college after high school.

District officials stressed that the new offering was not a remedial program or a free ride but instead was geared to help motivated students with average grades who have the desire to attend college but lack the practical skills and knowledge to get there and be successful.

And to do that really well, it was vital to involve the community, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for the district 's four high schools, said at a news conference at East High School.

A Look at the Dropout Issue

Jay Matthews:

Some of the most troubling questions about schools, such as what causes dropouts, have few clear answers because there is so little research. And the reason that data is lacking, at least in part, is that educators who would otherwise demand it are too busy with more even pressing issues, such as improving teaching and raising low student achievement.

The few schools that have made significant progress in teaching and learning, however, are beginning to look more closely at the dropout issue because they cannot be content when so many students miss out on what they have to offer. Note, for instance, a report just released by the KIPP Foundation (available at www.kipp.org) on the number of students who have left that well-regarded public charter school network.

Lucy Mathiak discussed a late 1990's analysis of Madison's dropouts here.

New Schools for Poor?

Nancy Mitchell:

Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.

The loose-knit group, called the New Schools Collaborative, includes the Piton Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, names known for their work in urban education.

The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.

That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.

Milwaukee Public Schools Lag in Special Education Funds

Amy Hetzner:

When it comes to state funding for some of the students who cost the most to educate, Wisconsin’s largest school system has been a big loser.

Over the past few years, as the state has ratcheted up its support for schools struggling with the costs of high-need special education students, the amount collected by Milwaukee Public Schools has barely budged.

Of the $5.4 million pool distributed this year, MPS took in just $40,182, according to an announcement by the state Department of Public Instruction. That puts MPS in the same range as Brown Deer, Manitowoc, and Montello, and the Milwaukee district received less than a third of the $131,390 that went to Middleton.

The Madison Metropolitan School District, the state’s second largest school district, got more than $1.4 million, and $439,673 was given to the Racine Unified School District.

National Debt Makes US Vulnerable: Fiscal Wake-Up Tour in Milwaukee Today

John Schmid:

Tax rates could double. Spending on education, research, health and even Social Security could be squeezed tighter than ever. And foreign governments could use powerful financial leverage, rather than military force, to impose their economic and political agendas on the United States.

All because the U.S. national debt - which is being financed on a daily basis by the governments of China and a host of oil-exporting states, among others - has made this country far more vulnerable than its elected leaders let on, says David Walker, who recently finished a 10-year stint as U.S. comptroller general and head of the Government Accountability Office.

The nation's former auditor-in-chief will outline this crisis scenario today in Milwaukee, when he and an entourage of like-minded Washington policy analysts make their latest stop on Walker's Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.

Foreign governments and investors now hold fully half of the United States' total outstanding debt, making Washington susceptible to a new form of geopolitical conflict that Walker calls "financial warfare."

Related:

• K-12 Tax & Spending Climate
• Fiscal Challenges @ Perot Charts

In Philadelphia, Privatized Schools Suffer a Setback

Keith Richburg:

Six years ago, the Philadelphia School District embarked on what was considered the country's boldest education privatization experiment, putting 38 schools under private management to see if the free market could educate children more efficiently than the government.

If it worked, the plan seemed likely to become a model for other struggling urban school districts, such as Washington's, suffering from a lack of funding, decaying buildings and abysmal student test scores.

This month, the experiment suffered a severe setback, as the state commission overseeing Philadelphia's schools voted to take back control of six of the privatized schools, while warning 20 others that they had a year to show progress or they, too, would revert to district control.

Students at Philadelphia's schools have made improvements overall, the commission said. But the private-run schools are not doing any better than the schools remaining under public control.

Teacher puts fitness lesson in 50-state trip

Paul Smith:

Haugen teaches eighth-grade science in Denver, and he is on a unique summer project. To raise awareness of childhood obesity and encourage Americans to get outdoors, he's attempting to climb the highest point in each of the 50 states in 50 days.

Haugen is joined on the trip by avid climbers Lindsay Danner from Denver and Zach Price from Seattle, and Jordan Mallan, an independent film producer from Los Angeles who is preparing a documentary on the trip. The group is traveling to all sites in the lower 48 in a midsize SUV with a trailer.

The effort may set a record, now held by Ben Jones of Lynnwood, Wash., who reached the top of all 50 in 50 days, 7 hours and 5 minutes.

Haugen's 50-50 challenge started June 9 when he reached the top of 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in Alaska. As he reaches down to tag the benchmark on Timm's Hill Saturday at 1 p.m., he notches his 30th peak in 19 days.

website.

Are Video Games the New Textbooks?

Julia Hoppock:

"Immune Attack" is still in its final stage of development and is not on shelves yet, but can be downloaded for free at their website. The game has already been evaluated in 14 high schools across the country with nearly a thousand more educators registered to evaluate it in the next phase of development. The reaction among teachers who have used the game has been positive.

Woodbridge, Va., high school AP biology teacher Netia Elam says the video game brought the concepts of immunology to life for her students.

"[With text books] they might read something, drag vocabulary words onto paper, or use their math, but they're not really integrated into it," Elam said. "Because they are playing video games, they were really engrossed in what they were doing. They took on more of an interest and more of an initiative to pay attention."

Economic Growth Provides Money for Education

The Billings Gazette asked Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-Montana) the following questions:

The Gazette invited Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who is seeking re-election, and state Sen. Roy Brown of Billings, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, to address these education-funding questions:

A few weeks ago, the Billings school board cut $2.2 million out of its K-8 budget after a proposed $817,000 levy failed. Some education proponents say those developments are the result of the state failing to meet its constitutional mandate to fund a basic system of quality education.

Do you think the state education-funding system is fulfilling its mandate?

How have you as governor or state legislator worked to fulfill the education-funding mandate while balancing the state budget?

What changes - if any - do you propose that the 2009 Legislature make in how Montana funds its K-12 schools?

Schweitzer is correct to emphasize economic growth (or, put another way, expansion of the tax base rather than tax rates). A growing tax base is essential, as Schweitzer points out.

LA Schools Chief Wants Principals to Have More Authority

Howard Blume:

L. A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer said this week he would "kick some ass" to improve schools if the school board would give him political cover, which would include standing up to employee unions who might resist reforms.

The comment came at a public but hard-to-reach meeting Thursday on the 24th floor of school district headquarters. The meeting's topic was the governance of the school district, and the discussion gravitated toward giving school principals real power over their budget -- along with demanding real accountability for results.

The room happened to be weighted with administrators -- even a representative from the League of Women Voters was a retired principal. There was broad agreement on a need to decentralize the district.

UCLA Professor William Ouchi offered the New York City schools as an example of progress through focusing on principals. These unchained administrators have used their new authority to reduce the number of students each teacher must handle per day, he said, because that tactic raises student achievement.

The Madison School District attempted, unsuccessfully, to give principals more staffing flexibility during the most recent round of teacher union negotiations.

New Madison School Superintendent To Collect Retirement Pay

Kelly McBride:

Outgoing Green Bay Superintendent Daniel Nerad will receive more than $150,000 in retirement pay during the next five years, even as he starts his new job as head of the Madison School District.

The money is part of the district's emeritus program, a benefit formula that provides money — but not insurance — for certain departing administrators.

"It's in the (administrator) benefit package," said John Wilson, the district's assistant superintendent for human resources, "and it is based upon your age and years of service with the district."

Administrators must be at least 55 years old, and their age plus years of service must equal at least 70, to qualify for the benefit. Nerad, 56, has been with the district in various capacities for 33 years, including the last seven as superintendent.

Channel3000.com:

Outgoing Green Bay Superintendent Daniel Nerad will receive more than $150,000 in retirement pay even as he starts another job that pays nearly $200,000 per year.

Nerad will become the superintendent of the Madison School District starting Tuesday.

Green Bay district spokesman John Wilson said the retirement pay is part of the district's benefit package for certain administrators.

Audio, Video and Links on Dan Nerad.

Why does society need to ‘have a grip’ on education of my children?

Shena Deuchars:

Society does not “have a grip” on whether or not I feed or clothe my children. Why does it need to : “have a grip” on their education? The law leaves the primary responsibility for education with parents and provides for measures to be taken against parents who do not educate their children, just as it does for parents who neglect their children. What more is required?

Another Look at Home Schooling

San Francisco Chronicle Editorial:

A California appeals court is showing good sense - and a feel for public sentiment - by reconsidering a sweeping ruling that undercuts the thriving home school movement.

This state needs more educational options, not fewer, and an appeals court ruling in February definitely worked against this goal. In that decision, the court went too far by declaring that parents of 166,000 home-schooled students needed teaching credentials.

The ruling hinged on a rule that children attend full-time schools or be taught by an credentialed instructor, but state authorities had usually left oversight on home-schooling parents to local school districts. This pliant arrangement has allowed home schooling to flourish alongside conventional classrooms, charters, private and parochial schools.

The rehearing is anything but a rehash. The outcry over the February decision drummed up a list of allies who virtually spilled out of the courtroom door this week. Lawyers for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Attorney General Jerry Brown and state schools superintendent Jack O'Connell all chimed in on behalf of home schools. The main, no-surprise opponent is the California Teachers Association, which wants the court to stick to the letter of the law and require credentials. It's a demand that could doom home schools and further alienate committed parents who find schools a bad fit for their children.

"Best" Graduate Schools

US News & World Report:

U.S. News has collected data from more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year's rankings. Start by selecting a discipline for access to our top program rankings.

Grand jury: School district should change how students are assigned to S.F. schools

Heather Knight:

The San Francisco Unified School District should dump its "confusing, time-consuming, alienating" system of assigning students to schools and instead allow them to go to ones in their neighborhoods, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury said in a report released Thursday.

The grand jury focused on the way kindergarten students were assigned to schools in the 2007-08 school year. The district's system, dubbed "the diversity index," is used for students of all ages entering new schools.
Under the current system, families submit their top seven school choices and a number of socioeconomic indicators, but not race. The vast majority of families get one of their seven choices, but families who can't get their child into a school in their neighborhood have complained it's unfair. Studies have shown schools are becoming increasingly resegregated.

The grand jury blasted the system for being expensive to run, driving families away from the district and not doing much to diversify schools.

Schools Need the Best and the Brightest

Letters to the Editor - the Toronto Star:

The dilemma confronting trustees of the Toronto school board and likely Jim Spyropoulos himself underscores a destructive flaw basic to the compensation structure of public education. Every time individuals excel as teachers or principals, they are promoted up and away from the site of their excellence.

Surely the education system can figure out a way to compensate talent generously and keep it where it is most needed. Many fields of professional endeavour – sports, theatre, science – manage to pay their stars considerably more than they pay their managers.

Clearly Spyropoulos can't be blamed for pursuing a path that is the most advantageous to career growth and compensation. But that's too bad. He is needed in school, as were many other talented people over the years who have been pulled from meaningful daily contact at schools and stuck somewhere away from the action.

Wisconsin Governor Doyle Tells State Agencies to Cut Budgets

Channel3000:

Gov. Jim Doyle is telling most state agencies not to expect any increase in funding over the next two years.

Doyle is also telling state officials to prepare plans for a 10 percent cut. He gave the same order to agencies two years ago.

The governor's instructions come in a letter that outlines what to expect in the next two-year budget plan he will submit to the Legislature in February.

Something to ponder as the Madison School Administration and Board consider a fall referendum.

Harris/Solberg vs. MMSD: 25 years later, Landmark Madison desegregation case revisited,

A. David Dahmer:

Twenty five years ago this week, there was a landmark decision where the people of Madison stood up for themselves and fought against the creation and maintenance of segregation resulting directly from school boundary changes.

t was an attempt to abandon the central city and the south side in favor of newer, developing peripheral areas. The process would have done serious damage to Madison’s Black population.
But two people wouldn't let it happen.

Sandy Solberg, on behalf of two neighborhood centers in Central and South Madison, and Richard Harris, who then was an administrator at Madison Area Technical College and a member of the district's Lincoln-Franklin Task Force, were instrumental in fighting a fight that eventually found that the Madison School Board's 1979 decision to close schools and redraw attendance boundaries discriminated against minority students and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Education is Massachusetts Governor Patrick's Test

Adrian Walker:

Thomas Birmingham's phone has been ringing a lot this week, in the wake of Governor Deval Patrick's plan to overhaul public education.

The former state Senate president was one of the last people to take on the task of reforming education in Massachusetts, in 1993. It was a valiant effort, but ultimately not enough.

"I don't think anybody thought in '93 that a bright day had dawned and that we would move on because all our education problems had been solved," Birmingham said yesterday.

The overriding issue then was the wild disparity between different communities in spending on education. But that emphasis proved simplistic.

The achievement gap was not nearly as well understood as it is now. "I think perhaps the disadvantages that poverty imposes were beyond what we might have accomplished, that it is a harder problem than we realized," he said. "We smuggle a host of issues into schools that are not educational."

Related: Fearing for Massachusett's School Reform and Mike Antonucci on Patrick's plan for a statewide teacher agreement.

More "Algebra" for Chicago Public Schools Eighth Graders

Alexander Russo:

What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?

From Catalyst: "The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.

"With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.

A commenter nails the issue:

The exit exams have to be real. They can't be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.

Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.

I'm all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.

Related:

• Madison West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus:

  Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.

• Math Forum audio / video and links

It will be interesting to see the results of the Madison Math Task Force's work.

No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, June 2008

National Council on Teacher Quality (3MB PDF