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Dan Dempsey, via a kind email:
r spent slightly more than $500,000 combined on their four campaigns, which was 81% of the total amount spent by those running in 2007. These incumbent Directors are endorsed for reelection in 2011 by the Seattle Times while The Stranger, an alternative newspaper, recommends three of the challengers.It will be interesting to see if Madison has contested board races in 2012...
This election has parallels to dissatisfaction underlying Occupy Wall Street. Many Seattle residents see the "School Reform" pushed by the District as largely driven by those more interested in profit by corporations than student learning. Public records of where the $500,000 plus came from in 2007 indicate likely pro corporate connections.
On March 2, 2011 after giving the public only 22 hours notice, the Board bought out Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her CFO-COO Mr. Don Kennedy for $360,000. The Superintendent had Broad Academy training and pushed for School Reform along the lines advocated by the Broad Academy in her 3.5 years in Seattle.
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Racine Unified School District (RUSD) implemented a district-wide vision for improvement in March 2009. Called the North Star vision, it is intended to specify "the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college." It includes performance targets at each grade level to be used in creating school improvement plans and in setting school-level learning targets.Public Policy Forum Report (PDF):The vision is the result of a collaborative effort by the school board, district administrators, the teachers and administrators unions, and the support staff union. A simple graphic illustrating the measures of focus at each grade level has been widely distributed to parents, teachers, and district stakeholders.
For dedicated readers, this 14th Annual Comparative Analysis of the Racine Unified School District will look quite different from the previous 13 reports. For the first time, we compare the district's performance to its own goals, as well as to its peers and to its past performance. The peer comparison tables, which have been the hallmark of previous reports, appear in Appendix I. The body of the report is focused on the district goals established in 2009 as the North Star vision, which according to the district, "is a shared vision that clearly identifies the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college."As in previous reports, we also present contextual information about the Racine community and student body. RUSD has experienced many changes over the past 14 years, including: slipping from the third largest district in the state to the fourth largest, becoming a majority minority district, and now having most of its students quality for free or reduced-price lunch. The community has also become less wealthy during this time and seen fewer adults obtain college degrees. It is clear that RUSD has many challenges to overcome and a loss of significant state aid for this school year is yet another challenge. Consequently, this year's report also includes a more in-depth analysis of the district's fiscal situation.
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Arjaan de Raaf
Related: Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.
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Sometimes you find yourself part of a trend accidentally: Some old, beloved jacket in your closet becomes fashionable, or your private, favorite novel is discovered by the world. Having written four books of fiction for adults, I wrote a novel for kids, and looked up from the first draft to find that other writers were doing the same thing--and adults were reading the books.My plunge into the world of children's publishing surprised my friends as much as it surprised me. One asked, "How did you make the change? Did you have some kind of magical elixir?" I did, if you consider that magical elixirs are slow and difficult and sometimes frustrating to make, and involve wrong turns and unexpected discoveries. But here's the basic recipe:
1. Don't worry about what category the book belongs in. I thought I was writing a young adult novel and discovered that there was a type of book called "middle reader" only when my publishers told me I'd written one. I worked in a state of utter naïveté about what the rules are for writing children's books, which was liberating.
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Madison Preparatory Academy would open next fall in a former church on the city's Near West Side if the School Board approves a contract for the controversial charter school.Meanwhile, Progressive Dane announces its opposition to the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.The non-profit organization that would run the school has signed a letter of intent to lease the former Mount Olive Lutheran Church at 4018 Mineral Point Road, according to a business plan for the school released Saturday morning.
The site is on a Metro bus route and includes a 32,000-square-foot facility and 1,200-square-foot house. It also achieves the school's goal of being located near the Downtown, said Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire.
"It's a good neighborhood," Caire said. "We would hope the neighbors would want to get involved with the kids in the school."
The business plan lays out several other new details including a daily schedule from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 90-minute classes, report cards for parents and performance bonuses for staff.
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The parents of three 15-year-olds who were strip-searched and jailed for three days after a trespassing charge expressed outrage Thursday during a press conference and called for the removal of Tate County Youth Court referee Leigh Ann Darby."If we don't stand up for our rights, no one else will," Dexter Burton of Senatobia, father of Lakiya Burton, told reporters at the Church of Christ at 401 W. Gilmore.
The three youths, who had not previously been identified because of their ages, were at the gathering with their parents and the families' attorney, J. Cliff Johnson II of Jackson. They are Larandra Wright of Southaven, and Lakiya Burton and Kevonta Mack, both of Senatobia.
Burton and Mack are 10th-graders at Senatobia High School; Wright is a 10th-grader at Southaven High. None had prior brushes with the law before they crossed a renter's yard at a duplex that faces Morgan Drive in Senatobia this summer.
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Recently there has been a significant move among Chinese educators to provide better sex education to students in college, primary schools and even kindergartens.The Ministry of Education recently issued a circular requiring colleges to make courses on reproductive physiology and sex psychology part of the standard curriculum.
This kind of education as a rule is included in courses known as physiology and hygiene in middle schools, but in actual practice some more sensitive topics are either not addressed or glossed over by instructors who consider them embarrassing and not essential.
In the past, this kind of information about sexuality was generally passed on informally outside the schools, by young people.
One of the many stated reasons for offering formal, medically accurate instruction is to protect children from sex abuse, and to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
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Last year, the United States reached a troubling new milestone in higher education: for the first time, total student loan debt in the United States exceeded total credit card debt. It's a development that should have come as no surprise. Over the past 15 years, the amount that students borrow to finance their postsecondary education has grown by every available measure: between 1993 and 2008, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who borrowed for their educations jumped from 49 percent to 66 percent, with average total debt at graduation increasing over 50 percent, from $15,149 to $24,700. Borrowing money to go to college, like borrowing money to buy houses and cars, is fast becoming a fact of American life--and so, it is turning out, is the struggle to pay it back.
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This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was shared between three scientists - Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss - for discovering, through their research on supernovae, that the universe's rate of expansion is accelerating.Yet, as the plaudits for the winners began to flow, one or two of their peers sounded notes of caution. Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society, suggested that this was an instance where the Nobel committee had been "damagingly constrained" by its convention of not honouring more than three individuals at one time.
The prize-winning work had been carried out by two groups, each made up of a dozen or so scientists. "It would have been fairer," Rees argued, "and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done, if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two groups."
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Education Plan (PDF) via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
Madison Preparatory Academy's educational program has been designed to be different. The eight features of the educational program will serve as a powerful mix of strategies that allow Madison Prep to fulfill its mission: to prepare students for success at a four-year college or university by instilling Excellence, Pride, Leadership and Service. By fulfilling this mission, Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst of change and opportunity for young men and women who live in a city where only 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduate from high school. Madison Prep's educational program will produce students who are ready for college; who think, read, and write critically; who are culturally aware and embrace differences among all people; who give back to their communities; and who know how to work hard.Business Plan (PDF), via a kind Kaleem Caire email:One of the most unique features of Madison Prep is the single gender approach. While single gender education has a long, successful history, there are currently no schools - public or private - in Dane County that offer single gender education. While single gender education is not right for every student, the demand demonstrated thus far by families who are interested in enrolling their children in Madison Prep shows that a significant number of parents believe their children would benefit from a single gender secondary school experience.
Madison Prep will operate two schools - a boys' school and a girls' school - in order to meet this demand as well as ensure compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The schools will be virtually identical in all aspects, from culture to curriculum, because the founders of Madison Prep know that both boys and girls need and will benefit from the other educational features of Madison Prep.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is one of those strategies that Madison Prep's founders know will positively impact all the students the schools serve. IB is widely considered to be the highest quality curricular framework available. What makes IB particularly suitable for Madison Prep is that it can be designed around local learning standards (the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the Common Core State Standards) and it is inherently college preparatory. For students at Madison Prep who have special learning needs or speak English as a second language, IB is fully adaptable to their needs. Madison Prep will offer both the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP) to all its students.
Because IB is designed to be college preparatory, this curricular framework is an ideal foundation for the other aspects of Madison Prep's college preparatory program. Madison Prep is aiming to serve a student population of which at least 65% qualify for free or reduced lunch. This means that many of the parents of Madison Prep students will not be college educated themselves and will need the school to provide considerable support as their students embark on their journey through Madison Prep and to college.
College exposure, Destination Planning, and graduation requirements that mirror admissions requirements are some of the ways in which Madison Prep will ensure students are headed to college. Furthermore, parents' pursuit of an international education for their children is increasing rapidly around the world as they seek to foster in their children a global outlook that also expands their awareness, competence and comfort level with communicating, living, working and problem solving with and among cultures different than their own.
Harkness Teaching, the cornerstone instructional strategy for Madison Prep, will serve as an effective avenue through which students will develop the critical thinking and communication skills that IB emphasizes. Harkness Teaching, which puts teacher and students around a table rather than in theater-style classrooms, promotes student-centered learning and rigorous exchange of ideas. Disciplinary Apprenticeship, Madison Prep's approach to literacy across the curriculum, will ensure that students have the literacy skills to glean ideas and information from a variety of texts, ideas and information that they can then bring to the Harkness Table for critical analysis.
Yet to ensure that students are on track for college readiness and learning the standards set out in the curriculum, teachers will have to take a disciplined approach to data-driven instruction. Frequent, high quality assessments - aligned to the standards when possible - will serve as the basis for instructional practices. Madison Prep teachers will consistently be analyzing new data to adjust their practice as needed.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of young men and women of color is uncertain.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.Black and Hispanic boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Hispanic girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League of Greater Madison by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their White peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
Both schools will be administratively separate and operated by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. (Madison Prep), an independent 501(c)(3) established by the Urban League of Greater Madison and members of Madison Prep's inaugural board of directors.
The Urban League of Greater Madison, the "founder" of Madison Prep, understands that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, limited access to schools and classrooms that provide academic rigor, lack of access to positive male and female role models in different career fields, limited exposure to academically successful and achievement-oriented peer groups, and limited exposure to opportunity and culture experiences outside their neighborhoods contribute to reasons why so many young men and women fail to achieve their full potential. At the same time, the Urban League and its supporters understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to specifically address these issues.Madison Prep will consist of two independent public charter schools - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - designed to serve adolescent males and females in grades 6-12 in two separate schools. Both will be open to all students residing within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) who apply, regardless of their previous academic performance.
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Earlier this year, Dropout Nation argued that one way that school reformers -- including school choice activists and Parent Power groups -- could advance reform and expand school choice was to file lawsuits similar to school funding torts filed for the past four decades by school funding advocates. But now, it looks like Parent Power activists may be filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles on a different front: Overhauling teacher evaluations. And the Los Angeles Unified School District may be the place where the first suit is filed.In a letter sent on behalf of some families Wednesday to L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and the school board -- and just before the district begins negotiations with the American Federation of Teachers' City of Angels unit over a new contract -- Barnes & Thornburg's Kyle Kirwan demanded that the district "implement a comprehensive system" of evaluating teachers that ties "pupil progress" data to teacher evaluations. Kirwan and the group he represents are also asking for the district to begin evaluating all teachers "regardless of tenure status" and to reject any contract with the American Federation of Teachers local that allows for any veteran teacher with more than a decade on the job to go longer than two years without an evaluation if they haven't had one in the first place.
We represent minor-students currently residing within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District (the "District" or "LAUSD"), the parents of these students, and other adults who have paid taxes for a school system that has chronically failed to comply with California law.Our clients seek to have the District immediately meet its obligations under the Stull Act, a forty year old law that is codified at California Education Code section 44660 et seq. (the "Stull Act").
In relevant part, the Stull Act requires that "[t]he governing board of each school district establish standards of expected pupil achievement at each grade level in each area of study."
Cal. Educ. Code § 44662(a). The Stull Act requires further that "[t]he governing board of each school district ... evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to ... [t]he progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments ...." Cal. Educ. Code§ 44662(b)(l).
In the forty years since the California Legislature passed the Stull Act, the District has never evaluated its certificated personnel based upon the progress of pupils towards the standards established pursuant to Education Code section 44662(a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by the state adopted criterion referenced assessments; never reduced such evaluations to writing or added the evaluations to part of the permanent records of its certificated personnel; never reviewed with its certificated personnel the results of pupil progress as they relate to Stull Act evaluations; and never made specific recommendations on how certificated personnel with unsatisfactory ratings could improve their performance in order to achieve a higher level of pupil progress toward meeting established standards of expected pupil achievement.
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Vice President Joe Biden turned a dinner speech to Florida Democrats at Walt Disney World into a pep rally Friday night, blasting Republicans as obstructionists with whom he said the administration can no longer work.Biden knocked Republicans for blocking President Obama's American Jobs Act, for "playing roulette" with the federal deficit ceiling and standing in the way of other Obama initiatives, from Wall Street reform to health care reform to the end of the Iraq occupation.
Biden said he and Obama tried for 2 1/2 years to sit down with Republicans and now he concludes, "This is not your father's Republican Party."
"It's time to stand up. I'ts time to fight back," Biden bellowed to a cheering crowd of more than 1,000 people at the Florida Democratic Party annual convention at Disney's Contemporary Resort. "We are looking for this fight."
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I love this scene in Goodwill Hunting because it sums up in large part how I feel about the current education system (only Matt Damon says it way cooler than I ever will).Does it trouble anyone else that university presidents (in Canada at least, I can't vouch for the USA) make more money than the Prime Minister does? It is primarily tax dollars that pay both of their salaries (most universities in Canada operate with about 60-70% of their costs covered by the government). How about the whole notion of publishing journal articles in a specific language that only certain people can speak effectively (APA, MLA, Chicago etc)? If you do not want to lay eyes on a somewhat cynical rant about the tyranny of post-secondary education monopolies then please avert your eyes.
Cynical or Realistic?
In my masters course last week someone who was taking their first course in several years (after being in the workforce for a substantial period of time) asked me why so much emphasis was placed on getting the exact period and comma marks right when citing sources (she was not questioning the validity of citing a source, only the extremely specific emphasis put on the minutiae of it). My response shocked her a little.
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Are Quebec schools embracing computers too zealously? I don't know the answer - I'm no pedagogue - but it's a question worth asking.Two things are clear.
One is that most parents, school officials and politicians see children's familiarity with computers at an early age as desirable - nay, imperative - for successful individual careers and for society's prosperity in a "knowledge economy." The English Montreal School Board, for one, even provides laptop computers as a teaching tool in pre-kindergarten (where the 4-year-olds use them for recognition of numbers and letters and to do puzzles). In response to strong public support for this trend, Premier Jean Charest promised a few months ago to put a smart whiteboard (a front-of-the-class board that allows for digital touch interaction) in every primary- and secondary-school classroom across the province.
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After revving up a few hundred adolescents in the Central Middle School auditorium during a recent homecoming pep rally, educators had to get the children out the doors and onto school buses idling outside.And there wasn't much time to do it.
As the children began to get up, principal Darren Guido jumped to direct traffic. Moments later, outside, aspiring school leader Nakia Fambro noticed some students were dallying. She rushed to the office.
"If you are a bus rider, the buses are leaving in 30 seconds," Fambro announced over the intercom system, repeating the urgent message several times.
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The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce:
New Position Seeks to Connect Students and Teachers with Local BusinessesMadison - The Madison Metropolitan School District and Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce announced a new partnership today to connect high school students with on-site work experience through youth apprenticeships. A cornerstone of the partnership will be a new position that will meet the needs of existing students and increase the
capacity for future students participating in the Youth Apprenticeship Program.
Youth Apprenticeship is a rigorous elective program for high school juniors and seniors that combines academic and technical classroom instruction with mentored on-the-job learning. The new Youth Apprenticeship Facilitator will serve as a liaison connecting all program partners with the ultimate goal of growing the number of student participants and
apprenticeship opportunities.
For Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce President Jennifer Alexander, collaborating with Madison schools to support youth apprenticeship was a natural alignment.
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Adrian of OpenClass responds to our questions. See our responses below:Adrian writes:
@Nixty, a competitor to OpenClass, asks:What happens when readily available free courses/texts help students learn better than Pearson's closed expensive courses/texts?
What happens when we have clear research support that shows how students taking the open and free course learn more than students taking Pearson's closed and expensive course?
Pearson's stated aim is to make the LMS a commodity so they can sell more of their closed content and course tools. What happens when Pearson isn't selling enough of their closed content and course tools?
Adrian's Answer: Is this a trick question? Doesn't this boil down to the more general question -- What happens when a free product is better than one you pay for? There's only one conclusion I can come to - free wins that round. And 'for pay' has to come up with something worth paying for, which is the essence of competition, the arms race that drives economics to produce improvement. I believe Pearson has proven it is up to that challenge for the long haul.
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The Seattle Times has made their perspective clear: they support the current school board. Not only did they endorse the incumbents in the upcoming election, they have gone out of their way to claim that the Board is not to blame for the recent scandals. They write that the Board has learned from those mistakes - not that they made any mistakes - and will do better now - not they they hadn't done well enough before. The Times would have us believe that the Board isn't to blame, but that the system is to blame - nevermind that the Board controls the system.
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On a humid Monday in late September, a wonky entrepreneur named Salman Khan visited New York City. Khan, a 35-year-old American of South Asian descent with bushy black hair and a nerdy affect, was in town to promote his Silicon Valley startup. He stayed at the London NYC, an upscale hotel just south of Central Park, and dined at Maze, the Gordon Ramsay restaurant off the lobby.Khan Academy.But that night, instead of seeing the sights or going out with friends, Khan holed up in his hotel room, fiddled with his laptop, and produced a series of amateurish videos about geometry. They are disarmingly simple - Khan's deep voice talks over a black screen, where he draws shapes and writes out questions and equations in multiple colours. One, a six-minute clip called "Congruent triangle proof example", shows a proof that a point on a line is the midpoint, using two triangles. Another, "Finding congruent triangles", establishes why four related postulates are all equally reasonable. When he was finished, he uploaded them to YouTube and went to sleep.
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I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.Paradise Valley School District's website.Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
What was most fascinating to me and an absolute pleasure is that here was a educator who made no apologies for wanting to serve gifted students. She gave a PowerPoint and several times talked about the need to serve these students needs as a district would any other student with a special need like ELL or Special Education. It was very refreshing and I have never, in all my years in SPS, heard any SPS principal or Board member or staff member or Superintendent speak in this manner.
She started out by showing a list from J. Skabos about differences between gifted children and bright children (and I note that she believes both groups need to be served). I couldn't find the exact list but here is link to one that is quite similar.
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I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
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Ah, the achievement gap. So much trouble to fix, so why bother trying? That seems to be the attitude in Washington, where pundits have spent the last several months ripping the current focus on improving the low end of student performance in our nation's schools. In September the Obama Administration put forward a plan to offer waivers to states that want more flexibility -- i.e., less ambitious targets -- under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week the bottom really fell out when the Senate committee that handles education passed a rewrite of the No Child law basically leaving it to states to figure out how (and probably, in practice, even whether) to close the gaps. In other words, a decade after an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort to get serious about school accountability, it's open season on a strong federal role in education. How did we get here?Let's start with the pundits. Leading the charge is the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, who, in the fall issue of National Affairs, launched a contrarian broadside against NCLB's focus on low-achieving students. "The relentless focus on gap-closing has transformed school reform into little more than a less objectionable rehash of the failed Great Society playbook," Hess wrote. Next came a September report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, another conservative think tank, claiming that the current focus is shortchanging high-achievers. Yet the data in the Fordham report didn't support its alarmist conclusions that high-achievers were being hurt by today's policies. The truth is, according to Fordham's own data, that high-performers didn't fare that badly overall. Other evidence bears this out. None of that slowed down the pundits.
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Geography has long been recognized as a "core academic subject" in federal education legislation. However, unlike all the other core academic subjects, including history, civics, economics, foreign languages and the arts, there is no dedicated federal funding stream to advance geography education. As a result, our nation is facing a crisis in geographic literacy that is jeopardizing our global competitiveness, our position of diplomatic leadership, and our ability to fill and retain over 150,000 jobs in geospatial technology in the next decade.
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The Royal Society continues to support scientific discovery by allowing free access to more than 250 years of leading research.From October 2011, our world-famous journal archive - comprising more than 69,000 articles - will be opened up and all articles more than 70 years old will be made permanently free to access.
kite
The Royal Society is the world's oldest scientific publisher and, as such, our archive is the most comprehensive in science. Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton's first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin's celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. Readers willing to delve a little deeper may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution - including Robert Boyle's account of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks 'without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.'
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After years of futility inside the classroom, Chicago Public Schools soon will adopt a more rigorous internal evaluation system that judges schools on how well they prepare students for college, a move that could lead to more school closings in the years ahead.This stricter method of evaluation promises to be an eye-opener for many parents, considering the current process used for years already paints a bleak picture of the district: 42 percent of schools -- 207 elementary and 76 high schools -- are on probation for low-academic performance and poor attendance.
Seventy-two schools have been on probation for five consecutive years, and 16 of them for 15 years in a row.
Approximately 123,000 students are in underperforming schools, officials said, prompting parents in large numbers to uproot their families for neighborhoods with better schools inside or outside the city. Maps presented to the school board Wednesday showed a correlation between some of the city's poorest-performing schools and schools that are most underenrolled.
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So here's a situation.A parent requested a conference with a teacher I know during conference time. This parent began yelling and gesticulating wildly during the conference, until the teacher asked the parent to leave. By the way, the teacher in question is so calm, he's practically a reincarnation of the Buddha. Parent stormed off and went to an administrator and made a bunch of wild claims about the teacher and then stormed out of the administrator's office.
So far, not all that unusual, right?
Here's where it gets interesting: the parent's kid approached the teacher a few days later, accused him of threatening the mother, and then threatened to attack the teacher. This was done IN FRONT OF WITNESSES.
Wow. Makes Race to the Top seem kind of insignificant and out-of-touch, doesn't it?
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Update: a reader asked about who pays for these audits and I mistakenly said the SAO. It turns out that the Legislature had passed a law for a hotline but had not funded it. For the first year, the SAO ate the cost for hotline investigations but could not sustain that cost. So if the State Auditor chooses to go forward with hotline requests (and I'm sure they don't follow-thru with all of them), it costs the district $83.60 per hour. (I just removed that "number of hours" as that is for the NEXT audit, not this special one.)On the one hand you could say, "Well, look at that money and the SAO found nothing illegal." On the other hand, you can look at this sad and sorry mess of a process and say that it sure doesn't look good or smell good. I'll have more to report on this after I read the SAO work product documents which I believe will make compelling reading.
End of update
A new low for reporting is the Times' article about the MLK, Jr. building sale.
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3 this week to approve the latest version of Senate Bill 22 (SB-22). The bill expands chartering authority to Wisconsin Cooperative Educational Service Agencies, and most importantly creates an independent statewide charter school authorizing board.The Good
I have blogged recently about the absurdity of Madison Prep having to get its education plan approved by the school board of a district that has proved incapable of effectively educating the very students Madison Prep seeks to serve. The state charter authorizing board would give startup charter schools like Madison Prep an authorizer option outside of their local school board. No longer would a resistant board be a brick wall for new charter schools.
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With the nation's student-loan debt approaching $1-trillion, and default rates at their highest level in a decade, President Obama is taking modest steps to ease students' debt burdens.Kelly Field & Kevin Helliker:Mr. Obama and administration officials announced changes this week that will reduce monthly payments for low-income borrowers and drop interest rates for students who consolidate into the government's direct-loan program.
The announcements--which came as the Occupy Wall Street protest stretched into its fifth week, fueled in part by borrowers with large educational debts and slim job prospects--were billed as a response to petitions urging the president to forgive student loans to stimulate the economy.
But the president's plan is a far cry from the kind of relief that the Wall Street protesters and other debtors are demanding, and it won't do a thing to address the roots of their repayment struggles: rising tuition and high unemployment.
Tuition and fees at the nation's four-year colleges climbed sharply again this year, though rising federal grants and loans took some of the sting out of the increases.At four-year public colleges, in-state tuition and fees for the school year beginning this fall rose by an average of 8.3% from the previous year, to $8,244, amid declining support from state legislatures, according to annual reports from the College Board, a nonprofit that conducts collegiate research. The total cost including room and board rose 6% to $17,131.
At private colleges, tuition and fees rose by an average of 4.5% to $28,500, as total costs including room and board jumped 4.4% to $38,589.
The markedly quicker rate of increase at public schools continues a decade-long trend that has narrowed the price gap between the two. This year, the average tuition-and-fees price of a four-year public college is 29% of the private-college price, compared with 22% a decade ago.
"While the importance of a college degree has never been greater, its rapidly rising price is an overwhelming obstacle to many students and families," said Gaston Caperton, College Board president.
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The Department has identified the following constituencies as having interests that are significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations. The Department plans to seat as negotiators individuals from organizations or groups representing these constituencies:
- Postsecondary students, including legal assistance organizations that represent students.
- Teachers.
- Financial aid administrators at postsecondary institutions.
- Business officers and bursars at postsecondary institutions.
- Admissions officers at postsecondary institutions.
- State officials, including officials with teacher preparation program approval agencies, State teacher licensing boards, higher education executive officers, chief State school officers, State attorneys general, and State data system administrators.
- Institutions that offer teacher preparation programs, including schools of education.
- Institutions of higher education eligible to receive Federal assistance under Title III, Parts A, B, and F, and Title V of the HEA, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian- Serving Institutions, Predominantly Black Institutions, and other institutions with a substantial enrollment of needy students as defined in Title III of the HEA.
- Two-year public institutions of higher education.
- Four-year public institutions of higher education.
- Private, non-profit institutions of higher education.
- Private, for-profit institutions of higher education.
- Operators of programs for alternative routes to teacher certification.
- Accrediting agencies.
- Students enrolled in elementary and secondary education, including parents of students enrolled in elementary and secondary education.
- School and local educational agency officials, including those responsible for hiring teachers and evaluating teacher performance.
The topics the committee is likely to address are as follows:
- The requirements for institutional and program report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(a) of the HEA);
- The requirements for State report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(b) of the HEA);
- The standards to ensure reliability, validity, and accuracy of the data submitted in report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(c) of the HEA);
- The criteria used by States to assess the performance of teacher preparation programs at higher education institutions in the State, the identification of low-performing programs (Section 207(a) of the HEA), and the consequences of a State's termination of eligibility of a program (Section 207(b) of the HEA);
- The definition of the term ''high quality teacher preparation program'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA);
- The definition of the term ''high quality professional development services'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA); and
- The service and repayment obligations for the TEACH Grant Program (Subpart E of 34 CFR 686).
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Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.
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In Calculus, we just finished our limits unit. I gave a test. It had a great question on it, inspired by Bowman and his limit activity.Without further ado, it reads:
Then I ask part (b)...
Which reads: "Scratch off the missing data. With the new information, now answer the question: What do you think the limit as x approaches 2 of the function is (and say "d.n.e." if it does not exist)? Explain why (talk about what a limit is!).
So then they get this...
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The State of California enrolls about 10 percent of the country's full-time students attending public four-year colleges, and about 15 percent of those at public two-year colleges. So when the state's public colleges have a big tuition hike--as they did this year--it has a big impact on the average tuition increase at public colleges across the country, says a new report from the College Board.For the fifth year in a row, the percentage increase in average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges was higher than it was at private ones, according to the report, "Trends in College Pricing 2011." The report, released on Wednesday, examines annual changes in colleges' sticker prices, as well as the net prices students pay after grant aid and tax benefits are considered. A companion report, "Trends in Student Aid 2011," looks at the money that helps students meet those growing prices. (The pricing report looks at data through this academic year, while the student-aid report has information through 2010-11.)
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For the many parents who are reeling from recent losses to their college-savings plans, insurers are pitching another option they claim can help: life insurance.Last week, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company launched a "Kids Take Charge" marketing campaign that promotes life insurance as a way to pay for college. Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America will roll out its latest campaign on life insurance as a college savings vehicle next month. Both firms join Illinois-based insurer Mutual Trust Financial Group, which this year has been promoting college savings as one of the main reasons to buy life insurance. In addition, insurance companies like National Life Group and Aviva USA have been encouraging their agents to talk about college planning and insurance with their clients.
While insurance companies have long touted whole life and universal polices as a back door way to finance college, experts say rarely have so many companies made such targeted pitches directly to parents. Why now? College savings plans have been hit hard by market losses over the past few months and low interest rates, say financial advisers, while tuition costs continue their steady rise. Insurers, they say, see a ready market in panicked parents.
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Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
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Thoughts of a Student Entrepreneur:
This jumped out to me after watching Steve Job's 2005 Stanford graduation speech; the biggest thing to make sure not to take for granted at college is how easy it is to meet so many different & amazing people. You get 4 years to live on a student campus full of dots waiting to be connected ( in the words of Steve ) you must take advantage of every possible moment to connect dots. Especially if you want to start a startup. Looking back I wish I would have hung out a ton more in the C.S. Lab instead of doing my comp sci hw in my dorm room lounge in between switching off games of call of duty with my roommates.I'm dying for an awesome co-founder right now!! More than anything, and it would have been awesome to be able to go to a college buddy with the same interests as I have. A college campus represents the easiest and most abundant source for finding a Co-Founder. Everything I've done until now I've done alone out of necessity b/c it's been extremely hard to find a good co-founder.
Don't take that barrier free access to tons of new friends & potential co-founders for granted!! That's my single most important advice to any college student that wants to start their own company. I took it for granted and it's making my startup career 100 times more difficult, trust me.
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Only one in four students who enter high school in New York City are ready for college after four years, and less than half enroll, according to the A-through-F high school report cards released on Monday.Those numbers, included for the first time in the report cards, confirmed what the state suggested several months ago: the city still has a long way to go to prepare students for successful experiences in college and beyond. And they were a signal that graduation rates, long used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as a validation of his education policies, were not as meaningful as they seemed.
"There's a huge change in life chances for kids who are successful in post-secondary education," the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said. "We really have a task to prepare kids for that, and the data is one of the most motivating tools."
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Is Denver going to follow in the footsteps of other reform minded urban school districts that saw momentum, change, and improvement fade away? Or will we be one of the few cities to sustain and even accelerate effective school reform?In less than two weeks, the most hotly contested and expensive school board race in the history of Colorado will come to an end. It looks like nearly $1 million will be spent by both sides in this election by the time Election Day arrives on November 1st.
Denver has a seven-person school board with four members currently supporting the Superintendent Tom Boasberg and a broad set of reforms while the remaining three board members have relied upon Diane Ravitch to try to thwart nearly every reform initiative. Needless to say, if two of the three seats go to anti-reform candidates, Boasberg will need to look for another job and the Colorado reform community is going to have to look to some other districts for bold leadership.
Denver has been the epicenter for reform in Colorado since Michael Bennet took the helm of Denver Public Schools (DPS). Most of the reforms, which were highlighted in Colorado's Race to the Top application and elsewhere, are dependent upon Denver leading the charge.
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Anne Arnesen, Barbara Arnold, Nan Brien and Carol Carstensen:
We applaud the Urban League's energy and persistence in identifying the significant achievement gap that remains in Madison schools. We welcome the fact that the Urban League has helped focus broader community discussion on this issue, and the need to serve more effectively and successfully African-American and Hispanic students. The achievement gap is real and must be addressed.While the Madison Preparatory Academy may provide a fine educational experience for 840 students, the Madison Metropolitan School District is charged with improving outcomes for more than 12,000 children of color. We may be better served by using our limited and diminishing resources:
1. To increase the number of students in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) by expanding this nationally proven and successful program, now in all four high schools, to lower grade levels. AVID is a college readiness system that accelerates learning for students in the academic middle who may not have a college tradition in their families. Ultimately, AVID uses research-based instructional strategies to increase academic performance schoolwide. East High, the first Madison school to implement AVID, has had two graduating classes. These graduates, who attend a variety of Wisconsin colleges and universities, are 90 percent students of color and 74 percent low income; 52 percent of these graduates speak a language other than English as their first language.
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I will not be working in the office Thursday. I have to care for my kids, two of whom, like lots of other Wisconsin public school students, have the day off.Why, you ask, are classes canceled on this entirely unremarkable Thursday the week before Halloween? On a day not set aside for any national holiday, nor part of any traditionally recognized vacation season, nor beset by record-breaking snowfall or some other natural cataclysm?
Well, because historically, a couple of consecutive weekdays in October have been something of a Wisconsin public schools-recognized holiday -- the traditional time for the annual convention of the statewide teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
I know what you're saying: "Don't be ridiculous. Teachers have two and a half months in the summer to hold their convention! Why wouldn't they have it then?"
And I hear you; an October teachers convention does defy logic. Yet, that's been the case until this year, when things managed to get even more illogical.
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via a kind Larry Winkler email.
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A recent SchoolBook article on the high teacher turnover at one of Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success Schools raises an important question in the debate over improving urban schools -- how can we stop corporate education reform's focus on "getting rid of bad teachers" from creating a level of instability in school staffing that hurts our city's students?The case of turnover in the Harlem Success schools is only the latest example of this issue, but it's a striking one. Over a third of the teachers at Harlem Success 3 have chosen to leave the school in the past few months, a decision Moskowitz describes as "frankly, unethical." At the same time, however, Moskowitz chooses to employ her staff with a policy of "at will employment" rather than a negotiated contract. Under this model, she and her principals have the right to terminate teachers' service at the school at any time, for any reason. In fact, Steven Brill's Class Warfare describes the case of one new teacher who was "forced out" only a few months into the school year when a young principal at Harlem Success decided she wasn't a "good fit" for the school.
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It was the kind of memo that high school students would dream of getting, if they dreamed in memos.Lisa Waller, director of the high school at Dalton, a famously rigorous private school on the Upper East Side, sent a letter to parents this summer announcing that tests and papers would be staggered to make sure students did not become overloaded. January midterms would be pushed back two weeks so students would not have to study during vacation.
Across town at the Trinity School, another of Manhattan's elite academies, the administration has formed a task force to examine workload, and the upper school, grades 9 to 12, has been trying ways to coordinate test-taking with papers, labs and other projects.
Horace Mann School, in the Bronx, opened a tutoring center this year to help students manage their work. Hunter College High School, which has a tough admissions exam, is for the first time this year offering homework holidays, on Halloween, the Chinese New Year (Jan. 23) and a day nearer spring, March 14.
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I get a ton of mail because of this blog, for the most part it is lots of fun and I really enjoy it. The thing that I don't enjoy is when people ask me if they should drop out of school or university to 'start their own business', typically accompanied by some minimal description of their circumstances.Of course it's my own fault, putting up a guide on how to run a small software consultancy business makes it look fairly easy and exciting compared to being in school or secondary education. Another reason is that I've documented that I (successfully) dropped out of school but circumstances have changed dramatically since then.
I landed on my feet but that's absolutely no guarantee. It was blood, sweat and tears and an uncommon dose of luck. At first I worked a crappy physical job, and from there I somehow found my way into being a professional programmer which in turn led to my first business. At the time anybody that could hold a keyboard without dropping it was making money hand over fist (because microcomputers were so new there was hardly any software for it, and there were hardly any people that knew how to write such software) but it was *still* hard work.
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When it comes to public-sector pensions, writes lead author Michael B. Lafferty in Fordham's newest report, "A major public-policy (and public-finance) problem has been defined and measured, debated and deliberated, but not yet solved. Except where it has been." As recounted in Halting a Runaway Train: Reforming Teacher Pensions for the 21st Century, these exceptions turn out to be revealing--and encouraging. As leaders around the country struggle to overhaul America's controversial and precarious public-sector pensions, this study draws on examples from diverse fields to provide a primer on successful pension reform. Download to find valuable lessons for policymakers, workers, and taxpayers looking for timely solutions to a dire problem.The complete report can be downloaded here.
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Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
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On Wednesday night at Oakland Technical High School, the Oakland school board votes on a staff resolution to close five elementary schools, Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe. But the board is expected to be presented with another downsizing proposal, too: The faculties at two other schools, ASCEND and Learning Without Limits, have voted to secede from OUSD and operate those schools as independently run charters.You can read more about it here. That story will be in Tuesday's Tribune. (And here is a link to a Sunday story about school closures.)
District staff estimate the budget shrinks by roughly $5,500 for each student who leaves OUSD (additional funds, such as the parcel tax, go to the district regardless of its enrollment/attendance). The enrollment of the two elementary schools adds up to about 800 -- which means the district's budget could take a hit of more than $4 million at the same time the administration is trying to save $2 million by closing schools.
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While a small number of cynics out there still argue that classroom teachers are not really an important ingredient in a child's overall education recipe, one of the most important developments in K-12 education policy in the last few years has been the recognition that decades-old teacher evaluations (where the best a child can hope for is a 'satisfactory' teacher over an 'unsatisfactory' teacher) aren't up for the task of recognizing which teachers are hitting the ball out of the park with their students.At DFER, we've long believed that the widespread irrelevance of excellence itself in the K-12 world has created a culture that has actively done damage to the lives of too many children who deserved much, much better from our nation's most important public institution.
But there have been a lot of positive developments in this area of late. There's obviously a long way to go, and surely some of what has been done to-date will need to be changed/enhanced/expanded, but we are clearly closer to a day where the link between teaching and learning is more clear in workplace evaluations for educators. (And we continue to hope and believe that this will usher in a new era where successful teachers are treated more like the community heroes that we believe they are.)
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Chicago charter schools could soon receive financial incentives similar to those being offered to city elementary schools that vote to lengthen the school day.The Chicago Board of Education will vote on a resolution Wednesday that would create a $4.4 million grant fund for charter schools that choose to extend their day. Individual schools would eligible to receive $75,000 and individual teacher stipends of $800. Roughly 42 schools will be awarded money under the program, which Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Becky Carroll estimated will cost about $6 million.
Carroll told the Chicago News Cooperative in September that charter schools would not be included in the city's longer day incentive program, which has been one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's signature education initiatives. She said the decision to incorporate charters followed "an organic conversation" between CPS and charter operators and is about ensuring "equity in the system."
The move to include charter schools is the latest salvo in the fight between the district and the Chicago Teachers Union over the length of the school day.
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An independent charter school program would expand to medium and large school districts around Wisconsin, under a bill passed Wednesday by Republicans on the Legislature's budget committee.The proposal passed 12-3 on a party-line vote, with Republicans voting in favor and Democrats voting against.
The bill would take an independent charter school program currently operating in only Milwaukee and Racine and extend it statewide to districts with more than 2,000 students. That would apply to roughly a quarter of the state's districts.
Republicans said it would help provide another options for students whose schools are failing them.
"The bill we are taking up today is truly something that is going to help the long-term prospects of Wisconsin," said Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington), a co-chairman of the committee.
But Democrats said that the program would undermine local control of schools by elected officials in favor of an unelected board. They said the proposal could also prove another financial blow to regular public schools that are losing nearly $800 million in state aid over two years as part of the state budget and having tight state caps placed on their property tax levies.
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) reports today on the 10.3% local tax levy increase in Milwaukee attributable to the Milwaukee school choice program. Because the choice program is not a taxing authority, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) levy is used as a fiscal agent to pay 34% of the total cost of the MPCP. As I've noted before, the levy used to pay for choice does not lower the actual total revenue MPS receives.There are two reasons for the increase in the MPCP levy this year. First, the local share of the cost of the choice program increased from 30% in 2010-11 to 34% this year due to a reduction in state poverty aid used to offset the MPCP levy. The second and more important reason, which Erin Richards focuses on in her MJS article, is the increase in choice program enrollment. The Department of Public Instruction estimates 22,400 Milwaukee students are using choice this year, up from about 20,300 last year. The rise is a direct result of changes in the 2011-13 state budget that raised income eligibility requirements for participating students and allowed suburban schools to enroll Milwaukee pupils through the program.
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Julian R. Betts and Y. Emily Tang via a kind Deb Britt email:
Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?
Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth- based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.Focusing on math and reading scores, the authors find compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects. However, important exceptions include elementary school reading and middle school math and reading, where evidence suggests no negative effects of charter schools and, in some cases, evidence of positive effects. Meta-analytic methods are used to obtain overall estimates on the effect of charter schools on reading and math achievement. The authors find an overall effect size for elementary school reading and math of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively, and for middle school math of 0.055. Effects are not statistically meaningful for middle school reading and for high school math and reading. Studies that focus on urban areas tend to find larger effects than do studies that examine wider areas. Studies of KIPP charter middle schools suggest positive effects of 0.096 and 0.223 for reading and math respectively. New York City and Boston charter schools also appeared to deliver achievement gains larger than charter schools in most other locations. A lack of rigorous studies in many parts of the nation limits the ability to extrapolate.
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Charter schools provide plenty of compelling news. Often the coverage is of great schools producing amazing outcomes for kids. But too often the stories are more tragic or sordid. A school's governing board becomes mired in dysfunctional arguments; a school's students are performing badly on state tests for several years running; somebody absconds with money; or a student with disabilities is discouraged from enrolling in a school.Facing these unfortunate circumstances, a person is likely to shout, "Somebody should do something!" The outraged observer is correct. Generally, the "somebody" that ought to act is a charter school authorizer. Strong charter school authorizers screen initial applicants to avoid future failures. They also implement practices that respect each school's autonomy while also protecting against abuses and ensuring that floundering schools close. Twenty years into the charter school movement, it appears that it will be difficult to hold all charter schools accountable unless we start to hold authorizers accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities.
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UNESCO Institute for Statistics, via a kind Kris Olds email:
Two out of three children in Africa are left out of secondary schoolThe complete report is available here (PDF).
Governments are struggling to meet the rising demand for secondary education, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are enough school places for just 36% of children of age to enrol, according the latest edition of the Global Education Digest.
Globally, secondary schools have been accommodating almost one hundred million more students each decade, with the total number growing by 60% between 1990 and 2009. But the supply is dwarfed by demand as more countries approach universal primary education.
In 2009, 88% of children enrolled in primary school reached the last grade of this level of education, compared to 81%. Yet, in 20 countries -- mostly in sub-Saharan Africa -- a child in the last grade of primary school has a 75% chance at best of making the transition to lower secondary school.
The path to prosperity
"There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education. This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today's globalized world. It is going to take ambition and commitment to meet this challenge. But it is the only path towards prosperity," said UNESCO's Director-General Irina Bokova.
"An educated population is a country's greatest wealth," she added. "The inequalities signalled in this Report, especially in relation to girls' exclusion from secondary education in many countries, have enormous implications for the achievement of all the internationally agreed development goals, from child and maternal health and HIV prevention to environmental security."
In terms of enrolment, sub-Saharan Africa has made the greatest gains of all regions, with gross enrolment ratios rising from 28% to 43% for lower secondary and from 20% to 27% for upper secondary education between 1999 and 2009. Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never spend a day in school.
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With increasing pressure over the last decade to improve student achievement, a growing body of research highlights the crucial role school principals play in creating good environments for learning.But in Minnesota, there is no uniform method to evaluate the state's roughly 1,700 principals. That's about to change, due to a law passed this summer, and a group of educators who will develop the evaluation criteria and method.
In the state education budget that passed this summer was a requirement that every principal be evaluated starting the 2013 school year. The law also lays out what must be measured.
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At Nicolet Union High School, science teacher Karyl Rosenberg keeps the evaluations she's received over the past 21 years in neat files: one for each of her first three years of probationary teaching, and one every third year after that.So far this year, she's been observed twice briefly by a principal. But how she will be formally evaluated in years to come is still unclear.
That's because many districts across the state, including Nicolet, are developing new systems for measuring teacher performance that aim to better distinguish superior educators from those who are average or below par. They will likely use student achievement growth as one measure of performance, and the results of the evaluation may help administrators decide whom to promote, dismiss or provide with more targeted help.
Research continues to show that the most significant in-school factor to improve student performance is teacher effectiveness, but Wisconsin districts such as Nicolet have been spurred to action by another factor: the Act 10 legislation signed by Gov. Scott Walker.
The legislation has dramatically limited collective bargaining in about two-thirds of the state's districts so far, and it allows for pay structures and staffing decisions based on factors other than seniority. But for quality rather than years of experience to be used as a determining factor in such decisions, administrators need an accurate tool to assess it.
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On Oct. 24, a Spokesman-Review reporter called me to talk about education. Over five years of education advocacy, this was the second phone call I've received from a SR reporter.Related: asking questions.The first call came Oct. 13, after I submitted a Letter to the Editor about the formal complaint I filed Sept. 28 with the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC). This PDC complaint concerns Spokane Public Schools and school board candidate Deana Brower. Reporter Jody Lawrence-Turner called me to ask for a copy of the complaint.
On Monday, Lawrence-Turner called again as I was driving home with my daughter and a student I'm tutoring. Before I talked with Lawrence-Turner, I confirmed that we were having a conversation that was NOT on the record. Having confirmed that, I talked with her about various education-related topics.
This is the article that showed up in the paper today: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/oct/25/caign-limit-trend-shifts-to-smaller-races
If Lawrence-Turner wonders why I asked if our conversation was off the record, all she needs to do is look at her articles. Gee, do you think The Spokesman-Review and Lawrence-Turner want Brower to win the school board election? I offered my entire blog to Lawrence-Turner, the information in it, and the links to district emails - and this is what she wrote. It looks to me like yet another slanted article with unsupported insinuations regarding school board candidate Sally Fullmer and a local community member, and with an accompanying free pass for opponent Brower.
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The first edition of this book appeared in 1946. Eight translations were made of it, and there were numerous paperback editions. In a paperback of 1961, a new chapter was added on rent control, which had not been specifically considered in the first edition apart from government price-fixing in general. A few statistics and illustrative references were brought up to date.Otherwise no changes were made until now. The chief reason was that they were not thought necessary. My book was written to emphasize general economic principles, and the penalties of ignoring them-not the harm done by any specific piece of legislation. While my illustrations were based mainly on American experience, the kind of government interventions I deplored had become so internationalized that I seemed to many foreign readers to be particularly describing the economic policies of their own countries.
Nevertheless, the passage of thirty-two years now seems to me to call for extensive revision. In addition to bringing all illustrations and statistics up to date, I have written an entirely new chapter on rent control; the 1961 discussion now seems inadequate. And I have added a new final chapter, "The Lesson After Thirty Years," to show why that lesson is today more desperately needed than ever.
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A Minnesota school district must report to the federal government any future allegations of harassment against Somali students as part of a tentative agreement to end a civil rights investigation, the district's superintendent said Monday.St. Cloud Superintendent Bruce Watkins said all but the final details of the agreement had been reached with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. The deal up for board approval Thursday night requires that the district make its schools more welcoming to Somalis; it finds that the district broke no federal rules in handling previous incidents, Watkins said.
An Oklahoma school district is facing a lawsuit for allegedly forbidding organizers of a Christian club from promoting events on campus."This is a simple matter of a school district targeting a Christian organization," said Matt Sharp, an attorney representing the "Kids for Christ," a community-led Christian group suing the Owasso Public Schools.
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What bullied child or parent of a bullied child has not longed for a school where the quirky kid is safely welcomed instead of shunned, his or her unique talents encouraged instead of rejected?Such a place -- The Alliance School in Milwaukee -- not only exists but won top honors as Wisconsin Charter School of the Year at an awards ceremony Oct. 21 at the Discovery Center in Milwaukee.
The Alliance School is a publicly funded charter school in downtown Milwaukee. It provides a safe haven for 165 students, in sixth through 12th grade, about half of whom identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.
The majority of students at Alliance say they have suffered from bullying at previous schools, many of them taunted with homophobic slurs whether they are gay or not.
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If you want to tell if someone is a good driver, you watch them drive. If you want to tell if someone is a good teacher, watch them teach. When it comes to evaluating teachers, the further from the classroom you get, the weaker the measure is.There's no doubt about it - high-quality evaluation systems for teachers and principals help students and schools. Our union of educators has called for consistent evaluations for years - and even advanced our own proposal back in January. We have been one of many voices on the State Superintendent's Educator Effectiveness Design Team, which is near to releasing a comprehensive evaluation framework.
The education community knows what works: professional development, consistent and thorough classroom observation and using results to help good educators become great.
It was troubling, then, when last week the state Senate voted to advance a bill to tie teacher discipline - even firing - to students' Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) test scores.
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A much-heralded cap on property taxes championed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is encountering resistance as some communities across New York chafe at what amounts to a restriction on their spending and seek to exempt themselves from the new limits.The communities, which include affluent New York City suburbs and rural communities near the border with Canada, are declaring that they cannot restrain the growth of property taxes and still comply with a variety of state-mandated programs and provide the services residents expect. And now dozens of town and county boards are overriding, or proposing to override, the cap.
"We should be able to dictate our own financial future," said Lee V. A. Roberts, the supervisor in the Westchester County town of Bedford, where the Town Board has already voted to grant itself a waiver from the cap.
The Legislature approved the tax cap in late June, an effort to limit the annual growth of local property taxes to 2 percent or the rate of inflation. After that measure passed, Mr. Cuomo vowed that it would "provide much-needed relief" from rising taxes, and he was so proud of the law that he signed it six times, once in his office and five times on the front lawns of houses in high-tax communities.
The Madison School Board unanimously adopted the 2011-12 district budget and tax levy on Monday, saving the average Madison homeowner $2.74 over their 2010-11 property tax bill.Ally Boutelle:The $372 million budget requires the district to levy slightly more than $245 million in taxes, down 0.03 percent, or about $62,000, from last year's levy.
The district gets more than $40 million in state funding and more than $10 million in federal funding. The rest of the budget gap is filled by student fees, special education funding and small-class-size funding, said Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Erik Kass.
Superintendent Dan Nerad's $3.5 million spending recommendations were amended into the adopted budget, but Kass said $2.5 million of that amount was reallocated money that already was built into June's preliminary budget.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad has proposed about $3.5 million in additional spending on top of the school district's current budget for 2012.Matthew DeFour:MMSD spokesperson Ken Syke said about $2.5 million of that money will come from sources previously unaccounted for, but income taxes in the City of Madison may need to be upped to cover the remaining additions.
"$1.6 million of that [money] became available because of debt defeasance, and $937,000 of it is coming from revenue from a Medicaid time study," he said.
In addition to the newly available $2.5 million, the district has introduced a recommendation for a total of $1,034,935 in additional funding for school maintenance programs, a statement issued by the district said.
The Madison School Board is considering about $3.5 million in additional spending proposals before it sets its 2011-12 budget and property tax levy Monday night.The new spending proposed by Superintendent Dan Nerad would come on top of the $369 million budget approved in June.
For an average Madison home valued at $239,239, the new spending would mean $28.71 more than what the board approved in June, for a December bill of $2,665.12. The school tax bill on the average home still would decline $2.74.
Nerad proposed the new spending because of additional revenue identified by the district since the board voted in June. The net result of the new spending and revenue would be a property tax levy that is about the same as the 2010-11 school year.
Much more on the Madison School District's 2011-2012 $372,000,000 budget, here.
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The movie event, including the popcorn, was sponsored by Vos, who co-chairs the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee -- and owns a popcorn company.Co-sponsors were Education Committee Chairs Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, and Rep. Steve Kestell, R-Elkhart Lake. Olsen is one of the lead sponsors of the charter authorizing bill, introduced in the Legislature last spring and currently before the Joint Finance Committee.
Panelists for the discussion included Gov. Scott Walker's policy director, Kimber Liedl; the president of Milwaukee-based St. Anthony School, Zeus Rodriguez; the Urban League of Greater Madison's charter school development consultant, Laura DeRoche-Perez; and a former president of Madison Teachers Inc., Mike Lipp, who is currently the athletic director at West High School.
There were also a number of panelists who were invited but did not attend, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad, state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts and a representative from WEAC, the state's largest teachers union.
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Most area schools will be closed Thursday and Friday, but with the annual teachers union convention canceled districts are considering whether to do away with the mid-semester break in the future.Many school districts had already set their calendars for this year by the time the Wisconsin Education Association Council announced in May it would cancel its fall convention.
But Sun Prairie and McFarland have decided to hold classes next year on the days previously set aside for the WEAC convention. Others, including Cambridge, Belleville and DeForest, are thinking about doing the same.
"Early indications are people would favor having regular classes on those days to reduce breaks in instruction for students," DeForest Superintendent Jon Bales said. "It also allows for the addition of makeup snow days at the end of the year without going too far into the month of June."
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The annual state teachers union convention that has traditionally meant a two-day school holiday at the end of October is off this year, leaving public school districts with decisions about how to schedule students and teachers.The Wisconsin Education Association Council canceled the convention, which would have been Thursday and Friday this week, after changes in state law weakened the union and its local affiliates.
Without the certainty of having input into school calendars through the negotiations process, members could not guarantee that they could all get the days off from school, said WEAC President Mary Bell, who added that the convention was "the flagship piece of professional development that we provided for members."
Some school districts, with their calendars already set before the convention was called off, are keeping the school holiday for students but bringing teachers in for training or other activities. Others, such as Waukesha, are keeping the holiday and treating it as two unpaid days for teachers.
The Brown Deer School District scheduled classes.
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Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale."People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.
Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.
Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.
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The Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., is a public charter school. It must hold a random lottery when it has more applicants than vacancies. It is not supposed to be selective.Yet somehow its average SAT score has risen to the top 10th of 1 percent nationally. Less than 10 percent of its students are from low-income families, compared with 40 percent in its city. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the school is allowed to ask (not require, it emphasizes) that every family donate $3,000 and 40 hours of volunteer time a year.
As a supporter of the charter school movement, I get grief from people who say that charters -- independent public schools using tax dollars -- are private schools in disguise. They are almost always wrong about that, but there are enough Pacific Collegiate situations to make me wonder whether the rules need revision.
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For some of us, it was Spock. For others, a humiliating performance as a pilgrim in the kindergarten musical. For me, it was William Blake's relentless (and beautiful) attacks on Reason. But everyone at some point encounters - and many of us swallow - the dangerous notion that creativity and calculation are irreconcilable enemies.This perspective lives at the very heart of our school curricula from first grade through graduate school, as our talents are identified and we, complicit in the scheme, label ourselves 'artistic' or 'sporty' or 'scientific.' No doubt there are real, epigenetic differences in the way people think and see the world, but in epigenesis lies the key: Nature gives us talents, but nurture determines how we use them, and how mono or multidimensional our minds become.
Like many quants - the mathematicians whose equations shape high-stakes decision making on Wall Street - Emanuel Derman arrived on Wall Street with little knowledge of economic theory. Unlike many of his colleagues, though, he had a background in theoretical physics, a field in which imagination and mathematics are happy bedfellows. From 1990-2000, Derman led Goldman Sachs' Quantitative Strategies group, presiding over the rise of mathematical modeling as the engine driving financial betting on Wall Street.
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Armed with tote bags for the handouts awaiting them, thousands of Chicago parents shuffled through display tables adorned with brightly colored posters as they faced the daunting task of selecting schools for their children.For many parents, the school fair, put on by the Neighborhood Parents Network, is their first encounter with the public school system. It is timed to coincide with the opening of the district's admissions process, which ends in December. Many parents hope to place their children in the growing number of charter, magnet and selective-enrollment elementary schools."If you hang out with parents of 4-year-olds, the conversation never stops," said Christine Whitley, a Chicago Public Schools parent. "That's all they talk about: 'Where are you sending your child to school?' "
As choosing a school becomes increasingly complicated, some entrepreneurial parents, including Ms. Whitley, have started small consulting businesses aimed at helping parents navigate the admission process. But some observers have raised concerns about the potential for parents to game the system.
The district has 482 elementary schools, multiple application forms and five specialty school options in addition to the neighborhood elementary schools: gifted, classical, magnet, magnet cluster and charter. Magnet, magnet cluster and charter schools select students largely through a computerized lottery, but gifted and classical require admission tests for children at age 4 because the schools offer an accelerated curriculum.
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ON the night of Sept. 8, Gina M. Raimondo, a financier by trade, rolled up here with news no one wanted to hear: Rhode Island, she declared, was going broke.Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But if current trends held, Ms. Raimondo warned, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.
It is not the sort of message you might expect from Ms. Raimondo, a proud daughter of Providence, a successful venture capitalist and, not least, the current general treasurer of Rhode Island. But it is a message worth hearing. The smallest state in the union, it turns out, has a very big debt problem.
After decades of drift, denial and inaction, Rhode Island's $14.8 billion pension system is in crisis. Ten cents of every state tax dollar now goes to retired public workers. Before long, Ms. Raimondo has been cautioning in whistle-stops here and across the state, that figure will climb perilously toward 20 cents. But the scary thing is that no one really knows. The Providence Journal recently tried to count all the municipal pension plans outside the state system and stopped at 155, conceding that it might have missed some. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions, including the big one: Are these numbers for real?
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Earlier this year, I said educators should try eliminating grade-level courses in high school and move everyone into honors or AP courses. Did I think anyone would actually do that? No.Wrong again. As some upset e-mailers have been telling me, the Anne Arundel County schools are going ahead with such a plan, in a slapdash way made worse by not preparing parents for the change.
Karen Colburn, who has a seventh-grader at Central Middle School in Edgewater, said her advanced-track son found himself in mixed math and English classes slowed to a crawl so non-honors students could catch up. "Kids are repeating things they learned in elementary school," Colburn said. "Also, supports are not in place for special education children and some standard-level children."
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SPRINGFIELD ---- Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.
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In the end it couldn't have come as any great shock when the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of a Muslim school teacher who claimed that the board of her Illinois school district was guilty of religious bias. Nor could it have come as any surprise that the Board of Education, Berkeley School District 87 Cook Country Illinois, was finally forced to settle the case brought against it by the DOJ. Still, even Americans accustomed to the relentless -- more precisely the relentlessly selective -- political correctness of the Obama Justice Department had to have been startled at the facts of this case and the deranged notions of equity that had impelled Eric Holder's DOJ to go rushing into battle against the school district.The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.
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The White House describes the changes:Today, the Obama Administration announced it is taking steps to increase college affordability by making it easier to manage student loan debt. The announcement is part of a series of executive actions to put Americans back to work and strengthen the economy because we can't wait for Congressional Republicans to act.The Administration is moving forward with a new "Pay As You Earn" proposal that will reduce monthly payments for more than one and a half million current college students and borrowers. Starting in 2014, borrowers will be able to reduce their monthly student loan payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income. But President Obama realizes that many students need relief sooner than that. The new "Pay As You Earn" proposal will allow about 1.6 million students the ability to cap their loan payments at 10 percent starting next year, and the plan will forgive the balance of their debt after 20 years of payments. Additionally, starting this January an estimated 6 million students and recent college graduates will be able to consolidate their loans and reduce their interest rates. ...
Current law allows borrowers to limit their loan payments to 15 percent of their discretionary income and forgives all remaining debt after 25 years. However, few students know about this option. Students can find out if they are currently eligible for IBR at www.studentaid.ed.gov/ibr. Last year, the President proposed, and Congress enacted, a plan to further ease student loan debt payment by lowering the IBR loan payment to 10 percent of income, and the forgiveness timeline to 20 years. This change is set to go into effect for all new borrowers after 2014--mostly impacting future college students.
In the realm of economic stimulus proposals, none is as audacious, as Machiavellian, and as transparently designed to buy the votes of a critical electoral demographic than the proposal to forgive all student loans. Even if it fails, as it likely will, the seamless coordination between members of Congress, leftist advocacy groups, and the media to try to sell this idea is a perfect example of how brilliantly certain factions play their hand in the high-stakes game of crafting the dominant political narrative.Launched into the teeth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where unemployable art history majors share tents with urine soaked street bums, Rep. Hansen Clark's (D-Mich) bill to forgive outstanding student loans is finding strong resonance among young people who want their voices heard. Those protesting bailouts are now shouting, "I Want Mine."
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Echo Lau drove to Whitney High School on a recent Monday evening to pick up her kids. She left with dinner.The student parking lot at the Cerritos campus is transformed every week into a congested food truck stop as eight mobile eateries attract the business of loyal followers, parents and students.
But this isn't a typical stop for these catering trucks; this is a school fundraiser, in which a portion of the proceeds go directly to Whitney to help pay for a new multi-media center.
Outdoor food courts are popping up in the parking lots of at least a dozen high schools across Southern California with more on the way. Financially strapped public schools -- hit hard by budget cuts, new fundraising guidelines, and fewer donors -- have found a way to capitalize on the food truck craze.
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Last week I walked into West High School for the first time since our daughter, Kate, graduated in 2001.Related: Madison School District maintenance referendums.I'd been warned I might be taken aback by how much the place had changed in a decade. But in fact, I had the opposite reaction. Based on my few hours there, it doesn't seem to have changed much at all.
It had the same delightful, eclectic, intellectual vibe and ethnic diversity one would expect at the public high school located nearest the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Its student body of 2,100 -- largest of the city's four high schools -- hails from 55 countries. It routinely has more semifinalists for National Merit Scholarships, 26 last year, than any school in Wisconsin.
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The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don't mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
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Terra Snider, via a kind JH Snider email:
Considerable research confirms the relationship between school start times, sleep deprivation, and student performance, truancy, and absenteeism, as well as depression, mood swings, impulse control, tobacco and alcohol use, impaired cognitive function and decision-making, obesity, stimulant abuse, automobile accidents, and suicide. Mounting evidence about the biology of adolescent sleep, and about the impact of later start times, shows that starting school before 8 a.m. not only undermines academic achievement but endangers health and safety. Because logistical and financial issues prevent local school systems from establishing safe and educationally defensible hours, however, federal legislation mandating start times consistent with student health and educational well-being is essential.Terra Snider:
As the parent of two former and one current Severna Park High School student, I've been living with the issue of early high school start times for years. Although the consensus of scientific opinion is that teenagers (and young adults) would be better off if school hours were better aligned with their biological clocks, the possibility of changing school hours inevitably sparks raging controversy, both here and across the country.Changing school hours costs money, and we all know school systems don't have a lot of that on hand. It also means changing the way we do things, and most of us don't like doing that much either. On the other hand, Moses didn't come down from Mount Sinai with commandments that schools must start at 7:17 a.m. and end at 2:05 p.m.
Surely if we know students learn better, and are healthier and safer, with different hours, we should make that our number one priority. Shouldn't we?
The Severna Park High School CAC (and the now defunct countywide CAC) have been working on the issue of high school start time for years, decades even - to no avail. Many of us have become convinced that the only solution to the problem is a national mandate. That's why I created a petition on We the People on WhiteHouse.gov, a new platform that allows anyone to create and sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues.
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I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook -- invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don't have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren't traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
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Parents of infants and toddlers should limit the time their children spend in front of televisions, computers, self-described educational games and even grown-up shows playing in the background, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned on Tuesday. Video screen time provides no educational benefits for children under age 2 and leaves less room for activities that do, like interacting with other people and playing, the group said.The recommendation, announced at the group's annual convention in Boston, is less stringent than its first such warning, in 1999, which called on parents of young children to all but ban television watching for children under 2 and to fill out a "media history" for doctor's office visits. But it also makes clear that there is no such thing as an educational program for such young children, and that leaving the TV on as background noise, as many households do, distracts both children and adults.
"We felt it was time to revisit this issue because video screens are everywhere now, and the message is much more relevant today that it was a decade ago," said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the lead author of the academy's policy, which appears in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics.
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Some of the states rejected for federal "Race to the Top" education grants are proceeding to revamp their school systems anyway -- in some cases more ambitiously than states that won.Colorado, for example, is moving forward with a new system tying teacher and principal reviews to student performance. That sort of linkage is central to the Race to the Top program. "We've had dramatic changes," says Mike Johnston, a Democratic state senator who sponsored the legislation creating the new system. Johnston says losing out on the federal grant "was more of an opportunity to lay out our plan for reform."
Colorado is one of six states -- along with Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and South Carolina -- that achieved finalist status in the first two rounds of the U.S. Education Department's $4 billion Race to the Top competition but walked away empty-handed.
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This summer I moved back to my boyhood house in San Mateo, California, after 48 years living elsewhere, mostly on the east coast and in China. My California-born wife and I are Golden State chauvinists of the sentimental kind. We have framed orange crate labels on our walls. We choke up when we hear "California Dreamin'" on the radio.San Mateo looked pretty much the same. But I found I wasn't recapturing the simpler days of my youth. When I started reconnecting with favorite spots like my old high school, I encountered complexities and advances I had not expected, particularly after the many headlines about California in decline.
The little house where I grew up on Voelker Drive still has no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, and no air-conditioning. But my brother Jim, the computer teacher at Baywood Elementary School, set up a Wi-Fi system and satellite TV. I felt up-to-date until I visited my alma mater, Hillsdale High School, a sprawling campus two blocks away on Alameda de las Pulgas.
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I notice that last summer Karl Smith asked "Why Are There Short People?" His logic is pretty good, except for the fact that the fitness variation seems to be much starker in males than females (there is some evidence I've seen that shorter women can be more fertile, though that's balanced by the fact that larger women seem to be able to manage gestation better). In any case, height seems to be a fitness enhancing trait which is highly heritable, and yet the variation in height remains!
Karl's readers offered some reasons. What do you think? Mind you, something which immediately comes to mind is that the logic presented for why everyone should be tall and vary only a touch is logic. Not all the assumptions need to hold. For example, has the advantage to height been invariant at all times and places? I have posited for example that the fact that humans became smaller after the Ice Age may have something to do with increased morbidity and declining mortality, where agricultural settlements "hugged" the Malthusian boundary more consistently than hunter-gatherers. In this sort of environment smaller individuals may have gained a fitness advantage because they required fewer resources to make it through the inevitable "starving times."*
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Milwaukee school board member Terrence Falk this week points out a looming budget disaster for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS): underfunded legacy costs. It is an issue we have followed here at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Unfortunately Falk sees fit to blame the Milwaukee school choice program for an issue rooted in collective bargaining agreements struck over fifteen years before the choice program began. Falk writes:"Much of the problem directly relates to the impact of the choice or voucher program. The funding voucher flaw was partly fixed under the previous Democratic state administration, and it helped place our books more in balance. In addition, if all the students who left MPS for suburbs and private schools were still in MPS, the school system would have far fewer problems in supporting these retirees. But the new expansion of the voucher program and the state funding cuts make the long term viability of this school district perilous."Blaming the choice program makes little sense. What Falk calls the funding voucher flaw does not cost MPS revenue.
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Finland is dominating my educational radar screen.When I read Linda Darling Hammond's excellent "The Flat World and Education" (2010) a few months ago, her description of "The Finnish Success Story" fascinated me. Watching the film American Teacher last month, the most hopeful piece of information for me was that in Finland teaching is the most admired job by college students. In the Q and A that followed a local showing of the movie, questions and comments about the Finnish system dominated. A few days later The Answer Sheet reprinted a compelling letter from Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier reporting on her visit to Finland and on the Finnish system of education. Finland. Finland. Finland.
And now comes a book by Pasi Sahlberg, the leading authority on Finland's educational reform strategy, "Finnish Lessons," to be published next month by Teachers College Press. A former teacher, leader of professional development for the Ministry of Education and then with the World Bank, where he wrote a definitive report on Finnish education, Sahlberg is now the leader of one of Finland's major organizations in the field of innovation.
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A tragedy of American politics is that civil rights groups like the NAACP oppose education reform, even as reform's main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans. The latest evidence comes in a study showing that black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools.The California Charter Schools Association looked at the state's Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that the average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data.
In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.
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America's schoolteachers are some of the most brilliant, driven and highly skilled people working today--exactly the kind of people we want shaping young minds. But they are stuck in a system that doesn't treat them like professionals.In most workplaces, there is an implicit bargain: Employees get the support they need to excel at their jobs, and employers build a system to evaluate their performance. The evaluations yield information that employees use to improve--and that employers use to hold employees accountable for results.
At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not. Teachers don't work in anything like this kind of environment, and they want a new bargain.
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After a bleak State of the Schools Report was released Wednesday by Nebraska's Department of Education, many are wondering what needs to be changed in our schools to improve student scores. One special Omaha Public Schools teacher is not discouraged.The Nebraska Teacher of the Year was awarded Tuesday at Liberty Elementary School at 20th and St. Mary. She has been a kindergarten teacher there for the past eight years. Despite the report, which some would say is disappointing, Luisa Palomo has a lot of hope for our students.
Palomo made her first official address under her new title Thursday at UNO to high school students interested in becoming future educators. "I did not see it coming, but I'm thrilled, I'm thrilled that I get to share the good things that are happening at our school and in Omaha with people around the country."
Some of the alarming statistics outlined in the report show that Nebraska is falling behind, particularly in math scores. Palomo says steps are being taken to improve Nebraska's education scores, including here in Omaha.
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Excerpt from Mikhail Zinshteyn's article:As the Senate moves forward with Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) bill to overhaul U.S. K-12 education, with a greater emphasis coming on the side of local control and funding flexibility, states are still shouldering federal expectations that aren't expected to go away any time soon.
Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government -- even as the country moves beyond NCLB -- and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.
One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on "billions" spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.
Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement -- a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.
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The age-old tension between federal authority and states' rights is back in a big way in this year's presidential campaign, with Republican candidates taking the let-the-states-handle-it position on everything from environmental regulation to health-care reform.Now President Barack Obama's education policy, a rare bipartisan winner, may also be headed back to the states, which were collectively responsible in recent years for dumbing down standards, ignoring obvious failure and otherwise jeopardizing the whole future of the country.
With the support of Republicans, Obama over the past three years has moved aggressively to set high education standards from Washington and let states and localities figure out how to meet them. But now the Tea Party is pushing Republicans to abolish the Department of Education and resist any federal "intrusions" into education.
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Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration's offering states waivers to the law's key provisions."Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on," Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. "It gave us a sense of urgency."
Mr. Harkin's committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington's role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee's ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it "a good compromise bill" that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.
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To note; again, not hugely comprehensive but a look at what the basic history is of charter schools. I think the history can best be summed up by saying the charter schools idea started as one thing and spread, like cracks on a windshield, in all directions. This is not to say that there are not some charters that are innovative. (I still need to do research to see if I can find even one charter that reflects the earliest thinking.)Like NCLB, where we have 50 different tests and no real way to prove how American students are doing as a whole, there is charter law in 41 states and the District of Columbia and every single law is different, the numbers of allowed charters is different, the accountability is different and yet, the movement grows. When I get to the Landscape Today, I have some thoughts on why that is (and it's not because charters do well).
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In a seminal paper published in 1955, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman envisaged a universal school choice program for parents of all economic stripes to find schools best suited to their children. Friedman argued that injecting competition into the education market would greatly expand the range of parental choice and result in higher levels of academic attainment.Unfortunately, today's school choice programs have yet to provide a real test for Friedman's free market thesis. They are simply too encumbered with anti-competitive and anti-free market constraints meant to equalize opportunities for disadvantaged students.
Despite the constraints, some choice programs around the country have shown encouraging results. Studies in Florida, Maine, Vermont, Ohio and Wisconsin have demonstrated that the proximity of choice programs to public schools had improved public school performance.
A 2001 study done by Caroline Hoxby, an economist from Harvard University, showed that Milwaukee's choice program had improved public school performance in math, science, language and social studies. Five more studies ensued, each showing results of increased academic productivity. According to Hoxby, just the threat of introducing choice competition into school districts had provoked a marked rise in public school productivity.
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2011-2012 Revised Budget 1.3MB PDF (Budget amendments document). District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753, yet "Fund Equity", or the District's reserves, has increased to $48,324,862 from $22,769,831 in 2007 (page 24). The District's property tax "underlevy" (increases allowed under Wisconsin school revenue limits which are based on student population changes, successful referendums along with carve-outs such as Fund 80, among others) will be $13,084,310. It also appears that property taxes will be flat (page 19) after a significant 9% increase last year. Interestingly, MSCR spending is up 7.97% (page 28).
2011-2012 enrollment is 24,861. $369,394,753 planned expenditures results in per student spending of $14,858.40.
I welcome clarifications and updates to these numbers, which are interesting. We've seen a doubling of District reserves over the past few years while spending has remained relatively flat as has enrollment.
Finally, this is worth reading in light of the District's 2011-2012 numbers: Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Advocates Additional Federal Tax Dollar Spending & Borrowing via President Obama's Proposed Jobs Bill.
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Wisconsin Association of School Boards & The Madison School District PDF Document.
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Madison School District Superintendent Daniel A. Nerad 215K PDF Presentation
During the annual conference the team of students engaged in.1. College planning including a tour of Missouri University
2. Participated in Achievement Gap Readings including discussions and student action planning
3. Shared their ideas about how to motivate students to succeed and how their school could be made a meaningful and interesting place
4. Developed plans of action to implement these strategies for change and report these valuable messages to the academic leaders of their schools and districts (See Attached- MSAN Students Conference Agenda)
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Let's see:Related: Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Acdemy IB Charter school.If the Madison Preparatory Academy can pull off all of that, how could it not improve the academic success of its largely black and Latino students?
- A longer school day and year, with July classes.
- Higher standards, expectations and school uniforms.
- Mandated extracurricular activities.
- Grades for parents based on their involvement at the school.
- More minority teachers as role models.
- More connections and internships with local employers.
- Millions in private fundraising.
That's the big picture view Madison should adopt as it considers the Urban League of Greater Madison's intriguing charter school request. Instead, a disproportionate amount of time and concern has been spent on a final part of the proposal:
Same-sex classrooms.
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When the notice went out that there would be a facilities planning meeting at Reagan High School a few weeks back, the rumor shot around that the administration was considering closing Reagan and that people should pack the meeting to protest such a move. In reality, facilities planning meetings were being held all over the school district, including most high schools, to figure out the direction for the entire district. Milwaukee has more school buildings than what it needs, and we need to close some of our oldest buildings, but that does not mean Reagan is on the chopping block.When the school year began this fall, school officials at both Rufus King and Riverside high schools discovered that each school was about a hundred students short. When they contacted the missing students, they discovered that many of them had elected to attend suburban and private high schools after hearing the dire predictions of overcrowded classrooms and cancelled programs.
Make no mistake about it, both schools took a financial hit, but the death of either school was wildly exaggerated. Both schools had to dig deeply into their waiting lists to fill up their student ranks this fall. Fortunately both schools report that recent orientation sessions for prospective students and parents were once again filled, and both schools will have little trouble filling their school with new students next school year.
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Like making a bad bet in Vegas, taxpayers gamble hundreds of millions of dollars a year on community college students who quit as freshmen - many in California.A new study shows that from 2004 to 2009, Americans spent nearly $4 billion on full-time students who dropped out after one year and didn't transfer.
California's first-year dropouts benefited from $480 million in tax-funded grants and allocations in that time - more than any other state - says the study, "The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges," from the nonpartisan American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C.
"I'm not in favor of pumping more money into the existing system where so many students don't succeed," said Mark Schneider, author of the report and vice president of the research group.
The 17-page report doesn't advocate cutting off dollars to schools. Instead, it urges colleges to do a better job of retaining students: making it easier for them to get the classes they need, rewarding colleges for reducing dropouts or penalizing them for failing to do so. It also encourages officials to gather better information about what's actually happening on their campuses.
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When a prominent educational figure remarked that, "a lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent," it was a rare candid statement about teacher quality. The comment arguably overstates the problem and -- in fairness -- he was also quick to point out that with several million teachers there would of course be some lousy ones, just as there would be in any field. Still, it was a jarring thing to say.Education policy debates are often like an argument between a couple in a bad relationship -- about everything except the actual problems. Our leaders seem congenitally unable to lead a difficult but honest conversation about our nation's teaching force that acknowledges that several things are all true at once -- we have a teacher quality problem and a management problem, teachers are not to blame for all that ails our schools, we can't fire our way to better schools, but removing some percentage of low-performers would be quite good for students. Instead we have a shallow debate dancing around the thing that matters most in schools: instructional quality.
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California Charter Schools Association, via a kind reader's email:
Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing ReformOne of the greatest public education challenges in California--and the nation--is the achievement and opportunity gaps between African American students and their White and Asian peers.
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has an interest in understanding how the state's charter public schools can accelerate closing achievement gaps for African American students, while at the same time advancing educational innovation that improves teaching and learning for all public school students.
The Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform report, released by CCSA in October 2011, details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that California charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American students, and that African American students are enrolled at higher percentage in the state's charters, among other findings.Since the inception of the Charter Schools Act in California in 1992, charter schools have become an important part of the public education system, opening their doors in both urban and rural areas, in order to provide quality educational options for families. Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform demonstrates that as laboratories of innovation, California's highly effective charter public schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated nationally.
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"It makes ... no sense to subordinate teaching to planting, cultivating, and harvesting when so few of us work on farms or live by agriculture ... we do not need the summer off." So spoke President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg of George Washington University in remarks to his faculty on November 11, 2002.President Trachtenberg was not the first, nor will he be the last, to propose pushing universities to a real year-round calendar. Instead of two 14- to 15- week semesters, have three. Students, if they wish, could study hard and graduate in three years, saving considerable amounts (even if per-semester tuition charges remained unchanged) and gain one more year in the labor force. That option could become more appealing if we rationalized federal student financial assistance. With year-round schooling, buildings and equipment that lie idle for vast periods could be utilized far more efficiently, in the long run reducing capital-expenditure outlays (which many in the university community think are somehow provided by God, not requiring annual budgeting).
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If you take the picture the media paints to heart, you are likely to feel very depressed. Eurozone is in trouble, there are protests all around the world, global warming is likely to get worse - the world is in crisis. Everything is getting worse.I thought I'd flip it around.
This is truly an incredible time to be alive, isn't it?
The world is flat, connected and extremely personal.
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"The next twenty-five years offer an opportunity to transform the way students have learned for centuries. We will be able to deliver education to students where they are, based on their specific needs, desires, and backgrounds."--Andrew S. RosenImagine a university where programs are tailored to the needs of each student, the best professors are available to everyone, curriculum is relevant to the workplace - and the value of the education is demonstrable. In Change.edu, Andrew S. Rosen shows how that future is possible but in danger of being stifled by a system of incentives that emphasize prestige and tradition, rather than access and outcomes.
The U.S. higher education system has historically been considered one of the best in the world. This thought-provoking story presents the imperative for transforming that system for the 21st century and beyond. Rosen takes on the sacred cows of traditional higher education models, and calls on the country to demand the changes we need to build a qualified workforce and compete in a global economy. Change.edu is sure to open minds -- and open doors to a wealth of opportunities.
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New York University pulled out of the National Merit scholarships, becoming at least the ninth school to stop funding one of the largest U.S. merit-based aid programs, because it doesn't want to reward students based on a standardized test.Related: 2011 National Merit Cut ScoresThe National Merit Scholarship Corp. distributed more than $50 million to students in the 2009-2010 year based on the PSAT college entry practice exam. Most of the money comes from almost 200 colleges, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago, to fund awards of as much as $8,000 over four years. Companies such as Boeing Co. and Pfizer Inc. also sponsor the program, primarily to benefit their employees' children.
NYU's withdrawal is another blow to National Merit, already ignored by many elite colleges and a subject of a critical report by a Harvard College-chaired commission. Schools are debating how to allocate scarce financial-aid dollars as tuition costs rise and the economy remains sluggish. While high schools trumpet National Merit winners, relying heavily on a standardized test is a flawed way to evaluate students, said Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president of admissions at NYU.
..........
National Merit hasn't collected any fees from the PSAT for the past 14 years, though it is entitled to a "nominal percent" of revenue under their contract, Kauffmann said. Instead, it has reinvested the funds into the program to keep test fees low and expand access to fee waivers, he said.
The College Board gains a marketing benefit from its association with National Merit when school districts or states consider using public funds to pay for the PSAT in 11th grade or ACT Inc.'s 10th-grade test known as PLAN, according to Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, a nonprofit group in Boston that works to end the misuses of standardized testing. Almost 1.3 million 10th-graders nationally took the PLAN test in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the nonprofit ACT.
Illinois 214Minnesota 213
Iowa 209
Massachusetts 223
Michigan 209
Texas 215
Wisconsin 209
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High School Students--please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America's workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
------------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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School officials could use standardized tests to help decide whether to discipline or fire a teacher, under a bill passed by the state Senate Thursday.The bill passed 17-16 on a party-line vote, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats in opposition.
Current law allows school administrators to use standardized tests as one of multiple criteria to evaluate teachers' performance but prohibits school districts from using the test results to fire or suspend a teacher. The bill would allow such actions as long as the test results weren't the sole reason for removing, suspending or disciplining a teacher.
Democrats urged senators to hold off on the bill and wait for an effort by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers to finish its work developing a system to better evaluate student learning.
"This is a very unfair position that we're putting teachers in," Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said.
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"I touch the future. I teach."Those were the words of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space. Her life would ultimately end 73 seconds into flight, when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart after takeoff in 1986. Her words honored every teacher.
Two Wisconsin teachers were taken from us Oct. 9 in a tragic traffic accident: David Novaez, who taught German at Westosha Central High School in Salem, and his wife, Kristin, who taught chorus at Union Grove High School. Their deaths prompted outpourings of grief, gratitude and heart-felt memories from hundreds of their students.
The devotion to these two teachers is in sharp contrast to how their peers were treated this spring in Madison. Educators were subjected to degrading comments from politicians, pundits and the people. From insults as to their worth ("they are paid far too much") to the demeaning of their profession, teachers had to endure the wrath of the public in the name of budget-cutting.
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2.6MB PDF, via a kind reader's email:
Black and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Latino girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their white peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
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School board elections in Wake County (Raleigh) North Carolina delivered an important victory for proponents of integration last week as Democrats swept four of five contested school board seats and led substantially in a fifth race headed for a runoff. Most importantly, board chairman Ron Margiotta, who had led the effort to dismantle a nationally acclaimed socioeconomic school integration plan in North Carolina's largest school district, was defeated, denying conservatives a majority on the nine-member school board.The vote has national significance because it demonstrates that if school diversity policies are pursued through choice, rather than compulsion, they can draw strong public support.
Wake County's widely lauded school integration plan sought to give all students a chance to attend solidly middle-class public schools by limiting the proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch at 40% in any one school.
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A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002.
They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Education Department, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its investigations.
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A state labor relations board sided with the Chicago Teachers Union Thursday, voting unanimously to seek an injunction that would stop Chicago Public Schools from offering financial incentives to teachers who add time to their days.Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made a longer school day one of his top priorities, and the vote by the five-member Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board threatens to disrupt his efforts, at least temporarily.
The labor board's decision is only the first step in a legal process. The board must petition Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to pursue the case and, if she agrees, the panel would then ask a circuit court judge to grant the injunction.
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Bert Grover, a pistol of a state legislator from the '60s who became a prominent state educator and then was elected superintendent of Wisconsin's public schools, has been battling some health issues the past several months -- not the least of which was a severe staph infection following some knee surgery -- but he's doing quite well these days, thank you.Related: Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Advocates Additional Federal Tax Dollar Spending & Borrowing via President Obama's Proposed Jobs BillI called Bert (actually Herbert J. Grover, Ph.D., but he has never been much for formalities) at his Gresham home last week not only to check in, but to get his take about what's been happening to Wisconsin's public education system now that Gov. Scott Walker and his gang have taken over state government.
"Well, let's just say this. Public schools are supposed to be places that are bubbly, enthusiastic, optimistic, hopeful," the 74-year-old educator remarked. "Sad to say, Walker has removed most of that."
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Six of every 10 Illinois public schools failed to meet federal test targets this year and risk federal sanctions as a result, according to information released Thursday by the Illinois State Board of Education.
High schools fared the worst.Statewide, 656 of the 666 public high schools fell short of the proficiency standard on math and reading tests that students take every spring. Only eight high schools where students take the exam in 11th grade met federal standards. Two more high schools made it based on participation and student performance on other state exams.
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Lucy Mathiak, via a kind email:
Dear Friends,I am appreciative of Lucy's tireless and often thankless work on behalf of our students.I am writing to thank you for your encouragement and support in my decision to seek election to the MMSD Board of Education in late fall 2005. Your help in getting elected, your support during tough times, and your help in finding solutions to problems, have made a great difference to my service on the board.
I am writing to let you know that I will not seek re-election in 2012. I continue to believe that the Board of Education is one of the most important elected positions for our community and its schools, and encourage others to step forward to serve in this capacity. MMSD is facing significant challenges, and it is more important than ever that thoughtful citizens engage in the work that will be needed to preserve the traditional strengths of our public schools while helping those schools to change in keeping with the times and the families that they serve.
At the same time, I do not view school board service as a career, and believe that turnover in membership is healthy for the organization and for the district. I have been fortunate to have had an opportunity to serve on this board, and to work with many fine community organizations in that capacity. For that I am grateful.
Again, thank you for your interest, support, and collegiality.
Lucy J. Mathiak
716 Orton Ct.
Madison, WI 53703Madison School Board
Seat #2
Every organization - public or private, deteriorates. It is often easier to spend more (raise taxes), raise fees on consumers - or a "rate base", reduce curricular quality and in general go along and get along than to seek substantive improvements. Change is hard.
Citizens who seek facts, ask difficult and uncomfortable questions are essential for strong institutions - public or private. Progress requires conflict.
Yet, very few of us are willing to step into the theatre, spend time, dig deep and raise such questions. I am thankful for those, like Lucy, who do.
Her years of activism and governance have touched numerous issues, from the lack of Superintendent oversight (related: Ruth Robarts) (that's what a board does), the District's $372M+ budget priorities and transparency to substantive questions about Math, reading and the endless battle for increased rigor in the Madison Schools.
In closing, I had an opportunity to hear Peter Schneider speak during a recent Madison visit. Schneider discussed cultural differences and similarities between America and Germany. He specifically discussed the recent financial crisis. I paraphrase: "If I do not understand a financial vehicle, I buy it". "I create a financial product that no one, including me, understands, I sell it". This is "collective ignorance".
Schneider's talk reminded me of a wonderful Madison teacher's comments some years ago: "if we are doing such a great job, why do so few people vote and/or understand civic and business issues"?
What, then, is the payoff of increased rigor and the pursuit of high standards throughout an organization? Opportunity.
I recently met a technical professional who works throughout the United States from a suburban Madison home. This person is the product of a very poor single parent household. Yet, high parental standards and rigorous academic opportunities at a somewhat rural Wisconsin high school and UW-Madison led to an advanced degree and professional opportunities.
It also led to a successful citizen and taxpayer. The alternative, as discussed in my recent conversation with Madison Mayor Paul Soglin is growth in those who don't contribute, but rather increase costs on society.
Lucy will be missed.
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Gheorghe Craciun, via a kind email:
We have started the "Madison Math Circle" for interested middle and high school students (please see more details below, or at https://www.math.wisc.edu/wiki/index.php/Madison_Math_Circle ), but we are having some trouble advertising it.Prof. Steffen Lempp told me that you might be able to help us.
Thank you very much!
Best,
George
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Nick Jensen, a graduate of Madison's LaFollette High School, has been named one of 117 top students at the national level for his performance on Advanced Placement courses while in high school.The College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Program also honored Rachel Sobel, a Brookfield Central High School graduate, for her performance on high school AP classes.
The two Wisconsin scholars are among just 117 students chosen from across the U.S. and the District of Columbia, according to a news release from the Department of Public Instruction.
This is the 21st year that the organization has granted State AP Scholar Awards, with the distinction going to one male and one female student from each state and the District of Columbia.
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Erin Richards, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
A young and tech-savvy charter school network that's gotten attention for reducing the achievement gap in San Jose, Calif., got the green light from a Common Council committee Tuesday to bring the model to Milwaukee.Rocketship Education, a nonprofit management company, has applied for a charter from the City of Milwaukee that would allow it to open a publicly funded school in the fall of 2013, with the eventual intent to serve up to 4,000 children in eight K-5 schools by 2017. Each school would have to show measurable progress before subsequent schools could open.
The organization, started in 2006, currently serves about 2,500 students in five San Jose area elementary schools.
A majority of members on the Steering and Rules Committee on Tuesday approved sending Rocketship's application to the full council for consideration.
Rocketship CEO and co-founder John Danner explained the organization's three areas of emphasis: engaging parents through teacher-led home visits and training them to advocate for their children; developing talent by growing a pipeline of teachers who can become school leaders; and giving all students individualized learning plans that blend six hours a day of face-to-face instruction with two hours of lab time spent working with online computer programs and low-cost tutors.
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Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) shifted a major teacher evaluation requirement out of his rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- known as No Child Left Behind -- over the weekend, shifting the dynamics of the debate over the bill's passage.The initial sweeping education law called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was enacted in 1965, and a 2001 reauthorization under George W. Bush took on the name, "No Child Left Behind." The law has been up for reauthorization since 2007. Harkin's rewrite, the first comprehensive reform to the legislation, came out of negotiations with Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions committee that Harkin chairs.
Harkin released a draft of the bill last week that required school districts and states which receive educator development funding to create teacher evaluation systems that would take student performance into account. But changes over the weekend through a manager's amendment removed the requirement from the bill, instead shifting the teacher evaluation component to a competitive grant program called the Teacher Incentive Fund.
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A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests the intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought.The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
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India and Bangladesh have launched their own brands of tablet and laptops, at unthinkably low prices.Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina launched Doel, a brand of netbooks and laptop that will be manufactured entirely in Bangladesh, on October 11. Distribution will reportedly start this week. They will be available from 10,000 takas (US$131), according to the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency.
"This is a big step towards building a digital Bangladesh," Mohammad Ismail, managing director of state-owned Telephone Shilpa Sangstha (TSS), which is in charge of making the gadgets, said following Doel's launch. At present, 90% of the laptop equipment is imported, "but within six months we will be able to produce 40% of the components," he said.
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"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
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157 page pdf, via a kind reader's email.
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A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002. They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 allegations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Department of Education, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its probes. But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a review of this relative handful of substantiated local cases shows that cheating schemes can be mundane or audacious, with motivations that include inflating the statistics that are used to evaluate a school, and helping a favorite student become eligible to graduate.
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In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence.One classic paper from 1991, for example, found that academic papers covered by the New York Times received more subsequent citations. Now, you might reasonably suggest a simple explanation: the journalists of the Times were good at spotting the most important work. But the researchers looking into this were lucky. They noticed the opportunity for a natural experiment when the printers - but not the journalists - of the Times went on strike.
The editorial staff continued to produce a "paper of record", which was laid down in the archives, but never printed, never distributed and never read. The scientific articles covered in these unprinted newspapers didn't see a subsequent uplift in citations. That is, if we can take a moment, a very clever piece of opportunistic research.
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Today, full page ads appear in the L.A. Times, Daily News and La Opinion taken out by Don't Hold Us Back -- respected organizations calling out United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD for letting kids fail. The new supergroup includes The United Way, The Urban League, Community Coalition, Alliance for a Better Community, Families in Schools, Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Communities for Teaching Excellence.The ad's bland wording at first seems a bit "so what?" but it's actually written in code to UTLA leaders, who have helped the local teachers union gain a reputation as one of the most anti-reform big-city education unions in the U.S. Here's a translation:
In one line, the ad says teachers should "be rewarded for academic excellence."
That sounds normal, right?
But in fact, that idea has for years been vehemently opposed by UTLA. UTLA has fiercely fought efforts to reward the most effective teachers, or the teachers who take on the toughest assignments, by giving them financial sweeteners -- merit pay.
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Shannon Maloney had already earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but she returned to Lehigh University for a fifth year to complete a second major she knows will make her more employable:Philosophy.
Yep, philosophy.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged - as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science - more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.
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In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information--how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it--is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius--a romantic, isolated figure--is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.
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The Senate approved a measure Tuesday that would curtail the expansion of school vouchers in Wisconsin, at least for now.The voucher program provides parents in eligible school districts with state subsidies to help defray their children's private school tuition. The subsidies have been a point of contention in Wisconsin for years. Conservatives insist the program gives children in struggling school districts an alternative, but opponents see it as vote of no confidence in public education and complain it pulls precious state dollars away from public schools.
The state Department of Public Instruction estimated it handed out $130.7 million in vouchers during the 2010-11 school year. Nearly 40 percent of that money came from a reduction in state aid for public schools in the city of Milwaukee, while the rest came from tax dollars, according to DPI.
The state budget Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed earlier this year laid out new qualifying criteria for vouchers based on a city's size, poverty levels and per-pupil spending. The new standards made districts across Milwaukee County as well as in the city of Racine eligible.
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When you're up for $150,000 in fees and extras for a child's private-school education, it'd be nice to know it's a good investment.After all, a year 7 student starting next year will cost $215,000 by year 12 if school fees keep rising at an annual rate of 6 per cent.
Advertisement: Story continues below.Could that be better spent on tutors and extensive travel to other cultures to broaden a young mind? Certainly it would be cheaper.
They might put a value on everything else but economists have a problem working out the worth of private schools, even though that's probably where many of them went.
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D.C. teacher Stephanie Black sent me an absorbing e-mail that began with a favorable review of my book "Work Hard. Be Nice" on KIPP school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Then she explained why her positive feelings about the KIPP charter school network had deepened her distaste for the D.C. teacher evaluation program, IMPACT.I have not taken a strong stand for or against IMPACT, other than to say it is better than the weak evaluation systems in many districts that give almost all teachers satisfactory ratings. Black's personal reaction to what happened at her school is moving and persuasive. I am going to ask a D.C. school official to respond.
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From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives, viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn't work very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn't work very well either.
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Kaleem Caire is feeling pretty confident that the Madison school board will approve Madison Preparatory Academy in late November. After all, he's made substantial concessions to appease his most influential critics, and support for the charter school, which would target at-risk minority students, appears to be gaining momentum.Still, Caire, who is CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, the nonprofit agency that would run the school, faces a dedicated opposition that remains unflinching in its wide-ranging criticism, some of it highly personal. Some opponents have called Caire an "enemy of public education."
"The fact that people scrutinize us isn't the issue, but it gets to the point where some of this borders on ridiculous," he says.
Caire proposed the school last year, calling it an important first step in closing the minority achievement gap, a problem first documented by the Urban League in 1968. Supporters say that after four decades of doing little, the time has come for a more radical approach.
"Can you imagine this city if 48% of the white kids were dropping out?" asks Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education professor at UW-Madison and Madison Prep board member. "I don't get why that kind of failure is tolerable."
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Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad publicly touted President Barack Obama's stalled jobs proposal Monday, saying it would help the School District pay for millions of dollars in needed maintenance projects.Federal tax receipts, spending and deficits, fiscal years 2007-2011, billions of dollars:"We either pay now, or we pay more at a much later date," Nerad said at a press conference at West High School, which is due for about $17.4 million in maintenance projects over the next five years.
A School Board committee is reviewing maintenance projects identified in a 2010 study by Durrant Engineers that said the district may need to spend as much as $83.7 million over five years on projects not already included in the budget.
The committee is expected to make recommendations early next year. Nerad said the committee hasn't decided yet whether to recommend another maintenance referendum. A 2004 referendum authorizing $20 million over five years ran out last year.
| Receipts | Outlays | Deficit | Deficit as a % of GDP |
| 2007 | $2,568$2,729 | $161 | 1.2% |
| 2008 | $2,524$2,983 | $459 | 3.2% |
| 2009 | $2,104$3,520 | $1,416 | 10% |
| 2010 | $2,162$3,456 | $1,294 | 8.9% |
| 2011 | $2,303$3,600 | $1,298 | 8.6% |
The most recent Madison School District maintenance referendum spending has come under scrutiny - though I've not seen any further discussion on this topic over the past year.
Related: Wisconsin state budget is bad for kids by Thomas Beebe:
"It'll be OK," Gov. Scott Walker said last winter when he announced a budget that snatched away more than $800 million in opportunities to learn from Wisconsin public school kids. "I'm giving you the tools to make it work."Reuters:Well, the tools the governor gave local school districts are the right to force teachers to pay more toward their retirement, and the option to unilaterally require educators to kick in more for their health care. The problem is that the tools, along with any money some of them might have left over from federal jobs funds, are one-time solutions. These tools can't be used again unless school districts ask teachers to give up even more of their take-home pay.
By law, all school districts have to balance their budgets. They always have, and always will. That's not the point. The point is that the governor has hijacked the language. Educational accountability isn't about balancing the budget, it's about giving kids opportunities to grow up into good, contributing adults. That's not what Gov. Walker wants to talk about.
The red line, here, is median real household income, as gleaned from the CPS, indexed to January 2000=100. It's now at 89.4, which means that real incomes are more than 10% lower today than they were over a decade ago.More striking still is the huge erosion in incomes over the course of the supposed "recovery" -- the most recent two years, since the Great Recession ended. From January 2000 through the end of the recession, household incomes fluctuated, but basically stayed in a band within 2 percentage points either side of the 98 level. Once it had fallen to 96 when the recession ended, it would have been reasonable to assume some mean reversion at that point -- that with the recovery it would fight its way back up towards 98 or even 100.
Instead, it fell off a cliff, and is now below 90.
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via a kind Rafael Gomez email. Please contact Rafael to learn more: filosistema@yahoo.com
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It has become fashionable for our most selective colleges to worry about becoming as representative of American diversity as suburban country clubs.College admissions experts conferring at the University of Southern California this year were so alarmed that they suggested our most prestigious campuses add space for another 100 students in each class and fill those slots with low-income kids.
Why are our choosiest colleges so dominated by affluent white or Asian students? The explanations are many: not enough financial aid, inadequate preparation in inner-city high schools, poor students' discomfort mixing with rich kids.
But a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona suggests something different. Great high schools and families like those in the Washington area may be at fault, at least in part. In the last 32 years, low-income students have significantly raised the grades and test scores that affect college admissions, but have made little headway because students from affluent families have improved even more.
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The president of a conservative group that claims the University of Wisconsin-Madison discriminates against prospective white and Asian students called on Republican Gov. Scott Walker or state lawmakers Monday to step in to end the practice.Republicans have balked for years at what UW-Madison calls a holistic admissions policy, which calls for admissions officers to take a number of factors into consideration, including academic performance and race. GOP lawmakers believe the policy permits reverse discrimination.
The Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church, Va., reviewed UW-Madison admissions data from 2007 to 2008 and found black and Hispanic applicants had a better a chance of getting in than whites or Asians. Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, chairman of the Assembly's higher education committee, had the center's president, Mark Clegg, walk the panel through the report -- a move that indicates Republicans are looking at the UW System's admission policies again.
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When the United States took control of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century, one of the first things the U.S. did was send in American teachers. The goal was to establish a public school system and turn the Philippines into an English-speaking country.It worked so well that two centuries later, American schools started traveling to the Philippines to recruit teachers to come here.
In a new documentary called The Learning, filmmaker Ramona Diaz follows four teachers on their journey from the Philippines to classrooms in Baltimore, where 10 percent of the city's teachers -- about 600 -- were Filipino in 2010.
"At the height of the recruitment, which was in '05, '06 and '07, they were recruiting from overseas because there was a shortage of math and science and special-ed teachers," Diaz tells Rebecca Roberts, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered.
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After district officials already lowered their estimated tax increase to 2.1 percent earlier this month in advance of a planned refinance of the district's debt-service fund, the district is again lowering the tax burden on Waunakee property owners, this time by an additional 0.7 percent. So when property owners receive their bills, they'll see about a 1.4 percent increase in their school tax levy.The new numbers come after the district saw less than anticipated growth in student population taken during the school's annual September head count.
In the count, taken on the third friday of classes, Waunakee had 3,874 students reporting to classes, up 180 students from the previous year. It's fewer than the 3,900 students district officials thought would be attending class, meaning the district is losing out on $172,791 in anticipated revenue under the complex revenue cap formula.
Because the enrollment count is a direct relationship with school revenue streams - as one goes up the other does, too - a lower enrollment means districts can't raise as much money. That means districts can cut from one of two streams of income, state aid or property taxes. But since Waunakee is already losing the maximum amount of state aid for the 2011-2012 budget - 10 percent - the district will trim back how much it takes from taxpayers.
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Frederick M. Hess's long essay in the latest issue of the quarterly National Affairs pleased those of us who share the American Enterprise Institute scholar's dislike for politicians' fixation on closing the achievement gap. Reducing the gap sounds good until you realize that means it is okay for high achievers to stagnate so that low achievers can catch up.I have been venting about this for several years and getting only puzzled looks. Hess's piece -- the most detailed and vehement ever on the subject -- will hopefully lead to more discussion of better ways to deal with the different average achievement levels of poor kids and affluent kids.
I think we have borrowed language from another issue, the income gap, and shoved it into the education debate, where it doesn't belong. Making money and learning about the world are not similar enterprises. If someone accumulates $1 billion and spends it on Rolls-Royces and gold bathroom fixtures, that is very different from fixating on learning something new about solar energy and making the world a cleaner place.
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At the Board meeting of Wednesday, October 19, the Board will both introduce and adopt their Superintendent Evaluation Instrument.Board evaluation of the Superintendent has been an issue locally, as well.
It is, on the whole, a better considered evaluation tool than they have used before. It has some elements that I really like. It is also missing a few things that I would like to see it include.
I encourage you to read it for yourself and reach your own opinion. Then send that opinion to the Board within the next two days because that's when they will be voting on it. So be quick about it.
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MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means "little seal" in Irish and it suits him.I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He'll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.
How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?
Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.
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In a move that has startled many on the left and the right, Iowa Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made public his new 18-page education reform bill titled "One Unshakable Vision: World-Class Schools for Iowa." The plan, officially released Oct. 3, makes sweeping changes to the Iowa public education system, as well as to the process for becoming a teacher in Iowa, which could substantially affect aspiring teachers at Iowa State and other colleges and universities in Iowa.Under this new education bill, students in K-12 public school will be subjected to a more intense Iowa core curriculum, third graders will be required to take a reading test in order to move on to the fourth grade, ninth graders will be asked to take a standardized test that would compare them to other students on an international basis, and 11th graders will be required to take a college entrance exam.
As for teachers, the required grade point average for admission into teaching programs at Iowa universities will be raised from a 2.5 to 3.0, core content coursework may be increased, new teachers will enter into an apprentice program in which they will be mentored and trained by distinguished veteran teachers, and a new pay ladder will be implemented from which pay will be tied to both performance and experience. Many believe that these new ambitious approaches are needed to make Iowa a leader in education again, but many still remain wary of some of the ideas proposed in the bill, especially the new standards for prospective teachers at Iowa universities.
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Peter Drysdale and Shiro Armstrong:
Asia already accounts for 27 per cent of world GDP and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) 2050 Report issued last May suggests that it will account for as much as 51 per cent a generation hence. The economies of the developed world are slipping back into recession. Asia, especially China, India and Indonesia continue their exceptional and rapid growth with the rest of the region, including Australia in tow. Asia is a region with high levels of interdependence within the region itself, especially within East Asia and between it and the rest of the world. It has a deep stake in the strength of the global economic system that supports open trade and international capital flows.What sort of changes will these developments wreak in the regional and global order?
There are great expectations of Asia not only as an engine of global growth -- led by China but with other emerging economies adding dynamism to the global economy -- but also of its leadership at a time of global economic fragility. The new global order, centred on the G20, includes six Asian powers and provides a platform for Asian leadership. But is Asia up to the task? And do the institutional structures and arrangements within Asia provide the foundations that are needed to build coherent policy strategies to deal with the economic problems the world now faces?
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Fran, by Way of IntroductionMy high school algebra 2 class which I had in the fall of 1964, was notable for a number of things. One was learning how to solve word problems. Another was a theory that most problems we encountered in algebra class could be solved with arithmetic. Yet another was a girl named Fran who I had a crush on.
Fran professed to not like algebra or the class we were in, and found word problems difficult. On a day I had occasion to talk to her, I tried to explain my theory that algebra was like arithmetic but easier. Admittedly, my theory had a bit more to go. She appeared to show some interest, but she wasn't interested. On another occasion I asked her to a football game, but she said she was washing her hair that day. Although Fran had long and beautiful black hair, and I wanted to believe that she had a careful and unrelenting schedule for washing it, I resigned myself to the fact that she would remain uninterested in me, algebra, and any theories about the subject.
My theory of arithmetic vs. algebra grew from a realization I had during that the problems that were difficult for me years ago when I was in elementary school were now incredibly easy using algebra. For example: $24 is 30% of what amount? In arithmetic this involved setting up a proportion while in algebra, it translated directly to 24 = 0.3x, thus skipping the set up of the ratio 24/30 = x/100. Similarly, it was now much easier to understand that an increase in cost by 25% of some amount could be represented as 1.25x. What had been problems before were now exercises; being able to express quantities algebraically made it obvious what was going on. It seemed I was on to something, but I wasn't quite sure what.
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Newcomb Central School had two big problems when Skip Hults took over as superintendent five years ago: There were only 55 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, and the cultural diversity was zero.Hults took a novel approach solving both problems: He recruited students from abroad.
"We realized that if we wanted to keep our school, we needed to expose our kids to the world," Hults said.
The innovation has worked as Hults intended. This fall, the school has nearly twice as many students, 96, including nine from such nations as Brazil, Russia, Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Lured by Newcomb's innovative programs, other students have come from neighboring districts, one from 50 miles away. And parents and teachers mention signs that show students are becoming more engaged in the world, too.
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Roll call is a thing of the past in Washington County Schools. Students now check in with finger scanning devices.Wow....School Superintendent Sandra Cook said the old method just wasn't cutting it.
"We got to talking about attendance in our district and how it was inconsistent," said Cook.
The systems have been up and running for two months inside the schools, but since the majority of students ride the bus every day, district officials decided to move the devices there.
But the transition hasn't been easy. One of the biggest challenges they've faced is where to put the devices on the buses. State safety codes require the isles to be kept completely clear, so one of the ideas they've discussed is to put a laptop on one side of the steering wheel and the finger scan system on the other.
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This group was created by a community of people brought together on the 12th October 2011 at the Guardian, York Way, London - made up of young people, teachers, ex-teachers, developers, parents and industry with the purpose of finding ways to support education of programming and computational thinking for the current and next generations in the UK. Whether this be through traditional education methods - or other stuff.One of the catalysts was a speech by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he said the country that invented the computer was "throwing away your great computer heritage" by failing to teach programming in schools. "I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools," he said. "Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made" (Full text of lecture], view lecture online).
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There is remarkably little good poetry about very small children. Maybe it's the lack of sleep that does it; for the first few months it's hard to remember to put out the bins, let alone write poems. Perhaps the first writer to make a serious attempt to evoke the world of earliest childhood was the Latin poet Statius, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Domitian (ad 81-96). In one of his most remarkable poems, Statius describes taking a newborn baby boy in his arms, "as he demanded the novel air with trembling wails". Bit by bit, he learned to interpret the child's inarticulate complaints and to soothe his "hidden wounds" (vulnera caeca). Later still, once the baby had learned to crawl, Statius would pick him up and kiss him, until bit by bit, cradled in the poet's arms, he would drop off to sleep. Statius's name was the toddler's first word, and Statius's face served as "his first plaything". How many other poets, in any language, have described the experience of having their face yanked around by a fascinated baby?
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New York state officials say cheating on state Regents exams is a growing concern but just a fraction of the cases are being discovered as the tests are being used more to evaluate schools and teachers.State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. says New York's system is missing many more cases in public, private and public charter schools. He is expected to announce on Monday several measures aimed at discouraging and catching cheats.
Cheating is often reported by students and parents, officials say, and the number of confirmed cases remains a fraction of the 222,000 teachers in the state's classrooms. Data obtained by The Associated Press shows just 50 cases were confirmed in the 2009-10 school year and 41 in the 2010-11 school year.
The data gives an incomplete picture of a problem that also concerns the state teachers' union.
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The first class of sixth-graders in the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy would attend school nearly year-round, be in class from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and participate in mandatory extracurricular activities.Parents would take classes in how to prepare their students for college while the school would aim to enroll at least 70 percent minorities and 65 percent low-income students.
Those and other new details about the controversial charter school proposal are included in a draft business plan the Urban League of Greater Madison provided to the Madison School Board this week. The School District provided a copy to the State Journal at the newspaper's request.
The business plan is incomplete. More details will be shared with the board by the end of the month, Urban League President Kaleem Caire said.
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Both the Associated Press (AP) and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) today highlight the relationship between reductions in school aids across the state and the way school choice and charter programs are funded. The AP story notes "$110 million [was] taken from public schools to pay for an expansion of voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee and Racine." Unfortunately the story fails to mention that the statewide aid reductions to pay for the charter program and the aid reductions in Milwaukee and Racine to pay for choice do not translate into less funding for school districts.Susan Troller:Why? Neither the charter nor choice aid reductions impact revenue limits. Districts can and do make up for the reduction with property taxes. In English, this means the Milwaukee Public Schools, Racine Unified, and the majority of school districts in the state that set their education levy at the highest permitted amount do not lose actual dollars because of these programs, they simply receive them from a different source.
School spending in Wisconsin, traditionally among the nation's highest, was falling even before changes in the current state budget and may already be no more than the U.S. average.Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University FundingThe conservative-leaning Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance reported last week that, while operational spending per pupil remained 5.5 percent above the national average in 2009, when debt and maintenance are figured in, overall spending was 1.6 percent below the U.S. average.
WISTAX estimated that, had the new state revenue limits been in place for 2009, instructional spending also would have been reduced to near the national average.
WISTAX researchers compared 2009 U.S. census data on school spending and revenues by state and also looked ahead to how recent state law and budget changes might affect Wisconsin's ranking. (A PDF of the analysis accompanies this story.)
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Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do.Five years ago, less than a quarter of the children in a special district set up by the state to manage the lowest performing schools scored at or above the "basic" level on state tests. Now, nearly half do.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the progress made by New Orleans's school reform effort in the six years since Hurricane Katrina has been "stunning." And there are many reasons for optimism about a system that is overwhelmingly made up of poor and minority students -- just the sort of place where optimism is in short supply.
There are three important things to consider about the New Orleans experience: Many of the structural changes occurred because the hurricane essentially destroyed the old system, allowing the city to begin fresh. Charter schools, while a foundation of the system now, did not by themselves improve achievement. And finally, New Orleans has done the hard work of changing the school culture while embracing new instructional methods.
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In his recent post on this blog, Lessons From Finland #1 - Teacher Education and Training, Bob Compton states that the quality crisis in the US education system can be solved by changing teacher's educational requirements to stipulate higher levels of education, specialization in the fields teachers teach, and an increase in the amount of time student teachers spend in classrooms under the guidance of experienced master-level teachers, rather than just in online courses or teacher training. He notes that these educational changes require the action of each state's governor and its legislature, and further states "All it takes is courage to withstand the screams from colleges of education - the sacred cash cow of most universities." At the heart of this issue is the question: "what does it take to effect political change?"Actually making political changes, of course, is for better or worse ultimately in the hands of our elected officials. Unfortunately the primary concern for many politicians becomes getting elected, even if their motivations are purely to serve their constituencies. We must also recognize that their constituencies are comprised of both individuals and businesses or other organizations, some of which often have very different priorities. Because corporate entities are frequently the largest political donors, their needs are often addressed first. Call it corruption or simply the nature of democratic government; either way, corporate contributors' interests often lead politicians to prevent legislative changes that might threaten business. Education reform is no exception.
So what can be done to spur the process? Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for creating the political will to change educational performance standards in this country. However, there are steps that can be taken to slowly turn the political behemoth in the right direction.
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Here's a blast from the somewhat-recent past: a set of five lectures I gave at CERN in 2005. It looks like the quality of the recording is pretty good. The first lecture was an overview at a colloquium level; i.e. meant for physicists, but not necessarily with any knowledge of cosmology. The next four are blackboard talks with a greater focus; they try to bring people up to speed on the basic tools you need to think about modern early-universe cosmology.Obviously I'm not going to watch all five hours of these, so I'll just have to hope that I'm relatively coherent throughout. (I do remember being a bit jet-lagged.) But I do notice that, while it was only a few years ago, I do appear relatively young and enthusiastic. Ah, the ravages of Time...
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The academic progress of public school students can be traced, in part, to where their teachers went to college, according to new research by the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research.But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training -- not where the training occurred -- best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.
Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research.
Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.
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If Milwaukee needs a big, well-crafted, we're-all-in-this-together effort by a wide-range of power players working on meeting the educational needs of so many thousands of our children, why do I sense so much reluctance to be enthusiastic about an effort that aims to be all of those things?Two simple answers:
Because we've been down roads like this before and nothing much came from them.
Because a lot of people, including some of those power players, are skeptical about our collective ability to make real progress.
I'm sympathetic with both of those points.
For years, I've seen community leaders of all kinds say good things (and often mean them) and come up with no consequential results.
I, too, suffer from oh-no-not-another-big-initiative syndrome. And we all know how deeply entrenched our problems are.
But overall, I say: It's time to get moving, folks.
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This is an evolving description of books and software that could be used to design a totally open undergraduate mathematics curriculum. This is meant to be a selective list, so you can consider these to be personal recommendations, not just links I've found promising. As such there will be a limited number of entries in each category. The first criteria in selecting texts is that preference will be given to those that are truly free - as in free to copy, free to modify, free to distribute, free to sell. For example, a text that prohibits commercial use does not have full freedom. Licensing terms are summarized for each item. The second criteria is that I have to have some reason to believe the text is accurate and has a selection of content that is in line with typical university courses.First some comprehensive software, then lower-division (including introductory programming), concluding with upper-division (alphabetically by subject). Suggestions are encouraged, especially for empty categories or books you have used in a course, but inclusion is subject to the above discussion.
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A 3-year-old is handed six sets of colorful stickers."You can keep all of them," he is told. "Or you can give some to a child you don't know. He doesn't have any stickers. Do you want to keep all of your stickers? Or do you want to give some to a child you don't know?"
That was the basic script for a study that took place recently in an Israeli playroom which doubled as a social-science laboratory. A child-care-professional-turned-researcher asked 136 children, aged 3 and 4 years old, to step one at a time into the playroom to shed light unwittingly on a hot topic in behavioral science: Are children altruistic?
It seems they are, and part of the explanation may be genetic, according to the study, published last month in the online scientific journal PLoS One. About two-thirds of the children chose to give one or more sets of stickers to an unknown recipient, described to them only as a child who had no stickers. There were no significant differences in generosity between boys and girls.
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But it's clear that teachers are doing their part to keep one small, if important, piece of the public education reform movement alive: making sure they have an organized voice.Now we should do ours.
Say what you want about his approach, Walker basically gave reform-minded school districts their chance by ramming through a collective bargaining law that drastically limits what's subject to negotiation.
So, if you think the school year should be longer, if you'd like to see your district have an easier time keeping that awesome first-year teacher and ditching the underwhelming 20-year vet, if you want more money put into recruiting minority teachers and less into teachers' generous health care and pension benefits -- now's your chance.
For despite what you might have heard from union backers, teachers union priorities and students' needs are not always the same thing.
Unions exist, appropriately, to protect their members. You can quibble about whether Walker went too far in lessening their power. But a grudge against a transitory public figure shouldn't take precedence over trying something new to improve public education.
Besides, it's not as if teachers won't have a seat at the reform table.
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Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn:
As a disruptive innovation--an innovation that transforms a sector from one that was previously complicated and expensive into one that is far simpler and more affordable--the rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize her fullest potential.Whether it does this in the coming years will depend on several variables.
Entrepreneurs and investors--both for-profit and non-profit--are doing their part, as they seek to fashion the future by solving the problems they see students and teachers struggling with today.
Some, like those at Los Altos School District and Rocketship Education, are creating new learning and schooling models and liberating students and teachers.
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What a month. I've learned so much in the past 30 days, I need a new brain in which to put it. This old brain of mine feels full. And tired. Public education is a rolling stone run amok. Who can keep up?This is why we parents and advocates tend to hedge our comments. We never know how things really are, and the minute we figure it out, they change it - without telling us. When we ask for updates, we have to drag it out of them, kicking and screaming through public records requests. And when we get the information, by golly - they change it again.
They do that because a) rolling stones can't be held accountable, and b) they get to say, "You just don't get it." And we don't. That's one reason why few parents will discuss education in any depth. They know they don't get it. Real knowledge is held over our head like a favorite toy, just out of reach. "Jump for it!" But most parents won't jump for it; we just leave. Since 2002, full-time student enrollment in District 81 dropped by about 3,000 students (net), even as operating costs grew by about $60 million.
Public records requests are an effective way of clearing up the fog. After I found out that RCW 42.17.130 prohibits using public resources (directly or indirectly) to campaign for an elective candidate or a ballot proposition (such as a bond or levy), I noticed how close the ties were between District 81 and bond/levy advocacy organization Citizens for Spokane Schools (CFSS).
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These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.
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A plan to provide vouchers to students from low-income families and are enrolled in failing schools is at the center of a four-point education reform agenda, but the Corbett administration declined to state how much these reforms would cost taxpayers.Calling on lawmakers to give students and their families access to the widest variety of educational options, Gov. Tom Corbett announced Tuesday a plan that would:
Offer a voucher program;
Expand the educational tax credit program;
Create a new statewide commission to oversee and evaluate charter schools;
Overhaul state's teacher evaluation process.
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Gov. Terry Branstad received a standing ovation when he took the stage in Ankeny High School's auditorium to talk education reform Wednesday night.He left the stage about 90 minutes later, to another round of applause, although the crowd stayed their seats this time.
It was the governor's fourth community forum since he unveiled his education blueprint last week. The blueprint will form the basis of a legislative package for education reform in the state that the governor plans to send to the General Assembly when it reconvenes in January.The blueprint calls for changing the way teachers are paid and evaluated, institutes a third-grade reading test students must pass to reach the fourth and a calls for a series of the end-of-course exams high school seniors must pass to graduate, among its biggest changes.
And at least to the 120 or so that came out to the Ankeny forum, those changes are sitting well, for the most part.
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Gov. Jerry Brown's message accompanying his veto of legislation to overhaul California's system of measuring the performance of students and their schools was blunt, iconoclastic and witty. In disputing the conventional wisdom emphasizing the importance of testing, the governor invoked Greek mythology - mocking the "siren song" of the latest trends in education reform - and quoted Albert Einstein - "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."But his veto message raised larger questions: Is Brown rejecting the value of testing in general or just attempting to play the role of a policy provocateur?
In a phone interview this morning with a U-T editorial writer, the governor said it was "neither a rejection of testing or a spur to debate." Instead, Brown said, it was "critical reflection" on the bill by Senate President Darrell Steinberg and its addition of more vague measures of student and school performance, which he called "a fool's errand."
"I believe [in] a certain amount of testing," Brown said, calling the existing Academic Performance Index "a good metric." But he said it shouldn't crowd out "other good measures" of student performance.
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently reported on a new civic effort to improve K-12 education in Milwaukee titled "Milwaukee Succeeds." The effort is certainly ambitious. Erin Richards and Tom Tolan report that it is "focused on large, big-picture ideas that are easy for folks to stand behind, such as making sure all children are prepared to enter school, succeed academically and graduate, take advantage of postsecondary education or training, and contribute to the Milwaukee community."
It is ironic that the Journal Sentinel also recently ran a profile of former Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent Lee McMurrin. It was McMurrin who in 1975 unveiled his own ambitious ten-point plan for fixing K-12 education in Milwaukee. His goals, according to an August 6, 1975 Milwaukee Journal story, included improving attendance, achievement, job placement for graduates, and the creation of a plan to engage staff in school improvement.
Ten years later McMurrin's plan was replaced by a new plan from Milwaukee school board members Joyce Mallory, Mary Bills and David Cullen titled "A Plan for the Future and a Plan for Now." Their plan, according to a November 17, 1985 Milwaukee Journal article, called for the creation of a 20-member committee of community leaders "to look at the work of futurists and strategic planners and come up with new ideas for running the schools here." Their committee was to include "religious and business leaders, college educators, legal officials and public officials."
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Imagine a world, in which when you teach something to someone the knowledge is considered your "intellectual property". Your students are not permitted to teach the things they have learned from you to anyone else, neither for money, nor even for free.To become a teacher, one must buy into the guild for a lot of money, inherit rights from someone who was a teacher, or teach something that hasn't been learned from anyone, i.e. something newly invented.
Being a teacher was a very powerful position. Having a monopoly to teach and usually even your own districts to educate exclusively, a teacher could charge any price. Furthermore, teachers even had the right to dictate the purpose and conditions on which the knowledge they taught was allowed to be used.
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Fred Smoller is gone from his post as head of Brandman University's master of public administration program.He's not fired, as he has tenure, but the situation is a sticky one that raises thorny issues of academic freedom with critics.
"I was told city officials were upset with my involvement in the examination of city compensation, and other things I've written regarding city consolidation, which they apparently found threatening," Smoller (far left) told us. "Academics are often criticized for living in an ivory tower. I've been criticized for trying to be relevant."
That's not quite the way Brandman (an independent part of the Chapman University system) sees it.
"There is an unfortunate rumor circulating that Dr. Fred Smoller was dismissed from his position as Director of the Master's in Public Administration program at Brandman University. This is totally incorrect," said a written statement we received from Brandman spokeswoman Rita Wilds.
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Abby Ramirez wants other people to come to - and act on -- the same beliefs she has: That a large majority of low-income children can become high-performing students and that the number of schools where such success is widespread can be increased sharply in Milwaukee.In an "On the Issues" session with Mike Gousha at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Ramirez described the work of Schools That Can Milwaukee, a year-old organization that has the goal of increasing the number of students in high-performing schools to 20,000 (more than twice the current total) by 2020. Ramirez is executive director of the organization.
"If you haven't seen a high-performing school, go visit one because it will change your belief in what's possible," she told about 150 people at the session hosted by Gousha, the Law School's distinguished fellow in law and public policy. She said you can tell in such a visit that the program is different - more energetic, more focused, more committed to meeting ambitious goals - than in schools where there is an underlying belief that the students aren't going to do well because of factors such as poverty.
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The modern fashion is for piling degree upon degree: MA upon BA and PhD upon MBA. And it is not easy to argue against it. If education is a good thing, more education should be an even better thing. And academic wisdom maintains that, as economies become more sophisticated and knowledge more advanced, people will have to spend longer studying. Just as industrial countries introduced universal secondary education in the 20th century, so post-industrial economies will introduce universal higher education in the 21st--followed by universal PhDs.It is doubly hard to argue for parsimony when the economy is in recession, giving all too many people a choice between further education and the dole queue, and when the person making the case has gorged on the fruits of higher education himself. But are we to wait for the good times to return before pointing out that higher degrees are not all they are cracked up to be? And is anybody better equipped to expose the credentials racket than one who has accumulated more than enough of them?
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1. Read: Any thing and Everything.2. Write: Use new words that your learn in your writings.
3. Listen: When someone uses a word you don't understand, ask them what it means or look it up later.
4. Carry a Dictionary.
5. Watch Frasier: Get your hands on Frasier Dvds. An entertaining way to Improve Your Vocabulary.
6. Make sticky notes of new words and post them in strategic places.
7. Download a words and definitions screensaver.
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Almost every local teachers union in the state without a contract has filed to keep its official status, according to a State Journal analysis.Of 156 local teachers unions in school districts that did not extend a collective bargaining agreement for this year, only 12 filed with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to hold votes later this fall.
"That's a very high number, higher than I would have anticipated," said John Witte, a UW-Madison political science professor who studies education issues in Wisconsin. "It very clearly shows that the teachers are not giving up on their unions at this point."
Another 268 local teacher unions -- 63 percent, which is more than previous estimates -- did not have to decide about recertification this year because their contracts continued through this school year. Among those with contracts are unions in 10 of the 11 largest school districts in the state.
Many of the districts continue to collect union dues from employees with contracts, though some negotiated changes to end that practice.
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BUY Computer Science Alumni Association:
Computer Science doctoral student Kristine Monteith pulls out her laptop and asks, "What are we feeling like?" With 30 seconds and a click of the mouse, her ThinkPad becomes a regular Beethoven, composing original songs based on any emotion she chooses.Monteith is a left and right brain kind of person. She came to BYU with a bachelor's degree in music therapy, a passion for voice, piano and guitar, and is now preparing to defend her doctoral dissertation on her computer program that can generate original music.
Since the beginning of her graduate work, Monteith has been trying to answer a golden question - can machines be creative like humans?
A classic issue in machine learning is developing ways for computers to act like humans. Can computers be so humanlike as to fool us? For Monteith, her question was "Can a computer act like a human in composing music?"
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When it comes to creditworthiness, it's hard to top the consumers of Wisconsin.Four Wisconsin cities - including Wausau at No. 1 - are among the 10 communities in the nation with the highest average credit scores, a new survey shows.
Wausau residents posted an average credit score of 789 in the survey conducted by the credit-rating agency Experian. Madison was third, at 785; Green Bay sixth, at 780; and La Crosse 10th, at 777.
Milwaukee, with a score of 765, was 33rd of 143 cities included in the survey.
"Wisconsin residents remain among the nation's most fiscally responsible," Experian stated Tuesday in announcing the survey results.
Higher credit scores generally give consumers the ability to borrow money at lower interest rates.
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I've prescribed Ritalin type drugs to children for 33 years. In the early 1990s I began feeling ethically uneasy about my professional role. I went public with my concerns in a book called "Running on Ritalin." In the process I was involuntarily enlisted into what has been called, "The Ritalin Wars," an often-polemical public debate about whether psychiatric drugs are good or bad for children.Recently I published an article on The Huffington Post called "The United States of Adderall." I mentioned that we are 4 percent of the world's population but produce 88 percent of the world's legal amphetamine (Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, etc.) virtually all for the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adults. I tried to maintain a balanced view on ADHD and medication. The article generated over 200 mostly extreme comments from my point of view.
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We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good--for the child, the parent, the family, and society.Clusty Search: John Coons.We begin with the delicate subject of authority--that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.
Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.
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Citing Pennsylvania's high dropout rates, Gov. Tom Corbett on Tuesday promoted taxpayer-paid vouchers as the ticket to a better education for low-income students in the state's worst-performing school districts as he detailed a broader plan to improve and reshape public education in Pennsylvania.Under the proposal, parents who qualify could use the vouchers -- dubbed "opportunity scholarships" by Corbett -- to send their children not only to private or religious schools, but also to better-performing public schools. His plan also calls for changing how charter schools are established and teachers are evaluated, and expanding tax credits for businesses that fund scholarships.
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Is United States Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) gearing up to take away a lot of rights from students with special needs and return decision-making about their education to states and localities?Of course not, he's a leading advocate for special education on Capitol Hill. But given how his proposed rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would leave most school accountability decisions to states and localities (Update: Full text now online here (pdf)) it's a question worth asking. After all, like special education students a generation ago the needs of poor and minority students are systematically overlooked by states and local school districts. You see this in access to resources like curriculum and effective teachers, you see it in the flows of public dollars to schools, and you see it in areas of emphasis.
What's different for special education students today? Well, for all of its ongoing problems and friction points the federal "IDEA" special education law is widely credited with a substantial leap forward for students with special needs. Why? It established standards and legal recourse when special education students were being shortchanged. Hasn't always been pretty and is far from perfect but has resulted in real progress for kids in special education. The obvious counterfactual is how much progress would have been made for special education students absent IDEA? I'd argue some, sure, but not as much and not as systemically.
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The list of words that was considered while producing DictionUp. About a 1000 words from this list are on DictionUp. Please feel free to print and use this word list while listening. This list can be used for GRE, SAT, CAT and IELTS preparation
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National Education Association's board of directors approved an allocation of up to $5 million to fund the campaign to defeat SB 5 in Ohio - the bill that severely restricts public employee collective bargaining.The $5 million comes from the national union's Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund, which was doubled in size by vote of NEA's delegates in July. This contribution is in addition to the estimated $5 million the Ohio Education Association dedicated to the referendum campaign, funded by a $54 special assessment the state union imposed on its members.
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Higher Education is in a bubble. Not only has total student loan debt in the United States surpassed credit card debt, but much of this debt has been taken out for degrees that are not worth the price of tuition. This is due to the fact that many students go to college with the false belief that a degree is a degree. And the colleges and universities profit off this widespread, but mistaken idea. Not all degrees are created equal.At The Best Colleges one of our primary missions is to help students make informed decisions about their education. Part of our challenge in doing this is exposing real, hidden risks in education. Several months ago we exposed what we believe is a Law School Bubble with a well-researched and informative infographic to help students make a wise decision before taking on a lifetime of debt. Because of the widspread success of this infographic, we began doing research on the wider problem of a higher education bubble. And this infographic is the result of our research.
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Florida's unpopular tea party governor, Rick Scott, wants more of the state's youths to pick up college degrees... but only if the degrees are useful to corporations and don't teach students to question social norms. "You know what? They need to get education in areas where they can get jobs," Scott told a right-wing radio host Monday morning. He continued:"You know, we don't need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That's what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job."
It's no idle sound bite. The governor, an ex-corporate CEO with a checkered business past, is pushing a plan that would all but kill liberal arts and social sciences at the Sunshine State's public universities--and he's got support from the Legislature's psychology-hatin' GOP majority. He explained the strategy Monday in a separate interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
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University fees are set to rise in England. But do the neighbours fare any better? Jasper Rees goes on a European tour and meets the students of Generation Skint ...From the hilltop castle which looms over Heidelberg the view is captivating. The river Neckar thrusts through forested hills. On the north side looms the Heiligenberg, up whose flank slithers the so-called Philosopher's Walk, sylvan haunt of many a strolling professor. At its foot are free-standing villas which speak discreetly of shockproof wealth. A gated bridge tiptoes over the gliding waters and leads to the old town with its elegant streets and important churches. What a gorgeous place to study.
Germany's oldest university doesn't come cheap. The cost of living is roughly €10,000 a year, not including tuition fees. Stefanie Schmidt (not her real name), a 25-year-old student with thin-framed specs and long auburn hair, is nearing the end of her studies in biology and English. Such is her parents' income that she did not qualify for a BAfÖG, or student loan, but her parents have been unable to give her further financial support, and so she has had to work. A lot.
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No factor is more important to the quality of education than the quality of the teacher. With so much at stake, it would be good to know just how well teacher preparation programs are equipping tomorrow's teachers -- and their students -- up for success.Teacher colleges balk at being rated Wisconsin schools say quality survey from national nonprofit and magazine won't be fair by: Erin Richards:
To answer this question, the National Council on Teacher Quality has partnered with U.S. News & World Report to launch a review of the more than 1,400 teacher preparation programs around the country. NCTQ will look at whether the programs select academically capable students, ensure they know the subjects they will teach and equip them with the techniques they need to help their students achieve. The review will let aspiring teachers know where they can get the best preparation, and encourage other programs to emulate the models of their field.
In the 2008-09 academic year, the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development produced more than 300 of the 4,500 new teachers who graduated in Minnesota. Yet despite its key role in filling the state's ranks of educators and despite being sent a formal request to participate in July, as of this week, CEHD has not indicated that they will cooperate with the review.
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The system's corps of lecturers feels this threat sharply. "We believe that if courses are moved online, they will most likely be the classes currently taught by lecturers," reads a brief declaration against online education on the website of UC-AFT, the University of California chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, "and so we will use our collective bargaining power to make sure that this move to distance education is done in a fair and just way for our members."
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The outbreak of scarlet fever in Hong Kong earlier this year caught the attention of specialists at the World Health Organisation. We think of scarlet fever in developed societies as a disease that was pretty well vanquished decades ago. So the emergence of a scarlet fever outbreak in a modern city like Hong Kong and in mainland China was something of an unexpected event. But more disquieting was the suggestion that the bacteria causing the disease had become resistant to certain antibiotics. Happily, the worst of the outbreak is over, but the global problem of drug resistance is definitely not.The discovery early last century of penicillin and antimicrobial drugs changed the course of history. Science began to gain the upper hand in the war on disease, and, at last, scourges such as leprosy, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, syphilis and many more could be mastered. But now many of those miracle drugs and the generations of others that followed could finish up in the rubbish bin as increasing levels of drug resistance threaten their effectiveness.
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Mending a frosty relationship between school and city leaders, building a new elementary campus and addressing long-term budget challenges are some of the key concerns emerging from the San Mateo-Foster City School District board election race.The race features political newcomers Fel Anthony Amistad and Audrey Ng and incumbent Colleen Sullivan vying for two spots on the board in the Nov. 8 election. Board President Mark Hudak is not running for re-election.
During a recent editorial meeting with the Times, Amistad, Ng and Sullivan all agreed that the relationship between the district and the Foster City council needs improvement. Much of the tension has involved the district's search in recent years for public land on which to build a proposed new school to address a student population surge.
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Whether gas, liquid or solid; radioactive or stable, reactive or inert; toxic or in your vitamin pill, the 118 building blocks each have its own chemically idiosyncratic characteristics, along with certain commonalities. See what makes your favorite element unique on this interactive periodic table
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We're glad state lawmakers are attempting to fix a potential problem created when the controversial school voucher provision was hurriedly stuck into the biennial budget passed in June.Senate Bill 174 would prevent the state's voucher program from expanding to districts that don't already qualify. The Green Bay School District falls into that category, but could eventually meet the qualifications.
Without the legislation, districts such as Green Bay could become eligible and begin the process of offering school vouchers without a full public hearing process. That would be unfair to taxpayers, parents, students and the public at large.
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As your editor expected, the waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act being pushed by President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, aren't worth the paper upon which they are written.Under the Obama plan, states will be allowed to evade the aspirational 100 percent proficiency provision with a vague set of "ambitious but achievable goals" and an equally amorphous requirement that states must put "college and career-ready" curriculum standards in place. Many surmise the latter means implementing Common Core standards in reading and math -- something that 45 states have done so far. But Duncan has had to avoid making such a public statement means in order to avoid the full wrath of congressional Republicans and some reformers who essentially declare that doing so oversteps the Department of Education's authority. As a result, a state can probably come up with some mishmash, call it college- and career-ready, and easily get it past federal officials.
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Welcome to Fantasyland. Eric Welch just sent me a detailed plan for a public charter school in Fairfax County. He and several other people on the board of what they call the Fairfax Leadership Academy say they want to help low-income families with a school unlike any local students have had before.They are deluded to think this would ever be approved, although Welch, much-honored as an educator, knows a lot about kids and teaching. We met several years ago when I visited his class at J.E.B. Stuart High School, where he used a program known as Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) to prepare average students for challenging courses. He is now the executive director and board chairman of the planned academy.
Counting him, the 17-member board includes 12 current or former Fairfax school educators, plus state Del. Kaye Kory (D-Fairfax). I expected more sense than this from such capable people, well-versed in the ways of public school politics. I hope they read the next few sentences carefully.
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I lied. My smartphone isn't a microscope -- yet. But there are some smart physicists who want to make that transformation possible very soon, if not for you and me at first, then for doctors who don't have easy access to laboratories.There are a lot of ways to trick out your smartphone. And if you're an eager Apple fan, the brand-new iPhone 4S will come with fancy apps that use its increasingly sophisticated camera to scan and image the world. A smartphone camera lens can measure objects, help translate words, and even tell you whether your potato chips have been caught in a food safety recall.
But Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu and colleagues at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis say a smartphone's camera lens can also serve as a microscope and a spectrometer, which both could be pretty handy for looking at blood samples.
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Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.To bolster their case and push their agendas, advocates for market-based education reform and market-based policies in general tout “miracle schools” that have supposedly produced amazing results . Urban Prep in Chicago is often exhibit A.
As Diane Ravitch wrote of Urban Prep and other ed deform favorites ” the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations.”
Locally, backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy have incorporated much of the Urban Prep model in their plan and have repeatedly cited the “success” of that school as evidence of the soundness of their proposal. Just this weekend Derrell Connor was quoted as saying in relation to Madison Prep “We are using Urban Prep (in Chicago) as an example, which for the last four years has a 100 percent graduation rate and all those kids have gone on to college.” As I pointed out in a back-and-forth in the comments on that interview, the actual Urban Prep graduation rate is far below 100% (62.6% is the correct figure, my mistakes in the comments, also there have only been two graduating classes, not four) .
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"Because we're in that position is exactly why we thought we could ask those questions," said Smith College President Carol Christ. "We aren't worried about what's going to happen next year."And Smith isn't alone. In the past year, presidents of several elite liberal arts colleges have questioned whether the financial model underpinning their institutions - one relying on high tuition costs and student aid paying for expensive instruction and residential life on beautiful campuses -- is sustainable over the long term. They have also begun to question whether the education they offer, with small classes, relatively rigid schedules, limited course and major offerings, and intense academic rigor, is going to continue to appeal to students.
"The model - if it's not breaking - it's showing signs of age," said Richard Kneedler, former president of Franklin and Marshall College, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and a consultant with Ann Duffield and Colleagues, a presidential consulting firm. "The price has been pushed up at a number of the top institutions. It's gotten to the point where people are asking a lot of questions about it, and this high price is creating a sense in part of the public that higher education is becoming a commercial exercise."
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A system that trains your brain to overcome degrading vision as you age will soon be available as an iPhone appWE HAVE gotten used to the idea that smartphone apps can substitute for devices like GPS navigation systems or portable music players. But the latest item on the list may come as a surprise: reading glasses.
Early next year, a company called Ucansi will launch GlassesOff, an iPhone app that could help older people shed their reading glasses for at least part of the time - and may allow others to carry on reading without optical aids for years longer than would otherwise be possible.
The app helps people compensate for deterioration in their eyes' ability to focus on nearby objects by training the brain to process the resulting blurred images. "We're using the brain as glasses," says Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University in Israel, and co-founder of Ucansi.
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Choehorned into a small living room in a South Los Angeles apartment, a dozen parents discuss why their kids' school ranks as one of the worst in the nation's second-largest school district.The answers come quickly: Teachers are jaded; gifted pupils aren't challenged; disabled students are isolated; the building is dirty and office staff treat parents disrespectfully.
"We know what the problem is -- we're about fixing it," said Cassandra Perry, the Woodcrest Elementary School parent hosting the meeting. "We're not against the administrators or the teachers union. We're honestly about the kids."
School parent groups are no longer just about holding the next bake-sale fundraiser. They're about education reform.
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Maryland has long been a leader in the field of educational accountability, and the Baltimore City school system took a crucial next step last year with a new teacher contract that will directly tie promotion and advancement to student outcomes. So it's mystifying that so little effort is being made to hold the private tutoring groups that are getting millions of dollars a year to help students from Baltimore's worst-performing schools accountable for the results they promise, or even to know whether they're making a difference.As part of the No Child Left Behind law, districts were required to set aside part of their federal Title I money to pay for free private tutoring for poor students at failing schools. Since Baltimore City has such a high proportion of students from poor families, and because the school system historically has struggled to meet NCLB's progress requirements, the city has been obliged to spend some $55 million on private tutors over the last nine years, with little oversight by the school system or the state.
That paradox arose because the NCLB law specifically forbade city school officials from vetting or ranking the private tutoring companies for effectiveness, on the theory that schools that were already judged to be failing should not be allowed to interfere with parents' decisions about what was best for their children. At the same time, the law required school systems to fully inform parents about the availability of such services and pay for whatever programs the parents chose. That prompted hundreds of tutoring outfits to emerge in hopes of capitalizing on the federal largesse. Some had established records of excellence, but many did not.
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Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips -- some have called them junkets -- for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips -- to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland -- they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.Rarely do they mention that they also meet with top executives of the Pearson company.
The foundation's officials say the free trips are solely educational and have no business purpose. On the foundation's tax forms for the last two years, the line for listing "payments of travel or entertainment expenses for any federal, state or local public officials" has been left blank.
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California Gov. Jerry Brown is one of the most powerful anti-student testing politicians in the country. So, when given the chance to sign into law a new system of education accountability that would place far less emphasis on test scores, what did Brown do? He vetoed it. In his veto message over the weekend he called the bill "yet another siren song of school reform" that "relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system."California Senate Bill 547 would have replaced what is known as the Academic Performance Index, which dates to 1999 and is based entirely on test scores, with the Education Quality Index, which, as the name implies, incorporated a broader range of measures. Schools' graduation rates, for example, as well as new indices of college preparedness and career readiness, would have been factored in. So would the availability and participation in extracurricular and enrichment opportunities. As for test scores, they would contribute no more than 40 percent of the value of the EQI for high schools and no less than 40 percent for elementary schools.
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McClatchy-Tribune News Service
:
Q The mother of one of my employees recently called my boss to complain that her daughter "Angie" was being overworked. Angie was upset because some required training made it difficult for her to complete her regular duties, so I quickly resolved the problem by changing her training schedule.
However, I was completely shocked that Angie had been afraid to talk to me directly and that her mother felt a need to contact my manager. With Angie's permission, I called her mother, who said she was just worried about her daughter's health.Apparently, the suggestion to call my boss came from our receptionist, who is a personal friend of Angie's mother. I don't understand why the receptionist never told me about this, because we have always had a great relationship.
The fact that all these people have been talking behind my back has me very upset. As Angie's supervisor, I feel I should have been given more respect. What should I do?
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Neal McCluskey and Vance Fried:
One of the major complaints of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, many of whom have taken on significant student debt, is that the cost of college is too darn high. And they're right, but not because of greedy corporate fat cats. No, the real guilty party here is federal politicians, who for decades have been fueling high profits -- and prices -- at both for-profit and nonprofit schools.Wait. Big profits at nonprofit colleges? Yes, money has been piling up even at schools you thought had no interest in profit. And Washington, D.C., is the biggest hand feeding the beast.
Thanks to recent congressional hearings and battling over new regulations for for-profit schools, most people -- including many college-aged, profit-disdaining Wall Street squatters -- are probably at least vaguely aware that for-profit colleges are making good money.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes
This week's Isthmus includes an opinion column by Larry Kaufmann entitled "What's So Bad About School Choice?" Mr. Kauffmann is identified as "an economic consultant based in Madison." I bet Mr. Kaufmann is really smart in a lot of ways. But this column of his seems strikingly misguided.In a nutshell, Kaufmann argues that our public schools have failed. Public education "is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America." Spending on schools has gone up but "students' combined math and reading scores have been flat." Hence, our educational productivity "has fallen by 50% since 1970."
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Kaufmann apparently is an economist and his preferred solution to what he sees as the underperformance of the educational-output industry is to unleash the magic of the market.
Specifically, his answer is unfettered school choice. Instead of shoveling money down educational sinkholes, parents should be given vouchers to purchase educational services from whomever they choose. Kaufmann assumes that parents as consumers will choose wisely; innovative and efficient schools will flourish; less effective schools will exit the market; and math and reading scores will soar.
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As a senior, I am at a critical point in my high school career, arguably the most significant, the college application process.It is a long, strenuous process that will determine not just the next four years, but also set the stage for the rest of my life. Yet as I look around in class and read the news, I have to wonder are we really being prepared for the future?
I'm not sure exactly when it happened but somewhere along the way as I saw our economy declining and educational budget cuts being made nationwide, I realized just how difficult it is becoming for students today to attain a higher education and to acquire a job in today's competitive and ever demanding labor market.
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The British are coming! The British are coming!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Public education needs more money! Public education needs more money!One of these statements (had Paul Revere actually said it) was true. One of these statements is obviously false. And the third, well, skies don't fall, silly.
Taxpayers keep hearing how the funding for public education has been cut. We're constantly barraged with: "Money is tight." "We've cut the budget to the bone." "We're running out of options." "We've done all we can; now we have to cut programs and teachers." These claims defy explanation. They aren't true in Spokane. They aren't true in Washington State. They aren't true in most other states, and they aren't true at the federal level. Unfortunately, many people believe them.
A city council candidate insisted recently: "We can't gut education!" Last week, a Spokane reporter wrote: "Since 2002, Spokane Public Schools has cut $45 million from its budget..." In its budget forums last spring, district administrators and board directors told the public that since 2002, the district has cut $54 million from its budget. Spokane school board candidate Deana Brower has repeatedly said that the district needs more money.
Let's look at some numbers. Follow the links to the budget documents. See how the budget has grown, and see the district's tendency to budget for greater expenditures than it has in revenues.
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California Governor Jerry Brown (PDF):
To the Members of the California State Senate:Valerie Strauss has more.I am returning Senate Bill 547 without my signature.
This bill is yet another siren song of school reform. It renames the Academic Performance Index (API) and reduces its significance by adding three other quantitative measures.
While I applaud the author's desire to improve the API, I don't believe that this bill would make our state's accountability regime either more probing or more fair.
This bill requires a new collection of indices called the "Education Quality Index" (EQI),consisting of "multiple indicators," many of which are ill-defined and some impossible to design. These "multiple indicators" are expected to change over time, causing measurement instability and muddling the picture ofhow schools perform.
SB 547 would also add significant costs and confusion to the implementation of the newly-adopted Common Core standards which must be in place by 2014. This bill would require us to introduce a whole new system of accountability at the same time we are required to carry out extensive revisions to school curriculum, teaching materials and tests. That doesn't make sense.
Finally, while SB 547 attempts to improve the API, it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system. The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB 547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools.
Adding more speedometers to a broken car won't tum it into a high-performance machine.
Over the last 50 years, academic "experts" have subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change and experimentation.
The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational "good" from the educational "bad." Instead of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for ever more measurement "visions and revisions."
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The University of Wisconsin System is trying to help transfer students get a degree quicker and cheaper as part of its effort to increase the number of college graduates in the state.Transferring credits from one school to another often means wasted time and money because course requirements don't match. With some 17,000 students - the equivalent of two small UW universities - transferring into and within the UW system each year, making the process more efficient could have a dramatic effect on retention and graduation rates.
Such a step might not seem like an economic driver, but boosting the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have a college degree could help lure companies to the state, system officials reason. That, in turn, could stimulate the economy.
Many college students today aren't dropped off at one school as freshmen and picked up at the same school four years later with a degree, said UW System President Kevin Reilly. It's more of a "swirl," he said, with students leaving college for a number of reasons, then returning to school somewhere else with credits to transfer.
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Get ready law schools: A Senate hearing on the ABA regulation of law schools might be coming. That is the subtext of Senator Boxer's most recent letter to the ABA. It's overdue.Law schools have demonstrated time and again that we are incapable of regulating ourselves. It started a century ago, when AALS and ABA wrote accreditation standards to keep out competition from lower cost urban law schools that educated immigrants and working class people. It was on display in 1995, when the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust suit against the ABA, charging that legal educators had captured the accreditation process and were using it to ratchet up their wages and reduce their teaching loads. And it is happening again now--as highlighted by two recent examples.
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Arnaud Chevalier, Joanne Lindley:
During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated; to compare pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates. We find the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. This suggests that the labour market accommodated most of the large expansion of university graduates. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills such as management and leadership. Additionally, genuine over-education increases unemployment by three months but has no impact of the number of jobs held. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it, does not alter these conclusions.
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The parent-teacher organizations and associations in our schools do good work, yet rarely agitate for change. Parents often pick their neighborhood because they like the school the way it is. Teachers often prefer to make their own decisions without parental interference.But occasionally, as happened at Leesburg Elementary School in Loudoun County, parent dissatisfaction reaches a level where the PTO begins asking questions and sending e-mails to the principal or, worse, the principal's bosses. Then those evening meetings, which used to put me to sleep, get stressful.
Communication breakdowns between parents and schools are common. We education writers usually shrug them off as too local and trivial. But little stories like the flap at Leesburg Elementary expose a major flaw in the way schools treat parents (that's right, I think the school is usually the villain) and deserve more attention than they get.
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"[People] like themselves just as they are," says Marvin Minsky. "Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves."Marvin believes that it is important that we "understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't-and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves."
Marvin Minsky is the leading light of AI-that is, artificial intelligence. He sees the brain as a myriad of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brain's cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level, abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a conscious human being can do.
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AMONG the episodes in his life that didn't last, that were over almost before they began, including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco. He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much--garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing. He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed, or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state. All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.Project Gutenberg:He came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, "Moby-Dick", pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the "Kama Sutra"). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe--a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.
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Representative Michele Bachmann promises to "turn out the lights" at the federal Education Department. Gov. Rick Perry calls it unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, would allow it to live but only as a drastically shrunken agency that mainly gathers statistics.Related: A Federal Takeover of Education.Even Mitt Romney, who in 2008 ran for president defending No Child Left Behind, the federal law that vastly expanded Washington's role in public schools, now says, "We need to get the federal government out of education."
For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation's 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards.
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Reclamations, a journal published by University of California students, has published a special, timely pamphlet called "Generation of Debt," on the trap of student debt in America. Young people in America are bombarded with the message that they won't find meaningful employment without a degree (and sometimes a graduate degree).Meanwhile, universities have increased their fees to astronomical levels, far ahead of inflation, and lenders (including the universities themselves) offer easy credit to students as a means of paying these sums (for all the money they're charging, universities are also slashing wages for their staff, mostly by sticking grad students and desperate "adjuncts" into positions that used to pay professorial wages; naturally, the austerity doesn't extend to the CEO-class administrators, who draw CEO-grade pay).
The loans are backed by the government, and constitute a special form of debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and that can be doubled, tripled, or increased tenfold through usury penalties for missed payments (the lenders themselves have a deplorable habit of applying these penalties even when payments are made, through "bureaucratic error" that is nearly impossible to correct).
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The Web site of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: "Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results."The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the United States Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.
The federal review of Carnegie Learning's flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had "no discernible effects" on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, "did not have statistically significant effects on test scores."
Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies' promotional materials.
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Consider three anecdotes from Mary Diez, dean of education at Alverno College:Several years ago, she was walking up to the door of a Milwaukee high school. A student told her, "Lady, you don't want to go in there. It's not a nice place." Unfortunately, she said, he was right. Too many staff members didn't really care about the kids, and you had the feeling the place could go out of control at any time. Is that the formula for a successful school?
While Diez was involved in an effort to help 11 specific schools in the city, a principal showed her a six-page document, listing rules and the consequences for violating them. Her response: "You think, if you had more engaging classes, you would need all that?"
Students at one school were telling her about their favorite teacher. "She respects us and we respect her back," one said. The teacher had found something you don't learn from a course or a manual: the right mix of caring for kids and demanding educational progress from them that brings good outcomes, even with high-needs youths.
Diez is one of the leading figures in the Milwaukee area in what I believe (and this may be hopeful thinking) is a growing commitment by schools and educators to strengthen their work on improving the character traits of their students - and of staff members.
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According to statistics provided by the Oakland school district (and crunched by your devoted education reporter):TOTAL SUSPENSIONS in 2010-11: 6,137
TOTAL DAYS OF SCHOOL MISSED: 14,533
DEFIANCE ("disruption/defy authority") was the basis for 43 percent of all suspensions.
BLACK MALES made up less than 20 percent of all students in OUSD, but received about half of the suspensions.
At least two of the schools had more suspensions than students: Barack Obama Academy and Youth Empowerment School. YES (on the King Estates campus) closed in June, and Barack Obama Academy, an alternative middle school that opened on the Toler Heights campus in 2007, is slated to merge with Community Day.
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In rebuttal to last week's controversial bake sale protesting affirmative action in college admissions at the University of California, Berkeley, students at Fordham University in New York staged their own sale on Friday.A Fordham professor of African American Studies, Mark Naison, is leading the charge, mobilizing students in his senior seminar on affirmative action to peddle pastries priced according to research they conducted on various groups' advantages in admissions.
As Mr. Naison wrote in a piece Thursday on The Huffington Post, the counter-sale reflects "frustration at the misinformation about affirmative action that prevails among large sections of the American public."
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Frederic Leblanc & Nicolas Lupien:
Have you ever experienced an online course ? If you are reading this article, I'm presuming the answer is yes. Whether you are the teacher or the student, you probably thought, at one time or another: the experience could have been better if... Maybe it wasn't exactly those words, but I'm sure you found out that the Learning Management System (LMS) you were using - or the course material you were producing/looking at - wasn't as hot as you expected.This is quite common. In the beginning of this century, LMSs are only starting to be usable by the mainstream. What we're asking teachers is to create online material without, sometimes, any knowledge of computers or the LMS itself.
How can the experience be better? LMS can be simpler if online material can be produced without requiring a degree in computer science... and in a reasonable time frame.
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At John McDonough High School in this city's Esplanade Ridge district, the new superintendent points to a broken window boarded up with plastic. Nobody thought to fix it properly. "Why? Because these are the poor kids," says John White, who arrived in New Orleans this spring. "The message is: 'We don't care.'"John Mac is one of the worst schools in New Orleans, which makes it one of the worst in America. It scored 30 out of 200 on a statewide performance scale when 75 counts as "failing." In a school built for 800 students, 340 are enrolled. Virtually all are African-American. A couple years ago, an armed gang burst into the cafeteria and assassinated a student.
Mr. White looks in on classrooms. In one, groups of seniors chat loudly and puzzle over a basic algebra problem. In another the teacher struggles to start a conversation about a USA Today article that few students had read. A girl in the corner sits with a jacket over her head, headphones in both ears.
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An article in today's Capital Times details the ongoing saga of Madison Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire's efforts to create an all-male charter school targeted towards African-Americans in Madison. The story highlights Wisconsin's need for an improved charter school law.
The school, Madison Prep, aims to use an extended school day, uniforms, and family engagement to get 6th - 12th graders ready for college. The need for a new approach in Madison is great, just 48.3% of African-American students graduate high school in four years. The problem is that charter schools outside of Milwaukee and Racine can only be authorized by school districts and the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) has not been eager to authorize Madison Prep.
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The Madison School District's student population grew this year to its highest level since 1998, not counting an additional 1,789 new students enrolled in 4-year-old kindergarten.The 24,861 students represent the second-largest official student count in the past two decades, though the population has stayed relatively constant between 24,000 and 25,000 students during that time. The count is taken on the third Friday of the school year and is used to calculate state aid.
The district estimates there are 2,100 4-year-olds living in the district, which puts the district's 4K enrollment at more than 85 percent.
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Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison School Board members appear to have ironed out some of the major wrinkles in the plans for the controversial new charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of minority students.But the devil remains in the details, board members say. Bringing several issues into clearer focus and then getting agreement will be essential to move the project forward. A final vote by the School Board will take place before the end of the year.
Details to be examined include the fine print on a broad agreement announced last week between the Madison teachers union and organizers of the Urban League-sponsored charter school.
"There are still some tremendously big questions that haven't been answered about how this agreement would actually work," says Marj Passman, School Board vice president. "It's not clear to me that all the parties are on the same page on all the issues, large and small."
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The National Education Policy Center finds that districts, including L.A. Unified, have increasingly suspended minority students, mostly for nonviolent offenses, over the last decade.In the decade since school districts instituted "zero tolerance" discipline policies, administrators have increasingly suspended minority students, predominantly for nonviolent offenses, according to a report released Wednesday.
The National Education Policy Center found that suspensions across the country are increasing for offenses such as dress code and cellphone violations. Researchers expressed concerns that the overuse of suspensions could lead to dropouts and even incarceration.
Suspensions are falling mostly on black students; nearly a third of black males in middle school have been suspended at least once, researchers from the University of Colorado-based group found.
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How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, daVincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.
Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much to science or art. She is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. Run-of-the-mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).
Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart. After considerable debate initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on creativity in the sixties, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.
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Madison Preparatory Academy, via email:
Today, Madison Preparatory Academy Board Chair, David Cagigal, announced a gift of $2.5 million presented to the public charter school from Madisonian Mary Burke.
Ms. Burke, a retired business executive whose family owns Trek Bicycles and who served as Wisconsin's Secretary of Commerce during the Doyle Administration, described the reason for her gift.
"We all know Madison can do better. I am happy to do my part to invest in our community and the future of all of our youth. Madison Prep is a powerful idea backed up by a powerful and cost-effective plan. It offers real hope to Madison students, teachers and families who want to realize their expectations and dreams."
Ms. Burke also shared, "I understand we are in tight budget times and don't want concerns about the cost of Madison Prep or the availability of public funding to supersede the real need for the School Board to support it. I am confident Madison Prep will be a great opportunity for children and want to see it happen. I hope my gift helps the School Board overcome its financial concerns."
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Vice Chair of Madison Prep's Board and the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sees Ms. Burke's gift as an investment in innovation and human potential.
"We need to search for new solutions to solve the achievement gap in our Madison schools. To do this, we must be willing to innovate. Madison can be a perfect incubator for new educational methods and approaches. Mary Burke's gift is stunning in its generosity and powerful in its potential."
Mr. Cagigal sees the gift as the start of an important trend in the region. "Mary is absolutely committed to eliminating the achievement gap and is investing her resources in multiple approaches to achieve this goal. Whether it's Madison Prep or the Boys & Girls Club's AVID/TOPS program, Mary believes that supporting such efforts will ultimately benefit our entire community in the future. She is setting a great example for others and we are very thankful to have her in our corner."
With Ms. Burke's gift, the Urban League of Greater Madison will further reduce its request for per pupil funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District from $11,471 per pupil to $9,400 in the school's first year, and $9,800 per pupil in years two through five of the school's proposed five year budget. The Madison district currently spends $13,207 per pupil to educate students in middle and high schools.
Madison Preparatory Academy plans to open two college preparatory public charter schools in the fall of 2012, one for boys and one for girls. Their mission will be the same: to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. Both academies will be tuition-free, offer an identical curriculum in a single-sex education environment, and serve as catalysts for change and opportunity, particularly for young people of color.
Beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the Academies will serve 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls when they open next year, eventually growing to serve 820 students total.
Madison's Board of Education will vote next month on the new charter schools.
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DM: But you do need a person.SJ: You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they're not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don't need an assistant. I think we have all the material in the world to solve this problem; it's just being deployed in other places. I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.
DM: This question was meant to be at the end and we're just getting to it now.
SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.
Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately twenty thousand dollars. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars. Over twice as much as a car. It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.
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Monopolists hate competition, and they'll say almost anything to prevent it. When natural gas competition was introduced in the mid-1980s, pipeline executives told regulators it would lead to gas explosions throughout Manhattan. As implausible as that tale was, it pales in comparison to the misinformation campaign waged by the public school monopoly against school choice.The school choice movement is gathering steam because of one simple fact: Public education is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America. Since 1970, spending on public schools (per student, in inflation-adjusted terms) has more than doubled. Over the same period, students' combined math and reading scores have been flat, and the U.S. has fallen behind most other industrial nations on standardized tests.
Educational productivity can be measured as the "output" of educational achievement for each inflation-adjusted dollar spent per student, and by this measure, the productivity of American public schools has fallen by 50% since 1970. A dollar invested in public schools in the U.K., Ireland and New Zealand now yields nearly twice the educational achievement as the same dollar spent in U.S. public schools.
These results cannot be explained by the efforts made to educate the disadvantaged, or by "exit exams" that reduce the pool of high school graduates in some countries. America's public schools clearly need to be improved but, in spite of receiving a massive increase in resources, have consistently failed to do so. Given this dismal performance, the current calls for fundamental educational reform are natural, healthy and long overdue.
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A college professor looks at the forgotten victims of our mediocre educational system--the potentially high achievers whose SAT scores have fallen, and who read less, understand less of what they read, and know less than the top students of a generation ago.Two crises are stalking American education. Each poses a major threat to the nation's future. The two are very different in character and will require separate strategies if we wish to solve them; yet to date, almost without exception, those concerned with restoring excellence to our schools have lumped them together.
The first crisis, which centers on disadvantaged minority children attending inner-city schools, has received considerable attention, as well it should. Put simply, it involves students whose habitat makes it very difficult for them to learn. The key issues are more social than educational. These children clearly need dedicated teachers and a sound curriculum, the two staples of a quality school, but the fact remains that most of them will not make significant progress until they also have decent housing, a better diet, and a safer environment in which to live.
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At the time, Julie Fitzgerald didn't know much about standardized testing or the laws in place that promote it. She just saw her young child crying."He was trying to do his math homework, which is a subject he usually enjoyed," she recalled. "He was really struggling, and he put his head down on the counter and started to cry. He said, 'I'm stupid.'"
Fitzgerald learned that her son, then in the second grade, had taken an assessment test that day in school and had become overwhelmed by it. A year later, she has informed Portland school officials in writing that she's opting both of her kids, students at Hall Elementary School, out of standardized testing.
She's one of few parents in Portland to take that step, but represents a local tie to a growing nationwide movement of parents dissatisfied with assessment tests mandated by state and federal education laws.
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Families were more dependent on government programs than ever last year.Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.
The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)
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A week after President Obama said he planned to rollback No Child Left Behind requirements, a majority of states have indicated they're on board with the plan, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is encouraging others to do the same.In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Duncan said that he wants "to get out of the way of the states," and that teachers need "room to move and we can't keep beating down from Washington."
In a letter to state education officials, Duncan stated that he was encouraging state and local government agencies to request waivers to NCLB, which Duncan says he is able to enact through a section in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The new waivers will provide flexibility to school curriculum, provided that the governing bodies meet certain requirements.
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It appears that the one thing holding down student achievement was the jeans the teacher wore to class. Oh, if only we had realized that unless the teacher was wearing a tie while dodging spitballs from his class of 60 kids, that would make all the difference as to whether or not Johnny could read.Nancy Ettenheim:No one cares to lower class sizes, and heaven forbid we should give teachers the opportunity to have any say in their workplace. So let's enact dress codes for teachers. No one is saying where the teachers are going to get the money for all these clothes, but I guess Goodwill might be high on the list.
What an interesting paradox to read the Oct. 2 article on dress codes for teachers in the same newspaper that carried the lament that we need more people with manufacturing skills such as machinists and CNC operators. Does anyone remember that some people who work with their hands are the ones who are actually helping the economy along? I mean, are we so blinded by the thought that we all want everyone to be a doctor, lawyer or MBA that we have forgotten that some people are amazing at doing jobs that don't require wearing a suit?
In this era of tumult and freefall for teachers in public schools, the imposition of a teacher dress code seems almost over the top. At first glance, it appears heavily dredged in the flour of unbounded management power.A number of public school districts in the metro area have imposed dress codes on their teaching staff. While the codes vary in detail, they seem to center around a neat, casual appearance for the teachers.
Politics aside, when one steps back and examines the strengths of the policy, it is a good idea. Teachers quoted in an Oct. 2 Journal Sentinel article, for the most part, appear to be supportive. In my experience, most teachers already dress this way, what I call "respectfully comfortable."
The key issue to me is that teachers not be mistaken for students because of lax appearance. Clothing is a powerful symbol in all areas of life; it makes announcements as to how a person wishes to be perceived. Teachers do and should occupy an arena of esteem and authority. This can be diminished if a teacher shows up in class wearing clothes so informal as to send a message to students that, hey, we're all buddies and I want to be your friend.
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"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
Measuring teacher performance has been a focus for Duncan, who last year upset many programs by suggesting that master's degrees in education should not automatically merit higher paychecks, saying that money should be redirected to teachers who either prove their ability to perform or work in high-needs areas such as low-income districts. The new federal proposal, which Duncan announced here on Friday, was widely praised for its goal of improving student outcomes. But it also prompted some skepticism from teacher education groups questioning its feasibility.
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The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don't be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).
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t sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students -- and to the international competitiveness of the United States.
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Dear Common Council Members, Mayor Barrett, Treasurer Whittow, and Comptroller Morics:As members of the Milwaukee Legislative Caucus, we are writing to request that you adopt and implement the Milwaukee Public School Board's proposal to break out the tax levy associated with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) from the tax levy for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) on all annual tax documents sent to taxpayers.
Inclusion of this information would amount to a simple act of truth in advertising and transparency in government. Milwaukee's taxpayers deserve to know exactly how much of their money is going to fund private and religious schools through the MPCP.
As you know, in 2010, state law compelled MPS to levy over $50 million in taxes to subsidize the private and religious schools that make up the voucher program, over which MPS has no authority or control. This amounts to 17 percent of the total MPS tax levy going to non-MPS schools.
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Everybody hates the No Child Left Behind Act. In the last few weeks, both conservative Republicans and President Obama have announced plans to overhaul George W. Bush's signature education law by sending power over K-12 schooling back to the states. On the surface, this might seem like a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. Don't believe it. The two plans actually represent radically different views of the federal government's responsibility for helping children learn.To see why, it helps to understand some common misconceptions about NCLB. The law requires schools to administer annual reading and math tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and it holds schools accountable for the percentage of students who pass the tests. That target percentage increases steadily over time, to 100 percent in 2014. Since universal proficiency is obviously impossible, the law has been cast as a malevolent force designed to tar public schools with "failing" labels as a prelude to corporate takeover and/or conversion to the free-market voucher nirvana of Milton Friedman's dreams.
There are, however, three aspects of NCLB that render this scenario very unlikely. First, states were given total discretion to set their own academic standards, pick their own tests, and decide what scores on the tests count as passing. Last year, for example, Alabama reported that 87 percent of its fourth graders had passed the state's reading test. Yet Alabama is, by all available measures, one of the most academically low-performing states in the nation. According to the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, only 34 percent of Alabama fourth graders are proficient in reading. The lesson: Give state education officials the ability to decide how their performance will be judged, and they'll respond in predictable fashion.
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Nancy Cantor is the chancellor of Syracuse University, but if you didn't know better you might think she was the mayor of this town.Since she took over at the university seven years ago, the institution has spent tens of millions of dollars--and attracted much more--to revitalize this sagging Rust Belt city.
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Emma Brown, via a kind James Dias email:
Seventh-grade history teacher Mark Stevens bellowed a set of 21st-century instructions as students streamed into class one recent Friday at Fairfax County's Glasgow Middle School."Get a computer, please! Log on," he said, "and go to your textbook."
Electronic books, having changed the way many people read for pleasure, are now seeping into schools. Starting this fall, almost all Fairfax middle and high school students began using online books in social studies, jettisoning the tomes that have weighed down backpacks for decades.
It is the Washington area's most extensive foray into online textbooks, putting Fairfax at the leading edge of a digital movement that publishers and educators say inevitably will sweep schools nationwide.
But questions remain about whether the least-privileged children will have equal access to required texts. Many don't have computers at home, or reliable Internet service, and the school system is not giving a laptop or e-reader to every student.
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The alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia in the later half of the fourth millennium B.C. witnessed a immense expansion in the number of populated sites. Scholars still debate the reasons for this population increase, which seems to be too large to be explained simply by normal growth. One site, the city of Uruk, surpassed all others as an urban center surrounded by a group of secondary settlements. It covered approximately 250 hectares, or .96 square miles, and has been called "the first city in world history." The site was dominated by large temple estates whose need for accounting and disbursing of revenues led to the recording of economic data on clay tablets. The city was ruled by a man depicted in art with many religious functions. He is often called a "priest-king." Underneath this office was a stratified society in which certain professions were held in high esteem. One of the earliest written texts from Uruk provides a list of 120 officials including the leader of the city, leader of the law, leader of the plow, and leader of the lambs, as well as specialist terms for priests, metalworkers, potters, and others. Many other urban sites existed in southern Mesopotamia in close proximity to Uruk. To the east of southern Mesopotamia lay a region located below the Zagros Mountains called by modern scholars Susiana. The name reflects the civilization centered around the site of Susa. There temples were built and clay tablets, dating to about 100 years after the earliest tablets from Uruk, were inscribed with numerals and word-signs. Examples of Uruk-type pottery are found in Susiana as well as in other sites in the Zagros mountain region and in northern and central Iran, attesting to the important influence of Uruk upon writing and material culture. Uruk culture also spread into Syria and southern Turkey, where Uruk-style buildings were constructed in urban settlements.
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When he was 12, William Palmer joined a gang without even realizing it. To him, he was just hanging out with his big brother and their friends in their Easterhouse neighborhood in Glasgow. At first, he stood and watched as his friends defended their 200-sq-m territory from rivals. Lining up military-style, both sides would lunge and retreat until someone, usually drunk, engaged, and the fight would begin. Soon enough, Palmer was fighting alongside his brethren. By the time he was 20, he was selling drugs -- mostly ecstasy -- to younger kids in his neighborhood, taking care to avoid other gangs' territories lest he get jumped.Now 29, Palmer regards himself as lucky to have survived his youth. One of his brothers, a heroin addict, is in prison. Palmer himself did a two-year term after attacking a rival gang member with a hatchet. That led to an epiphany, and he joined Alcoholics Anonymous to dry out. Today he mentors kids at risk of joining gangs, even though the charity for which he works still has to carefully smuggle him through enemy lines -- five years after he left his gang. He is also wanted by the Glasgow police, but in a good way. They regularly ask Palmer to talk with new officers about how to get through to gang members. The role reversal amuses him. "We used to phone them up just to toy with them so we could get a chase off them," he says of the police. "Now they're phoning me up for advice."
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In recent years, both with its money and its reputation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has endorsed the principles of Venezuela's El Sistema national music training program. The Phil set up a Los Angeles youth orchestra partially modeled on El Sistema, and hired the program's star graduate, Gustavo Dudamel, to be the orchestra's music director.Now the L.A. Phil is following El Sistema's lead again.
On Tuesday, the orchestra announced that it is partnering with Bard College in upstate New York and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., to launch a joint musical education initiative that will aim to combine first-rate musical instruction with the broader goal of serving underserved community.
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Paul Gross, Forward by Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Kathleen Porter-Magee:
Science will soon join the short list of K-12 subjects for which American states, districts, and schools will have the option of using new, multi-state (aka, "national") academic standards rather than standards developed by individual states. One can reasonably surmise that new assessments aligned with those standards will follow in due course, as will curricula, professional development, textbooks, and much more.Is this a good thing for American students and teachers--and for the nation's future? It depends, of course, on whether the new standards (and ensuing assessments, etc.) are better than those that states have been devising and deploying on their own. Today, every state has its own unique version of K-12 science standards. A year or so from now, however, many of them are apt to be deciding whether to replace their individual standards with the new multi-state standards that a (privately funded) consortium of organizations (led by Achieve, Inc.) recently began to draft.
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Business schools are under the microscope again, their relevance and value questioned in many quarters. The financial crisis has triggered a self-examination of their raison d'etre.However, before we can decide whether and how business schools need to change, it is worth pausing to consider how and why business schools have evolved as they have.
A new book, "The Roots, Rituals and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools After the Second World War," describes the revolution in business education that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. The book was published by Stanford University Press.
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Certainly not for the many young Americans being graduated from colleges that have prepared them inadequately for the competitive marketplace. The failure of colleges and universities to teach basic skills, while coddling them with plush dorms and self-directed "study," is a dot-connecting exercise for Uncle Shoulda, who someday will say -- in Chinese -- "How could we have let this happen?"We often hear lamentations about declining educational quality, but the focus is usually misplaced on SAT scores and graduation rates. Missing from the conversation is the quality of what's being taught. Meanwhile, we are mistakenly wed to the notion that more people going to college means more people will find jobs.
Obviously the weak economy is a factor in the highest unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 29 since World War II. But there's more to the story. Fundamentally, students aren't learning what they need to compete for the jobs that do exist.
These facts have been well documented by a variety of sources, not to mention the common experience of employers who can't find applicants who can express themselves grammatically.
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Researchers are finding that a hormone in the body believed to help people form emotional bonds with each other may work to treat people with schizophrenia, autism and certain other psychiatric disorders related to social interaction.A number of small scientific studies have been published recently suggesting that puffs of oxytocin into the nose may reduce some symptoms in people with these disorders and improve their ability to function. In particular, the hormone seemed to enhance patients' abilities to recognize others' emotions, which is a crucial step in improving social interactions.
Oxytocin, produced both by men and women, is nicknamed the "love hormone" because of its apparent role in building trust between people. Women, for instance produce large amounts of oxytocin during labor preceding childbirth, presumably to foster bonding with the newborn.
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Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.
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Stopping in areas notorious for volatile labor relations this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrapped up his Great Lakes bus tour in Milwaukee and Chicago on Friday with little talk of teachers union battles.In Milwaukee, Duncan was joined by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who outraged educators by signing a budget in June that severely limited their collective bargaining rights, at a town hall event focused on connecting learning to career skills.
"All of us feel your presence today but appreciate your interest in Milwaukee and particularly the Milwaukee Public School system," Walker said in the library of Milwaukee's School of Career and Technical Education.
"You've done some things we agree with, and you've done some things that we don't agree with," Duncan said, addressing Walker. "Limiting collective bargaining rights is not the right way to go," he added, garnering applause.
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I suppose this is, officially speaking, the end of the tennis season. Djokovic and Nadal - a raging bull tamed by a matador of superhuman reflexes and speed - fought out their thunderous final in New York a month ago and our end-of-season party at the club took place not long afterwards. As far as I'm concerned, though, there is no end to the season; I was brought up to play in light snow and some of our most exhilarating battles have been joined on crisp winter evenings with the temperature close to zero.Perhaps the best moments of my tennis year, so far, came just as the autumn leaves started to strew the courts, just before the nets and posts of the grass courts were taken up for the last time. There were some good late-season games - but even better than the games were flashes of insight, not just into technical aspects of the game but more particularly into the true nature of mentoring.
Our club is a place where people of different generations come regularly and naturally together, from the senior members, a little creaky in the limbs, to very young children just beginning to swing racquets (you hope not in the direction of their brothers and sisters), and that in itself is unusual in a world that is more and more stratified in terms of age - and not just age.
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The Chicago Teachers Union's closed-door "policy briefings" for aldermen Monday were as much about public relations as they were about school policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's unofficial City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O'Connor (40th Ward) said after attending one of the three sessions.For weeks, the union and Emanuel have been locked in a war of words over the mayor's push to immediately extend the school day by 90 minutes. On Monday, the union's leaders made their case instead to 25 of the council's 50 members, with eight other aldermen sending aides to the meetings.
"They're trying to win a little more sympathy from the public and the City Council, and this was their effort to do that," O'Connor said. "I think today was an attempt by the Chicago Teachers Union to basically say, 'We don't like to be vilified. We don't want to be in a position when people are upset with us as being an obstruction to a longer school day.'"
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It was interesting to read the op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from Mary Bell, the president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC). In Bell's world, the state's teachers unions are a benevolent force for education in Wisconsin.Maybe that is the view from the WEAC office building on Nob Hill outside Madison. Parents, advocates for reform in education, and even a few teachers might have a little less sanguine view of the supposed benefits of the teachers unions.
We should be grateful to Bell for at least differentiating between the role of the teacher and the union. "As educators, we are determined to help every student succeed. As a union, we are determined to help every educator - and our schools - succeed."
We're just not sure in what the union wants the teachers and school districts to succeed. If it's in educating children, the union has done it's best to fight any needed education reforms that would allow teachers and schools to succeed.
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If this year is anything like the last 10, around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates will enter the consulting or finance industry*. This is a big deal. This is a huge deal. This is so many people! This is one-fourth of our people! Regardless of what you think or with whom you're interviewing, we ought to be pausing for a second to ask why.I don't pretend to know anymore about this world than the rest of us. In fact, I probably know less. (According to the Internet, a consultant is "someone who consults someone or something.") But I do know that this statistic is utterly and entirely shocking to me. In a place as diverse and disparate as Yale, it's remarkable that such a large percentage of people are doing anything the same -- not to mention something as significant as their postgraduate plans.
I want to understand.
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Baghdad-born architect Zaha Hadid continues to show the British how to create when parts of Iraq have been reduced to rubble by forces from her adopted land.Hadid, 60, won the Stirling Prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects for a second straight year for a school in Brixton, south London.
The Evelyn Grace Academy, a concrete-and-glass structure with a running track linking the campus gates, was voted best new European building built or designed in Britain.
Speaking at its inauguration 12 months ago on a site that previously hosted a garbage truck depot, Hadid said the place was not like a fortress. There were secure gates, she noted, but people outside could see activities within.
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To attract students and families turned off by the potential for six-figure tuition bills, a growing number of private colleges are taking a page out of the retail playbook: They are cutting their prices.Most recently, Seton Hall University announced that it would offer tuition discounts of up to 66% for academically qualified students, joining more than a dozen schools across the country that have announced similar programs in the last few months. Some schools, like Seton Hall, are offering straight-up tuition discounts for qualified students. Others are rolling out three-year degree programs that allow students to, effectively, cut their tuition bills by 25%. Still others are guaranteeing tuition won't rise while a student is in school. The most generous of the programs can whittle the price of private college -- $27,000 per year -- to less than $10,000.
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It all seemed like a good idea at the time: give students an option to attend school online rather than through traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.The concept launched in Colorado in 1995 was intended to help at-risk students who struggle in traditional settings and to provide a choice for students and parents looking to reap more from their educational experiences.
Here in Poudre School District, its online school, the Global Academy, is controlled with much the same accountability as other PSD schools, including regular audits and monitoring for achievement and standardized testing.
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Don Severson, via email:
DATE: October 3, 2011PDF Version.
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Don Severson, President, 577-0851, donleader@aol.com RE: Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing
Notes: For public appearanceThe actions of the past few days are stunning, but not necessarily surprising ULGM (Madison Prep) and MTI have made working 'arrangements' regarding employment of teachers and staff and working conditions, the details of which have yet to be made public.
Major issue: 'negotiations/arrangements' have been made between MP & MTI without MMSD BOE nor administration at the table--both observed and verified by parties not involved.
In other words, MTI is the de facto negotiator for the Board and NOT the elected BOE, nor specified as its representative
ACE has publicly stated its support of MP. We must now withhold affirmation of that support until and unless major, systemic changes occur in how the proposal process and plans (both academic and business) play out.By design, default, benign neglect or/and collusion the BOE has abdicated the authority vested in it by law and the electorate of the District with regards to its fiduciary irresponsibility and lack of control for policy-making.
Lest you are OK with your past and current operating methods; have forgotten how you are demonstrating your operating methods; or don't care, you have been elected to be the leader and be in charge of this District, not MTI.
By whatever BOE action or in-action has thus far been demonstrated, the proposed operational direction of MP has been reduced to appearing and acting in the mirror image of the District. This is inappropriate to say the least. The entire purpose of a charter school is to be different and to get different results.
How is forcing MP to operate in essentially the same fashion as the District and at a cost of more money....any different from....operating the District's nearly 30 current alternative/innovative programs and services for 800 students, at millions of dollars, taking away from other students in the District? And, you can't even produce data to show what differences, if any, are being made with these students.
This current Board, and past Boards of Education have proven over and over again that spending more money and doing essentially the same things, don't get different results (speaking here essentially about the 'achievement gap' issue)
Continuing to speak bluntly, the Board's financial and academic philosophies, policies and actions are inconsistent, phony and discriminatory.Let us be clear...
The process for consideration of the Madison Prep charter school proposal must
- be open and public
- be under the leadership of the BOE
- be accountable to the BOE and the public
- have ALL stakeholders at the same table at ALL times
Thank you.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
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Late last week the proposal cleared a major hurdle with the announcement that the Urban League had struck a deal with MTI to employ unionized teachers, nurses and clerical staff.
AFSMCE Local 60 President Tom Coiyer asked the district to use its own unionized custodial staff rather than allow them to be contracted. And Don Severson, president of a conservative district watchdog group, withdrew his previous support because of the deal struck between the Urban League and MTI, which didn't involve the School Board.MTI executive director John Matthews, who attended but did not speak at the hearing, said the union would no longer oppose the proposal. However, he remains skeptical that Madison Prep would be more successful than the district's high schools at closing the achievement gap.
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At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being "shaken up" by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of "free schools" has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand - but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes - the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word "free" meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish "Glorious Revolution" of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.
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Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students -- the "smart kids" -- were capable of advanced coursework.But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom's school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.
South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.
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It would have been easy to predict an unpromising future for Maurice Thomas when he was born. His mother was single, 17 years old, and the product of a low-income, troubled Milwaukee home.But Thomas had some big things going for him: His mother's dedication to education. Teachers who pushed him forward with care and skill. And his own commitment to making a difference.
"Trajectory" is a word used often by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, the organization that over two decades has trained more than 20,000 high performing college graduates to be teachers and placed them in high-needs classrooms across the country for their first two years out of school.
Kopp is convinced that the trajectory of the lives of children - in fact, of entire communities - can be turned for the better, especially by education.
When Kopp published her book, "A Chance to Make History," last winter, Maurice Thomas, who was with Teach for America in Atlanta, was one of the people she wrote about in detail. She described his impact as a teacher and how he had become deeply involved in getting his students to succeed.
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Most principals can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less help teachers improve, according to a new book.Leading for Instructional Improvement: How Successful Leaders Develop Teaching and Learning ExpertiseIt's happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers.
Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington's Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less come up with helpful suggestions for improvement.
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If the FDA won't go after diet sodas for all the dangerous chemicals they contain, maybe the FTC can take action for false advertising.There's nothing "diet" about diet sodas. After all, studies have linked them to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart problems, and more.
And now, yet another study confirms that people who drink the most diet soda have the biggest bellies.
Researchers from the University of Texas medical school examined data on 474 seniors who took part in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging, and found that the waistlines of those who drank diet soda grew 70 percent more than those who didn't drink the stuff during the average follow-up of nearly 10 years.
And the more they drank, the more they grew: The researchers say those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had five times the increase in belly size than those who drank no soda, according to the study presented at a recent American Diabetes Association meeting.
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Grant Wiggins, via a kind reader
There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators' benefit.One wonders what became of the Madison School Districts Math Task Force?That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don't see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.
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Denmark is to impose the world's first "fat tax" in a drive to slim its population and cut heart disease.The move may increase pressure for a similar tax in the UK, which suffers from the highest levels of obesity in Europe.
Starting from this Saturday, Danes will pay an extra 30p on each pack of butter, 8p on a pack of crisps, and an extra 13p on a pound of mince, as a result of the tax.
The tax is expected to raise about 2.2bn Danish Krone (£140m), and cut consumption of saturated fat by close to 10pc, and butter consumption by 15pc.
"It's the first ever fat-tax," said Mike Rayner, Director of Oxford University's Health Promotion Research Group, who has long campaigned for taxes on unhealthy foods.
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The ongoing debate over whether using student test results on standardized exams is a good way to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness just took a new twist.The U.S. Department of Education on Friday released a report calling for new regulations designed to link federal funding for teacher-education programs to the test scores of students.
"While there are many beacons of excellence, unfortunately some of our existing teacher preparation programs are not up to the job," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says in the forward to the report. "They operate partially blindfolded, without access to data that tells them how effective their graduates are in elementary and secondary school classrooms after they leave their teacher preparation programs. Too many are not attracting top students, and too many states are not setting a high bar for entry into the profession."
The report, which outlines the Obama administration's proposals for teacher education reform, also calls for additional funds for teaching scholarships and expanding efforts to create more minority teachers. It's mainly catching the eyes of higher education officials nationally, however, for proposing ways to hold colleges, universities and programs that produce teachers accountable for those they send into the classroom.
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One hundred fifty-three thousand words per week. That's the difference between the 215,000 words per week that the average child in a privileged home hears and the 62,000 words per week that the average child in a family on welfare hears. I'll explain the research behind these numbers later; for now, just consider how staggering the differ- ence is. And consider the implications. Hearing language is the first step in learning to read and write and make sense of the world.The language gap that results in the achievement gap begins at home. Schools can and should do their part to close this gap, but parents, by reading to their children and interacting with them in positive and encouraging ways, need to do their part, too.
The idea that families need to provide enriching educational activities is not new. In 1908, Edmund Burke Huey, regarded as "one of the foremost leaders" in educating children with learning disabilities,1 wrote, "The school of the future will have as one of its important duties the instruction of parents in the means of assist- ing the child's natural learning in the home."2 This insight was just one of many in his classic work The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, a 500-page book so highly regarded that it was reprinted by the MIT Press in 1968 and again by the International Reading Association in 2009.
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It was sometime in July 2009 that then-Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and then- Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) President John Tarka had some things to work out. They were in yet another on a proposal to the Gates Foundation that would eventually win them $40 million and national acclaim, and they decided to leave the room where they were meeting with staff.When they didn't come back for much longer than expected, Rob Weil, director of field programs in the Educational Issues department of the American Federation of Teachers, who was visiting Pittsburgh and sitting in on the meetings, decided to look for them. He expected that maybe each had wandered away indi- vidually for a break. Instead, he found them both in Roosevelt's office, huddled together looking over some documents, deep into a conversation that obviously hadn't broken since they left 15 minutes earlier. "This is what needs to happen," he told them.
"I wish more places would do that: have an honest discussion about the issues," Weil says now, thinking back to that visit. "Mark and John already knew that the relationship [between the union and] the district had to change for the future of the kids in Pitts- burgh. They said that outright."
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Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I've been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.What came first?
At first there was a problem, and the problem is called Magister. Magister is software for the school administration but it also expanding it's reach to serve as an education learning environment and a license-tool for educational materials. When a school deploys Magister students are required to go online and use Magister via their browser. For them the tool is web-based. Till 2008 there where no issues, but in 2008 Schoolmaster, the company behind Magister, partnered with Microsoft and Siverlight was chosen as the tool of choice. Since Magister 5.x problems have been mounting for students using other browsers than Internet Explorer or another operating system than Windows. Microsoft and Schoolmaster state that Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Well, as most Linux fans and users know, there is an open source implementation for Silverlight. It's called Moonlight and to call it a crappy implementation would be giving it too much credit. Students using Moonlight can't get Silverlight to work.
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A Waukesha County judge has ruled that the state's effort to strip Mukwonago High School of its Indians nickname was unconstitutional because an administrative hearing on the case was unfair.Circuit Judge Donald Hassin Jr. granted summary judgment Thursday in favor of two residents who challenged the 2010 state law that allowed complaints about Indian nicknames and mascots.
While he did not find the law itself unconstitutional, he said found it "an uncommonly silly law," quoting from a famous U.S. Supreme Court case on privacy. But eliminating it, Hassin wrote, is up to the Legislature.
Hassin did agree with residents James Schoolcraft and Craig Vertz that the law, as applied against Mukwonago schools, was unconstitutional because the decision maker - a Department of Public Instruction employee named Paul Sherman - had an impermissibly high risk of bias.
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We have historically been uncomfortable with so-called "charter" schools, which too frequently sacrifice the principle of providing all students with a well-rounded education in favor of narrower experiments.And we have never had any taste for separate-but-equal -- or more usually separate-and-unequal -- schemes that divide students along lines of race, class and gender.
As such, we approached the Madison Preparatory Academy project with trepidation.
The proposal to create a charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students has been sincerely and generally well presented by Urban League President Kaleem Caire. We respect that Caire is attempting to address serious issues, including a lingering frustration with the Madison Metropolitan School District's responses to the achievement gap that has plagued the district for many years.
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Cognitive psychology is, broadly, the study of mental processes almost as if the human mind was a type of computer. It is generally a highly empirical academic discipline relying on experimentation to study faculties such as language, attention and memory. It could be revolutionized by smartphones.The current problem, according to a paper in peer-reviewed publication PLoS One, is that experiments usually rely on groups of volunteers coming to a research facility. By using smartphone technology instead, data could be collected from thousands of subjects across the world.
The paper comes from an international group of researchers who have been running a classic experiment which asks users to distinguish rapidly between words and non-words. (Its results can be used, for example, in the diagnosis of reading impairments.) Participants in the experiment downloaded a free app from iTunes to use on their iPhone or iPad.
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Tim Comer says when his son moved from a mostly black magnet school in Chicago to the Madison School District in 2006, "he went from sharp to dull."Comer, 45, a black father and unemployed electronic engineer, said the difference was that Madison was "laid back" while the Chicago school pushed students to work extra hard to succeed.
"In Chicago he was always a frontrunner," Comer said. "But here, he's always on the back burner."
Comer's dissatisfaction is shared by many black parents in Madison where, despite decades of efforts, a significant gap persists between white and black students' academic performance and graduation rates.
Although the gap is closing among students completing algebra by the 10th grade, it has widened on 4th grade reading tests and in high school graduation rates since 2003. Those changes have come as the number of black students in the district has increased and the number of whites has declined.
"We know that we're not pushing the needle significantly," Superintendent Dan Nerad said about what he considers "the most significant social justice issue in America."
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Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you're not doing your job.Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.
A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That's right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal's status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and--above all--get jobs. And business is so good I'm booked ahead for months.
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State leaders have created at least five task forces over the past three decades to provide recommendations for overhauling Iowa's education system. The groups produced at least six reports with their ideas for changes. These are the highlights of the proposals."First in the Nation Education," 1984
Implement an effective evaluation process for teachers, administrators and support services staff.
Give all educators 12-month contracts and use time for planning, developing, implementing and evaluating programs, staff development and more instruction time.
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So after waves and waves of reform, you thought Chicago public elementary schools had made tremendous progress in the last 20 years?Rebecca VeveaThink again.
Despite millions of dollars in fixes and programs, Chicago's elementary grade reading scores have barely budged over the last two decades, a new report by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research has found.
Math scores improved only "incrementally" in those grades, and racial gaps in both subjects increased, with African American students falling the most behind other groups, especially in reading -- an area pushed heavily under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
But the good news in a unique study called "Trends in Chicago's Schools Across Three Eras of Reform: Summary of Key Findings" is that Chicago Public Schools made "dramatic improvement" in its high school graduation rate over almost two decades. Less than half of CPS freshmen graduated by age 19 in 1990, compared to about two thirds today, the study said.
In 20 years of near-constant reform efforts, Chicago's elementary school students have made few gains, high school students have advanced, and the achievement gap between poor and rich areas has widened, a major University of Chicago study found, contradicting impressions created by years of Chicago Public Schools testing data.The report examined performance across three eras of reform over the last two decades -- a span including the Argie Johnson, Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan regimes. Researchers for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that most publicly available data measuring the success of public schools in Chicago did not provide an accurate picture of progress.
One of the most striking findings is that elementary school scores in general remained mostly stagnant, contrary to visible improvement on state exams reported by the Illinois State Board of Education. The consortium study used a complex statistical analysis of data from each state-administered test over the last 20 years, controlling for changes in the test's content and how it was scored, said Stuart Luppescu, a lead consortium researcher.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
October 3, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times newspapers reported over the weekend, the Urban League of Greater Madison, the new Board of Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison Teachers, Inc., the local teachers' union, achieved a major milestone last Friday in agreeing to collaborate on our proposed charter schools for young men and women.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work "aggressively and proactively" with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD's Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a "non-instrumentality" charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI's collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD's administration. MMSD's 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD's Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep's teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep's longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th - 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD's administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members' concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We've since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep's first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher's union and community stakeholders, we've been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches - including new schools - to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today's children are tomorrow's workforce; tomorrow's leaders; tomorrow's innovators; and tomorrow's peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children's teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
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Big news over the weekend in the Madison Preparatory Academy saga. There has been significant and positive movement on four issues by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM). First, they have changed their request from non-instrumentality to instrumentality, increasing control by and accountability to the district. Second, they have agreed to be staffed by teachers and other educators represented by Madison Teachers Incorporated (MTI) and follow the existing contract between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District (the memo on these two items and more is here). ULGM has also morphed their vision from a district-wide charter to a geographic/attendance area charter. Last, their current budget projections no longer require outrageous transfers of funds from other district schools. Many issues and questions remain but these move the proposal from an obvious red light to the "proceed with caution" yellow. It is far from being a green light.Before identifying some of the remaining questions and issues, I think it is important to point out that this movement on the part on the Urban League came because people raised issues and asked questions. Throughout the controversies there has been a tendency to present Madison Prep as initially proposed as "THE PLAN" and dismiss any questioning of that proposal as evidence that the questioners don't care about the academic achievement of minorities and children of poverty. This has been absurd and offensive. Remember this started at $28,000 per/pupil. Well, ULGM has moved this far because people didn't treat their proposal as if it had been brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses; if the proposal is eventually approved, MMSD and likely Madison Prep will be better because these changes have been made. As this process enters the next phases, I hope everyone keeps that in mind.
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Hung-Hsi Wu, via Richard Askey:
Many sets of state and national mathematics stan- dards have come and gone in the past two decades. The Common Core State Mathematics Standards (CCSMS), which were released in June of 2010,*have been adopted by almost all states and will be phased in across the nation in 2014. Will this be another forgettable stan- dards document like the overwhelming majority of the others?Perhaps. But unlike the others, it will be a travesty if this one is forgotten. The main difference between these standards and most of the others is that the CCSMS are mathematically very sound overall. They could serve--at long last--as the foundation for creating proper school mathematics textbooks and dramatically better teacher preparation.
Before the CCSMS came along, America long resisted the idea of commonality of standards and curriculum--but it did not resist such commonality in actual classrooms. Despite some politicians' rhetoric extolling the virtues of local control, there has been a de facto national mathematics curriculum for decades: the curriculum defined by the school mathematics textbooks. There are several widely used textbooks, but mathe- matically they are very much alike. Let's call this de facto math- ematics curriculum Textbook School Mathematics (TSM).1
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Since January 2007, I've attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools' leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It's an effort you'd think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district's activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I've had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn't available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:
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Last year, 120 students took 223 Advanced Placement exams from 15 different exams last year. Congratulations to all of our faculty and staff who contributed to our students' success.For the period 1997-2011:
- 34% of juniors - over 40% of seniors and over a quarter of juniors took at least one AP course and exam in 2010-2011. The most recent report available shows the national figure in 2010 was 2010 was 26% for Wisconsin.
- 86.7% of EHS students who took an AP course scored a 3 or higher (passing), compared with 69.9% in the State of Wisconsin and 60.2% globally.
- 38.2% of the EHS graduating class passed (scored 3, 4 or 5) at least one AP exam. According to the 2010 AP report, the national average was 16.9% and Wisconsin average was 18.3% for any time during high school.
- EHS offers one AP course for every 13-14 seniors.
- Edgewood's average ACT score rose about 2 points to 25.0 with an average of 96% of EHS students taking the test over that period. During the same period, state and national averages remained essentially unchanged from the low 22s and about 21, respectively. In 2010-11, 71% of Wisconsin students and 49% of all US students took the test.
- The total number of students taking Edgewood's AP courses more than tripled.
- The average number of tests taken per EHS AP student per year rose from 1.34 to 1.86.
- The percent of students receiving passing scores (3, 4 or 5) rose from 54% to 87%.
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Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Massachusetts's successful pitch for $250 million from the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, Gov. Deval Patrick, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state Education Secretary Paul Reville on Wednesday touted the efforts the state has made to improve innovation and student performance in public schools.How does Wisconsin compare to Massachusetts? Find out, here.The anniversary comes as state education officials indicate they plan to seek a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that require 100 percent of students to be proficient in English and math by 2014. Obama announced the opportunity for states to apply to opt out of portions of NCLB last Friday.
Duncan credited Massachusetts with setting "a great example for the country," despite Reville acknowledging that under No Child Left Behind over 90 percent of Massachusetts schools have been categorized in some way as "underperforming" based on the most recent MCAS scores.
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I've been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.But I'm coming around. I'm coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive -- and positive -- changes are coming; and they're coming faster than many might think. I've concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they'll do it in a matter of years, not decades.
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Someone PLEASE explain to us the fascination the district (or a portion thereof) has with the need for Mandarin Chinese in the curriculum!We hear the argument, "China is the second largest country by size and most populous--and therefore the ability to speak Chinese will ultimately have value".
Right. And property values always rise. And 100-year storms only occur once in one hundred years.
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James E. Rosenbaum and Kelly Iwanaga Becker:
In her senior year of high school, the low-income student with the C-minus average--the one who almost dropped out--is not only looking forward to graduation, but plans to attend college. Her college counselor, her teachers, her parents, and her peers have all told her that a college degree will land her a good-paying job.No one has told her that she must pass a college placement test before she can take college classes. No one has told her that if she fails, she must pay for remedial courses for which she will receive no credit. No one has told her that she probably lacks the aca- demic preparation to do well in remedial courses, much less col- lege courses. No one has told her that most students like her never earn a college degree.
What if, instead of hoping poorly prepared students will catch up in college, we supported them in taking rigorous courses-- even college-level courses--before they graduate from high school? What if, instead of lamenting the fact that many students struggle in transitioning from high school to college, our high school and college educators worked together to create a clear path from high school graduation to college graduation? What if:
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It's 9 a.m., and the rush is on.Buses disgorge hundreds of students at one side of Bailey Elementary School in Woodbury. On the other side, parents line up in SUVs to drop off their kids.
"Bye-bye," says Silva Theis of Woodbury, kissing her fourth-grade daughter.
In the hubbub, no one notices what's missing - the dying practice of walking to school. Of 620 students at Bailey, not one walks - not even those who live one block away.
Managers of a 6-year-old federal program think they know why.
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In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested--and await sentencing--for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
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You can buy a pair of jeans at Wal-Mart for $29 and one from Ralph Lauren for $98. While both cover your backside, one comes with a label of status that appeals to some and not to others. Customers -- and let's not forget that students are customers of academic services -- like choices and they usually make selections based on more than one factor, price being only one.When my son checked into his freshman dorm, there were no lights in his room - nothing on the ceiling, walls or desk. There were two outlets: if you wanted light, Yale required you to bring your own lamp. I thought this took the parable of Plato's Cave a bit too far.
Applicants to GW look for more than overhead lights: they want living and dining choices, places to study and swim, comfortable desks and chairs, and tennis and basketball courts. Yes, they are looking for great professors but they want more than classroom life. The only way to provide more books in the library, more theaters for performances, laboratories for experiments, coffee shops for study breaks is to have the dollars to build and maintain all these things - and dollars come from tuition.
At the same time as the demand for quality services increased, so too did the cost for basic utilities: electricity, water, security, oil, insurance, personnel health and other employee benefits have all risen over the past 40 years.
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Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in our elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year.1 Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching positions, be retained in them, and lead their students to strong learning gains. Weak programs set minimal standards for entry and graduation. They produce inadequately trained teachers whose students do not make sufficient academic progress.Unfortunately, while there are shining examples of strong programs throughout the country, too many of our teacher preparation programs fall short. As a whole, America is not following the lead of high-performing countries and recruiting the nation's best and brightest into teaching. Instead, only 23% of all teachers, and
only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.2 Our differences with other nations are not due to teacher preparation alone. We must do more to support and reward excellent teaching at various stages in the education system. However, we can do more in the area of preparation. After admission, too many programs do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work. Only 50 percent of current teacher candidates receive supervised clinical training. More than three in five education school alumni report that their education school did not prepare them for "classroom realities." 3
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Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president "gives" states a "voice" in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was "Mr. Republican," revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP's 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In "The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party," Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania's Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.
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It started with a partnership between the school district and the teachers' union.Next came $100 million in grant funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, then the arduous job of explaining the Empowering Effective Teachers plan to more than 11,000 teachers.
On Monday night, a small group of parents braved heavy rains for its chance.
Turnout at Chamberlain High School to hear Hillsborough County school officials explain and answer questions about the program was sparse. But Melissa Erickson, president of the county PTA council, didn't mind.
"It's the beginning of a conversation," she said.
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Yun Xiang, Michael Dahlin, John Cronin, Robert Theaker, Sarah Durant:
Fordham's latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America's highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and "leaving no child behind" coming at the expense of our "talented tenth"--and America's future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
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There are few sure investments in this chaotic economic climate, but on a national level, education has proven to pay off big down the road. As tight economic times have put the squeeze on education budgets here in the U.S., a new report shows the big benefits of even small investments in early education worldwide.For every dollar invested in boosting preschool enrollment, middle- and low-income countries would see a return of some $6.40 to $17.60, according to a new analysis published September 22 in The Lancet. "Early childhood is the most effective and cost-effective time to ensure that all children develop to their full potential," noted the authors, led by Patrice Engle, of California Polytechnic State University. "The returns on investment in early child development are substantial."
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Education writers rarely examine high school sports, but something is happening there that might help pull our schools out of the doldrums.In the last school year, a new national survey found, 7,667,955 boys and girls took part in high school sports. This is 55.5 percent of all students, according to the report from the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the 22nd straight year that participation had increased.
Despite two major recessions and numerous threats to cut athletic budgets to save academics, high schools have found ways not only to keep sports alive but increase the number of students playing. We have data indicating sports and other extracurricular activities do better than academic classes in teaching leadership, teamwork, time management and other skills crucial for success in the workplace.
Coaches may be the only faculty members still allowed by our culture and educational practice to get tough with students not making the proper effort. They have the advantage of teaching what are essentially elective non-credit courses. They can insist on standards of behavior that classroom teachers often cannot enforce because the stakes of dismissing or letting students drop their courses are too high.
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Hundreds of pieces of legislation are sitting on Governor Jerry Brown's desk awaiting his proverbial "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." Gov. Brown has already warned that many of these bills will be vetoed, saying that there will be "plenty of veto blues."One bill that regretfully deserves a veto is Senate Bill 946 (Steinberg). It would impose a costly new mandate for private health insurance to pay for educational non-medical services for children with autism, while exempting the public health programs -- Medi-Cal and Healthy Families -- from the requirement to cover the same therapy.
The bill was jammed through the legislature at the last possible moment without sufficient time for debate or evaluation of the potential consequences of passage. While on the surface it may seem like a well-intentioned bill, it is riddled with flaws and in the end will do more harm than good.
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Ed Hughes has a problem.Like most of his fellow school board members and practically everyone else in Madison, he was bowled over by Urban League president Kaleem Caire's vision for Madison Prep, a charter school that would aggressively tackle the school district's entrenched minority achievement gap.
"The longer day, the instructional focus, and the 'no excuses' approach appealed to me," Hughes says.
But as he looked into the details, Hughes became more and more concerned about the cost of the school and "whether there is a good match between the problem we are trying to address and the solution that's being proposed."
Expressing those doubts in his blog has turned the soft-spoken Hughes into a heretic.
Caire is a superstar who has galvanized the community to get behind his charter school. At school board hearings, only a handful of speakers express any reservations about the idea, while an overwhelming number speak passionately about the need to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and about Madison's moral obligation to do something for the kids who are not being served.
Hughes listens respectfully. But, he says, "for Madison Prep to be the answer, we'd need to know that the students it was serving would otherwise fall through the cracks."
.....
But Hughes' big problem with the Urban League's draft proposal, submitted to the district last February, is cost. The total cost to the school district of $27 million over five years is just too much, he says.
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
I don't know if the Urban League's plans for Madison Prep will come to fruition. If they do, I predict here and now that the school will have a higher graduation rate than the Madison school district as a whole for African-American students and probably for other groups of students as well. I also predict that all or nearly all of its graduates will apply to and be admitted to college. What is impossible to predict is what difference, if any, this will make in overall educational outcomes for Madison students.Of course charter schools like Madison Prep will have higher graduation rates than their home school districts as a whole. Students enrolled in charter schools are privileged in one clear way over students not enrolled. Each student has a parent or other caregiver sufficiently involved in the child's education to successfully navigate the process to get the student into the charter school. Not all students in our traditional neighborhood schools have that advantage. Other things equal, students with more involved parents/caregivers will be more likely to graduate from high school. So, one would expect that charter schools will have higher graduation rates.
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Several major impediments facing the proposed Madison Prep charter school appear closer to resolution after a series of meetings and communications Friday between Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire, district Superintendent Daniel Nerad and John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.Matthew DeFour and Gayle Worland:The changes are just in time for a public hearing on the Urban League-backed school on Monday, Oct. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
In a major shift, the proposed charter school will now be what's called an "instrumentality" of the Madison Metropolitan School District. That means a significant portion of the school's staff will be covered by the contract the district has with the local teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc. The contract runs through the end of June 2013
On the eve of a public hearing for Madison Preparatory Academy -- a proposed charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students -- backers of the school agreed to employ union staff, eliminating a potential hurdle to approval of the school.Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the substance of the arrangement, particularly its implications for the current MMSD schools and Madison Prep's curriculum and operating plans.A budget plan for Madison Prep, proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, also was released late Friday. It estimates the Madison School District would spend $19.8 million over five years on the school, or about $2,000 less per student than it spends on other secondary-school students.
In lengthy meetings Friday, Urban League officials hammered out an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents Madison school teachers. MTI executive director John Matthews said the union, which previously opposed creation of Madison Prep, will remain neutral on whether the school should be approved.
A friend notes that the change is "stunning" and that it will likely "cost more" and perhaps "gut" some of Madison Prep's essential components.
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John V. Lombardi , Elizabeth D. Capaldi and Craig W. Abbey:
Those of us who inhabit the core of the university's academic environment share the enthusiasm for measuring and evaluating the quality of our institutions, although we have less enthusiasm for the endless ranked lists that appear in popular publications.While some dote on the U.S. News rankings, which like their BCS counterpart rely on hugely unreliable opinion surveys, we, however, prefer our own system for evaluating the Top American Research Universities that recognizes the importance of successful performance among highly competitive institutions without requiring a simple top to bottom ranking that often distorts more than it informs.
For over ten years, The Center for Measuring University Performance, now located at Arizona State University, has produced an annual report on the Top American Research Universities that uses objective data on nine measures to put universities into categories according to their performance.
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Your co-signer could do you more harm than good.Before they will lend thousands of dollars to a college-bound 18-year-old, around 80% of private lenders require a co-signer, according to the Consumer Bankers Association. Typically, that's a parent or another relative, but it can be anyone willing to take responsibility for paying back the loan. Private lenders often tout the benefit of an adult cosigner, saying that because students don't have much of a credit history, the a co-signer's good standing can help secure a lower interest rate. That's true, but it also puts the student at the mercy of the parent's credit history, which may not be so stable these days.
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In February 2009, in his first speech to Congress, President Obama pledged that America would regain the world lead in college attainment by 2020. It was a bold declaration, one that gave hope to those who worry that the nation's historic commitment to higher learning is at risk.Whether Obama really means it, however, remains to be seen. The administration has not yet developed a plan that would plausibly produce the millions of additional graduates needed to meet the 2020 goal.
To get there, the president must change the politics of higher-education reform. He should begin by using the bully pulpit to underscore how public and student interests often conflict with the priorities of traditional colleges and universities. The administration knows how to do this, because it's already done so--twice. In 2010 it took $87-billion in unneeded student-loan subsidies away from private banks and gave the money to taxpayers and low-income students in the form of more-generous Pell Grants. In 2011 the Department of Education installed a new system for regulating the rapidly growing for-profit higher-education sector, protecting public dollars and saving students from being suckered into borrowing too much money for low-value degrees.
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Shaun Johnson is a blogger and assistant professor of elementary education at the College of Education at Towson University in Maryland. He has been active in the movement to protest overuse of standardized tests by persuading parents to opt their children out of the testing, an option few exercise or even know they have.I told him I thought that was a bad idea. He agreed to debate the issue here. I start:
Mathews: You realize, I assume, that the vast majority of parents approve of testing and want their schools to be accountable in this way. Politicians who embrace the notion that we have to junk standardized tests don't go far. You are never going to get much support for an opt-out. Why do it? Why not instead come up with an alternative that makes sense to most parents? You don't have that yet.
Johnson: There's a lot of assumptions being thrown around here. I think you assume incorrectly that a vast majority of parents approve of testing and want "schools to be accountable in this way." It's the only "way" that's been offered to them within the mainstream conversation on education. As a result, parents, and even many educators, don't necessarily receive the perfect information to make rational decisions. The test-driven mandate is what predominates in educational discourse in both traditional and non-traditional media.
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Two years ago in a column on how schools could save money, I suggested replacing elementary school homework with free reading."Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects," I wrote. "Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents -- at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on."
Many readers liked the idea, but they and I were sure it would go nowhere, particularly in the Washington area. Many children here see homework as a welcome rite of passage, like getting a library card or being allowed to watch the seamier shows on the CW. Many parents equate heavy homework with good teaching.
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In honor of the National Book Festival, running Sept. 24 - 25 on the National Mall, we asked some of the authors participating to share their thoughts on a few writerly subjects.What do writers think about writing? Here's a small selection of what they had to say.
THE THING I'M HAPPIEST ABOUT IN MY WRITING CAREER IS . . .
That rarest of occurrences: being able to finance my writing life with the writing itself.
-- Russell Banks
The sound of my father's voice on the telephone when I told him that I had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. That the book, "Thomas and Beulah," dealt with my home town and was about my maternal grandparents made the announcement that much sweeter.
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A face-off on the UC Berkeley campus Tuesday pitted Democrats vs. Republicans, pro-affirmative-action students vs. those favoring race-blind policies, and, ultimately, cupcakes vs. brownies.None other than former UC Regent and affirmative-action opponent Ward Connerly showed up on Sproul Plaza to help campus Republicans sell frosted cupcakes priced according to the race of the buyer - a stunt intended to mock legislation before the governor that would allow universities to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
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David Crane, the former economic adviser--at that moment rapidly receding into the distance--could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they had when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. "This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years," says Crane later. "Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs." Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state's highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he'd made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education--that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state's share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.wikipedia on bread and circuses.This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. "You have to realize the thing was so much fun!" he says. "We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama." As we roll to a stop very near the place on the beach where he began his American bodybuilding career, he says, "You have to step back and say, 'I was elected under odd circumstances. And I'm going out in odd circumstances.' You can't have it both ways. You can't be a spoiled brat."
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