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Save our Public Schools - #GRUMPS Press Conference against vouchers with a focus on Madison. 3/5 - 10:30 AMDetails bit.ly/13qKwIA
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 28, 2013
SAVING MADISON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
GRUMPS (GRandparents United for Madison Public Schools) will be joined by leaders from the business and non-profit sectors to speak out in support of the Madison Metropolitan School District and against legislative efforts that may weaken our schools. Vouchers, private charter schools, special education vouchers will fragment our community and weaken MMSD, a strong public school district whose doors are open to all students.
Date: Tuesday, March 5
Time: 10:30 am
Location: Madison Senior Center, 330 W. Mifflin St.
Speakers:
GRUMPS: Nan Brien, Carol Carstensen
Businesspersons: Betty Custer, Founder and Managing Partner at Custer Financial Services,
Robert Gibson, Chairman and President, Composite Rebar Technologies, Inc.
Non-profit leaders: Michael Johnson, CEO, Boys & Girls Club of Dane County; Sal Carranza, Latino Education Council of Dane County; Eileen Mershart, Retired CEO, YWCA Madison
LWV: Andrea Kaminski, Executive Director, League of Women Voters, Wisconsin
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
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The schools are failing to educate the district's growing population of minority kids. Note that in 1991, 21% of students were non-white; 20 years later, the figure was 53%. Only about half of black and Latino youth graduate. The percentage deemed to be college-ready is embarrassingly small.The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading ResultsThe district's problems are not new. Almost a decade ago, John Wiley, then chancellor of UW-Madison, convened a meeting to discuss how the Madison schools, once a draw for faculty recruitment, were becoming a hindrance. Among the complainants, Wiley recounts, were top black UW faculty and staff who did not like how their children were treated in the Madison schools.
Those concerns, of course, echo loudly today in the efforts of the Urban League's Kaleem Caire to address the problems of minority students in the Madison schools. For that effort, Caire has been ostracized by progressive leaders. My opinion is very different. I belong to the Urban League, and I think that Caire is uncommonly brave in facing unpleasant facts.
Like it or not, we're in an era of change and choice in education. Extending public vouchers to private schools in Madison may be wild overreach by the governor, but Madison parents already have choices for schooling.
If they don't like their neighborhood school, parents can open-enroll their child in any Madison school or even in a suburban district. They can pack up and move to a suburban district. They can enroll their kid in a public charter school like Nuestro Mundo. They can send their child to a private school. They can home-school. They can sign their kid up for one of the many online schools.
This is a good thing. As long as academic programs address state educational standards and meaningful accountability is in place, why shouldn't parents be able to pick a school setting they feel best suits their child's needs? More to the point, why shouldn't the district's response to the painful achievement gap demonstrate this flexibility?
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.
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A David Dahmer, via kind reader:
That's because there are two Madisons. At our own fun, liberal, near-eastside extravaganzas -- La Fete de Marquette, Willy Street Fair, Marquette Waterfront Fest, Orton Fest, etc. -- there's nary a brown face or a black face in the crowd. Slightly less than you'd find at a Republican Convention. In the same vein, at all of the fantastic minority events that I go to in Madison, I am almost always the only white person in the room (except for Mr. Jon Gramling).The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading ResultsI often hear conversations among my white liberal friends talking smack about and making fun of Milwaukee and its hyper-segregation, its tremendous white flight, its subtle and overt racism. I want to shout at them. "WE ARE MILWAUKEE JR."
In short, our white-dominated liberal events and organizations in Madison never come close to resembling our growing diverse population and never include multiple voices, styles, and cultural norms. While our discussion of the horrendous achievement gap that has existed in Madison for 40-plus years was finally started by a black guy, it's only allowed to be discussed and solved by a small group of whites who have no feel for, connection to, or dialogue with the minority communities they want to save.So, the challenge I issue today to all the nice white liberals in America's third-best city to be a nice, white liberal is to finally make an effort to get to know all of the people of your city. Because you won't slander somebody you know. You won't fabricate things about them. You won't silence their voices. You won't ignore them. You won't segregate them if you know them. Right?
As it turns out, Ananda was way more knowledgable, passionate, and qualified than Manski. As it turns out, she has no illicit ties; no evil far-right Republican intentions -- just a Brazilian immigrant with incredible educational expertise and experience who has a minority child in a district that has for decades upon decades failed minorities.
But it's too late for Ananda now. She should be at forums, debates, radio shows, and conferences expounding upon her vast and unique experience with education as we use our democratic system to flesh out the best candidate for the School Board job at this extremely crucial juncture in Madison.
But her voice has been silenced.You can write her in (as I will) but a write-in candidacy is nearly impossible. My challenge to Madison is to get to know Ananda and all of the Anandas out there ... before you completely dismiss them.
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.
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It was a blistering blog last week by conservative David Blaska about the Madison School Board race that also-ran Ananda Mirilli says prompted her to protest that her campaign was a victim of political shenanigans long before Sarah Manski's jaw-dropping withdrawal from the race.The Madison School Board, Experience and our long time Disastrous Reading ResultsBlaska called Seat 5 primary winner Manski's pullout from the School Board race 48 hours after the primary as "so cheap and tawdry it defies explanation" and skewered the local liberal "Tammany Hall" that endorsed her.
Negative reaction to Manski's move isn't just coming from the right: "Has Madison politics ever seen such high-handed, self-absorbed behavior as that of leading vote-getter Sarah Manski?" asks former Isthmus editor Marc Eisen in a column.
In the aftermath of Manski's withdrawal, people have questions. Some are speculating whether there was a conspiracy to recruit Manksi to run, knowing she might drop out, and then replace her on the School Board with a union-friendly pick. "Now we might have a conspiracy of liberals putting a person of color down ... what about other conspiracies that people were pegged in to?" asks Mirilli, whose third-place primary finish keeps her off the April 2 ballot.
Mirilli said she doesn't know what to make of the timing of Manski's withdrawal: "It's a coincidence -- who knows who is telling the truth? But without a doubt, there was a conspiracy to say that I was pro-voucher," Mirilli told me Wednesday. "But no one is investigating that."
Mirilli shared an old email exchange Wednesday, before announcing that she would not pursue a write-in campaign, as many observers had been urging.
Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Elections, here.
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WU Yingkan, via a kind Richard Askey email (PDF):
xamination is a critical issue in education system in China. Zhongkao is a kind of graduation examination of junior high school, and at the same time, the entrance examination to senior high school. This paper describes the structure, features and changes in zhongkao mathematics in China based on a detailed analysis of 48 selected zhongkao mathematics papers from eight regions in recent six years. Examples of examination items are given to illustrate the identified features and changes. Zhongkao Mathematics, examination, features, changes, junior high school graduatesINTRODUCTION
China is the birthplace of examination system. The imperial examination was started in 597 during the Sui Dynasty, and was banned in 1905 during the Qing dynasty (Li & Dai, 2009; Zhang, 1996). It lasted for about 1300 years. With the influence of the long existence of the imperial examination system, examination is of great importance in China. It attracts attention from parents, educators, teachers, students, policy makers and so on. It is a big issue in education.There are two significant examinations for students in school education in China, which are called "zhongkao" and "gaokao". Figure 1 shows the school education system in China. Students start their nine-year compulsory education usually at six years old. Most of them stay at elementary school for six years, and junior high school for three years. In some districts like Shanghai, students stay at elementary schools for five years and junior high school for four years. At the end of Grade Nine, all students take zhongkao, which is summative assessment of the nine-year compulsory education, and more importantly, the entrance examination to senior high school. Nearly 90% of junior high school graduates continue their study. About half of them go to senior high schools, and the other half enter secondary vocational schools (Ministry of education of China, 2010a). The results of zhongkao decide whether students go to key senior high school, ordinary senior high school or vocational school. At the end of three-year senior high school study, students take gaokao, which is the entrance examination to universities. About 80% senior high school graduates are promoted to tertiary education (Ministry of education of China, 2010a). The results of gaokao decide whether senior high school graduates go to key university, ordinary university, college, or other high education institutes.
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My son is 19 and has an autistic spectrum disorder akin to Asperger's. Technically it's NLD, but close enough. He also graduated from a high school specialized in kids on the spectrum, and attended numerous social skills groups. I've probably been around 100 people with something like Asperger's. I've got another son who is, as they say, neurotypical, so I have some experience in contrast.mMy first reaction is to point out that this is a highly individualized neurological condition. Any response you get is going to be rather particular, and comes through the prism not just of a disorder, but of an individual human personality.
Some people have Asperger's and are cheerful, some are dark. Some are intelligent, some are not. Some are self-conscious, some are blithe. Some have large souls, and some are pinched. Like people. Asperger's can be mild, which is what you usually see in the notable people who are said to have Asperger's, or it can be severe, which is quite limiting.
In general though, you've got a kid without a ton of social skills. That means some things that come easy and natural around communication, particularly with peers, can be tough. This doesn't matter much in the early years, and in some cases the kid's oblique way of looking at things can make them attractive to other kids. As school progresses though, and other kids learn social nuance, an Asperger's kid can be increasingly left out.
That is hard to watch, sometimes to a point of heartbreak - that depends in part on how much your kid cares about what other kids think, and again this varies. As someone watching various types of rejection happen to my kid, I have never yearned harder for normality. Not most popular, not the academic star, just...normal.
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In this review of Diane Ravitch's book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education," Gary Houchens, a former teacher, principal, and school administrator, criticizes Ravitch for the "mistake" she makes in conflating school choice and testing. Houchens writes, "There are many excellent public schools throughout the U.S. But Ravitch and defenders of the educational status quo seem blind to the fact that millions of children are being grossly underserved by government-run schools, which are the only option for most families of modest means. "Houchens, now a professor of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research at Western Kentucky University, continues,
And this is another fundamental point that Ravitch and many other school choice opponents seem to miss. Just like traditional public schools, some schools of choice will be successful, while others will fail. The difference is that schools of choice that fail to satisfy their clients will go out of business, whereas failing public schools will continue to drain millions of dollars of taxpayer money forever. School choice is not a panacea for all of education's problems, but it gives many families something they can only dream of under the current system: an option.
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This is the time of year where I have the great pleasure of teaching an education class to undergraduates at MIT. We address two questions during the semester: "What's worth learning?" and "How do we know that students are learning what's worth learning?"Most weeks, we have an online discussion about current events in education. This week, students chose to examine an article on a school district that just committed to a district-wide 1-1 iPad program. Their responses are characteristically thoughtful, and here are a few of their perspectives. We'll be discussing this during our class meeting Wednesday at 2:30, so leave a comment or tweet a response (@bjfr) by then, and I'll make sure the students get it.
For Individuals not Groups
As I said above, individual iPads for each student create barriers in the classroom. It's hard for me to see how doing something on an iPad is better than doing without it. The best way to teach is to engage and motivate, and if throwing expensive technology is the school district's plan, in my opinion they are wasting a lot of money. If everyone has an individual tablet, then it's hard to make the argument that these iPads will bring the classroom together. Whenever we worked with laptops in my high school, the classroom felt empty when everyone quietly labored away on their keyboards. Even if the classroom is brought together through this technology, what is preventing them from working together without any Apple products? Ideally, it sounds nice to present every student with the best technology out there to do their work, but not at the expense of deteriorating classroom cohesiveness.While I'm against the idea of having iPads in the classroom, I'm not opposed to using them outside the classroom. Great teaching is done with groups and collaboration, but reinforcement of material could be greatly improved with interactivity, social aspects and new technology. These are all areas where I think the iPad could be beneficial to learning.
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French management schools are rethinking their apprenticeship policies as competition for public funding increases. While some schools are already reducing the number of apprentices, other schools are getting around this problem by setting up apprenticeship-like schemes through scholarships, internships or temporary contracts."The main challenge for the development of apprenticeships is the funding issue," says Pierre Tapie, president and dean of Essec Business School and head of the Confédération des Grandes Écoles, a body which represents over 200 higher education institutions in France. Essec has already reduced the number of apprenticeships it offers to 650 from its peak of 760 in 2010.
Apprenticeships in France make it possible for people aged 16 to 25 to combine academic learning with concrete professional experience. The system involves a working contract signed by the employer, the apprentice and the training institution. Originally designed for vocational courses in the French lycées, it was opened to higher education in the late 1980s.
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The most comprehensive graduation research report of late found that for the first time the U.S. is on track to meet the national Grad Nation goal of a 90 percent high school graduation rate by the class of 2020. The national high school graduation rate increased 6.5 percentage points since 2001 with an average growth of 1.25 percentage points each year from 2006-2010 to 78.2. As a result of this acceleration more than 200,000 additional students received diplomas in 2010 than in 2006. The 2013 report update of Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic, released February 25 by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America's Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows that the nation continues to make progress.This growth was driven in large part by significant gains in Hispanic and African American graduation rates, with Hispanic rates achieving the greatest gains, jumping 10 percentage points from 61 percent in 2006 to 71.4 percent in 2010. Similarly, African American graduation rates rose from 59.2 percent in 2006 to 66.1 percent in 2010. The South also contributed to this accelerated pace, home to five of the top 10 states with the greatest improvements since 2006 but also the top seven states with the greatest decline in "dropout factory" high schools. A "dropout factory" is a high school in which 12th grade enrollment is 60 percent or less of 9th grade enrollment three years earlier.
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The leader of Mexico's powerful teachers' union, the largest labor syndicate in Latin America, has been arrested on accusations that she embezzled millions of dollars in union funds for personal expenses, including California residences, cosmetic surgery and artwork, the country's attorney general announced Tuesday night.The arrest of the union boss, Elba Esther Gordillo, a bombastic figure viewed as a kingmaker among politicians for her ability to deliver votes and suppress enemies, stunned a nation accustomed to seeing powerful figures escape scrutiny despite whispers of their spending habits.
"She was this mixture of political patron, incredibly powerful union boss and very, very wildly 'entrepreneurial,' " said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst in Mexico City.
Ms. Gordillo was arrested a day after President Enrique Peña Nieto signed into law sweeping changes in education law, designed to break the union's grip on hiring and the administration of schools, and a day before the union planned to meet on a strategy to fight the changes. The timing of the arrest is sure to raise questions; Mexican presidents have been known to use the power of federal prosecutors to go after rivals, only for the cases to fall apart eventually.
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Two years ago when Gov. Scott Walker introduced a budget packed full of controversial changes that drastically affected public education statewide -- including record funding cuts and the crippling of teachers unions -- another change simultaneously hit the Racine public schools.More here and here."The budget passed in July (2011) and the voucher program started in August," says Marc Duff, the Racine Unified School District's budget director and a former Republican state representative until 2002. "It all happened so quickly and at the same time we were dealing with all the other changes to collective bargaining and Act 10."
Now, for the second budget in a row, Walker is talking vouchers. It's a program first started in Milwaukee two decades ago that requires the state and school district to share in the cost of educating a student at a private rather than a public school. In the 2011-13 budget, Walker extended the voucher program to Racine.
Walker says they improve student educational performance and provide an alternative for parents whose children are in struggling public schools.
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Sarah Manski did the right thing when she quit the race for an open Madison School Board seat just days after finishing first in the Feb. 19 primary. Manski's strong primary finish had positioned her as the front-runner in the general election April 2. But after she learned that her husband had been accepted for graduate school in California, she recognized that it is not appropriate to seek a term of office she could not complete.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.Manski brought to the race big ideas and a commitment to build real coalitions to expand and improve upon Madison's support for public education. She was relentless, and right, in her unequivocal rejection of Gov. Scott Walker's cuts to school funding and assaults on local democracy. That's why she won more than 45 percent of the vote in the primary.
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Please listen up. We are all being conned by the Obama administration. This year, the American taxpayer will fork over about $571 billion to pay for educating children in the nation's public schools. All told, the country spends close to $16,000 per student every year on primary through college education. That's the highest per-student spending rate in the world.More, here.However, according to President Obama, it's not enough. He wants more tax dollars, especially for "early education." He said so in his State of the Union address, and it drew big-time applause from his crew. Of course we need to spend more on education. And anyone who opposes that hates kids!
The centerpiece of the president's early-education vision is the "Head Start" program, which has been in place since 1965. Over the past 48 years, the feds have spent close to $200 billion on Head Start. But there's one big problem: The program is not working.
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Wisconsin school boards would have less control over their own charter schools under Gov. Scott Walker's state budget proposal.The changes could have major implications for districts such as Madison, where the School Board has exerted tight control over charter school expansion, including rejecting a school proposed by Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire that sought exemptions from district policies.
On Monday night, Madison School Board members said they might have to halt plans to revamp the district's charter school policy.
"We've saved money and we've implemented programs and then with the swipe of a pen we have been outnumbered and outmanipulated by a governor who apparently wants to run for president," board member Maya Cole said.
"I hope he's really happy."
The majority of charter schools in the state have less autonomy than others around the country, said Carrie Bonk, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. Walker's proposal would change that.
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Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession:
As we enter 2013, the legal market continues in the fifth year of an unprecedented economic downturn that began in the third quarter of 2008. At this point, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the market for legal services in the United States and throughout the world has changed in fundamental ways and that, even as we work our way out of the economic doldrums, the practice of law going forward is likely to be starkly different than in the pre-2008 period. The challenge for lawyers and law firms is to understand the ways in which the legal market has shifted and to adjust their own strategies, expectations, and ways of working to conform to the new market realities. While there is certainly evidence that some firms and lawyers have begun to make these adjustments, many others seem to be in denial, believing (or perhaps hoping) that the world will go "back to normal" as soon as demand for legal services begins to grow again.Legend has it that in 1519, when he and his cohort of some 500 soldiers and 100 sailors landed on the shores of the Yucatan intent on conquering the large and powerful Aztec empire, Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez promptly ordered his men to "burn the ships." Cortez knew that, unless more tempting alternatives were removed, it would be difficult to motivate his men to take on an empire with a large army that had been in power for more than six centuries. Hence, his bold and decisive order.
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Multiple research in the US has shown that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And now the Equity and Excellence report, commissioned by the US Congress, says the US education system is largely to blame."This is a question of priorities, much of what has made the US great in the last decade was our investment in our people, human capital in our education system and what we are seeing is an unravelling of that system .... we see a constant defunding of the education system in the US... Instead of seeing the government push for education we see a push to privatise education. Education should mitigate the inequality at the starting gate and we should bring everyone to the starting line so everyone has an equal opportunity."
- Sylvia Allegretto, a labour economist
The study says: "Ten million students in US's poorest communities ... are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students."
So what has become of the American dream? Despite growing up with economic hardships do you still have the opportunity for prosperity and financial success through hard work?
It is a notion that President Barack Obama recently alluded to in his inaugural address: "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own."However, the report on education says that in no other developed country has the system stacked the odds against so many of its children.
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It's ironic that democracy activist Sarah Manski would run for the Madison School Board knowing that if she won, she might have to resign before her term was up.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board election, here.As it happened, she dropped out of the race on Thursday, just two days after winning her primary -- turning what had been a solidly democratic contest among three candidates into a cakewalk for one. T.J. Mertz is now the only person on the ballot who could actually take the seat.
Ironic, too, that fellow progressive and current board vice president Marj Passman would allegedly -- i.e., Passman denies it -- tell Manski not to worry about having to resign because if she did, the board would, as Manski claims Passman told her, "appoint somebody good."
But I can't be that shocked about a pair of progressives in democratically engaged Madison engaging in some democratically questionable behavior when the process for electing school board members in Madison is itself a minor mockery of democracy.
Here's why:
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Classroom design can have a significant effect on students' academic progress, reports Adi Bloom in the Times Educational Supplement:"Academics from the University of Salford in Britain examined how much pupils' environment affects their performance, looking at whether certain types of classrooms encourage learning learning. Their findings were published in the latest issue of the journal Building and Environment.
Researchers examined the academic achievement of 751 pupils, studying in 34 classrooms across seven schools. Their observations found that 73 per cent of the variation in pupils' performance could be explained by environmental factors.
In fact, the difference between the academic performance of an average pupil placed in the worst classroom, compared with that of a pupil placed in the best classroom, was equal to the average improvement of a child during an entire academic year."
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Low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, according to a new study that could provide doctors a signpost for early detection of the still poorly understood disorder.Led by Michigan State University, the study found that low-birth-weight newborns were seven times more likely to be diagnosed with autism later in life if an ultrasound taken just after birth showed they had enlarged ventricles, cavities in the brain that store spinal fluid. The results appear in the Journal of Pediatrics.
"For many years there's been a lot of controversy about whether vaccinations or environmental factors influence the development of autism, and there's always the question of at what age a child begins to develop the disorder," said lead author Tammy Movsas, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at MSU and medical director of the Midland County Department of Public Health.
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Four years ago the State Journal editorial board worried that Tony Evers would "be a spokesman for the status quo" if elected state superintendent of schools.Boy, were we wrong.
Evers has distinguished himself during these hyper-partisan times as a leader who cares more about results for Wisconsin schools and students than he does politics or publicity.
The State Journal strongly endorses his re-election April 2.
Like most of the educational establishment, Evers opposed Republican Gov. Scott Walker's big cut in state aid to public schools coupled with strict limits on collective bargaining for teachers.
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For my family, one of the unexpected assets of the Madison School District was the Strings Program. Perennially under attack during the Superintendent Rainwater reign, I've seen little mention of the District's String's program, now available from grades 5 to 12. I only found this snippet on the Madison School District's website:
Music opportunities continue to expand in Grades 5 through 12. Strings instruction is available to students starting in 5th grade and the curriculum is based on the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards for Instrumental Music. Students in grades 6 and 7 choose to participate in Band, Chorus, General Music, or Orchestra, which also have curriculum based on the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards. In grades 8-12, students may elect to enroll in one of these classes or the additional elective courses at our high schools. These course in connection with the community musical offerings, provide a breadth of experiences to help build student skills and knowledge of music.Is there more?
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The Road Map Project brought together experts in geography, education, and research from across the U.S. to create a set of landmark reports focusing on key issues for educational improvement: instructional materials for students, education of teachers, assessment, research, and public attitudes. These road map reports will chart a course for the large-scale improvement of K-12 geography education in the U.S.Funded by a 2-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, this project responds to the growing recognition among business leaders and policy makers that Americans lack the critical geographic understanding and reasoning skills that will be required for careers and civic life in the 21st century.
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Would you like all of your Facebook FB -0.56% friends to sift through your trash? A group of designers from Britain and Germany think that you might. Meet BinCam: a "smart" trash bin that aims to revolutionize the recycling process.BinCam looks just like your average trash bin, but with a twist: Its upper lid is equipped with a smartphone that snaps a photo every time the lid is shut. The photo is then uploaded to Mechanical Turk, the Amazon-run service that lets freelancers perform laborious tasks for money. In this case, they analyze the photo and decide if your recycling habits conform with the gospel of green living. Eventually, the photo appears on your Facebook page.
You are also assigned points, as in a game, based on how well you are meeting the recycling challenge. The household that earns the most points "wins." In the words of its young techie creators, BinCam is designed "to increase individuals' awareness of their food waste and recycling behavior," in the hope of changing their habits.
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The Madison School District should screen all elementary school students for mental health problems and develop school-based mental health clinics for older students, according to a district task force.Wow.The Mental Health Task Force said in a report to the School Board on Monday that dwindling community resources, poor communication between service providers and school psychologists, and minority students not accessing mental health services to the same degree as their white peers are problems that need to be addressed.
"These are huge issues," district chief of staff Steve Hartley said. "The president is talking about it. The governor is talking about it."
The report comes as mental health has taken on greater prominence in the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. Gov. Scott Walker has proposed a $30 million increase for spending on mental health services in his 2013-15 budget.
The report includes seven recommendations of a mental health task force formed nearly two years ago by former superintendent Dan Nerad.
As an aside, it is quite fascinating that DeFour's article lacks any links, much less to the report (255K PDF). What year is it?
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes
Call me crazy, but I think a record of involvement in our schools is a prerequisite for a School Board member. Sitting at the Board table isn't the place to be learning the names of our schools or our principals.Notes and links on Ed Hughes and the 2013 Madison School Board election.Wayne Strong, TJ Mertz and James Howard rise far above their opponents for those of us who value School Board members with a history of engagement in local educational issues and a demonstrated record of commitment to our Madison schools and the students we serve.
I've become a broken record vis a vis Madison's disastrous reading results. The District has been largely operating on auto-pilot for decades. It is as if a 1940's/1950's model is sufficient. Spending increases annually (at lower rates in recent years - roughly $15k/student), yet Madison's disastrous reading results continue, apace.
Four links for your consideration.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use. This program continues, despite the results.
3rd Grade Madison School District Reading Proficiency Data ("Achievement Gap Plan")
The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don't present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print.
Madison Schools Distort Reading Data (2004) by Mark Seidenberg.
How many School Board elections, meetings, votes have taken place since 2005 (a number of candidates were elected unopposed)? How many Superintendents have been hired, retired or moved? Yet, the core structure remains. This, in my view is why we have seen the move to a more diffused governance model in many communities with charters, vouchers and online options.
Change is surely coming. Ideally, Madison should drive this rather than State or Federal requirements. I suspect it will be the latter, in the end, that opens up our monolithic, we know best approach to public education.
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I know Sarah and Ben Manski, and I wish them well in California. Congratulations to Ben for getting into a prestigious graduate program there.Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board Election, here.But graduate schools don't just call you up out of the blue and say you're in! It's not like the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes -- you plan for this.
So, the question is, if Sarah Manski knew that her husband had a good chance of getting into school out there, and she knew she would go with him, then why did she run for school board in the first place? And while she was running, why didn't she disclose that possibility?
Both Manskis have put transparency and concern about the process at the center of their careers. So why was it lacking here?
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The Madison Machine has put the fix in to elect a school board wholly beholden to the teachers union. No one suffers more than the poorly served minority community in Madison. Its candidates are being undermined for the benefit of the insider power structure that has allowed the minority achievement gap to grow to alarming levels.Madison School Board member Mary Burke supports my suspicions. She says Madison Teachers Inc. president John Matthews is the brains behind Sarah Manski's Trojan horse candidacy. Whoever is its author, the gambit succeeded in blocking a freethinking minority candidate, Ananda Mirilli, from surviving the front-end-loaded primary, so precipitously concluded.
For the record, John Matthews responded with a monosyllabic "no" mid-Sunday afternoon to my inquiry: "Is Mary Burke correct? Are you the brains behind the Sarah Manski bait and switch?"
So far, School Board member Marj Passman, the union's most vociferous defender, and a longtime water carrier for the union, is left holding the bag. Matthew DeFour's fine reportage in Saturday's Wisconsin State Journal reports this:
Manski said she didn't plan to run for School Board, but entered the race because Passman and a few other people [my italics] very strongly encouraged her to run. She declined to say who the other people were.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. newsletter (PDF) via a kind Jeannie Bettner email
Does it matter to you when school begins in the fall? How about when and how long winter or spring break is? And, how about when the school year ends? Have you thought about how many days you work for your annual salary, or how many hours make up your school day? In members' responses to many years of MTI bargaining surveys, all of these factors are "very important" to those in MTI's various bargaining units.It was MTI's case in 1966 which gave teacher unions an equal voice on all of the above topics. Ruling for MTI, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school calendar is a mandatory subject of bargaining, meaning that a school district in Wisconsin must negotiate with the Union to determine each of the factors described above. Unfortunately, Governor Walker's Act 10 in effect overturned the Supreme Court's ruling because Act 10 removed workers' rights to collectively bargain.
Impact? Act 10 enables a school board without a good conscience to engage in mischief or abuse of all MTI-represented staff, especially teachers, because teachers are paid an annual salary not on an hourly basis.
So far, the Board of Education has continued to negotiate the school calendar with MTI. In 2012's negotiations, the calendar was agreed upon through the 2013-14 school year. MTI is fighting to overturn Act 10 and to restore the Union's right to negotiate over the school calendar.
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Willie Ney, a self-described "multicultural activist" on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in the 1990s, heard teens performing poetry and saw revolutionary potential.Starting in 2003, Ney took an exploding, coast-to-coast movement of spoken word poetry and created the country's first hip-hop academic program on a university campus. Ney is now executive director of the UW-Madison's Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, which oversees the First Wave Spoken Word and Urban Arts Learning Community.
Each year, First Wave accepts 15 students, gives each of them a full-ride scholarship, and crafts a curriculum to encourage their skills in poetry, political activism, music, dance and theater. Their success could prove what Ney predicted years ago.
"Whichever university takes a risk on these kids, the cutting-edge kids of the 21st century, they'll revolutionize the institution," Ney said. "This is the most exciting thing happening in high school. These kids are literary geniuses, so it correlates well to academics.
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The Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind reader's email:
The bad news: A Harvard Study using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) finds that Wisconsin ranks 38th out of 41 states in progress in reading and math between 1992 and 2011. Both low and high performing states from 1992 have outperformed us, and they tend to be states where serious reforms were made in instructional content and pedagogy. The top 10 show up on many lists of states with improved reading instruction: Maryland, Florida, Delaware, Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia. Some of these states served as models for our recent Wisconsin legislation on early reading screening and a new reading exam for teacher licensure. A logical next step is to look at what they are doing for professional development for their in-service teachers of reading. Which leads to . . .The good news: A committed group of 38 teachers and tutors will spend 12 Saturdays in 2013 being trained in LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling). LETRS is a comprehensive professional development program created by Louisa Moats, the primary author of the foundational reading standards of the Common Core State Standards. LETRS is quite common elsewhere in the country: in some states it is the official state-funded development tool for teachers of reading, and in some cases it is required for certain teaching licenses. Despite its popularity and proven value, it has not been available in Wisconsin. The current opportunity is being sponsored by the Milwaukee Summer Reading Project, an initiative of Howard Fuller's Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. UW-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education is hosting at their conference facilities in downtown Milwaukee. The training is being presented by Alicia Sparks through the Rowland Reading Foundation, which is a LETRS affiliate site. Participants include teachers from public and charter schools in Milwaukee and Wausau, as well as tutors from a variety of literacy programs for children and adults in Milwaukee and Madison. This training is at capacity, but other communities interested in sponsoring LETRS training can contact the Rowland Reading Foundation in Middleton.
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Marguerite Roza, Monica Ouijdani, via a kind Deb Britt email:
Constrained revenues are forcing some districts to cut staff, which can drive up class sizes. While media reports tell us class sizes are rising to concerning levels, some researchers and education leaders suggest that repurposing class-size reduction funds to pay for other reforms may not be such a bad idea.Consideration of whether smaller classes are preferable to larger ones requires some recognition of the opportunity costs involved. While smaller classes are on many levels desirable, they come with a hefty price tag. And so, in an environment of scarce resources, those seeking better outcomes in education have begun rethinking previous decisions to lock up their funds in small classes.
Practically speaking, class sizes vary from state to state, and any discussion of tradeoffs makes most sense in the context of the existing arrangement. Political tolerance for raising class sizes might depend on the magnitude of current class sizes, as well as the level of funds that can be repurposed in doing so.
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It is getting harder to ignore the fact that American higher education is in great need of reform. Academia is lurching along unsteadily down an unsustainable and uncertain future--with rising student debt, suffocating political correctness, falling standards, and unrestrained debauchery. Change is inevitable; whether it will come from deliberate policy changes or as an inevitable collapse remains to be seen.The problems do not come from a shortage of viable ideas to set academia on the right path, but, rather, from Ivory Tower intransigence and denial. Ideas for reform are everywhere; some are proven, some are untried, some are still up for judgment, but many can certainly improve the status quo.
In celebration of the 100th issue of Academic Questions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), 100 academics, higher education critics, and independent scholars were asked for their suggestions on how to improve this obstinate and arrogant institution, the Ivory Tower. The results appear in the 100th issue, entitled "One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education." The publication of these ideas coincides with the NAS's 25th anniversary celebration. (For more information about that celebratory event in New York City on March 1-2, 2013, please visit the organization's website.)
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For the first time in decades, the United States is making steady gains in the number of high school students earning diplomas, putting it on pace to reach a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020, according to a new analysis released Monday.But the good news comes with a big asterisk: students with learning disabilities and limited fluency in English face long odds to finish high school, with graduation rates for those groups as low as 25 percent in some states, the analysis found. Minority students also continue to fall well behind their white peers, with about one-third of African-American students and 29 percent of Hispanic students dropping out before graduation.
The "Building a Grad Nation" report - which was co-authored by Robert Balfanz, a leading scholar of dropout rates at Johns Hopkins University - found strong improvements in graduation rates in a diverse collection of states including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, California, Texas and New York. The national graduation rate jumped from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, with the pace of improvement accelerating in the past few years.
"For the first time in 40 years, we have seen significant, sustained improvement," said John Bridgeland, a co-author of the study and the chief executive of Civic Enterprises, a public policy group in Washington, D.C.
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"I fell asleep often." This is an anonymous comment by a student on the website "Rate My Professors," where instructors are ranked as "Good Quality," "Average Quality," and "Poor Quality," with anecdotal assessments included. The comment by the sleepy student is not an admission of ill-preparedness, a confession of intellectual laziness, or even simply an acknowledgement of too many nights at the pub. It is a self-evident accusation: the professor who can't keep this student awake is a dull fellow, and other students should beware.As anyone knows who has checked this public site, Rate My Professors is full of such accusations against professors -- for being boring, overly demanding, or ungenerous about marks or deadlines. "He means well but his grading is very hard on students," reads one such complaint, with the implication produced by the ambiguous wording that low marks are an unjust hardship. Professors are frequently castigated for sins of "over-intellectualizing," "droning on about versification," and -- a frequent lament -- having "unreasonable expectations." One instructor is "not very personable" while another "does not give students the opportunity to excel." Another prof "makes such meticulous effort to choose her vocabulary that much of her lecture loses all meaning." The same commentator warns, in explanation of a "Poor Quality" ranking, "Be prepared to listen HARD and think."
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I feel like my head is going to explode.Related: And so it continues......As a Dem-leaning, Urban League board member; fiscally cautious, small business-owning product of both private and public education; and a native Madisonian proud of our city's progressive past, why do I feel caught in a remake of the Temptations' old-school classic "Ball of Confusion"?
Maybe it began December 19, 2011. That's when I heard Madison School Board member Marj Passman painfully explain why she was going to vote against Madison Prep, the initiative designed to get more of Madison's black students college ready.
In artfully prepared notes, an emotional Passman, who is a former teacher and proud Madison Teachers Inc. member, echoed her earlier op-ed for the The Capital Times defining her view of public schools, including the important and noble benefits of equal opportunity and the responsibilities of preparing students to be economically self-sufficient and improving social conditions.
Yet Passman voted against the sentiment of black parents that night who eloquently described an experience in Madison's schools that ran counter to the very goals she listed.
Passman was caught in a progressive conundrum of the first order. Vote for current educational models and justice for teachers unions, or listen to the voices of a community asking for new ideas and justice for their struggling kids? A tough call for any progressive.
The head spun more during a conversation with MTI leader John Matthews. He offered his view on teacher accountability. A champion of union rights, Matthews maintained teachers shouldn't compete against each other for pay, but rather work together collaboratively to create better schools. Yet, at a later meeting, Matthews was put on his heels when Urban League president and native Madisonian Kaleem Caire asked why, in 2010 with less than fifty percent of young black males in Madison graduating from high school, not one of Madison's 2,700 teachers was dismissed for any reason, including substandard performance.
Our kids compete for grades and are held accountable for performance. Yet teachers shouldn't compete, and accountability for them is a word rife with conflict? So a champion of Madison's black poor challenges the champion of teachers. The head spins.
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Superintendent Richard Zimman:
The Ripon teacher compensation model was designed around three basic concepts: 1) individual annual improvement; 2) peer collaboration; 3) professional environment. As compared to the traditional step and lane salary schedule based on years of experience and graduate credits or the merit-pay system based on competitive ranking of teachers, the Ripon model is intended to build a collaborative, professional environment which supports each teacher in building his/her craft as an effective instructor. We firmly believe that five years from now our schools will be better places to work and learn than those schools where teachers are compensated by the other systems.760K PDF document:Let me explain why I can make that statement.
First, we focus on individual annual improvement. If we hire the right people, support them with appropriate staff development, and evaluate them with a research-based coaching model (we use the CESA 6 Teacher Effectiveness Program), then our goal is to help these teachers grow and improve each and every year. Rather than having them compete with each other, we want them to compete with themselves like a runner or swimmer trying to better his/her time with deliberate practice. If every one of our teachers is better next year than this year, and better in two years than next year, and this cycle of annual improvement continues, then our students will be receiving better instruction every year which will result in higher student achievement. Just imagine five years into the future after five continuous years of every teacher improving (or removed if performance is not up to standard). We'll put that future against the result of any other system because they either create complacency or winners and losers in a competitive ranking.
Background
The RASD Teacher Salary Plan was designed in the 2011-12 school year by a joint committee of Ripon teachers, administrators, and school board members. Modeled loosely on the collegiate promotion system in use at Ripon College, the driving vision was to reinforce quality instruction by fostering a culture of professionalism through peer review, accountability through a job-embedded salary structure, and continuous improvement through lifelong learning. This compensation system recognizes that there are significant differences between business and academic organizations, public and private sectors, and the development of people and products. A goal of the RASD Teacher Salary Plan is to promote a positive and collaborative learning environment in which teachers are compensated for their professionalism.II. Overview
A single-lane, career ladder is used as the basis for salary advancement (see Appendix I). There are five distinct levels through which a typical teacher will pass through during a career spanning 2-3 decades of employment with the RASD. Teachers typically move from one level to the next level every six years through a promotion process based on peer review. Instead of the promotion process, the top level uses an evidence-based, professional growth model with financial incentives in the form of annual bonuses. Advancement requires collaboration, professionalism, and evidence of continuous improvement based on personal reflection and ongoing feedback from peers, administrators, students, and parents. In addition to the salary amount indicated on the salary structure, annual stipends are provided throughout a teacher's career for advanced degrees and National Board certification.III. Career Levels
The single-lane salary structure is based on a sequence of six-year career levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Associate, Lead) which were loosely based on collegiate levels (e.g., Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor). The final career level is the much-respected Veteran status, similar to the collegiate capstone of an endowed chair. It is very important to note that these levels are stages in a career for all teachers and are not based on proficiency or skill level. Just as the collegiate system does not equate a full professor rank with a higher teaching proficiency rating than an assistant professor rank, the RASD Salary Plan does not contain any proficiency ranking of teachers. Promotions from one career level to another are based on evidence of professional improvement in a multi-faceted review process. This is a professional advancement career ladder and not a merit-based or performance-based pay system.
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Even before the cost estimates and program details have been made public, President Obama's proposal for expanding high-quality preschool education has encountered criticism from House Republicans. Yet decades of research has shown that well-designed preschool programs more than pay for themselves by giving young children the skills they need to move ahead. The challenge at the federal level will be to make sure that taxpayer dollars flow to proven, high-quality programs instead of being wasted on subsidies for glorified day care.
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Daniel Willingham, via a kind reader's email (pdf):
Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically. In layperson's terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new
evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: That's what we mean when we refer to "thinking like a scientist" or "thinking like a historian."This proper and commonsensical goal has very often been translated into calls to teach "critical thinking skills" and "higher-order thinking skills" - and into generic calls for teaching students to make better judgments, reason more logically, and so forth. In a recent survey of human resource officials1 and in testimony delivered just a few months ago before the Senate Finance Committee,2 business leaders have repeatedly exhorted schools to do a better job of teaching students to think critically. And they are not alone. Organizations and initiatives involved in education reform, such as the National Center on Education and the Economy, the American Diploma Project, and the Aspen Institute, have pointed out the need for students to think and/or reason critically. The College Board recently revamped the SAT to better assess students' critical thinking. And ACT, Inc. offers a test of critical thinking for college students.
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We've had generations to act on our public education shortcomings. But we haven't. The Deep South now outpaces Minnesota by numerous accounts. We trail the nation.If Minnesota's white students posted nation-worst achievement and graduation rates, we'd have redesigned education overnight.
Instead we protect status quo, punishing those who are "different" than us.
Our toilsome history
In 1865, the U.S. Congress voted "yea" on the Thirteenth Amendment. Passing in the House of Representatives by a mere two votes, we abolished slavery and brought closure to the bloody Civil War.
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The recession continues to create challenges for higher education in the US. Appropriate responses depend on expectations for the economy in the future, and whether the shocks we have experienced are short- or longer-term trends. Moody's US Higher Education Outlook Negative in 2013 report does little to address these issues.The optimal response to a cyclical change is to not allow significant changes to the structure of the colleges and universities. But if a change is permanent, adjustments are warranted. Of course, it is difficult to know whether shocks are permanent or temporary - there is a tendency to assume positive shocks are permanent and negative ones temporary, leading to inappropriate policy responses when wrong. This explains some of the problems facing many colleges and universities.
One of the most important developments in the US economy is the growth of real incomes. In the past decade, real incomes have suffered, putting downward pressure on tuition increases at many institutions. If real income growth picks up, so will the ability of some institutions to increase tuition.
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President Obama's second Inaugural Address used soaring language to reaffirm America's commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own."The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.
Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they've lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.
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Of all the changes sweeping through the American public education system, one of the most significant is simply demographic: the growing population of Hispanic students.A new analysis released Thursday of nationwide test results in the five most populous states -- California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas -- shows that depending on where they live, Hispanic students' academic performance varies widely.
According to the report, which examines data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often cited as the most reliable standard in academic testing, Hispanic students accounted for more than half of all eighth graders in California in 2011, the highest proportion in the country. But only 14 percent of those students were proficient on eighth-grade reading tests administered by the United States Department of Education.
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I applaud the Wisconsin State Journal's efforts to dig deeper into the Madison Superintendent search process. A kind reader pointed out to me how "shocking" it is that Barbara Thompson was NOT one of the two finalists.
The Madison School Board named these two finalists:
Jennifer Cheatham - apparently selected.Walter Milton, Jr. - withdrew under a cloud of controversy.
from a larger group that included:
- Joe Gothard, Madison's assistant superintendent for secondary education.
- Barbara Thompson, a former Madison principal and New Glarus superintendent who is currently superintendent in Montgomery, Ala.
- Tony Apostle, a retired superintendent from the Puyallup School District near Tacoma, Wash.
- Curtis Cain, administrator of the Shawnee Mission School District near Kansas City, Mo.
- Sandra Smyser, superintendent of Eagle County Schools in Eagle, Colo.
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Thank you MMSD BOE ,"unanimously opposed to the Governor's proposed expansion of Private School Voucher Programs." Public=public.
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 24, 2013
There's also the obvious point: If seniority and degree attainment make for better teachers, why are seniority protections and automatic raises for degree attainment necessary in a collective bargaining agreement or an employee handbook?Focus needed on long-term educational goals by Dave Baskerville:One would think good teachers should have secure employment, dibs on choice positions and regular raises by virtue of being, well, good teachers.
I'm not drawing attention to the ridiculousness of seniority and degree-attainment perks because I think Walker's decision to effectively end public-sector collective bargaining was a good one.
But support for these common contract provisions is one way to measure school board candidates.
There's a difference, after all, between being pro-union and union-owned.
There is now much excitement around Madison and the state with the selection of a new Madison School District superintendent, the upcoming election of new School Board members, the expected re-election of State Superintendent Tony Evers, the rollout of new Common Core state standards, and now a vigorous debate, thanks to our governor, over the expansion of school vouchers.www.wisconsin2.orgThe only problem is that for those of us who pay attention to classroom results and want to see our students really move out of second-class global standings, there is no mention of long-term "stretch goals" that could really start getting all of our kids -- black and white, poor and middle class -- reading like the Canadians, counting like the Singaporeans or Finns, and doing science like the Japanese -- in other words, to close the gaps that count long-term.
Let's focus on two stretch goals: Wisconsin's per capita income will be 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030, and our eighth grade math, science and reading scores will be in the top 10 globally by 2030.
This would take not only vision, but some serious experimentation and radical changes for all of us. Can we do it? Of course, but not with just "feel good" improvement and endless debate over means to that end, and without clear global benchmarks, score cards, and political will.
The New Madison Superintendent Needs to "Make Things Happen", a Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Barely half of the district's black students are graduating from high school in four years. That's a startling statistic. Yet it hasn't produced a dramatic change in strategy.Ms. Cheatham, it's your job to make things happen.
Your top priority must be to boost the performance of struggling students, which requires innovation, not just money. At the same time, Madison needs to keep its many higher-achieving students engaged and thriving. The district has lost too many families to the suburbs, despite a talented staff, diverse offerings and significant resources.
Being Madison's superintendent of schools will require more than smarts. You'll need backbone to challenge the status quo. You'll need political savvy to build support for action.
Your experience leading reform efforts in urban school districts is welcome. And as chief of instruction for Chicago Public Schools, you showed a willingness to put the interests of students ahead of the grown-ups, including a powerful teachers union.
We appreciate your support for giving parents more options, including public charter schools and magnets. You seem to understand well the value of strong teacher and student assessments, using data to track progress, as well as staff development.
The traditional classroom model of a teacher lecturing in front of students is changing, and technology can help provide more individualized attention and instruction. The long summer break -- and slide in learning -- needs to go.
Madison School Board Election Intrigue (Public!)
he top vote-getter in Tuesday's Madison School Board primary said Friday she ran for the seat knowing she might not be able to serve out her term because her husband was applying for graduate school in other states.Sarah Manski, who dropped out of the race Thursday, said she mentioned those concerns to School Board member Marj Passman, who Manski said encouraged her to run. Passman told her it wouldn't be a problem if she had to resign her seat because the board would "appoint somebody good," Manski said.
Passman vigorously denied encouraging Manski to run or ever knowing about her husband's graduate school applications. After learning about Manski's statement from the State Journal, Passman sent an email to other School Board members saying "I had no such conversation with her."
"It's sad to believe that this kind of a person came close to being elected to one of the most important offices in our city," Passman wrote in the email, which she also forwarded to the State Journal.
Manski said in response "it's possible (Passman) didn't remember or it's possible it's politically inconvenient for her to remember."
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References to procrastination have been dated back to as long as 3,000 years ago. However, research on procrastination is ironically enormously behind the curve in active research on its antecedents and effects. Academic procrastination is a unique outlet of procrastinatory tendencies and is the object of much less scientific research. Academic procrastination occurs when students needlessly delay completing projects, activities or assignments and has been linked to lower academic grades, poorer well-being, and more stress. Studies have found procrastination to be a vital predictor of success in college and the development of a scale upon which to measure it could be quite profitable to colleges and universities. Numerous scales such as the Lay (1986) General Procrastination Scale, the Solomon and Rothblum (1984) Procrastination Assessment Scale for Students, and the Choi and Moran (2009) scale have been used to measure procrastination. However, the Tuckman (1991) Procrastination Scale is the most widely-used scale to identify academic procrastinators.The current study examined these scales as compared to a new scale, the Academic Procrastination Scale (APS). The main goal of the current study was the development of a superior academic procrastination scale. The 25-item APS was originally developed in a pilot study using 86 undergraduate college students and was based on six different characteristics of procrastinators: Psychological belief about abilities, distractions of attention, social factors, time management skills, personal initiative, and laziness. The current study examined the relationship between the APS and the personality trait of conscientiousness and the predictive ability of the APS in regards to academic success as compared to the other procrastination scales.In the current study, a total of 681 participants responded to a survey. Participants were, on average, 21 years of age and came from diverse academic majors and demographic backgrounds. The APS exhibited greater reliability and internal consistency, á = .94, as compared to the four other scales. The APS also exhibited ample convergent validity and was significantly correlated with the other scales. The APS was also significantly related to Grade Point Average (GPA); as individuals procrastinated more, they possessed a significantly lower GPA. Yet, the APS proved far superior at predicting grades in school as compared to the four most widely-used procrastination scales. The APS even added incremental validity beyond these four scales in predicting semester grades. The APS also predicted variance in grades beyond a well-known personality predictor, conscientiousness. Moreover, scores on the APS fully mediated this established relationship between conscientiousness and grades.A factor analysis of the APS revealed one underlying factor, seemingly indicating that the scale was measuring academic procrastination. Test bias could possibly destroy a scale's validity and was therefore assessed using two different procedures. An Analysis of Variance revealed that scores on the APS did not systematically vary with such irrelevant variables as gender, ethnicity, academic major or academic year. The Lautenschlager and Mendoza (1986) approach found that scores did, however, vary across ethnicity with Caucasians exhibiting a higher GPA across all levels of the APS when compared to African Americans. This trend was also found for the Tuckman scale, however. However, this bias could potentially be explained by GPA varying across ethnicity with Caucasians exhibiting a significantly higher cumulative GPA as compared to Hispanics or African Americans. Although the internal consistency of the APS was quite high, it is also symptomatic of redundant items. Thus, the possibility of reducing the scale to five items was assessed and validated. This shortened scale also exhibited adequate reliability, á = .87.Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are used across the country to select students on the basis of success in college. However, both the APS and SAT uniquely predict college grades and together, account for 16% of the variance in college grades. It is even proposed that the current scale be used in conjunction with SAT scores to predict success in college. The APS could add significant validity to such a collegiate selection procedure. If procrastination is consistently found to have negative consequences, then students who exhibit higher scores on the APS could also be remediated in educational settings. Thus, based on results from the current study, the APS could be used as a valid, reliable, and instrumental tool within the educational community.
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From a national standpoint, the 20-year-old charter school movement has been a disappointment. More than a third of these independently run, publicly funded schools are actually worse than the traditional public schools they were meant to replace. Abysmal charter schools remain open for years, even though the original deal was that they would be shut down when they failed to perform. New York City's experience, however, continues to be an exception.For the second time in three years, a rigorous study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes shows that the typical New York City charter school student learns more in a year in reading and math than his or her peers in their neighborhood district schools. The difference, over a typical year, amounts to about a month's more learning in reading -- and a whopping five months' more learning in math.
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At first blush, the news item that Maryland has announced plans to buy an iPad for every one of its roughly 500 athletes at a cost of about $300,000 seems like just another case of temporary insanity caused by the recruiting arms races.But when you realize this is the same Maryland athletic department that announced it was bolting as a founding member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for the big payday of joining the Big Ten because of its crippling department debt, which prompted it to drop seven sports programs, the insanity seems more than temporary.
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Pupils in England are at risk of missing out because their schools do not have good enough wi-fi, figures suggest.Schools need fully accessible wi-fi if they are to embrace digital learning in all subjects, argues Valerie Thompson of the E-Learning Foundation.
But only a quarter of schools achieve this, suggests the British Educational Suppliers Association (Besa).
"It's vital to a 21st Century learning environment," said Ms Thompson.
The data comes from surveys of a representative panel of some 600 state schools across England, carried out by market research company C3 Education for Besa.
Of 250 secondary schools, about 22% said they had wi-fi in most or all classrooms, 39% had it in some classrooms, leaving 39% with wi-fi in only a few or no classrooms.
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At Wednesday night's Oakland school board meeting, there were few empty seats and dozens of people with speaker cards to discuss the several adult education programs that may be cut. Adult education, however, was not on the agenda and the board did not make any comments regarding any cuts.Instead, the board approved to deny the charter renewal for East Oakland Leadership Academy High.
Philip Dotson, acting director of the Office of Charter Schools, read the report highlighting why the charter should not be renewed for EOLA based on figures developed over the five years the charter has been in place.
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As we settle into 2013, I find myself increasingly optimistic about the future of the teaching profession. There are battles ahead, debates to be had and elections to be contested, but, as Sam Cooke sang, "A change is gonna come."The change that I'm most excited about is the potential for a shift towards teacher leadership in schools and school systems. I'm not naive enough to believe it will be a linear or rapid shift, but I'm confident in the long-term growth of teacher leadership because it provides a common ground for stakeholders to achieve their goals, because it's replicable and scalable, and because it's working already.
Much of my understanding of school improvement comes from my teaching career - now approaching two decades in the classroom, mostly in public high schools. However, until six years ago, I hadn't seen teachers putting forth a compelling argument about how we might begin to transform our profession. A key transition for me was reading a Teacher Solutions report from the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ). That 2007 report, Performance-Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve, showed how the concept of performance pay could be modified and improved upon with better definitions of a variety of performance, and differentiated pay based on differentiated professional practice, rather than arbitrary test score targets. I ended up joining the CTQ Teacher Leaders Network the same year, and have had the opportunity ever since to learn from exceptional teachers from around the country.
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One might say that the advent of online education has been disruptive for higher education in California. One might also say that the advent of penicillin was disruptive for the practice of medicine.More than 20 years ago, technology began to creep into my teaching. Ten years ago, I began to use electronics to present information in my classrooms and to allow students, even remote ones, to give me input during class.
Now, everything I say, present or draw during class is posted to the class website as it happens; any student with Web access can submit questions, suggestions or comments to me during my lectures. I love how dynamic my lectures have become with the varied opportunities for student input. I am hooked, and so are my students.
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Teachers all over Wisconsin lost benefits after Bruce Vielmetti:Act 10 eliminated most collective bargaining by public employees.Related on the adult employment focus of school districts.But maybe none lost more than those in Neenah, where hundreds of veteran educators are now headed to court in a class-action lawsuit to try to win back $170,000 in stipends, which supplemented their regular pensions.
District officials said changes to the retirement plan were necessary in light of $185 million in unfunded retirement liabilities.
"Obviously, you care about what your neighbors think, but ultimately you have to look out for your family," said Tim Hopfensperger, 49, who noted he passed up administrative jobs in other districts because the extra pay over 10 years still wouldn't match what he thought he had coming from Neenah, where he's been an elementary school teacher since he was recruited from Germantown schools in 1990.
For years, Neenah's teachers enjoyed one of the most generous retirement plans in Wisconsin. Many who were hired in the 1990s could retire at age 55 if they had 15 years with the district and get big stipends on top of their regular state retirement, plus health care coverage until they were eligible for Medicare.
The payment was based on 10 annual payments of one-half the starting teacher salary in the district, which last year was $34,319, or about $170,000. Teachers hired after July 1, 1998, had to work 20 years and reach age 57 to collect eight annual payments. Those hired after 2003 were eligible for less lucrative retirement enhancements.
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Just what is a charter school? That's the question I get most often when I talk to people in the general public. It's a good question. What's going on with charter schools around here is both important and tough to grasp.Gov. Scott Walker unveiled ideas last week for momentous steps related to education around the state as part of his budget proposal for the next two years.
One of them was not allowing public schools to spend more money for operations in the next two years than they're spending now. I was betting Walker would back a modest increase, at least in line with increased state aid for schools. By not increasing what is called the revenue cap on schools, Walker effectively proposed using increased education aid for property tax relief, not education. That would mean putting public schools statewide in increasingly tight circumstances. Will Republicans in the Legislature accept that or moderate it? A big question for the coming months.
Another Walker proposal would allow launching private school vouchers in as many as nine more cities in the state (Milwaukee and Racine have them now). It's very controversial and we'll talk about it in coming weeks.
But Walker's budget proposal also includes important charter school changes. Those have gotten less attention, so let's focus on them here, mostly in the form of a primer on charters.
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This week, I will not go to the library.I did not go to the library last week either, or the week before that. I have not borrowed from a library for 25 years. The one I used as a boy in Aberdeen has been pulled down and is now a field; many more in the city and across the country are threatened with closure. But I'm not upset by any of this; I do not cry over what's happened or bemoan the end of libraries because they are based on an idea that is no longer working.
The orthodoxy says otherwise - and it's an orthodoxy delivered with aggressive certainty. Libraries do all kinds of wonderful things, say their supporters: they promote justice, literacy and health, minimise social division and, these days, provide free downloadable books and a coffee and a bun as well. This diversification is presented as the solution to the decline of libraries, but is, in fact, the problem: going into a library now is like going into HMV or Woolies just before it closed. It is a model that is confused and unclear; it no longer knows why it is there. And as for free downloadable books in libraries: like Kindles in Waterstones, that is like inviting a pussy cat into an aviary - the route to certain destruction from within.
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Here's how five citizens answered this week's question (on the expansion of Wisconsin voucher school opportunities) posed by Capital Times freelancer Kevin Murphy. What do you think? Please join the discussion."Yes, I think parents should have the choice to decide which school their children will attend and this would allow them to have the money to make that choice instead of having to go to the one in the area they live. Choice is better for everyone -- parents too. When you give people the power to decide, it gives school districts an incentive to improve their programs for the students or they will go elsewhere."
Beatrice Makesa
financial analyst
Madison
"I don't think taking money away from public schools and giving it to private ones is right. I'm from California where our schools are in (bad) shape because the public schools don't have enough money to do a good job of educating. I don't want to see that happen here. In the city of Los Angeles, there's a handful of relevant public schools due to lack of state funding and that leaves everyone else trying to get into private schools, which can pick and choose who they want to enroll. As a general rule, taking away more money from the public school systems doesn't seem wise."
Charlie Frederich
technical service rep
Madison
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Is Laura Linder's son Chris being pushed out of Thomas Stone High School?It seems that way. Charles County school officials did not honor several credits the transfer student earned in Yuba City, Calif., where he was a 12th-grader. He is 18, but Maryland says he is still in 10th grade. He has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He has difficulty with math and science. But he does not qualify for full learning disability services.
Linder says Charles County Schools Superintendent James Richmond and other officials have suggested that Chris go back to California. That sounds harsh, but consider the context. Even smart educators like Richmond are at the mercy of a national movement to raise academic standards and graduation rates. The effort contradicts itself and is often at odds with educators' instincts and students' circumstances. Chris is a prime example.
Linder and her son moved to Waldorf last summer. Neither anticipated that the move would threaten his desire to get a high school diploma. He had fallen far behind in California when, Linder says, he was hospitalized four times for having suicidal thoughts. He also spent two months in juvenile hall for graffiti violations.
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Oxford, United Kingdom--11 February 2013--computerbasedmath.org announced that Estonia will be the first country to make use of its revolutionary and widely praised rethink of math education in a project to build a new school statistics course."Since the start of computerbasedmath.org, I've been asking, 'Which country will be first?'" said Conrad Wolfram, Founder. "Now we have the answer: it's Estonia."
Jaak Aaviksoo, Minister of Education and Research, Estonia, said, "In the last century, we led the world in connecting classrooms to the internet. Now we want to lead the world in rethinking education in the technology-driven world."
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Traditional colleges and a new breed of online-education providers, trying to figure out how to profit from the rising popularity of massive open online courses, are pouring resources into efforts to solve a problem that has bedeviled teachers for centuries: How can students be stopped from cheating?
David Walter Banks for The Wall Street Journal
Satia Renee, a 50-year-old from Smyrna, Ga., sees incidences of cheating as a byproduct of course design.Coursera, a Silicon Valley-based MOOC, recently launched a keystroke system to recognize individual students' typing patterns. EdX, its East Coast rival, is employing palm-vein scans. Other strategies include honor codes, remote web-camera proctors and test-taking centers.
Until recently, MOOCs have offered only certificates of completion that in some cases come with a letter grade. Typically, papers have been assessed by fellow students and tests marked by computers. Students frequently study together in online chat rooms--and there is often little to prevent them from cheating on tests or papers.
The efforts to stamp out cheating underscore just how much the stakes are rising. Until now, MOOCs have generally been free of charge and the most popular classes have attracted 150,000 students at a time. More than three million students from at least 160 countries have signed up for courses ranging from "A Beginners Guide to Irrational Behavior" to "Financial Engineering and Risk Management." Given the vast profit potential, MOOCs are scrambling to ensure the academic integrity of the courses.
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Alexandria city officials have ramped up efforts in recent years to improve the stubbornly dismal academic performance of Jefferson-Houston School. They brought in a new principal and a group of new teachers; they hired an outside turnaround consultant and math coaches; they instituted extra tutoring, drew up blueprints for a state-of-the-art makeover and scheduled the longest school day in the city.But Virginia lawmakers say it's too late. The state plans to take over the school, thanks to bills passed in the General Assembly last week that would create a statewide school division to oversee Virginia's chronically under-performing schools.
The move is galvanizing protests from teachers, principals and school board leaders in Alexandria and around the state. They argue it's impractical for a distant school board to manage the day-to-day details of bus rides and school lunches. And they say it's out of sync with a long American tradition of locally controlled public schools.
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I know it's late, but I was just at the check-out counter reading magazine covers still touting magical resolutions that would change us for the better in 2013. I was musing about what I would list for OUSD to tackle in 2013 that would benefit students with disabilities. My partial list, in no order:1. Identify and publicly celebrate those achieving positive results for these students. There are a lot of success stories out there - programs and individual educators and administrators who are helping students to reach their full potential. It continues to surprise me how infrequently OUSD highlights these achievements and we only hear about the same few examples. C'mon, OUSD - brag a bit!
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Way back in 2008, the three most admired personalities in sport were probably Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius. They were portrayed not just as great athletes but as great men, role models: Woods was the ultimate professional, Armstrong had overcome cancer to rule cycling, and the double amputee Pistorius had become an outstanding sprinter. It later turned out that Woods was a serial adulterer, Armstrong a drugs cheat, and on Thursday in South Africa Pistorius was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. His family and management have disputed the accusation "in the strongest terms".Any sentient person over the age of eight already knew that great athletes are not necessarily role models. That's not what the scandals have taught us. Rather, we can see now that the sports-industrial complex - the machine of media and advertising that cranks out myths about athletes - has gone into overdrive. As with investment banking it might be time to shrink it before it destroys society.
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A positive school culture should be a never-ending goal these days. There are so many mandates and changes happening in education. The cloud of accountability seems to follow us as we negotiate our way through the days and weeks. Sometimes we worry about them so much that they take our eyes off what is really important about what we do day in and day out. A positive school culture can help us refocus on our goals of educating students and expose them to opportunities they may not get anywhere else.One of the ways teachers do this is through readers' theatres. It helps them make strong literacy connections with students. Readers' theatres are simple to do, and once you get passed the idea that you don't need to be Andrew Lloyd Weber to create one, they are a great deal of fun as well. Teachers find a good script (resources below) and students act them out with the script in hand. No need for acting lessons or a big Hollywood production! It gives students a real opportunity to use their voice and practice inflection.
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The top vote-getter in Tuesday's Madison School Board primary said Friday she ran for the seat knowing she might not be able to serve out her term because her husband was applying for graduate school in other states.I am pleased and astonished that substantive questions are being raised by our local media.....Sarah Manski, who dropped out of the race Thursday, said she mentioned those concerns to School Board member Marj Passman, who Manski said encouraged her to run. Passman told her it wouldn't be a problem if she had to resign her seat because the board would "appoint somebody good," Manski said.
Passman vigorously denied encouraging Manski to run or ever knowing about her husband's graduate school applications. After learning about Manski's statement from the State Journal, Passman sent an email to other School Board members saying "I had no such conversation with her."
"It's sad to believe that this kind of a person came close to being elected to one of the most important offices in our city," Passman wrote in the email, which she also forwarded to the State Journal.
Manski said in response "it's possible (Passman) didn't remember or it's possible it's politically inconvenient for her to remember."
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In private conversation humanities scholars increasingly give voice to a strange confession regarding digital scholarship: "Actually, I'm O.K. with it, but the institution is not." Such a stark opposition between an assertion of individual progressiveness and a hesitation about institutional entrenchment hides a more complex story.As institutions become increasingly open to new approaches, resistance to digital work still emanates more from a traditionalism rooted in departmental lore. It's hard to change cultures, but academic publishing currently confronts a major structural transformation, and contributors as well as evaluators seek advice on how to assess digital projects. What steps should scholars, especially younger ones, take with their digital work to ensure that it will "count" toward hiring, promotions and tenure?
When I advise doctoral students assembling their dossiers for humanities teaching positions, most report great excitement about their digital projects, but remain uncertain whether to mention these for fear that they won't "count" or that they may even count against their applications. Some tell me their advisers have encouraged such projects, but also doubted that one can be hired or promoted solely on the basis of digital contributions.
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Nobody wants to be that hothead who flies off the handle in the face of some everyday annoyance, causing others to roll their eyes and wonder, "What's wrong with him?"But people who experience extreme reactions to stress--from a racing heart to full-blown rage--may be hard-wired to do so, researchers are finding. It isn't known how many people are highly reactive to stress, but the tendency can endure for years or a lifetime.
People who overreact often can't explain why a minor project setback or a child's spilled juice can unleash a volcanic response.
"They think they're weird, wondering, 'Why don't other people react like this?' " says Lois Barth, a New York-based life coach who works with stress-reactive people on performing better at work and reaching personal goals. "But many people can't help it."
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After Los Angeles Unified School District board members approved a Parent Trigger earlier this week, mayoral candidates Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel refused to comment on the historic vote, which allows parents to take over a chronically failing elementary school in West Adams.Now mayoral candidate Kevin James and two Parent Trigger heavyweights are speaking out about that silence -- and Garcetti and Greuel's commitment to education reform is being questioned. With an alarming 21 percent dropout rate at L.A. Unified, it's no small matter.
On Tuesday, L.A. Unified board members approved the first Parent Trigger to take place in the district, which is the second largest public school system in the United States. The Parent Trigger is a California law that allows parents to institute changes at a chronically failing school through petition.
In this case, parents sought to bring reform to 24th Street Elementary School in West Adams, which serves mostly poor Latino students.
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For much of my adult life I was a diligent producer of daily and weekly journalism. In recent years I have become a gargantuan consumer of it. It is a privilege to earn one's living by writing but, as I discovered, it is also a privilege, and a less stressful one, to earn one's living by reading.I read all day. Were it not for the demands of sleep and family life, I would read all night. My aim is to find all the writing worth reading on the internet, and to recommend the five or six best pieces each day on my website, the Browser. I pass over in silence here the Browser's many virtues. My purpose here is to share with you four lessons I have learnt in five years' drinking from the fire hose.
My first contention: this is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.
I don't pretend that everything online is great writing. Let me go further: only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader, by which I mean the demographic that, in the mainstream media world, might look to the Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs or the Atlantic for information. Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.
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Gamification in libraries has become a topic of interest in the professional discourse, and one that ACRL TechConnect has covered in Applying Game Dynamics to Library Services and Why Gamify and What to Avoid in Gamification. Much of what has been written about badging systems in libraries pertains to gamifying library services. However, being an Instructional Services Librarian, I have been interested in tying gamification to library instruction.When library skills are not always part of required learning outcomes or directly associated with particular classes, thinking more creatively about promotion and embeddedness of library tutorials prompted me to become interested in tying a badging system to the University of Arizona Libraries' online learning objects. For a brief review on badges, they are visual representations of skills and achievements. They can be used with or instead of grades depending on the scenario and include details to support their credibility (criteria, issuer, evidence, currency).
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Fernandez and Lee are among 14,000 eighth-grade students in the Washington region each year who spend a day of school visiting the finance park, making real-life decisions about health care, housing, investments and banking. Most of the students who participate -- 13,000 -- are from Fairfax County, with the rest coming from Alexandria, Arlington, the District and Prince George's County.The students attend the finance park, which sits on the campus of Robert Frost Middle School and W.T. Woodson High School, after spending five weeks learning about interest and credit; the risks and benefits of saving and investing; the difference between gross and net monthly income and other aspects of financial literacy during math and social studies classes.
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We've all heard of the Grand Design, leaving us to wonder what kind of world we would design if we were given the opportunity.Sophomores at Walnut High are taking the time to design their own domains in the school's new Academic Design Program. It's part and parcel of the program that asks students to learn through hands-on problem-solving.
The teens aren't given the answers to their worldly problems, they have to uncover the answers on their own. And so it was with a little trepidation that we stepped into their domain last week.
School officials say 75 sophomores volunteered for the innovative program that has proven successful in other Walnut Valley schools such as Chaparral Middle School in Diamond Bar.
In fact, program coordinator Jennifer La Certe transferred from Chaparral to share her expertise in design-based learning. The math instructor earned a master's degree from Cal Poly Pomona in integrative studies.
"Our emphasis on hands-on activities really motivate the students. Their interests are piqued when we ask them to do some real-world problem solving," La Certe explained.
Working in small groups, the students approach unusual challenges that require critical thinking and multi-disciplinary approaches. That's why the Academic Design Program blocks off the first three periods of the day for these teens.
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The Springfield School District will pay outgoing School Superintendent Walter Milton $177,797 under a separation agreement obtained by The State Journal-Register. Milton's resignation takes effect March 31, according to the agreement.
The 16-page agreement, signed by Milton Jan. 31, was released to The State Journal-Register Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The school district also will continue to pay for Milton's health and dental insurance until May 31, 2014 unless Milton finds a new job that provides similar benefits, according to the agreement. Milton will receive Illinois Teachers Retirement System credit for about 56 days of unused sick time.
The document says Milton sought the agreement in order to be able to pursue other positions. Milton said at Monday's school board meeting he decided to search for a new job after being denied a contract extension several months ago, and after realizing that he and the board have "fundamental policy disagreements." "I would have loved to have had the opportunity to fulfill the school year," Milton said Tuesday. "I was honored to serve. I love Springfield public schools."
Resignation, reference language
Once Milton resigns, the agreement says, a Sept. 28 letter from school board president Susan White will be removed from Milton's personnel file, as well as his response. The nature of the letter was not disclosed. The State Journal-Register filed FOIA requests for those letters Tuesday.
White would not comment on whether Milton's settlement -- to be paid in two installments by May 1 -- was taken into consideration when the school board determined budget reductions for next year. Along with a non-disparagement clause, the agreement outlines language to be used in response to inquiries, and it includes Milton's resignation letter and a recommendation letter to be sent when the school board is asked to provide a reference for Milton.
That recommendation letter matches an emailed statement that White sent Feb. 4 to a reporter in Madison, Wis. and to The State Journal-Register. That letter indicated Milton would end his employment with the district March 31. At the time, White said the date was a typographical error. The email prompted The State Journal-Register to submit a series of Freedom of Information Act requests regarding Milton's employment status.
Johnson: Resignation 'coerced'
The agreement is signed by six of the seven school board members, all except Judy Johnson. "No, I won't sign it," Johnson said Tuesday. "I don't agree with the action the board has taken. I don't think it's fair. To me, it's forced and coerced. Dr. Milton has done a good job."
A statement to media and district employees, slated for release March 11, also is included in the agreement. The agreement, which stipulates that the statement would be the only comment made by the board and Milton to media and employees regarding the separation agreement, apparently explains board members' recent silence on the matter.
The agreement also allows the board to search for candidates to become interim superintendent without notifying the public. White said the details of the negotiations needed to be confidential because they involved a personnel matter.
"In my opinion, there's nothing about the way this negotiation has been handled that is inappropriate," White said. White said she is frustrated that the word "secret" is being used to describe the private deliberations during which board members and Milton agreed to the separation agreement.
"This negotiation was no more secret than any other personnel matter the board considers in executive session," White said. "There are reasons, and I think public policy reasons, why employment and bargaining matters take place in private. ... There's a privacy component that employees are entitled to." White said any steps to accept Milton's resignation or hire an interim superintendent will be done in public.
Even though the details of the separation agreement have been released, and though Milton has made public statements, White said board members are still bound by the confidentiality agreement and cannot comment on much, including the timing of Milton's planned departure.
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The leading vote getter in a Madison School Board primary race abruptly dropped out Thursday.
Sarah Manski said in a statement she would no longer campaign for the seat because her husband was accepted into a sociology Ph.D program in California. Manski's name will remain on the ballot.
Read more at Madison.com
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Some parents and others have succeeded in stirring up debate in the Statehouse over whether Indiana should withdraw from uniform reading and math education standards that most states have adopted.It seems, however, that they'll have a much more difficult time winning their cause against the Common Core State Standards education initiative.
A bill that could be voted on by the state Senate in the coming week would suspend implementation of the benchmarks at Indiana schools until after the state Board of Education has finished a new review of the standards it adopted in 2010.
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The newspaper sought the names of all candidates interviewed by the School Board and background material provided. The district disclosed those names along with background materials for the two finalists it named publicly, Milton and Cheatham.The other finalists were:
• Joe Gothard, Madison's assistant superintendent for secondary education.
• Barbara Thompson, a former Madison principal and New Glarus superintendent who is currently superintendent in Montgomery, Ala.
• Tony Apostle, a retired superintendent from the Puyallup School District near Tacoma, Wash.
• Curtis Cain, administrator of the Shawnee Mission School District near Kansas City, Mo.
• Sandra Smyser, superintendent of Eagle County Schools in Eagle, Colo.
Cheatham and Milton were the only finalists the board named on Feb. 3. They were scheduled to appear together at a community forum on Feb. 7, but Milton abruptly dropped out two days before the event amid questions about his background.
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The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarize in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other. I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of "politically and financially motivated greed" on the one hand and "an opportunity to find out more about learning" on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true. It's always hard to be able to hold two complex and even contradictory ideas in one's mind at once but, well, that's life. Both can be true. And there is so much to be gained from a sustained conversation on every side and from each side's learning from the other without assuming the other side is being naive or callous in its concerns.Here's a case in point: although I've not done a data count, I would say that, about a year ago, the majority of articles on higher education in the mass media ran the gamut from snide to extremely negative, often springboarding off entrepreneur Peter Thiel's offering cash rewards to students choosing not to go to college. The rhetoric of so many articles seemed to be "is higher education really worth it?" These articles (I bet there were dozens if not hundreds) were often filled with hard data about the soaring costs of higher education and horrific student debt pitted against anecdotes of unemployment among the college educated. It was virtually a meme, that if you are fool enough to go to college, you end up deeper in debt and unemployed and therefore college isn't worth it. The tone in the press emphasized that latter point, demeaning the importance of higher education, laughing slyly at anyone who thinks higher education is a worthy goal.
Enter the MOOC: whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt that seemingly everyone wants--really, really wants--more not less higher learning. Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the conversation has now shifted from "is college worth it?" to "how can we make necessary, important, invaluable learning available to the widest number of people for the lowest cost"? I certainly have.
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I've been listening this month to the conversation at our house, and it is deflatingly predictable: "Have you finished your homework? Then why are you playing computer games?" "Your room is still a mess, put that down until it's done." "Have you gotten off the couch today?" And this recent favorite, "You are banned from playing games until the end of the school year."We have a bad case of digital distemper, but it has been hard to find a solution. As with going on a diet, you still have to eat. Our girls have hours of computer-based homework almost every night. We have a terrible time knowing when the work is done and when the play has begun.
On one infamous Sunday in December, we watched 14½ hours of Netflix. I knew it was bad but didn't know how bad until I looked back at the log and spotted a dozen episodes of "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." I immediately canceled Netflix. But that's like cutting the head off the hydra.
What would Hercules do?
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One of the nation's largest nurses' unions -- the National Federation of Nurses -- plans to announce on Thursday that it will affiliate with the far larger American Federation of Teachers.Barbara Crane, the president of the nurses' federation, said her group's national board voted to join forces with the teachers' union to give the nurses more political clout and money to try to unionize more nurses.
"We were not going to be able to achieve some of our goals unless we found a partner," said Ms. Crane, whose union represents 34,000 nurses in Montana, Ohio, Oregon and Washington. "We wanted a professional union that believes in growth through organizing."
Competition has been growing among various labor groups wanting to expand the unionization of the nation's three million nurses, including the Service Employees International Union, which represents 90,000 nurses, and National Nurses United, a union that represents only nurses, 185,000 of them.
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The British Library has been digitizing some of its prize pieces and they announced a new round of six artifacts had been completed including Beowulf, a gold-ink penned Gospel, and one of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks."Each of these six manuscripts is a true splendour, and has immense significance in its respective field, whether that be Anglo-Saxon literature, Carolingian or Flemish art, or Renaissance science and learning," Julian Harrison, the library's curator of medieval artifacts, blogged. "On Digitised Manuscripts you'll be able to view every page in full and in colour, and to see the finer details using the deep zoom facility."
All of these texts can be appreciated on a visual level, particularly because the scans are so good. Even the grain of the paper is fascinating.
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U.S. and state officials are intensifying efforts to hold colleges accountable for what happens after graduation, a sign of frustration with sky-high tuition costs and student-loan debt.Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) are expected to reintroduce this week legislation that would require states to make more accessible the average salaries of colleges' graduates. The figures could help prospective students compare salaries by college and major to assess the best return on their investment.
A similar bipartisan bill died last year, but a renewed push has gained political momentum in recent weeks. "This begins to introduce some market forces into the academic arena that have not been there," said Mr. Wyden, adding that support for the move is unusually broad given the political divide in Washington. Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the House majority leader, said he intends to support a similar measure in the House.
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When the government is in the business of handing out money, interest groups lobby to get it -- or advocate to receive more than they are already getting.So it is with spending on higher education.
As the Michigan Legislature debates the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year, more money for preschool, college and everything in between is being proposed. Over the long-term, the funding for those areas has increased dramatically. Taxpayers should be skeptical of the current reasons for subsidizing universities further.
Requests for more higher education funding is reported willingly in the media: It's the "most important investment" people can make. It "returns $17 in economic benefits" per dollar spent. It results in "lifetime earning power."
But the central arguments are dubious for five main reasons:
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In the fall of 2012, clinical psychologist, author and school consultant Michael Thompson visited Avenues to talk to parents about the pressures facing students today. The talk was recorded and is now being made available through OPEN and our YouTube channel. Check out the three-part series below, or start from part one on YouTube.
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"History doesn't teach lessons, historians do." Because historians interpret the past they often disagree, even revise, the meaning of events from the French Revolution to the American Civil War to school reform.What historians can do is show that in the flow of time constant change occurs. As a wise ancient Greek said: you cannot step into the same river twice. Thus, the past differs from the present even when they seem so similar. Consider, for example, U.S. involvement in Vietnam a half-century ago and Afghanistan since 2001. Or "scientific management" dominating school reformers' vocabulary and action in the early 1900s and the audit culture of test-driven accountability pervasive a century later. Historians can show the complexity of human action in the past and offer alternative perspectives that can inform current policy making but they cannot give policymakers specific guidelines. Although some try.
With that in mind, I turn to the current conventional wisdom among school reformers that focusing on the state and district are the best units for engineering change in schools and classrooms. In examining past generations of school reformers, however, it becomes clear that where change must occur has shifted time and again from the smallest unit-the teacher in the classroom-to the school, the district, the state, and nation. As political, economic, and social changes occurred in the U.S., previous generations of reformers skipped back and forth among these units of change as to which would best produce the changes they sought.
For example, in the early 1900s, few, if any, school reformers thought of the state or nation as the unit of reform. They saw the district and individual school as appropriate levers for change. A century later, however, with No Child Left Behind, test-driven accountability rules, Race to The Top incentive funds, and Common Core standards in math and reading adopted by nearly all the states- many policymakers see both the state and nation as the dominant units for reforming schools.
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The weekend news that Gov. Scott Walker hopes to drastically expand the state's school voucher program has been met with a swift response, not only from public school advocates but members of both political parties.How far his proposal gets as part of the next two-year state budget remains to be seen. He plans to unveil the 2013-15 spending package in its entirety on Wednesday.
Republicans enjoy an 18-15 majority in the Senate. But at least two -- Sen. Mike Ellis of Neenah and Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon -- have spoken out recently against a state-imposed expansion of voucher schools. Ellis has said, among other things, that local school district residents should be able to vote on bringing in voucher schools.
"The governor can propose anything he wants in his budget," Olsen says. "But I'm thinking we (the Legislature) want to do something else."
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Baxter, the affordable, humanoid industrial robot recently unveiled by Rethink Robotics, is so easy to program that I once did it one-handed and drunk. We were at a party at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he was standing in the corner, looking lonely. No, really--Baxter has expressive eyes projected on a touchscreen where you'd expect it to have a face, virtually guaranteeing that you'll anthropomorphize it.Drink in hand, I walked over and, with only the vaguest sense of how to get it to respond to my touch, grabbed it by the wrist. I guided its "hand" over to a box full of small objects. Its caliper-like fingers closed on a widget. Then I moved its hand, which offered almost no resistance at all, to another position on the table. It dropped the object.
After that, it dutifully repeated the procedure I had taught it, again and again, emptying the box. In a display of the sort of capabilities that used to be almost impossible in robotics but are now routine, its machine vision allowed it to cope with the differences in position and shape of each of the widgets. Baxter was untroubled by the poor lighting, loud music or my clumsiness. In less time than it takes to update my calendar, I had, in essence, trained Baxter to pack a box for shipping, or to transfer goods from one conveyor belt to another--two tasks that are common in manufacturing and distribution centers.
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Governor Earle, President Beury, friends of Temple University, and, I am glad to be able to say now, my fellow alumni:I have just had bestowed upon me a twofold honor. I am honored in having been made an alumnus of Temple University; and I am honored in having had conferred upon me for the first time the Degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence.
It is a happy coincidence that we should meet together to pay our respects to the cause of education not only on the birthday of the Father of this Nation, but also in the halls of a very great institution that is bringing true education into thousands of homes throughout the country. I have always felt certain that in Washington's wise and kindly way, he deeply appreciated the importance of education in a Republic--I might say throughout a Republic--and also the responsibility of that thing known as Government to promote education. Let this simple statement stand by itself without the proof of quotation. I say this lest, in this year of 1936, if I quoted excerpts from the somewhat voluminous writings and messages of the first President of the United States, some captious critic might search the Library of Congress to prove by other quotations that George Washington was in favor of just the opposite! Therefore, on this anniversary of his birth I propose to break a century-old precedent. I shall not quote from George Washington on his birthday.
More than that, and breaking precedent once more, I do not intend to commence any sentence with these words--"If George Washington had been alive today" or "If Thomas Jefferson" or "If Alexander Hamilton" or "If Abraham Lincoln had been alive today--beyond peradventure, beyond a doubt or perhaps the other way around, etc., etc., etc."
Suffice it to say this: What President Washington pointed out on many occasions and in many practical ways was that a broad and cosmopolitan education in every stratum of society is a necessary factor in any free Nation governed through a democratic system. Strides toward that fundamental objective were great, as we know, in the first two or three generations of the Republic, and yet you and I can assert that the greatest development of general education has occurred in the past half century, indeed, within the lives of a great many of those of us who are here today.
As literacy increases people become aware of the fact that Government and society form essentially a cooperative relationship among citizens and the selected representatives of those citizens.
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think of it this way: The government contracts for goods and services all the time. Contracting out our societal obligation to educate our children isn't all that different.Numerous notes and links on vouchers, accountability and per student spending can be found here.As with any other private organization that wins a publicly funded contract, private schools that take vouchers should provide the same kind of quality and access we expect of our other public services and infrastructure.
Jim Bender, president of the pro-voucher School Choice Wisconsin, largely agrees.
And Department of Public Instruction spokesman Patrick Gasper said his agency "is in conversation with legislators, private schools and the governor's office to find a way to bring schools participating in the voucher program into an accountability system."
Voucher students in private schools already have to take the same state-mandated tests as public school students, and private schools must use admissions lotteries to prevent them cherry-picking the best voucher students.
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A federal commission on Tuesday said the U.S. education system had "thoroughly stacked the odds" against impoverished students and warned that an aggressive reform agenda embraced by both Democrats and Republicans had not done enough to improve public schools.The report from the Equity and Excellence Commission - a panel of 27 scholars, civil rights activists, union leaders and school officials - describes an American public education system in crisis.
The commission, which was dominated by more liberal members, called on the federal government to take a more active role in public education - traditionally considered a local matter - by pushing states to desegregate schools, equalize funding and demand better training for beginning teachers. The group also echoed President Barack Obama's recent call for universal preschool.
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Students say Spoken Word is a nonjudgmental club where they can write poetry, some of which they later recite at poetry slams."I feel like I found my people," said Selin Gok, 16, a sophomore at West High School who wrote a poem about body image and named it "Thick Chick."
Selin competed Friday in a regional slam at West for the chance to take part in the state competition March 2 in Milwaukee, and her poem was chosen. Poems are limited to three minutes.
Other slams were held at Goodman Community Center. East High School will hold its slam Thursday.
Those who advance at state will have the opportunity to attend the national event, Brave New Voices, Aug. 7-11 at the University of Chicago.
The slams are open to those ages 13 to 19, and Madison School & Community Recreation supports Spoken Word clubs at East and West.
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Questions and Answers from Board Of Education Candidates
Because the School Board candidates Sarah Manski, TJ Mertz, and Ananda Mirilli are on the primary ballots for Seat 5 on February 19, 2013, the above link is a version of the candidate forum held on February 18, 2013 edited to include only the above candidates for Seat 5. The video is about one(1) hour in length.
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Jason Stein and Patrick Marley:
Gov. Scott Walker is proposing increasing by at least 9% the taxpayer funding provided to private and religious voucher schools - an increase many times larger in percentage terms than the increase in state tax money he's seeking for public schools.Related links:The increase in funding for existing voucher schools in Milwaukee and Racine, the first since 2009, comes as the Republican governor seeks to expand the program to nine new districts, including Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Madison. Walker is also proposing allowing special-needs students from around the state to attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
Even after the proposed increase to voucher funding and the substantial cuts Walker and lawmakers approved for public schools in 2011, the aid provided to voucher schools would still be substantially less on a per-pupil basis than the overall state and local taxes provided to public schools.
But to provide that bigger increase to voucher schools, the Republican governor will need to persuade lawmakers to break a link in state law that currently binds the percentage increase in aid to voucher schools to the percentage increase in state general aid given to public schools.
"The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don't present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print."
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Scientists are set to release the first batch of data from a project designed to create the first map of the human brain.The project could help shed light on why some people are naturally scientific, musical or artistic.
Some of the first images were shown at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
I found out how researchers are developing new brain imaging techniques for the project by having my own brain scanned.
Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital are pushing brain imaging to its limit using a purpose built scanner. It is one of the most powerful scanners in the world.
The scanner's magnets need 22MW of electricity - enough to power a nuclear submarine.
The researchers invited me to have my brain scanned. I was asked if I wanted "the 10-minute job or the 45-minute 'full monty'" which would give one of the most detailed scans of the brain ever carried out. Only 50 such scans have ever been done.
I went for the full monty.
It was a pleasant experience enclosed in the scanner's vast twin magnets. Powerful and rapidly changing magnetic fields were looking to see tiny particles of water travelling along the larger nerve fibres.
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Walker's reform proposals include:Related links:Additionally, Walker's spokesman confirmed plans to make no additional funding available for public schools in the budget he plans to propose Wednesday.
- Expanding private school vouchers to school districts with at least 4,000 students and at least two schools receiving school report card grades of "fails to meet expectations" or "meets few expectations." The expansion, which would include Madison schools, would be capped at 500 students statewide next year and 1,000 students the following year.
- Creating a statewide charter school oversight board, which would approve local nonreligious, nonprofit organizations to create and oversee independent charter schools. Only students from districts that qualify for vouchers could attend the charter schools. Authorizers would have to provide annual performance reports about the schools.
- Expanding the Youth Options program, which allows public school students to access courses offered by other public schools, virtual schools, the UW System, technical colleges and other organizations approved by the Department of Public Instruction.
- Granting special education students a private school voucher.
- Eliminating grade and residency restrictions for home-schooled students who take some courses in a public school district. School districts would receive additional state funding for home-schooled students who access public school courses or attend virtual schools.
"The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don't present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print."
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I wrote today about how Obama's proposal for universal pre-K is stunningly out of touch with the realities of today's society. It's clear that most mothers do not want to work full-time when they have kids, and it's clear that Obama is advocating school as a daycare system rather than an educational system. You can read the whole post here.But what I noticed, as I was writing it, was how mainstream media manages to report this story without mentioning homeschool. What is best for kids when they are four years old? Unstructured play. This is well documented, but if you push parents to provide unstructured play to a four-year-old it's like pushing them to provide breastfeeding to a one-year-old: maybe it's too hard on the parent!
So it's not politically correct to tell parents to suck it up and do what's right for their kids. And it's not politically correct to advocate spending tons of money to let low-income parents stay home with their kids. But it is politically correct to tell low-income parents to drop their kids off at daycare even if they would rather stay home with their kids?
It's obviously ridiculous, but it's in keeping with the way media reports on homeschooling, which is that they ignore it. Mainstream media misses the opportunity to point out that homeschooling works for everyone, no matter where they are in the economic spectrum.
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The U.S. Department of Education has used the economic downturn to drive a marketplace-based educational agenda in which test scores, merit pay and charter schools figure prominently. States and districts, desperate for funds, quickly agreed to these requirements in the Race-to-the-Top and Title I School Improvement Grants. Based on the same principles, private foundations have used their economic power to sway elections, sponsor and influence the content of administrative leadership training programs and fund the opening of charter schools that draw students and funds away from regular public schools.Related: www.wisconsin2.orgHow to build public support for a longer-term, more broadly focused education reform agenda is very challenging. The December shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut may be a tragic historic moment that provides insight into the value of the social and emotional dimensions of children's school experience. We may never know what complex set of factors led a young man to commit such unfathomable violence against innocent children. But we do know on a deep emotional level that children's safety, their sense of belonging and value as members of their communities are of paramount importance.
Many, maybe with some sensitivity in mind to the recent demeaning of teachers and their profession, have appropriately called attention to the heroism and selflessness of Newtown's educators. However, this may also be an occasion for public reflection about whether our economic anxiety has caused us to get our educational priorities far out of balance.
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Every spring, without fail, a Teach For America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer."Sorry."
Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.
It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach For America recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in poor schools. I allowed TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, filled with urban studies and African American studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and most of whom came from the kind of high-poverty neighborhoods where TFA proposed to send its recruits.
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Solidarity newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (65K PDF):
Reducing one's teaching contract by any percentage used to be a major risk. In doing so, one not only was at peril to remain part-time for the rest of their career, but their contract percentage could be varied year-to-year by the District, and worse yet, the District could unilaterally decide not to continue the contract. This is because part-time contracts are not covered by the "continuing contract law" by which teachers' contracts are renewed annually.Because of the demands by MTI members, the Union negotiated the right of one to temporarily reduce their contract and return to full-time the following year. This enables one to spend time with a child, an aging parent, or for any reason the teacher desires. Additionally, MTI negotiated that those employed under part-time contracts in Madison are issued individual contracts annually.
Requests to reduce one's contract for a one-year period, with the right to return to full-time the following year, must be made in writing to the District's office of Human Resources on or before March 1 for the 2013-14 school year.Reducing one's contract without using Section IV-W of MTI's Contract has major negative implications. Members considering this are urged to contact MTI Headquarters (257-0491).
These steps seem like steps every employer should have to follow. They are not, but MMSD must follow them because of MTI's Contracts. Governor Walker's Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI is working to preserve them.
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Most people assume a degree in the arts is no guarantee of riches. Now there is evidence that such graduates also rack up the most student-loan debt.A Wall Street Journal analysis of new Department of Education data shows that median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design average $21,576, which works out to a loan payment of about $248 a month. That is a heavy burden, considering that salaries for graduates of such schools with five or fewer years' experience cluster around $40,000, according to PayScale.com.
The data also show that graduates of research universities tend to carry less debt than those of liberal-arts colleges. Median debt loads average $19,445 for liberal-arts schools, versus $18,100 for research universities.
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What's more expensive than going to college? Until recently, the answer was easy: not going to college. Numerous studies over the years have shown that individuals with college degrees significantly out-earn those with high school degrees by $1 million or more over the course of a lifetime.But as the cost of education increases faster than inflation and the economy remains relatively weak, people are beginning to question how they spend their education dollars. As student loans hit the $1 trillion mark and more and more graduates are faced with years of paying staggering monthly payments, many are starting to ask themselves, "Is it worth it?"
While there's no doubt that a college degree increases earning power and broadens opportunities, today's high cost of education means it makes sense to more carefully consider which degree you earn. When it comes to return on investment (ROI), not all degrees are considered equal. This article exposes eight college degrees with poor ROI.
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Superintendent Jane Belmore (652K PDF):
This information is provided in response to a request for more information made at the January 28th Regular Board of Education meeting regarding the implication of CogAT for the 2012-13 school year. Communication with DPI TAG consultant has occurred on numerous occasions. A Review Committee, with additional members, met twice since January 28 and a survey of options was developed and distributed to the Assessment Review Committee and elementary and middle school principals. Results from this survey, in addition to previous Review Committee information, were used to develop the recommendation.A few charts from the report:The BOE requested a report on CogAT which is attached to this memo.
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Andrew Statz, Chief Information Officer (PDF):
Project Description: Hanover offers school districts a service to aggregate, compile, and analyze data, gather intelligence, and identify best practices suited to specific needs of their district. They will do market research, surveys, benchmarking, and evaluating efficiencies.Clusty Search: Hanover Research Council.Analysis: MMSD guides the analysis topics assigned to Hanover. With a single track of service, Hanover works on one topic at a time from start to finish before moving on to another topic. MMSD was a member for the first time in early 2010. Examples of reports prepared or being prepared specifically for MMSD since that time include:
Compilation and coding of public input for the Building Our Future Plan to address achievement gaps
Review of the effectiveness of the four block schedule at La Follette High School;
Determining the impact and satisfaction level of summer school offerings;
Survey of various stakeholders to determine what makes the "ideal
graduate";Review of staff recognition programs of other districts;
Identification of a methodology to approve new handheld and wireless
technology in classrooms; andVarious information papers.
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Kenneth Bernstein, via Valerie Strauss:
You are a college professor.I have just retired as a high school teacher.
I have some bad news for you. In case you do not already see what is happening, I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom, even if you teach in a highly selective institution.
No Child Left Behind went into effect for the 2002-03 academic year, which means that America's public schools have been operating under the pressures and constrictions imposed by that law for a decade. Since the testing requirements were imposed beginning in third grade, the students arriving in your institution have been subject to the full extent of the law's requirements. While it is true that the U.S. Department of Education is now issuing waivers on some of the provisions of the law to certain states, those states must agree to other provisions that will have as deleterious an effect on real student learning as did No Child Left Behind--we have already seen that in public schools, most notably in high schools.
......
I mentioned that at least half my students were in AP classes. The explosive growth of these classes, driven in part by high school rankings like the yearly Challenge Index created by Jay Mathews of The Washington Post, is also responsible for some of the problems you will encounter with students entering your institutions. The College Board did recognize that not everything being labeled as AP met the standards of a college-level course, so it required teachers to submit syllabi for approval to ensure a minimal degree of rigor, at least on paper. But many of the courses still focus on the AP exam, and that focus can be as detrimental to learning as the kinds of tests imposed under No Child Left Behind.
Let me use as an example my own AP course, U.S. Government and Politics. I served several times as a reader for the examination that follows the course. In that capacity, I read the constructed responses that make up half of the score of a student's examination. I saw several problems.
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But because the district has made significant progress and expects to make further improvements to its program, it won't face any penalties at this time, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said.Much more on the 2010 parent complaint on Madison's "Talented & Gifted" program, here. The move to more one size fits all classes, such as English 10 a few years ago, reduced curricular options for all students.Parents who filed a complaint with the DPI about Madison's TAG program in September 2010, and wrote the DPI another letter last fall about shortcomings in the district's middle school offerings, were pleased with the results of the latest audit.
"The preliminary report achieves a good balance of recognizing effort without losing sight of continued weaknesses," parent Laurie Frost said in an email. "I am happy the district was found to be in only partial compliance, but also very glad the DPI did not levy any financial penalty."
The DPI determined the district's program was deficient in 2011, but agreed to an Aug. 22, 2012, compliance deadline. The School Board adopted a TAG plan and hired a program administrator in 2011.
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Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter's education.His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter's education.
Many families in the West sacrifice to put their children through school, saving for college educations that they hope will lead to a better life. Few efforts can compare with the heavy financial burden that millions of lower-income Chinese parents now endure as they push their children to obtain as much education as possible.
Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job, because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last decade.
Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty 200-square-foot house with a thatch roof. They have never owned a car. They do not take vacations -- they have never seen the ocean. They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and gifts, and for Mr. Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines. Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement savings.
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Employment Contracts for Administrative Personnel (350K) PDF:
IT HEREBY AGREED by and between the Madison Metropolitan School District (herein referred to as the "District") and _________________ (hereinafter referred to as the "Administrator'') that the District does hereby employ the Administrator under the terms and conditions specified herein.The timing and content of Administrator contracts has been somewhat controversial over the years (more). It appears that contracts continue to be in place (based on the dates contained in this document) prior to the District's annual budget cycle.This contract shall cover a period of one year, beginning on July 1, _______ and ending on June 30, _______.
RESPONSIBILITIES
The Administrator agrees to perform his/her assigned services, duties, and responsibilities at a professional level of competence, and in compliance with the laws and regulations of the State of Wisconsin and the rules, regulations and policies of the District which are now existing or which may be hereinafter enacted by the District.At all times, the Administrator shall maintain such licensure (i.e., active and in good standing) with the State of Wisconsin (1) as is required by the State for an individual performing the administrative duties assigned to the Administrator by the District, and (2) as may be separately and additionally required by the District as a discretionary qualification for the assigned position/duties. Failure to maintain such licensure is sufficient grounds for termination of this Contract and the Administrator's employment with the District.
The Admin'1strator agrees to devote full time to the duties and responsibilities normally expected of the Administrator's position during the term of this contract, and shall not engage in any pursuit which interferes with the proper discharge of such duties and responsibilities.
The Superintendent of Schools shall have the right to make such assignments or transfers of the Administrator's services as the interests of the District may demand.
The Administrator shall have the responsibility to become familiar with the contents of the District's Affirmative Action Plan and shall take an active role in implementing its policies and practices.SALARY AND LENGTH OF CONTRACT
For the 2013-14 school year the Administrator will be placed on the Administrator's salary schedule at Salary Grade in consideration for services rendered, the District will pay the Administrator a salary of ___________ for a minimum of _______ days worked (July 1, 2012 through June 30, 2013), as such days are defined by the District's Human Resources Department for payroll purposes. Additional work at times such as weekends, after typical business hours, etc. may sometimes be necessary or required, but does not entitle the Administrator to additional compensation (except as provided herein in regard to additional assigned summer work).The function of specifying a number of working days within this contract is to define the extent to which the Administrator's annual salary is pro-rated off the annual amount that would be applicable to a "225 day" (i.e., 100% of specified salary) contract at the same salary Grade and Step. Administrative personnel employed on a Jess than 225 day basis shall be available for additional employment during the summer months when requested/required by the Superintendent of Schools. When such additional summer work is expressly requested or required by written direction from the Superintendent, the Administrator shall receive additional compensation at a daily salary rate of _________ for the number of full additional days requested or required.
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In the old days, the U.S. program for foreign-student visas helped developing nations and brought diversity to then white-bread American campuses. Today, the F-1 program, as it is known, has become a profit center for universities and a wage-suppression tool for the technology industry.International students are attractive to strapped colleges because they tend to pay full tuition or, in the case of public institutions, pay more than full price in out-of-state rates.
Last year, this was taken to a new level at California State University, East Bay, a public institution just south of Oakland. The school directed its master's degree programs to admit only non-California students, including foreign students. Even before this edict, international students made up 90 percent of its computer-science master's program.The pursuit of foreign students by U.S. schools affects not only college access for Americans but also their careers. Back in 1989, an internal report of the National Science Foundation forecast that a large influx of F-1 doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and math -- the STEM fields -- would suppress wages. The stagnant salaries would then drive the American bachelor's degree holders in these fields into more lucrative areas, such as business and law, after graduation, and discourage them from pursuing STEM doctorates.
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Gov. Scott Walker will propose a modest increase in funding for Wisconsin public schools in his budget to the Legislature on Wednesday, two years after his steep cuts and all but elimination of collective bargaining for teachers sparked the unsuccessful movement to recall Walker from office.Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding (2008).Walker is also making incentive money available, which could be used as incentive payments for teachers based on how well schools perform on state report cards, Walker told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
Walker provided details of his education funding plan to the AP ahead of its public release Sunday. Not only will he put more money into K-12 schools in his two-year budget, Walker will increase funding for the University of Wisconsin System and technical colleges two years after their funding was also slashed.
The roughly 1 percent increase in aid to schools Walker is proposing comes after he cut aid by more than 8 percent in the first year of the last budget. Schools would get $129 million in aid under Walker's plan, but total K-12 funding would go up $276 million
Tom Beebe, project director for Opportunity to Learn Wisconsin, a liberal-leaning group and former executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, has been critical of Walker's cuts to education.He said the amount of general aid increase proposed for this next biennial budget - $129.2 million over two years - only amounts to about $161 for each of Wisconsin's 800,000 public-school students.
"If the revenue cap does not go up, then there is no new money going to schools no matter how much aid increases," Beebe said. "The increase in school funding simply goes to property taxpayers not into the classroom."
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, said the modest increase was really just keeping overall revenue for schools flat.
"The stagnant revenue on top of the largest cuts to education funding in Wisconsin history in the last budget is another clear indication that this governor has no intention of supporting neighborhood schools," Bell said in a statement.
"(Walker's) real focus is privatizing public education with another infusion of resources to the unaccountable taxpayer-funded private school voucher program while leaving our neighborhood public schools on life support," she added.
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I've been listening this month to the conversation at our house, and it is deflatingly predictable: "Have you finished your homework? Then why are you playing computer games?" "Your room is still a mess, put that down until it's done." "Have you gotten off the couch today?" And this recent favorite, "You are banned from playing games until the end of the school year."We have a bad case of digital distemper, but it has been hard to find a solution. As with going on a diet, you still have to eat. Our girls have hours of computer-based homework almost every night. We have a terrible time knowing when the work is done and when the play has begun.
On one infamous Sunday in December, we watched 14½ hours of Netflix. I knew it was bad but didn't know how bad until I looked back at the log and spotted a dozen episodes of "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." I immediately canceled Netflix. But that's like cutting the head off the hydra.
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The students in Professor Peter Froehlich's "Intermediate Programming" and "Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers" (a Python language class) classes, boycotted their finals last December. The former initially organized the boycott and the latter followed suit.To avoid the stress of taking their exam, the students decided to capitalize on a loophole in Froehlich's grading system.
"In my courses, all grades are relative to the highest actually achieved score. Thus, if no one showed up and everyone got 0 percent, everyone would be marked as 100 percent," Froehlich wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Since Froehlich started at Hopkins in 2005, no class had taken that challenge until last semester. Both of Froelich's classes were awarded with perfect scores on their final exams.
"Peter tends to say this in each of his classes as almost a challenge to the entire class to execute," James Gliwa, a student in Intermediate Programming, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Froehlich speculated that the Occupy Wall Street movement provided students with a model, as students coined the phrase "Occupy Hackerman" to describe their effort. He also cited the use of the online forum Piazza as facilitating the boycott.
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At a former paper-printing factory in Hong Kong, a 20-year-old wunderkind named Zhao Bowen has embarked on a challenging and potentially controversial quest: uncovering the genetics of intelligence.Mr. Zhao is a high-school dropout who has been described as China's Bill Gates. He oversees the cognitive genomics lab at BGI, a private company that is partly funded by the Chinese government.
At the Hong Kong facility, more than 100 powerful gene-sequencing machines are deciphering about 2,200 DNA samples, reading off their 3.2 billion chemical base pairs one letter at a time. These are no ordinary DNA samples. Most come from some of America's brightest people--extreme outliers in the intelligence sweepstakes.
The majority of the DNA samples come from people with IQs of 160 or higher. By comparison, average IQ in any population is set at 100. The average Nobel laureate registers at around 145. Only one in every 30,000 people is as smart as most of the participants in the Hong Kong project--and finding them was a quest of its own.
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Richard Phelps 365K PDF, via a kind email:
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the US's largest insurers refused to honor damage claims from customers living on the US Gulf Coast who submitted hurricane insurance claims, asserting that their property had not been damaged by hurricane, but by flooding. Only a high-stakes, high-profile, class-action lawsuit ultimately pried the insurance payments loose. Currently, this large US insurance company, with its own trust issues, is running a series of television commercials poking fun at an institution that it assumes is trusted by the public even less--the Internet. "They wouldn't put it on the Internet if it wasn't true" says the naïve foil who purchased allegedly inferior insurance after believing the promises in an Internet advertisement, presumably eliciting off-screen laughter in millions of living rooms.The paper is also available here.Now suppose that you are responsible for learning the "state of the art" in the research literature on an important, politically-sensitive, and hotly-contested public policy topic. You can save money by hiring master's level public policy students or recent graduates, though none with any particular knowledge or experience in the topic at hand--a highly specialized topic with its own doctoral-level training, occupational specializations, and vocabulary. You give your public policy masters a computer with an Internet browser and ask them to complete their reports within a few months. What would you expect them to produce?
You can see for yourself at the website of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development2 (OECD). In 2009 the OECD launched the Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes. Apparently the "Review" has not claimed an acronym. In my own interest, then, I give it one--REAFISO.3
In its own words, REAFISO was created to:
"...provide analysis and policy advice to countries on the following overarching policy question: How can assessment and evaluation policies work together more effectively to improve student outcomes in primary and secondary schools?"
To answer this question, the OECD intended to:
"...look at the various components of assessment and evaluation frameworks that countries use with the objective of improving the student outcomes produced by schools.... and
"...extend and add value to the existing body of international work on evaluation and assessment policies."REAFISO's work interested me for two reasons. First, I once worked at the OECD, on fixed- length consulting contracts accumulating to sixteen months. I admired and respected their education research work and thoroughly enjoyed my time outside work hours. (The OECD is based in Paris.) I particularly appreciate the OECD's education (statistical) indicators initiatives.
Second, I have worked myself and on my own time to address the overarching question they pose, ultimately publishing a meta-analysis and research summary of the effect of testing on student achievement. As I lacked the OECD's considerable resources, it took me some time--a decade, as it turned out--to reach a satisfactory stage of completion. I hedge on the word "completion" because I do not believe it possible for one individual to collect all the studies in this enormous research literature.
......
Deficiencies of the OECD's REAFISO research reviews include:
overwhelming dependence on US sources;
overwhelming dependence on inexpensive, easily-found documents;
overwhelming dependence on the work of economists and education professors;
wholesale neglect of the relevant literature in psychology, the social science that
invented cognitive assessment, and from practicing assessment and measurement
professionals; and
wholesale neglect of the majority of pertinent research.
Moreover, it seems that REAFISO has fully aligned itself with a single faction within the heterogeneous universe of education research--the radical constructivists. Has the OECD joined the US education establishment? One wouldn't think that it had the same (self-) interests. Yet, canon by canon by canon, REAFISO's work seems to subscribe to US education establishment dogma. For example, in her report "Assessment and Innovation in Education", Janet Looney writes
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How has school changed since you began teaching?Athens High School The Plains, Ohio.Physically, the school and grounds have improved markedly. Our building, parking areas, playing fields, and land lab are beautiful and much more functional than 30 years ago. A great deal of the credit for this should go to Mr. Meek and to both Mr. Meek and Mr. Weinfurtner for the land lab. In addition, the educational technology we've come to take for granted was barely dreamed of when I first started teaching.
Our Athens High School students are pretty much the same as they have always been. They were and are bright, often intensely interested in issues and learning, naturally naive, mostly polite and caring toward one another.
On the other hand, what happens in our classrooms hasn't changed much either. In some senses this is good because we have a dedicated and intelligent faculty who recognize the task of preparing our students to be capable, engaged citizens as the privilege it is. At the same time, we too often fail to make the most of the insights of educational research that have demonstrated repeatedly that students learn best when they are actively engaged in discovery. We have so many new tools and access to real data and original sources that can foster such learning given a knowledgeable guide, and yet we have too seldom pushed the envelope.
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MAP is very different from the WKCE. It is given by computer, it is given three times a year (in most schools), and results are known immediately. I've sat in on teacher meetings where MAP results were being used well to diagnose students' progress and prod good discussion of what teachers could do to seek better results.Madison recently began using "Measures of Academic Progress".Some school districts (West Allis-West Milwaukee is one) are using MAP results as part of evaluating teachers. Milwaukee Public Schools, which began using MAP several years ago, isn't doing that, but it is using overall MAP results as an important component of judging whether a school is meeting its goals.
MAP is an "adaptive" test - that is, the computer program modifies each test based on how a child answers each question. Get a question right and the next question is harder. Get a question wrong and the next one is easier. This allows the results to pinpoint more exactly how a child is doing and aims to have every student challenged - the best don't breeze through, the worst don't give up when they're entirely lost.
MAP tests are generally given three times a year, which is one of the things supporters like and critics hate. On the one hand, you get data frequently and can make mid-course corrections. On the other hand, it means more times in the year when school life is disrupted.
A MAP spokeswoman said in December there were 287 "partners" in Wisconsin, ranging from MPS down to individual private schools. Many suburban districts use MAP, as do many Catholic and other private schools and charter schools.
At a lot of schools in southeastern Wisconsin, there is enthusiasm for using MAP and it is seen as a good way to judge how kids are doing and to determine what to focus on in helping them.
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Tension over Madison Prep, a controversial charter school proposal that the Madison School Board rejected in December 2011, appears to linger in this year's races for School Board. Some wonder if the racial tensions that the school, which was geared toward minority students, have now provoked a backlash against African-American candidates running for office.Much more on ">the rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.In one of the contests, School Board President James Howard, who was one of two board members to vote in favor of establishing Madison Prep as a "non-instrumentality" school, meaning it would operate separately from the school district and employ non-district and non-unionized staff, is facing an opponent who entered the race in large part to oppose such projects.
"We should be looking for solutions within our public schools, not giving away taxpayer dollars to unaccountable, non-instrumental charter schools," says Greg Packnett, who works as a legislative aide to state Reps. Christine Sinicki, D-Milwaukee, and Penny Bernard-Schaber, D-Appleton, and is active in local Democratic politics.
Howard, in a recent interview with the Cap Times editorial board, suggested that Packnett was recruited to run by the Dane County Democrats (Packnett sits on the executive board and has received the group's endorsement) and others unhappy with Howard's vote on Madison Prep and threatened by his strong advocacy for hiring more minority teachers and staff.
"In the debates, those are the two things that always come up -- Madison Prep and diversity hiring. I'm being challenged on my views on diversity hiring and I'm not retreating on that," he said.
Howard pins much of the blame on the Democratic Party of Dane County. He says he is puzzled by the involvement by a partisan group in what is officially a nonpartisan race, as well as the involvement of a county organization, whose membership includes people from outside of Madison, in a city race.
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Louisiana has the second-lowest public high school graduation rate in the nation for special education students, according to federal figures.The rate in Louisiana, 29 percent, is only lower than Mississippi and Nevada, statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education show. The graduation rate in both those states is 23 percent.
South Dakota is tops in the nation at 84 percent, federal figures show. The national average is 58 percent.
Louisiana's dismal rate is one of the key drivers behind state Superintendent of Education John White's push to revamp the way the state finances special education.
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The Nevada System of Higher Education's chancellor found himself Friday inside a hornet's nest of angry legislators who expressed disgust over the lack of state funds their local colleges and universities would receive under a new formula.While Dan Klaich said the formula is designed to bring fairness and equity and lead to higher graduation rates, he added it might work better if higher education was funded at pre-recession levels.
Under the governor's proposed budget, higher education would receive $946.5 million in state support over the two-year period that starts in July, a 5.9 percent increase over the current two-year budget. But state support for higher education was $1.316 billion in 2007-09.
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In choosing a company to design a computer-based student-information system for all of Wisconsin's public schools, the state put a local bidder at a disadvantage after it removed an evaluator and incorrectly calculated cost proposals, according to a protest filed Friday.The challenge to the outcome of the Department of Administration's procurement process for a statewide student-information system vendor comes from Stevens Point-based Skyward Inc., which provides school management software to 221 Wisconsin school districts covering 39% of the state's students.
The company's formal protest comes two weeks after the department announced it intended to negotiate a contract with rival bidder Infinite Campus, a school software company from Minnesota serving fewer districts in Wisconsin. The department said Infinite Campus earned the highest technical score and lowest cost bid.
The contract to build the system could be worth between $60 million and $90 million over the next decade, according to details provided by Skyward.
Department spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis defended the state's procurement procedure, saying that it identified the best product for the best price in a transparent process free of outside influence.
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The Wisconsin company that lost out on a contract to run a student information system in the state's schools protested the awarding of the bid to Minnesota's Infinite Campus on Friday, arguing that the process was unfair.Hillary Gavan:Skyward Inc., of Stevens Point, said in its protest filed with the state Department of Public Instruction that it should be awarded the contract or all the bids should be thrown out. Skyward said DPI, as well as the committee of five unidentified people who evaluated the bids, "failed to provide a fair, transparent, and open process."
Skyward, which employs about 270 people statewide, threatened to leave Wisconsin if it lost the contract that's $15 million initially but could grow to as high as $80 million over the next decade. The company has been waging a public relations battle for the past two weeks since the state announced the contract would be going to Infinite Campus of Blaine, Minn., running full-page ads in newspapers across the state urging people to contact Gov. Scott Walker.
School District of Beloit Director of Technology Victor Masliah said Beloit has been using Skyward Student system for 20 years. On Monday he said all districts have been asked to convert their student system side to Infinite Campus in the next five years. The latest state decision only affects the Skyward Student side, as Infinite Campus does not have a business side.wsaw:"The longer we wait, the higher our conversion costs may be as we continue to enter more types of data into our Skyward Student system daily," he said.
Masliah said 80 percent of Wisconsin school districts use the business side of Skyward, as it's recognized to be the best business system for schools.
The student side of Skyward costs approximately $52,000 per year, and the business side costs about $66,000 per year. Transitioning a system brings significant costs in data conversions, data migrations and trainings. For example, switching to a different Student system could potentially cost between $200,000 to $450,000.
The evaluation was accurate and fair. That's what Infinite Campus says about the process used to pick them to provide student information services for most schools across the Badger State.Much more on Infinite Campus, here.Over the past couple weeks we've heard a lot from Skyward. They're asking Wisconsin residents to encourage the state Department of Instruction to overturn its decision to go with Infinite Campus.
Today, we examined the actual score card that lead Infinite Campus, based in Minnesota, to get the job. That scorecard was released by Infinite Campus.
It ranks 31 different categories such as grading, attendance and technical support. Infinite Campus beat out six different candidates, including Skyward in nearly every category. The process by which the scores were awarded isn't detailed, and the Department of Public Instruction said they won't comment on the process.
The Wisconsin DPI's scorecard (200K PDF).
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Milwaukee's private-school voucher program has swelled to nearly 25,000 students in 113 schools that largely mirror local public schools in terms of race and poverty, and rapid enrollment growth is raising new questions about how much taxpayer money the private schools should receive to adequately serve students.Results from an annual survey of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program released Wednesday underscore what's already well-known about the voucher program: Participating private schools spend less to educate each pupil than Milwaukee Public Schools but offer little achievement data about how those pupils are doing.
The survey also offers a new reason that the voucher schools' per-pupil costs may be lower: About a third of the private schools report they do not have specialty teachers for subjects such as art, music and physical education.
MPS has also struggled to provide adequate numbers of specialty teachers in an era of tight budgets.
The survey results come from the Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee policy research organization that conducted its 15th annual census of the voucher program in Milwaukee, which is in its 23rd year. The forum also now surveys the 2-year-old voucher program in Racine.
"Overall, we find that students who receive vouchers to attend these private schools look very much like students in MPS, but we are not investing much in them as a public," said Anneliese Dickman, research director for the forum. "The results raise the question of whether these are the types of low-income students who deserve more funding."
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(Special to The Root) -- President Barack Obama was exactly right in his State of the Union speech to mention the need for college graduates as part of his prescription for more American jobs. While there are more job seekers than jobs in our struggling economy, many employers are hiring but are having a hard time finding the college graduates they need to fill today's high-technology -- and high-paying -- jobs.The trouble is, he didn't give the need for college graduates much more than a mention. "Most young people," he said, "will need some higher education." Most young people? Some higher education?
He acknowledged that "skyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education or saddle them with unsustainable debt." But he proposed no new aid, just conditioning federal aid to colleges on their affordability and introducing a college scorecard to help parents and students get value for their education dollars.
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Cindy Koeppel, via a kind email:
Congress in the Classroom is a national, award-winning education program developed and sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center, the workshop is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information on teaching about Congress.Congress in the Classroom® is designed for high school or middle school teachers who teach U.S. history, government, civics, political science, or
social studies. Thirty-five teachers will be selected to take part in the
program.Applications will be accepted through March 15. We expect to confirm selections by March 29
The workshop will feature a variety of sessions related to the U.S. Congress.
Presenters will emphasize ideas and resources that teachers can use almost
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Getting in can be grueling.Students may be asked to submit a 15-page typed research paper, an original short story, or a handwritten essay on the historical figure they would most like to meet. There are interviews. Exams. And pages of questions for parents to answer, including: How do you intend to help this school if we admit your son or daughter?
These aren't college applications. They're applications for seats at charter schools.
Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.
"I didn't get the sense that was what charter schools were all about - we'll pick the students who are the most motivated? Who are going to make our test scores look good?" said Michelle Newman, whose 8-year-old son lost his seat in an Ohio charter school last fall after he did poorly on an admissions test. "It left a bad taste in my mouth."
Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools typically operate under private management and often boast small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus. They're booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.
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Charter schools pride themselves on asking a lot of their students. Many ask a great deal of parents, too.Nearly 40 percent of charters nationwide do not participate in the federal subsidized lunch program, often because they don't have space for a kitchen or don't want to deal with the paperwork, according to the pro-charter Center for Education Reform.
That can leave low-income parents scrambling to find a way to feed their children. Nearly half of American school kids are eligible for subsidized meals, and more than 90 percent of traditional public schools provide them.
Most states don't require charter schools to offer transportation, so that's often up to parents, too.
And then there's the forced volunteerism. Traditional public schools can and sometimes do ask parents to help out, but they can't force the issue. Scores of charter schools, however, require parents to work up to 40 hours a year - or forfeit their child's seat. To meet the mandate, parents might chaperone field trips, keep order at lunch or direct traffic in the parking lot.
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Wisconsin is among the top 10 states for people moving out, according to the annual survey from United Van Lines. Forbes reported the story recently and it has been widely circulated -- although probably not by many chambers of commerce.The moving company United Van Lines has been doing the survey for 36 years and analyzed some 125,000 residential moves in the continental U.S. last year. While not scientific, it does provide a nice snapshot of migration patterns, along with fodder for social media chatter.
"I think people see Wisconsin as a dead end," says George Dreckmann, longtime city of Madison recycling coordinator. "The paper industry is near death, the auto industry is gone. Our flagship university is closed to most of the state's kids. The government under both Walker and (former Gov. Jim) Doyle showed no initiative or imagination. If I wasn't 62, I'd be leaving, too."
At No. 10 with 55 percent of 2,405 United Van Lines moves considered "outbound," Wisconsin isn't alone as a Great Lakes state seeing residents flee. Illinois is No. 2 and Michigan is No. 6. New Jersey was No. 1 with 62 percent of moves outbound. The top 10 also includes West Virginia (No. 3), New York (No. 4); New Mexico (No. 5); Connecticut (No. 7); Maine (No. 8) and Kentucky (No. 9).
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The belief that girls are brainier and better behaved is holding boys back at school, research suggests.A study of British pupils found that, from a young age, children think girls are academically superior.
And, what's more, they believe that adults think so too.
University of Kent researchers said the beliefs may be self-fulfilling and help explain why boys lag behind at so many subjects.
Simply boosting boys' self-belief could help close the academic gap, they said.
Research showed that boys performed better in tests when told they were as good as girls.
In the first part of the study, 238 pupils aged between four and ten were given a series of statements about children's ability and behaviour.
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As Madison voters prepare to cast ballots Tuesday in important primary elections for the state Supreme Court and the Madison School Board, it is vital to recognize that the most critical challenge facing school districts across Wisconsin is the assault on public education that has been launched by out-of-state special interest groups and the politicians who do their bidding.Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack is seeking re-election with heavy funding from Michigan, Texas and Arkansas donors with long histories of seeking to elect officials who will undermine public education with voucher schemes that divert taxpayer dollars to private schools. That should disqualify Roggensack in the eyes of any voter who wants to maintain the Wisconsin tradition of providing strong support for great public schools.
In the Madison School Board race, all three candidates express support for public schools, which is an indication that they know the community and surrounding Dane County. But, even in what has historically been a center of support for public education, it is important for voters to be aware of how and when outside groups will seek to influence local elections.
That's why The Madison Institute's Progressive Round Table forum on Saturday, Feb. 16, is so necessary.
The "Public Schools Under Attack: Vouchers, Virtual and Charter Schools" discussion will feature Julie Underwood, the UW-Madison dean of education, Madison School Board Vice President Marge Passman and state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, the former chair of the Assembly Education Committee.
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From the West High PTSO:Monday evening, February 18th, at 7:00PM, the West HOUSE Connection is sponsoring a Board of Education Candidate Forum. Each candidate will answer written questions submitted by community members and the audience. Please join us!
The forum will be held at the Urban League of Greater Madison (http://www.ulgm.org), 2222 South Park Street, 1st Floor Rooms A&B Located Directly Off the Lobby. There is plenty of parking adjacent to the building. The Goodman South Madison Branch Library is located in the same building, see http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/goodman-south for a map.
If you would like to submit a question for the candidates please email Paul Radspinner at Pradspinner@att.net, or call, 233-7076.
Our schools are at the heart of our community. We encourage you to attend this important informative meeting in support of your student, our schools, and our community. For more information about the Board of Education see https://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/
Este es un mensaje importante de la Organización de Padres y Madres, Maestros, y Estudiantes (PTSO) de la escuela West.
El grupo de West HOUSE Connection está auspiciando el Foro de Candidatos a la Junta Educativa el lunes, 18 de febrero, a las 7:00 PM. Cada candidato responderá a preguntas escritas y enviadas por miembros de la comunidad y del público. ¡Por favor, reúnase con nosotros!
El foro estará en el Urban League of Greater Madison, 2222 South Park Street, Madison, WI 53713 (Salones A y B del primer piso, ubicados cerca a la puerta del edificio.) Hay suficiente estacionamiento a lado del edificio. La Biblioteca pública de Madison: Goodman South está ubicada en el mismo edificio. Para ver un mapa, vaya a la página electrónica http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/goodman-south
Si quiere enviar una pregunta para los candidatos, por favor envíela a Paul Radspinner al Pradspinner@att.net, o llame, 233-7076.
Nuestras escuelas están al centro de nuestra comunidad. Les alentamos asistir a esta reunión importante e informativa para apoyar a sus estudiantes, nuestras escuelas, y nuestra comunidad. Para conseguir más información sobre La Junta Educativa vaya a la página electrónica https://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/
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Three candidates vying to succeed Maya Cole for Seat 5 on the Madison School Board after incumbent Cole announced last year she would not seek a third term. The primary is Tuesday; the top two finishers will advance to the general election April 2.More notes and links, here.
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I talk a lot to people who are deciding between startups and established companies. They're usually early in their careers and have been exclusively affiliated with well-known schools and companies. As a result, they're accustomed to praise from family and friends. Going to a startup is scary, as Jessica Livingstone, cofounder of Y Combinator, describes:Everyone you encounter will have doubts about what you're doing--investors, potential employees, reporters, your family and friends. What you don't realize until you start a startup is how much external validation you've gotten for the conservative choices you've made in the past. You go to college and everyone says, "Great!" Then you graduate get a job at Google and everyone says, "Great!"But optimizing for external validation is a dangerous trap. You're fighting over a fixed pie against well-credentialed peers. The most likely outcome is a middle management job where you'll have little impact and never seriously attempt to realize your ambitions. Peter Thiel's personal experience illustrates this well:
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Fearful of accidentally chomping down on cardboard-stuffed dumplings or toxic chicken, Chinese consumers may soon be able to run safety tests on their food before putting it in their mouths.According to a report from the official Xinhua news agency, scientists at the Tianjin University of Science and Technology in northern China have developed an at-home testing kit to help consumers detect more than 60 varieties of chemicals in their food.
The tests, conducted with indicator paper, let consumers know within minutes if a food sample contains harmful substances, Xinhua said, predicting the product will likely be in high demand.
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Wisconsin students with disabilities and unique needs are sometimes unable to secure what, in their parents' judgment, is an appropriate education at a public school. The courts and legislators have recognized that federal funds must be available for educating such students in private schools instead.
There is, nevertheless, a large disparity between the formally reported percentage of children in Wisconsin public schools who have disabilities (approximately 14 percent) and the percentage of children in private schools who have disabilities (less than 2 percent).1This has led some to contend that private schools are not receptive to children with special needs.
A survey of private school administrators conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute as part of the research for this paper dispels that myth. Private school administrators say both that they educate more children with disabilities (about 6 percent) than official Department of Public Instruction numbers reflect, and that would like to teach even more.
There are myriad, inter-related reasons why they can't or don't. Denials of funding are not uncommon, and what funding does exist is often inadequate. The system for determining which children receive assistance is not uniform. Public school officials are not always conducting the "child find" process in a timely manner. There is, in fact, at least the appearance of an inherent conflict of interest in requiring public school districts to identify and evaluate children in private schools who will receive federal funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) because this money is, in essence, subtracted from resources otherwise available to the school district.
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One of the nation's largest nurses' unions -- the National Federation of Nurses -- plans to announce on Thursday that it will affiliate with the far larger American Federation of Teachers.Barbara Crane, the president of the nurses' federation, said her group's national board voted to join forces with the teachers' union to give the nurses more political clout and money to try to unionize more nurses.
"We were not going to be able to achieve some of our goals unless we found a partner," said Ms. Crane, whose union represents 34,000 nurses in Montana, Ohio, Oregon and Washington. "We wanted a professional union that believes in growth through organizing."
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Jessica Lahey, author of the piece "Introverted Kids Need to Learn to Speak Up at School," is a teacher who obviously cares deeply for her students. She's absolutely right that reticent children need to be sensitively encouraged to push through their fears so they can make their voices heard when they have something to say, and so they can face the world with confidence and joy.As others have pointed out in the comments, however, her article is primarily about shy children who fear social judgment, not introverts who simply prefer quieter environments and think before speaking. And grading shy kids based on class participation may not be the best way to help them.
Here are some alternative ideas for helping shy children:
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Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The open access movement is a long-standing campaign in the world of research to make scholarly works freely available and reusable. One of its fundamental premises is that the progress of knowledge and culture happens scholarly works of all kinds are widely shared, not hidden in ivory towers built with paywalls and shorn by harsh legal regimes.Scholarly journal publishers currently compile research done by professors (for free), send articles out to be peer reviewed (for free), and distribute the edited journals back to universities around the world (for costs anywhere up to $35,000 each). Subscription prices have outpaced inflation by over 250 percent in the past 30 years, and these fees go straight to the publisher. Neither the authors nor their institutions are paid a cent, and the research itself--which is largely funded by taxpayers--remains difficult to attain. Skyrocketing costs have forced university libraries--even Harvard's, the richest American university--to pick and choose between journal subscriptions.
The result: students and citizens face barriers accessing information they need; professors have a harder time reviewing and teaching the state of the art; and cutting-edge research remains hidden behind paywalls, depriving it of the visibility it deserves.
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U.S. and state officials are intensifying efforts to hold colleges accountable for what happens after graduation, a sign of frustration with sky-high tuition costs and student-loan debt.Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) are expected to reintroduce this week legislation that would require states to make more accessible the average salaries of colleges' graduates. The figures could help prospective students compare salaries by college and major to assess the best return on their investment.
A similar bipartisan bill died last year, but a renewed push has gained political momentum in recent weeks. "This begins to introduce some market forces into the academic arena that have not been there," said Mr. Wyden, adding that support for the move is unusually broad given the political divide in Washington. Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), the House majority leader, said he intends to support a similar measure in the House.
High-school seniors now trying to decide which college to attend next fall are awash with information about costs, from dorm rooms to meal plans. But there is almost no easy way to tell what graduates at specific schools earn--or how many found jobs in their chosen field. Supporters say more transparency is needed as students graduate deeper in debt and enter the rocky job market.
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framed print of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" hangs above the moss-green, L-shaped sectional in John Bargh's office on the third floor of Yale University's Kirtland Hall. Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych imagines a natural environment that is like ours (water, flowers) yet not (enormous spiked and translucent orbs). What precisely the 15th-century Dutch master had in mind is still a mystery, though theories abound. On the left is presumably paradise, in the middle is the world, and on the right is hell, complete with knife-faced monster and human-devouring bird devil.By Bosch's standard, it's too much to say the past year has been hellish for Bargh, but it hasn't been paradise either. Along with personal upheaval, including a lengthy child-custody battle, he has coped with what amounts to an assault on his life's work, the research that pushed him into prominence, the studies that Malcolm Gladwell called "fascinating" and Daniel Kahneman deemed "classic." What was once widely praised is now being pilloried in some quarters as emblematic of the shoddiness and shallowness of social psychology. When Bargh responded to one such salvo with a couple of sarcastic blog posts, he was ridiculed as going on a "one-man rampage." He took the posts down and regrets writing them, but his frustration and sadness at how he's been treated remain.
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People ask me what I do for a living. It's a fair question, one I certainly feel comfortable asking other people, and, yet, one I can't easily answer for my own career. I tell them I'm an "industrial mathematician."A business operates some set of processes or activities within a set of limitations or constraints and realizes some kind of outcome, revenue or profit, from it. (How is that for a general definition of a business?) In its operation, a business makes choices or decisions that affect the outcome. The process of selecting the best decisions that stay within the business limitations is called "constrained optimization."
My education is in a field called "Operations Research," so named because it started as the study of ways to help the U.S. military after World War II. It is also called "Management Science" with similar fields called "Industrial Engineering" and "Engineering-Economic Systems." In one form or another, these fields specialize in constrained optimization, finding the best solution amid a vast array of choices, maximizing a given objective within specified limitations.
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For more than a century, the lengthy school days of French children have been punctuated by a midweek day off, in recent decades for most children on Wednesdays, originally created for catechism studies.The long hours and peculiar weekly rhythm have been criticized as counterproductive to learning and blamed for keeping women out of the full-time work force, as well as widening inequalities between rich and poor because of the demands they place on working parents. Yet the Wednesday break has remained a fulcrum of French family life.
With all that in mind, the government of President François Hollande recently issued a decree introducing a half day of school on Wednesdays for children 3 to 11 starting in September, while reducing the school day by 45 minutes the rest of the week. In a country with a broad consensus in favor of shortening a school day that typically runs from 8:30 a.m. to at least 4 p.m., and sometimes longer, Mr. Hollande's government still did not expect the plan to be controversial. It has not worked out that way.
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One of the benefits of participating in an interactive event, such as the recent ELI Webinar that Michael and I led yesterday, is that the learning goes both ways. During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was - this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors.What follows are some key excerpts along with some observations, but for anyone considering participation in one of the xMOOCs - read the whole report.
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It's the latest sign that the District is on track to become a city where a majority of children are educated not in traditional public schools but in public charters: A California nonprofit group has proposed opening eight D.C. charter schools that would enroll more than 5,000 students by 2019.The proposal has stirred excitement among those who believe that Rocketship Education, which combines online learning and face-to-face instruction, can radically raise student achievement in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Rocketship's charter application -- which is the largest ever to come before District officials, and which might win approval this month -- arrives on the heels of Chancellor Kaya Henderson's decision to close 15 half-empty city schools, highlighting an intense debate about the future of public education in the nation's capital.
A growing number of activists have raised concerns that the traditional school system, facing stiffer-than-ever competition from charters, is in danger of being relegated to a permanently shrunken role. And they worry that Washington has yet to confront what that could mean for taxpayers, families and neighborhoods.
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Learn more about Avenues via their website, Twitter and this recent Chris Whittle interview.
Related: How Do You Say "Early Admission" in Mandarin?
The first of a new breed of elite private school opens its doors
The Best School $75 Million Can Buy:
Equipping pupils to prosper in the global economy is at the core of the Avenues curriculum, which has been developed by various experts including some from Harvard's School of Education. Mr Whittle thinks that even America's best private schools have a "stale" curriculum in this respect, especially when it comes to foreign languages, which often are not taught until pupils are 11. From the day they enter kindergarten at Avenues, pupils will be taught half their lessons in a foreign tongue, either Mandarin or Spanish--an "immersion" process that Mr Whittle reckons will make every pupil fully bilingual within seven years.
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Ripon, WI Superintendent Richard Zimman:
A few weeks ago, while attending the annual WASB Convention in Milwaukee, I was in the audience when Governor Scott Walker addressed the attendees. It took me a while to jot down the thoughts I had while listening to the governor's speech, but today I was finally able to send this letter to Governor Walker.Much more on Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman, here.Dear Governor Walker:
Recently you spoke to school board members, school superintendents, and school business managers at the 92nd annual Wisconsin Education Convention held in Milwaukee. In reference to school funding, you said that your 2013-15 biennial budget would increase funding for all schools. There was widespread applause at the hope of receiving adequate money to keep pace with rising costs associated with educating our youth. Thank you for any assistance you can give us in this area so that we do not have to further cut programs and opportunities for students due to lack of funds.
You also indicated that you were looking at giving "bonus" funds to schools which scored well on the new DPI report cards since those schools, teachers, and administrators who were getting good results should be rewarded for their efforts. While this idea of a "bonus" for those schools which are getting better results may seem to follow market-driven tenets, it is actually an example of what happens when market forces are replaced by government-driven controls that tip the balance to favor some at the expense of others.
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New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has donated $1 million to a campaign to elect three board candidates who strongly support current L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy -- two of the three candidates also are political opponents of the Los Angeles teachers union.The donation was confirmed by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission.
Bloomberg's donation is the largest to date for the school board contests and could change the complexion of the race.
The most heated primary contest is in District 4, which stretches from the Westside to the west San Fernando Valley. One-term incumbent trustee and former teacher Steve Zimmer is trying to hold on to his seat with backing from the teachers union, other unions representing employees, the L.A. County Federation of Labor and the local Democratic Party.
Running against him is parent and attorney Kate Anderson, whose campaign, already well-funded, is expected to get a major boost from Bloomberg's donation.
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Shortly after Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad resigned last year, School Board member Ed Hughes told me that when it comes to the Madison School District, "People want improvement, but they don't want change."Related: And so it continues.....I thought about Hughes' words last weekend after the school district announced it had hired Chicago Public Schools chief of instruction Jennifer Cheatham as Nerad's replacement.
Cheatham is seen as the best bet for improvement -- specifically to the long history of low-income and minority student under-achievement.
The question now is: Will people tolerate her changes?
Hughes told me Sunday he was "optimistic" they would. "I think she will earn teachers' trust and inspire them to do their best work," he said. "If she succeeds at that, everything else will fall into place."
I hope he's right, but I don't yet share his optimism.
Back in 2011, it was the district's long-standing inability to do anything bold about the achievement gap that left it vulnerable to the Urban League of Greater Madison's bid to open its own charter school for minority and low-income students.
Madison Preparatory Academy brought the issue of the achievement gap to the fore. But the school's rejection -- largely due to opposition from the teachers union -- left notoriously progressive Madison doing some uncomfortable soul-searching.
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Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was in Virginia last week, helping push for a new law that would install an "A-F" grading system for all public schools in the commonwealth, similar to a system that has existed in Florida for well over a decade.In making his case, Governor Bush put forth an argument about the Florida system that he and his supporters use frequently. He said that, right after the grades went into place in his state, there was a drop in the proportion of D and F schools, along with a huge concurrent increase in the proportion of A schools. For example, as Governor Bush notes, in 1999, only 12 percent of schools got A's. In 2005, when he left office, the figure was 53 percent. The clear implication: It was the grading of schools (and the incentives attached to the grades) that caused the improvements.
There is some pretty good evidence (also here) that the accountability pressure of Florida's grading system generated modest increases in testing performance among students in schools receiving F's (i.e., an outcome to which consequences were attached), and perhaps higher-rated schools as well. However, putting aside the serious confusion about what Florida's grades actually measure, as well as the incorrect premise that we can evaluate a grading policy's effect by looking at the simple distribution of those grades over time, there's a much deeper problem here: The grades changed in part because the criteria changed.
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New research suggests that teacher absenteeism is becoming problematic in U.S. public schools, as about one in three teachers miss more than 10 days of school each year. The nation's improving economic picture may also worsen absenteeism as teachers' fears ease that they'll lose their job over taking too many sick days, researchers say.First-ever figures from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, compiled in 2012, also show that in a few states, nearly half of teachers miss more than 10 days in a typical 180-day school year.
Among them:
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Megan Thode isn't the first Lehigh University student who was unhappy with the grade she received in a course. But she may be the first to sue to get it changed.The C+ that Thode was given scuttled her dream of becoming a licensed professional counselor and was part of an effort to force her out of the graduate degree program she was pursuing, said her lawyer, Richard J. Orloski, whose lawsuit seeks $1.3 million in damages.
Orloski said his client is the victim of breach of contract and sexual discrimination, and a civil trial began Monday before Northampton County Judge Emil Giordano over the claims. They're nonsense, said Neil Hamburg, an attorney for Lehigh University.
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Using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test the Guardian has tracked the reading level of every state of the union
.
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Recently this writer participated as part of a television panel in which it was asked if there aren't enough jobs that require a college degree for the coming glut of college grads. The question was a funny one, one that conferred on college grads skills much greater than those possessed by the average individual. Maybe, but not asked enough is what job requires a college degree? The truth is no job does, though politicians and policy analysts would have us believe otherwise.President Obama regularly talks up the need for more math classes "to equip our children for the future." The latter is odd and a bit dated, particularly when we consider that computers and calculators have largely made the need for math knowledge something of the past.
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n the course of filming a fictional mystery about a 1978 sculpture in the school's courtyard, La Follette High School freshmen Laura Martinez, 14, Stephanie Dombrowski, 14, and Denzell Jones, 15, became interested in the actual history of the work.So they're also filming a separate video about the origins of the sculpture, in part using information they obtained from the school's archive and history museum.
"It was very important," Laura said about the research.
The La Follette High School Archives and History Museum is a rare treasure in a Wisconsin public high school.
A final exam project chosen by freshmen students of former La Follette history teacher Victoria Straughn in the spring of 1999 led to the museum. The students pieced together some history of the school by talking to teachers and family members who were alumni and collecting memorabilia.
"So they started collecting things, and we didn't have any place to put them except my desk," Straughn said.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):
Rights granted to an employee by the Union Contract are among the most important conditions of one's employment. Those represented by MTI, in each of MTI's five bargaining units, have numerous protections based on SENIORITY. Whether it is protection from involuntary transfer, being declared "surplus" or above staff requirements, or layoff, SENIORITY is the factor that limits and controls management's action. Because of SENIORITY rights guaranteed by the Union's Contract, the employer cannot pick the junior employee simply because he/she is paid less.Making such judgments based on one's SENIORITY may seem like common sense and basic human decency, but it is MTI's Contract that assures it. Governor Walker's Act 10 destroys these protections. MTI is working to preserve them.
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David Kirp
WHAT would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. -- bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream -- argues for reinventing the public schools we have. Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It's a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.
Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students' achievement scores now approximate the statewide average. What's more, in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent -- roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average. Last year, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivies.
As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I've never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy. Ask school officials to explain Union City's success and they start with prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There's abundant research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is believing.
One December morning the lesson is making latkes, the potato pancakes that are a Hanukkah staple. Everything that transpires during these 90 minutes could be called a "teachable moment" -- describing the smell of an onion ("Strong or light? Strong -- duro. Will it smell differently when we cook it? We'll have to find out."); pronouncing the "p" in pepper and pimento; getting the hang of a food processor ("When I put all the ingredients in, what will happen?").
Cognitive and noncognitive, thinking and feeling; here, this line vanishes. The good teacher is always on the lookout for both kinds of lessons, always aiming to reach both head and heart. "My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children," the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. "It's all about exposure to concepts -- wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. 'Let's do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.' I don't ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 -- I could teach a monkey to count." From pre-K to high school, the make-or-break factor is what the Harvard education professor Richard Elmore calls the "instructional core" -- the skills of the teacher, the engagement of the students and the rigor of the curriculum. To succeed, students must become thinkers, not just test-takers.
When Alina Bossbaly greets her third grade students, ethics are on her mind. "Room 210 is a pie -- un pie -- and each of us is a slice of that pie." The pie offers a down-to-earth way of talking about a community where everyone has a place. Building character and getting students to think is her mission. From Day 1, her kids are writing in their journals, sifting out the meaning of stories and solving math problems. Every day, Ms. Bossbaly is figuring out what's best for each child, rather than batch-processing them. Though Ms. Bossbaly is a star, her philosophy pervades the district. Wherever I went, these schools felt less like impersonal institutions than the simulacrum of an extended family.
UNTIL recently, Union City High bore the scarlet-letter label, "school in need of improvement." It has taken strong leadership from its principal, John Bennetti, to turn things around -- to instill the belief that education can be a ticket out of poverty. On Day 1, the principal lays out the house rules. Everything is tied to a single theme -- pride and respect in "our house" -- that resonates with the community culture of family, unity and respect. "Cursing doesn't showcase our talents. Breaking the dress code means we're setting a tone that unity isn't important, coming in late means missing opportunities to learn." Bullying is high on his list of nonnegotiables: "We are about caring and supporting."
These students sometimes behave like college freshmen, as in a seminar where they're parsing Toni Morrison's "Beloved." They can be boisterously jokey with their teachers. But there's none of the note-swapping, gum-chewing, wisecracking, talking-back rudeness you'd anticipate if your opinions about high school had been shaped by movies like "Dangerous Minds." And the principal is persuading teachers to raise their expectations. "There should be more courses that prepare students for college, not simply more work but higher-quality work," he tells me. This approach is paying off big time: Last year, in a study of 22,000 American high schools, U.S. News & World Report and the American Institutes for Research ranked Union City High in the top 22 percent.
What makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn't followed the herd by closing "underperforming" schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools. A quarter-century ago, fear of a state takeover catalyzed a transformation. The district's best educators were asked to design a curriculum based on evidence, not hunch. Learning by doing replaced learning by rote. Kids who came to school speaking only Spanish became truly bilingual, taught how to read and write in their native tongue before tackling English. Parents were enlisted in the cause. Teachers were urged to work together, the superstars mentoring the stragglers and coaches recruited to add expertise. Principals were expected to become educational leaders, not just disciplinarians and paper-shufflers. From a loose confederacy, the schools gradually morphed into a coherent system that marries high expectations with a "we can do it" attitude. "The real story of Union City is that it didn't fall back," says Fred Carrigg, a key architect of the reform. "It stabilized and has continued to improve."
To any educator with a pulse, this game plan sounds so old-school obvious that it verges on platitude. That these schools are generously financed clearly makes a difference -- not every community will decide to pay for two years of prekindergarten -- but too many districts squander their resources. School officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds, eager for a quick fix. But they're on a fool's errand. These places -- and there are a host of them, largely unsung -- didn't become exemplars by behaving like magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps learning from experience and tinkering with its model. Nationwide, there's no reason school districts -- big or small; predominantly white, Latino or black -- cannot construct a system that, like the schools of Union City, bends the arc of children's lives.
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Rick Hess, via a kind reader's email:
You didn't think the ferment around Common Core could keep building? Hah! Prepare for several more years of increasing wackiness. In the middle of it all is Jazon Zimba, founding principal of Student Achievement Partners (SAP) and the man who is leading SAP after David Coleman went off to head up the College Board. SAP is a major player in Common Core implementation, especially with the aid of $18 million in support from the GE Foundation. Zimba was the lead writer on the Common Core mathematics standards. He earned his doctorate in mathematical physics from Berkeley, co-founded the Grow Network with Coleman, and previously taught physics and math at Bennington College. He's a private dude who lives up in New England and has not been part of the Beltway policy conversation. I'd never met Zimba, until we had the chance to sit down last week.Now, I think readers know that I'm of two minds when it comes to the Common Core. On the one hand, it does have the potential to bring coherence to the education space, shed light on who's doing what, raise the bar for instructional materials and teacher prep, and so forth. On the other, there are about 5,000 ways the whole thing could go south or turn into a stifling bureaucratic monstrosity-and one rarely goes wrong when betting against our ability to do massive, complex edu-reforms well. Given all this, like many of you, I'm carefully watching how all this is playing out. In that spirit, I enjoyed meeting Zimba; found him smart and engaging; and thought you all might be equally interested in hearing from him. In particular, I'd love to hear how much Zimba's responses do or don't assuage various concerns about the Common Core. Here's what he had to say (in an email interview that followed our conversation):
.....
RH: How confident are you that teacher preparation programs are ready and able to alter their practice in light of the Common Core?
JZ: There is a long tradition of mathematicians partnering with education schools and local districts to enhance the mathematical education of teachers. The first thing I ever read about this was Richard Askey's 1999 article in American Educator. The National Math Panel also made recommendations to improve teacher preparation in mathematics. But the fact that mathematicians have been working on the mathematical preparation of teachers for so long is really a good-news/bad-news story. The Common Core could bring some much-needed scale and impetus for change here.I've heard about some of the alternative certification programs basing their training on the Common Core, and that makes sense because these programs tend to have national reach. As for traditional universities, I assume change will happen faster in some places but slowly in most. I would love to see some creative thinking about this from the universities themselves, but also from the states and districts who are their clients.
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An interview with Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, on his paper entitled Optimizing Talent: Closing Educational and Social Mobility Gap Worldwide, published last year at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria.Marc Tucker: In your paper, you start out making an argument that today's children are more intelligent than their parents and their grandparents and you combine that with an argument that the quality of teaching in government-funded schools appears to be higher than that in private schools in most wealthy countries. Can you tell us more about the research on both points?
Dylan Wiliam: The first argument draws on the work of psychologist James Flynn (the Flynn effect), an American living and working in New Zealand. He found that IQ tests need to be re-benchmarked every decade, because IQs are rising, about 3 to 4 points every ten years. So IQ norms are rising, and people are getting smarter in ways we may not entirely realize. The average would be around 110 or 115 if we didn't adjust it. It has risen 15 points since World War II. This is occurring on some tests more than others; arithmetic scores have gone up very little while spatial scores and problem-solving scores are increasing substantially. Maybe young people aren't using their intelligence today as well as they could be but there is evidence that they are smarter.
Tucker: Most American teachers think about intelligence in the way they were taught to - it is a function of the genes. Is the gene pool changing, or do we have a different idea now about what these tests are measuring?
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On a National Assessment of Educational Progress test given to urban students a few years ago, Detroit Public Schools students scored the lowest ever measured in the nation.Or, in the words of one urban education expert: "They are barely above what one would expect simply by chance, as if the kids simply guessed at the answers."
But thanks to school choice, there may finally be hope.
Detroit school children are learning at a rate of an extra three months in school a year when in charter public schools compared to similar counterparts in conventional Detroit Public Schools, according to the findings of a Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study done by Stanford University on students in the Detroit area.
Charter public schools in Detroit give parents an educational option for their children that previously didn't exist. Charter public schools in Detroit enroll 47,000 students, the third highest charter enrollment in the country behind Los Angeles and New York. DPS has an enrollment of about 66,600 students.
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Oxford University was founded in 1096, Cambridge in 1209. Harvard, a relative newcomer, was founded in 1636. Other than religions, few institutions appear to have maintained their existence or their relative status for as long as major universities. And few institutions, notably again other than religions, have seen so little change. Oxford in 2012 teaches students in ways remarkably similar to Oxford in 1096, seated students listening to professors in a classroom.I suspect that these two facts are related; stasis in methods has led to stasis in status. And I suspect that both of these facts are about to change. Online education will change how universities teach; as a result, online education will change which universities teach.
Advantages of Online Education
I see three principle advantages to online education, 1) leverage, especially of the best teachers; 2) time savings; 3) individualized teaching and new technologies.Leverage
The importance of leverage was brought home to me by a personal anecdote. In 2009, I gave a TED talk on the economics of growth. Since then my 15 minute talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times. That is far fewer views than the most-watched TED talk, Ken Robinson's 2006 talk on how schools kill creativity, which has been watched some 26 million times. Nonetheless, the 15 minutes of teaching I did at TED dominates my entire teaching career: 700,000 views at 15 minutes each is equivalent to 175,000 student-hours of teaching, more than I have taught in my entire offline career.[1] Moreover, the ratio is likely to grow because my online views are increasing at a faster rate than my offline students.
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Buried in a new Congressional Budget Office report is the revelation that the CBO now thinks federal student loans will add $35 billion more to the deficit in the next ten years than it previously thought. "The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023," released this week, details the changes in the CBO's baseline projections for the federal deficit for the coming decade.
The CBO scores student loans as a "net negative subsidy"; this means that student loans will bring in $35 billion less of a profit, thus increasing the deficit by that amount.
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Math class should be fascinating, right? At TED2010, Conrad Wolfram suggests that one reason it often isn't is hand calculation. Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computersMost students spend years in math class learning to work sums by hand that a computer can now do. After all, computers are far better at calculation than human beings will ever be, while people are far better at defining problems and coming up with creative solutions.Wolfram's website, ComputerBasedMath.org, supports curriculums that allow teachers to focus on real-world math problems, so students can study concepts rather than calculation. As Wolfram says on the site:
"Rather than topics like solving quadratic equations or factorizing polynomials, Computer-Based Math focuses on using the power of math to solve real-world problems like, 'Should I insure my mobile?,' 'How long will I live?' or 'What makes a beautiful shape?'"
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The New Jersey Department of Education has released two reports that evaluate the status of the first-year pilot for evaluating teachers. One was prepared by the Evaluation Pilot Advisory Committee and the other by the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education.Here's the memo that was sent out to all chief school administrators and charter school leaders.
After the passage of TEACHNJ, the Legislature's reform of teacher and principal evaluation and tenure law, the DOE selected ten districts to participate in a pilot program for the teacher evaluations. Districts, on a very short time line, selected teacher evaluation rubrics (most chose Charlotte Danielson's model) and started the time-sucking practice of lengthy, data-driven, teacher evaluations.
Both reports praise the commitment of teacher and administrators as they pioneer a framework for fairly evaluating teachers based largely on student growth. They reference the difficulty of changing a culture where all teachers are deemed above average, and note that this endeavor is, by definition, a long process. Pilot districts have devoted enormous time and resources to extensive professional development, collaboration, and implementation.
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Something unusual stopped me in these sentences from a Times article about a state-by-state study of flaws in the American electoral system: "A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor Gerken's 2009 book, 'The Democracy Index,' was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said. 'Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings,' Professor Gerken said. 'But it also produces professional peer pressure.'"It almost took my breath away: Professor Heather Gerken, who is in her early forties, felt free to tell a reporter that Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, not to mention tongue rings, are horrible. Gerken broke one of the unwritten rules of being middle-aged: don't go after the young and what they love. Not in print, anyway. Don't open yourself up to the charge of curmudgeonliness, because the inevitable retort--"You just don't get it, Professor! You sound like your parents!"--is probably accurate, certainly unanswerable, and absolutely devastating. Few things in America are less forgivable than getting older.
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A small room lies down the hallway from the entrance to the Coralville Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, its heavy wooden doors blocking out the noise of passersby.A fireplace and mellow overhead lighting illuminate a series of bookshelves, each bearing rows of novels and short stories.
It is a library, and it has made the Marriott, local industry officials said, one of the first hotels to join what has become a nationwide trend over the last two years.
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, via a kind reader's email.
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As the writer Andrew Solomon, his husband, John Habich, and their three-year-old son George descend the stone steps, they bring a burst of colour to the dark grey underworld of the New York Transit Museum: John in brilliant red corduroys, George in an orange-striped shirt, Andrew in a bright-blue striped shirt and scarlet socks.
I have brought along my son, Leo. Being three, the boys don't really talk to each other, they run. There are antique buses to drive, models of the third rail to electrify, subways to bounce around.Solomon has just published his spectacularly successful book Far from the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love, which chronicles the stories of children who, for various reasons, are extremely different from their parents. The book took 11 years to write and its 702 pages include autism, schizophrenia, Down's syndrome, child prodigies, transgendered children, deafness, dwarfism, and crime. Each chapter tackles a different subject, seen through interviews with numerous families.
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Aisha Khan was finally stumped.She hemmed and hawed for a moment as she searched her memory for the answer.
Try as she might, the seventh-grader at Spring Harbor Middle School couldn't recall the last word she misspelled in the Madison All-City Spelling Bee.
"I don't really remember," Aisha said.
That's understandable, considering she was just a fifth-grader the last time she stumbled over a word in the city contest.
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BARACK OBAMA likes to call education "the currency for the information age". His presidency has brought a big shift in America's priorities, devoting more effort and resources--and an extra $2 billion--to children who have not yet started their formal schooling.That is part of an international trend. South Korea plans to extend their early-education provision for all three- and four-year-olds this year. Turkey has ambitious plans too. Pre-school education was long neglected. "90% of the brain develops between the ages of zero to five, yet we spend 90% of our dollars on kids above the age of five," says Timothy Knowles of the University of Chicago. That is now changing. Academic studies, including in neuroscience, have highlighted the long-term effects of experiences in a child's early years.
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As companies seek individuals who can work anywhere in the world, plenty of U.S. business schools claim they're "going global," adding weeklong jaunts to China, Korea or Brazil and increasing the share of international students in their classes.But that's not enough to train tomorrow's leaders, argues Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at IESE Business School in Barcelona. In order to prepare students for a global business environment, he says, schools must do a better job explaining globalization--and its many limits.
Mr. Ghemawat, 53 years old, recently served on a task force coordinated by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, an industry accrediting group, to offer recommendations on how schools can teach the complex topic.
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The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.- JFK
MYTH 1: Sexism is perpetrated by a small number of men, typically close to retirement age, who are "against women." Most academics, especially mathematicians, are open-minded people who are against discrimination.
FACT: Please read this study on gender bias in science hiring:
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Having secrets is widespread among teenagers, especially girls. But teens who share their secrets in confidence with parents and friends have fewer headaches and depressed moods and are more confident in social situations than others who keep secrets to themselves, according to a report in the Journal of Adolescence.Researchers worked with nearly 800 boys and girls, ages 14 to 19, from five schools in the Netherlands. Most came from two-parent families. The teens reported on questionnaires if they had a private secret that they never talked about, how long they had kept the secret, if the information was known to others and how difficult it was to keep or reveal the secret.
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Nicholas Kulish & Chris Cottrell:
For 32 years, the German education minister's 351-page dissertation sat on a shelf at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf gathering dust while its author pursued a successful political career that carried her to the highest circles of the German government.
The academic work was a time bomb, however, and it exploded last year when an anonymous blogger published a catalog of passages suspected of having been lifted from other publications without proper attribution.The university revoked the doctorate of the minister, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, on Tuesday (she retains the title pending appeal), and on Saturday she was forced to resign her cabinet post. It was the second time a minister had resigned from the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel over plagiarism in less than two years.
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If Steve Boedefeld graduates from Appalachian State University without any student loan debt, it will be because of the money he earned fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the money he now saves by eating what he grows or kills.Zack Tolmie managed to escape New York University with no debt -- and a degree -- by landing a job at Bubby's, the brunch institution in TriBeCa, where he made $1,000 a week. And he had entered N.Y.U. with sophomore standing, thanks to Advanced Placement credits. All that hard work also yielded a $25,000 annual merit scholarship.
The two are part of a rare species on college campuses these days, as the nation's collective student loan balance hits $1 trillion and continues to rise. While many students are trying to defray some of the costs, few can actually work their way through college in a normal amount of time without debt and little or no need-based financial aid unless they have an unusual combination of bravery, luck and discipline.
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Paula Kaiser says she is getting a lot of experience as a tour guide these days. She shows people around the Miller Brewery perhaps?Nope.
It's Walker School, a kindergarten through fifth-grade elementary school on S. 119th St. in West Allis.
Kaiser's title gives you an idea of what is bringing folks to the 350-student school: She is "next generation learning lead" for the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District.
In other words, she is one of the key people in reshaping life in a growing number of classrooms in the district in a way that is making them showcases for what might be the future on a much wider basis - a higher tech, more individualized, less structured approach to learning, even in the earliest grades.
The new approach sure looks different.
Walk into Team Respect - that's the name of a combined grouping of 54 first- through third-graders - and you don't see much of what you saw when you were in those grades.
No rows of desks, not even many tables. Instead, there's friendly furniture like bean bags, a selection of comfortable nooks and lots of space on the carpet. Kids seem to be mostly sitting around, even lying around, sometimes milling around, by themselves or in pairs or small groups. Most of the time, no teacher is in the front of the room telling everyone what to do.
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The 2012 election has produced a low-grade Republican panic about the long-term consequences of a shifting electorate, with legions of younger, minority and unmarried Americans voting heavily Democratic.But there's at least one demographic trend that's working in the opposite direction - hurting Democrats and helping Republicans - and Wisconsin has become the most extreme example in the country: the shrinking union vote.
Nationally, union membership saw one of its sharpest declines in years in 2012, dropping from 11.8% of the workforce in 2011 to 11.3% last year, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the really eye-popping numbers could be found in Wisconsin, where membership in public-sector unions plummeted in the aftermath of Act 10, the hugely controversial Republican measure that wiped out most collective bargaining for public employees and made it far harder for their unions to operate.
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Congrats to new #MMSD Supt. Jennifer Cheatham.If she respects district employees (MTI), we can succeed.We teach the children.
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) February 9, 2013
Leadership comes in different shapes and sizes. After spending time with 41-year-old Jen Cheatham and attending the community forum on Thursday, I kept thinking back to the winter day 23 years ago when 43-year-old Barry Alvarez was introduced to the Madison community and made his memorable statement about how fans interested in season tickets better get them now because they'd soon be hard to get.Related: Madison's third grade reading results:Like Cheatham, Alvarez was an outsider, a rising star in a major program who was ready to take the reins of his own program and run with it. That certainly did not guarantee success, but he proved to have that rare and ineluctable something that inspired his players to raise their game, that drove them to succeed as a team because they couldn't bear to let their coach or teammates down.
As with Barry, so with Jen. For those of us who have been able to spend time with Jen Cheatham and talk to her about her vision for our Madison schools, it is clear that whatever leadership is, she has it. What we heard time and again from those she's worked with is that Jen is able to inspire principals and teachers to do their best possible work for the students they serve. But also like Alvarez, she's doesn't shy away from tough decisions when they're necessary.
"The other useful stat buried in the materials is on the second page 3 (= 6th page), showing that the 3rd grade proficiency rate for black students on WKCE, converted to NAEP-scale proficiency, is 6.8%, with the accountability plan targeting this percentage to increase to 23% over one school year. Not sure how this happens when the proficiency rate (by any measure) has been decreasing year over year for quite some time. Because the new DPI school report cards don't present data on an aggregated basis district-wide nor disaggregated by income and ethnicity by grade level, the stats in the MMSD report are very useful, if one reads the fine print."Madison School Board Needs to Address Search Fiasco:
That being the case, Cheatham would come to this position in a difficult circumstance. As Kaleem Caire, the president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, told the State Journal: "The perception of people in this community when we have one pick, they will always question the value of this woman. That's not fair to her and not fair to our kids."Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman - August, 2009The School Board has presided over a fiasco that board member Ed Hughes admits -- in a major understatement -- "has not gone as smoothly as we'd like."
Now the board needs to get its act together.
If would be good if the board were to seek the return of the more than $30,000 in taxpayer money that was allocated for what can only charitably be referred to as a "search." However, we don't want the board to squander more tax money on extended legal wrangling.
The board should make it clear that it will not have further dealings with this search firm, as the firm's vetting of applicants does not meet the basic standards that a responsible board should expect.
Perhaps most importantly, the board should engage in a serious rethink of its approach to searches for top administrators. The Madison Metropolitan School District is a great urban school district. It has challenges, especially with regard to achievement gaps and the overuse of standardized testing, that must be addressed.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
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Those interested in corruption and academia can get a Master's degree for their efforts.The International Anti-Corruption Academy, which launched in Laxenburg, Austria, in 2010, announced on Thursday the 30-person inaugural class of its new Master's in Anti-Corruption Studies. The two-year, part-time program will serve as an enhancement to professional development, the academy said.
It comes as compliance becomes more important within companies amid a changing regulatory environment. The degree is aimed at those who work in corporate compliance, internal oversight, law enforcement, investigative journalism, academia, finance and international affairs, the academy said in the statement.
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Looking back at the school desegregation case he took as a young lawyer, Rubin Salter Jr. sees a pile of wasted money and squandered opportunities. After almost four decades in court and nearly $1 billion in public spending, little has changed for the black children whose right to a good education he had labored to defend.They are still among the lowest-performing students in the Tucson Unified School District, still among the most likely to be suspended or to be assigned to special-education programs and still among the least likely to join groups for gifted students. They are, as Mr. Salter put it, "still getting the short end of the stick."
A federal judge approved a plan on Wednesday intended to lift a longstanding desegregation order that has served as a reason and an excuse for a lot that has gone wrong in the district over the past decades: shrinking enrollment, sliding graduation rates and insistent dropout rates.
After all these years, Mr. Salter, whose family left Mississippi in the 1950s to escape segregation, said he no longer harbors hope for integration. One reason is that the district, overwhelmingly white when he began working on the case in 1974, is now largely made up of Latino students, who are also a party in the litigation and perform just as poorly as their black counterparts. Another is that parameters set long ago by the Supreme Court prevent the busing of students beyond a school district's boundaries as a remedy for segregation.
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A California lawmaker is proposing a bill that would require online privacy policies to be short and clearly written.A measure introduced this week would impose a 100-word limit on privacy policies -- a bit shorter than this post - and require that they be written in "clear and concise language" at "no greater than an 8th grade reading level."
"The problem being, number one, these documents are very lengthy; number two, they contain a lot of technical terminologies people do not understand," the bill's sponsor, freshman Assemblyman Ed Chau (pictured) told CBS Sacramento.
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I've been taking the Coursera course Fundamentals of Online Education for the last week. I nearly said fortnight because it seems like longer and it seems like a lot has happened yet at the same time nothing has happened. The course was supposed to last 6 weeks but today (now yesterday), without any prior warning, the plug was pulled and the course unceremoniously closed. As a number of people on Twitter said, "Wow! Just wow!". It's difficult to know what any of the supposed 41000 enrollees are thinking because the site is shut. No one has anywhere to discuss or comment on their feelings or thoughts about the closure. Well we have e.g. our blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, but we are disconnected from each other. No community had developed in the week that the course was open and even in FaceBook, there was little widespread engagement.Why did this happen? How could a course offered by a company that only offers courses to cohorts of many thousands allow this course to get through their quality control? (I'm making an assumption that there is a quality control process and that Coursera turn their experience gained over the last year or so to helping new courses get off on the right foot. I'm not sure whether it is more generous to think that they have failed in quality control or that they didn't fail because they omitted it altogether.)
The course was supposed to teach the Fundamentals of Online Education and I think that it failed to do that in at least 3 ways; the course design, the pedagogical approach, and the materials used. It's difficult to separate these out so I'll describe the sequence of events.
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Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader's email:
Wisconsin law requires boards to release the identities of at least five candidates to the public upon request when there are at least five applicants, according to a 2004 opinion by then-Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager.Related: Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, via a kind reader's email:The opinion doesn't specify when the names must be disclosed.
School district officials said Friday they were still reviewing the newspaper's request. On Tuesday district lawyer Dylan Pauly told the newspaper the district would respond to the request within 10 business days.
Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said the School Board "is clearly violating the spirit of the law" by not making the names public before the board made a decision. The law calls for records to be provided as soon as possible.
"For the district to pick a superintendent candidate without first meeting its statutory obligation to identify (at least) five candidates considered most qualified delegitimizes the selection that is made," Lueders said.
It's also illegal. Government entities cannot require a requester to come into the office to get a copy of a record except in the rare circumstance where it is not possible to copy the record. Wisconsin law provides plainly that "any requester has a right to inspect a record and to make or receive a copyof a record that permits photocopying." Wis. Stat. 19.35(1)(b) (emphasis added). Decades ago, the law actually permitted the government to choose whether to provide a copy or require the requester to come in and copy it. In 1991, however, the legislature amended the law to remove that choice when a request is not made in person. State ex rel. Borzych v. Paluszcyk, 201 Wis. 2d 523, 527, 549 N.W.2d 25 (Ct. App. 1996) (describing the legislative history and noting that "[b]y statute, [the custodian] was required to photocopy and send the material requested").Be aware, though, that the government entity can charge you the actual postage cost to mail the copies. Wis. Stat. 19.35(3)(d).
When the Education Action Group ran into this kind of excuse from a school district* in northern Wisconsin last week, they called us. We wrote a letter to the school district's superintendent, and the very next day EAG got an email saying the records were in the mail.
Know your rights when it comes to open records! If you ever want some advice about how to file a record request, what to ask for, or whether the fees being charged are lawful, give us a call.
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I wrote a thing last fall about massive open online courses (MOOCs, in the parlance), and the challenge that free or cheap online classes pose to business as usual in higher ed. In that piece, I compared the people running colleges today to music industry executives in the age of Napster. (This was not a flattering comparison.) Aaron Bady, a cultural critic and doctoral candidate at Berkeley, objected. I replied to Bady, one thing led to another, the slippery slope was slupped, and Maria Bustillos ended up refereeing the whole thing here on The Awl.Bustillos sees institutions like San Jose State experimenting with credit for online courses from startups like Udacity, and asks: "are we willing to jeopardize the education of young people (at the cost of millions or billions in public funds) on a bet like that?"
To which my reply is: "Depends. How well do you think things are going now?"
Bustillos' answers seem to be that in the world of higher education, things are going fine, mostly, and that the parts that aren't going fine can largely be fixed with tax dollars. (Because if there's one group you'd pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.) I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it.
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For years -- and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women's aptitude -- researchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.Now comes an intriguing clue, in the form of a test given in 65 developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It finds that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science -- but not in the United States.
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When I turned 18, my parents expected me to go to college- it was the only option, the only way to be a successful adult. I'm a 2nd generation Italian. My mother and grandparents came over to America and bootstrapped themselves from nothing, so needless to say, I would be the first in the family to get a degree and it was kind of a big deal.We were middle class, but not rich, so I had to borrow to afford a $44,000/year RIT tuition. It's what everyone else does, right? $44,000 might as well have been a million dollars, because in my mind they were equally unfathomable- with only $300 in my checking account, I had to make a decision whether or not to borrow $176,000. Makes sense.
No one could tell me why I was wasting my creative energy, focus, and life on something I didn't want to do. Classes didn't hold my attention- I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class. My classes appealed to the lowest-common denominator. The bottom of the barrel.
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Madison has many wonderful traits. This town's obsession with process is not one of them.Much more on Madison's most recent Superintendent search, here.All indications are that the one remaining choice for the Madison public schools' new superintendent, Dr. Jennifer Cheatham, would be a great pick. I'm told by people close to the decision that the Chief Instruction Officer for the Chicago Public Schools has been the top candidate all along, and that she is a "rock star" in the education world.
There is no job harder or more important in our city than being its schools superintendent. This is a city full of education experts whose child is clearly a genius (just like them) and yet isn't being challenged enough by their teachers. At the same time, we have a growing number of poor kids who come to school without the basics, even a good breakfast. So, the challenge is to meet the high expectations of highly educated parents, while trying to give underprivileged kids the best chance possible to succeed, all in the context of constricted budgets.
At the same time, the stakes for our whole city are enormous. Failing public schools have been the downfall of dozens of American cities.
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Khan Academy has a short series of videos featuring LeBron James asking science and statistics questions, with his "good friend Sal" answering them. They cover stuff like the odds of LeBron making three free throws versus one three pointer and what muscles you use when you shoot a basket. They're an engaging introduction to Khan Academy's videos.
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When I read this story, I suddenly became grateful. You see, I used my book advance from Sex & God at Yale to pay off my student loans. Turns out I was very fortunate-more so than some of my fellow low-income graduates, apparently.Yale University may have an endowment in excess of $20 billion, but that hasn't stopped it from suing some of its poorest graduates for unpaid student loans.
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Madison Urban League, via a kind email:
The Urban League of Greater Madison strongly supports the Madison School Board's decision to hire Dr. Jennifer Cheatham to serve as the next Superintendent of Schools of the Madison Metropolitan School District. Dr. Cheatham's strong background in teacher quality, teacher evaluation, instructional leadership and organizing school system functions and operations around the educational and developmental needs of young people will be great assets for Madison's public schools.
Kaleem Caire, President and CEO of the Urban League shared that, "Dr. Cheatham's experience as a leader of teachers and her strong focus on improving instruction, implementing a rigorous curriculum for all students, ensuring teachers build strong and motivating relationships with children, and using data to inform teaching represent the core of what our school system needs right now." Caire further stated that, "The Urban League believes that children in Madison deserve world class leadership, world class teachers and world class schools. Dr. Cheatham's history and track record show that she shares a common belief in these ideals and what it takes to get there. We look forward to supporting her transition and welcoming her and her family to Madison."
The Urban League is presently partnering with the Madison Metropolitan School District on the recruitment of high quality teachers and professional staff, preparing high school juniors and seniors for the ACT college entrance exam, and engaging parents of color in the work and decision-making of the school system. The Urban League also launched the Urban League Scholars Academy in January 2013 at Sennett and Toki Middle Schools, a program that extends the instructional day for 6th graders by 80 minutes in reading/language arts and mathematics. The League also operates the Schools of Hope tutoring program at 17 middle and high schools in Madison, Middleton, Oregon and Sun Prairie in partnership with these school districts, the United Way of Dane County and Madison School Community Recreation.
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The Sunday Times carries a long front-page article about a young man, Richard Fee, who committed suicide.The article claims: "Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers."
But the article contains no evidence or proof of this claim that "growing numbers of teenagers and young adults" have faked symptoms. It's a claim that would be hard to prove, because you'd have to rely on someone self-reporting that they lied, and anyone who admits that they lied is someone whose testimony might well be considered not 100% reliable.
The article goes on to blame Fee's doctor and the drug manufacturer for his suicide. Fee himself, and his parents, don't get blamed or scrutinized much at all.
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Every eighteen months or so, a new student loan study or article or opinion piece makes the rounds online, in print, and then usually capped by a segment on the Today Show or similar broadcast outlet. These pieces, relevant to my own interests, tend to start with an anecdote talking about a liberal arts grad living at home for years after graduation unable to get a job in his/her field. Usually that field is something like philosophy, and the school is an expensive four-year east coast private school -- but there are plenty of variations on this theme. In the last few years, the angle has shifted from reporting on these unlucky liberal arts grads to professionals who dodged the flailing economy by borrowing to work toward a Master's Degree, teaching certificate, or other professional certification to improve their chances of employment. Often, these advanced degrees didn't help, leaving skilled, educated and trained professionals worse off financially than before their continued education. Most of these articles compare the current state of the student loan market to the housing crisis with an increasing sense of urgency. Two years ago, there was a "Student Loan Bubble" but now there's a Student Loan Debt Crisis.
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Obviously education is important and necessary for a host of reasons. But there's little evidence it drives growth. In "Does Education Matter?" British scholar Alison Wolf wrote, "The simple one-way relationship ... -- education spending in, economic growth out -- simply does not exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity."Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder," argues that education pays real benefits at a micro level because it allows families to lock in their economic status. An entrepreneurial father can ensure his kids will do OK by paying for them to become doctors and lawyers. But what's true at the micro level may not be at the macro level.
Think about it this way: Growing economies spend a lot on education, but that doesn't necessarily mean that spending makes them grow. During the so-called Gilded Age, the U.S. economy roared faster and longer than ever before or since, while the illiteracy rate went down. But the rising literacy didn't cause the growth. Similarly, in the 20th century, in places such as China, South Korea and India, the economic boom came first while the investments in education came later.
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The accounting firm that worked with former Gov. Jim Martin in investigating academic fraud at UNC-Chapel Hill last week dropped one of their key findings.Martin had said athletic officials and academic support officials raised questions with the Faculty Committee on Athletics about courses in one department that were supposed to be lecture courses but never met. But eight members of the faculty committee told The News & Observer's Dan Kane no such concerns had been raised.
After Kane's reporting was published, Martin doubled-down on his claim. He wrote a letter to The N&O defending his conclusion and posted similar comments on various Internet sites.
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In her first visit to a Madison school, superintendent candidate Jennifer Cheatham met two La Follette High School students whom principal Chad Wiese said represent the district's diversity and also its greatest challenge.Much more on Madison's latest Superintendent search, here.Senior Tanner Trickle, a basketball player and honors student, and junior Khaleah Monger, a varsity cheerleader, president of the black student union and an AVID/TOPS participant, led Cheatham on a tour of the school, highlighting a remodeled study hall, the gym and Lussier Stadium.
When Trickle told Cheatham he had applied to University of Chicago, Cheatham replied, "That was my first choice too. It didn't work out at all."
Nonetheless, Cheatham, 41, chief of instruction for Chicago Public Schools, received her bachelor's degree from DePaul University in Chicago and earned graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard University.
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Five years ago, people were praising newly named Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad as a paragon of listening skills and inclusiveness -- a trained social worker who seemingly never burned a bridge in his life.Much more on the Madison School District's latest Superintendent search, here.By contrast, Milton, the current superintendent at the Springfield (Ill.) school district, and Chicago School District administrator Jennifer Cheatham seem willing to upset the apple cart if they think it will help students.
School Board president James Howard told me the board's focus was not to find candidates who would shake things up because, overall, Madison remains a quality district that doesn't need a whole lot of shaking.
Rather "the issue" -- or, as he later clarified, one the most important issues -- "is one thing: the achievement gap."
And the board certainly wanted to know if candidates had "the kind of will to make the kind of changes" to tackle that problem, he said. "To demonstrate success, you have to be from a district that has some diversity."
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In a recent post, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones discusses his growing skepticism about the research behind market-based education reform, and about the claims that supporters of these policies make. He cites a recent Los Angeles Times article, which discusses how, in 2000, the San Jose Unified School District in California instituted a so-called "high expectations" policy requiring all students to pass the courses necessary to attend state universities. The reported percentage of students passing these courses increased quickly, causing the district and many others to declare the policy a success. In 2005, Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second largest district, adopted similar requirements.For its part, the Times performed its own analysis, and found that the San Jose pass rate was actually no higher in 2011 compared with 2000 (actually, slightly lower for some subgroups), and that the district had overstated its early results by classifying students in a misleading manner. Mr. Drum, reviewing these results, concludes: "It turns out it was all a crock."
In one sense, that's true - the district seems to have reported misleading data. On the other hand, neither San Jose Unified's original evidence (with or without the misclassification) nor the Times analysis is anywhere near sufficient for drawing conclusions - "crock"-based or otherwise - about the effects of this policy. This illustrates the deeper problem here, which is less about one "side" or the other misleading with research, but rather something much more difficult to address: Common misconceptions that impede deciphering good evidence from bad.
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"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."--George Orwell
While we spend billions on standards for skill-building and the assessment of skills, we don't seem to notice that our students, in general, are not doing any academic work. This assumes that there is a connection between the academic work of students and their academic achievement, but for most of those who study and comment on education that link seems not to be apparent.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media--and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people's lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38--almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]
If our students spend that much time, in addition to sports, being with friends, and other activities, like sleep, when do they do their academic work?
Indiana University' High School Survey of Student Engagement found most recently that:
Among (U.S.) Public High School students:
82.7% spend 2-5 hours a week on homework.
42.5% spend an hour or less each week on their homework.
This may help to explain how they manage to free up 53 hours a week to play with electronic entertainment media, but is there any effect of such low academic expectations on our students' engagement with the educational enterprise we provide for them?
Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education reported on January 7th of this year that:
Gallup research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged. Our educational system sends students and our country's future over the school cliff every year.
The statement of the obvious which applies here would seem to be that we have driven our high school students to distraction, by asking them to do little or no homework and by spending billions of dollars to lead them to prefer electronic entertainment media to the academic work on which their futures depend.
On June 3, 1990, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in his regular New York Times column that:
As we've known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized. But when they were allowed to see the whole process--or better yet become involved with it--productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits--history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned--it's no wonder they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review's authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it's time to take it seriously.
Despite my own bias for having students read history books and write history research papers, I think it may be argued that if we give students nothing to do academically, we clearly contribute to the disengagement which we now find.
If we don't take their academic work seriously, neither will they. What we take seriously we have a chance of doing well, and when we don't take something seriously, we have little chance of achievement there. Verbum Sap.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
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Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader's email:
Only 8.3 percent of students who participated last year received the full program, according to the United Way of Dane County, which coordinates the project with the Madison School District.Jeff Glaze, via a kind reader's emailA quarter of students received individualized tutoring, but for fewer than 15 sessions. The remainder of the 6,132 students either didn't complete the program or were tutored in larger groups.
About 60 percent of the district's elementary students participated in the program last year. Participants were predominantly low-income or minority students.
The program currently has a need for 100 more volunteer tutors, who would help offer the full program to more students, United Way president Leslie Ann Howard said.
"To get the biggest impact, we need to do it based on the model," Howard said.
Annalee Good, the UW-Madison researcher, recommended tutors work as many as three students at a time to expand the reach of a limited number of tutors.
But the study also found that students in kindergarten who participate in Schools of Hope tutoring sessions made fewer gains in reading than similar peers. Students in grades 1-4 made significant gains over peers, while results in fifth grade were mixed.
In total, education spending makes up 35 percent of United Way's budget for this year.The charity also announced investments in programs to prevent family homelessness, keep former inmates from re-offending, screen students for mental health issues, and help seniors avoid adverse drug affects.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
On Thursday, February 14, MTI members are called to the Capitol (State Street entrance) commencing at 4:45 p.m., to commemorate the second anniversary of the uprising against Governor Walker's anti-public employee legislation which destroyed collective bargaining and has caused significant loss in wages.The legislation (Act 10) has, in effect, frozen wages and caused most public employees to pay a greater share of health insurance premiums and 50% of pension deposits.
MTI members will be joined by Union members of Madison Firefighters, Madison Police, AFSCME, SCFL and TAA, as well as other supporters of public schools for a solidarity sing-a-long and candlelight vigil to commemorate the two-year anniversary of our historic effort to fight back. Wear MTI Red in support of your MTI colleagues and public education in Wisconsin.
MTI President Kerry Motoviloff Takes MTI Advocacy & Political Experience to Quebec
Kerry Motoviloff, MTI President and 22-year veteran teacher, describes herself as the proud great- granddaughter of union organizers for immigrant workers in Worchester, MA. She was a member of the MTI Board of Directors as Secretary in 2011, when MTI members led the uprising against Governor Walker's proposed anti-public employee legislation. She ran for MTI President later that spring.Motoviloff spoke last week at the "Stand Up! Stay Strong!" Annual Conference of the Ontario Coordinating Committee, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) which represents 55,000 education support workers in Toronto. Legislation that is similar to Wisconsin's Act 10 is also threatening many other countries in the world, as well as public workers in numerous states. It is the product of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Quebec's proposed legislation would curtail the ability of Unions to participate in political action; control the Union's ability to organize within the labor movement; and otherwise have a negative impact on collective bargaining.
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School Board members and Ray and Associates, the consultant in the superintendent search process, have been under fire since Sunday when the district announced finalists Walter Milton Jr., superintendent of schools in Springfield, Ill., and Jennifer Cheatham, chief of instruction for the Chicago Public Schools.Much more on Madison's latest Superintendent search, here.Milton pulled his name from consideration late Tuesday, following days of online comment by Madison residents on incidents in his past. Those included a 2007 state audit finding of mismanagement at the New York school district he headed and his hiring of a former business partner who was a convicted sex offender while with the Flint, Mich., school district. according to news reports. Milton also had been questioned about inaccurate resumes in applying for previous jobs.
The question bandied about in comments to online stories is: If citizens could unearth these apparent red flags about Milton's background on Google, why didn't Ray and Associates?
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Does science have a "beauty" problem? David Orrell, a mathematician and consultant, argues that it does--or, at least, that some of its practitioners are in thrall to ideals involving "elegance," "symmetry," and "unity" that are beckoning them down false paths.From Euclid and Pythagoras down to 20th-century physicists, many who explore the underlying laws of the natural world have seen truth and beauty as inextricably intertwined. "Beauty is a successful criterion for selecting the right theory," the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann said in a much-quoted TED talk, in 2007. In their popular-philosophizing mode, physicists like to quote the poets Keats ("beauty is truth, truth beauty") or Blake on the subject of nature's "fearful symmetry."
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Gov. Bill Haslam says that changing the direction of higher education is "more than a battleship," but that he eventually expects to change its governing structure, according to Hank Hayes report on a meeting with members of the Kingsport Times-News Editorial Board.An excerpt:
"It's such an insular world. It's the most insular world I've ever seen," Haslam, a Republican, said of higher education.
After a top-to-bottom review last year, Haslam didn't push for change in the state's higher education governing structure.
That governing structure features two big boards -- the Tennessee Board of Regents and the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees -- in addition to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the state's coordinating agency for higher education.
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Create Small Learning EnvironmentsNotes and links on small learning communities, here.With 1 out of 4 black students chronically absent in MMSD and increasing alarm over the achievement gap, it is obvious that teachers must employ culturally relevant teaching practices. These practices begin with getting to know your students and their families - a practice that necessitates smaller learning environments. According to UW professor, Alice Uldvari-Solner, "Teachers who uphold the dynamics of culturally relevant pedagogy are practicing inclusive education as they impart influential messages that each child brings value to the classroom and that each child is powerful in directing his or her own achievement." (Creating an Inclusive School, pg. 100)
Unfortunately, as our students grow, the learning environments become larger and less-personalized. A primary teacher spending most of the day in a SAGE school in a classroom of 14 can get to know his students quite well. Contrast that to a high school teacher teaching five sections of 30+ kids. Individualizing the education process is seemingly impossible. Students need to feel a sense of worth and belonging. Reestablishing smaller learning communities that focus on relationships and team-work will create safety nets for students feeling lost in the crowd.
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A school in Washington DC is making a difference for young African-American girls. Many of their families live below the poverty line of $35,000 for a family of four, in communities where more than half of all students drop out before they reach high school. This special school is turning around the lives of girls.They start their day with a prayer.
Then it's off to class at The Washington Middle School for Girls in the nation's capital. One hundred students attend this Catholic day school. They come from low-income homes with complex family backgrounds. Many are being raised by a single parent or grandparent.
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Dr. Richard Askey, via a kind email (PDF):
TIMSS is an international set of tests on mathematics and science which is given every four years in grades 4 and 8 to a sample of students, and occasionally for a sample of students taking advanced mathematics and physics in their last year in high school. All of these will be given in 2015.The following useful link gives access to the released TIMSS-2011 items and the scores different countries made on these items.
............
One interesting fact is that among the 42 countries which tested 8th grade students, Finland had the highest percent of students who picked answer A and the third lowest percent correct, Chile had 11.7and Sweden had 14.4 percent. The Finnish result is likely a surprise to the people who have praised the Finnish school system for their results on another international test, PISA. However, one group which would not be surprised are university and technical college mathematics faculty in Finland. See an article signed by over 200 of them which is on the web at:
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As a top Chicago Public Schools administrator visits Madison on Thursday to make her case to be the next Madison superintendent, questions linger about the School Board's selection process.Much more on Madison's latest Superintendent search, here.The day after the other finalist for the job suddenly withdrew amid questions about his past, two Madison School Board members stood by the board's decision to move forward with the visit by Jennifer Cheatham. The other five did not return calls seeking comment.
Board members Ed Hughes and Mary Burke also said they weren't ready to pass judgment on the search consultant, Ray and Associates of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after Walter Milton Jr., superintendent in Springfield, Ill., withdrew, and it was not clear how much board members knew about his background.
"We understand why people have questions about our process because it hasn't gone as smoothly as we'd like," Hughes said. "That said, I think we are excited about the possibility of Jennifer Cheatham. She sounds like she could be a terrific candidate."
Jennifer Cheatham links: Bing, Blekko, Clusty, Google, Twitter.
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Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:
February 6, 2013Related: Kaleem Caire interview, notes and links along with the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school (rejected by a majority of the Madison School Board).
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
As the Board of Education deliberates on who the next Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District will be, and as school districts in our state and across the nation wrestle with what to do to eliminate the racial achievement gap in education, while at the same time establishing world class schools that help prepare all children to learn, succeed and thrive in the 21st century, it's important that we not lose sight of what the research continues to tell us really makes the difference in a child's education.
More than 40 years of research on effective schools and transformational education have informed us that the key drivers for eliminating the racial achievement gap in schools and ensuring all students graduate from high school prepared for college and life continue to be:If we place all of our eggs in just one of the five baskets rather than develop strategies that bring together all five areas that affect student outcomes, our efforts to improve student performance and provide quality schools where all children succeed will likely come up short. This is why the Urban League of Greater Madison is working with its partners to extend the learning time "in school" for middle schoolers who are most at-risk of failing when they reach high school, and why we'll be engaging their parents in the process. It's also why we've worked with the United Way and other partners to strengthen the Schools of Hope tutoring initiative for the 1,600 students it serves, and why we are working with local school districts to help them recruit effective, diverse educators and ensure the parents of the children they serve are employed and have access to education and job training services. Still, there is so much more to be done.
- An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom - We must ensure every classroom is led by an effective teacher who is committed to and passionate about teaching young people, inspires all children to want to learn, has an appropriate depth of knowledge of the content they are teaching, is comfortable teaching and empowering diverse students, and coaches all of their students to high performance and expectations. Through its Race to the Top Initiative, the Obama Administration also defined an effective teacher as someone who can improve a students' achievement by 1.0 grade levels in one school year while a highly effective teacher is someone who can improve student achievement by 1.5 grade levels annually. Schools with large numbers of students who are academically behind, therefore, should have the most effective teachers teaching them to ensure they catch up.
- High Quality, Effective Schools with Effective Leaders and Practices - Schools that are considered high quality have a combination of effective leaders, effective teachers, a rigorous curriculum, utilize data-driven instruction, frequently assess student growth and learning, offer a supportive and inspiring school culture, maintain effective governing boards and enjoy support from the broader community in which they reside. They operate with a clear vision, mission, core values and measurable goals and objectives that are monitored frequently and embraced by all in the school community. They also have principals and educators who maintain positive relationships with parents and each other and effectively catalyze and deploy resources (people, money, partnerships) to support student learning and teacher success. Schools that serve high poverty students also are most effective when they provide additional instructional support that's aligned with what students are learning in the classroom each day, and engage their students and families in extended learning opportunities that facilitate a stronger connection to school, enable children to explore careers and other interests, and provide greater context for what students are learning in the classroom.
- Adequately Employed and Engaged Parents - The impact of parents' socio-economic status on a child's educational outcomes, and their emotional and social development, has been well documented by education researchers and educational psychologists since the 1960s. However, the very best way to address the issue of poverty among students in schools is to ensure that the parents of children attending a school are employed and earning wages that allow them to provide for the basic needs of their children. The most effective plans to address the persistent underachievement of low-income students, therefore, must include strategies that lead to quality job training, high school completion and higher education, and employment among parents. Parents who are employed and can provide food and shelter for their children are much more likely to be engaged in their children's education than those who are not. Besides being employed, parents who emphasize and model the importance of learning, provide a safe, nurturing, structured and orderly living environment at home, demonstrate healthy behaviors and habits in their interactions with their children and others, expose their children to extended learning opportunities, and hold their children accountable to high standards of character and conduct generally rear children who do well in school. Presently, 74% of Black women and 72% of white women residing in Dane County are in the labor force; however, black women are much more likely to be unemployed and looking for work, unmarried and raising children by themselves, or working in low wage jobs even if they have a higher education.
- Positive Peer Relationships and Affiliations - A child's peer group can have an extraordinarily positive, or negative, affect on their persistence and success in school. Students who spend time with other students who believe that learning and attending school is important, and who inspire and support each other, generally spend more time focused on learning in class, more time studying outside of class, and tend to place a higher value on school and learning overall. To the contrary, children who spend a lot of time with peer groups that devalue learning, or engage in bullying, are generally at a greater risk of under-performing themselves. Creating opportunities and space for positive peer relationships to form and persist within and outside of school can lead to significantly positive outcomes for student achievement.
- Community Support and Engagement - Children who are reared in safe and resourceful communities that celebrate their achievements, encourage them to excel, inform them that they are valued, hold them accountable to a high standard of character and integrity, provide them with a multitude of positive learning experiences, and work together to help them succeed rarely fail to graduate high school and are more likely to pursue higher education, regardless of their parents educational background. "It Takes A Whole Village to Raise a Child" is as true of a statement now as it was when the African proverb was written in ancient times. Unfortunately, as children encounter greater economic and social hardships, such as homelessness, joblessness, long-term poverty, poor health, poor parenting and safety concerns, the village must be stronger, more uplifting and more determined than ever to ensure these children have the opportunity to learn and remain hopeful. It is often hopelessness that brings us down, and others along with us.
As a community, I strongly believe we can achieve the educational goals we set for our chlidren if we focus on the right work, invest in innovation, take a "no excuses" approach to setting policy and getting the work done, and hire a high potential, world-class Superintendent who can take us there.
God bless our children, families, schools and capital region.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
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It is academic reference season. Every day I receive requests from former and current students, or people whose work I have read or examined, or met in a lift, to write in support of their application for further study or for academic jobs. I'm usually happy to do my bit. But as these references accumulate in files around the world, I do wonder how many of them will ever be read.Data protection has taken the fun out of reference writing, and hence the fun out of reference reading. Gone are the days when it was possible to write on a plain note card "Grab him if you can," as apparently Gilbert Ryle, professor of philosophy at Oxford, did for one of his students in the 1960s. Or in the strangulated prose of Isaiah Berlin, in his recommendation for the brilliant legal philosopher HLA Hart, "What he is tortured by is the thought that he will never be better than [AC] Ewing and will never hold other views than Ewing. He realises himself that this is not a very exciting state of mind to be in ... Nevertheless ... he cannot be worse than Ewing, who, after all, is ... in his own way, not contemptible."
These days one has to keep in mind that the person you are writing for may eventually see the reference. Accordingly, reference inflation has set in, and everyone is simply wonderful. One reference writer has said of several of his PhD students, "He reminds me of the young Wittgenstein." (That's right! He can never get his shirt to stay tucked in either!) Perhaps the oddest comment I've seen is "Pound for pound she is the best philosopher in the department." What can that mean? She's not very good, but on the other hand she is really small?
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As someone who was clueless when the newspaper world was being upended by the Internet world, I've taken a late-life reportorial interest in the epochal changes ripping through American institutions.David Krakauer, who runs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at UW-Madison, gets it. The guy understands how far reaching those changes are. I first heard him speak last February at a luncheon sponsored by the Wisconsin Innovation Network.
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Everyone knows that many K-12 public schools are not producing desired results. The big question is: how will we improve them? The dominant assertion today is that if we can just get better at telling teachers what to do, and how to do it, then improvement will follow. In this climate, "getting tough" with teachers appears to be the only solution. Fortunately for those of us not fond of one-bet strategies, other assertions are entering the discussion. One of these assertions is that trusting teachers, and not controlling them, is the key to school success.Some policymakers and education leaders in states and school districts are granting groups of teachers who request it collective autonomy to make the decisions influencing whole school success. These groups of teachers have the opportunity to choose--even invent--the learning methods and job structures they think will best improve learning for the students in their schools.
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Just about everywhere you look, the funding model for public education is broken. School districts are dealing with escalating costs in the face of devastating budget cuts. This cannot stand; too much is at stake.The current lack of funding affects all families, but it is especially hard on the 160,000 Oregon children living in poverty. For them, school can be a refuge, and education is their ticket to a better life. Financial trends are taking them -- and all of our school districts -- in the wrong direction.
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The New York Times this week ran a story on the steep decline in law school applicants, which appears to be on track to hit a 30-year-low as prospective students weigh skyrocketing tuition (ranging from $20,000 to $45,000 a year) against diminishing job prospects.The Times reported a 20 percent decrease in applicants from last year and a 38 percent falloff from 2010, leading law schools across the country to scale back admissions.
The UW Law School is following that trend. After a 27 percent decline in applicants since 2009 -- from 2,951 to 2,153 -- Law School Dean Margaret Raymond says the school made a conscious decision to cut back on admissions by 10 percent. The school enrolled 215 students last fall, compared with 278 in 2009.
The state's other law school, at Marquette University, last fall actually admitted a few more students than in 2009, 224 this school year compared to 219 three years ago. But in that same period applicants dropped from 2,121 to 1,723, a 19 percent decline. Marquette Law School Dean Joseph Kearney didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.
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Matthew DeFour, via a kind reader's email:
The superintendent of the Springfield, Ill., school district has withdrawn from the search for the same job in Madison.Much more on the latest Madison School District Superintendent Search, here.Walter Milton Jr. pulled his name from consideration for the Madison School District's superintendent job Tuesday evening, according to a statement the Madison School Board provided to the State Journal.
The decision comes amid questions about parts of Milton's background and how much the board knew about them before naming him Sunday as one of two finalists for the job.
At previous jobs he hired without conducting a background check a former business partner who had been convicted of child molestation, according to news reports. Milton also faced questions about submitting inaccurate resumes when applying for jobs.
Also, a 2007 New York state comptroller's audit found Milton had been overpaid while superintendent at a school district there from 2003 to 2005 and used a district credit card for personal expenses that he had not paid back.
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After paying an Iowa-based headhunting firm $30,975 to develop a candidate profile and launch a three-month nationwide recruitment effort, and after screening 65 applications, the Madison school board has narrowed its superintendent search down to two finalists. Dr. Jenifer Cheatham is chief of instruction for Chicago Public Schools, and Dr. Walter Milton, Jr., is superintendent of Springfield Public Schools in Illinois.Parents and community members will get a chance to meet both finalists at a forum at Monona Terrace starting at 5:45 p.m. Thursday night. But despite the exhaustive and expensive search, the finalists aren't without flaws.
Cheatham was appointed to her current post as chief of instruction in June of 2011 by Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, who has since resigned. According to her Chicago district bio, Cheatham's focus is improving urban school districts by "developing instructional alignment and coherence at every level of a school system aimed at achieving breakthrough results in student learning." Cheatham received a master's and doctorate in education from Harvard and began her career as an 8th grade English teacher. But she found herself in a harsh spotlight as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and district officials pushed for a contentious 7.5 hour school day last year, which became one of many big issues that led to the Chicago teachers strike in September.
"It was handled horribly in terms of how it was rolled out," says Chicago attorney Matt Farmer, who also blogs about Chicago school issues for The Huffington Post.
Farmer says pressure was mounting last spring for the district to explain how the longer day would work and how it would be paid for. Cheatham was sent to a community meeting he attended on the city's south side to explain the district's position.
Some of candidate Walter Milton Jr.'s history a surprise to School Board president
Madison School Board president James Howard said Monday he wasn't aware of some of the controversial aspects of Walter Milton Jr.'s history until after the board named him a finalist to be Madison's next superintendent.Steven Verburg: Jennifer Cheatham fought for big changes in Chicago schools:Prior to becoming superintendent in Springfield, Ill., Milton was criticized for hiring without a background check a colleague who had been convicted of child molestation in Georgia. The colleague, Julius B. Anthony, was forced to resign from a $110,000 job in Flint, Mich., after a background check uncovered the case, according to the Springfield State Journal-Register.
Milton and Anthony were former business partners and worked together in Fallsburg, N.Y., where Milton was superintendent before moving to Flint, according to news reports.
"Jennifer Cheatham will be the third person in the last two years from our administration who I've been a reference for who has taken over a fairly significant school district," Vitale said. "Chicago is a pretty good breeding place for leaders."Matthew DeFour:
A Springfield School District spokesman said Milton is declining interviews until a community forum in Madison on Thursday.School Board members want a superintendent with vision, passion and a thick hidePrior to Fallsburg, Milton was a teacher and principal in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. He received a bachelor's degree in African history and African-American studies from Albany State University, a master's degree in education from the State University of New York College at Brockport and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Buffalo.
Milton's contract in Springfield expires at the end of the 2013-14 school year. His current salary is $220,000 plus about $71,000 in benefits.
Madison School Board member Marj Passman says she was looking for superintendent candidates who have had experience working in contentious communities. "That's important, considering what we've gone through here," she told me Monday.What are the odds that the traditional governance approach will substantively address Madison's number one, long term challenge? Reading....And what Madison schools are going through now.
The Madison Metropolitan School District had scarcely released the names of the two finalist candidates -- Jennifer Cheatham, a top administrator in the Chicago Public School System and Walter Milton Jr., superintendent of the schools in Springfield, Ill. -- before the online background checks began and comments questioning the competency of the candidates were posted. So the new Madison superintendent has to be someone who can stand up to public scrutiny, Passman reasoned.
And the issues that provoked the combative debate of the last couple of years -- a race-based achievement gap and charter school proposal meant to address it that proved so divisive that former Superintendent Dan Nerad left the district -- remain unresolved.
So, Passman figured, any new superintendent would need experience working with diverse student populations. Both Cheatham and Milton fit that bill, Passman says.
Much more on the latest Madison Superintendent search, here along with a history of Madison Superintendent experiences, here.
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There's a new CREDO report (Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes) on how to identify high-performing charter schools and encourage their expansion. You can download either the Executive Summary or the full report here, ), but here's a few highlights:One big take-away: a charter school's first year is indicative of its long-term performance, and kids do better with historically-successful CMO's. There's little justification for not closing down a poorly-performing charter after the first couple of years.
- Charter schools don't tend to improve much over time. If a school is struggling in its first year or two, it's unlikely to duplicate the success of high-performing charter schools. "Based on the evidence, there appears to be no structural 'new school' phenomenon of wobbly performance for several years."
- This holds true for all schools, but especially for middle and high schools; i.e., if they're not getting it right from the get-go, then odds of turnarounds are not high. "Substantial improvement over time is largely absent from middle schools, multi-level schools and high schools. Only elementary schools show an upward pattern of growth if they start out in the lower two quintiles."
- Charter Management Organizations (CMO's), or groups of three or more charters run under one management, have a higher degree of success with minority and poor kids. "They produce stronger academic gains for students of color and student in poverty than those students would have realized either in traditional public schools (TPS) or in many categories what would have learned in independent charter schools."
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Providing more students with a variety of college choices is a good thing. But I'm beginning to wonder about the unintended consequences of policies that try to accomplish it.Take the case of Wisconsin, which shares a tuition reciprocity agreement with Minnesota. Many students, especially those living on the borders of the two states, and those who don't get a place in their flagship university, choose to attend college in the other state. That's very nice, of course, and very neighborly. And, according to the press, it helps the state attract "the best students." But every policy has its downsides, and in this case there may be several:
(1) It seems to nudge data reporting toward the uninformative. Since both Minnesota and Wisconsin are treated as residents for tuition purposes, the vast majority of official reporting from the state and the campuses combines the two groups. This makes it hard for the public to examine the characteristics of Wisconsin residents. For example, say in order to assess equality of educational opportunities you wanted to compare the % of Native Americans among Wisconsin residents statewide to the % of Native Americans among Wisconsin residents enrolled at UW-Madison. It's not in any publicly available report, since reports like these aggregate MN and WI students together. (Sure, this could be changed without altering the reciprocity agreement, but right now there seems no incentive to do it.)
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Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child's individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, "the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people." Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called "the principle and method of self-development" in the young.
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The Madison Metropolitan School District had scarcely released the names of the two finalist candidates -- Jennifer Cheatham, a top administrator in the Chicago Public School System and Walter Milton Jr., superintendent of the schools in Springfield, Ill. -- before the online background checks began and comments questioning the competency of the candidates were posted. So the new Madison superintendent has to be someone who can stand up to public scrutiny, Passman reasoned.Much more on Madison Superintendents past, present and future, here.And the issues that provoked the combative debate of the last couple of years -- a race-based achievement gap and charter school proposal meant to address it that proved so divisive that former Superintendent Dan Nerad left the district -- remain unresolved.
So, Passman figured, any new superintendent would need experience working with diverse student populations. Both Cheatham and Milton fit that bill, Passman says.Madison School Board members had 90-minute interviews with a pool of semifinalists before selecting Cheatham and Milton, and will interview them again on Thursday. The candidates also will appear at a public forum that starts at 5:45 p.m. Thursday at Monona Terrace Convention Center.
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Almost all fifth- through 12th-graders -- 95% -- say it is likely they will have a better life than their parents. However, in a separate Gallup poll, half of U.S. adults aged 18 and older say they doubt today's youth will have a better life than their parents.This hope divide might limit the support that adults are willing to give children to help them reach their full potential. Undoubtedly, some adults will be tempted to explain to children that there are economic and political circumstances in the world that children can't understand -- ones that make their future look less rosy. Adults might even point out that many children are fantasizing about a future that is out of their reach. These cautions are grounded in some wisdom, but they also might be associated with the pessimism adults have about our own future, our personal vulnerabilities, or our profound inability to predict the future.
To bridge the hope divide we have to do three things.
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A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded.These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But we should factor in another cause of receding economic equality: the decline of educational opportunity. There's a well-established correlation between a college degree and economic benefit. And for guidance on what helps students finish college and earn more income, we should consider the SAT, whose power to predict graduation rates is well documented. The way to score well on the SAT--at least on the verbal SAT--is to have a large vocabulary. As the eminent psychologist John Carroll once observed, the verbal SAT is essentially a vocabulary test.
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Last week, Senate Democrats lashed out at a Republican bill they said was intended to weaken the already enfeebled Office of the Secretary of State, currently held by Democrat Doug La Follette."It's directed to take the one Democrat elected to statewide office and cut him out of the legislative process," state Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, says of the legislation, which would remove the secretary of state's ability to delay the publication of a bill for up to 10 days after passage, as La Follette did following the controversial passage of Gov. Scott Walker's collective bargaining bill two years ago.
Technically, Risser is correct. The secretary of state, which Gov. Tommy Thompson long ago relegated to obscurity, is the only statewide office held by Democrats.
But while the superintendent of public instruction is technically a nonpartisan position, current Superintendent Tony Evers, like his predecessors for the past 30 years, is supported by Democratic-affiliated groups and has been an outspoken opponent of many of Walker's policies.
And unlike La Follette, Evers has a meaningful platform to influence one of the most important issues facing the state.
It's noteworthy, then, that Evers does not seem to be a significant target for conservatives, even though his lone challenger in the April 2 election for another four-year term is a GOP member of the Assembly: Don Pridemore.
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Language learning software is broken in terms of reaching its 'holy grail.' I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country.This is a problem worth solving. I read somewhere recently(if you find a link please message me) that the demand to learn English is so great in China that if they hired every US college student to teach English, they would not fulfill the demand.
There are some fundamental reasons why many of these software platforms fail at the attempt to reach the holy grail.
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Education will never be the same. The sooner we realize that and stop trying to resist the inevitable, the sooner we can find solutions to the obstacles we face. The main problem we face is the fact that people assume there is one problem: bad teachers, lack of funding, stupid students. Do people not realize there can be more than one problem?The Problems
Funding: One of the main problems facing education in general in the US is a lack of quality funding. Part of this problem stems from the fact that our society has decided that education is not as important as fighting wars against an ideology in countries that are not our own. Plenty of schools have a decent amount of funding, but they don't use it to the best of their abilities because they don't see any other problem. They see a lack of funding, blame that for the fact that their students are not learning, and continue to ask for more. Granted some schools don't get enough funding, and why they're not getting more is beyond me.
Teachers: We have plenty of good teachers, not enough great teachers, and too many bad teachers. Teachers unions believe that teaching is a right and that a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. This is just crap. Teaching is a privilege that has to be earned and a lot of teachers haven't earned it yet. Now teachers have a point on the fact that a meritocracy doesn't work. Using standardized test scores doesn't work because there are so many factors that play into a child's learning ability that the teacher has no control over. But that's not an excuse for having bad teachers.
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The Wheeler Report, via a Matthew DeFour Tweet:
Today, the Department of Administration (DOA) issued a Notice of Intent to Award letter for the Statewide Student Information System (SSIS) project. DOA issued the letter to Infinite Campus, Inc., which was the highest scoring proposer in the SSIS competitive Request for Proposal process. The state will now move into contract negotiations with Infinite Campus for the company to establish and maintain DPI's student information system for more than 440 school districts and non-district public charter schools in Wisconsin.many notes and links on Madison's challenges with Infinite Campus.Cari Anne Renlund of the DeWitt, Ross & Stevens Law Firm conducted an extensive observation of the procurement, evaluation and selection process of the SSIS. Her report concluded:
1) The SSIS procurement, evaluation and selection process was open, fair, impartial and objective, and consistent with the RFP criteria;
2) The State and the Evaluation Team carefully followed the statutory and regulatory requirements applicable to the procurement process;
3) All proposing vendors were afforded an equal opportunity to compete for the contract award; and
4) The procurement, evaluation and selection process satisfied the goals and objectives of Wisconsin's public contracting requirements.Further, Renlund stated the Request for Proposal (RFP) "was drafted to identify the best possible vendor for the job at the best possible price."
A few additional notes:
1. Wisconsin firm may challenge loss of statewide school data pact
A Stevens Point company providing school software to about half of Wisconsin's districts has lost a bid to become the supplier of a new statewide student-information system, and now it's moving to challenge the state's decision to go with a different vendor.The Wisconsin Department of Administration announced Friday that it intends to negotiate a contract with Minnesota's Infinite Campus Inc. to create a centralized K-12 student data system. In response, Stevens Point-based Skyward Inc. called the evaluation process "flawed," while some elected officials over the weekend urged the state to reconsider its decision.
The evaluation and selection process was already under heightened scrutiny after being paused and restarted in June, after it was discovered that Skyward had been offered tax breaks contingent on it winning the statewide contract.
Based in Blaine, Minn., Infinite Campus provides student data systems to about 10% of Wisconsin's districts, including Milwaukee-area districts such as Greenfield, Whitnall, Elmbrook and New Berlin.
Financial details of the emerging contract have not been made public, but $15 million was initially appropriated to launch the project. The overall cost to implement and maintain the system will likely be millions more than that.
The blanket K-12 student-information system for Wisconsin is important because it would allow the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to better track student and teacher information in and between districts and schools.
Currently, each district and independent public charter school chooses its own system to track and manage student data. The robustness of these systems can vary from place to place, and none are obligated to "talk" to each other.
For the DPI, the goal is to raise the level of student performance by collecting and then synthesizing common data from all schools on everything from enrollment and student absences to discipline records and test-score results.
A common system also could assign teachers a unique identifier, allowing for richer data about their records of performance.
2. Many school districts have successfully implemented complete student systems where parents can follow a course syllabus, all assignments, attendance, notes and grades. Madison has spent millions of dollars for a system that is at best partially implemented. What a waste.
3. Kurt Kiefer was instrumental in Madison's acquisition of Infinite Campus. Kurt is now with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. I like Kurt and was privileged to serve on a parent committee that evaluated student information systems. That said, I felt strongly then that no money should be spent on such systems if their use is not mandatory throughout the organization.
I wonder what sort of implementation strategies are part of this acquisition?
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Higher Education: A new study finds almost half of Americans with college degrees are working at jobs that don't require one. It's the latest example of how federal subsidies are creating a massive higher-education bubble.The study, by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, found that an incredible 48% of college graduates -- about 13 million of them -- hold jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. About 5 million have jobs that don't even require a high school diploma.
There are, for example, roughly a million sales clerks, 300,000 waiters and 100,000 janitors with college degrees.
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Research conducted by the Tennessee Department of Education shows teacher effectiveness is not related to either experience or advanced degrees, according to a presentation made to the State Board of Education this morning.The board was shown graphs using teacher evaluations as an effectiveness measurement and told the graphs show that the two attributes that usually add to teacher salaries -- years of experience and advanced degrees -- have no relationship to effectiveness. The research was created by a new internal research team in the department and was based on teacher evaluations for the 2011-12 school year.
The final results of those evaluations have not been released to the public.
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Substitute the word "conservative" for "liberal" and the paragraph reads like Diane Ravitch. Ms. Malkin proceeds to repeat various anti-Common Core assertions as facts-but are they facts? Having read that last bit about "standards that do anything but set the achievement bar high" I decided to put it to a straightforward empirical test.Kentucky was the earliest adopter of Common Core in 2012, and folks from the Department of Education sent some before and after statistics regarding 4th grade reading and math proficiency. I decided to compare them to NAEP, first 2011 KY state test and 2011 NAEP for 4th Grade Reading and Math. NAEP has four achievement levels: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. Kentucky also has four achievement levels: Novice, Apprentice, Proficient and Distinguished. The first figure compares "Proficient or Better" on both NAEP and the state test in 2011:
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Albert Shanker, New York Times, 1990:
"As we've known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process--or better yet become involved in it--productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits--history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned--it's no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review's authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it's time for us to take it seriously."Graphic via the Gallup Blog.
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Would you rather attend a local live concert with music performed by a fine, amateur orchestra, or listen to a masterful rendition of the same music recorded by a world-renowned musician? That was the question a colleague posed to me recently as we were debating the merits of online education.Conversations on the academic front have been running along several lines lately, one of them about the number of prestigious universities and colleges, including Stanford and MIT, involved in promising models for online education that could have worldwide impact. An expansion of this initiative by dozens of public universities in the US is now underway which would result in for-credit massive open online courses, or MOOCs, being offered to takers anywhere in the world. In a recent piece in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman waxes rhapsodic about the potential for such initiatives to have a global effect.
Meanwhile, here in the US parents and educators alike worry that the conventional model for higher education is vastly overpriced. Critics argue that the liberal arts model may be an expensive anachronism, and others observe that the lives of entrepreneurial heroes such as Steve Jobs suggest that accomplished and creative high school students may be better off avoiding formal post-secondary school studies altogether.
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10th Annual Educational Policy Studies Conference
Madison, Wisconsin
March 21-22, 2013
All events in Room 159 of the Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall, UW-MadisonFREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Thursday, March 21, 2013
8:30-10:00AM: Public Discourse on American Education
Michael Apple, Curriculum & Instruction & EPS, UW-Madison
Nancy Kendall, EPS, UW-Madison
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Curriculum & Instruction & EPS, UW-Madison
Chair: Bill Reese, EPS & History, UW-Madison
10:15-11:45 AM: Race/Ethnicity and the Evolution of U.S. Public Education
Jack Dougherty, Trinity College
Adrienne Dixon, University of Illinois-Chicago
Michael Fultz, EPS, UW-Madison
Chair: TBA
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The Madison Metropolitan School District has chosen the two finalists for the superintendent position, it was announced Sunday in a press release.Much more on Madison Superintendents.The two finalists are Dr. Jennifer Cheatham, chief of instruction at Chicago Public Schools, and Dr. Walter Milton, Jr., superintendent of Springfield (Ill.) Public Schools.
The public is invited to a public forum Thursday, Feb. 7 at 5:45 p.m. at the Monona Terrace to meet and ask questions of the two candidates. If you cannot attend the forum, you can email your comments or questions to board@madison.k12.wi.us.
A recent look at Madison Superintendent hires.
UPDATE: Samara Kalk Derby:
According to Cheatham's biography on the Chicago Public Schools website, her focus is on "systemic improvement in urban school districts" and her expertise "lies in developing instructional alignment and coherence at every level of a school system aimed at achieving breakthrough results in student learning."She has worked as a Chief Area Officer for Chicago Public Schools and the executive director of Curriculum and Instruction for San Diego City Schools, the biography said. She has a bachelor's degree in English from DePaul University, a master's in education from the University of Michigan, and a master's and doctorate in education from Harvard University.
According to a personal website promoting his book, "Me in the Making: One Man's Journey to Becoming a School Superintendent," Milton is a native of Rochester, N.Y., who earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Albany and a master's from SUNY College at Brockport. He took post-graduate courses at the University of Rochester to receive his administrative certifications, including his superintendent's license. He holds a doctorate of education in leadership and policy from the University of Buffalo. He has also been a teacher and principal.
Google News on Springfield Superintendent Walter Milton.
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MEMPHIS -- In the end, it was a pink baseball cap that revealed an audacious test-cheating scheme in three Southern states that spanned at least 15 years.Test proctors at Arkansas State University spotted a woman wearing the cap while taking a national teacher certification exam under one name on a morning in June 2009 and then under another name that afternoon. A supervisor soon discovered that at least two other impersonators had registered for tests that day.
Ensuing investigations ultimately led to Clarence D. Mumford Sr., 59, who pleaded guilty on Friday to charges that accused him of being the cheating ring's mastermind during a 23-year career in Memphis as a teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor.
Federal prosecutors had indicted him on 63 counts, including mail and wire fraud and identify theft. They said he doctored driver's licenses, pressured teachers to lie to the authorities and collected at least $125,000 from teachers and prospective teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee who feared that they could not pass the certification exams on their own.
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I've had a hallucination hanging around in my head the last few weeks. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic if I vent it here. Keep in mind that this is just a hallucination.But what if . . .
. . . what if Mayor Tom Barrett called all the key education players together. In my hallucination, it's Barrett because, dammit, he's the mayor. One huge problem we have is that there is no one person who is responsible for the whole enterprise of education in Milwaukee. Instead, we've had a generation of schisms and division over MPS, voucher schools and charter schools when unity could help bring quality. So who could be the convener for a summit meeting, the agent to push unity? Scott Walker? No one thinks "convener" when they think of him. Barrett has never had much of an education role or platform, so at least he's kind of neutral. And, dammit, he's the mayor. Oh, I said that already.
. . . what if Barrett told everyone: Make yourself comfortable. He has an unlimited budget to order in pizza. (One person I mentioned this to asked for a low-carb option. Granted.) He'll even bring in pillows and blankets, if needed. But no one is leaving the room until everyone agrees on an outline for a new way to run the school scene in Milwaukee.
. . . what if everyone agreed (maybe with help from the bold, visionary, and even intimidating work of the mayor) on a few basic points: (1) Schools need to be fairly and adequately funded. All schools. (2) The fighting between the streams of schools has to stop because, dammit, it's been so counterproductive and this is reality - the voucher and charter schools are here to stay, whatever you think of them philosophically. (3) Most important, quality is what it's all going to focus on as we go forward. We're going to create systems in which schools that get good results flourish and increase and schools that don't get good results have to improve their ways or leave the scene.
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AN ODDITY has hidden for nearly a century in a dusty bowl just east of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Deep Springs is a two-year college and, also, a cattle-and-alfalfa ranch. Its 26 students share duties irrigating fields and riding the herd, but also fixing boilers and scrubbing pots, alongside reading Nietzsche and swotting at their maths problems. They pay no tuition fees, and most finish their bachelor's degrees at Harvard, Yale and the like.And they are all male. The college has admitted no women as regular students since it was founded in 1917, in accordance with a trust established by Lucien Nunn, the tycoon who founded it as a place "for promising young men". The atmosphere is intellectual, rugged and ascetic, and the college is a democratic body, where student-led committees decide admissions, hire the faculty and mind most matters of policy.
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MUCH is being written about the preposterously high cost of college. The median inflation-adjusted household income fell by 7 percent between 2006 and 2011, while the average real tuition at public four-year colleges increased over that period by over 18 percent. Meanwhile, the average tuition for just one year at a four-year private university in 2011 was almost $33,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. College tuition has increased at twice the rate of health care costs over the past 25 years.Ballooning student loan debt, an impending college bubble, and a return on the bachelor's degree that is flat or falling: all these things scream out for entrepreneurial solutions.
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The Conservative MP Liz Truss, like so many in public policy, has noticed that childcare is unaffordable - families in the UK spend nearly a third of their income on it; more than anyone else in the world.Truss is unique, I think, in identifying the problem as over-regulation - specifically, she thinks the current adult-to-child ratios are too stringent. In her plan, one adult would be able to care for six two-year-olds (at the moment it's four). This would force up wages (apparently), and professionalise the role of childcare - which process, incidentally, would be shored up by new requirements, including C grades in maths and English GCSEs.
Opinion gathered along party lines - rightwing thinktanks and blogs hailed this as Truss's "moment"; lefties said she was barking. Ah, the smell of Napisan in the morning, I love it. But did anybody test-drive her theory for her, even in its planning stage? I do not think they did.
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The Madison School District may discontinue its dual-language immersion program at Chavez Elementary because of a lack of Spanish-speaking families interested in the program.Superintendent Jane Belmore said Thursday the district is reviewing several options and no decisions have been made. Other district schools that offer dual-language classes, which provide instruction to native and non-native English speakers in a mix of Spanish and English, are not affected, she said.
"It's a problem that we haven't had in other attendance areas because we've always had enough Spanish speakers," Belmore said. "To really have a thriving program, you need half and half."
School Board president James Howard said the board already plans to review the program in coming months because of a shortage of Spanish-speaking teachers.
"We just need to step back and have a conversation about where the program is and where it's headed," Howard said. "Do we need to slow down a bit?"
The district's program started at the Nuestro Mundo charter school in 2004. It has since expanded to Chavez, Glendale, Leopold, Midvale and Sandburg elementaries and Sennett Middle School, with plans to expand it to Lincoln Elementary and Cherokee, Sherman and Toki middle schools.
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Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:
Dear Colleagues and Friends:The citizens of Washington State need your help in defending the principle of open government.
Last week, I wrote an article for my blog "Betrayed" about how the board of Spokane Public Schools is again attempting to modify the Public Records Act in ways that would undermine the Act for citizens across the entire State of Washington. That article is found here: http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/p/by-laurie-h.html
One of the bills introduced this year regarding the Public Records Act is HB 1128, a bill that would essentially gut the Public Records Act for citizens and whistleblowers. HB 1128 would make it nearly impossible to obtain records that agencies do not want to release. It was theoretically written to protect and defend public agencies against abusive records requesters; it was not written to protect or defend citizens against abusive agencies.
On Jan. 25, HB 1128 was discussed in a legislative hearing. All of the pro-HB 1128 arguments were made by public officials, including Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke. Nearly all complained about vindictive behavior by former public employees. Meanwhile, all arguments made in opposition to HB 1128 were made by non-government people who spoke up for the principle of open government and the right of citizens to hold their government agencies accountable.
Legislators wisely elected to revisit the language of HB 1128, so we have a brief opportunity to influence this process. I've written an analysis of HB 1128, which I've pasted below and attached in a PDF file. You will see that the impact of HB 1128 would be devastating for open-government in Washington State and for all citizens. I also have serious worries about future bills regarding the Public Records Act.
All comments and suggestions are welcome. You also are welcome to quote or forward this email and the analysis as you wish.
If the language in any new legislation regarding the Public Records Act and other open-government laws doesn't protect the rights of citizens and whistleblowers, I guarantee that language will be used against us. Please help us to maintain open government in Washington State. Please ask your legislators, your friends and your colleagues to stand up against HB 1128, against the language in HB 1128, and against any other bills that would negatively affect the principle of open government in this state.
There are other ways to accomplish what the authors of HB 1128 intended. Tim Ford, the open-government ombudsman in the Attorney General's Office, would be a great point of contact on how to do it.
Thank you for your help. Please see the analysis below or attached.
Laurie Rogers
Spokane, WA
wlroge@comcast.net
An analysis of HB 1128, Washington State, regarding the Public Records ActSeveral eloquent arguments were made on both sides in the Jan. 25 legislative testimony over HB 1128.
Legislators wisely elected to revisit the language, so we have a brief opportunity to affect how the bill is worded, if changes to the Public Records Act are indeed deemed to be necessary.I'm not well versed on bill writing, but I'm intimately acquainted with what can happen when a public agency is allowed to re-interpret the Public Records Act at will. If a bill must be passed, it must also protect ordinary citizens and whistleblowers. Following are issues I see with HB 1128, based on my experiences and on some of the testimony given before the legislature.
Premise: Terms and rules must be clearly stated and narrowly defined so that all citizens - including the "least among us" - are treated equally and fairly under the law.
Problem: The language in HB 1128 is subjective, allowing public agencies to decide for themselves what constitutes an "undue burden."
Potential problem: Some have suggested different rules for favored people.· The terms of HB 1128 are vague and allow agencies to unilaterally decide what is meant by "harass," "intimidate," "punish," "undue burden" and "retaliation." Agencies also will be able to interpret and apply the law independently of another agency. For example, one county may decide that a request is reasonable and fill it for the requester, while another county may decide the request is unreasonable and file for an injunction.
o Where is the definition of the line between "persistence" and "harassment"?
o If a citizen seeks a large amount of data, is that automatically an undue burden?
o If a citizen works for years to hold an official accountable, is that "punishing," "threatening" or "intimidating"?
· All terms must be clearly and narrowly defined IN the legislation, allowing courts to appropriately enforce the law. Otherwise, the law could be applied unevenly or with bias.
· Clear definitions of terms also are necessary to protect citizens. Otherwise, well-intentioned citizens won't know where the line is between "persistence" and "harassment."
· A public official who testified for HB 1128 said exemptions to HB 1128 can be made for the media. A Spokane official said no one wants to upset the media so they'll all go way out of their way for the media.
The media's access to public documents must be protected, but not via a special exemption. Access to records is a citizen right and must be extended equally to all.
Premise: No bill should be written that allows agencies to deny records at will to citizens.
Problem: HB 1128 would allow agencies to deny records at will to citizens.· An ability to file for injunctions is easily abused.
Agencies could choose to file as a way to put off requesters, betting that most would give up, be unable to hire an attorney, run out of money, or be intimidated away from the request before it's filled. Public agencies are not limited by having to spend their own money; they have lawyers on staff or retainer who are paid for by taxpayers.
· An ability to limit the time spent on requests each month also is easily abused, as is the ability to prioritize (without a time limit).
An agency could simply never find the time to fill problematic requests - especially those for records suggesting malfeasance. Agencies can easily "make work" for themselves, overestimate the time it will take to fulfill the requests, repeatedly ask "for clarification" from requesters and purposefully increase the time they must spend on requests. All of this is without oversight by an independent person or agency.
· A public official who testified for HB 1128 acknowledged that her example wasn't actually abusive. "It was just time-consuming." Under HB 1128, other "time-consuming" or problematic PRRs likely would receive the "injunctive-relief" solution.
Premise: Any legislation must be written to protect the interests of agencies and citizens, including the "least among us."
Problem: HB 1128 is written to protect agencies, and it's based on assumptions about agencies that aren't universally true:· The entire premise of HB 1128 rests on a rosy assumption that governmental agencies want us to know what they're doing with our money. Citizens are supposed to blindly trust in agencies they might be investigating.
· Theoretically, HB 1128 was written to protect agencies from abusive citizens. There is nothing in it to protect citizens or whistleblowers from abusive agencies.
A person who testified for HB 1128 gave an example of "wonderful" records requests that asked for class names for reunions. Obviously, that isn't what's at stake here.
· Proponents of HB 1128 said they have implemented "safeguards" for citizens. However, as Rowland Thompson, Allied Daily Newspapers, noted, the first section of HB 1128 is all about what happens AFTER the courts are called in.
o Giving citizens a "notice" of legal action is not a "safeguard." (To mix a metaphor, it's like closing the barn door after the lawyer is hired.)
o "Continuing to fill the request" while the court weighs an injunction is not a "safeguard." The agency's goal obviously is to not fulfill the request. (And it wouldn't have to, considering the mere five hours per month it would be required to spend on PRRs.)
o "40 years of case law being on the side of requesters" is not a "safeguard." It's fake reassurance. If an agency didn't believe the court would find in its favor, why would it file for an injunction? And once a motion for an injunction is filed, it's no longer a fair fight. Taxpayer money will be used by agencies to argue that requests should not be filled. Requesters who are not attorneys cannot possibly hope to know court procedures, court rules and brief writing. They will have to hire an attorney. The average citizen who faces a motion for an injunction will find himself in a David versus Goliath situation.
· HB 1128 could be used to attack, punish and intimidate requesters who are trying to hold an agency accountable.
Prior to any determination by the court, a requester would have to pay for a lawyer to defend the records request. That alone could easily bankrupt most citizens.
· HB 1128 could be used to threaten defamation of character.
Citizens could be determined to be threatening, harassing or retaliatory, in a court of law, in an official public record. Because of HB 1128's option of a "summary proceeding," that determination could be made without citizens being present (and able to defend themselves). Citizens would have to appeal, again paying for a lawyer. Even if citizens won an appeal, their reputation is unlikely to be restored. How would a determination like that follow a citizen through life? And ultimately, there would be no penalties for the refusal to provide records. How many citizens would pursue this?
· HB 1128 raises constitutional issues.
Citizens are constitutionally guaranteed the right to petition their government for a redress of grievances (noted by Bill Will, Washington Newspaper Publishers Association). This constitutional right is infringed upon by HB 1128.
· Briahna Taylor, Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs, "specializes in advocating for cities, counties, and other local governments to the Washington State Legislature and Executive Branch." (bolding is mine). Her interests are clearly seen:
o in her two supposed "safeguards" of a) providing notice to requesters and b) supposedly continuing to fulfill requests while legal action is taken
o in claiming counties wouldn't engage in frivolous injunctions and do not want citizens to have to go to court,
o in reassuring us that courts have traditionally favored requesters in lawsuits
o in saying requesters could submit a "statement of purpose" on why they want the records so courts could see if the requesters have a "legitimate purpose."
Her argumentation is not supported by logic, by the evidence, or by the obvious interests of the public agencies. In addition, agencies don't spend their personal money. The legal consequences of an agency's inappropriate use of legal action are rarely personal to public officials. I've already seen how readily officials will spend taxpayer dollars on legal action against taxpayers.
· HB 1128 does not eliminate citizens' right to maintain anonymity, however anonymity would be more difficult (and expensive) to maintain under HB 1128.
The option of anonymity must be protected. One public official who spoke for HB 1128 said the agency puts online all of the PRRs they receive, noting the time spent on each. That action is inherently intimidating. The agency has carte blanche to calculate its own time. Agencies can easily inflate their estimate of the time they'll spend. Assigning requests to an inept, corrupt or inexperienced person in the agency can significantly add to it. Meanwhile, requesters have no opportunity to defend or explain themselves.
· Current PRA law doesn't allow agencies to ask requesters why they want records. HB 1128, however, says a requester's "statement of intent" could be weighed in determining whether a request is abusive.
If a requester refuses to be identified or to offer such a statement to a court, could that refusal weigh against him? What if the requester suspects that fraud or wrongdoing is taking place in an agency? If the requester publicly states this, it could be defamatory and subject to civil action.
· HB 1128 could allow courts to make decisions on the basis of one point of view - the agency's.
Even well-intentioned courts won't know the background or context of a records request. To understand and make a judgment on whether a requester is "well-intentioned," they must hear from the requester. But HB 1128 allows agencies to move for summary judgment, which means requesters must argue their case in writing to the judge, or hire someone to do it. Even if the requester is permitted to appear in court, the requester is now identified and must explain in a courtroom - in front of the agency - the context and background. (Anonymous requesters must hire and pay for a proxy.) Going back to the need to protect "the least among us," not all citizens are able or willing to articulate their thoughts in front of a judge.
· HB 1128 essentially eliminates consequences to agencies for operating in bad faith.
Under HB 1128, if an agency loses its motion for an injunction, the requester still has no financial remedy. Even if a governmental agency files for an injunction in an effort to intimidate a requester or to hide vital information from the public - there is no penalty under HB 1128.
· HB 1128 asks courts to make decisions about a requester's intent based on what might be flimsy evidence.
As every lawyer knows, establishing "intent" can be difficult. Rowland Thompson wondered how "nefarious intent" is determined simply by a person asking for records. (Establishment of intent is even harder if the citizen isn't invited to testify.) The process could easily become a railroading.
Premise: Legislation should be workable for all citizens.
Problem: HB 1128 is not workable for citizens. Its net effect is to de facto eliminate the PRA for most.· HB 1128 forces certain requesters to hire an attorney. That eliminates the PRA for most citizens. Meanwhile, public agencies can use publicly funded lawyers and a bottomless pit of taxpayer dollars to defeat public records requests.
· A pro-HB 1128 speaker suggested using "discovery law" as a solution. This also requires a lawyer (and could be used to intimidate requesters).
· HB 1128 eliminates penalties, regardless of the outcome. That spells the end of lawyers taking a case on contingency. It also means no consequence to agencies for operating in bad faith.
· HB 1128 gives citizens a chance to modify the request, but agencies can still file for an injunction, and without further notice.
Citizen requesters don't always know how to ask for things, and there isn't a lot of help out there. We must muddle through it. In Spokane, a requester (who has filed a single request with the agency) was publicly deemed to be abusive. Another requester, new to the process, was publicly attacked before she ever had a chance to modify her request. The agency did not want to fill those requests, and as of this date, a year later, hasn't.
· A pro-HB 1128 person said this bill "allows people to go to court." Oh, yay.
No citizen wants to go to court. Few have the time to do it, the knowledge, or the money for a lawyer. Only people who spend their days in court, or who regularly deal with publicly funded lawyers, see legal intervention as the "go-to" option for citizens. And the courts are overwhelmed with cases. Funding for the courts has not increased much in recent years. In fact, programs for the very needy have been cut. Judges will tell you that dealing with individuals who represent themselves significantly increases the burden on the courts.· James McMahan, Washington Association of County Officials, said HB 1128 would simply allow agencies to "ask for an outside opinion."
Seriously? Courts don't issue advisory opinions. The courts are used to determine actual controversies and are adversarial. The more one has to spend on lawyers, the more likely it is that the client will win the case. Having an advisory opinion is an excellent idea, but that is done more efficiently and less expensively by expanding the authority of the Open Government Ombudsman, Tim Ford, for the Attorney General, or Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government. Do citizens go to court to ask for an outside opinion? Do we force others to cough up thousands of dollars to defend themselves, just so we can get an outside opinion? The argument is silly and without any merit.
Other thoughts:
· A pro-HB 1128 speaker mentioned a "safe harbor component." I'm not sure if he meant that to apply to agencies or the public. It certainly isn't applied in the bill on behalf of citizens.· Tim Blanchard, lawyer, said, "Sometimes you have to ask for all of something to know what there was." He said just because we might ask for a lot of things, or are considered to be a "serial requester," that doesn't mean we aren't "well-intentioned."
· A pro-HB 1128 comment was that resources were being diverted away from "doing the work the agency is there to do." But part of the agency's work is to provide records to the public when asked to do so.
· Another pro-HB 1128 comment was that PRRs negatively affect students and teaching. How do PRRs do that? (Are students being yanked out of class to go through records?)
· Almost all of the public records requests problems cited on Jan. 25 were because of former employees. Perhaps a fix is in there somewhere.
· The Public Records Act already contains 500 or so exemptions to disclosure. Rowland Thompson said: "It isn't like we haven't thought about these things ... We've been doing this for 40 years. It's a statute that some will say is long in the tooth, but others will say it has been perfected gradually over time by committees like this ... There are all sorts of other reasons that people need these records, and why they're available anonymously, so that the least among us can keep track of agencies and be able to take on their government pro se ..." He said it can be more expensive for agencies to disallow overly broad requests than to allow them.
· Protective mechanisms are already in place for agencies: "Triaging" requests; placing records online; and the "rolling disclosure" option. Options can be clarified and improved without limiting the Public Records Act for citizens.
· Perhaps records requests should be contracted out to organizations and people who aren't beholden to the agencies.
Rowland Thompson said the number of public records is growing exponentially. He's correct. National databases now gather everything on everyone, shipping it between states and agencies and between governments and corporations. It's alarming, on the face of it, but also in its implications for the PRA. Agencies will continue to seek relief from the PRA until they're finally free of it. We must develop a long-term, workable solution so we don't have to debate this every year.As technology has provided agencies with a problem, it also can provide the solution. The tech industry -always up for a lucrative challenge - can develop ways to gather records more efficiently than is currently done. Additionally, Tim Ford, open-government ombudsman for the Attorney General, and Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, can offer suggestions and recommendations for protecting agencies while still protecting citizen rights. Expanding the authority of the Ombudsman would be a tremendous first step. Theoretically, the Ombudsman is beholden to no one.
If the PRA is to be modified, it must be strengthened on behalf of the people for whom it was passed. Currently, there is little help for whistleblowers, little enforcement ability, insufficient funding, and almost nowhere for a citizen to go for explanations or guidance. The Open Government Ombudsman, first hired by Rob McKenna, has valuable information on the Attorney General's Web site. He is helpful, but his office is underfunded and it has extremely limited authority. Unless this changes, requesters are on their own. Agencies and their lawyers can stonewall requesters. Agencies and their lawyers can (and do) interpret the laws in ways that favor the agencies. The Public Records Act can be made clearer, easier to access, and easier to enforce. That would benefit everyone, including the agencies.
For decades, this Act has been a practical and symbolic representation of Washington State's commitment to open government. It's been a fine example for the rest of the country. We have an opportunity to strengthen it, and thus strengthen open government in Washington State.
Ultimately, any change to the Public Records Act must also protect whistleblowers and other citizens, or I guarantee to you, that change will be used against us.
Laurie H. Rogers
P.O. Box 48151
Spokane, WA 99228
wlroge@comcast.net
509-468-0402
509-599-0913 (cell)
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A proposal by the Prince George's County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual.Orwellian.The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.
"There is something inherently wrong with that," David Cahn, an education activist who regularly attends county school board meetings, said before the board's vote to consider the policy. "There are better ways to do this than to take away a person's rights."
If the policy is approved, the county would become the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the school board assumes ownership of work done by the school system's staff and students.
David Rein, a lawyer and adjunct law professor who teaches intellectual property at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, said he had never heard of a local school board enacting a policy allowing it to hold the copyright for a student's work.
Related: Aaron Swartz:
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by federal authorities in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR.[8][9] Swartz opposed JSTOR's practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR's fees were limiting public access to academic work that was being supported by public funding.[10][11]
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Frederick Hess & Andrew Kelly:
he Obama administration's first term was marked by a blast furnace of efforts to reform K-12 schooling. Fueled by billions in borrowed stimulus dollars, and building on the expansive precedents set forth by the George W. Bush administration with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Obama's Department of Education launched several novel, high-profile efforts. These included the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition, the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund, and the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program. The administration also made headlines with its waiver process, which permitted states to opt out of NCLB if they embraced administration priorities, and its controversial efforts to promote the Common Core State Standards in reading and math.Despite the current partisan political climate, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have received kudos from across the political spectrum. Even conservative voices like New York Times columnist David Brooks and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal have heaped praise on Race to the Top, the administration's signature initiative, with Brooks calling the program a "quiet revolution."[1] More recently, journalist Thomas Friedman, after taking stock of Arne Duncan's ability to diplomatically navigate the school reform and teacher union communities, gushed that Duncan should become the next secretary of state.[2]
As the administration embarks on a second term, Duncan has made clear that he hopes to be equally aggressive in the next four years. It is an open question whether that will even be possible. Absent the one-time splurge of stimulus dollars, and with the heavy lift of encouraging responsible implementation of first-term initiatives, Duncan may not have the funds or political resources to mount anything like the first-term effort. Political controversy around the Common Core and NCLB waivers will make a repeat performance even less likely.
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Madison Superintendent Jane Belmore (300K PDF):
Mental Health touches all of us. We pay tremendous immediate and long-term costs when students' mental health needs are not met. It was with this awareness that the Board of Education directed former Superintendent Nerad in Spring 2011 to form a Task Force charged with developing a set of recommendations for a comprehensive, integrated and culturally-informed school-linked system of mental health practices and supports for MMSD students. A group of 35-40 representatives from a wide variety of community stakeholders including MMSD, HMOs, non-profit mental health agencies, law enforcement, city and county government, advocacy agencies and parents was invited to engage in this important work.The work of the Task Force was initially facilitated by Superintendent Nerad and Scott Strong, Executive Director of Community Partnerships. Steve Hartley served in the co-facilitator role with Scott Strong upon Dr. Nerad's departure. Staff in the Department of Student Services served as 'staff' to the committee and provided the structures and processes to keep the group moving forward toward its goals. The Task Force met on a monthly basis from January 2012 through January 2013, working both in a large group as well as in subgroups in the focused areas of Organization and Policy, Education and Outreach, Direct Services and Access and Individualized Care. The preliminary recommendations and consensus regarding priorities were completed in January 2013 and are contained in the attached document entitled: "School Community Plan to Support Children's Mental Health".
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Jane Belmore (PDF):
Superintendent Jane Belmore (4MB PDF):
The Building Our Future plan provides direction for improving student achievement and district accountability. The plan identifies specific strategies and corresponding measures to meet the four overarching priorities of the district. The measures provide data to monitor progress towards improvement.
The key reason to include district and program measures in this report is to make sure that the Building Our Future plan is contributing to closing achievement gaps. Each program and initiative in Building Our Future is based on extensive research and planning. However, it is important to connect these initiatives to tangible outcomes. Tracking these measures helps increase accountability, allocate resources effectively and efficiently, and continuously improve our efforts to educate all students.District Priorities: MMSD Management Team identified overarching district priorities in the areas of Attendance, Behavior, Growth and Achievement. The rationale for these priorities is based on the following theory of action:
When our teachers apply strong, explicit teaching skills within an aligned multi-tiered system of instruction and support, and students attend school regularly with behavior that positively impacts their learning and the learning environment, then students will show academic achievement, and social and emotional growth and gaps in learning and achievement will close.
This report outlines 2011-12 progress indicators for each of these priorities and includes historical data when appropriate.
Strategies: Each initiative in Building Our Future is outlined in the report, including a narrative description, the alignment to district priorities, the primary contact(s), action steps, and objectives with annual progress measures. When available, data from 2011- 12 on key progress indicators is included, along with relevant history for comparison. The approved 2012-13 budget for each strategy will also be integrated into the report to help contextualize how MMSD will allocate resources for this initiative moving forward.
Goal setting: This update includes a discussion on the methods used to set goals associated with each strategy. These are described in Attachment 3 and use literacy goals for Chapter 1, Strategy #1 as an example.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. via a kind Jeannie Bettner email (PDF):
In response to the demands of MTI members seeking further clarification regarding the District's enforcement of Board Policy 4221 - Use of Restraint and Seclusion - Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore provided a memo defining restraint and providing guidance about appropriate instances of incidental or brief physical contact with students while carrying out one's duties. The Superintendent also clarified that, "Physical restraint is NOT briefly touching or holding a pupil's hand, arm, shoulder or back to calm, comfort or redirect the pupil."While MTI continues to encourage staff to be cautious when redirecting students using any physical prompts, Belmore's clarification is welcome. The District is in the process of providing training to staff relative to the appropriate use of physical restraint and seclusion, within the meaning of applicable Wisconsin Statutes.
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The challenger in the spring election for state superintendent of public instruction is calling on school districts to post volunteer security guards in schools to protect student safety.Rep. Don Pridemore, R-Erin, issued a statement Thursday saying school boards "should be given the freedom to hire a competent, well-trained school official or employee who is experienced with applying force whenever force is required." He said retired or on-duty police officers would be preferred.
Many school districts already contract with local police departments to assign police officers to schools. Madison has a police officer assigned to each of its high schools.
Pridemore said the most cost-effective approach would be for districts to ask qualified, retired volunteers from their community to patrol.
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Fourth-quarter drives--even the most impressive--are often not enough to alter game outcomes. So it is with educational interventions: Getting students on track by third grade (and keeping them there) yields greater long-term results than high school interventions. However, this paper from two Dartmouth and UC Davis professors argues that certain late-game pushes can help college-going and college-persistence rates for some K-12 pupils. Analysts targeted "college-ready" high school seniors in twelve large New Hampshire high schools who had shown interest in college but had made little to no progress on their applications (guidance counselors helped ID these students). They randomly assigned about half of these students to receive targeted college coaching, meaning college-application mentoring from a Dartmouth student, money to cover application fees and ACT/SAT exams, and a $100 bonus if they completed the application and filing process
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California Gov. Jerry Brown smacked state and federal education policy in his State of the State Address Thursday, calling for more local control of school issues and saying, "I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work - lighting fires in young minds."He proposed a new local control funding formula that would distribute supplemental monies to school districts "based on the real world problems they face."
"Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice," he said.
Here's what he said on education:
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On the domestic front, Gates expects his foundation to devote increasing resources to ranking colleges not by how selective or prestigious they are -- the infamous U.S. News and World Report model, which Gates called a "perverse metric" -- but on how aggressively they recruit underperforming students, provide them with a rigorous education, and then place them in remunerative careers. Real success in higher education, Gates, said, would mean accepting a student with "a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they're super happy." He also hopes to rank teachers' colleges according to how well their graduates perform in the classroom, but warned that real "excellence" in teacher education is probably a long way off.One of Gates' most controversial priorities has been his attempt to encourage school districts and states to tie teacher evaluation and pay to evidence of student learning. Through the federal Race to the Top education grant competition, the Obama administration adopted this agenda, and now 33 states have passed laws overhauling the way public school teachers are evaluated.
The devil, Gates freely admits, is in the details. In his 2013 "annual letter" about his philanthropic work, released yesterday, Gates praised the Eagle County school district in Colorado, which abolished seniority-based pay and instead rewards teachers by grading them during intensive classroom observations and by factoring in their students' scores on standardized tests in math, reading, and science. Teachers of other subjects are exempted from many of the test-score based components of this system. But Eagle County's program could be seriously upended by SB191, the law Colorado passed three years ago in response to Race to the Top. The bill requires that every Colorado teacher -- even those in currently non-tested subjects, like art and music -- be evaluated according to individual students' achievement metrics. Pencil-and-paper tests are unlikely to be the best way to measure student learning in non-traditional subjects. But because tests are "cheap," as Gates puts it, some states and districts are extending them to music, art, and even gym classes.
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McShane's point is one I heard Howard Fuller, former MPS school board member John Gardner, and others make many years ago. It's a point that initially attracted me to the cause of education reform in Milwaukee. However, it's also a difficult point to make sense of if you are not familiar with Milwaukee's education system.Consider the experience of Teach for America. Naturally when they came to town they were only interested in public schools (defined as MPS and charter), because their mission is to serve primarily low-income children. However, when MPS layoffs left many of their teachers searching for a school they discovered that Milwaukee private schools, by virtue of their participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), serve an overwhelmingly low-income population. Today many Teach for America teachers are placed in private Milwaukee public schools.
So what are the differences between MPS and the charter and choice sectors? In recent op-ed a wide group of Milwaukee advocates argued that "MPS is the only educational institution in this city that has the capacity, commitment and legal obligation to serve all of Milwaukee's children."
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North Carolinians might have seen this coming when they elected Patrick McCrory governor in November. He's a Republican and the second half of his name is "Rick," and these days -- with Rick Scott in Florida and Rick Perry in Texas -- that tends to mean criticism of the liberal arts and flagship universities.On a national radio program Tuesday morning, McCrory, who goes by Pat, said he would push legislation to base funding for the state's public colleges and universities on post-graduate employment rather than enrollment.
"I'm looking at legislation right now - in fact, I just instructed my staff yesterday to go ahead and develop legislation - which would change the basic formula in how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges," McCrory told radio host Bill Bennett, who was education secretary under President Reagan. "It's not based on butts in seats but on how many of those butts can get jobs."The Republican governor also called into question the value of publicly supporting liberal arts majors after the host made a joke about gender studies courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. "If you want to take gender studies that's fine, go to a private school and take it," McCrory told the radio host. "But I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job."
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