Jim Zellmer – Page 352 – School Information System

Abolish the U.S. Department of Education? Seriously?

We all owe Stella Lohmann of Atlanta, Georgia thanks. Ms. Lohmann is the substitute teacher who via video asked GOP candidates in last night’s debate:

What as president would you seriously do about what I consider a massive overreach of big government into the classroom?

Prior to asking the question, Ms. Lohmann offered some important context to show her credibility:

I’ve taught in both public and private schools, and now as a substitute teacher I see administrators more focused on satisfying federal mandates, retaining funding, trying not to get sued, while the teachers are jumping through hoops trying to serve up a one-size-fits-all education for their students.

Next time I visit Georgia, I would not mind shaking Ms. Lohmann’s hand for posing such an interesting and illuminating, albeit extremely loaded, question.

Then I would ask whether she happens to be the same blogger and communications consultant found at stellalohmann.com wearing a “Freedom Czar” baseball hat. And how Fox happened to find her?

Book Review: School Blues

The Economist:

THOMAS NAGEL, an American philosopher, wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Ian Anderson, a Scot who performs with the band Jethro Tull, sang of a slightly less intractable difficulty: “wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.” In “School Blues” Daniel Pennac, a prize-winning French writer, describes what faces a school dunce when the teacher before him cannot recall what it felt like to be ignorant.
Mr Pennac was once such a child (he uses the French cancre, as in Cancer, the crab: a creature that scuttles sideways instead of advancing forwards). But despite becoming a teacher, he can remember what it was like not to understand lessons. The voices in his head remind him of it. They taunt him throughout his semi-autobiographical novel, which partially traces his sorry academic career as the child of high-achieving parents whose three older brothers excelled at school. Luckily for him, his parents did not let him flee the system but instead persisted in finding a teacher who would help him to succeed. The breakthrough came aged 14 when his latest tutor–“no doubt amazed by my increasingly inventive excuses as to why I hadn’t done my homework”–commissioned him to write essays and then a novel.

Common Core unconstitutional, will “nationalize mediocrity, stifle innovation”

Gary Palmer:

With the help of some Republican governors and school board members, the Obama Administration is on the verge of taking over education.
Common Core is the latest attempt to expand the reach of federal government even more broadly into our daily lives. Common Core, which was reportedly conceived by the National Association of Governors, was originally presented to the states as an effort to develop consistency in state curriculums for college and workforce readiness. Theoretically, the Common Core standards will improve education outcomes and increase transparency and accountability.
One problem with the new Common Core standards is that they are almost indistinguishable from the old state standards they are supposed to replace. According to an Education Week blog by Catherine Gewertz, many teachers and administrators don’t see any difference between their old state standards and the Common Core standards. The fact is, state boards of education have bought into something that most of them had little or no input in and that many of them really do not fully understand and that will inevitably lead to having federal government bureaucrats setting education standards for Alabama’s children.

A Look at Madison Badger Rock Middle School

On a recent school day, sixth-grader Cassidy Wimmer places surveyors’ flags in spots where runoff water from the Beltline, other roads and parking lots flows toward the wetlands of Indian Springs south of Madison.
She and her classmates are part of a field biology class at Badger Rock Middle School and they’re learning a hands-on lesson about water quality and the environment in the neighborhood that surrounds their school.
“It’s interesting to see where the water travels,” she says. “It probably has a lot of pollution in it.”
Meanwhile, other students from Badger Rock are studying an enormous burr oak tree, and estimating its age. Still other sixth-graders are helping move a giant compost pile toward a community garden at their school that they help tend. Their lesson today is on improving soil to nourish growing plants, and learning the ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen to create the best compost.

Pro-Charter Group Seeks to Bolster Support

Dan Mihalopoulous & Rebecca Vevea:

Chicago’s charter school advocates could have reason for unprecedented optimism, given that new Mayor Rahm Emanuel frequently praises their efforts – and that a prominent charter-school executive was Emanuel’s election campaign co-chairman.
Yet, rather than assume that they will reap the benefits of firm political backing, charter advocates say they are organizing a show of support from parents to help convince the new mayor and other leaders that they deserve more funding.
A rally on Saturday, billed as the “Charter schools Day of Action,” is among the first public displays of a new public-relations push. The New Schools for Chicago group, which is devoting tens of millions of dollars to scores of new charters, has entered into a $250,000 contract with the United Neighborhood Organization to organize public support, said Juan Rangel, UNO’s chief executive officer.

The destructive nature of power without status

Nathanael J. Fast, Nir Halevy, Adam D. Galinsky:

The current research explores how roles that possess power but lack status influence behavior toward others. Past research has primarily examined the isolated effects of having either power or status, but we propose that power and status interact to affect interpersonal behavior. Based on the notions that a) low-status is threatening and aversive and b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings, we hypothesized that power without status fosters demeaning behaviors toward others. To test this idea, we orthogonally manipulated both power and status and gave participants the chance to select activities for their partners to perform. As predicted, individuals in high-power/low-status roles chose more demeaning activities for their partners (e.g., bark like a dog, say “I am filthy”) than did those in any other combination of power and status roles. We discuss how these results clarify, challenge, and advance the existing power and status literatures.

A New Law on School Fitness Data Faces Obstacles

Morgan Smith:

Texas children are fat — and getting fatter.
It is something state policy makers have known and have struggled to address for years. In the last decade, the Legislature has passed laws that set nutritional standards for school meals, required body mass index screenings for children and adolescents, and instituted physical activity requirements.
The latest effort came during this year’s legislative session with a bill passed by Senator Jane Nelson, Republican of Flower Mound, that allows a deeper study of schools’ fitness data.
Under the new law, researchers can access unidentified individual student data, which they say will help bolster aggregate analyses that already show correlations between physical fitness and academic performance, gang activity and absenteeism.

Think Different? Not in Higher Ed

Jeffrey Selingo:

When Steve Jobs introduced the “Think Different” advertising campaign on his return to the helm of Apple, in 1997, the slogan was not just aimed at consumers. It was also meant to inspire those inside the struggling company to innovate for the future.
Of course, what followed is now the story of one of the most successful companies in American history: a decade when Apple transformed the music industry with the iPod, the mobile-phone industry with the iPhone, and now the publishing industry with the iPad.
Apple succeed partly because it decided to take a different path than its competitors in the tech industry, and consumers followed. The history of business is filled with similar tales. Just look at what happened to Detroit’s Big Three after the arrival of Japanese automakers in the United States.

Clashes of Money and Values: A Survey of Admissions Directors

Scott Jaschik:

Admissions counselors like to talk about finding the right “fit” for applicants — a great match between a student’s educational and other goals and an institution’s programs. But a new survey of the senior admissions officials at colleges nationwide finds that this “fit” is, from many colleges’ point of view, increasingly about money. As evidence of that pressure, the survey found that:
For many colleges, a top goal of admissions directors is recruiting more students who can pay more. Among all four-year institutions, the admissions strategy judged most important over the next two or three years — driven by high figures in the public sector — was the recruitment of more out-of-state students (who at public institutions pay significantly more). The runner-up was the strategy of providing more aid for low- and middle-income students.
Among all sectors of higher education, there is a push to recruit more out-of-state students and international students.

School district tackles its changing demographics

Mila Koumpilova:

WORTHINGTON, Minn. (AP) — Perla Banegas arrived in Worthington a decade ago, on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles. Her single mom had heard about a safe, quiet town in the upper Midwest and steady jobs at its meatpacking plant.
In sixth grade that year, Banegas quickly got a reputation as a painfully shy kid — and a talking-to for taking too many bathroom breaks. She wasn’t shy: She just didn’t understand a word of English in class. In bathroom stalls, she’d have a good cry and then give herself a pep talk: “You have to go back and try.”
She did. And she graduated.

Building an Education Nation

Tom Brokaw:

Think of American education as a house of many rooms, each with a distinct function but taken as a whole, this house is shelter against the winds of change buffeting the world and threatening our future.
Any objective analysis of that shelter comes to the same conclusion: we have work to do to be sure we’re secure and able to hold our own against whatever this new global climate sends our way.
That’s the unsettling news. The good news? Work is under way, from the most remote school districts in rural America, to the inner city of our largest urban areas.

Why won’t the Chicago Teacher’s Union Support a Longer School Day?

Elena Silva:

There has been plenty of chatter in the past weeks about Chicago’s plans to extend its school days by 90 minutes. An editorial in today’s Washington Post asks why won’t the Chicago Teachers’ Union support a longer school day? Well, they are a union, which is designed to protect teachers pay and work. But this aside, how many people do you know that would accept 2 percent more pay for more than 20 percent more work?
Teachers at more than a dozen CPS schools have agreed to the terms, and more will likely sign on in the coming weeks. They are the heroes of this editorial because they are “willing to buck the union leadership” and because, we are reminded, it’s all about the student. Except it’s not just about the student. Remember that most important in-school factor for student learning that needs better systems for evaluation, training, support, promotion and pay? We held a focus group recently with about a dozen teachers from Chicago-they were open to talking about evaluation reforms and career ladders and differential pay structures. But the 2 percent for 90 more minutes a day? At least this one small group was entirely against it.

StoryCorps Launches National Teacher Initiative

W J Levay:

StoryCorps — a national oral history project whose interviews you’ve probably heard on public radio — kicked off its National Teacher Initiative earlier this week with AFT president Randi Weingarten participating at the White House event.
The project, which launched Sept. 19, celebrates and honors the courageous work of public school educators nationwide. “This is a fantastic opportunity to hear from teachers — the people who are closest to the kids,” said Weingarten. “Their stories will be a window to the world on today’s public education — what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do better to prepare our children for the 21st-century knowledge economy.”
StoryCorps is looking to partner with schools, districts, teachers unions, community groups, and others to conduct an on-site recording day, and will send their staff and equipment to schools or events if the local or state federation can guarantee that at least eight interview pairs that include at least one teacher are available to participate. Each interview takes 40 minutes, and the participants will receive a CD of their interview.

Milwaukee Public Schools: Educator & Social Agency

James Causey:

Imagine what would happen to Milwaukee’s most vulnerable children if it weren’t for the services provided by their school district: Milwaukee Public Schools.
I know what some of you are thinking: Their parents should be providing for them. Or: MPS might get better results if the district focused more on education and less on being a social service agency.
I agree. Parents are responsible for their kids, and the district is responsible for education. I’m not here to defend the district against justifiable criticism.
But understand: Many of the kids who attend MPS come from homes so impoverished that even the most basic things – breakfast or a place to sleep – are missing. How can the district educate kids living in such circumstances?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that nearly half of Milwaukee’s kids live in poverty. More than 80% of MPS students receive free or reduced-price lunch.

Let’s Not Focus on the Achievement Gap

The Milwaukee Talkie:

A thought-provoking essay in the current issue of National Affairs by the prolific and sardonic Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute calls for a retreat from education reform’s long-held focus on closing the achievement gap. Hess feels the federal No Child Left Behind Act has, ironically, become “education policy that has shortchanged many children.” His thesis is that by focusing on improving achievement scores of the lowest performing subgroups of students, opportunities for reform that would also benefit the other students have been passed up. The result is that many parents, educators, principals, and elected officials see school reform as inapplicable to the average- or highly-performing students who make up the majority of children in most classrooms across the country.
Which begs the question–if most children in the country are, in fact, being served pretty well by their public schools (and there can be strong arguments made that children who are white, or female, or upper class, or suburban are served well enough by public schools), then why should the adults who care for and educate them want to reform their schools? Should education reform affect change throughout the system or should it focus more narrowly on those students poorly served by public schooling?

Parental participation in Milwaukee Public Schools appears weak

Alan Borsuk:

Twenty-three percent?
Does it surprise you to hear that is the percentage of Milwaukee Public Schools children who had adults in their lives attend parent-teacher conferences last spring?
Or that the figure for a year earlier was 47%, meaning the percentage dropped by half in one year?
I’ve often heard anecdotes from teachers or principals about how low involvement is in parent-teacher conferences. Five parents show up for conferences involving a class of 27 kids. Numbers like that. There are individual MPS schools where participation is high, but that underscores how low the figure is at many other schools.
Parent-teacher conference attendance is sometimes overemphasized. There are other things parents can and should do that are much more important. But conferences can be seen as a measure of parent involvement. I had never seen specific numbers for MPS as a whole until now. The School Board was given a report on parent involvement this month, including numbers produced by stepped-up efforts in MPS to monitor this.

Are Today’s Youth Really a Lost Generation?

Derek Thompson:

They’re calling us the “Lost Generation.” Young people are struggling in record numbers to find work, leave home, and start a family, according to 2010 Census figures released today.
The proximate cause is the Great Recession. The number of young Americans living with their parents, nearly 6 million, has increased by 25 percent in the last three years. But the greatest cause for concern is that even when the recession has finally let go of the economy, young Americans — Generation Y or Millennials — will face a longer road back to normalcy than their older peers and parents.
Last week, I compared the impact of the recession on three generations: Gen-Y, Gen-X, and Boomers. Each face a particular challenge. For Boomers, it’s a wealth crisis. They invested in homes whose value has fallen by as much as 30 percent. For Gen-X, it’s an income crisis. They should be in the highest-earnings years of their life, but the recession has depressed their salaries and threatened their pensions. For Gen-Y, it’s about the future. The money they’re not making today is a problem. But the money they might not make tomorrow is a greater concern. Two decades after graduating into a recession, an unlucky generation can continue earning 10 percent less than somebody who left school a few years before or after the downturn. When Don Peck added it all up, he found “it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation.”

Teenage Brains

David Dobbs:

To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts.
Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.
Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience–a skydive or a fast drive–quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.

Great Recession yields a lost generation of workers

Hope Yen:

Call it the recession’s lost generation.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others — nearly 1 in 5.
New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.

Our Achievement-Gap Mania

Frederick Hess:

A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: “Achievement gaps” became reformers’ catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.
Today, the notion of “closing achievement gaps” has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.
The No Child Left Behind Act’s signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps — a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that — you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that’s unacceptable for America.” Margaret Spellings, Bush’s secretary of education, said last year, “The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers.”

Wisconsin School chief Evers says state will seek No Child Left Behind waivers

Scott Bauer:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the “first possible moment.”
Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
“This is absolutely outstanding news,” said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.

Kevin Helliker:

Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.
In characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn’t be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
“It’s problematic,” Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, “we would need legislation passed.”

Much more on No Child Left Behind, here
I spoke with a local mother recently who mentioned that her child was doing great, based on the WKCE math report.

Is it “all about the kids” (and what that might mean)? — Take One (in relation to ULGM and Madison Prep)

TJ Mertz:

My training as a historian has taught me that all knowledge is tentative and that this is especially true when it comes to assigning motives to people’s actions. It has also taught me to not accept self-proclaimed motives at face value , to only state an opinion about the motives of others when there is a preponderance of evidence, and to look at actions and consequences as well as rhetoric when trying to make sense of things.
With those caveats, I think it is worthwhile to investigate the motives, actions and the consequences of the actions of Kaleem Caire and some of others associated with the Madison Prep proposal and the Urban League of Greater Madison in relation to public education.
Enemies of teachers and teacher unions have seized upon the phrase “it is all about the kids” to ridicule and attack teachers and their representatives. With union and (almost all) others, of course it isn’t “all about the kids.” Interestingly, those who blame unions for some or all of the ills of public education — like many of the proponents of Madison Prep — often offer their own versions of “it is all about the kids.” Examples include Michelle Rhee who named her group Students First (Valarie Strauss pointedly offered a column on Rhee’s organization titled “Rhee’s campaign is not about the kids.”) and the anti-Union political bribery has been done in Illinois (and elsewhere) under the banner of Stand for Children ( a must-see video here).

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.

Texas Students of all backgrounds outperform Wisconsin Students

Allison Sherry, via a kind reader’s email

While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.
Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools. On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.
“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”

National Center for Education Statistics State Education Data Profiles.
much more at www.wisconsin2.org

1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison, by State

1990-2010 High School College Graduates USA @ SIS

Download a 55K PDF version.
Conor Dougherty & Rob Barry

Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation’s most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California’s Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.
The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
“In a knowledge economy, success breeds success,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor’s degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.

Data Source: American Community Survey.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org

The worth of education cannot be determined solely by marketplace logic. Hong Kong needs to reflect on the true mission of a university to avoid failing its future generations

Anthony Cheung:

While money does not work miracles (as the saying goes, any problem that money can solve is not a problem), it is a necessary ingredient of many solutions to our problems. Without money, many poor countries and rural communities simply cannot provide basic education to improve literacy and promote life skills, never mind consider the quality of education. Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, calls on all governments to invest in education, to provide “education for all”.
Having said that, education should not be seen as just an investment business in the sense that we look for money indicators to measure performance – for example, if we invest so much in a law degree student, how much will he or she earn upon graduation – as if justice can be measured by earnings.

Living and Working to 100

Alice Korngold:

Advocating for the value of online education, Angel Cabrera told us that he takes issue with those who are concerned that online education will dilute quality. In fact, says Cabrera, “online eucation can dramatically improve quality.” Cabrera is President of Thunderbird School of Global Management that was ranked #1 Best in International Business Full-Time MBA by The Financial Times 2011 for the fifth consecutive year, and #1 by U.S. News and World Report 2012 for the sixteenth consecutive year; the list goes on. “The traditional campus, centered around large lecture halls, will have to reinvent itself.” Thunderbird offers a variety of educational models, including distance-learning.
“Online education will move from the add-on to the centerpiece,” Cowen told me. “Higher education will move towards a hybrid approach with top faculty teaching online, and motivational coaches working with students on a personal level.” Cowen sees the hybrid model making college education more affordable. He envisions new job opportunities in statistics, search, programming, and logic, “since you need people behind smart machines.” Cowen also envisions job growth in the motivational sector.

20-Somethings Rack Up Frequent-Flier Miles to Take Far-Flung Journeys; Flying to Fiji for Lunch

Scott McCartney:

The 18-year-old Drexel University student in Philadelphia buys cheap tickets and takes “mileage runs” solely to build up frequent-flier account balances. Then, he cashes in the miles for expensive, far-flung journeys. Once there, he buys rail passes and catches the first train that comes along–doesn’t matter where it’s going–just to see some of the city. “It’s hard for me to stay home. I just want to go,” said Mr. Nguyen, who is from Seattle.
Mr. Nguyen is among a growing number of 20-somethings mastering the calculus of frequent-flier miles, making globe-trotting their hobby. It’s a generation that has grown up with airline deregulation, discount airlines, global airline alliances and “open skies” treaties that make flying between countries easier. They’re also at an age when they have time and flexible schedules. As a result, many have become ferocious travelers.

Restructuring, Reform and Reality

Nancy Connor:

In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB’s complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, “When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That’s not this law’s fault, and it’s not going to be solved by any future law. Rather, it’s cultural, deep rooted and demands real leadership…”
He has a point. However, the restructuring project is pretty daunting and beset with real practical constraints. Take the staffing issue. Which staff would you replace if the achievement failure is limited to the Hispanic subgroup within the school, but two-thirds of the students are Hispanic? What do you do if you are having difficulties with second-language learners, but your school has kids who speak fifteen different languages? Would you really fire all of the special education staff, even if there is no hope of hiring more?

The Myth About Traditional Math Education

Barry Garelick, via email:

The education establishment commits to fads like group and collaborative learning, but Garelick says they shouldn’t ignore and misinterpret traditional math.
Most discussions about mathematics and how best to teach it in the K-12 arena break down to the inevitable bromides about how math was traditionally taught and that such methods were ineffective. The conventional wisdom on the “traditional method” of teaching math is often heard as an opening statement at school board meetings during which parents are protesting the adoption of a questionable math program: “The traditional method of teaching math has failed thousands of students.” A recent criticism I read expanded on this notion and said that it wasn’t so much the content or the textbooks (though he states that they were indeed limited) but the teaching was “too rigid, too inflexible, too limited, and thus failed to adequately address the realities of educating a large, diverse, and rapidly changing population during decades of technological innovation and social upheaval.”
There is some confusion when talking about “traditional methods” since traditional methods vary over time. Textbooks considered traditional for the last ten years, for example, are quite different than textbooks in earlier eras. For purposes of this discussion, I would like to confine “traditional” to methods and textbooks in use in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. And before we get to the question about teaching methods, I want to first talk about the textbooks in use during this time period. A glance at the textbooks that were in use over these years shows that mathematical algorithms and procedures were not taught in isolation in a rote manner as is frequently alleged. In fact, concepts and understanding were an important part of the texts. Below is an excerpt from a fifth grade text of the “Study Arithmetic” series (Knight, et. al. 1940):

IXL Learning

ixl.com

Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun! IXL allows teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students and motivate them through interactive games and practice questions. Widely recognized as the Web’s most comprehensive math site, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment for children to practice math. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.

The View from Fifth Grade

Dean Dad:

“I have a locker!”
You forget what’s important when you’re ten.
TW and I went to the parents’ open house at The Boy’s school. Now that he’s in fifth grade, he’s in a new building that unites the kids from the various elementary schools in the district. And yes, he gets a locker.
The principal greeted the parents, if you want to call his mumble a greeting. Honestly, one of the first principles of public speaking is “try to at least pretend to care.” His entire affect conveyed that he’d rather be almost anywhere else. This did not inspire confidence. The only time he seemed to engage was when he mentioned where parents should park.
The library made me sad. TB later reported that his class took a trip there, and he was disappointed in its selection. Luckily we have a good public library in town, and I’ve lent TB my kindle before. At the rate he blasts through books, electronic delivery may be our only hope of keeping up.

How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed My Life

Paul Lukas:

Meet Marie Garaventa.
What you see above is the front of her report card from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a vocational school she attended in the late 1920s, after she had finished the eighth grade. As you can see, she had a perfect attendance record–this despite moving several times, having a deceased father, and being hard of hearing.
If you click through the rest of Marie’s student record, you’ll see that the school’s staff initially described her as “slow” and “irritable” (perhaps due to her hearing problems) but that she eventually gained confidence and made the honor roll. You’ll also see that the school helped to place her in more than a dozen sewing and dress-finishing jobs after she graduated, and that at one point she was scolded for not returning to a job after her lunch break.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Americans Say Federal Gov’t Wastes Over Half of Every Dollar; Believe state and local governments waste proportionately less money

Jeffrey M. Jones:

PRINCETON, NJ — Americans estimate that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, a new high in a Gallup trend question first asked in 1979.
The current estimate of 51 cents wasted on the dollar is similar to what Gallup measured in 2009, but marks the first time Americans believe more than half of federal spending is wasted. The low point in the trend is 38 cents wasted on the dollar, in 1986.
Americans are less likely to believe state and local governments waste money they spend than they are to believe this about the federal government, with the state estimate at 42 cents on the dollar and the local at 38 cents.

Plan would shake up Utah Education

Paul Rolly:

At its next general session, the Legislature will be considering a bold plan that would put a new face on public education in Utah and dramatically alter the relationships between school districts, individual schools and students.
The question being asked now: Will the plan propel individual student achievement or stunt it?
Legislation proposed by Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, would give each high school student in Utah an individual education savings account, sort of like a debit card, and that student could use that money any way he or she wanted toward earning a diploma.
The plan would be unique in the United States and, just like initiatives from the Utah Legislature on public employee pension reform and Medicaid reform, could become a model for other states, its supporters boast.

Declining Local School District “Control”

Lyndsey Layton:

Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are scheduled Friday to detail plans to waive some of the law’s toughest requirements, including the goal that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014 or else their schools could face escalating sanctions.
In exchange for relief, the administration will require a quid pro quo: States must adopt changes that could include the expansion of charter schools, linking teacher evaluation to student performance and upgrading academic standards. As many as 45 states are expected to seek waivers.
For many students, the most tangible impact could be what won’t happen. They won’t see half their teachers fired, their principal removed or school shut down because some students failed to test at grade level — all potential consequences under the current law.

A Capital Times Editorial:

Wisconsin has moved to take authority away from local elected school boards and parents and to rest it with political appointees who respond to Gov. Scott Walker and out-of-state groups that are spending millions of dollars to undermine public education.
Wisconsin’s best and brightest teachers — the Teacher of the Year award winners — have joined mass demonstrations to decry the assault by politicians and their cronies on public education.
What’s Walker’s response? He wants to tell the nation how to do the same.

Proposed Madison Prep Academy needs to show proof of effectiveness of single-gender education to get grant

Matthew DeFour:

The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding.
The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform “is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence,” according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
The Urban League of Greater Madison originally proposed Madison Prep as an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities. But after a state planning grant was held up because of legal questions related to single-gender education, the Urban League announced it would open the school next year with single-gender classrooms in the same building.

I find this ironic, given the many other programs attempted within our public schools, such as English 10, small learning communities, connected math and a number of reading programs.
Related: Co-Ed Schooling Group Study Assails Merits of Single-Sex Education and from Susan Troller:

A newly published article by child development experts and neuroscientists blasting the trend toward single-sex education as “pseudoscience” won’t help the cause of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy.
Neither will the continued opposition of the South Central Federation of Labor, which reiterated its opposition to the Urban League-sponsored proposal this week because teachers at the school would not be represented by a union. The Madison Metropolitan School District has a collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. that runs through June of 2013, and Madison Prep’s plan envisions working conditions for its staff — a longer school day and a longer school year, for example — that differ substantially from the contract the district has with its employees.
With a public hearing on the charter school scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, the debate surrounding Madison Prep is heating up on many fronts. The Madison School Board must take a final vote giving the charter school a go or no-go decision in November.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League and a passionate proponent for the separate boys and girls academies aimed at helping boost minority youth academic performance, says he is unimpressed by an article published in the prestigious journal, Science, on Sept. 23, that says there is “no empirical evidence” supporting academic improvement through single-sex education.

Are other DPI funded initiatives held to the same “standard”?
The timing of these events is certainly interesting.
14mb mp3 audio. WORT-FM conducted an interview this evening with Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the authors. Unrelated, but interesting, Hyde’s interview further debunked the “learning styles” rhetoric we hear from time to time.
UPDATE: The Paper in Question: The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling:

In attempting to improve schools, it is critical to remember that not all reforms lead to meaningful gains for students. We argue that one change in particular–sex-segregated education–is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.

Co-Ed Schooling Group Study Assails Merits of Single-Sex Education

Tamar Lewin:

Single-sex education is ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping, a paper to be published Friday asserts.

The report, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.

It asserts that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.”

Evolution Honored as the best Canadian Science Book for Young Readers

Daniel Loxton via a kind Larry Winkler email:

Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be took home the national Lane Anderson Award as the best Canadian science book for young readers at an award dinner in Toronto last night. The win was reported today by the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire, the Canadian Children’s Book Center and other media. It was published by Canadian publisher Kids Can Press. But it’s not for lack of trying that a Canadian publisher rather than American publisher issued this book.
According to author Daniel Loxton, US publishers wouldn’t touch it.
“It’s important to realize that most of the publishing professionals I dealt with in the US were lovely and encouraging. They all said “no,” but some recommended smaller, artier presses they felt might consider Evolution…. [S]ome of America’s top children’s publishing professionals rejected Evolution, some citing concerns that it was too controversial, too much of “a tough sell,” or (“in today’s climate”) too likely to find needed distribution channels closed…. It was certainly frustrating to knock on cold doors, but I am sympathetic to publishers. [I]t’s a tough time for book producers, and they need to work hard to mitigate risk. Publishers face the on the ground reality that almost half of American adults–many of them reviewers, librarians, booksellers, or teachers–believe that evolution did not happen at all.

Recess Making Comeback in Chicago Schools

Rebecca Vevea:

As more Chicago public schools cash in on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s longer-day financial incentives by adding 90 minutes to their school day, the previous votes by a dozen schools to add about a half hour to the day by bringing back recess are going unnoticed.
Restoring recess is part of a broader health push by parents, advocacy groups and some city officials to bring more exercise and better nutrition to both schoolchildren and preschoolers.
Beginning in November, the city’s Department of Public Health will require children who attend preschool or day care centers in Chicago to spend less time in front of television or computer screens — 60 minutes or less — and more time, at least an hour a day, participating in physical activity. At snack or meal time, milk cannot have a fat content higher than 1 percent, unless a child has written consent from a doctor. Only 100 percent juice can be served.
In Chicago, 22 percent of children are overweight before they enter school, more than twice the national average, according to research compiled by the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, a group of organizations and health advocates.

Christie, Cerf, and Teachers’ Union: A Fragile Peace

John Mooney:

Fred Frangiosa’s presence was conspicuous last week when Gov. Chris Christie visited a Bergenfield middle school to promote his plans for remaking teacher evaluation statewide.
Frangiosa is president of the Bergenfield Education Association, and it is his union’s 450 teachers who will help test the new system. Bergenfield is one of 10 pilot districts for Christie’s plan.
But there was Frangiosa, sitting in Christie’s audience in a middle school classroom — not a cheerleader for the plan, by any means, but not protesting it, either.
“You can’t sign off on something if you don’t know what it is,” Frangiosa said, “and you can’t oppose it either. “

Universities Seeking Out Students of Means

Tamar Lewin, via a kind reader’s email:

Money is talking a bit louder in college admissions these days, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by Inside Higher Ed, an online publication for higher education professionals.
More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September.
Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.

WEA Trust demands talk show host ‘cease and desist’

Wisconsin Reporter:

WEA Trust doesn’t like what Mark Belling has to say, and the health insurer wants the conservative talk show host to “cease and desist.”
WEA Trust, which bills itself on its website as a not-for-profit insurance group for Wisconsin public school employees and their families, today sent a letter to the afternoon, drive-time, radio host at 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, demanding Belling stop making what WEA Trust describes as “defamatory public accusations.
Belling repeatedly has accused the private health insurance company of “racketeering” by transferring its revenue to the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC, the state teachers union, an act that would be illegal under state and federal law.

Illinois Bombshell: Class of 2014 Median LSAT/GPA Is 163/3.70, Not 168/3.81

TaxProf:

Following up on my prior post, Did Illinois Inflate LSAT (168), GPA (3.81) Medians to Goose U.S. News Ranking?: Illinois today dropped this bombshell:

The accurate, independently verified data for the class of 2014’s Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and grade point averages (GPA) are as follows: median LSAT, 163; median GPA, 3.70. Information originally posted on the College of Law website last month inaccurately listed the median LSAT score as 168 and the median GPA as 3.81.

Ruling forbidding classroom banners mentioning God to be appealed

Tony Perry:

A Michigan-based legal group said Monday that it would petition the full U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a three-judge panel’s ruling that a San Diego-area teacher does not have the right to display banners that mention God in his classroom.
A three-judge panel of the court ruled last week that Bradley Johnson’s right to free speech was not violated when the school district told him to remove the banners from his classroom.
Johnson, a high school mathematics teacher in the Poway Unified School District, had hung banners in his classroom for more than two decades with phrases such as “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and “God Bless America.”
But in 2007 the principal of Westview High School in Rancho Penasquitos said the banners’ size made them into a “promotion of a particular viewpoint.” Johnson took down the banners and filed a federal lawsuit.

In Zeeland, an iPad for every high school student in the district

Mark Smith:

As students walk through the halls of Zeeland West High School, their backpacks are a little lighter. Stacks of paper and some textbooks have been replaced by the Apple iPad — one for every high-schooler in the district. That’s 1,800 iPads between the two high schools.
And it’s just the beginning for Zeeland Public Schools, which embarked on an ambitious project this fall that will give a tablet to every student in grades 3-12 — the only district in Michigan to do so.
The program represents one of the most aggressive in the country and has garnered national attention. With each student taking responsibility for one, the school uses the iPad for assigning classwork, testing and communicating with students. Some teachers have gone paperless.

Wisconsin Governor Walker slated for NBC News ‘Education Nation’ Summit

Susan Troller:

Gov. Scott Walker will be featured as part of a bipartisan slate of governors during a panel discussion of The State of Education during NBC News’ 2011 “Education Nation” Summit on Monday, Sept. 26. The annual summit will continue on Sept. 27 as well.
NBC News’ Brian Williams will host the discussion, which focuses on education and economic competitiveness.
In a press release sent from the governor’s office Tuesday, Walker says “I believe we have a great story to tell about our reforms and our bipartisan collaborations to further improve our schools. … Improving education is a key to ensuring we have a talented workforce that will grow and attract jobs.”
According to the release, among the topics to be discussed are some highly controversial, hot-button Wisconsin issues, including budget cuts, the role of teachers unions, teacher effectiveness, charter schools and online learning. Other issues include college and career preparation, Common Core standards, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

L.A. school named after guitarist Carlos Santana

Los Angeles Times:

Legendary guitarist Carlos Santana has hit records and 10 Grammys, and now he has a school named after him in North Hills.
The Los Angeles Unified School Board voted Tuesday to rename Valley Region Elementary School No. 12 as Carlos Santana Arts Academy.
The school, which can accommodate up to 650 students, opened this school year, and district officials say it will have a focus on the arts.

America’s Report Card

Column Five Media:

As we ramp up to the 2012 election, politicians are really starting to grandstand about their accomplishments, but what do the everyday people think about how their state is doing? This infographic done with 1Bog, asked hundreds of U.S. residents in all 50 states to grade their state on several different factors.

Spelling City

VocabularySpellingCity.com

VocabularySpellingCity.com is dedicated to helping students, teachers, parent-teachers, and school systems. VocabularySpellingCity is an award-winning site with ongoing introduction of new features, many based on input from existing users.
The site was launched on the web as SpellingCity in 2008 and has grown primarily through word of mouth. During the 2008-2009 school year, the site was used by over a half-million people in the peak months. In 2009-2010, SpellingCity was used by over a million unique visitors a month. The site’s services have been steadily expanded over the years. SpellingCity became VocabularySpellingCity in January 2011 to reflect the addition of significant vocabulary capabilities. During the 2010-11 school year, the site attracted nearly two million unique visitors per month – over four million visits total, and over 40 million page views monthly. (source Quantcast.com). This level of traffic and usage gives VocabularySpellingCity a ranking as a top 1000 site in the U.S. during its peak months. VocabularySpellingCity is supported by revenues from Premium Memberships (which are priced low for maximum accessibility) and advertising displayed to non-Premium Members. VocabularySpellingCity prides itself as being amongst the best values in education.

Selling out public schools: Millions of dollars are changing face of education

Bill Lueders:

“School choice” is a broad term that refers to a wide range of alternatives, including themed charter schools that are entirely under the control of their home school districts. Forty states and the District of Columbia have those in place, according to the American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group.
But it is the voucher programs, in which public funds are used to send children to private schools, that are the focus of much of the energy around the choice movement. Seven states and the District of Columbia have those, and Milwaukee’s voucher program is the first and largest of its kind in the country. That makes Wisconsin a key national battleground.
“Wisconsin has a high level of value to the movement as a whole,” says Robert Enlow, president of the Indianapolis-based Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a nonprofit group that advocates for school choice. The state, he says, is notable for “the high level of scholarship amounts that families can get.”
Milwaukee’s voucher program had 20,300 full-time equivalent voucher students at 102 private schools in 2010-11, compared to about 80,000 students at Milwaukee’s public K-12 schools. The total cost, at $6,442 per voucher student, was $130.8 million, of which about $90 million came from the state and the rest from the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Critics see the school choice program as part of a larger strategy — driven into high gear in Wisconsin by the fall election of Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans — to eviscerate, for ideological and religious reasons, public schools and the unions that represent teachers.

It would be interesting to compare special interest spending in support of the status quo, vs groups advocating change, as outlined in Bill Lueders’ article. A few links:

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state’s largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That’s how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected – enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an “all in” bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
In an Oct. 25 report to the Government Accountability Board, the 98,000-member union reported that it will independently:
Wisconsin teachers union tops list of biggest lobbying groups for 2009-10, report shows

The statewide teachers union led in spending on lobbying state lawmakers even before this year’s fight over collective bargaining rights.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent $2.5 million on lobbying in 2009 and 2010, years when Democrats were in control of all of state government, a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Board showed.
WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker’s plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn’t helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.
Spending in summer recall elections reaches nearly $44 million

Spending in the summer’s recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
Kansas City School District Loses its Accreditation

Kansas City, Mo., School District Loses Its Accreditation

A.G. Sulzberger:

The struggling Kansas City, Missouri School District was stripped of its accreditation on Tuesday, raising the possibility of student departures and a state takeover. The action follows weeks of tumult that included another round of turnover of top leadership.
Though not entirely unexpected, the move was a painful return to reality for the city after a period of optimism that difficult choices were finally being made to confront longstanding problems in the school district, most notably the closing of nearly half the schools in response to a huge budget deficit.
The Missouri Board of Education cited the continued failure to improve academic performance and the continued instability in district leadership as driving its decision. The district has been provisionally accredited for nearly a decade after a two-year period during which it was unaccredited.
“We’ve given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems,” said Chris L. Nicastro, the state education commissioner, who had recommended the move. “Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards.”

Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater formerly worked for the Kansas City School District.
The great schools revolution Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned.
Money & School Performance is well worth a read.
It is a rare organization that can reinvent itself, rather than continuing to atrophy.

Time for a Tuition Revolt: By The Way, We Teach A Little Too

Investors Business Daily:

It’s time for a tuition revolt, and higher taxes aren’t the answer. Students and the rest of the public are now paying for decades of mission creep and bureaucratic bloat.
The regents of the University of California met this past week to revisit an old issue they’ve never really dealt with well — how to cope with erratic (and usually dwindling) state aid.
Sooner or later, they’ll probably raise tuition again, as they have in the past. But for now they are quailing at a plan, offered by UC’s president, to raise students’ costs by at least 8%, and up to 16%, annually for the next four years. “It scares the bejesus out of folks,” said one of the regents, California’s Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
If the past is any guide, that horror will give way to realism. The regents will take a shot at raising more private money from corporations, foundations, rich alumni and the like. They’ll come up short, if only because every other academic institution is trying to do the same thing and there’s only so much money to go around.

How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores

E D Hirsch:

THE latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered.
This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to hold down a job. It also predicts future income.
The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.

Parental Involvement in Education: Fact and Fiction

Harrison Blackmond:

I have attended dozens of legislative hearings, community meetings, and board meetings where the problems related to public education are discussed. Not to mention the numerous one-on-one conversations I’ve had with adults who are usually middle or upper class, where the subject of parental involvement in children’s education is raised as a major factor contributing to the ills of public education. Educators who work in urban areas are quick to point out how negligent their students’ parents are and are eager to recite anecdotes to illustrate their case. What is not said, but clearly implied is this: if the parents of these children in low-performing schools would do their jobs as parents, these children would not be failing.
Every time I hear someone raise the issue of parental involvement, I can’t help but think of the parents in the latest “education” movies: The Lottery and Waiting for Superman. What good did “parental involvement” do for their children that didn’t get accepted into a charter school? If they were not lucky enough to have their number called, they were still stuck in bad schools with educators who, for the most part, had given up on them. What good did “parental involvement” do for them?

Britain needs schools for science

Martin Rees:

Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn’t understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn’t peculiar to science. It’s sad if some citizens can’t tell a proton from a protein. But it’s equally sad if they’re ignorant of their nation’s history, can’t speak a second language, or can’t find Venezuela or Syria on a map.
Indeed, I’m gratified and surprised that so many people are interested in dinosaurs, the Large Hadron Collider or alien life – all blazingly irrelevant to our day-to-day lives. We should be grateful to David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Brian Cox and other popular writers and television presenters for generating such interest. But it’s depressing that all too often this natural enthusiasm of the young has been stifled by the time they leave school.
That’s sad, because science is important for its own sake. It is a cultural deprivation not to appreciate the wonderful panorama offered by modern cosmology, DNA and Darwinian evolution. This common understanding should transcend all national differences – and all faiths, too. It should be part of global culture; but even in the UK a group of scientists including Attenborough has this week felt the need to reassert this.

Pearson Buys U.S. Online School Network

Simon Zekaria:

Pearson PLC on Thursday said it has acquired U.S.-based online schooling network Connections Education for $400 million in cash, as the U.K.-based publishing giant ramps up its extensive North American education operations.
Pearson acquired the company from an investor group led by private-equity investment firm Apollo Management LP.
“Virtual schooling is an attractive choice for a growing group of American parents and in the next decade it will take off in other countries,” Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said.
Connections Education supplies “virtual” education services to students in grades K-12 and learning programs to educational institutions globally. It operates online public schools accredited in 21 U.S. states, serving more than 40,000 students who choose not to attend traditional schools, Pearson said.

A better way for Madison Prep

Jack Craver:

If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here’s a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That’s the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It’s frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.

Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.

Spending in summer recall elections reaches nearly $44 million

Jessica Vanegeren:

Spending in the summer’s recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
Put in perspective, the $43.9 million spent on the recalls more than doubled the previous record for spending by candidates and groups in legislative races, which was $20.25 million for 99 Assembly seats and 16 Senate seats in the 2008 general elections, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Despite changes, Wisconsin charter school expansion bill faces a headwind

Susan Troller:

A controversial bill that would create an independent, statewide authorizing board for charter schools is facing a tougher path now that Republicans have a razor thin 17-16 edge in the Wisconsin Senate. The legislation is designed to expand charter school choice in Wisconsin and to allow charters to be formed even in communities where they are not approved by local school districts.
Although the bill, introduced by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, last spring, has been modified from its original form, the amended Senate Bill 22 still doesn’t pass muster with the Department of Public Instruction. Perhaps more importantly, moderate Republican Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, says he continues to have “more concerns than enthusiasm” for the legislation.
If he, or one of the Senate Democrats that opposed the earlier legislation, can’t be persuaded that more independent charter schools would benefit Wisconsin students, SB 22 will be in trouble if it moves from the Joint Finance Committee to a vote in front of legislators, likely in October.
Read more: http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/education/blog/article_a54178bc-e30a-11e0-b207-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1YXkYxg5f

Petition to Redistribute College GPA Scores

Mark Perry

Do some students really need a 4.0 GPA? Isn’t that “excessive”? Let’s make it a 3.80 and redistribute those extra GPA points to another student who’s struggling to graduate.

The great schools revolution Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned

The Economist via a kind Mary Battaglia email

FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA’s latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org.

Kaleem Caire draws on personal experience to support school alternatives for blacks

Dan Simmons:

“Come on Madison, we can do better than this!”
That’s Kaleem Caire. He said it not recently but in 1998 in an op-ed questioning why his hometown wasn’t paying more attention to the poor educational outcomes and high incarceration rates of black males.
“I’m asking Madison to be your best self and get this done!”
That’s also Caire, in an interview this week about his proposal for a publicly funded charter school designed to improve educational outcomes of low-income minority students.
What hasn’t changed, then to now, is Caire’s conviction that Madison’s public schools are failing minority students and his willingness to force issues that cause some distress to the city’s white liberal establishment.
What has changed is Caire’s clout. He returned to his hometown in 2010 after a decade long detour with his family to the East Coast. As president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, and public face for the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, his profile has skyrocketed. But with it has come criticism and skepticism over a plan that challenges Madison’s longstanding commitment to inclusive learning.

Madison ACT Results vs. Milwaukee; “All Wisconsin Juniors Should Take the ACT”

Michael Ford:

As others have pointed out before me, the way ACT results are reported now paints a misleading portrait of the college-readiness of students, particularly in districts with significant minority populations. One clear example is the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).
The district bragged in an August 17th press release that “[c]ompared to their state peers, MMSD ethnic and racial subgroups scored 3.5% to 18% higher on the ACT.” Technically true, but only 31.1% of African-Americans and 36.7% of Hispanics in MMSD actually took the test. Compare this to 76.5% and 70.8% respectively in MPS. The disparity makes an accurate comparison of MMSD with MPS, or the rest of state considering that over half of the state’s African-American and Hispanic students who took the test are in MPS, impossible.
The more interesting question spurred by ACT results in Madison and elsewhere is why do so few minority students take a test that is a prerequisite for admittance to a four-year college? Take away Milwaukee and only 38% of Wisconsin African-American and Hispanic high school students took the ACT this year.

The great schools revolution

The Economist:

Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned
FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA’s latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Rapid Improvments in K-12 Math Education Are Possible

Cliff Mass:

One of the most frustrating aspects of working on the improvement of math education is dealing with an educational establishment that makes decisions based on fads and opinions rather than empirical facts.
Now, let us accept that there are different approaches to teaching mathematics, with a major divide between the “reform, discovery approaches” and the more “traditional, direct instruction” approaches. Reform/discovery approaches became the rage among the educational community in the 1990s and I believe it is a major, but not sole, reason that math performance has lagged.
As a scientist, it would seem to me that the next step is clear: test a variety of curriculum approaches in the classroom, insuring the class demographics are similar, and find out what works best. In short, do a carefully controlled experiment with proper statistics and find the truth in an empirical way. But what frustrates me is that such experimentation is virtually never done by the educational bureaucracy. They seem to go from fad to fad and student progress suffers. Reform math, Integrated Math, Teach for America, Whole Language, and many more.

“1493” and How We Teach History

Joshua Kim:

Before I jump into an argument about how we teach history, I want to make we don’t lose the point that Charles Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is a wonderful book.
A modern updating of Crosby’s classic The Columbian Exchange, Mann traces the biological, epidemiological, and agricultural impact of trade between Europe, Asia and the America’s after 1493.
1493 is a book for fans of Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Morris’ Why the West Rules — for Now.
If you like your history to be big, the scope to be wide, but to be tied into how you eat and pay your way in the world, then 1493 is probably perfect.

Alabama public schools turn to Wii to help fight childhood obesity

Marie Leech:

Ask most third-graders whether they’d rather run laps in hundred-degree temperatures or play a video game, and it doesn’t take a genius to correctly predict their answer.
What did take some brainpower, however, was figuring out how use that fondness for electronic games to get some of the same benefits as running.
Wee Can Fight Obesity is a fitness program for third-graders in Alabama public schools, and uses the Wii Fit Plus Bundle and EA Sports Active video games to improve physical fitness three days a week during P.E. class.
The one-year program is in 30 schools this year, and was in 30 different schools last year. The goal is to eventually offer the program to every elementary school.

Strike Hits Madrid’s High Schools

Jonathan House:

High-school teachers in the Spanish capital started a two-day strike Tuesday, disrupting the school days of hundreds of thousands of youths as opposition to sweeping austerity measures starts to harden ahead of general elections this November in the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy.
The Madrid protests were echoed by demonstrations across the country against spending cuts on education. Teachers in Galicia, in northwest Spain, have called a strike for later this month. The protests follow close on the heels of a series of rallies called by unions against new constitutional budget controls they say will undermine the social welfare state.
The cuts in education are part of a new round of austerity from regional governments as Spain aims to narrow its budget deficit to 6% of gross domestic product this year, from just over 9% in 2010. Most of the country’s 17 regions are now in the hands of the conservative Popular Party. Currently in the opposition at the national level, the Popular Party is widely tipped by opinion polls to win the Nov. 20 elections and oust the incumbent Socialists. If he becomes prime minister, party leader Mariano Rajoy has pledged to follow the example of austerity set by the regions, regardless of any public backlash.

NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell: My Best Idea For K-12 Education

Nicole Perloth:

America’s school system is broken. On that the Forbes 400 can agree. America’s richest give more to education-related causes than to any other issue. But in terms of how best to reform education, there is little consensus.
Education-related causes that have materially benefited from Forbes 400 wealth vary from Michael Moritz’s $50 million check to his alma-mater Christ Church to Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark’s public schools. Bill and Melinda Gates have focused their efforts on reorganizing high school curriculum, while Eli Broad believes our educators would benefit from managerial expertise. Their ideas are so divergent that this year, my colleagues and I reached out to a few billionaires, as well as a few recipients of their charity, to solicit their best ideas for K-12 education reform.

Unvaccinated Students Denied School Attendance, California

The State Column:

Middle school and high school students who have not received the required whooping cough vaccine are denied attendance at some California schools. This comes as a result of a law passed last year, after a spike in potentially fatal diseases swept through schools. Last year, there were 70 reported cases for whooping cough.
This law, passed in September 2010, required all students entering grades seventh through twelfth grade to be vaccinated by the start of 2011-2012 school year. Even after a 30 day extension period before the law went into effect, students were still unable to meet the deadline for the vaccination.

Putting our minds to helping immigrants learn English

Steve Lopez:

In my back-to-school column two weeks ago, I wrote that parents ought to look in the mirror before pinning all the blame for the state of education on schools and teachers.
Readers were with me on the idea that parents ought to be more engaged in their children’s education, whether they do so at home, on campus or by marching on Sacramento. But reactions split over my suggestion that parents who make no effort to learn English aren’t helping their kids or themselves.
As promised, here’s the follow-up.
And let me begin by saying that lack of parental involvement is a problem regardless of income or race. Are any parents more annoying than those who impose no discipline at home, then blame their child’s disruptive antics or lousy grades on the school, the curriculum or the teacher’s inability to recognize what a genius the child is?

Online education offers as much (if not more)

David Bornus:

Larry J. Crockett’s nostalgic commentary (“Online education doesn’t measure up,” Aug. 23) reminded me of a critique that might have been made by medieval apprenticeship guilds about the emergence of renaissance universities.
The world is changing; we no longer live in a prewired society where colleges act as “finishing schools” teaching table manners and deportment to impressionable youths. The modern world has become heavily virtualized, and education is no exception. The online medium actually enhances education in a number of ways:
1) No one can hide in a virtual classroom — all have opportunity to participate and are expected to do so, and everyone has ample time to make contributions to class discussions, to look up citations and compose their arguments.
Class discussion occurs in threaded discussion posts, meaning everyone participates and has time to read and respond to others, cite what others have said, look up reference material, and proofread their statements, all of which generally enhances the quality of class interaction.

Little Rock desegregation plans go back to court

Associated Press:

The state wants to end its long-running payments for desegregation programs, but three school districts that receive the money say they need it to continue key programs. And a federal judge has accused the schools of delaying desegregation so they can keep receiving an annual infusion of $70 million.
A federal appeals court will hear arguments Monday from both sides. The judges are expected to decide eventually whether Arkansas still has to make the payments and whether two of the districts should remain under court supervision.
The schools, which serve about 50,000 students, have come a long way since 1957, when the governor and hundreds of protesters famously tried to stop the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School. But thousands of white and black children still have to be bused to different neighborhoods every day under one of the nation’s largest remaining court-ordered desegregation systems.
Now parents are worried about the schools’ future, and some are considering enrolling their children elsewhere.

Racine Unified union head may leave

Racine Journal Times:

The entity that oversees Racine Unified’s teachers’ and educational assistants’ unions is looking for a new executive director.
The job of executive director for the Racine Education Uniserv Council – which includes the Racine Education Association teachers’ union and the Racine Educational Assistants Association union – was posted online Sept. 1.
The executive director is involved in long-range planning, membership programs, contract negotiations, employment recommendations and accounting, among other duties, according to the job posting.

Putting Parents in Charge

Peg Tyre:

Peg Tyre is the author of “The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve.”
THE school year is in full swing and, if you are the parent of a school-age child, you’ve probably figured out how to get your children up each weekday morning, dressed and out the door — toast in hand — in order to catch the school bus. Good for you.
If you’ve met and exchanged contact information with your child’s homeroom teacher or gone the extra step and volunteered to become the class parent, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re on your way to becoming an engaged parent — the kind of adult, education researchers say, who helps children to be the best they can be in school.
Now, steady yourself. New legislation, called the parent trigger, which is being proposed in more than 20 states, including New York, is about to make your role as an engaged parent a lot more complicated.

Infographic: Student loan defaults rise as job prospects dim

Mary Mahling, Carla Uriona and Ben Wieder:

Student loan defaults are rising fast, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Education. While much of the press coverage focused on defaults by students attending for-profit schools, defaults at state colleges and universities went up, too. The bad job market is a big factor: Unemployment in 2010 was 10.1 percent for people between the age of 25 to 34, and those numbers are even higher when you remove people above the age of 30. At the same time, state budget cuts to higher education have led to big tuition hikes at many public colleges. California students graduated from public colleges with the least debt in the country in 2009, but tuition jumped 18 percent last year for in-state students in California and double-digit increases are projected for the next several years, as well.

Starting College Later

Phil Bowermaster:

Some interesting comments from reader John Kennedy (no relation, as far as I know) on the recent poll about people’s reasons for going to college. He writes:

There’s another question in this discussion that I didn’t address in previous comment. Apparently, kids going to college with no clear goal is somehow thought stupid (that’s the implication). But I would ask, how many 17- or 18-year-olds have any idea about the real working world or about their own strengths and limitations? How many can think? What about having a chance to grow up a bit? This is also what college provides. OK, expensive? Do the first two years of general education at a community college, not perhaps a fine intellectual atmosphere, but possible to live at home, listen to the instructors, maybe get a clearer idea about personal and vocational possibilities.

In California, More Cuts Are in the Cards

Vauhini Vara:

California Gov. Jerry Brown already anticipates relying on spending cuts and forgoing higher taxes to balance his state’s budget next year, sobered by his deadlock with Republicans over revenue issues this year.
“There will be no taxes, as far as I know, by the legislature,” he said in an interview this week.
The Democrat also said he hasn’t decided whether to seek a ballot measure next year that would allow him to bypass the legislature and ask voters to boost taxes–apparently backing off earlier plans to do so. “I’m talking to groups…but we don’t have a clear path forward,” he said.
On Sept. 9, the last day of the legislature’s eight-month session, Mr. Brown failed to pass a plan to rework state tax breaks after GOP senators balked. It was the 73-year-old’s latest letdown after he unsuccessfully tried to pass a budget pairing deep cuts with the extension of some expiring tax increases. Those higher taxes would have been subject to voter approval.

Caps and gowns behind locked gates

Carla Rivera:

Friday was graduation day for Brian Steven Hernandez, a goal that was never a sure thing growing up in his tough North Hollywood neighborhood.
At Jack B. Clarke High School, within the locked gates of a state youth correctional facility in Norwalk, Hernandez realized he could turn his life around.
But Hernandez and his 22 classmates, proudly wearing maroon caps and gowns, are the last graduates to receive diplomas at Clarke, which is closing at year’s end due to state budget cuts.
“This is the place where I learned I could change if I wanted to,” said Hernandez, 20, who has been in juvenile detention for 5 years after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. “It sucks for the other kids that have to go to other places that are much harder places to be in to learn.”
Operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic will be the third such facility to close since 2009. Shuttering the facility will save the state about $44 million annually, officials said.

Networked schools outperform independent schools in world’s largest school choice market

Anneliese Dickman:

Milwaukee’s private school voucher program, now in its twelfth year, is dwarfed by the 30-year-old voucher program in Chile, where almost half of all students attend private voucher schools. The Chilean program is therefore of significant interest to school reformers and researchers looking to make voucher and charter schools a success in the US.

The most recent research, published by the Cato Institute, finds that when the Chilean public school test scores are compared with those of independent private schools and with those of private schools that are part of multi-school networks or franchises, the students in the franchised private schools perform best. (The independent, mom-and-pop private schools do about the same as the public schools.) In addition, the Chilean research indicates the more schools there are in the franchised networks, the better they outperform the others.

The researchers note that in Chile, “The private voucher school sector is essentially a cottage industry. More than 70 percent of private voucher schools are independent schools that do not belong to a franchise.” The franchised schools are either owned by for-profit school management companies; affiliated with non-profit, secular organizations; or part of the Catholic or Protestant school systems.

Do these findings reflect what we know about Milwaukee’s program? Its hard to say, since only one year of comparative data on student performance in voucher schools is available and it does not differentiate between the various types of private schools. However, those data do indicate considerable variability in performance across Milwaukee’s voucher schools–some are producing high scoring students and some are no better than the worst public schools. It would be nice to know if all the high performing private schools had something in common besides the fact they participate in the voucher program.

Family Pioneers in Exploration of the Genome

Amy Dockser Marcus:

A group of researchers said that by examining the whole genome of a family of four, they were able to make unusually specific findings, including the daughter’s risk of blood clots, and suggestions for preventive care.
The study, published Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics, was led by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., but also listed as co-authors John and Anne West, a father and daughter who were researching their own genetic make-up at home in Silicon Valley and met the Stanford team in the process. The research is part of scientists’ continuing quest to extract truly useful information from the genome, a person’s complete genetic code.
This is the second time a paper has been published about a family’s whole genome. In the earlier paper, published last year in Science Express by a different group of researchers, the two children in the family had rare genetic conditions, and researchers were searching for the genes that caused them. The goal in the current study was to better predict the disease risk of a family and how family members might respond to medications.

For Nashville Schools, Homework Will Now Include Country, Rock and Rap

John Jurgenson:

Nashville bills itself as Music City-now it’s trying to lock in the future of that status. The city is overhauling its music education program across all 144 public schools, Mayor Karl Dean announced today at a press conference at the Ryman Auditorium, downtown Nashville’s temple of country music.
Classes in country, rock and rap will supplement the traditional curriculum of orchestra, choir and band. Instruction in songwriting, production and other skills such as DJ-ing will also be added to music theory and other existing offerings. The new program, dubbed Music Makes Us, will be funded through a mix of public and private funds, primarily commitments from Nashville’s deeply embedded music industry, which includes hundreds of record labels, publishers and venues, plus countless professional musicians.
“The music industry has picked this as their cause,” Mr. Dean said yesterday in an interview. “It just makes sense to take advantage of this asset we have here.”

A Digital Promise to Our Nation’s Children

Arne Duncan And Reed Hastings:

Student achievement and educational attainment have stagnated in the U.S., and a host of our leading economic competitors are now out-educating us. In a knowledge economy, such stagnation is a slow-acting recipe for obsolescence.
Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students’ levels of knowledge. All of this will happen. The only question is: Will the U.S. lead the effort or will we follow other countries?
In the past two decades, technology has revolutionized the way Americans communicate, get news, socialize and conduct business. But technology has yet to transform our classrooms. At its full potential, technology could personalize and accelerate instruction for students of all educational levels. And it could provide equitable access to a world-class education for millions of students stuck attending substandard schools in cities, remote rural regions, and tribal reservations.
Other countries are far ahead of us in creating 21st-century classrooms. South Korea, which has the highest college attainment rate in the world, will phase out textbooks and replace them with digital products by 2015. Even Uruguay, a small country not known for leadership in technology, provides a computer for every student.

A better way for Madison Prep

Jack Craver:

If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here’s a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That’s the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It’s frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.
I saw the intersection of both the cultural and economic aspects that bring black guys down. At my high school, in Montclair, NJ, which was slightly majority-minority, blacks were not only much more likely to come from poor or uneducated backgrounds, but many black kids from well-to-do or educated families felt pressure to conform to the mainstream image of black Americans. To not be “oreos.” This, according to friends who spent their whole lives in Montclair, was one of the reasons why groups of friends were generally more integrated in grade school and middle school than in high school.

Comparing Wisconsin & Illinois Education “Reform”

Alan Borsuk:

Whoever thought before this year that Illinois would be held up as a model over Wisconsin of people – politicians, specifically – playing nicely together and making forward-thinking change?
But you hear that fairly often when it comes to education policy. It’s one of the things U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in Milwaukee on Sept. 9.
He criticized the way Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans kiboshed teachers union rights and said Illinois did much better by coming up with bold changes that were passed by the legislature with support from both political parties, business and civic leaders, education activists and many (but not all) union leaders.
What Illinois did is noteworthy, especially if you consider what would have seemed doable anywhere in the United States five years ago.
Beginning with steps taken in 2010, Illinois’ Democratically controlled legislature is now mandating that a teacher’s actual performance be a key in assignments, tenure decisions, firing decisions, and, when necessary, layoffs. How students are progressing will be central to determining a teacher’s rating.
All these actions received broad support.

Pay for Only 4 Years of College. Guaranteed.

Alan Schwarz:

Each incoming freshman at Randolph-Macon College this year was eligible to take part in a brief signing ceremony.
The new student, along with a parent and the college president, could sign a special agreement that is emerging at some colleges and universities: As long as the student keeps up with academic work and meets regularly with advisers, the college guarantees that earning a degree there will take no more than four years.
If it fails to hold up its end of the bargain — if required classes are not available, or if advisers give poor counsel — the college promises to cover the cost of additional tuition until the degree is completed.
Four-year degree guarantees, as they have become known, are being offered at a growing number of smaller private colleges. They work as a marketing tool, giving colleges a way to ease parents’ fears that their children might enjoy college enough to stick around for five or six costly years. And they help to focus attention on the task at hand: graduating in four years.

Video games go viral at UW educational research lab

Ron Seely:

Upstairs in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, scientists toil away in their labs researching everything from stem cells to viruses.
Downstairs, you’ll find a very different kind of laboratory. In cubicles and makeshift computer labs, a number of people sit behind their screens — playing games. They’re not nerds, they’re researchers.
OK, they are a bit nerdy and seem as glued to their screens as any game-crazed teenager. But there is science being done here, too. This is Susan Millar’s computer lab, the Educational Research Integration Area in the Morgridge Institute for Research, where researchers design and build games that help teach and communicate science — everything from the formation and perils of blue-green algae to the workings of viruses.
On a recent afternoon, in a darkened conference area, several programmers, designers and artists worked in the reflected blue light from their machines, racing to finish the newest version of one of the lab’s most successful and popular efforts, a game called Virulent that can be found in the iTunes store and boasts 2,000 downloads.
And it’s a game that doesn’t involve guns or race cars or football players. It’s about viruses.

For Student Borrowers, a Hard Truth

Annamaria Andriotis:

As many students and parents struggle to make payments on their student loans, many are finding this debt comes with some serious strings attached.
After years of economic difficulty and rising college tuition, the recent news that the default rate on federal student loans has risen came as little surprise to many. Nearly one in ten federal student-loan borrowers defaulted during the two years ended Sept. 30, 2010, meaning they failed to make a payment on their loans for more than 270 days, according to the Department of Education. That’s up from 7% in 2008. Much of that increase came from for-profit colleges, whose students’ default rate jumped to 15% from 11.6%, but the default rate among students at public and private, four-year universities also increased.
What many people may not realize, however, when taking out a student loan is just how different it is from other kinds of debt. Credit-card debt, for example, can be wiped out in bankruptcy. Mortgages can be discharged through foreclosure. For borrowers with crippling student loan debt, financial failure offers no such fresh start. The loan still must be paid off, and often with new collection costs tacked on, making it much more expensive than before. On top of that, up to 25% of a person’s wages can be deducted until the loan is paid back in full. (Private lenders must get court approval for wage garnishment and the amount they can take varies.) With federal loans, the government can also keep your federal and state income tax refunds, intercept future lottery winnings and withhold part of your Social Security payments. “Defaulting can be completely devastating to a family’s finances and sense of well being,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com.

The Case for Paying College Athletes

Ben Cohen:

Somebody will win Saturday’s football game between Ohio State and Miami, which has been jokingly dubbed “the IneligiBowl.” But no matter the outcome, neither team can fairly consider itself a winner.
Both of these football powerhouses are under NCAA investigation for alleged rules violations in which athletes were given cash, gifts and services ranging from tattoos to wild parties on a private yacht. The NCAA, which is rightly determined to make sure its championships can’t be bought, forbids athletes from taking anything from supporters beyond the benefits in their scholarships.
As the muck thickens, the narrative that has taken hold is that the lucrative end of college sports–particularly football–is a fetid swamp that needs to be drained and disinfected. But amid all the righteous indignation, there’s a small but incongruous fact lurking just outside the picture: In most cases where college athletes take money, the sums are pretty small.

The Shame of College Sports

Taylor Branch:

A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes–and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA.
“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”
How to Fix College Sports Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers–among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

Taking the Dread Out of Phys Ed

Sue Shellenbarger:

For many middle school students, the words “Phys Ed” are enough to provoke fear–fear of getting dressed in the locker room, of wearing a nerdy uniform, of looking clumsy, of being picked last.
Tammy Brant, a gym teacher at Selma Middle School, in Selma, Ind., is rethinking the way schools have taught girls and boys about fitness. Instead of group calisthenics and contests that favor the most athletic kids, Ms. Brant, like many other teachers nationwide, devotes class time to fitness instruction and to games structured so that more kids can play and enjoy.
Instead of pushing everyone to hit specific performance targets, she urges them to progress toward individualized “fitness zones.” She teaches the stages of a workout–warm-up, training, cool-down–and straps a heart monitor on each child. The goal is to instill healthy habits for life.

Can you name successful parent coup?

Jay Matthews:

Joseph Hawkins, senior study director at the Rockville.-based research group Westat, read my recent attack on the Parent Trigger Law in California and issued a challenge:
“If we put 10 hot-shot education reporters together in a room and asked this question I think the answer would be zero: ‘In the past 10 years of school reform, can you list any schools where a parent revolution took place?'”
Hawkins said he is talking about a successful parent rebellion– “meaning that the parents were fed up with low performance and they literally took over the school and improved it–demanded that it become better.”
He said “I don’t think such parent ‘revolutions’ ever take place at all. We probably could find some schools where a group of fed-up parents started their own charter, but I’m talking about something totally different. I’m pretty sure that both us have been in those low performing schools where many parents when quizzed in depth about their school confessed their frustrations. But mounting a coup d’état? Out of the question.”

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling

Clifford Levy:

The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice. “Daddy? I want to go home,” said my 8-year-old daughter, Arden. Two hours earlier, I dropped Arden and her two siblings off at their new school in a squat building in a forest of Soviet-era apartment blocks on Krasnoarmeyskaya (Red Army) Street in Moscow. They hugged me goodbye, clinging a little too long, and as I rode the metro to my office, I said a kind of silent prayer to myself that they would get through the day without falling apart.
But Arden had just spent the minutes between class periods hiding in the bathroom so no one would see her crying. Finally, she composed herself, found her teacher and pantomimed that she needed to talk to me. “I don’t understand . . . anything,” she told me. I tried to respond with soothing words, but I had no idea what to do. You can tell your kid to tough it out when she transfers from one school to another in your hometown. This was different.

MBA applications: How to beat the drop

The Economist:

The Graduate Management Admission Council’s latest report on business-school applications makes for grim reading. According to its 2011 Application Trends Survey (PDF) over two-thirds of schools worldwide say that they have seen applications to their two-year full-time MBA programmes fall over the last year. Meanwhile, 57% also reported a drop in applications to one-year full-time programmes.
There may be several contributing factors. With applications at an all time high the year before (generally applications to business schools rise in tough economic times) there is an element of a return to normality. Still, this doesn’t account for all of the collapse.
Dave Wilson, GMAC’s president, says it may not be that there has been a shocking drop in the number of applicants, rather that each candidate is applying to fewer schools. This is interesting because one explanation could be that more students are only applying for local programmes, where there is a limited choice. If true, this fits neatly with the projections of many of those predicting tough times ahead for business schools.

New Haven’s School Effort Hits Hurdles

Shelly Banjo:

A dozen students in uniforms of white-collared shirts and blue slacks looked up attentively at their sixth-grade teachers at the Brennan Rogers School on the first day of school this year.
“We will never make you do something that doesn’t guide you to a purpose, we’re not here to waste your time,” said second-year teacher Kimberlee Henry. Her students nodded. “Everything you will do this year will prepare you for something else, giving you the skills you need to go on to high school, college, and excel at life.”
The school’s focus wasn’t always as sharp. Brennan Rogers, which has about 360 kindergarten through eighth-graders, spent decades failing its students. Parents commonly campaigned for transfers to other schools that weren’t plagued with violence and lagging from inattention.
Now, the school serves as the centerpiece of a sweeping reform effort launched three years ago by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano to turn around this inner-city district, where one in four children drops out every year and test scores have languished for decades.

THE DARK SIDE: Religion has no place in public schools

David Ziemer:

Many years ago, I attended a public high school student’s graduation ceremony out in what I consider the sticks.
I was amazed at the overt Christianity. There was a prayer at the beginning, and again at the end. The commencement speeches were full of references to God.
My own public high school was roughly one-third Jewish, so this wouldn’t have flown. Someone would have sued, and rightfully so. A Jewish student should be able to go to his own public high school graduation without being told he needs to pray to Jesus Christ.
But out in the sticks, I guess, that sort of thing was okay.
Being a lawyer, I approached the father of the graduate, knowing he was not religious, and asked if he would like to bring a lawsuit against the school district. He said he found the ceremony offensive, but that he owns a business in that town, and he was certainly not going to bring a lawsuit just because they turned his son’s graduation ceremony into a revival meeting. Fair enough. I let the matter drop.

Only 20 states check test-tampering

Jay Matthews:

USA Today, in the persons of reporters Marisol Bello and Greg Toppo, has a new ground-breaking report on the feeble response to standardized test-tampering in America.
Bello and former USA Today reporter Jack Gillum exposed test security problems in the D.C. schools. Now, we learn that most states are even worse than D.C. because they don’t bother even to look for evidence of unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.
USA Today reports that only 20 states and the District do any erasure analysis. Four others give tests online (a good way to prevent principals from changing answers after the kids go home) and so don’t have erasures to check. It said five other states, including Maryland, plan to check erasures next year because of the outbreak of cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the District. New York may do the same.

SAT Reading, Writing Scores Hit Low

Stephanie Banchero:

SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2011 fell in all three subject areas, and the average reading and writing scores were the lowest ever recorded, according to data released on Wednesday.
The results from the college-entrance exam, taken by about 1.6 million students, also revealed that only 43% of students posted a score high enough to indicate they were ready to succeed in college, according to the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the exam. Students had to score a 1550 out of a possible 2400 to meet that benchmark, which would indicate a 65% chance of getting at least a B-minus average in the first year of college, the Board calculated.
The report on the SAT, long known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, comes on the heels of results from the ACT college-entrance exam that suggested only 25% of high-school graduates who took that exam were ready for college. And results from national high-school math and reading exams show only modest progress over the past five years. The data highlight the difficult task faced by the Obama administration in pursuing education policies to help Americans remain globally competitive.

Michael Alison Chandler:

SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.

Fight about affirmative action in school admissions all about context

Chris Rickert:

The most striking thing about Tuesday’s press conference on UW-Madison’s alleged affirmative-action-driven bias against white and Asian applicants was not the loud, mildly violent protest that overran it.
It was the university professor who publicly touted the rising admission rate for white students and the declining rate for blacks. This from an institution that only 11 years ago was so worried about its less-than-diverse image that it Photoshopped a black student onto an admissions catalog.
That aside, nothing about the presser/protest was all that ground-breaking, and Roger Clegg, president of the conservative outfit that did the study showing UW’s bias, got to the nut of the whole affair in only about 35 minutes.
“I view discrimination as something that happens to individuals, rather than something that happens to aggregate groups,” he said.
Read more: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/chris_rickert/article_af9f024e-df35-11e0-a10f-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1Y4bqeYTM

why do people still buy books?

jared tame:

there’s been a lot going on recently with books. i’ve been watching eric ries and i’m blown away by how successful he’s been at promoting his book the lean startup. i saw that @dharmesh wrote about it at onstartups.com, and tweeting out small agreeable little tidbits from the book is genius–i don’t know whether this was intentional or not, but that’s an awesome idea.
i met noah kagan last friday to catch up over drinks at showdown in sf, and i met someone interesting there: laura roeder. i usually meet people who claim to be “social media experts” (as every hacker reading this rolls their eyes) but this woman actually had a significant following and presence on twitter and facebook, and not one of those fake “follow me and i’ll auto-follow you back” type of things. i dropped in on a small video conference she was doing today corresponding to her book launch, which i had not realized she was working on (for some reason, she didn’t mention it when we met, even though i had mentioned startups open sourced was paying my rent at this point).