Jim Zellmer – Page 357 – School Information System

Los Angeles teachers test a pilot evaluation program

This is what one of Los Angeles Unified’s most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem.
The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions — “What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?” — all aimed at helping the teacher improve.
These training sessions are the school district’s first concrete steps toward replacing its age-old teacher evaluation system, which is widely regarded as a failure. The new version is based on more detailed observations, student and parent feedback, and students’ standardized test scores.

Hong Kong Eco-primary school considers a step up to secondary

Chloe Lai:

Sitting under a parasol to avoid the fierce summer sun, two teenagers at a summer camp in the New Territories debate the criteria for an ideal secondary school. Rosemary and White Cloud – adopting nature-related nicknames is a tradition at the camp – are responding to a Q&A session held earlier, when two secondary school principals were quizzed on topics ranging from the logic of school uniform design to how to prevent teachers from abusing their power.
“The school must have strict rules so every student will behave and be polite,” White Cloud says.
Rosemary has very different ideas: “It is not going to work. Strict rules will only make the disobedient even more disobedient. My ideal school is one with no penalties.”
The two friends’ contrasting views reflect their exposure to Gaia School, an alternative private primary school in Tuen Mun that emphasises personal responsibility and learning from nature.

Peter the Wild Boy

Roger Moorhouse:

A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King’s Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.
In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.
After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously, ‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

Here’s how to get your children a great education

Greg Toppo:

Journalist Peg Tyre’s new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve ($26, Henry Holt) out Aug. 16, condenses decades of education research to help parents make better choices about selecting schools for their children. Tyre, whose 2008 book The Trouble With Boys helped spark a national conversation, says, “Schools can’t reasonably be expected to both educate children and educate parents about education. Parents are going to have to get more sophisticated about what excellent education looks like — and demand it for their child.” Tyre recently spoke to USA TODAY:

Chicago Principals to Get Merit Pay

Rebecca Vevea:

Chicago Public Schools will offer merit pay to principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics that may include student growth on test scores, the school climate and leadership skills, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday.
The performance rewards will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to create a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the bonuses will range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per principal.

WEAC issues layoff notices to 40% of staff

Erin Richards:

Layoff notices have been issued to about 40% of the Wisconsin Education Association Council workforce, a total of 42 employees who work for the state’s largest teachers union, Executive Director Dan Burkhalter confirmed Monday.
Burkhalter said that the layoffs and other budget cuts at WEAC are a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s “union-busting” legislation.
“Right now we’re engaged in membership continuation campaigns,” Burkhalter said in a statement. “We’ve made steady progress in signing up members and we anticipate further progress will be made as the school year resumes. Despite budget cuts and layoffs, our goal remains the same: to be a strong and viable organization that represents the voices of Wisconsin’s public school employees.”

An Open Letter to Our Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB)

The Milwaukee Drum:

Dear Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB),
Something has occured within our Black Community which needs to be addressed and I’m going to peel the scab off of it. The chasm has been widened between those in our community who possess knowledge, resources, wisdom, creativity, and determination and those who should be moving into the fold to advance our race. It is a slow death which if prolonged, will choke off any feasible possibility for future survival and success for our people.
YGTB, I sit positioned between you and our elders… not young enough nor mature enough to be in either category. I am transitioning and this is what I want to give you now during my journey (breadcrumbs to follow). Our (some) elders have eaten of the tree of (trick)knowledge bearing the forbidden fruit integration. The false promises of this fruit tantalized those who tasted its flesh with the hope of equality to White People, justice, freedom, legacy, and political power in America (our wilderness).
YGTB, stop!!!!! I am telling you not to follow down their path! Reject this fruit and the lies which flow from its bosom. What you need only to do is observe the plight of our people and judge if the present course (last 2 generations) of our direction produced results that have uplifted the majority of our people? If you see what I do, then you agree that our condition is getting worse. Do not continue to do what has failed us.

Stearns High School pitch to China is a failure

Associated Press:

A school district in the deep woods of Maine that sought out Chinese students to help boost its enrolment and its finances fell far short of its ambitious goal of bringing in 60 students.
Only six Chinese students will attend high school in Millinocket, in a rural part of the northeastern state, next month.
The target of five dozen was probably overly ambitious, officials said.
The efforts were also hindered by a recruiter in China who failed to deliver any students and a writer who told readers of China’s Global Times newspaper that the school was “mediocre” and that Millinocket children hang out in parking lots for fun.
Stearns High School officials said they were disappointed more Chinese students won’t be attending when classes begin on September 6 but will stick with the programme and try to expand in the years ahead.

Pulling strings into a top school: More parents are getting their children to play the harp as a way into prestigious institutions

Lana Lam:

More Hong Kong youngsters are following in the footsteps of Botticelli angels by learning the harp, with parents encouraging this special option as a way to secure a spot in a prestigious school.
Demand for harp lessons had steadily increased in the last three years and its appeal was multi-faceted, said professional harpist Joan Lee Wai-ying, who opened a home-based harp school in Sha Tin in 2008.
“Many parents want to widen the musical knowledge of their children but it’s also because of the school admission test which requires a basic instrument like the piano but also a very special instrument like the harp,” Lee said, with the number of students at her school increasing fivefold since opening.

We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading

Alan Jacobs:

While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI’s wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.

Sun Prairie’s 2011-2012 Budget Pork

sp-eye:

It’s getting time to fish or cut bait. We’ve taken a good hard look at the proposed/draft 2011-12 SPASD budget, and we find a number of budget lines to be potentially low hanging fruit…ripe for the pickin’.
Download a PDF copy of SP-EYE Analysis of the 2011-12 SPASD Budget
Maybe we don’t have it right…we can admit it when we make an error…but it places the burden of proof squarely upon the district. PROVE to the community that you absolutely need all that is budgeted, and you have our support.

Why are high school grads still learning to learn?

Chris Rickert:

I’m not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn’t learned the difference between “it’s” and “its,” for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master’s level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts “Learning to Learn Camp,” Madison Area Technical College’s nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.

Little Girl Found

Patti Waldmeir:

One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.
I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness – so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago – a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?

The myth of the rational education market

Peg Tyre:

The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the “Parent Trigger” in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton “pulled the trigger,” but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures–including New York — are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.

What does it mean to be a proficient 8th grade reader in Georgia? Not much.

Maureen Downey:

The U.S. Department of Education released a new analysis of state standards this week that maps the standards against federal ones to assess rigor. We don’t look strong on the mapping, especially in eighth grade reading where we trail the nation.
The analysis using National Center for Educational Statistics data superimposes a state’s standard for proficient performance in reading and mathematics onto a common scale defined by scores on NAEP, a federal test administered to student samples in every state to produce a big picture view of American education. (This report offers a lot of data and great graphics.)
The most alarming mapping revealed that Georgia’s standard for proficiency in 8th grade reading is so low that it falls into the below basic category on NAEP scoring. (We don’t look in 8th grade math, either, but the feds warn that our change from QBE standards to Georgia Performance Standards undermines comparisons.)

Pre-college camps help incoming students learn how to learn

Deborah Ziff:

The fall semester hasn’t officially started yet, but this week a group of incoming Madison Area Technical College students gathered on campus to study in groups, submit homework, and take notes on lectures.
They won’t be tested. They’re just practicing.
Programs like this one at MATC — called Learning to Learn Camp — are increasingly common at colleges and universities as educators try to prepare students for the academic rigor and social stresses of college.
The courses tend to provide basic study skills such as note-taking and time management, as well as information on decidedly squishier topics, such as how to stay motivated or take personal responsibility.
“It all sounds very elementary, but particularly for community college and technical college students who often don’t have a college frame of reference, or somebody in their family who went to college, it’s really useful information,” said Melinda Mechur Karp, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.

Web site lets you compare Michigan high schools’ success

Lori Higgins:

The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents — and everyone else — a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year’s worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.

Double degree adds up for Hong Kong maths prodigy

Peter So:

The wonderkid who at nine became the city’s youngest undergraduate four years ago completed his bachelor’s and master’s programme this week at the age of 13.
March Boedihardjo will now head off to the United States for a research programme and, possibly, a doctorate. The youngster was admitted to Baptist University’s double-degree programme in mathematical science in 2007, finishing it in four years – a year early. March said he really enjoyed his university years, despite earlier concerns about how such a young boy would adapt to the life.

The 15-Year-Old Creator Of The Trimit App Makes Regular Old Entrepreneurs Seem Like Slackers

Kit Eaton:

Trimit’s a recent $0.99 app for the iOS platform that does one simple thing very well: It boils down longer-form Net content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries. The longer summaries are meant to be handy for people pressed for time to read bigger articles, perhaps during a commute, and the shorter summaries make it easy to share the body text of interesting content (more than just a “hey this is good!” introduction to a link in an email or tweet) on the web, with the 140-character limit obviously tailored for Twitter. It’s also useful for deciding if you want to, later, read a long-form article.
Its design taps into the same thinking as web acryonyms like LOL and TWSS, and there’s more than a little nod in the direction of hyper-abbreviated SMS language. Perhaps this thinking was boosted because the chap behind it is just 15.
App creator Nick D’Aloisio tells Fast Company that he came up with the idea for the app during exam studies when he was “required to research a vast amount of webpages.” Nick realized that while poring over sites was “browsing a lot of pages that were, in fact, irrelevant to the task and therefore wasting” a lot of his time. Thus the aha moment, where he realized a quick precis of a website could be invaluable in helping you decide if you wanted to browse the rest of it. D’Aloisio stressed that the intention really is to “aid users in consuming content on the web” rather than sharing it socially, though this is a natural benefit of its design.

Pell Grants Best for Buying Votes

Neal McCluskey:

Quite simply, Pell Grants are not supposed to be for the middle class. As the U.S. Department of Education’s website makes clear, Pell is supposed to be for “low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students.”
So why characterize Pell as a benefit for the middle class? Because lots of people consider themselves to be in that group — which federal politicians rarely define — and policymakers want their votes.
Unfortunately, as Rep. George Miller (D-CA) recently demonstrated, saying Pell is intended for the middle class also makes it a valuable weapon in waging class warfare.
“Pell is the reason they are able to go to college and get ahead,” Miller said in response to congressional Republicans purportedly looking to trim the program as part of debt reduction. “It’s a shameful excuse and an attack on middle class families.”

Children With Autism, Connecting via Transit

Christine Haughney:

Ravi Greene can tell you how to get anywhere in New York City by transit — like the beach, on the 6 train.

“The 6 goes elevated from Whitlock Avenue to Pelham Bay Park,” he explains. “And at Pelham Bay Park, you can transfer for a Bx29 or a Bx12 — the Bx12 to Orchard Beach.”

Ravi has drafted elaborate proposals for expanded bus service in Brooklyn, and has memorized the exact date that the W train stopped running in 2010.

And he is only 5 years old.

Building character is a worthy subject in schools

Alan Borsuk:

Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?
I grant it’s a false choice. You ought to have both, and they’re not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It’s hard to find a school that doesn’t have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don’t need much more because they have a lot already.
But it’s not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students’ character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it’s not the school’s job to civilize children. That’s the parents’ job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.

Handbooks replace union contracts in Wisconsin schools

Erin Richards:

Some are calling it the summer of the teacher handbook.
With the start of school approaching on Sept. 1, about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts are rushing to finalize employee handbooks to replace now-extinct collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined duties and salaries for workers.
The passage of the state’s new “Act 10” legislation – in effect for all districts that didn’t extend a contract with teachers before the passage of the law – gives administrators the ability to make sweeping changes to teachers’ pay scales, hours and working conditions without having to negotiate them with unions.
Some sacred cows are disappearing, such as teacher tenure, layoffs based on seniority and the guarantee of 10 years’ worth of post-retirement health insurance. Other big and complex changes on the horizon include new salary structures and pay-for-performance plans.

The ever-increasing burden of education

Ivan Lorentzen:

Even with all its flaws, I’m a proponent of public education in much the same way I remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy despite recent events in D.C. having tested this commitment.
In terms of public education, there are countless books, articles, and research projects from numerous points of view and it’s clear one can find proponents and opponents to whatever perspective you may choose. One recent publication is noteworthy due to the clarity in writing and direct premise — “Schools Cannot Do It Alone” by Jamie Vollmer, former attorney, businessman, and harsh education critic, now an advocate and consultant to education. I’d like to quote and paraphrase from this book in the following column.
He argues schools need the trust, understanding, permission and support from their communities in order to improve the public education system and increase student success. In tracing his journey from critic to consultant, he weaves an interesting tale as he encounters “blueberries, bell curves, and smelly eighth graders,” and comes to two conclusions. First, we have a system problem, not a people problem. We need to modify the system in order to get the graduates we want. And second, we cannot touch the system without touching the culture of the surrounding town because everything that goes on inside a school is tied to local attitudes, values, traditions and beliefs. But in order to improve the system it’s vital that we first accurately understand the system that presently exists and how it came to be.
For the first time in history the security, prosperity, and health of our nation depend on our ability to unfold the full creative potential of every child — not just the easy ones, not just the top 20 percent of the class, and not just those who reflect our preferred values. The problem is that America’s public education system was never designed to do this. As Thomas Jefferson imagined it, schools should be designed to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. Back then most everyone was a farmer, the pace of change was slow, options were few, and only a small handful of people were paid to think.

Partnership between Elgin school, salon a cut above

Emily McFarlan:

U46 schools won’t start class until next week, but already on Thursday, 5-year-old Nicky Moraetes of Elgin leaned forward in his chair at Harriet Gifford Elementary School with a look of intense concentration on his face.
Nicky will start dual-language kindergarten Wednesday, Aug. 24, at Gifford, and he’ll look good when he does. As he squeezed his eyes shut, a smock wrapped around his shoulders, a Salon Professionals Academy stylist clipped short the back of his blond hair.
The 5-year-old was one of many Gifford students and their siblings who got free haircuts during registration at the elementary school Thursday afternoon.

Discarding “No Child Left Behind”

John Van Hecke:

In the midst of unsettled, economically anxious times, conservative policy advocates have embraced a public chaos strategy. While they create disorder, sapping public confidence in public infrastructure, conservative policymakers pursue a policy agenda limiting public investment in public systems that serve all Minnesotans. They create cover for their true aim, directing public investment’s benefits to fewer and wealthier people.
“No Child Left Behind” is a terrific example of this strategy. By creating an impossible performance standard–every child must pass the mandated standardized exam–the results allow conservative advocates to express outrage and shock that public schools are failing the public. It’s not responsible public policy but it is a marvelously self-fulfilling prophecy, consistent with conservative traditions of defunding government while attacking it for failing to do what they’ve deliberately prevented it from doing.
In the meantime, while modest income people struggle, our country still fights two wars and gives huge tax breaks to the very richest Americans. Minnesota has its own version of this experience, revealed during the recent budget stand-off and state government shutdown. Conservative policy leaders preserved a lower effective tax rate on the richest Minnesotans while cutting state services and accelerating program costs shift to property tax payers.

10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges

Reader’s Digest:

If you’re the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don’t do it.
Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America’s colleges and universities — especially the elite — aren’t worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.
More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. “Tuition is probably the second-largest item you’ll buy in your lifetime, after your home,” Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk on education

Chan Stroman:

Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk:

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on The Schools, Community, Curriculum & Parenting

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin Interview 8.12.2011 from Jim Zellmer.

I am thankful that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin took the time to chat yesterday.
Mobile (iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android) visitors, please use this link.
19MB mp3 version.

Meeting test score standards – by lowering the bar

Mary McConnell:

Today’s Wall Street Journal highlights a report for the U.S. Government’s National Center for Education Statistics. In case you have trouble following the link, here’s the discouraging news:
“Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.”
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Michigan has power to reimagine education, but will it?

Tom Watkins:

There are lessons that Michigan business and government must learn from the lost decade that stripped our state of pride and nearly 1 million high-paying middle-class jobs.
If we don’t embrace and imagine a better future, instead falling back on “business as usual,” we will be relegated to the trash heap of dinosaurian, economic history.
The revisionists among us would like us to believe Michigan’s fate was pre-determined by the collapse of the domestic auto industry, capped off by a global economic meltdown in 2008.
While the perfect storm of events that hit Michigan were clearly impactful, they need not have defined us. As my dad always told me, “You have little control what happens to you in this life, you have 100 percent control over how you respond.”
Michigan responded poorly.

Judge Blocks Colorado Voucher Plan

Stephanie Simon:

A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.
Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program “provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students,” the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.

Much more on the Douglas County voucher program, here.

A Look at Sun Prairie’s Health Care Costs

sp-eye

In our last post, we made some estimates on potential savings in the 2011-12 budget due to over-budgeting for health insurance premiums in the wake of Governor Walker’s budget.
Our calculations were based on the following:
The cost to the district for a Family plan was estimated to be: $14,249
The cost to the district for a Single plan was estimated to be: $ 6,307

Sun Prairie’s website.

Parents must hold kids accountable

Laura Schubert:

The recent spate of criminal activity involving marauding bands of young people has a lot of greater Milwaukee residents wondering what is going on inside the heads of today’s teenagers and young adults.
The answer, according to current brain research, is a lot. It turns out that the adolescent brain is not fully mature, as previously believed, but is actually in a period of intense growth until children reach their late teens or early 20s. One of the last areas of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex.
In a nutshell, the prefrontal cortex governs impulse control. The hormonal surges of puberty kick up heightened emotional responses at a time when the brain is least equipped to regulate emotional urges, thus creating the perfect storm for poor choices.

Obama Shows Spunk Pushing Bold Education Plan: Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter:

Although President Barack Obama is on the ropes, with even some Democratic allies describing him as weak and passive, this week he showed boldness and imagination in one vital area: education.
Obama backed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement that he will grant waivers to states that want to be excused from the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind , Washington’s much-maligned 2002 overhaul of elementary and secondary education policy.
Republican lawmakers complain that the White House waivers run roughshod over the legislative branch — and they’re right. But gridlock demands more robust use of presidential authority and, at least in this case, we’re getting it. Unless Duncan’s action is challenged and reversed on constitutional grounds, No Child Left Behind will be left behind for good.

College Tours: When did they become a thing?

Jeremy Singer-Vine:

Despite a lousy economy and high gas prices, college visits by prospective students increased over the last year, according to an informal poll by the New York Times. Almost three-quarters of the 41 colleges surveyed said they had more visitors this summer than last. When did the pre-enrollment campus visit become a “thing”?
The late 1960s. The college visit as we know it–with guest-lectures from the provost, tours, and occasional free goodies–dates to the Vietnam era. During this time, universities faced increased competition from a boom in two-year colleges, while cheaper airfare, the civil rights movement, and a shift to co-educational teaching gave prospective students more choice than ever among postsecondary schools. Colleges realized they needed to market themselves more vigorously, and campus visits became a big part of the pitch. (This was a smart move: A 1982 study found that about 16 percent of prospective students considered their campus visit the most influential factor in naming their first-choice college.)

Bullying climates at schools may be linked with lower test scores

Jeannine Stein:

Bullying can affect a student’s academic performance, but a school’s bullying climate may be linked with lower overall test scores, a study finds.
The study, presented recently at the American Psychological Assn.’s recent annual convention in Washington, D.C., surveyed 7,304 ninth-grade students and 2,918 teachers who were randomly chosen from 284 high schools in Virginia. Students and teachers were asked about incidents of bullying and teasing at the school. Ninth-grade students were chosen because researchers felt this first year of high school was a critical adjustment period, and because poor test scores in this grade may be linked with a higher drop-out rate.
In the study, bullying was defined as using strength or popularity to deliberately injure, threaten or embarrass another person, and that harassment can be verbal, physical or social. Two students close in strength who argue are not considered bullies.

At Dalton, a Push for Change

Sophia Hollander:

Assembling diverse classes is an oft-stated goal among New York City private schools, with brochures featuring beaming multicultural students.
But this September Dalton will approach a rare benchmark: Nearly half of the incoming kindergarten class will be students of color.
Dalton will dramatically exceed the citywide average for kindergarten diversity at New York’s private schools, which was 30% students of color last year, according to data from the National Association of Independent Schools.
It’s a milestone in an aggressive campaign by the admissions director, Elisabeth “Babby” Krents, to broaden the school’s reach since she assumed the position in 1996. The previous year, the kindergarten class was 6% diverse. This year, it will be 47% of the 97-member incoming class.

States Fail to Raise Bar in Reading, Math Tests

Stephanie Banchero:

Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the “basic” level on the national NAEP exam. “Basic” means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to “proficient,” which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at “proficient”–and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.

Are school boards part of the problem or the solution?

Anne M. Byrne:

In the drama of public education, many people seem to see school boards as wearing black hats. When is the last time you heard a positive reference to school boards in our ongoing national debate? School boards are part of the problem, right?
Actually, local school boards have an essential role in education reform. More often than not, they are composed of energetic citizens who bring a passion for their communities to bear on nettlesome issues ranging from graduation rates to childhood obesity and bullying.
As a longtime school board member in New York State and chair of the student achievement committee for the National School Boards Association, I have been looking at what research says about school boards and student achievement. Does what happens in the boardroom make a difference in the classroom? The answer is yes, unequivocally.
Controlling for demographic differences, districts with high levels of student achievement have school boards that exhibit habits and characteristics that are markedly different from boards in low-achieving districts.

Robots put leadership under skills pressure

Andrew Hill:

We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.

Why parents can’t save schools

Jay Matthews:

One of the summer scandals keeping us education wonks amused until school starts is a American Federation of Teachers gaffe in Connecticut. Union officials posted online an analysis of their lobbying against a parent trigger law in that state that revealed too much about their distaste for letting moms and dads decide who should run their schools.
Bloggers RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo exposed the union celebrating its gutting of a Connecticut version of California’s parent trigger law. School reform organizations and editorialists were aghast. AFT president Randi Weingarten disowned the Web post. Activists pushing for parent triggers in Texas and New York welcomed the attention.
This idea has already reached the Washington area and may someday inspire legislation here. That would be bad. Despite its worthy proponents and democratic veneer, the parent trigger is a waste of time. Let’s toss it into the trash with other once fashionable reform ideas like worksheets for slow students and brief constructed responses on state tests.

A balance of power in school governance is vital to ongoing improvements AND relevance.

Don’t Filter Information

Joshua Kim:

The context for this advice was some technical information about e-learning system downtime that we needed to communicate with our leadership. I was thinking of how to present this information to communicate the meaning I thought most essential, and therefore drive toward the conclusions and actions I thought we should take. Controlling the message and managing the information might be an understandable desire, but when it comes to technology (and perhaps everything else), a controlled message is sometimes the wrong approach.
Deciding not to filter information does not mean that we cease thinking about how to effectively communicate. We need to understand the recipient of the information, and have insight into the most effective manner to package our communication. We should also be aware of how the communication will be perceived, and be prepared to address concerns or questions.

School Vouchers – Panacea or Snake Oil?

Ross Meyer:

As most Coloradans know, at least those who keep up with statewide education news, the Douglas County school board recently approved — unanimously — a groundbreaking plan to help pay the tuition costs for hundreds of students so that they can attend private schools.
This plan, known colloquially as a school voucher program, enjoys ardent support from some quarters, but vigorous opposition elsewhere.
Is such a plan useful, does it seem a wise use of taxpayer provided money, and is it available to all students?
Or, as many think, should public money earmarked for education be used exclusively for public schools to benefit all students? As with so many topics dotting the American sociological landscape, the answers lie in the murky sea of the individual’s political leanings.

Education in Chile: We want the world

The Economist:

IT BEGAN on August 4th with the metallic clink of a few pots and pans. By nightfall, thousands of people were on the streets of Santiago banging kitchenware, a form of protest last heard under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This time the cacerolazos, as they are called, are being staged in the name of educational Utopia–and in response to a cack-handed government ban on marches.
Chile’s school system is the least bad in Latin America, according to the OECD’s PISA tests, which compare educational attainment across countries. But that does not make it good. And the overall performance hides huge disparities. Analysis done in Chile of the test results in the 65 countries that took part finds that it ranked 64th in terms of the variance of the results according to social class. Rich pupils get good private education; poor ones are condemned to underfunded, dilapidated state-funded schools.

Wisconsin teachers union tops list of biggest lobbying groups for 2009-10, report shows

Scott Bauer:

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.
Much of its lobbying in 2009 was in support of removing caps on raises for teachers during contract negotiations, a move supported by Doyle and approved by the Legislature.

The Trouble with Debt to Degree

Robert Kelchen:

I was pleased to see the release of Education Sector’s report, “Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success,” by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon. They created a new measure, a “borrowing to credential ratio,” which divides the total amount of borrowing by the number of degrees or credentials awarded. Their focus on institutional productivity and dedication to methodological transparency (their data are made easily accessible on the Education Sector’s website) are certainly commendable.
That said, I have several concerns with their report. I will focus on two key points, both of which pertain to how this approach would affect the measurement of performance for 2-year and 4-year not-for-profit (public and private) colleges and universities. My comments are based on an analysis in which I merged IPEDS data with the Education Sector data to analyze additional measures; my final sample consists of 2,654 institutions.
Point 1: Use of the suggested “borrowing to credential” ratio has the potential to reduce college access for low-income students.

Related: Debt to Degree.

Some Folks Have a (Really) Hard Time with Change

Peter Murphy:

Change is hard. So said many a politician trying to tackle problems confronting the state or nation.
The president of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), Richard Iannuzzi, is a tell-tale example of someone having real difficulty with change by showing a dark side.
Yesterday’s Associated Press story on the changing landscape of public education was telling. With strengthened accountability and teacher evaluation combined with tightening resources, changes are afoot. On the one hand, Governor Andrew Cuomo is recognizing the “gravitational forces” of change and is in some ways its instigator by his focus on “improving student performance,” including his push that gave more teeth to the state Regents evaluation requirements.

Preparing Future Teachers

Melissa Westbrook:

From the Grand Rapids, Michigan Press, comes a story about Arne Duncan and what he thinks should happen for teachers and teacher training:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says teachers should be paid between $60,000 to $150,000 – but should be held more accountable.
Duncan also told the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards last week that it should be more difficult for prospective students to enter college teacher preparation programs.
The latter sentence is part of a bigger discussion over whether colleges of education in this country do a good job of attracting good students and if they are training them properly. Indeed, a big worry expressed among some UW COE faculty about bringing in TFA is that if the COE doesn’t step up and do better they could be shut down. Some of the UW COE faculty seem to think the TFA training may be the training of the future for teachers.

Madison Schools To Start New Talented & Gifted Program

Matthew DeFour:

Spurred by a critical state audit, the Madison School District will begin a new program this year intended to better identify and provide services for talented and gifted students.
Using an approach similar to how it identifies and serves special education students, the district plans to categorize talented-and-gifted services into three tiers and identify where all students fit into those tiers based on a combination of test scores, grades, teacher and staff assessments, and parent and self-identification.
Students who qualify for the top tier could receive additional academic services outside of the classroom. The program also seeks to develop the potential talent of all students, especially those who may not have been identified in the past, such as English language learners and low-income students.
In the past, Madison schools have used a more ad hoc, less systematic, approach for identifying and serving students who demonstrate advanced abilities in intellect, academics, leadership, creativity, and the performance and visual arts. The district also has historically blanched at grouping students by ability.

Ravitch rallies teachers vs. ‘astroturf’

Politico:

Ravitch’s public speaking schedule over the last year included more than a dozen speeches across the country to local AFT and NEA affiliates. Brill suggested that some of those appearances carried a price tag of between $15,000 and $20,000. But Ravitch, for her part, said she has never received speaking fees approaching the sums that Brill claims.
“That is a flat out untruth,” Ravitch told POLITICO. “Most of my speaking appearances to union groups have been for free.”
“Most of the time that I speak to unions it has been for free.”
Spokesmen for NEA, AFT and the Gates Foundation all declined to comment for this story.

Super Teachers Alone Can’t Save Our Schools

Steven Brill:

A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We’ve all seen that movie–more than once, starting with “Stand and Deliver” and “Lean on Me” in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers’ union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren’t enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country’s most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.

We’d All Love to See the Plan

Mike Antonucci:

On the pages of Time, Andrew Rotherham examines the various reform-minded groups that have sprung up within the ranks of the big-city teachers’ unions. Sarah Rosenberg at The Quick and the Ed follows suit. Rotherham calls them “insurgents” while Rosenberg refers to “a revolution.” While I applaud any publicly stated diversity of thought within NEA and AFT, I am considerably less sanguine about the prospects of major internal reform.

There are two problems. One is that in any corporate culture radical changes in direction are frowned upon, if not suppressed. In unions, whose very hallmark is solidarity, this reluctance to entertain unorthodox thought is ratcheted up several levels. The relative electoral success of NewTLA is remarkable, but such victories don’t usually result in further gains in subsequent elections. I admit we are operating in extraordinary times, so maybe things will be different and I’ll be surprised.

For Better Grades, Try Gym Class

Gretchen Reynolds:

If you want a young person to focus intently in school and perform well on tests, should you first send him or her to gym class? That question, which has particular relevance for school districts weighing whether to reduce or ax their physical education programs to save money, motivated a number of stimulating new examinations into the interplay of activity and attention. Some of the experiments studied children; others looked at laboratory rats bred to have an animal version of attention deficit disorder. For both groups, exercise significantly affected their ability to concentrate, although some activities seemed to be better than others at sharpening attention.

The most striking of the new studies involved 138 schoolchildren ages 8 to 11 who were living in Rome. The children were physically healthy, and none suffered from serious attention deficits. But like most children that age, they found it difficult to remain fully engaged in their lessons as the school day wore on. As the study’s authors, all affiliated with the Foro Italico campus of the University of Rome, point out, children “who undergo prolonged periods of academic instruction often reduce their attention and concentration.”

To determine whether exertion could make students less distracted, the researchers, whose study was published last week in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, had the children complete several types of gym classes, as well as a typical instructional or lecture class. Just before and immediately after the classes, the children took a written test that required them to pick out certain letters from long chains of symbols in a short time. The test is widely accepted as a good indicator of a person’s attention and ability to concentrate.

Atlanta Starts New School Year Under Cloud of Cheating Scandal

Judy Woodruff

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, the first of two stories about the nation’s schools.
Students returned to Atlanta classrooms for the start of a new school year today. But students and teachers will be laboring under the cloud of a major cheating scandal that’s raising big questions in Atlanta and in districts across the country.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia, was a beacon of hope. Located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, it had built a reputation as a high-achieving school.
Chandra Gallashaw felt lucky to send her children to Parks.
CHANDRA GALLASHAW, mother: This was a college prep middle school. I had seen the change going on over there. And I was really impressed with that. That’s what made me want my daughter to go there more so than ever.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks had made some of the largest gains anywhere in Georgia. Pass rates on the state tests climbed from 35 percent to 78 percent in reading, and from 24 percent to 86 percent in math.

Hong Kong Teachers stand up against ‘moral lessons’; Profession’s biggest union says government’s proposed curriculum should ‘be given a fail’

Jennifer Ngo:

The city’s biggest teachers’ union has called on the government to scrap its plan to introduce mandatory moral and national education classes at schools after a survey of more than 2,000 of its members found widespread opposition to the proposal.
The pro-democracy Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, which claims a membership of 80,000, or 90 per cent of all the city’s teaching professionals, says the poll found 70 per cent were against the move.
Union officials also criticised the government for carrying out consultation over the move in a “condescending” way and called for a new round of talks.
“If we have to speak in terms of grading requirements, this document [proposing the new curriculum] would be given a `fail’,” said James Hon Lin-shan, deputy director of the union’s rights and complaints department.

Hong Kong Professional Teacher’s Union website. Much more on the Moral and National Education (MNE) curriculum, here.

The Annotated No Child Left Behind Waiver Conversation

Andrew Rotherham:

I’m not opposed to a new round of waivers on No Child Left Behind, but the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, the details seem to be getting short shrift lately in favor of the same talking points. To wit, let’s take a look at today’s NYT story on the forthcoming Duncan waiver proposal. Here it is (mostly) annotated with text from the article in itals.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Well, it’s not really 100 percent, more like 92 percent or so, and it’s not 2014 in practice but really several years later. And in practice for a school to make “adequate yearly progress” often only 6 or 7 in 10 of its students need to be passing a test at the proficient level right now. And, to be proficient doesn’t mean a perfect score on a test, often more like getting half the questions on a test right. That all makes it sound too reasonable though. Besides, those are details! Nothing but details!

Facebook’s Privacy Issues Are Even Deeper Than We Knew

Chunka Mui:

Questions about what social networks mean for personal privacy and security have been brought to a head by research at Carnegie Mellon University that shows that Facebook has essentially become a worldwide photo identification database. Paired with related research, we’re looking at the prospect where good, bad and ugly actors will be able identify a face in a crowd and know sensitive personal information about that person.
These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot.

Thomas D. Parker: Time to downsize federal student loans

Thomas Parker:

I have spent much of my working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, I have spent years seeking to expand and then working for the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Currently, I consult to a for-profit student-loan company.
I am surprised, therefore, to hear myself saying that it is time to start downsizing the federal student-loan programs.
I am watching to see how the new Federal Direct Student Loan Program (FDLP) works out. I hope that it is successful.

Judge rules Memphis city schools to merge with county

Bill Mears:

Public schools in Memphis, Tennessee, will be consolidated with those of the surrounding county beginning in 2013-14, a federal judge ruled Monday. The decision ends for now a yearslong fight over funding that spilled into questions of race and politics.
The 146-page ruling from Judge Hardy Mays was prompted by a lawsuit and subsequent voter referendum in March that dissolved the Memphis City Schools charter.
“The Memphis City Schools has been abolished for all purposes except the winding down of its operations and the transfer of administration to the Shelby County Board of Education under the terms of Public Chapter 1 and Tennessee education law,” wrote Mays. He said the surrender of the city charter did not affect the validity of the city board’s actions up until now.

At a Convention Full of Them, It’s Apparent Not All Twins Are Created Equal

Dionne Searcey:

Brothers Mike and Matt Wickert arrived at Twins Days here last weekend dressed alike. But their matching blue polo shirts and khaki shorts didn’t gain them much attention.
The 32-year-old fraternal twins from Cincinnati don’t share all that many features. Mike has blue eyes, Matt has brown. Mike’s face is angular, and Matt’s nose is more rounded. Matt’s hair is dark brown; Mike’s is blonder.
“I feel shafted here because everybody looks the same,” said Matt Wickert who was attending the festival with his brother in the town named for a set of identical twin landowners, Moses and Aaron Wilcox.
Mike Wickert chimed in: “Yeah, we’re the redheaded stepchild here, the fraternals.”

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales: Variation and Change in State Standards for Reading and Mathematics, 2005-2009

US Department of Education, via a kind Chan Stroman email:

State-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results are an important resource for policymakers and other stakeholders responsible for making sense of and acting on state assessment results. Since 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has supported research that focuses on comparing NAEP and state proficiency standards. By showing where states’ standards lie on the NAEP scale, the mapping analyses offer several important contributions. First, they allow each state to compare the stringency of its criteria for proficiency with that of other states.
Second, mapping analyses inform a state whether the rigor of its standards, as represented by the NAEP scale equivalent of the state’s standard, changed over time. (A state’s NAEP scale equivalent is the score on the NAEP scale at which the percentage of students in a state’s NAEP sample who score at or above that value matches the percentage of students in the state who score proficient or higher on the state assessment.) Significant differences in NAEP scale equivalents might reflect changes in state assessments and standards or changes in policies or practices that occurred between the years. Finally, when key aspects of a state’s assessment or standards remain the same, these mapping analyses allow NAEP to substantiate state-reported changes in student achievement.
The following are the research questions and the key findings regarding state proficiency standards, as they are measured on the NAEP scale.

Wisconsin’s oft criticized WKCE vis a vis NAEP:
WKCE “proficient” = 2009 NAEP Below Basic for grade 4 reading (along with 34 other states) and grade 8 reading (along with 15 other states)
= 2009 NAEP Basic for grade 4 math (along with 41 other states) and grade 8 (along with 35 other states)
WKCE results showed more positive changes than NAEP results for grade 4
reading from 2007 to 2009, grade 4 math from 2007 to 2009, and grade 4 math from 2005 to 2009
NAEP results showed more positive changes than WKCE results in grade 8
reading from 2005 to 2009.
How does Wisconsin compare? Learn more, here.

Pop Quiz: Why Are Tuitions So High?

David Hogberg:

College students and their families have struggled to pay for the rising cost of tuition, a cost that has been driven in part by swelling administrative expenses.

Over a 20-year period, the growth in administrative personnel at institutions of higher education has outpaced the growth in both faculty and student enrollment.

Critics refer to this as administrative bloat and contend it shows that universities and colleges are inefficient institutions.

Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders–Even Computers

Jeffrey Young:

The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don’t worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That’s the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.
“They think like assessors, not professors,” says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university’s cadre of graders. “The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don’t know them. They don’t know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students’ work.”
Western Governors is not the only institution reassessing grading. A few others, including the University of Central Florida, now outsource the scoring of some essay tests to computers. Their software can grade essays thanks to improvements in artificial-intelligence techniques. Software has no emotional biases, either, and one Florida instructor says machines have proved more fair and balanced in grading than humans have.

Is College Worth the Cost?

Christina Couch:

Today’s parents are paying substantially higher out-of-pocket costs for higher education than their parents did 30 years ago. And the public has noticed. Three out of four Americans say college is unaffordable for most people, according to the widely publicized survey Pew Research Center survey “Is college worth it?”
A four-year degree is becoming increasingly difficult to attain due to several factors:
–College costs are rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation, according to FinAid.org.
–More than 1 in 10 students graduate with more than $40,000 in undergraduate student debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.

Emanuel defends property tax increase for Chicago Public Schools

John Byrne

Mayor Rahm Emanuel today said a property tax hike for Chicago Public Schools is acceptable because district administrators have made large cuts to the school budget and investment is necessary to improve important programs like early childhood education.
In his first comments since the proposed schools tax increase was announced last week, the mayor said school officials have done more to make the schools more efficient.
“I have no tolerance for an overblown bureaucracy, and I have no tolerance for inefficiency in the city budget, in other agencies, and I’m glad (school officials) followed the cut and invest strategy,” Emanuel said. “I think they’ve made the tough choices.”
“I also expect people to respect the hard-earned dollars of taxpayers,” he added. “But they also rely on the school system. As you know, I said I was going to protect the classroom. We’ve not only protected the classroom, we’ve expanded educational choices and opportunities for the parents that rely on the school system, while other school systems are cutting back.”

Madison’s Dual language immersion program faces challenges

Matthew DeFour:

As the Madison School District’s dual language immersion program enters its eighth year, the increasingly popular option for native Spanish and English speakers is experiencing growing pains.
The district is expanding the program to all of its high school attendance areas, and is looking into possibly adding French and Chinese dual language programs, which would also pair native and non-native English speakers.
National research has shown dual language programs improve student learning better than programs that teach English to non-native speakers or two languages to non-English speakers.
But some School Board members have concerns about the expansion, especially after a recent report highlighted some of the program’s shortcomings.
“I’d rather fix the red flags and make sure we’ve got it right before we expand,” said School Board member Lucy Mathiak. “I don’t see how you expand a program and attend to the things that need to be dealt with at the same time.”

Memphis Consolidation Decision Leaves Board Question Unanswered

Bill Dries:

Attorneys for all of the sides in the schools consolidation court case have a Friday, Aug. 12, deadline that will set the stage for the next crucial part of the landmark court case.
What does a new countywide school board look like and when is there a transition to that school board?
Federal Judge Hardy Mays ruled Monday that the county school system controls the move toward consolidation of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools, which Mays ruled, will take place in August 2013. But he also ruled the county school board districts, which do not include the city of Memphis, are unconstitutional and have to be redrawn or changed in some way.
He gave the attorneys on all sides through Friday to suggest remedies. And his 146-page ruling left some clues about how he will judge the ideas.

It Rhymes With ‘Tool’

Liam Goldrick:

Thursday morning in Washington DC — the only city that could host such a vacuous, inane event — the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is hosting (the hopefully one-off) “Education Reform Idol.” The event has nothing to do with recognizing states that get the best results for children or those that have achieved demonstrated results from education policies over time — but simply those that have passed pet reforms over the past year.
It purports to determine which state is the “reformiest” (I kid you not) with the only contenders being Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin and the only judges being: (1) a representative of the pro-privatization Walton (WalMart) Family Foundation; (2) the Walton-funded, public education hater Jeanne Allen; and (3) the “Fox News honorary Juan Williams chair” provided to the out-voted Richard Lee Colvin from Education Sector.

Online Education: A Word of Caution

Andrew Miller:

Online education is becoming a legitimate and viable option for education systems around the country. Both colleges and secondary schools are offering classes to students. In fact many states and schools are requiring students to take some method of mode of online learning. New York made major changes around seat time and face-to-face contact between student and teacher. The state’s intentions are good. They want to move away the focus from seat time, and they want to offer courses that might be hard to offer in certain areas of the state to all students. With all these innovative systemic changes, one might think we are completely on the right track. I offer a word of caution.
Online education is in danger of replicating a system that isn’t working. Yes, I wrote it. With all the potential for innovation that online education has to offer, we have fallen into the pitfall of replication. The keyword is “danger.” There is much that online education can do to innovate the education system, and much that has already been done as a result. Yet most of the actual courses and pedagogical structures that are in place are simply replicating the traditional style of education.

Debate camp in Oakland

Katy Murphy:

DIEGO GARCIA: Two years ago I went to my first BAUDL summer institute, dragged along by my sister Jazmin to the foreign world of debate. I remember being nervous: I had never engaged in an activity like that before, and was worried about having to speak in front of a crowd. But in the end I loved it, and started spending a lot of time on it, enough that my partner and I came out of last year’s season as League Champions.
When the 2011 BAUDL institute began my biggest concern was the camp tournament – I had a reputation to defend. The last day of the institute there is a tournament were debaters would test their knowledge based on their own personal experiences and what they learned during the week. Being the competitive debater that I am it’s always exciting being at a tournament just to really challenge opponents and make it a learning experience for both teams.

A New Tactic To Encourage Mothers To Breast-Feed

Shirley Wang:

Public-health officials are shifting tactics in an effort to encourage more women to breast-feed their babies–they are pushing hospitals to change their maternity practices.
The percentage of women who breast-feed is well below public-health goals, according to recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hospitals are key to encouraging breast-feeding because the steps taken immediately after birth are essential to help women establish an adequate milk supply and effective nursing practices. If a woman doesn’t really try breast-feeding until a week after giving birth, she probably won’t be successful, experts say.
“What happens in the first three days can make or break your breast-feeding success,” says Jane Morton, a pediatrician at Burgess Pediatrics in Menlo Park, Calif., who helped develop a breast-feeding medicine program at Stanford University.

State budget problems keep squeezing Minn. schools

Chris Williams:

Each summer as she sets up her classroom for the fall, elementary school teacher Kate Schmidt said it seems like she spends more of her own money for school supplies, her classes get larger and she has fewer colleagues.
“I remember people telling me that if you get through your first year of teaching, you’re good to go,” said the 22-year teaching veteran. “Well, I work much harder now than I ever did as a first-year teacher.”
Schmidt, 43, teaches fourth-grade in the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district in the Twin Cities suburbs which, like most districts, is coping with state funding that has failed to keep up with inflation for nearly a decade. Then in July the Legislature and Gov. Mark Dayton held back another $700 million to solve the latest budget deficit.

Raise for Verona superintendent leaves teachers, staff feeling betrayed

Susan Troller:

Coming out of negotiations this spring, Verona School District teachers and staff felt hopeful. In the face of unprecedented cuts in state aid to public schools, they were encouraged by the words of their administrators and School Board members about the value of shared sacrifice and the importance of pulling together to ensure a quality education for the district’s students.
Then, last week, the School Board gave district Superintendent Dean Gorrell a more than 7 percent raise.
Now many Verona teachers and support staff — education aides, cooks and custodians, among others — feel betrayed, both by their School Board and their administration. They say it’s not the additional money — just under $9,500 — that Gorrell will receive on top of his $130,000 annual salary, but the principle involved.
“It’s not the dollar figure,” insists Jennifer Murphy, a high school math teacher who is president of the Verona Area Education Association, the union representing the teachers.

Student testing shows districts without bargaining performed better, but posted smaller gains

Erik Schelzig:

An Associated Press analysis of student testing data shows Tennessee school systems without teachers’ collective bargaining rights performed slightly better than those with negotiated contracts, but posted weaker gains.
Thirty-eight of the state’s 135 local school districts did not engage in collective bargaining with their teachers before a new law eliminated those rights this year, according to the Tennessee Education Association.

Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy’s Website is Live

via a Kaleem Caire email:

Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Our mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service.
To achieve this mission, young men will receive an education that:

Notes and links on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.

Arguing With Success Eva Moskowitz’s aptly named Harlem charter schools.

The Wall Street Journal:

We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today’s report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools – Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success academies – have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City’s public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies’ black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.

No Child Left Behind Gets A Revamp

Elizabeth Shogren:

The Obama administration is giving school districts a waiver from some mandates of the No Child Left Behind education law.
The law requires schools to reach higher goals each year, and by 2014, it demands that every student be graded proficient in reading and math. The administration, which has repeatedly called on Congress to rewrite the legislation, says the law is overly punitive.
In an announcement on Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan opened the door for states to avoid the penalties and deadlines of the current No Child Left Behind Law.
States have long been clamoring for changes to the law. Its requirements have gotten so strict that Duncan says soon more than 80 percent of the nation’s schools could be failing them.
June Atkinson, the state superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina, says the law’s all-or-nothing approach just doesn’t work.

PBS NewsHour has more.

Charter schools: The long turnaround Why the Big Easy has gone furthest with the charter experiment

The Economist:

WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, right at the start of the school year, thousands of students across Orleans Parish saw their classes delayed. Teachers were displaced, and so were parents; the schools themselves were festering, where they were not destroyed. Even before the levees broke the schools were struggling, as the city was. More than two-thirds of pupils in the public system attended schools that were officially failing. In the high schools, fewer than half could pass their graduating exams.

Six years on, it appears that Katrina was catalytic. Reformers had been fretting over New Orleans schools for years. In 2003, for example, the state created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take over failing schools. In July 2005 the Knowledge Is Power Programme, a national network of charter schools, opened its first outpost in Orleans Parish. But after the storm these efforts had a new urgency.

Coming up, a Facebook-like education website

The Economic Times of India:

Jaipur: Fed up of your child logging into Facebook at the cost of studies? The Rajasthan government has hit upon a remedy – a social networking site that will also help brush up a youngster’s academic knowledge.

“The idea is to utilise the popularity of social networking sites among students. Most of them spend a lot of time on such websites every day,” a senior official of the state’s information technology department, which is developing the portal, told IANS.

Jocks vs. Pukes

Robert Lipsyte:

In the spring of that hard year, 1968, the Columbia University crew coach, Bill Stowe, explained to me that there were only two kinds of men on campus, perhaps in the world–Jocks and Pukes. He explained that Jocks, such as his rowers, were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goal-driven, while Pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning. Pukes could be found among “the cruddy weirdo slobs” such as hippies, pot smokers, protesters and, yes, former English majors like me.
I dutifully wrote all this down, although doing so seemed kind of Puke-ish. But Stowe was such an affable ur-Jock, 28 years old, funny and articulate, that I found his condescension merely good copy. He’d won an Olympic gold medal, but how could I take him seriously, this former Navy officer who had spent his Vietnam deployment rowing the Saigon River and running an officers’ club? Not surprisingly, he didn’t last long at Columbia after helping lead police officers through the underground tunnels to roust the Pukes who had occupied buildings during the antiwar and antiracism demonstrations.

‘Star schools’ distort Taipei property market

Jens Kastner:

Epoch-making educational reform is predicted to leave its mark on the Taipei City property market. In 2014, Taiwan’s nine-year compulsory education will be extended to 12 years, and junior high school students will no longer have rigid entrance exams for senior high schools – it will all depend on their house address.
Instead of test scores in combination with household registration in desirable school districts, only the latter will determine the school that students get into. This, along with the huge faith ambitious parents put in the performance of so-called “star schools“, has caused dramatic rises in house prices and rents in the catchment areas of the best schools.

Debating Early College and AP Tests

Kevin CareyL

When the producers at Fox & Friends asked me to get up early on Saturday morning to debate the merits of students earning college credits in high school, my third thought (after “Am I being set up as the liberal stooge?” and “Will this get me on The Daily Show?”) was, “Who could be against that?” The president of Belmont University, as it turns out. Here’s the clip.
While our education system is structured to move people along in age cohorts, some people obviously learn much faster than others. Falling behind is a problem, but so is falling ahead and getting stuck in boring classes that you don’t need. As I note, we’ve been running AP and IB programs in for decades now-I took seven AP tests as a high school student in the mid-80s. Curiously, the object lessons of this experience often seem lost in the broader education debate. People are constantly denouncing multiple-choice “fill in the bubble” standardized tests as horribly inadequate and a tool of corporatist oppression, yet well-off progressive parents scramble to enroll their children in high schools with a full slate of AP courses. “Teaching to test” is also a horrible sin, unless, apparently, the test is AP Physics and you’re angling for the Ivy League.

India’s Teachers may work 8 hrs a day

The Times of India:

Schoolteachers had better brace for eight hours of work daily. The Right to Education (RTE) Act, which specifies 45 working hours a week for teachers, including preparation hours, is reportedly about to be implemented in the state.
Though school education minister Bratya Basu said he was not aware of any such development, a senior school education department official said the state government has decided on several changes in schools. For instance, the number of class hours to be put in by students in a year has been fixed. The number will be 800 for classes I to V and 1,000 for classes VI to VIII.
“Students of classes I to V will attend school for 200 days a year while those in classes VI to VIII will have 220 school days annually,” said a senior school education department official.

Raising a dyslexic child: from guilt and confusion to progress

Dr Lau Yuk-king:

I would like to tell you about my experience as the mother of a child with dyslexia. According to the Health Department, children with dyslexia have difficulty with word recognition, reading and dictation. Without proper assistance, this may result in a severe disability in acquiring reading skills.
A 2008 study by the University of Hong Kong found that dyslexia affects 7 per cent to 9 per cent of children in Hong Kong, and up to 17 per cent of children worldwide.
My first child, a girl, is a “normal” child. As an enthusiastic and committed mother, I read books and took courses to equip myself with appropriate parenting knowledge and skills. My daughter learned to read before kindergarten.

Glenn Grothman – Wisconsin State Senator or Walker Education Policy Puppet?

bdgrdemocracy:

In a letter to constituents, and Wednesday on “Sly in the Morning“, Senator Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) extolled the education-saving virtues of Act 10, saying it was “…the best thing we could do for our public schools.” Grothman went on to say that “Wisconsin Schools are just not that great right now,” citing recent test scores as signs of an education emergency that only eliminating collective bargaining could remedy. Specifically noting that the “…most recent test scores show that black kids have the worst scores in the country…” and “…white kids scored lower than the national average.” Grothman stated his belief that collective bargaining is a roadblock to student achievement that had to be removed – for the sake of the kids. According to Grothman, there are too many “bad teachers” protected by unions that are “too hard to get rid of,” and that “people shouldn’t need an Education degree to teach.”
After speaking with Senator Grothman today two things are very clear – first, he was not very familiar with the full data from the scores, admitting that Governor Walker seemed to have “cherry picked” the scores he cited. The Senator was merely repeating the information he was given by Scott Walker, trusting its accuracy – even out of context. The other issue that was perfectly clear is that he (and the other Republicans) are behaving as puppets to Scott Walker and the Corporatics pulling HIS strings – believing every bit of misinformation being fed to them to demonize teachers and their unions. The best thing for Wisconsin and our children is for this propaganda to be exposed and debunked, so that a real debate about education can take place. For the record, this information was shared with Senator Grothman today.

Parents see big gap in school fees among districts

Diane Rado, Mick Swasko and Jim Jaworski:

On top of hefty charges for textbooks, technology, bus rides, sports and clubs, school districts are hitting up parents to pay fees for hundreds of individual courses, from French I to American literature, history, foods and furniture-making.
The so-called course or lab fees can range from $10 or $20 to more than $100 per class, depending on the school, records show, pumping up parents’ bills and adding to the rising cost of a public school education in the Chicago region.
“This is like private school,” said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School’s registration this week shellshocked. The final tally for her sophomore son’s classes: $665.

School boards pay big money to part with leaders

Associated Press:

State records show that Texas school boards have paid more than $7.7 million in severance pay over the past several years to buy out the contracts of superintendents.
The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that school trustees have offered buyouts to 71 superintendents since 2005 ( http://dallasne.ws/nonEL2). Most received six-figure checks.
The deals have become a common way for school districts to for part ways with their top school administrators. Among the largest settlements in recent years were in the Richardson and Irving school districts.
Though teachers have one- or two-year contracts, superintendents routinely have contracts of at least three years. School trustees also sometimes extend the contracts as shows of support during annual evaluations. To dismiss a superintendent and end the contract early requires a process that involves hearings, appeals and legal costs. So school boards choose to pay severance instead of paying salaries for the full length of superintendent contracts.

Big business of school reform

Sommer Brokaw:

Critics of public school “reform” say that it looks too much like a business model with education foundations that have big wallets taking control away from local communities.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of $33.5 billion as of 2009. The foundation is “driven by the passions and the interests of the Gates family,” with an education goal to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Another notable figure is Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with road). With his wife Edythe, Broad founded The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.1 billion with a mission to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.
“Priorities of some of these foundations nationally have taken precedence over parents and community members,” said Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, the local affiliate of Parents Across America. “They’re trying to do a lot of things that have never been proven to work. We feel like our kids are like an experiment.”

Does class size really matter?

Peg Tyre:

Few things about a school seem to matter more to parents than class size. For many of us it is the litmus test for a well-run school. Small class size speaks of a school that is focused on putting resources in the right place — not administrative retreats, paneling for the principal’s office, or expensive but rarely used class-room technology. Small class size is a signal to us that a hundred smaller decisions that accompany the running of a school have been shaped with our children as a priority. As a result, a school is able to invest in an appropriate number of teachers.
Classrooms with fifteen students and one teacher usually look better, too — more controlled than classrooms with thirty kids. At best, we imagine that small classes are environments where our children will be closely observed and where teachers have the opportunity to get to know each child. We assume that in small classes our children will receive personalized attention and that learning can be sprinkled like stardust through the thoughtful, free-ranging give-and-take between student and teacher. Small class size creates an environment that invites parent involvement, as well. If your daughter is one of thirty second-graders, you know without being told that the teacher is going to be hard-pressed to remember which reading group your daughter is in, much less her progress with phonemes. It’s not surprising that so many parents will move heaven and earth to get their children in schools with a low teacher-student ratio.

State board to run Bridgeport schools

Stephanie Reitz:

A banker, a professor, a hospital administrator, and a pastor are among the members of a newly created board to run Bridgeport’s school district and overhaul its finances and student achievement.
Acting state Education Commissioner George Coleman announced the six appointments yesterday, saying the new board will start its work immediately in place of the nine-member elected school board being swept out during the state takeover.
State education officials decided this summer that Connecticut needed to assume control of the troubled Bridgeport schools under provisions of a 2007 state law that lets it step in when students’ academic performance is in dire need of improvement.

Wisconsin Charter school growth faces uncertain future

Alan Borsuk, via a Senn Brown email:

At the start of this year, John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, was predicting that the state soon would have one of the best laws in the nation for improving the number and quality of charter schools.
It’s August now. There’s no new law and Gee is gone as head of the group. Clearly, things haven’t gone as expected this year for these important, independently operated, publicly funded schools.
Charters haven’t fared as badly since January as, say, teachers unions. There are going to be more charter schools in Wisconsin this fall than ever – around 225. In Milwaukee, some weak schools are gone, some strong ones are picking up momentum, and there will be more than 10,000 kids in more than 25 charters in September. Charters are here to stay.
But the bumpy ride for charter school advocates in recent months underscores questions about how big and strong the movement is going to be.

Maximum property tax hike sought for Chicago public schools

Rosalind Rossi:

Chicago property taxes that fund schools would be raised to the maximum allowed by law for the first time in four years — costing the average homeowner an extra $84 a year — under a proposed Chicago Public School budget released Friday.
To fill a $712 million deficit, the first budget outlined by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new school team would hike property taxes by $150.3 million, cut spending by $320.7 million, and use $241 million in reserve dollars to keep the system in the black.
Faced with rising costs and the evaporation of one-time federal dollars, the budget marks the second year in a row that CPS plans to spend more than it takes in, a pattern experts call “unsustainable.” And, CPS officials concede, even grimmer days await three years from now, when a pension contribution waiver expires and the system’s pension tab will skyrocket.

More University of Washington/TFA E-Mail Conversations

Melissa Westbrook:

In this batch of e-mails you start to sense some wariness on the part of UW (and I think they should be). I think TFA is having these universities create these single-use alt certifications but will, in the end, create their own on-line teaching and cut out the middlemen. If U-ACT still exists in 5 years, I’ll be surprised.
David Szatmary (a financial Vice-Provost) to Stritikus; he submitted a number of questions like:

Georgia Governor Deal wants more college graduates, but are we pricing kids out of school?

Maureen Downey:

I am not sure the timing was ideal for Gov. Nathan Deal to talk about prodding Georgia’s public colleges to raise student completion rates. Research shows that a major obstacle to college completion is affordability, and the steps taken by Deal to preserve the long-term viability of the HOPE Scholarship have made college more expensive for thousands of students.
As we have been discussing here on the blog, the cuts to higher education by the Legislature have led to dramatic increases in student fees as colleges look for new sources of revenue. While the University System raised about $221 million from student fees five years ago, it will raise $500 million this year because of rising enrollment and higher fees.
Research suggests that costs are a major reason why low-income students fail to finish college.
But Deal wasn’t talking about higher ed funding or HOPE today. He announced that Georgia was one of 10 states to received a million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will help underwrite a Complete College Georgia Initiative aimed at improving graduation rates.

Who is Fibbing in Colorado Education Case?

Vincent Carroll

So which is it? Are most Colorado schools doing a good job, as officials regularly assure parents and the public, or are they failing miserably, as some of the same officials will be telling a state court over the next few weeks in a case known as Lobato vs. the State of Colorado?
Both types of assertions can’t be true. And if some aren’t, they amount to — let’s not sugarcoat it — deliberate fibs.
Consider Center School District Superintendent George Welsh as a case in point. According to the website Education News Colorado, Welsh was asked Monday in court to reconcile an awkward contradiction. On the one hand, he’d testified at length on the district’s failures. Yet he’d also sent a letter to parents in 2007 “citing the good education his own children had received.”
“Is that a statement you stand by today?” an assistant attorney general asked Welsh.
“You’ve got to put a positive spin on things to make your community feel comfortable,” Welsh said, but then, reports Education News, answered ” ‘no’ when asked again if he stood by the 2007 praise of the district’s quality.”

Why Competition Works

Warren Kozak:

Peter Boscha is a tall, handsome man with a friendly bearing and a youthful charm despite the fact that he is almost 80. As he welcomes you into his home, on the outskirts of Racine, it is immediately evident from his accent that he didn’t start here. Peter Boscha was born in the small hamlet of Friesland, Holland, in 1932. His father worked on a nearby farm like most of the men in that northern part of the Netherlands. There were few extras in Peter’s early life, but Peter was born with a desire to succeed. The family had enough to eat when he was growing up and their house was one of the first to have electricity, which by today’s standards does not sound terribly noteworthy, but in rural Holland in 1938, electricity was a great luxury.
That luxury along with everything else in Peter’s life changed dramatically on the morning of May 10, 1940. “I remember the Messerschmitts flying low over our street.” Germany had invaded Holland. Actually, rolled over it is more precise. The Dutch Army was no match for the power of the Third Reich – Holland was merely a way to get to the bigger prizes of Europe – France and England.
“At first, life under the Germans seemed fairly normal,” Peter remembers. “But soon, the grip began to tighten and we saw new laws put in place.” It started with relatively minor decrees and then grew much worse.
Peter’s formal education ended in 1943. “The Germans took over our school and they just kicked us out.” For obvious reasons, this is something that has always stayed with him. “I never went past the sixth grade.”
From the age of 12 on, he worked on the farm, mostly tending tulip bulbs. But throughout the dark days of the war, indeed from his earliest memories, there was one goal that always beckoned – the United States. That may seem odd in this relatively homogenous and isolated part of Holland – that a country thousands of miles away would capture a young boy’s imagination as well as his heart. But as for Peter, as for millions of people around the world, there was something special about America.

School choice is the ‘civil rights’ issue of the 21st century

Ed Jones & Todd Hollenbeck:

It is often difficult to feel optimistic about the future of liberty. Those of us who value individual liberty and free markets look only at the encroachment of government in our lives. We often overlook the victories that should give us hope for the future of liberty. The school choice movement is one of the most important fights in the future of liberty, and one that we are starting to win.
It is fitting to talk about this now, because July 31 would have been Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s 99th birthday. Over fifty years ago, Friedman jump-started the school choice movement with an article called “The Role of Government in Education.” In it, he laid out a plan for school vouchers that would allow parents to have a choice in where they send their children. In a 2005 interview with Reason Magazine, Friedman said, “I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used.”

Douglas County, Colorado school voucher hearings wrap up; What happens when citizens lose faith in government? 2011 Madison School District Open Enrollment Data (4.73% Leave)

Elbert County News:

Closing arguments in the case challenging the Douglas County School District’s voucher program ended three days of hearings that could halt the program in its infancy.
A standing-room-only crowd listened in Denver District Court while a legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against a team that included the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to decide the fate of the district’s school choice scholarship program.
Both sides agreed that any decision from Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez will likely face an appeal, regardless of the ruling.
“There will be an appeal either way,” said Michael McCarthy, a plaintiff attorney representing the Taxpayers for Public Education. “What (the school district has) done is press the envelope as far as they can. For those interested in preserving public education in this state, they have got in their face as far as they can.”

More from the Wall Street Journal: Wall Street Journal:

In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools. The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado. What do you think? Should vouchers only be used with lower-income students? Should they never be used? Do they violate the constitution?

Chrystia Freeland:

One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev’s special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America’s seminal thinkers.
In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit — stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice — speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.
For Mr. Krastev, this idea — the trade-off between exit and voice — is the key to understanding what he describes as the “perverse” stability of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. For all the prime minister’s bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev’s view, is “vegetarian.”
“It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history,” he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this “user-friendly” character of Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia’s relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: “Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it.”