Jim Zellmer – Page 405 – School Information System

Veto merit pay for teachers?

Merit pay for teachers based on genuine, verifiable student learning would be a good thing. But the bill the Legislature finalized early Friday morning has too many holes in it, takes away local control and doesn’t pay for the changes it orders.
Gov. Crist has said he might veto the bill, and that’s exactly what he should do.
The bill requires local school districts to hire, fire and pay teachers according to how well students do on end-of-course exams in all subjects. But those tests don’t exist yet. So how can teachers and students know they’ll be valid when they go into effect in 2014? The Legislature says the state Department of Education will take care of the details.
That would be more reassuring if the state had a better track record on the FCAT. For a decade Florida has corrupted an otherwise useful test by putting way too much weight on it. Entire schools and districts are graded on a high-stakes test that doesn’t even cover most subjects.

Grad School Survival Guide

Scott Jaschik:

While most doctoral programs have some sort of orientation, the focus on such matters as required courses, time to degree and dissertation goals may diminish opportunities to consider really important matters — such as how to wander into a colloquium at which food is served, timing your entrance so you don’t need to listen to the talk.
Adam Ruben wants to help. His Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School is just out from Random House and offers advice — tongue in cheek but with plenty of truth — for those who want a doctorate. Ruben earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2008, so the material comes from his personal experience — although the attitude comes from his moonlighting as a stand-up comic. He covers everything from selecting professors to work with to figuring out when you need to finish up already (the latter in a chapter appropriate for the Passover season, “Let My Pupil Go.”)

Before It Ends, Schools ‘Race’ Is a Success

New York Times:

Critics of the Obama administration’s signature education initiative have been breathing fire since it was announced that only Delaware and Tennessee had won first-round grants under the program, known as Race to the Top. Politicians from some losing states have denounced the well-designed scoring system under which the 16 finalists were evaluated. Others have thrown up their hands, suggesting that retooling applications for the next round is more trouble than it’s worth.
Plenty of states will line up for the remaining $3.4 billion. But even if the program ended today, it already has had a huge, beneficial effect on the education reform effort, especially at the state and local levels.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Great Debt Bailout

“Hellasious”:

This blog was created in late 2006 in order to “vent” my frustration over the huge debt bubble and what I perceived to be the risks it posed to the global economy. In summary, I claimed that the economy had become hooked on debt to create additional GDP growth – or “growth” in quotation marks – and that the finance “tail” was wagging the real economy “dog”.
Soon thereafter, the bubble burst – first in the U.S. and then everywhere else. What followed was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And we are still in the midst of it, albeit in ever-mutating form, so today’s post is meant as a tour d’horizon, a quick summary of how I see things shaping up today.
I believe all that has happened so far is The Great Debt Bailout. Governments and central banks have issued trillions in new government-backed debt, some to replace private debt gone bad (bailouts for billionaires) and some to finance massive budget deficits (pennies for penniless). It is a policy mishmash produced by the combination of (a) Bernankean revulsion to monetary deflation and (b) Keynesian aversion to economic recession.

As School Districts consider property tax increases to address spending growth and flat or reduced redistributed state and federal tax dollars, it may well be useful to keep local goodwill in reserve for future funding challenges.
Related: Peter Gorenstein: Pray For Inflation — It’s Our Only Hope and New Jersey’s K-12 Staffing growth.

Homeschoolers don’t match stereotypes

Chanel Volpel:

I was flipping through the paper the other day, and one of the comics stood out to me. (Yes, I do still enjoy reading the funny pages; it’s relaxing after a long day.) It was Ziggy, one of my favorites, because of its cute illustrations, and funny one-liners.
In this particular comic, Ziggy was at the doctor’s office, sitting on a chair next to the doctor, when he looked at the diploma on the wall. Then he cried out, “Wait a minute! This says you were homeschooled!”
I laughed, because it was a stereotypical illustration of a common reaction that people have of homeschoolers, such as myself.
One of my favorite reactions happened at my school, Fox Valley Technical College. I was chatting with another student before my class and, somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned having been homeschooled. She looked at me in amazement, and exclaimed, “I would have never guessed you were homeschooled!”

A pact for D.C. school reform

Washington Post:

THROUGHOUT the torturous contract talks between D.C. schools and teachers, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee vowed she would not agree to anything that didn’t further her efforts at reform. The innovative agreement announced Wednesday is evidence of that resolve — and also of a gutsy willingness by local and national union leaders to make the changes that are needed if D.C. children are to do better in school.
Ms. Rhee and officials of the Washington Teachers’ Union reached an accord — subject to ratification by the full membership and approval by the D.C. Council — that would provide base salary increases of 21 percent over five years. In return, school officials would get important tools to reward teachers who do well with children and hold accountable those who don’t. This includes a performance-based bonus system to be instituted in the fall, greater autonomy in assigning teachers and better means of getting rid of teachers unable to produce results.

Denver Schools using Gates Foundation grant to find a better way to evaluate instructors

Jeremy Meyer:

As fourth-grade teacher Abel Varney introduced a lesson on negative and positive integers, all eyes in his Sabin Elementary classroom were upon him — including the unblinking lens of a high-tech camera.
The camera recorded Varney’s every move and utterance and captured the reactions of every child in the room — images that will be examined by researchers in a national study trying to figure out what makes effective teaching.
Varney is one of 176 teachers from 17 Denver schools who signed up to have their lessons analyzed during a two-year project funded by a $878,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Vouchers and the Rising Tide

Greg Forster:

I haven’t had a chance to read the details yet, but from the executive summary of the new results released today by the School Choice Demonstration Project, it looks like vouchers have done a good job of improving education for all students in the city of Milwaukee.
What? That’s not the way you heard it?
Of course not. Because the new result, taken in isolation from other information, simply says that after two years, the voucher students are making learning improvements about the same as public school students. The scores for the voucher students are higher, but the difference is not statistically certain.
However, let’s plug that into the larger universe of information. We know – from the very same research project – that vouchers are improving education in Milwaukee public schools. The positive incentives of competition and the improved matching of student needs to school strengths are causing public schools to deliver a better education.

On New Jersey K-12 Schools’ Staffing (and spending) Growth

Steven Malanga:

Gov. Chris Christie is trying to solve New Jersey’s chronic bud get problems by cutting spending, including state aid to local schools. But the state’s powerful teacher unions and many school boards are balking — claiming that this will either drive up local property taxes or result in devastating cuts to school services.
In fact, there’s plenty of fat to cut. For proof, just take a close look at the recent hiring and spending patterns of Jersey’s school districts: Both hiring and spending have risen far faster than can be justified by the mild growth in enrollment. Thus, most should have plenty of room to cut spending without major impact.
Given the state’s chronic budget woes, the schools’ hiring spree defies logic. Since 2001, just as budget problems began in earnest, public-school enrollment in Jersey has risen by less than 3 percent, or slightly more than 36,000 students. But total school hiring (full-time employees and equivalents) has jumped by 14 percent, or nearly 28,000 employees, according to federal Census statistics.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wants to bring civics education to social media

Christina Boyle:

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not on Facebook or Twitter, but she wants to use the power of the Internet to get young people interested in civics.
“Two-thirds of Internet users under the age of 30 have a – whatever this is – social-networking profile,” the feisty 80-year-old said in a speech at New York Law School Tuesday.
“We need to bring civics education into the 21st century.”
O’Connor, who retired in 2006, said she knows young people are using sites such as Twitter and Facebook to swap political views – and the medium could be harnessed for other messages.

Hillsboro School District budget highlights for 2010-11 not encouraging

Wendy Owen:

Teachers in the Hillsboro School District may see even more students in each classroom next school year as the district seeks to cut the budget without “decimating” programs.
The school district’s budget committee, a mix of citizens and board members, took its first look at the funding “highlights” for 2010-’11 and it wasn’t good news.
“The best scenario is unhappiness,” said Sam Heiney, budget member.
Projecting a continued shortfall in state education funding, the district is considering plans to maintain staff levels. Enrollment, however, is expected to increase by 1 percent, which could bump up class sizes from the current average of 27.

Rhode Island Education Commissioner Gist: Failing schools need sweeping change

Eric Tucker:

Failing schools are a drain on the state’s already sluggish economy and require wholesale transformation, not just minor tinkering, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist told lawmakers Wednesday in a speech on education reform.
Gist, whose reform efforts led to the firings of all teachers and staff at one of the state’s worst-performing schools, said test scores in the state need vast improvement, the graduation rate must grow and too few high school graduates — just more than half — are heading directly to college.
Improving schools is critical to the economy in Rhode Island, a state with nearly 13 percent unemployment, since students who drop out will struggle and be a cost to society, Gist said in an address to the General Assembly.
“We cannot thrive in a knowledge-based marketplace if 45 percent of our high-school students cannot do math and 39 percent cannot do science at the very basic level,” said Gist, who is in her first year as commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
The commissioner annually addresses the Legislature.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Fed Chief Bernanke Says U.S. Must Address Soaring Debt

Luca Di Leo:

The U.S. must start to prepare for challenges posed by an aging population with a credible plan to gradually reduce a soaring public debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday.
Health spending is set to increase over the long term as the U.S. population grows older, posing challenges to the country’s already strained finances, the Fed chief warned.
Meanwhile, Fed Bank of New York President William Dudley said Wednesday that the damage caused by financial-market bubbles should bring about a sea change in the way the central bank acts, with the Fed needing to move toward active efforts to reign in financial market excess.
“There is little doubt that asset bubbles exist and they occur fairly frequently,” and when they burst the economy frequently suffers, Mr. Dudley said. While it can be difficult to discern the existence of a financial-market bubble, “uncertainty is not grounds for inaction” on the part of central bankers, Mr. Dudley said.

California’s schools From bad to worse

The Economist:

AS THE Obama administration spreads enthusiasm about a proposal to replace a patchwork of state education standards with national ones, it might also heed a cautionary tale. In the 1990s California too established rigorous standards. “We thought they were the highest,” up there with those of Massachusetts and Indiana, says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC. But California never translated those standards into results. Its public schools are, with some exceptions, awful. Moreover, the state’s fiscal crisis is about to make them even worse.
California’s 8th-graders (14-year-olds), for example, ranked 46th in maths last year. Only Alabama, Mississippi and the District of Columbia did worse. California also sends a smaller share of its high-school graduates to college than all but three other states. One of its roughly 1,000 school districts, Los Angeles Unified, which happens to be the second-largest in the country, has just become the first to be investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights about whether it adequately teaches pupils who have little or no English.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist who is trying to reform education, blames a combination of California’s dysfunctional governance, with “elected school boards made up of wannabes and unions”, and the fact that the state’s teachers’ union is both more powerful and “more regressive” than elsewhere. The California Teachers Association (CTA) is the biggest lobby in the state, having spent some $210m in the past decade–more than any other group– to intervene in California’s politics.

We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities

Peter Conn:

Predictions are always perilous. Many of us recall the hearty enthusiasm of the Bowen report of 1989, which assured prospective graduate students that they would find “a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences” when they earned their degrees in the mid-1990s. Of course, they did not.
Moral: Avoid confident assertions about the future of the academic job market in the humanities (or in any other field). It may be that our current dilemma is another episode in a longish cyclical history. It may also be, as I rather pessimistically suspect, that something more serious is going on.
My reason is that just about all of the key drivers are simultaneously pointed in the wrong direction. Full-time tenured and tenure-track jobs in the humanities are endangered by half a dozen trends, most of them long-term.

New Orleans Schools See Progress Despite Troubles

PBS NewsHour:

In his ongoing look at efforts to turn around ailing schools in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. John Merrow reports on the use of alternative school programs in Louisiana and progress on negotiations between a teachers union and public schools in the nation’s capital.
JIM LEHRER: The “NewsHour”‘s special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has been tracking changes in the public schools of New Orleans and Washington, D.C., two cities that are being watched nationally.
We begin in New Orleans tonight. John looks at alternative schools for students with behavior and academic problems.
JOHN MERROW: When school superintendent Paul Vallas arrived in New Orleans three years ago, he faced a tough challenge: how to educate students who are way behind academically or who have gotten in trouble with the law.
This school, Booker T. Washington, was designed for teenagers who are performing at an elementary school level. Although three-fourths of students in Vallas’ district are at least one grade level behind, here, the problem is extreme.

A Food Revolution in School Lunches

Kari McLennan:

Has anyone been watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? I have and I have to say that Jamie is truly inspiring. He’s got so much passion and drive. I wish I had a pinky’s worth of his. If you’re not familiar with Jamie, he has a long career that I believe started with his simple cooking show The Naked Chef. Since then he’s revolutionized the British school lunch program and is now on to America’s unhealthiest city to continue the revolution.
So just what is so bad about school lunches? Well, this is certainly not a new topic for The Green Mama, but it’s important because kids are the future and habits are created when we’re young. This is the first generation that is not expected to live longer than their parents due mostly to obesity. One in three Illinois children is overweight or obese and according to the Community Food Security Commission, 1 in 3 children will develop type 2 diabetes. It’s heartbreaking.

Book of Work

Tom Vander Ark:

Had an encouraging conversation at College Board this morning about the potential for a new AP assessment system that would allow several testing times each year (eventually many times or anytime) and reduced reliance on the end of course assessment but considering a ‘book of work’ during the course taking period.
The reason this would be a breakthrough is that this country could double the number of AP courses taken by expanding online offerings. Districts could double the number of courses offered, ensure instructional quality, and reduce costs by moving all AP online (or a blend of online and onsite). This would best be facilitated by 1) eliminating seat time requirements, 2) adding flexibility to certification requirements, and 3) making it easier to take the test when a student is ready.

The Writing on the Wall – Facebook Apps, Trust, and Your Reputation

Rusty Carter:

If you didn’t know me, and I told you that I was an attorney working as the executor for a recently deceased prince and needed your help to move millions of dollars would you believe me?
Right, I didn’t think so.
What if you did know me, and you found out that I enabled a social networking app that tells me how many times each of my friends were peeking at pictures I posted from my last vacation to the beaches in Spain?
I bet you might want to enable it too!
In a previous blog post last year (http://siblog.mcafee.com/consumer/from-the-419-to-facebook-email-scams-and-you/), I commented about the possibility of social networking scams using information gleaned from Social Networks about a person to target them in a confidence scam. Since that posting, that concept has become a reality, and criminals have begun executing advanced fee and confidence scams on people on social networks like Facebook. Today, tools like SiteAdvisor and SiteAdvisor Plus (http://www.siteadvisor.com) which show you sites that are bad (phishing, etc.) and protect you from being exposed to malware for download, along with good old-fashioned vigilance, go a long way to keep you safe from these types of threats.

Dispelling Myths about Gifted Students and Gifted Education

Tamara Fisher:

Back in 1982, Gifted Child Quarterly published a special edition that focused on myths about gifted education – and the research that dispels those myths. For a look at those first articles, check out this link. It really was an important collection of works, focusing on such myths as “myth: we need to have the same scores for everyone” and “myth: there is a single curriculum for the gifted” and “ myth: the gifted constitutes a single, homogenous group.”

Recently, GCQ undertook the same task, tackling a series of current myths about gifted students and gifted education and providing the research that backs up why those myths are not true. Many of the myths tackled in the 2009 issue are the very same ones tackled in the 1982 issue, plus the list is expanded with timely and relevant new (actually – old) myths, such as “myth: it is fair to teach all children the same way” and “myth: classroom teachers have the time, the skill, and the will to differentiate adequately” and “myth: high-ability students don’t face problems and challenges.”

States push to pay teachers based on performance

Dorie Turner:

For parents and politicians hungry for better schools, the idea of paying teachers more if their students perform better can seem as basic as adding two and two or spelling “cat.”
Yet just a handful of schools and districts around the country use such strategies. In some states, the idea is effectively illegal.
That could all be changing as the federal government wields billions of dollars in grants to lure states and school districts to try the idea. The money is persuading lawmakers around the country, while highlighting the complex problems surrounding pay-for-performance systems.
Some teachers, like Trenise Duvernay, who teaches math at Alice M. Harte Charter School outside of New Orleans, want to be rewarded for helping students succeed. Duvernay is eligible for $2,000 a year or more in merit bonuses based on how well her students perform in classroom observations and on achievement tests.

Negotiating the price of college — Flagel, Part 4

Andrew Flagel:

For the most part, admissions and financial aid are honorable professions. My colleagues are generally very ethical people who strive to help students and deeply believe in the importance of their mission and the service they provide.
That being said, sometimes their work this time of year – the months that colleges and universities package financial aid – can seem a little dirty. I’m not talking DIRTY – I’ve yet to hear about a colleague finding a way to engineer financial aid kickbacks or helping the cartels launder money through financial aid.
Clearly, however, the process is neither transparent nor easy to understand. For years I’ve listened to my colleagues cry that we’re NOT used car dealers (by the way, I know some very ethical car dealers), but in the end, it comes down to a basic question for most families:

Loudoun County raises property taxes, lowers school funding

Sholnn Freeman:

Loudoun County officials approved a $1.4 billion annual budget Tuesday that includes a property tax increase and a 2.5 percent cut in school system funding.
The county Board of Supervisors adopted a tax rate of $1.30 per $100 of assessed value, a 4.4 percent increase over this year’s rate. Ben Mays, deputy chief financial officer for the county, said the average tax bill for homeowners should go up only about 2.5 percent because of declining property values. The average commercial tax bill could fall by that amount because property values in that category have dropped even more, he said.
Earlier in the year, the county had proposed a tax rate of $1.40 per $100 of assessed value but scaled back after an outpouring of e-mails from taxpayers who cited economic distress brought on by the recession. Under the approved fiscal 2011 budget plan, the county will cut about 75 full-time positions, 50 of which are currently unfilled, Mays said.

30% of Driver Candidates Flunk UPS “Traditional” Training

Jennifer Levitz:

Vexed that some 30% of driver candidates flunk its traditional training, United Parcel Service Inc. is moving beyond the classroom to ready its rookies for the road.
In the place of books and lectures are videogames, a contraption that simulates walking on ice and an obstacle course around an artificial village.
Based on results so far, the world’s largest package-delivery company is convinced that 20-somethings–the bulk of UPS driver recruits–respond best to high-tech instruction and a chance to hone skills.
Driver training is crucial for Atlanta-based UPS, which employs 99,000 U.S. drivers and says it will need to hire 25,000 over the next five years to replace retiring Baby Boomers.
Candidates vying for a driver’s job, which pays an average of $74,000 annually, now spend one week at Integrad, an 11,500-square-foot, low-slung brick UPS training center 10 miles outside of Washington, D.C. There they move from one station to another practicing the company’s “340 Methods,” prescribed by UPS industrial engineers to save seconds and improve safety in every task from lifting and loading boxes to selecting a package from a shelf in the truck.

The Death of Liberal Arts

Nancy Cook:

After the endowment of Centenary College in Shreveport, La., fell by 20 percent from 2007 to 2009, the private school decided to eliminate half of its 44 majors. Over the next three to four years, classic humanities specialities like Latin, German studies, and performing arts will be phased out. It’s quite a change from 2007, when NEWSWEEK labeled Centenary the “hottest liberal-arts school you never heard of,” extolling its wide range of academics. In their place, the school is considering adding several graduate programs, such as master’s degrees in teaching and international business. Such professional programs have proven increasingly popular and profitable at other universities and colleges, especially during economic downturns, a point that the college president tries to downplay. “We’re not intentionally trying to chase markets,” says David Rowe. “We think the students need to have a grounding in the arts and sciences, but they also probably need some training in a specific area.”

D.C. Deal With Teachers Union A Model For U.S.?

All Things Considered:

One of Washington, D.C.’s angriest, most bitter disputes may be coming to an end. After more than two years of wrangling, District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the city’s teachers union have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract.
The deal could become a model for school reform around the country.
It comes after a protracted, three-year dispute that got so nasty, few thought it would ever be resolved. Rhee and union officials made key concessions that once seemed unattainable, but it was worth it, Rhee said at a hastily arranged news conference.
“We’ve had one goal since [starting the job as chancellor], and that is to build a school system that ensures that every child in this city, regardless of where they live, has the opportunity to obtain an excellent education through our public school system,” Rhee said.

School Choice Deserves the Red Carpet Treatment

Christian Schneider:

I generally have a great deal of sympathy for regular schmoes who look inordinately like famous people. Through no fault of their own, they walk through life being judged on what they are not (the famous person), rather than what they are (a working stiff that is sick of being told he looks like Jim from “The Office.”)
Imagine if you were the guy who works at Kinko’s who looks sort of like Matt Damon. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) People don’t notice that you may be better looking than your average guy – they only judge you on how far you fall short of looking like Jason Bourne. (After all, if you looked exactly like Matt Damon, you probably wouldn’t be working at Kinko’s. Staples, maybe – but certainly not Kinko’s.)
On Wednesday of this week, the results of a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were released. The study, mandated by a state law enacted in 2006 and conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, is an attempt to compare student achievement in the Choice program in Milwaukee to similar students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

Technology and Tutoring

Ben Miller:

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an interesting article ($) earlier this week about the use of online graders located in other countries both to ease the burden of scoring papers for professors and because teaching assistants were not offering quality feedback. The piece mainly focuses on graders from EduMetry, a Virginia-based company, which are providing this service for business students at the University of Houston, though one can easily imagine that there are schools across the country trying similar programs:

Goodbye FCAT, Hello Education

Stefani Rubino:

Last week marked a historic time for the public school system as President Obama and Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, announced that they were drafting a blueprint to “overhaul” the No Child Left Behind policy and improve the quality of the nation’s schools – exactly what the current policy left behind. Though they are only in the planning process, this is the one of the greatest and most desirable moves the White House has made to date – even more so than healthcare reform.
In Fla., we are all too familiar with the No Child Left Behind policy, specifically with the creation of the FCAT and other standardized tests that are supposed to be used to gauge students’ knowledge and education. “Supposed to” is the key phrase here. According to teachers’ complaints, the FCAT has forced teachers to teach only for the test. As a result, students are learning to perform well on the test when they should be learning the material.

Bank of Mom and Dad Shuts Amid White-Collar Struggle

Mary Pilon:

When Maurice Johnson was laid off a year ago from his six-figure salary as a managing director at GE Capital, it wasn’t his future he was worried about.
It was his children’s.
The family income of the Johnsons is a fifth of what it used to be. And the children are about to feel the pain. Mr. Johnson’s two oldest are attending his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, at an annual cost of $50,000 apiece. And his youngest daughter, 15 years old, recently began her own college search. Mr. Johnson isn’t sure whether he’ll be able to help her to go to college, or even to get the older kids to graduation.

Young Wisconsin students’ math improves; high schoolers weaken

Amy Hetzner & Erin Richards:

Wisconsin students continued to make steady gains in math proficiency in 2009-’10, boasting their best performance in five years, even as reading scores remained flat over that same time period, according to statewide test results released Wednesday.
Yet even though the overall proportion of students deemed proficient or advanced in math increased to 77.3% on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations from 72.8% in 2005-’06, the share of students considered at least proficient in 10th grade – the highest grade tested – decreased in that time.
The share of Wisconsin 10th-graders who scored proficient or advanced in math was 69.8% this school year, compared with 71.6% five years ago.
Meanwhile, reading proficiency remained almost constant, with 81.6% of students considered proficient or advanced on this year’s test vs. 81.7% in 2005-’06, when the current version of the WKCE first was implemented.

States Skeptical About ‘Race to Top’ School Aid Contest

Sam Dillon:

A dozen governors, led by Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, sat with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hotel ballroom in Washington a few weeks back, praising his vision and gushing with enthusiasm over a $4 billion grant competition they hoped could land their states a jackpot of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But for many of those governors, the contest lost some sizzle last week, when Mr. Duncan awarded money to only two states — Delaware and Tennessee.
Colorado, which had hoped to win $377 million, ended in 14th place. Now Mr. Ritter says the scoring by anonymous judges seemed inscrutable, some Coloradans view the contest as federal intrusion and the governor has not decided whether to reapply for the second round.

Ongoing evaluation of Milwaukee Choice Program finds students achieving on same level as peers

Stacy Forster:

Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, presented their findings at UW-Madison. The study also found that Milwaukee Public Schools are doing better than expected when compared with other urban school districts.
The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.
The comparison between students in private voucher schools and those in public schools was made two years after large panels of students in the program and students in the Milwaukee public school system had been carefully matched to each other.

Minnesota Governor Urges Changes in Teacher Licensing

Associated Press:

Minnesota was hoping for $330 million in grants, which go to states deemed innovative in their school policies. In the next round, Minnesota can’t get more than $175 million.
Pawlenty wants more latitude to let experts become teachers without going through traditional routes, to reassign teachers based on effectiveness and to more closely link teacher pay to student performance.
Democratic state Rep. Mindy Greiling said the alternative licensure proposal has a better shot than the others.

Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don’t believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn’t simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren’t we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren’t answered in the teachers’ manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don’t yet know how to teach it to others.

Wisconsin Likely to Adopt “Common Core” K-12 Standards, Drop Oft-Criticized WKCE

Gayle Worland:

Wisconsin students can count on one hand the number of times they’ll still have to take the math section — or any section — of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the annual weeklong test whose results for 2009-10 were scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That’s because the WKCE is expected to give way in a few years to tests based on new national academic standards proposed last month that could become final this spring.
The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and all 50 U.S. states except Alaska and Texas in the fall signed on to the development of the Common Core State Standards for math and English, which spell out what the nation’s public schoolchildren should be taught from kindergarten through high school.
When the final standards are unveiled, probably in late May, Wisconsin likely will adopt them, said Sue Grady, executive assistant to the state school superintendent.

Math lessons in Mandarin? Local schools go global

Linda Shaw:

For nearly an hour, no one speaks a word of English in this first-grade math class.
Not the teacher, Ying Ying Wu, who talks energetically in Mandarin’s songlike tones.
Not the students — 6- and 7-year-olds who seem to follow along fine, even though only one speaks Mandarin at home.
Even the math test has been translated, by Wu, into Chinese characters.
At Beacon Hill International School, many students learn a second language along with their ABCs by spending half of each school day immersed in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.

Lessons from the First Round of Race to the Top

The New Teacher Project:

In Round 1 of Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education delivered on its promise to hold states to a high bar for reform. Only 2 states out of 16 finalists and 41 total applicants were selected for awards: Delaware and Tennessee.
These states won because they outlined bold, comprehensive visions of reform and demonstrated the ability to make them a reality. Statewide teacher effectiveness policies were the foundation for their success. They focused on putting effective teachers in every classroom and giving teachers the critical feedback and support they need to do their best work. They shifted to evaluation systems that improve their ability to recognize great teachers and respond to poor performance. Together they set a new benchmark for reform that Round 2 applicants must meet in order to win.
This analysis offers a close look at the scoring of the Round 1 finalists. It refutes some of the most common myths about Race to the Top and offers important lessons for states applying for the $3.4 billion in funding that remains available in Round 2.
At the same time, it examines scoring deficiencies that the Department of Education must address. While these issues did not result in a lowering of the bar for Round 1 winners, they could mean the difference between winning and losing for states applying in Round 2.

Trenton Fails, The World Blogs

New Jersey Left Behind:

A few data points: according to the last School Report Card, there were over 800 freshman at Trenton Central. However, so many kids drop out (24.7% of White students) that there were only 440 seniors left last year. 51.6% of these students failed the language arts HSPA and a stunning 79.5% failed the math HSPA. 43% of the student body was suspended during the 2008-2009 school year. Total cost per pupil is $16,843. 4.4% enrolled in an Advanced Placement class; the state average is 19%. Average SAT scores are 364 Math and 369 Verbal.
What has the Trenton School Board have to say amidst this bleakness? Here’s Board Member Donald Shelton:

More Pay for Teachers Reform bills will pay off for teachers, House sponsor says

Kenric Ward:

Florida’s education reform bills would mean more money — not less — for public-school teachers, says Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey.
“This bill (HB7189) does not affect retirement, it does not cut salaries, it does not eliminate tenure for current teachers,” Legg told a packed meeting of the House Education Policy Council on Monday.
Instead, Legg said, a new performance-based pay program would bring “value-added” components to setting salaries.
Effective July 1, 2014, school districts would be required to reward “effective” or “highly effective” teachers “on top of base pay,” Legg said. Half of those ratings would be based on student learning gains, with the remaining 50 percent tied to other factors, subject to collective bargaining agreements.
Since 1999, districts have been under orders from the state Department of Education to implement pay scales “primarily” linked to academic performance. The reform bills define “primarily” as 50 percent and order districts to earmark 5 percent of funding for performance pay. Statewide, that 5 percent share currently amounts to $900 million annually.

How health education could pay off

Lotus Yu:

The ongoing health care debate has focused on accessible and affordable health care. Although reforming health care policies is important, we need to change the health behaviors that make our health system one of the most expensive in the developed world. Costly chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease are linked to obesity, smoking and diet – things we can do something about.
The Michigan Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that nearly one-fifth of high school students smoke cigarettes and binge drink. Over 50% do not attend any physical education classes, and the number of overweight youth has been increasing. These behaviors set the stage for lifelong obesity, smoking habits and poor diet.
According to Trust for America’s Health, in five years, Michigan could save $545 million in annual health care costs by spending just $10 per person on programs to increase physical activity, encourage better nutrition and prevent the use of tobacco.

Parents spending more time with teens, college race blamed

Jay Matthews:

Two economists who work 2,274 miles away have identified the essence of parenthood in the Washington area since 1995. It turns out we have been spending all that time with our older children — chauffeuring, applauding, coordinating, correcting, planning, obsessing — because we have a deep need to beat the other stressed-out parents in getting our kids into good colleges.
The researchers are Garey and Valerie A. Ramey, a married couple at the University of California-San Diego. They have done the hyper-active parent thing themselves and have a son at Stanford University to show for it. They also admit that most of this exhaustive parenting is done not by men but by women, including, by her own account, Ms. Ramey herself. To sum up, college-graduate soccer moms are trying to outdo all the other soccer moms to get their children into a good school so their daughters can repeat the cycle with their own children.

Ravitch is Wrong Week, Day #1

Stuart Buck:

Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” has been burning up the charts. Ravitch has been ubiquitous, writing op-eds in support of her book, doing lectures and interviews all over the place, and being reviewed in all sorts of high-profile venues.
As an overall matter, the book says little, if anything, that is actually new on the subjects of testing and choice. What Ravitch is really selling with this book is the story of her personal and ideological conversion. Not so long ago, she was writing articles like “In Defense of Testing,” or “The Right Thing: Why Liberals Should Be Pro-Choice,” a lengthy article in The New Republic that remains one of the most passionate and eloquent defenses of school choice and vouchers in particular. Now she seems to be a diehard opponent of these things. But she’s not saying anything that other diehard opponents haven’t already said countless times.

The Case for Common Educational Standards

Craig Barrett:

Recently, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a group of 48 states organized by the nation’s governors and chief state school officers, released draft K-12 education standards in English and mathematics.
As a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I know that common education standards are essential for producing the educated work force America needs to remain globally competitive. Good standards alone are not enough, but without them decisions about such things as curricula, instructional materials and tests are haphazard. It is no wonder that educational quality varies so widely among states.
English and math standards have so far mostly been set without empirical evidence or attention as to whether students were learning what they needed for college and the workplace. College educators and employers were hardly ever part of the discussion, even though they knew best what the real world would demand of high school graduates. Luckily, about five years ago, states began to raise the bar so that their standards would reflect college- and career-ready expectations.

Education for all: India shows the way

Khaleej Times:

India’s United Progressive Alliance government has come out with a landmark legislation making education a fundamental right for all children between the ages six and 14. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, was first introduced in the Indian Parliament way  back in 2002.
It took more than seven years for this act — which makes access to education a fundamental right — to be notified after much debate in and outside the Parliament. The importance of the legislation can be gauged from the fact that there are nearly 300 million Indians below the age of 15, many of whom belong to poor families that can ill-afford the high cost of primary education.
There are about 10 million children in the targetted age group who are today not in school, but working in factories, farms and other places, often in abysmal condition, and helping their parents make both ends meet. It remains to be seen how many of these children can be brought back to classes.
The effectiveness of the landmark measure will depend on how state governments will ensure its implementation. Education falls under the concurrent list in the Indian Constitution and states have a major responsibility in ensuring access, especially to primary education. While many of the southern and western states have a better track record, those in the north and east have been laggards. Guaranteeing free education to millions of children — and making it legally enforceable — will also cost a lot of money. The federal government led by the Congress Party has asserted that funding would not be a problem. Estimates are that a whopping $40 billion will be needed over the next five years and the government has promised a mere $5.5 billion to states during this period.

What NAEP reading scores really show

Daniel Willingham:

As Chad Aldeman pointed out at the Quick and the Ed, many major newspapers missed the story on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores. The New York Times bemoaned that fourth-grade reading scores have barely increased since the early 1990s.
Aldeman pointed out that reading scores look somewhat better if you separate the data by race, as shown here.

Charter school and Latino leaders push unions to innovate

Bruce Fuller:

Antonio Villaraigosa, the handsome high-voltage mayor of Los Angeles, really comes alive when recalling his start in local politics–as a labor organizer agitating for reform inside decrepit and overcrowded schools. “I cut my teeth working for the union. I cultivated these young teachers who had come to these schools to change the world,” he said, brimming with pride.
Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. “Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet,” recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). “When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug.”

L.A. school board to discuss Student Transfer permit policy

Carla Rivera:

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday will consider amending a new policy that limits the ability of students who live in the district to attend school elsewhere, a contentious issue expected to draw scores of parents to the afternoon meeting.
In February, Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines moved to limit the types of permits issued to families seeking attendance in other districts, allowing exemptions only for students whose parents work within the boundaries of the other school district and for students who would complete fifth, eighth or 12th grades next year.
Last year, L.A. Unified granted permission to more than 12,200 students to enroll in 99 other districts, including Torrance, Culver City and Santa Monica-Malibu. Cortines estimates that the district is losing $51 million in state per-pupil funding, money that could help to close a $640-million budget shortfall.

College Grads’ Outlook Grim

Sara Murray:

Despite signs of life in the job market, the outlook for newly minted college graduates remains grim and many are trying new strategies for landing positions.
Students are starting their job hunts months earlier than usual, while others are looking into short stints at positions outside their major.
Bob Tutag began beating the bushes in October, a time when most college seniors are barely back from summer vacation. But it paid off: The 21-year-old Michigan State University student in March accepted an offer at Developers Diversified Realty Corp., a commercial real-estate firm in Beachwood, Ohio. He starts in May.
Mr. Tutag knew he faced a challenge, having majored in accounting with a specialization in real estate, a sector of the economy hammered by the downturn.

Input of teachers unions key to successful entries in Race to the Top

Nick Anderson:

Delaware’s surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama’s education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board’s vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.

TIP/School voucher study results

Stacy Forster:

Reports on the third-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will be released in Madison on Wednesday, April 7.
The reports on growth, school switching, testing, integration and other measures of the 20-year-old program will be released by the evaluation team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Room 313 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The evaluation team includes professor John Witte of UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs; Patrick Wolf, Jeffery Dean, Jonathan Mills and Brian Kisida, all of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas; Joshua Cowen of the University of Kentucky; David Fleming of Furman University; Meghan Condon of UW-Madison; and Thomas Stewart of Qwaku & Associates.
The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the evaluation in 2005 to learn how well the program, the oldest and largest urban educational voucher program in the United States, is working. The maximum voucher amount in 2007-08 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used vouchers to attend secular or religious private schools.
The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in terms of longitudinal student achievement growth and grade attainment, drop-out rates and high school graduation rates. The former will be primarily accomplished by measuring and estimating student growth in achievement as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations in math and reading in grades three through eight during a five-year period.

K-12 Math: The Separate Path and the Well Travelled Road

Barry Garelick:

It explores two different approaches to math; one is representative of the fuzzy math side of things, and the other is in the traditionalist camp. I make it clear what side I’m on. I talk about how the fuzzy side uses what I call a “separate path” in which students are given open ended and ill posed problems as a means to teach them how to apply prior knowledge in new situations. I present two different problems, one representing each camp.
The math may prove challenging for some readers, though high school math teachers should have no problems with it.
Much has been written about the debate on how best to teach math to students in K-12–a debate often referred to as the “math wars”. I have written much about it myself, and since the debate shows no signs of easing, I continue to have reasons to keep writing about it. While the debate is complex, the following two math problems provide a glimpse of two opposing sides:
Problem 1: How many boxes would be needed to pack and ship one million books collected in a school-based book drive? In this problem the size of the books is unknown and varied, and the size of the boxes is not stated.
Problem 2: Two boys canoeing on a lake hit a rock where the lake joins a river. One boy is injured and it is critical to get a doctor to him as quickly as possible. Two doctors live nearby: one up-river and the other across the lake, both equidistant from the boys. The unhurt boy has to fetch a doctor and return to the spot. Is it quicker for him to row up the river and back, or go across the lake and back, assuming he rows at the same constant rate of speed in both cases?
The first problem is representative of a thought-world inhabited by education schools and much of the education establishment. The second problem is held in disdain by the same, but favored by a group of educators and math oriented people who for lack of a better term are called “traditionalists”.

Where Do School Funds Go?

Marguerite Roza:

Imagine if a school were to spend more per pupil on ceramics electives than core science classes. What if a district were to push more funding to wealthy neighborhoods than to impoverished ones? Such policies would provoke outrage. Yet these schools and districts are real.
Today’s taxpayers spend almost $9,000 per pupil, roughly double what they spent 30 years ago, and educational achievement doesn’t seem to be improving. With the movement toward holding schools and districts accountable for student outcomes, we might think that officials can precisely track how much they are spending per student, per program, per school. But considering the patchwork that is school finance–federal block funding, foundation grants, earmarks, set-asides, and union mandates–funds can easily be diverted from where they are most needed.

Clusty Search: Marguerite Roza.

Europe’s Education Crisis: College Costs Soar

Meg Handley:

College students are known for their ability to survive on instant noodles, toast and a shoestring budget. But recently, some students in Ireland have gotten particularly desperate. “I have heard from students who have lived on biscuits stolen from the chaplaincy in their college for a week, students who have lived in their cars for months,” says Hugh Sullivan, education officer at the Union of Students in Ireland, a group that advocates on the behalf of over 250,000 students around the country.
The reason? Over the past 15 years, fees at Irish universities that cover the cost of registration, exams and student services have gone from the equivalent of $240 per student to nearly $2,000. On top of that, the government cut funding to universities by 5% last year and Sullivan expects another 5% cut this year. “It’s a time of famine,” Sullivan says, adding that even though students don’t show up in the country’s grim unemployment rate (currently 13.1%), they have become the hidden victim of the recent financial crisis. “The last thing you eat is your seeds.”

Top 10 Myths in Gifted Education

Via a kind reader.

Film: A Right Denied – The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform

via a kind reader’s email:

Whitney Tilson and True South Studios present A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform. Education reformer Whitney Tilson gives the most in-depth exploration ever committed to film of the twin achievement gaps that threaten our nation’s future: between the U.S. and our economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education’s shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them. He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film. More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.

University of Wisconsin System plan would boost graduates 30% by 2025

Sharif Durhams:

University of Wisconsin System leaders are crafting a plan to boost the number of degrees the schools award each year by 30% over the next 15 years, a move that would make the universities even more of an engine that makes the state’s economy attractive for businesses.
The goal is to boost the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have college degrees or some professional certificate from a university or college. To meet it, the schools would have to confer 33,700 degrees in 2025, up from today’s rate of about 26,000 a year. If the universities meet the goal, they will award 80,000 more degrees over the next 15 years than they would otherwise.
UWM would be a major player in the plan, UW System President Kevin Reilly said. Officials could announce as early as Monday how many additional degrees the urban campus would produce under the plan.
Meeting the goal would come at an up-front cost for the state, Reilly said. The universities would have to make the case to state lawmakers to reverse a long-term trend in which a shrinking share of the budget for the campuses comes from the state. Reilly also said the state would have to help increase faculty salaries, which lag behind salaries at peer universities in other states.

Girls vs. Boys: The Great Money Divide

Stephone Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder:

STEVE: “Are girls different from boys?” I asked Levi the other night.
He slowly turned toward me from his Facebook screen, arching his eyebrows and flashing a smirk that said: Wow, Dad is even more clueless than I thought. “About money,” I quickly added. “How are teenage girls different from boys about money?”
“Oh,” he mumbled, less cocky now. He thought for a minute: “I don’t know.” Truth is, neither of us does, which is why we’ve avoided the topic in this column. We’re a family with three boys; what do we know about girls?
Boy issues seem simple to me. Girls seem, well, complicated.

Eight questions for Wendy Kopp

The Economist:

WENDY KOPP proposed the idea for creating a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. She then did just that, creating Teach For America (TFA) shortly after graduation. Ms Kopp tells the remarkable story behind the early days of the organisation in her book “One Day, All Children…”. Today TFA attracts many of the brightest college graduates to teach in America’s neediest communities. In the most recent school year, the organisation placed some 7,300 corps members in schools across the country. They join nearly 17,000 TFA alumni, many of whom have become leaders in the education-reform movement. We close out education week by asking Ms Kopp about TFA’s success and what lessons it holds for America’s public-education system.
DiA: You have done a lot of research on the characteristics of successful TFA teachers. What is the magic formula and do you think it holds for non-TFA teachers as well?
Ms Kopp: We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.
It follows that the characteristics our research has shown to differentiate our most successful teachers are leadership characteristics–perseverance in the face of challenges, the ability to influence and motivate others, organisational ability, problem-solving ability. All of our insights around successful teaching have come from our work in the nation’s most economically disadvantaged communities so I can’t say that this is the approach or that these are the characteristics that differentiate successful teachers elsewhere.

In today’s society, teachers must fill gap

Eugene Kane:

The recent disclosure that African-American fourth-graders in Wisconsin have the worst reading skills in the entire country came as a shock to many Milwaukeeans.
Keisha Arnold wasn’t among them.
Her 10-year-old son has experienced reading problems and poor grades at his Milwaukee school for some time. Arnold has been frustrated with her inability to find a way to address the problem.
“I just don’t understand why he can’t seem to get the help he needs,” said Arnold, 28, a single parent who returned to Milwaukee a few years ago after living in Phoenix.
When she returned to her hometown, she enrolled her son in a local charter school. “I didn’t want him to go to MPS because I didn’t think he’d get a good education there,” she explained.
But it didn’t take long for Arnold to recognize that deficiencies in her son’s reading and math skills were not being addressed.
She met with his teachers and sought additional tutoring, but her son’s grades failed to improve.

Desegregation and schools: No easy answers

The Economist:

IN 1971, a young black lawyer brought up in rural North Carolina under Jim Crow laws argued on behalf of a boy from Charlotte called James Swann before the United States Supreme Court. In that case, Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the court held that school districts may use busing, quotas and other such methods to ensure integration. Nearly 40 years later that same lawyer, Julius Chambers, stood once again before nine people, this time the Wake County board of education, and this time as a concerned citizen rather than an advocate, to plead a case: that the county ought to retain its programme of assigning pupils to schools based on levels of family income. His suit failed: on March 23rd the board voted 5-4 to abandon that policy.
That vote ended a decade-long experiment. In 2000 Wake County’s school board decided to integrate its schools by income level rather than race. No more than 40% of students at any one school should be receiving free or subsidised lunches (which are given to children from poor families). Evidence dating back more than 40 years shows that schools with too great a concentration of poor pupils are undesirable. Teachers do not stay, and poor pupils tend to perform worse when they are put with others who are poor.

How About Interdistrict Teacher Choice?

New Jersey Left Behind:

The New York Times education writer, Winnie Hu, had no trouble in Saturday’s paper distinguishing some of NJ’s wealthy and high-performing school districts from our poor, low-performing ones: Cresskill, Montclair, Ridgewood, Millburn, Westfield, West Windsor-Plainsboro and Glen Ridge, she writes, “have long attracted families because they offer some of the best public education in the state. But now many of these top school systems are preparing to reduce the academic and extracurricular opportunities that have long set them apart.”

“Have long set them apart.” It’s an irony-free description of NJ’s educational inequity despite decades of Abbott compensation and the hard line of accountability etched from No Child Left Behind legislation. Among are 591 school districts (and 566 municipalities) are intractably poor, failing schools. Leveling the playing field in NJ is a quixotic task. Sword-yielding education reformers tilt at the windmills of an inculcated culture of disparity with little appreciable difference in student achievement. We can’t cure poverty; we can’t break down district barriers unless we find the cohones to desegregate and move to county-wide districts, an unlikely scenario. School choice is an embryonic concept with a long, slow learning curve (although the DOE just received 36 charter applications, a new record).

Two Madison School Board Candidates on “Places to Cut the Budget”

The Capital Times.
Watch a recent Madison School Board Candidate Forum here. The spring election is tomorrow, April 6, 2010.

Grade 10 Diploma Not a Wise Idea

Ze’ev Wurman, Sandra Stotsky:

In February, the national press reported on a pilot program that will give high school sophomores in eight states a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to credit-bearing math and English courses at a state college. To do so, they will have to take special course work and can try to pass academic tests known as board exams as early as grade 10.
The idea of a grade 10 diploma is the latest brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the originator of the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative in the 1990s. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its initiative to create small high schools as a way to get more low-achieving students through high school.
The center’s so-called fast-track approach ups the ante and aims to get at-risk students out of high school and into college – and supposedly on a quick credit-bearing path to a degree. It also aims to get bright high school students into college sooner for supposedly better course work. However, the center’s proposed 10th-grade “diploma” is the wrong answer to the wrong problem for three groups of students: those with a strong academic orientation, those without it but who are willing to stay in school and those who drop out.

Education’s Sacred Cows

Dan Haley:

It was a Race to the Top, but Colorado, amazingly, finished close to the bottom.
Of the 16 finalists for President Obama’s cash giveaway for education reform, only New York and Washington, D.C. — areas with some of the country’s worst schools — finished below Colorado. It was an embarrassing plummet for a state whose bid just a year ago looked so promising.
Colorado had been at the forefront of education reform since Gov. Roy Romer ushered in CSAPs and then-state lawmaker Bill Owens pushed for charter schools. Even Denver Public Schools for the past five years have been incubators for what are now emerging as national reforms.
This was Colorado’s race to lose. And we did.
Obama dangled $4.35 billion in front of states to spur them into developing innovative education-reform plans. But Colorado’s plan lacked ambition, bold ideas and statewide impact. It also failed to build great teachers and leaders, according to the Obama administration’s scoring system.

Hong Kong Model school under threat as rolls fall

Liz Heron:

Six years ago, the then-principal of a small primary school in Sheung Wan was fired with enthusiasm for two key government policies – small-class teaching and integrated education for children with special needs.
Leung Wai-ming ploughed HK$1 million of his money into San Wui Commercial Society School to employ extra teachers and buy state-of-the-art materials and equipment for special needs teaching.

The End of History (Books)

Marc Aronson:

TODAY, Apple’s iPad goes on sale, and many see this as a Gutenberg moment, with digital multimedia moving one step closer toward replacing old-fashioned books.
Speaking as an author and editor of illustrated nonfiction, I agree that important change is afoot, but not in the way most people see it. In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.
The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

Steven Greenhouse:

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.
Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.

The illusion of ever-lower college acceptance rates

Valerie Strauss:

It may just be me, but I found myself getting increasingly annoyed as I read my colleague Jenna Johnson’s blogpost detailing the latest admissions statistics for some of the nation’s most elite schools.
For example, Harvard University’s 7 percent overall rate of admissions last year was apparently not low enough. This year, it dropped to 6.9 percent. Harvard received more than 30,000 applications this year, a 5 percent increase from last year, and accepted 2,110 students.
“That’s 28,000 broken hearts,” one admissions staff member said as several passed trays stuffed with rejections into a car to be mailed, according to the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson.
Duke University was down to 14.8 percent from 18 percent last year, after receiving 26,770 applications, up 11 percent from last year.

One in a Million

Seth Godin:

The chances of a high school student eventually becoming first violin for the Boston Philharmonic: one in a million.
The chances of a high school student eventually playing basketball in the NBA? About the same.
In fact, the chances of someone growing up and getting a job precisely like yours, whatever it is, are similarly slim. (Head of development at an ad agency, director of admissions for a great college… you get the idea). Every good gig is a long shot, but in the end, a lot of talented people get good gigs. The odds of being happy and productive and well compensated aren’t one in a million at all, because there are many good gigs down the road. The odds are only slim if you pick precisely one job.

Race to the Top Should Be Left Behind

Heather Kirn:

After reading aloud from an essay about the fast-food industry, I threw a typical softball question to the students of a UC Berkeley composition class:
“What’s the argument of the paragraph?”
Silence.
Written by a former student, the paragraph implied that a rise in American obesity is linked to increased dollars spent on fast food.
I called on a student. “Advertising?” she said, a word that appeared in the paragraph only once. Why did this student, a hard-working athlete, so badly misread the paragraph? Because instead of really interpreting the passage, she used a little clue. “Advertising” had been mentioned in the thesis just a paragraph earlier.
Unfortunately, strategies such as hers aren’t uncommon in the college classroom. Within the same lesson, another student made quick assumptions about a sentence’s meaning because of its first words. My colleagues and I often swap stories like these, in which our students use faulty shorthand in place of critical thinking.

Me vs. smartest critic of AP in low-income schools

Jay Matthews:

This was going to be a piece about a great new book about Advanced Placement, “AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program.” I promise to summarize its conclusions before this column ends.

But I want to focus on the most interesting contributor to the volume, a Texas economist named Kristin Klopfenstein who is author or co-author of two chapters and one of the four editors of the book. She has become the most articulate and knowledgeable critic of using AP to raise achievement in low-income schools, a movement I have been supporting for a quarter of a century, I decided to call her up, discuss our differences and report what she had to say.

Klopfenstein is an associate professor of economics at Texas Christian University, currently on leave to work as a senior researcher at the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas-Dallas. In the new book, she is the sole author of a chapter that argues that people who say AP saves taxpayer money and reduces time to college graduation are wrong. Since I am not one of those people, I didn’t ask her about that chapter, but about a chapter of which she is the lead author, with Mississippi State University economist M. Kathleen Thomas as co-author, entitled “Advanced Placement Participation: Evaluating the Policies of States and Colleges.”

Klopfenstein has spent many years looking at AP in public schools, aided by a terrific state data base in Texas that follows students from grade school into college. Other researchers in Texas and California have produced studies that suggest that taking AP courses and exams in high school leads to more success in college than avoiding or being barred from AP, as happens with most college-bound students. Klopfenstein told me those studies should not be given great weight because they show correlation, not causation.

Walpole Superintendent Lincoln Lynch says achievement gap may not have been great enough for Race to the Top funding

Keith Ferguson:

Massachusetts did not receive Race to the Top school funding but state education officials say they plan to reapply for the grant.
Pres. Barack Obama established the Race to the Top program last summer for states to compete for $4.35 billion in grant funding to pursue education overhauls and innovative reform.
Of the initial 40 states to qualify, Massachusetts was named one of 16 finalists. Early this week, the U.S. Department of Education announced Delaware and Tennessee were the only winners.
The program states winners would be chosen simply on the state’s readiness to rework their education system.
Superintendent Lincoln Lynch said Massachusetts might have been passed up since the achievement gap here may not be as great as in other states. As a finalist, however, Massachusetts will have the opportunity to reapply in for a second round of funding in June.

Montclair teenager gives New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie an education

Paul Mulshine:

The kids weren’t buying it. One girl gave the Gov a quiz on the state Constitution. After first noting that the state Constitution provides for “a thorough and efficient system of free public schools,” the student noted the school board was likely to make drastic budget cuts. She then asked: “What does it mean if the superintendent and the school board say the budget they approved cannot provide for that thorough and efficient system?”
Wow, I thought, these kids are sharp — a lot sharper than their governor, it turned out.
The girl had made a point of repeating, as if to a dull student, that in our Constitution the adjectives “thorough and efficient” modify the noun “system.” This is a key legal point. For a moment there, I wondered if the kids had been reading the Rutgers Law Journal. I’m thinking of the excellent article by legal scholar Peter Mazzei in which he traced the language back to New Jersey’s 1873 constitutional convention, at which time it clearly implied equal distribution of state aid to all school districts.
As for the Gov, he hadn’t done his homework. Christie responded that “we have two constitutional issues at conflict here. One is the constitutional obligation to balance and the budget and the other is the constitutional obligation to provide a thorough and efficient education.”

Jaime Escalante didn’t just stand and deliver. He changed U.S. schools forever.

Jay Matthews:

From 1982 to 1987 I stalked Jaime Escalante, his students and his colleagues at Garfield High School, a block from the hamburger-burrito stands, body shops and bars of Atlantic Boulevard in East Los Angeles. I was the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Washington Post, allegedly covering the big political, social and business stories of the Western states, but I found it hard to stay away from that troubled high school.
I would show up unannounced, watch Jaime teach calculus, chat with Principal Henry Gradillas, check in with other Advanced Placement classes and in the early afternoon call my editor in Washington to say I was chasing down the latest medfly outbreak story, or whatever seemed believable at the time.
Escalante, who died Tuesday from cancer at age 79, did not become nationally famous until 1988, when the feature film about him, “Stand and Deliver,” was released, and my much-less-noticed book, “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America,” also came out. I had been drawn to him, as filmmakers Ramón Menéndez and Tom Musca were, by the story of a 1982 cheating scandal. Eighteen Escalante students had passed the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam. Fourteen were accused of cheating by the Educational Testing Service, based on similarities in their answers. Twelve took the test again, this time heavily proctored, and passed again.

The 3×5 Learning Revolution

Tom Vander Ark:

Twenty years after technology began transforming every other sector, there is finally enough movement on a sufficient number of fronts–15 to be precise–that, despite resilience, everything will change. New and better learning options are inevitable, but progress will be uneven by state/country and leadership dependent.
The 5 Drivers. These Web 2.0 forces are benefiting the learning sector, emerging economies, as well as every other sector:

More broadband: increasingly ubiquitous high speed Internet access is enabling a world of engaging content including video, multiplayer games, simulations, and video conferencing.
Cheap access devices: netbooks, tablets, and smart phones have dropped below the $100 per year ownership level enabling one-to-one computing solutions.
Powerful application development platforms: rapid application development and viral adoption have radically reduced cost and increased speed of bringing solutions to market.
Adaptive content: personalized news (iGoogle), networks (Facebook), purchasing (Amazon), and virtual environments (World of Warcraft) have created a ‘my way’ mindset that will eventually eliminate the common slog through print.
Platforms: Apple’s iPhone illustrates the elegant bundling of an application, purchasing, and delivery platform.

Input of teachers unions key to successful entries in Race to the Top

Nick Anderson:

Delaware’s surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama’s education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board’s vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.

Terms sway furlough debate: At issue is determining which school workers are “nonessential”

Honolulu Star Bulletin:

As a teacher at Noelani Elementary School, Katie Nakamura says she believes any person who works directly with students is essential, including librarians, who can serve as a valuable resource to help children.
“Every day that another person can help a child is an essential part of that child’s growth, and every day that we fail to touch a child is a waste of what we, as educators and school employees, seek to achieve,” Nakamura said in an e-mail.
Gov. Linda Lingle sees it differently.
Librarians are among the educational system employees who were included on a list of “nonessential” workers released by the Lingle administration this week.
Determining which workers are “essential” and “nonessential” is at the heart of a $30 million difference between two plans aimed at ending Furlough Fridays for public school students.

Discipline disparities merit a long look from education reformers

Rhonda Graham:

Two weeks ago Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he wanted to tackle the disparity in how students of different races with discipline problems are treated in public schools.
Earlier this month, the Civil Rights Division of his federal agency informed Delaware’s largest school district that it is opening an investigation involving the same issue.
Then on Monday, Duncan announced that Delaware is one of two first-round winners in the federal Race To the Top education reform competition. It now has $100 million to spend on strengthening standards and assessment, supporting quality educators, developing data systems to better measure student performance, and turning around failing schools.
Talk about intended consequences.

Union fails to restrict Los Angeles charter schools

Jason Song:

A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles teachers union to block the city’s school district from giving new campuses to charter schools was denied Friday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.
The suit was filed in December on behalf of United Teachers Los Angeles as a result of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s controversial school reform plan, which sought to turn over 30 campuses to bidders from inside and outside the district, including charter school organizations.
The lawsuit claimed that L.A. Unified could not allow charter operators to take over new campuses unless 50% of the district’s permanent teachers petitioned for it. Charters are independently managed public schools and are generally nonunion.
The legal process went forward, and the school board voted to give teacher-led groups control of 22 of the campuses; four were awarded to charters.

US girl sues for $1m over arrest for desk scribble

BBC:

A 12-year-old US schoolgirl is suing the New York City authorities for $1m ($650,000) in damages after she was arrested for writing on her desk.
Alexa Gonzalez was led out of her school in handcuffs by police after she was caught scribbling a message to her friends with an erasable, green marker.
Miss Gonzalez and her mother are suing the police and education departments in New York City.
They are claiming for excessive use of force and violation of her rights.

Video: Getting Started in a 1 to 1 Classroom

Mr. Byrne:

The Maine International Center for Digital Learning has produced four videos designed to help schools prepare for and transition into one-to-one schools. The videos feature former Maine Governor Angus King and two Maine teachers, Lisa Hogan and Google Certified Teacher Sarah Sutter. The video series covers the practical and logistical aspects of one-to-one for teachers as well as the educational theory aspects of one-to-one.

A Map of the World Anti-Spanking League

Strange Maps:

s spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children?
Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy in case of a parenting emergency. A hard core of disgusted disciplinarians protest that the practice’s decline is why today’s youth lacks any respect for authority – and ultimately is one of the main causes for the Decline of Everything.
The ambiguity extends to the legal sphere. Many countries have outlawed corporal punishment in the classroom (2), while only a handful have done the same for parental correction of the physical kind. This map shows those countries on a world map, and amplifies their relatively small number by submerging all other countries (3).
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I count 23 countries on this map. So, which are the members of the World Anti-Spanking League?

India’s Right to Education Act: A Critique

Ajay Shah:

The `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009′ (RTE Act) came into effect today, with much fanfare and an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In understanding the debates about this Act, a little background knowledge is required. Hence, in this self-contained 1500-word blog post, I start with a historical narrative, outline key features of the Act, describe its serious flaws, and suggest ways to address them.
Historical narrative
After independence, Article 45 under the newly framed Constitution stated that The state shall endeavor to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.
As is evident, even after 60 years, universal elementary education remains a distant dream. Despite high enrolment rates of approximately 95% as per the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2009), 52.8% of children studying in 5th grade lack the reading skills expected at 2nd grade. Free and compulsory elementary education was made a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution in December 2002, by the 86th Amendment. In translating this into action, the `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill’ was drafted in 2005. This was revised and became an Act in August 2009, but was not notified for roughly 7 months.

New Jersey Schools Brace for Cuts

Winnie Hu:

The New Jersey School Boards Association, which surveyed school officials about the state aid cuts, found that 268 districts would lay off teachers and that 185 would make cuts to their education programs.
In addition, 206 districts said they would reduce the number of extracurricular activities, and 96 would charge students an activity fee for the first time.
Districts are also seeking to save on teachers’ salaries and benefits, with 195 considering reopening contracts with local teachers’ unions. An additional 265 are already at the bargaining table. As an incentive, Mr. Christie this week announced a proposal to give additional state aid to districts that negotiate salary freezes.
The school boards association received responses from 323 of the state’s 588 districts about how they were preparing for the possible loss of state money.

Wisconsin School District’s face similar issues: the state ranks in the top 10 in per capita debt and the Federal Government’s debt position continues to deteriorate. Local property taxpayers may bear the brunt of local District spending increases.

Fiscally responsible school budgeting

Dallastown Area School District Superintendent Stewart Weinberg:

The school budget is an opportunity for the board and the administration to financially describe the academic aspirations for all children. It’s the means for a district to implement and follow through on its strategic plan. In strategic plans we find the vision and scope for delivering the educational program. The budget must articulate this vision for academic excellence.
It is imperative that each school district, each year, re-examine all of its revenue sources and expenditures. School districts are primarily funded by local real estate taxes. In Dallastown, nearly 78 percent of revenue sources come from local sources — 85 percent of which are local real estate taxes. State sources make up about 21 percent; federal and other sources make up the remai

Clusty Search: Stewart Weinberg.

Mitch Henck & Don Severson on the Madison School District’s Budget

13.1mb mp3.
Mitch Henck & Don Severson.
Much more on the 2010-2011 Madison School District budget here.

Dear Iowans

Chad Aldeman:

Your schools are not what they once were. Last week you were named one of only four states to have its fourth-grade reading scores decline on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the nation’s report card.
This is sad news, but it shouldn’t come as any great surprise: Iowa’s scores have been flat for nearly two decades. In 1992, you trailed only four states in fourth-grade reading. You now trail 25, including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.
It might be tempting to blame your declining scores on changing demographics, and that’s fair to some extent, but you haven’t had the same influx of minority students that your neighbor Minnesota has, for example, even though their scores have risen much faster than yours.

New Jersey Governor urges local teachers’ unions, school boards to agree on salary freezes

Tom Hester, Sr.:

Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday sent letters to the heads of the statewide teachers union and the state school boards’ association urging them to have local union leaders and school boards agree on pay freezes, an action that would provide a school district with more state aid.
The governor sent the letters to New Jersey Education Association President Barbara Keshishian and New Jersey School Boards Association Director Maria Bilik.
“The additional state aid to those districts that make the right choice and join in the shared sacrifice will ensure that more teachers stay in their jobs, more students will be able to participate in extracurricular activities, and protect educational services,” Christie said. “While it is not the easy choice, it is the right choice and it shows we put New Jersey’s children first.”

India makes elementary education compulsory

CNN:

A new law went into effect in India Thursday making education a fundamental right for every child.
An estimated 8 to 10 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 do not attend school in India.
In most cases, the abject poverty many of these children live in necessitate they instead work to supplement their family’s meager income.
In some cases, parents often frown upon sending daughters to school, and some rural areas deny children of lower castes access to education.

Milwaukee Public Schools “Progress Report”

Erin Richards:

Milwaukee Public Schools today provided some response to the not-so-much-progress progress report recently issued by an independent expert who’s overseeing the implementation of an educational improvement plan in the district.
In a letter, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board President Michael Bonds tell Alan Coulter, the independent expert, that it’s unfortunate his report doesn’t “accurately reflect the incredible efforts underway by the District” and that it seems he has been “factually deprived of pertinent information” regarding MPS’ progress.
In an e-mail today, Roseann St. Aubin, district spokeswoman, also said there appears to be a communication problem between the Department of Public Instruction in Madison and Coulter in New Orleans.
But, she also said that Coulter is required to do these progress reports under the settlement agreement between Disability Rights Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and that MPS is not a party to this settlement.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Taxes Per Person Comparison

Greg Mankiw:

Some pundits, reflecting on the looming U.S. budget deficits, claim that Americans are vastly undertaxed compared with other major nations. I was wondering, to what extent is that true?
The most common metric for answering this question is taxes as a percentage of GDP. However, high tax rates tend to depress GDP. Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can. For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person, which we can compute using this piece of advanced mathematics:
Taxes/GDP x GDP/Person = Taxes/Person

A New Maintenance Referendum? The latest Madison School District Facilities Review

Madison School District Administration [2.3MB PDF]:

The 2010 Facility Assessment identifies $85,753,506 of immediate maintenance needs. It does not address items that have been traditionally handled through our work order system and the annual operating budget. This includes items such as floor tile, carpeting, casework, ceilings tile, painting, wall treatments, minor fencing projects, grounds maintenance and window treatments. The Facility Assessment includes projects divided into specific areas

Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Building Envelope, gym floors, interior doors, high school athletic fields.
Roofing
Pavement
Playgrounds

In previous years, all projects were prioritized in order to insure life safety items took precedence over other items like parking lots. It is now necessary to spread funding over multiple trade areas in order to prevent one area from becoming excessively deteriorated. The 2010 Facility Assessment recommends funding all areas offacility needs annually, at varying levels, according to the condition assigned.

A Madison School District Property Tax Increase Outlook (39% over the next 6 years) including 4 Year Old Kindergarten (4K)

Madison School District 102K PDF:

2009-2010 Adopted: 3.85%
2010-2011 “Projected”: 12.22%
2010-2011 “Cost to Continue”: 11.82%
2011-2012 “Projected”: 8.88%
2012-2013 “Projected”: 6.03%
2013-2014 “Projected”: 4.47%
2014-2015 “Projected”: 3.23%

The document projects that the Madison School District’s tax on a “typical” $250,000 home will increase from $2,545.00 in 2009-2010 to $3,545 in 2014-2015, a 39% increase over 6 years. Significant.
The District’s total property tax levy grew from $158,646,124 (1998-1999) to $234,240,964 (2009-2010); a 47.6% increase over that 11 year period.
The proposed 2010-2011 budget increases property taxes by 11.8% to $261,929,543
Background:

Madison School District 5 Year Budget Forecast
Madison School District Financial Overview:

1) Impact of State’s finance on MMSD finances and budget projections
We utilized two separate papers from the legislative fiscal bureau (attached) and a presentation given by Andrew Reschovsky to provide detail to the board of education. Unfortunately projections at this point in time are showing a shortfall for the 2011-13 biennial budget of approximately $2.3 million. Without knowing if there will be another stabilization type package to help ease this burden, chances are funding for education and many other State funded programs will be looked at for possible reduction.

A Summary of Research that Supports the Instructional Resource Teacher Positions (IRTs) in Madison’s Elementary Schools

Madison School District: [1.5MB PDF]

Professional development is the manner with which we all learn and grow in our profession. The needs of our students continue to grow and change. The expectations of teachers continue to develop. Larry Wilson once said, “Our options are to learn the new game, the rules, the roles of the participants, and how the rewards are distributed, or to continue practicing our present skills and become the best players in a game that is no longer being played.” Just as we expect doctors, lawyers, and other professions to be current on the latest research and methods, our teachers need to continue developing their skills through professional development.

“Professional development is the key to the success of a school.” (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
“One of the most cost-effective methods for making significant gains in student performance on standardized tests is providing teachers with better content knowledge and instructional methods to enhance the curriculum.” (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
“In the history of education, no improvement effort has ever succeeded in the absence of thoughtfully planned and well-implemented professional development.” (Guskey & Yoon, 2009)
‘A school culture that invites deep and sustained professional learning will have a powerful impact on student achievement.” (Brandt, 2003)
According to research, high-quality teaching has about five times more statistical effect than most feasible reductions in class size (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine as cited in Frank & Miles, 2007).
“We have a rich, untapped pool oftalent in the millions ofmediocre teachers that are currently in the classroom. Rather than dismiss them, we need to help them grow. If we could move two million teachers from ‘mediocre talent’ to even ‘mediocre- strong’, it would have an incredible effect on student outcomes… Rather than focusing on punishing bad schools and teachers, we need to develop a culture of development and growth.” (Scott, 2010.)

Fascinating.
Clusty search: “Instructional Resource Teacher“. Madison School District Instructional Resource Teacher Search.

Education commissioner praises public schools for performance gains but says deep cuts are overdue

Abigail Crocker:

Rhode Island’s new education boss told a large crowd of Bristol and Warren residents last Thursday night that their towns have gotten a great deal for nearly two decades, but it’s time to settle up. The message was frustrating and disappointing to many in attendance.
Department of Education Commissioner Deborah Gist confirmed that a proposed funding formula would slash into the Bristol Warren Regional School District’s revenue stream each year for the next 10 years, escalating to a $9.1 million reduction by 2020. Her message was delivered to a large crowd packed into the Mt. Hope High School auditorium to hear her speak.
Half the reduction is elimination of a regionalization “bonus” that has been given to the school district each year since the two towns merged their school systems in the early 1990s. Ms. Gist said the state simply does not have the resources to continue to fund the district at the level it has been. However, Ms. Gist offered one small carrot — she said the state would help pay for students requiring a high level of specialized services.
According to Ms. Gist, the proposed funding formula would distribute enough funds to each district so all can adhere to the Basic Education Plan, an outline of standards Rhode Island students must achieve.

What liberal arts are good for.

Rochelle Gurstein:

Why draw from the model? A number of years ago, my husband and I and some friends–all, except for me, artists who also teach at art schools here in New York–spent hours discussing this question, though without arriving at anything particularly convincing. A few of them recalled drawing from the model as undergraduates, but none had done so in graduate programs–these were the heady, experimental days of the early ’70s, when all the action took place in the seminar room; in my husband’s program, studios had been dispensed with altogether. When we turned our attention to the art world today, drawing and models seemed just as antiquated. Installation, photography, and video, more popular than ever, are mechanically derived. And though we could easily think of paintings with figures in them, all of them had been lifted from mass-media images; they had as little relation to drawing from the pose of a living person in the artist’s studio as photography.
Yet, at art schools today, freshmen are required to draw from the model, sometimes six hours at a stretch, their labors then judged by teachers who have no use for, indeed, who disdain, the practice in their own work. We spent quite a while trying to account for this odd disjuncture. The best anyone could come up with is that studio drawing focuses the eye and hand; it is an intense discipline in seeing and then translating what one sees into material form. This, it seemed to me, was another way of saying that it was good for its own sake, even if it had no relation to making art these days. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but the next morning what had eluded us the night before now appeared so ridiculously obvious that I could not believe we had missed it: The reason the Academy required students to master the painstaking practice of drawing from the model was because, until very recently, the action of figures–gods, heroes, and mere mortals–was the prime subject, the central drama, the moving force, of all the greatest paintings.

Race to the Top, Phase I State Proposal Reviewers

via a kind reader’s email: 250K PDF.

Slashing Prices in Higher Education

Jack Stripling:

Tuition discounting reached record high levels at private colleges and universities in 2008, and the largest share of that aid was awarded without consideration of students’ financial need, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO).
The average discount rate for full-time freshmen increased from 39 percent in fall 2007 to 42 percent in fall 2008, and the average award covered more than half – 53.5 percent – of the “sticker price.” The discount rate represents the share of tuition and fee revenues colleges use to award institutionally funded aid.
Despite lamentations from some college presidents, tuition discounting has become an increasingly common practice at private institutions. Standard discounting involves placing the sticker price of attendance beyond the reach of many families, only to effectively slash that price by offering institutionally funded financial aid to many or, more typically, most students. Critics say it steers too much aid toward students without financial need, and it also forces high-tuition colleges to defend sticker prices students seldom actually pay.

Teaching One Child at a Time

Shukla Bose:

Educating the poor is more than just a numbers game, says Shukla Bose. She tells the story of her groundbreaking Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which brings hope to India’s slums by looking past the daunting statistics and focusing on treating each child as an individual.

2010 Broad Prize Urban School District Finalists

The Broad Prize for Urban Education:

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, N.C.
Gwinnett County Public Schools outside Atlanta
Montgomery County Public Schools, Md.
Socorro Independent School District, El Paso, Texas
Ysleta Independent School District, El Paso, Texas