Top 10 Education Concerns



Michael Shaughnessy interviews the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews:

7) What do you see as the top ten concerns in education? What are the biggest concerns in the Washington Circle?

My concerns or Washington’s? I will go with mine:

  1. Low standards and expectations in low-income schools.
  2. Very inadequate teacher training in our education schools.
  3. Failure to challenge average students in nearly all high schools with AP and IB courses.
  4. Corrupt and change-adverse bureaucracies in big city districts.
  5. A tendency to judge schools by how many low income kids they have, the more there are the worse the school in the public mind.
  6. A widespread feeling on the part of teachers, because of their
    inherent humanity, that it is wrong to put a child in a challenging situation where they may fail, when that risk of failure is just what they need to learn and grow.

  7. The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won’t be as successful in life.
  8. A failure to realize that inner city and rural schools need to give students more time to learn, and should have longer school days and school years.
  9. A failure to realize that the best schools–like the KIPP charter schools in the inner cities—are small and run by well-recruited and trained principals who have the power to hire all their teachers, and quickly fire the ones that do not work out.
  10. The resistance to the expansion of charter schools in most school district offices.

Matthews list is comprehensive and on target.




12 Ways to Make Your Kids Financially Savvy



Jonathan Clements:

Ten years after I am dead and gone, I suspect only two people will give much thought to me, and their names are Henry and Hannah.
They’re my legacy, so I hope they thrive — and I sure hope they remember me fondly.
Henry and Hannah are, of course, my children, now ages 15 and 19, respectively. Like any parent, I spend a lot of time thinking about my kids, including how I can best help them financially.
This isn’t simply about coughing up dollars and cents, though the sums involved have been frighteningly large. Rather, what it’s really about is passing along values.
Yes, I want my kids to be financially successful. But mostly, I want them to be competent, contented managers of their own money, so they don’t spend their lives agonizing over their finances and dogged by foolish mistakes.
I am not claiming to have the road map for every parent. We all have different values, different incomes and strong ideas about how best to raise children — and you will likely scoff at some of the things I’ve done. With that caveat, here are a dozen ways I have endeavored to help my kids financially.




Virtual School Was Real Solution



Susan Lampert Smith:

The schools are virtual, but the children learning from them are very real.
And, sometimes, real kids have real problems.
Brennan Fredericks, 16, had big problems in middle school. His parents, Dan and Donna of Black Earth, said his former school did little to protect him from bullies. He has life-threatening food allergies and, his mother said, other kids would throw peanut butter sandwiches at him and taunt him.
“He ‘d sit all alone at a table labeled peanut ‘ and get picked on, ” Donna Fredericks said.
It got so bad that the thought of going to school made him ill.
After home schooling their son through much of eighth grade, the family was delighted to find the Monroe Virtual High School, a charter school run out of the Monroe School District.
To fulfill high school requirements, Brennan can choose between high school and college courses, which arrive with books and online homework. When it ‘s time to take exams, a teacher from the Monroe school drives to Black Earth and administers the test at the local library.
It has worked well for a kid who struggled in regular school.




The Annual Geo Quiz



John Flinn:

1. Are there any countries where you can you see lions and tigers and bears in the wild?
2. What is the only U.S. state to allow its residents to cast absentee ballots from outer space?
3. If you could somehow hover at a point in space just above the equator, roughly how fast would the ground below be moving relative to you?
4. It was originally named the Flavian Amphitheater, but nobody calls it that today. What is its more common name?




A Visit to the Hmong in Laos



Thomas Fuller:

That view is not shared by the Hmong, many of whom felt betrayed by the United States when the war ended. Using battered radios, the veterans here have followed what to them are the confusing events of recent years: the friendship proclaimed between Vietnam and the United States and the arrest in June of Vang Pao, the former Hmong general who faces charges in the United States of plotting to attack the Laotian government.
Mr. Pao’s indictment in California, after a federal sting operation in which a government agent posing as an arms dealer offered him weapons, is bewildering to the veterans here. Attacking Communists was the very job Mr. Pao was paid to do by the C.I.A.
Mr. Yang and his group say they still hope for a democratic Laos but have given up any notion that they can assist in the overthrow of the Communist government.

Much more on Vang Pao and Madison here (our latest elementary school was to be named for Pao).




Madison’s Military Problem: It isn’t Army recruiting, but our attitude towards serving



Marc Eisen:

Monday, Nov. 5, wasn’t a good day for the U.S. military in Madison.
Over at the Doyle administration building, anti-war activists were lobbying the Madison school board to remove Army recruitment signs from high school sports stadiums.
Critics say the ads mislead impressionable young people and support unconscionable war-making. I have a problem with that.
I’m at a loss to understand how a sign asking, “Are you Army strong?” and giving a recruiter’s phone number represents a threat to young people. On a list of the top 2,000 baleful media images thrust before kids — have you seen the American Apparel ads pitched to teenage girls? — this ranks maybe 1,834th.
Over at East High, meanwhile, the military’s estrangement from the good people of Madison was in even starker relief.
Roughly 70 parents and students turned out for a “junior night” look at post-graduation prospects for college, technical school, and yes, the military. Not one participant stopped by the military recruitment table, Sgt. Frederick Hutchison of the Marines and Machinist Mate Michael Pflanzer of the Navy told me.
Per school district policy, recruiters will have two more cracks at East High kids, and Pflanzer guardedly thought some would eventually sign up.
Oh sure, East High kids will enlist, I thought as I walked out the door carrying college-bound material for my own junior daughter. But they’ll probably be black- and brown-skinned kids, or Hmong, and blue-collar kids who aren’t laser-focused on college the way that the children of the professional classes are taught to be.

Some related books that are well worth reading:




Flexible High School Hours



Ericka Mellon:

It’s shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday, and while most of her peers across Texas are in school, 18-year-old Angelina Banda is driving to her $7.50-an-hour job at Home Depot.
“I need Pampers,” said Banda, who has a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-month-old son.
The young mom is enrolled in a special program at Houston’s Furr High School, which allows her to attend class in the morning and work in the afternoon.
Similar programs designed to keep teens from dropping out of school could become more popular thanks to a new law that makes it easier for districts to obtain state funding for students with nontraditional schedules.
Evening, weekend classes
State Rep. Scott Hochberg, who proposed the bill, said he hopes it encourages districts to offer evening or weekend classes for students who must work to support their families and cannot attend school during the conventional 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. day.




Virtual schools here to stay; law, courts must adapt



Jeff Bush:

Insight School of Wisconsin, one of the state’s newest publicly chartered virtual schools, could not disagree more profoundly with the recent Court of Appeals ruling that a virtual school violated Wisconsin law because its teachers and students are not entirely located within one school district’s borders.
The ruling is a step back for education. It hurts Wisconsin’s quest to be economically competitive in a high-tech, online educational world. Most disturbingly, it hurts some of the neediest students we’re all trying so hard to help.
The Appeals Court ruling denies what is already happening in schools. As a former teacher and principal, let me point out the obvious: Technology has changed the classroom. Online schools, video programming and Web-based distance learning have obliterated school district borders. The world is now our classroom.
Visit a school today and you’ll likely see that it’s already linked to one of the state’s 33 distance learning networks. You might see a distance-taught class over BadgerNet taught by teachers in another city, state or country.




Where to Educate Your Child? Madison Area is #2



Via a reader’s email: David Savageau (Contributing Editor of Expansion Management Management):

Three out of 10 of us either work in an educational institution or learn in one. Education eats up 8% of the Gross National Product. Keeping it all going is the biggest line item on city budgets. Whether the results are worth it sometimes makes teachers and parents–and administrators and politicians–raise their voices and point fingers.
In the 1930s, the United States was fragmented into 130,000 school districts. After decades of consolidation, there are now fewer than 15,000. They range in size from hundreds that don’t actually operate schools–but bus children to other districts–to giants like the Los Angeles Unified District, with three-quarters of a million students.
Greater Chicago has 332 public school districts and 589 private schools within its eight counties. Metropolitan Los Angeles takes in 35 public library systems. Greater Denver counts 15 public and private colleges and universities. Moving into any of America’s metro areas means stepping into a thicket of school districts, library systems, private school options and public and private college and universities.

Here are some of their top locations:

  1. Washington, DC – Arlington, VA
  2. Madison, WI
  3. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham
  4. Baltimore -Towson
  5. Akron, OH
  6. Columbus, OH
  7. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY
  8. Syracuse, NY
  9. St. Louis, MO
  10. Ann Arbor, MI

The Madison area has incredible resources for our children. The key of course, is leveraging that and being open to working effectively with many organizations, something Marc Eisen mentioned in his recent article. Madison’s new Superintendent has a tremendous opportunity to leverage the community from curricular, arts, sports, health/wellness, financial and volunteer perspectives.
Related:

The Capital Times:

The Madison area, which includes all of Dane County as well as immediately adjoining areas, was awarded A+ for class size and spending per pupil in public schools, and for the popularity of the city’s public library.
The greater Madison area scored an A for being close to a college town and for offering college options.
Private school options in the greater Madison area were graded at B+.
There has been some confusion in the response to the rankings because they lump together numerous school districts — urban, suburban and rural.

Channel3000:

The engineering-based program is just one example of the district’s willingness to bring college-level learning to his high school students. That effort appears to be paying off nationally, WISC-TV reported.
“It reinforces that what we’re trying to do as a district and as an area is working,” said Granberg. “And it’s getting recognized on a national level, not just a local or state level.”
“This is not a community that accepts anything but the best and so that bar is always high,” said Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Rainwater also credits the ranking to teacher development programs.
“We spend an awful amount of time and an awful amount of effort working with our teachers in terms of how they deliver instruction to individual children,” said Rainwater.
He said the school district will continue to improve techniques, focusing on the needs of every student.




Minneapolis School District Aims for a New Start



Catherine Gewertz:

The Minneapolis school district has been struggling in the past few years with low student achievement, declining enrollment, money shortages, and frequent leadership changes. Now, its leaders are staking their hopes on a new strategic plan to help revitalize the system and rebuild public confidence.
At a meeting last week, the school board adopted a set of nine recommendations drawn from the plan 36K PDF. They form a broad outline for the district as it addresses complaints that have prompted hundreds of city families to sign their children up for private, charter, and nearby suburban schools.
The recommendations include raising expectations and academic rigor for students, correcting practices that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, building a stronger corps of principals and teachers, and shoring up the district’s financial health.
Minneapolis’ strategic plan still must be shaped into concrete steps to be implemented in the coming months, a process made tougher by next year’s projected $11 million shortfall in the roughly $650 million budget.




2007 High School Challenge Index



Washington Post:

The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school’s effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 27, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.

Local schools on the list include: Madison Memorial and Verona




Online teaching tools catching on in traditional schools



Amy Hetzner:

When students from her 10th-grade honors class returned from summer break, Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Nelson organized an online open-house activity to discuss three novels they had read during their time off.
After six hours, the English teacher at the Hartland school had a 178-page transcript of her students’ dialogue and a new appreciation of the power the remote technology of the Internet can lend to the sometimes intensely interpersonal field of teaching.
“You think of computers as being cold,” she said. “But they were really into some deep topics.”
Even as fully virtual schools face an uncertain future after a state appeals court this week found one such school violated state laws, most of today’s students are more likely to encounter an online learning experience like that practiced in Nelson’s honors English classroom.
Instead of replacing the face-to-face interaction of a brick-and-mortar school with a virtual-school experience, Nelson and other teachers throughout the Milwaukee area are using online discussion boards, textbooks, surveys and collaborative features to extend class time beyond the traditional school day.




Schools Accused of Mainstreaming to Cut Costs



John Hechinger:

For years, Jonathan Schuster’s mother begged the public schools here to put her son in a special program where he could get extra help for his emotional problems. By 11th grade, Jonathan had broken his hand punching a wall and been hospitalized twice for depression — once because he threatened to kill himself with a pocket knife.
But teachers insisted that Jonathan, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and bipolar disorder, could get by in regular classrooms. His mother, Kathleen Lerch, says the reason was cost. “It was all about the bottom line,” she says. Citing confidentiality, school officials declined to discuss Jonathan’s case but said they seek to provide an appropriate education to all children.
Advocates for the disabled have long promoted the inclusion of special-education children in regular classes, a practice called mainstreaming. Many educators view mainstreaming as an antidote to the warehousing of children with special needs in separate, and often deficient, classrooms and buildings.
Now, some experts and parents complain that mainstreaming has increasingly taken on a new role in American education: a pretext for cost-cutting, hurting the children it was supposed to help. While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can’t meet their needs. Inclusion has evolved into “a way of downsizing special education,” says Douglas Fuchs, a Vanderbilt University education professor.
Districts have a powerful motivation to cut special-education costs. U.S. schools spend almost twice as much on the average disabled student as they do on a nondisabled peer, according to a 2004 federal study. But the study also found that, in recent years, per-student special-education costs rose more slowly than for the general population. One of the likely reasons, researchers found, was cost savings from mainstreaming.




Madison: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign



Marc Eisen:

The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district’s proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they’re still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That’s why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin’s 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children “to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers.”

Related:




For a Few, the More Kids the Merrier



Lisa Takeuchi Cullen:

There’s an odd phenomenon being reported in tony enclaves across the country: highly educated, highly compensated couples popping out four or more children–happily and by choice. In Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, four-packs of siblings rule the playgrounds. In New York City, real estate agents tell of families buying two or three adjacent apartments to create giant spaces for their giant broods. Oradell, N.J., is home to so many sprawling clans that residents call it Fouradell. In a suburb of Chicago, the sibling boomlet is called the Wheaton Four.
Of course, big families never really disappeared. Immigrants tend to have more kids, as do Mormons, some Catholics and a growing cadre of fundamentalist Christians. But in the U.S. today, the average number of children per mom is about 2, compared with 2.5 in the 1970s. While 34.3% of married women ages 40 to 44 had four or more children in 1976, only 11.5% did in 2004, according to the Current Population Survey. Though factoring in affluence can be statistically tricky, an analysis by Steven Martin, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, shows that the proportion of affluent families with four or more kids increased from 7% in 1991-96 to 11% in 1998-2004. Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, speculates, “For most people, two is enough because there are so many other competing ways to spend your time and money. People prefer to have fewer kids and invest more in them. My guess is the wealthy are having more because they enjoy children, and they have the time and resources to raise them well. They don’t have to make those trade-offs.”




Expanding the horizon for home-school students



Lisa Kocian:

Eight-year-old Ben Shapiro’s days are a blur of gymnastics, piano playing, and art history lessons. He can also be found doing fractions, reading a biography of Marco Polo, and, soon, delving into physics. But he’s not at school. And he’s not alone.
He is part of a fast-evolving home-school movement that is traveling away from the stereotype of child and parent at the kitchen table. Shapiro does spend most of his day with his mother, but not alone. Instead, she shuttles him from one group activity to another.
The home is no longer where all the action is in this new wave of home schooling. Although some instruction takes place at home, parents now choose from an increasing number of options that allow their children to interact with and learn alongside other home-schooled peers. The opportunities for socialization are numerous – swim lessons at the YMCA, staging a play with like-minded friends found over the Internet, or any of myriad academic courses offered at cooperative schools in the area.
“It all can be subcontracted,” said Marcia Coakley, who teaches her 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter at home in Medway. “There’s so many resources out there, it’s almost hard to decide.”




Schools of Hope Tutoring Program Expanded to Madison High Schools



Andy Hall:

After more than a decade of aiding younger students, the Schools of Hope project is heading to high school.
The Schools of Hope Leadership Team, a 27-member community group, decided Wednesday to establish a tutoring program for ninth graders in the Madison School District.
More than 50 volunteer adult tutors — and possibly many more — will be sought to serve at least an hour a week in high schools.




More time in class equals better math skills



Greg Toppo:

The idea that more time in school produces better results could get a small boost today with the release of international data from the Brookings Institution. The study finds adding 10 minutes of math instruction to an eighth-grader’s day translates into a jump in math skills.
The findings come as a handful of states and school districts experiment with packing more minutes into the school day and, in a few cases, more days into the year.
The study, which examined eighth-grade math scores in 20 countries, found that five of seven that added instructional minutes from 1995 to 2003 showed improved skills. Of the 13 countries that subtracted time, 10 got worse results. The three exceptions were Latvia, the Netherlands and the USA.
Most U.S. eighth-graders got 45 minutes of daily math instruction in 2003, down from 49 in 1995, but their scores on the Trends in Mathematics and Science Survey improved slightly. Researcher Tom Loveless says that is an anomaly, and more time in class could help boost scores. But even 450 more minutes of math, or two weeks’ worth, would shrink the gap between the USA and top-scorer Singapore by less than 5%, he says.




Report Finds Better Scores in New Crop of Teachers



Sam Dillon:

Teaching is attracting better-qualified people than it did just a few years ago, according to a report released Tuesday by the Educational Testing Service.
Prospective teachers who took state teacher licensing exams from 2002 to 2005 scored higher on SATs in high school and earned higher grades in college than their counterparts who took the exams in the mid-1990s, the report said.
On the other hand, the report found that those attracted to the profession continued to make up a strikingly homogeneous group — prospective teachers were overwhelmingly white and female — at a time when the proportion of public school students nationwide who are black, Hispanic or other minorities was nearly half and rising.




Insiders’ Guide to AP and IB



Jay Matthews:

The Washington Post sports pages this weekend were full of detailed analyses of our beloved local football, basketball and baseball teams. It was inside stuff, lapped up by readers like me who care about these sports and love to see the latest numbers.
Why can’t we get that excited about what is happening inside our schools? Okay, watching great teachers explain the mysteries of plate tectonics or cultural assimilation is not as exciting as seeing Todd Collins complete a pass to Ladell Betts for a touchdown. But our schools do have some intriguing statistics, just like sports teams. I spent my weekend using them to look inside several high schools in the Washington area and finding some thrilling surprises.
Last week’s column was about the new best high schools list in U.S. News & World Report, and how it compares to the Challenge Index list in Newsweek. That is, as the economists say, the macro part of the school assessment game, the big picture. Today, I want to look at the micro part, the inside-the-school perspective, aided by the latest Challenge Index rankings of this region’s 186 public high schools, coming out in The Post and on this Web site Thursday.
The Challenge Index ranks schools by their college-level test participation rates — the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-credit exams given at each school, divided by the number of graduating seniors. I do not factor in how well students do on those exams in the main rankings, because I have been convinced by successful AP and IB teachers that even students who struggle with the exams are much better off academically than if they did not take a college-level course and test at all.




Even amid poverty, some schools succeed



Challen Stephens:

Crunching the numbers with poverty factored in shows variety of winners
Most once-a-week tutors find their way into Lincoln Elementary School through a network of churches. But Joan Prewitt simply walked in the front door and asked if she could help.
Prewitt, a grandmother, had tried the same thing at another elementary school, but she never heard back. But Lincoln has a volunteer coordinator paid with private donations, and Prewitt became one of more than 50 volunteer reading tutors who help propel Lincoln’s test scores into the ranges more typical of middle class schools across town.
Neighborhood poverty or affluence predict test scores for most schools across Madison County. But Lincoln Elementary students did better than expected in reading and math this year, expectations based on the fact that nearly all of Lincoln’s families qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
“I just wanted something to do with my time that I felt was somewhat more worthwhile,” said Prewitt. “I knew Lincoln was in a neighborhood that could use some help.”
“Economic background is what matters, not race,” said Dr. John Humphrey, a principal in north Huntsville for more than 10 years. “I’ve always believed that. And then, along came Lincoln Elementary.
“They’re proving you can overcome the economic barrier.”




A Librarian’s Worst Nightmare: YAHOO! ANSWERS, WHERE 120 MILLION USERS CAN BE WRONG.



Jacob Leibenluft:

When it does battle on the Web, Google rarely loses. Last year’s closure of Google Answers, however, marked a rare setback for the search giant. An even bigger shock is that Yahoo! succeeded where Google failed. Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can’t be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!’s internal stats. The site has compiled 400 million answers, all searchable in its archives. According to the Web tracking company Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is the second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.




25 in Oregon turn down federal money that binds them to No Child Left Behind rules



Betsy Hammond & Lisa Grace Legnicer:

A t least 25 Oregon schools whose students are behind in reading and math have turned down federal aid intended to help those students learn more, an analysis by The Oregonian has found.
Not taking the money — typically $200,000 a year — allows a school to dodge consequences and pressure to improve brought by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
As a result, students in those schools don’t get free tutoring and don’t have the extra teachers and teacher training that federal money would buy. Parents don’t get letters notifying them of their school’s achievement problems and plans to improve, and students lose the opportunity to transfer to a better-performing school.
“Why would they turn down the money? It’s not like we don’t need the tutoring,” says Madison junior Betelehem Shenbulo. She would have failed algebra II last year without the help of a tutor paid with federal funds, the 16-year-old says.
“I have seen people struggle this year, really struggle, but tutoring is not available anymore,” she says. “We should still have it.”
Under No Child Left Behind, any school receiving federal funds to help disadvantaged students that misses academic performance targets two years in a row is put on a federal must-improve list.
Nationwide, more than 2,500 schools — including 80 in Oregon — have been put on the federal list. They face consequences if they don’t improve.




Wisconsin School taxes up 7.4%, largest jump since ’93



Wistax:

Statewide, school property taxes are up 7.4%, the largest increase since 1992-93. About 35% of districts had double-digit increases, compared to 21% last year. A late state budget and no new state aid contributed to the tax jump, although the legislature offset some of the increase with additional property tax credits.




Weird Science Fall: 2007



Joey @ UT-Austin: (video)

This has to be one of the best ACTLab class presentations I have seen in a long time. Pretty much every project hit hard. And there were many that hit well above the mark. So lets take a look at those:
Laser Harp! Yeah that is right, Derek, a student of mine, along with Drake as his programmer and Sandy as a consultant created a laser harp. While he ran into many issues, he did have a proof of concept to show off. Check it out:




Madison Schools Consider an Increase in School Safety/Security Spending



Susan Troller:

We are at a point in our high schools and middle schools where we need to take some action to assure the public that our schools remain safe and secure,” Superintendent Art Rainwater said. He noted that public safety had become a significant issue in neighborhoods throughout the city.
But long time board member Carol Carstensen asked to table the proposal, and other board members agreed to put the decision off a week for more study.
“I’m probably going to vote for it,” she said. “But I would like a little more time and more details in the next week.”

Related:




Madison Teachers Protest Larger Class Size



Channel3000:

Many of Madison’s elementary school teachers spoke out to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Board of Education on Monday night.
Carrying brightly colored signs, the group protested the increased class size for gym, arts and computer classes. The larger related arts classes are known by some as “one and one-half classes,” WISC-TV reported.
District officials started the policy at the elementary level this year to save money.
Some teachers said their students, many of whom come from low-income backgrounds, are getting short-changed.
“I teach in a school with 46 percent or more kids on free or reduced lunch,” said Rhonda Schilling, a music teacher for Thoreau and Hamilton elementary schools. “Many of the kids come from really rough backgrounds, and those are the kids in particular that shine often in the arts. They need that contact time with their teacher.”




Two in three California students deemed out of shape



Bruce Lieberman:

OK, ready? Start your push-ups. Fifteen-year-old boys, you have to do at least 16. Fifteen-year-old girls, at least seven.
That’s one of several physical fitness tests that fifth-, seventh-and ninth-graders in public schools across California take every year – and a lot of the students don’t measure up.
The state released its latest round of scores for the California Physical Fitness Test yesterday, and they were barely better than last year’s – which were also bad.
Only 27.1 percent of California students in fifth grade, 30.9 percent in seventh grade and 30.1 percent in ninth grade met fitness standards in six areas: cardiovascular endurance, percentage of body fat, abdominal strength and endurance, trunk strength and flexibility, upper body strength and endurance, and overall flexibility.
Looked at another way, more than two in three public school students in the state are out of shape




Race & IQ



Malcolm Gladwell:

My contribution to the (endless) Race-IQ debate is out in this week’s New Yorker. You can read it here. In the meantime, the psychologist Richard Nisbett has also published a rejoinder to the James Watson-Will Saletan foolishness in Sunday’s New York Times. It is–characteristically–very good, and includes this:

More here.




The Next Attention Deficit Disorder?



Claudia Wallis:

With a teacher for a mom and a physician’s assistant for a dad, Matthew North had two experts on the case from birth, but his problems baffled them both. “Everything was hard for Matthew,” says Theresa North, of Highland Ranch, Colo. He didn’t speak until he was 3. In school, he’d hide under a desk to escape noise and activity. He couldn’t coordinate his limbs well enough to catch a big beach ball.
Matthew, now 10, was evaluated for autism and attention deficit hyper-activity disorder, but the labels didn’t fit. “We filled out those ADHD questionnaires a million times, and he always came out negative,” Theresa recalls. “When we found this place, I cried. It was the first time someone said they could help.”
This place is the Sensory Therapies and Research [STAR] Center, just south of Denver, which treats about 50 children a week for a curious mix of problems. Some can’t seem to get their motors in gear: they have low muscle tone and a tendency to respond only minimally to conversation and invitations to play. Others are revved too high: they annoy other children by crashing into them or hugging too hard. Many can’t handle common noises or the feel of clothing on their skin. A number just seem clumsy. Adults can remember kids like these from their own childhood. They were the ones called losers, loners, klutzes and troublemakers. At STAR Center they wear a more benign label: children with sensory processing disorder (SPD).




Scientists say teen brain, still maturing, key to behavior



AP:

The teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash.
And, perhaps, a crime.
Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor, helped draft an American Psychological Association brief for a 2005 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for crimes committed before age 18.
That ruling relies on the most recent research on the adolescent brain, which indicates the juvenile brain is still maturing in the teen years and reasoning and judgment are developing well into the early to mid 20s. It is often cited as state lawmakers consider scaling back punitive juvenile justice laws passed during the 1990s.




Commentary on The Wisconsin Virtual School Ruling



  • State Representative Brett Davis:

    Just as modern technology is allowing many people in our country to work out of their home, innovative public school districts nationwide are allowing students to learn from home via virtual schools without having to attend a traditional brick-and-mortar school. Our education system in Wisconsin utilizes virtual schools, which are changing the way education is delivered to some students. As we prepare our children for the 21st Century workplace, we have to seriously consider the role of virtual schools and how they can enhance student achievement. We must ensure our state laws allow public schools to continue offering this important alternative school setting.
    Virtual schools are not for every student. They certainly are not meant to, and will not, replace traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Virtual schools simply are an option for certain students who learn better outside of the traditional classroom setting. Gifted and talented students, as well as students with special needs, can benefit from this model of learning. To ensure high quality, state licensed teachers monitor a student’s progress, while parents play an active role in the daily education of their child.

  • Mike Plaisted:

    Since first posting about the Court of Appeals decision that eliminated funding for the so-called Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA) last week, I have had a fairly active and interesting comment thread (as has, way on the other side of the issue, Rick Esenberg).
    I spent some time engaging on the comments with some of the usual suspects saying the usual things – Dad29: “In the end, the Leftist State will have unfettered power and control over all its citizens. So the ideology is about control (power.)”; karl marx: “What a surprise!! Mike Plaisted is against children and for the UNION.” There were also the K12 talking-points to deal with on mainstream radio (MSR) and the wing-nut blogs – you know, WEAC is just interested in money and protecting their union hacks in the classrooms; the opinion means we can’t our kids with homework anymore; and blah-di blah blah.

Details: A blow to innovation: The Legislature should ensure that online public schools can continue serving students in Wisconsin.




Madison School Board Debates School Security



WKOW-TV:

The Madison school board on Monday night is set to consider approving a $780,000 plan to tackle problem behavior in middle and high schools.
Principals have been complaining that behavior issues are creeping up, said Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. That includes everything from running in the hallways to bullying to fighting.
School officials want to hire what amounts to be a behavior coach in its middle and high schools. The staff person would work with students with behavior issues, reaching out to them and contacting their parents or county agencies, as needed.

Channel3000:

At the high school level, the proposal would add four behavior and case managers to work with students who are already having problems, who may be disengaged or disruptive.
At the middle school level, the district wants to add seven and a half positive behavior coordinators who would help teach students how to be better school citizens.
“In our middle schools, I would say if there is one area that we have seen a bit of a shift in behavior, it’s bus behavior,” said Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for Madison Middle and High Schools. “We have more issues on middle school buses than any of us would like. That’s an area, that behavior piece, that we want to target as well.”
Part of the school security proposal would include adding two extra security guards at each of the city’s four high school and installing surveillance and radio equipment at middle schools.




Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2006



US Department of Justice:

Presents data on crime and safety at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population. A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It also provides the most current detailed statistical information on the nature of crime in schools, school environments, and responses to violence and crime at school. Data are drawn from several federally funded collections including the National Crime Victimization Survey, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, School Survey on Crime and Safety, and School and Staffing Survey.




Fixing schools usually fails



Liz Bowie:

Maryland’s attempts to turn around its worst schools in the past several years have largely failed, according to a report by a Washington-based nonprofit education research group.
Of the 76 schools labeled failing for at least five years, only 12, or 16 percent, have improved significantly since 2004, the Center on Education Policy found.
“Even in an advanced state like Maryland, that has tried to deal with these problems for a decade … we just don’t know what to do,” said Jack Jennings, president of CEP.




Advocating Teach for America in Wisconsin



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

It’s exhausting work, the pay is low, the fruits of the labor are sometimes hard to see. But those facts haven’t discouraged thousands of America’s brightest college students from applying to work for the fast-growing non-profit Teach for America.
Wisconsin’s most troubled urban school districts might benefit from this program, in which new graduates from some of America’s most prestigious universities spend two years teaching in low-income schools.
State education officials, local administrators and the teachers unions should make reasonable accommodations so that no artificial barriers prevent the program from being launched in Wisconsin. The Kern Family Foundation of Waukesha, which has education reform as part of its mission, is pushing to bring Teach for America to the state.
Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by founder Wendy Kopp at Princeton University. During its first year in 1990, the organization sent 500 people into six low-income communities. This year, 5,000 TFA teachers are working across the country, and the TFA alumni network numbers thousands more.
Teach for America recruits and trains recent graduates from schools like Dartmouth, Princeton, Notre Dame, Marquette and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 2007 class has 43 UW alumni; nearly 500 from Wisconsin’s public and private schools have participated since the program’s inception. TFA trains the new teachers and helps them obtain alternative certifications; the schools pay their salaries.




Casting for Knowledge



Mark Coddington:

Jesus Reyes, a fifth-grader at Dodge Elementary School, stands in front of a green piece of fabric in the school’s library, reading a script he wrote about last week’s Grand Island sewer emergency.
As the camera on a MacBook laptop records him, an image on its screen replaces the fabric with photos Jesus took on a trip to the city’s wastewater plant this week.
Later, a classmate, Dayne Jaros, records an introduction to Jesus’ piece, handing his Internet viewers off to “our on-the-spot reporter, Jesus.”
The end result, an audio and video broadcast accessed over the Internet, is miles beyond kids fiddling around with their parents’ video camera for a school project.
In fact, increasingly elaborate podcasts like Jesus and Dayne’s are giving several area schools a medium for largely self-directed projects that provide a whole new realm to bring writing, reading and listening skills to life.
With podcasts, “learning becomes more than just a grade in the gradebook,” said Jamey Boelhower, who teaches English at Centura public school near Cairo. “It matches the culture and the world they’re growing up in.”
At Lincoln Elementary School, about a dozen students are working on a range of podcasting projects, most of them with only basic staff instruction, said Maura Hendrickson, the school’s integration specialist.

Anne Eisenberg:

These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.
At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.
When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.
“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”
Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate. “The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”




Many young black men in Oakland are killing and dying for respect



Meredith May:

Along with the Christmas trees and family gatherings, there’s another end-of-the-year ritual in Oakland – a candlelight vigil for the murdered.
The body count is woven into the civic consciousness here – a number chased by homicide inspectors, studied by criminologists, lamented in churches, reported by journalists. Every mayor leaves City Hall on broken promises to quell the violence, and the killings continue. An additional 115 have been killed this year, putting Oakland on pace for another gruesome record.
In the last five years, 557 people were slain on the city’s streets, making Oakland the state’s second-most murderous city, behind Compton.
Most victims are young, black men who are dying in forgotten neighborhoods of East and West Oakland.
A handful of their killers, speaking from prison, describe an environment where violence is so woven into the culture that murder has become a symbol of manhood.




State Nudges Tennessee Schools Back to Basics



Jaime Sarrio:

Metro Schools Director Pedro Garcia’s legacy as an idea man has hit a snag.
The school chief once enjoyed strong support for his ideas on reforming Nashville’s public education. But after Metro failed to meet No Child Left Behind requirements for four years in a row — one of the first two Tennessee districts to do so — state officials have a louder voice in how the district is run.
And its leaders are listening.
Board members want to take the state’s advice and hold off on Garcia’s new ideas until the district gets a handle on the basics. The attitude marks a significant shift in the dynamic between the board, the director and the state Department of Education.
“Some things have come back to haunt us,” said District 7 board member Edward Kindall, who represents north Nashville. “I can’t totally blame Dr. Garcia or the administration. I think in some instances, we haven’t focused on the right thing.”
Amid the innovations, many of Metro’s students have been struggling to learn math and reading. Poor reading scores among Hispanic and black students and dismal math scores across the county prompted the failing marks under No Child Left Behind.
“Clearly the administration has tried to make a lot of big splashes with their innovation, but they haven’t always given a lot of thought to what they’re doing,” said Erick Huth, president of the Metro Nashville Education Association, the teachers union.




Are We Too Tough on Kids Who Commit Crimes? States take new look at push to charge juveniles as adults



Sharon Cohen:

A generation after America decided to get tough on kids who commit crimes – sometimes locking them up for life – the tide may be turning. States are rethinking and, in some cases, retooling juvenile-sentencing laws. They’re responding to new research on the adolescent brain and studies that indicate teens sent to adult court end up worse off than those who are not: They get in trouble more often, they do it faster and the offenses are more serious. Some states are reconsidering life without parole for teens. Some are focusing on raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction, while others are exploring ways to offer kids a second chance, once they’re locked up – or even before. “There has been a huge sea change…it’s across the country,” said Laurie Garduque, a program director at the MacArthur Foundation, which is heavily involved in juvenile justice reform.




Unleash Online Schools



Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:

The state Court of Appeals just handed the Legislature an important assignment:
Update state laws governing public education to take advantage of the opportunities presented by online learning in virtual schools.
Lawmakers should dig into the homework, starting now.
Virtual schools, which deliver coursework via computer to educate students in their homes, have great potential as a cost-effective alternative to standard schools.
But last week the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha put the future of virtual education in Wisconsin in doubt.
The court ruled that the Wisconsin Virtual Academy based in suburban Milwaukee violates state laws controlling teacher certification, charter schools and open enrollment.
The three-judge panel also put the academy in a financial bind by ordering the state to stop paying for students who attend the academy when those students are not residents of the local school district.




Science Videos



Carol Fertig:

There are more and more groups of professionals who are committed to making information freely available to the public through the Internet. Many universities and scientists are willing to share their lectures and expertise. Instructional videos are available for students of all ages—elementary through graduate school.
SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). It has a relatively new Web site that contains some material for elementary students and larger quantities of material for older students through scientists. Young people who are interested in careers in science will be fascinated by the various topics being studied. Just seeing what is going on at different universities may help students focus on their future objectives.
Examples of videos available at the sight include Where Does Water Go When It Rains? Dissections, and Freezing by Boiling. There is also much information on highly sophisticated topics that will be appealing for highly able high school students.




Just Another Big Con: The Crisis in Mathematics and Science Education



Dennis Redovich:

What is the rationale for all United States high students passing three advanced courses in math and science to receive a high school diploma? What is the rationale for “all” high school graduates satisfying the requirements for admission to a four-college program? There is none!
The United States is the uncontested leader of the world in scientific research in respect to published accomplishments, Nobel Prizes, volume of research and expenditures on scientific research. The United States is the leader of the world in technology and the unchallenged leader of the world in the global economy. The United States dominates the world because of its educational systems, including K-12 public education, post-secondary colleges and universities that produce the most highly educated, productive and successful workforce in the world.




A blow to innovation: The Legislature should ensure that online public schools can continue serving students in Wisconsin



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Wisconsin kids may be locked out of the virtual schoolhouse after a state Court of Appeals decision Wednesday that threatens the future of online learning for public schoolchildren. But the Legislature can fix the problem by crafting a law that makes clear that the state supports such alternative and innovative means of instruction.
………
Virtual schools offer parents a credible alternative for students who don’t do well in traditional settings. Judging from 2006 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination scores, the kids attending Wisconsin Virtual Academy are thriving. They score at or above the state average in most subjects at nearly every grade level.
This sort of competition, also seen in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, has the potential to improve education in Wisconsin. The Legislature, as well as state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster, must embrace such innovation instead of shrinking from it.

Patrick McIlheran:

“They could learn a lot from our teachers about a new way of teaching,” Rose Fernandez told a radio interviewer.
She’s a parent at Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the Fredonia-based online public charter school. She was talking about the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers union whose slogan is, “Every kid deserves a great school.”
WEAC, not in a learning mood, had just gotten a court to outlaw Fernandez’s kids’ great school. About 850 children who attend the school are now left hanging after Wednesday’s Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision. The school will stay open while it appeals, but a further loss would endanger every virtual school in the state.
Why would the teachers union try to kill a high-performing public school?
Because, said a written statement from the union, laws written for traditional schools can’t be applied to virtual schools. We need new laws to “make them accountable.”
Accountable? Such as testing students and reporting results? They do that. The academy’s scores on state tests are just dandy – exactly in line with schools in Cross Plains, Mukwonago and Fond du Lac that the academy families I talked to would otherwise use. Ninety-two percent of the academy’s students score proficient or advanced in reading.
And if the virtual school doesn’t satisfy, parents can put their kids back in the school down the block. Yet it’s the virtual school that may get closed. Have you heard of the union suing to close any brick-and-mortar schools that are failing?
All irrelevant, argued the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. It sought, with the union, to close the academy. Whether the school successfully teaches is beside the point, said the department’s lawyer. Whether it fits the state’s regulatory model is what counts. The court agreed.
This makes Wisconsin unique, says Susan Patrick, who heads the North American Council for Online Learning. She used to head educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She says to her knowledge, no state has shut down virtual schools over a teacher licensing dispute.




The race is not always to the richest



The Economist:

Money and effort aren’t enough to impart the skills and knowledge needed in a cut-throat world
SPOOKED by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no child will be left behind. Whether this programme, launched by George Bush in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications, combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), average spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in real terms between 1995 and 2004.
Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. The latest report from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment shows average attainment staying largely flat. This tome, just published, compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took centre stage.




Studying math in high school = success in college



Andrew Freeman, via a reader’s email:

Encouraging teens to drive safely, honor a curfew, or simply make good choices is an enormous task. However, there’s something else parents should add to their list — something that can open many opportunities for high school students: persuade them to take advanced math.
Trust me. I know how hard it can be to convince high school students of the importance of taking a course they may not want, particularly when many seem to have an aversion to this subject. However, as a college admissions professional, I’ve seen the difficulties students experience without an adequate math background. I’ve seen how the lack of math skills limits their choices.
Chances are your son or daughter may not want to put down the video game remote to pick up a scientific calculator. They may even believe their deepest aspirations don’t require a lot of math. However, the reality is that more than 50 percent of students change their majors at least once. So, even if the major they choose now doesn’t require advanced math, the odds are good the one they pick later probably will.
And that’s not the only good reason for improving math skills. In high school, you get up to 40 weeks to learn the material. In college, you get about 15. Students who enter college without the necessary math skills are often required to take non-credit skill-building courses. This extra review could mean a crammed first semester schedule or an additional semester in college.
Math doesn’t have to be a teenager’s nightmare. Encourage them to ask questions in class, stay for help, find a tutor, access math Web sites, take advantage of WXXI’s Homework Hotline or find out if your school offers math-specific study halls.




Study maps brain abnormalities in autistic children



Susan Kelly:

Autistic children have more gray matter in areas of the brain that control social processing and sight-based learning than children without the developmental disability, a small study said on Wednesday.
Researchers combined two sophisticated imaging techniques to track the motion of water molecules in the brain and pinpoint small changes in gray matter volume in 13 boys with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome and 12 healthy adolescents. Their average age was 11.
The autistic children were found to have enlarged gray matter in the parietal lobes of the brain linked to the mirror neuron system of cells associated with empathy, emotional experience and learning through sight.
Those children also showed a decrease in gray matter volume in the right amygdala region of the brain that correlated with degrees of impairment in social interaction, the study found.




Making Better Use of Limited (Financial) Resources



Wisconsin Center for Education Research:

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has documented a steady increase in per-pupil education funding in the U.S. over the past 100 years. After adjusting for inflation, education funds have risen on average about 3.5% annually. UW-Madison education professor Odden says the consistent rise in spending has not, however, been accompanied by a similar rise in student performance, at least over the past 30 to 40 years.
Current education goals are thus not likely to be met without determining how better to use school resources.
Today, about 60% of the education dollar is spent on instruction. Another 10% is spent on administration, 10% on instructional and pupil support, 10% on operations and maintenance, 5% on transportation, and 5% on food and miscellaneous items. Odden says this pattern is similar across districts, regardless of demographics and enrollment.
To align resources with strategies for improving student achievement, Odden suggests thinking of education spending as divided into three “portions”:

  • One portion for core instructional services, professional development, and site administration;
  • A second portion for instructional and pupil support services, which help the education system accomplish the goal of student achievement in the core subjects; and
  • A third portion for overhead (school operation and maintenance, transportation, food services, and central office administration).

Much more on Allen Odden. Related: K-12 Tax & Spending Climate:




A Vote for Latin: Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna



Harry Mount:

AT first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, “Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna.”*
None of the leading presidential candidates majored in Latin. Hillary Clinton studied political science at Wellesley, as did Barack Obama at Columbia. Rudy Giuliani had a minor brush with the language during four years of theology at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn when he toyed with becoming a priest. But then he went on to major in guess what? Political science.
How things have changed since the founding fathers.




A School on The Brink



Kevin Cullen:

The kids at St. Peter’s School have started asking questions, and like any good first-grade teacher, Colleen O’Dwyer is a master of deflection.
“I tell them nothing’s been decided,” she was saying, as she and Courtney Carthas, a second-grade teacher, sat with seven kids for the after-school book club.
Technically, that’s true, as the final decision to close the Dorchester parochial school has not been made by Cardinal Sean O’Malley. But the stars and the numbers are aligned against St. Peter’s, and it is only a matter of time.
To describe St. Peter’s as a victim of consolidation in an archdiocese trying to stem a decline in enrollment in its urban schools is to completely miss the importance of the building and those who people it. Sitting on Bowdoin Street, at the foot of Meetinghouse Hill, St. Peter’s is more than a school. It is a haven, a sanctuary, four stories of red-brick proof that all is not lost in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.
St. Peter’s has 156 students, but with its after-school programs serves about 400 children who live around Meetinghouse Hill. One of them is Alaister Santos, a chatty, personable first-grader. When they were preparing to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of the great Barry O’Brien, the school’s biggest private benefactor, Alaister had only one question: “Where was he shot?”




Wisconsin Appeals court rules Northern Ozaukee virtual school violates state law



Court Opinion.
Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families Statement
WEAC (Wisconsin State Teachers Union)
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Statement
Top Wisconsin Lobbyists (2005-2006 Legislative Session) via the Wisconsin State Ethics Board (1.7MB PDF):

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce $1,591,931
Wisconsin Education Association Council $1,533,186
Wisconsin Hospital Association Inc (WHA) $1,532,927
Wisconsin Independent Businesses Inc $1,103,747
Wisconsin Merchants Federation $1,088,632
Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation $1,084,664
Forest County Potawatomi Community $860,260
Arjo Wiggins Appleton Limited $843,677
Wisconsin Insurance Alliance $755,313
Wisconsin Energy Corporation $722,367
Wisconsin Counties Association $720,284

Much more on the Wisconsin Virtual Academy here.
Amy Hetzner:

A virtual school based in the Northern Ozaukee School District plans to appeal a court ruling that it violates several state laws and ask for a stay of an order that would prevent it from receiving payments for non-district students enrolled at the school.
The ruling against Wisconsin Virtual Academy “threatens every online school program in Wisconsin,” WiVA Principal Kurt Bergland said. “There’s thousands of kids and teachers and families in all those schools that are now involved with this, whether they realize it or not.”
The decision by the District 2 Court of Appeals in Waukesha, which was released today, overturns a previous decision by an Ozaukee County judge.
“As the law presently stands, the charter school, open-enrollment and teacher certification statutes are clear and unambiguous, and the District is not in compliance with any of them,” Judge Richard Brown wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel that decided the case.

Rick Esenberg:

There were three issues. The first two had to do with where the school was located and where the children attend. State law requires that the answer to both questions be the district that chartered the school, Northern Ozaukee. The school’s administrative offices are located there but its teachers work from home around the state and the students, who do their work at home, also live in various locations. The Court of Appeals held that the district is, literally, located wherever its teachers live and that its students attend at wherever their home happens to be. You can read the statute that way, but that reading is by no means compelled. It seems just as plausible to say that the school is located, and children attend, at the location where the administrative offices are located.




Millar: Improving education in math and science



Terry Millar:

Improvement in math and science education is a priority in Madison, as it is across the nation.
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) training is not only of growing importance to our technology-dependent society, these disciplines also represent esthetically compelling advances in human knowledge that all students should have the opportunity to appreciate.
Since 2003, UW Madison and the Madison School District have been involved in a unique partnership, funded by the National Science Foundation, to reform science and math education from kindergarten through graduate school.
Preliminary results are encouraging. This five-year endeavor, SCALE — System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators — has partners that include three universities and large school districts in Madison, Los Angeles, Denver and Providence, R.I. The NSF made exploring new forms of partnership its key feature.
Improving STEM education has proven resistant to traditional “you do your thing, I ‘ll do mine ” approaches. SCALE ‘s successes underscore the wisdom of NSF ‘s emphasis on partnership.
SCALE incorporates research on student learning and teacher professional development. SCALE puts premiums on increasing teachers ‘ STEM subject matter knowledge and boosting their teaching skills.
In one preliminary study, teachers showed a significant increase in content knowledge after attending SCALE science professional development institutes in Los Angeles.
SCALE partners believe the most important resource in a school is its teachers, an idea that has not always been central to reform. However, the final measure of effectiveness is increased student understanding and performance. In 2009-2010, a randomized study involving 80 elementary schools in Los Angeles will provide definitive data on SCALE ‘s impact on student performance in science.

Links:

(more…)




Two Ways to Rate High Schools



Jay Matthews:

On Dec. 13, The Washington Post will mark the 10th year of the Challenge Index, my high school rating system, with our latest ranked list of all 185 public schools in the Washington area. Since 1998, Newsweek magazine also has been publishing its national best high schools list using the same method.
I am particularly excited this time because we have some competition. U.S. News & World Report, at the urging of Andrew J. Rotherham, my friendly adversary on this issue, has just published its own “America’s Best High Schools” list at usnews.com. I have long celebrated what I call the School Rating Scoundrel’s Club, composed of those of us who think that rating and ranking — despite their many critics — are useful ways to help readers figure out which schools are best for them. I admire the U.S. News college rankings and am intrigued by its new high school list. It is strengthened by Rotherham’s commitment to improving schools, but it is also too complicated for its own good.
The Challenge Index rates and ranks schools by just one number, the college-level test participation rate, calculated by dividing the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests — college-level exams given in high school — by the number of graduating seniors. The U.S. News list mixes together several numbers. It looks for schools in the 40 states for which it has data whose average state test scores exceed statistical expectations and whose minority proficiency rates exceed state averages for those groups. Schools that survive that initial screening are then ranked based on a weighted formula that includes both AP test participation and AP test scores.
The essential differences between the two ways of ranking reflect the differences between Rotherham and me. Only 36, Rotherham has served as an education adviser to President Bill Clinton, has founded two education policy and research organizations and is a member of the Virginia Board of Education, the youngest appointee to that board in modern times. He is a policy maker. His high schools list is based on key factors in the policy process: test scores, minority achievement and college readiness as measured by AP participation and success. U.S. News and the statisticians at Standard & Poor’s, led by Paul Gazzerro, the director of analytical criteria for School Evaluation Services, have compiled the list using a basic policy-making tool–data collected each year by state government




English takes hold in Latino families by third generation, study says



Tyche Hendricks:

Almost all Latino adults born in the United States to immigrant parents are fluent in English, but among their parents, just fewer than 1 in 4 say they are skilled English speakers, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.
“The ability to speak English very well and the amount of English used increase sharply from one generation to another among Hispanics,” said one of the report’s authors, D’Vera Cohn. “The first generation speaks mainly Spanish and doesn’t speak English very well. The second generation speaks English very well but holds onto its Spanish. And by the third generation and beyond, English is universal and pervasive, and Spanish fades into the background.”
The results of the study are intuitive, but at a time of high levels of immigration and a debate over how well immigrants are integrating into American society, it provides a detailed snapshot of English acquisition over generations among Latino immigrants, who comprise the majority of foreign-born people residing in the United States.




The LA School District’s Public Relations Plans



Sandy Banks:

It’s too bad Los Angeles Unified School District officials didn’t make the first assignment for their new spin doctors spinning the news that they’ve hired spin doctors.
The district’s fledgling public relations effort stumbled this week, when news leaked out that Supt. David Brewer handed out contracts worth more than $350,000 a year to a team of consultants charged with improving the district’s public image.
Team leader and former Telemundo news director Victor Abalos says he’s a not PR man, but a broker of “communication strategies” for “target audiences” that will help the district get its good news to a disenchanted public.




OU study looks into how parenting affects teens



AP:

An ongoing study done by the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center is examining how parenting and other factors affect the long-term behavior of teenagers.
The “youth asset study” is being funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers are looking at how 17 “assets,” including parental involvement and religion, factor into teenage behavior.
During the past five years, researchers have interviewed 2,200 Oklahoma City-area children and their parents, looking into risky behaviors and the level of parental involvement. The goal of the $4 million study is to determine which assets strongly correlate with well-adjusted teens and, conversely, those assets that don’t seem to affect teens involved in activities including drug use and sex.
“The most important analysis will be to see how these (behaviors) change over time … and how the presence or absence of assets contributes to those changes,” said principal investigator Roy Oman, an associate professor at the OU College of Public Health.

Complete Report.




Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest



Amanda Millner-Fairbanks:

Girls won top honors for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced yesterday at New York University.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

More here.




Two Marshfield High Students Are Wisconsin’s AP Scholars



Joanna Pliner:


The students with the highest Advanced Placement exam scores in Wisconsin are both graduates of Marshfield High School.
Noah Elmhorst and Jamie Robertson, Wisconsin ‘s 2007 Advanced Placement state scholars, were to be recognized at a ceremony at the school, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Dostal said last week.
“We have had past AP State Scholars, but we have never had the top male and the top female in the same year, ” Dostal said. “We were just pleasantly surprised. ”
Marshfield High has 1,385 students and offers 23 AP classes, Dostal said. Elmhorst took 17 of the advanced classes, while Robertson took 13, she said.
Statewide, 25,020 Wisconsin students took 39,811 AP exams in the 2006-2007 school year. More than 68 percent of those students earned a grade of three or higher.
Nationwide, more than 1.4 million high school students took more than 2.5 million AP exams in 2007.




Montgomery County High School Black Students Pass 1000 AP Exams



Daniel de Vise:

Black students in Montgomery County high schools passed 1,062 Advanced Placement tests this year, making the school system the first, along with the New York City public schools, to cross the thousand-test threshold.
Superintendent Jerry D. Weast announced the results yesterday at a news conference. He challenged education leaders to engage in a “friendly competition” to increase AP participation among black students, who remain underrepresented in the college preparatory program.
In the District, the number of AP exams taken by black students rose by nearly 50 percent, though the number of passing scores rose only slightly, the school district reported.
Black students in Prince George’s County took 740 more tests than they did last year, a 34 percent increase, and about 100 more exams received passing marks. AP performance among black students in Fairfax County was essentially unchanged.
Montgomery, Fairfax and most other D.C. area school systems have posted tremendous gains in AP testing in this decade, part of a vast expansion nationwide in college-level course work in high schools. Although most school systems remain focused on overall AP results, some districts have publicly campaigned to raise the performance of black students.




Elvehjem Boundless Playground Fundraiser Tonight



Via a reader’s email:

LVM Dreams Big is working to bring the FIRST Boundless Playground to the state of Wisconsin by 8/8/08!
Join our effort to kick down physical barriers and raise a play structure that opens a world of play to all children.
Please help us build the dream so that children of all abilities can reach the highest heights and learn the lessons of childhood through play.
Since forming in 2005, the committee has worked to raise funds to support the mission of improving accessibility while also promoting physical fitness and increasing safety for all children.

December 4th 5:30-7:30 Great Dane Night! Spend an evening at the Great Dane Brew Pub [Map] – free food, fun and a very special guest! Donation Stations will also be available to help build the FIRST Boundless Playground in the state of Wisconsin!




Parents are the Problem (WEAC & Wisconsin DPI Sue to Kill the Wisconsin Virtual Academy)



Rose Fernandez, via a reader’s email:

On Tuesday of this week, in a Waukesha courtroom, the state governmental agency responsible for our public schools and a labor union came before the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and pleaded with the judges to keep parents out of public schools. Yes, that’s right. The state and the teachers union are at war with parents and I’m mad as heck about it. (Madder than heck, actually, but trying to keep this blog family friendly).
According to the Department of Public Instruction and the state teachers’ union, parents are the problem. And these bureaucracies know just how to fix it. They want to keep parents, and indeed anyone without a teaching license, out of Wisconsin public schools.
Of course WEAC, the state teachers’ union, likes that idea. Licenses mean dues. Dues mean power.
DPI likes it because ……..well, could it be just because WEAC does?
The lawsuit before the Court of Appeals was filed by WEAC in 2004 in an effort to close a charter school that uses an on-line individualized curriculum allowing students from all over the state to study from home under the supervision of state certified faculty. The school is the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA). The Northern Ozaukee School District took the bold step of opening this new kind of school in the fall of 2003 after DPI approved their charter. Hundreds of families around the state enrolled their children under open enrollment that first year and mine was one of them. WIVA has grown every year since and this year has more than 800 students.
In January of 2004, WEAC filed their lawsuit against the school and DPI who authorized its existence. Later that year in a stunning reversal DPI switched sides and moved to close its own public school. DPI alleges that parents are too involved in their own children’s education.
That’s right. They argue parents are too involved.
I’ve always thought parental involvement in a child’s education was a good thing. What do I know? I don’t have a teacher’s license.

This issue was discussed extensively by Gregg Underheim during the most recent Wisconsin DPI Superintendent race (April, 2005). Audio / Video here.
Much more on the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Also check out www.wivirtualschoolfamilies.org.




Teachers draft reform plan



Howard Blume:

In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone — neither teachers nor students — what to wear.
These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.
If Brewer passes on the delegation’s proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.
At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District’s effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these “high priority schools” scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year’s California Standards Tests.
Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.




More day-care programs going beyond holding pattern for kids



James Walsh:

Providing day care was once seen as a way to get low-income parents into the workforce, but now, using child care to pull future generations out of poverty is capturing the imagination of government and businesses alike.
From St. Paul’s North End to north Minneapolis to Wayzata to Blue Earth County, a number of projects aim to get more daycare workers introducing 3- and 4-year-olds to what they’ll be learning in kindergarten.
“Right now, we’ve got about 50 percent of our kids not ready for kindergarten,” said state Sen. Tarryl Clark, DFL-St. Cloud. “For many families, child care is today’s preschool. And with very high percentages of parents working, we can make a difference here.”




Group files lawsuit for disabled students



Maureen O’Hagan:

Jacob, a former Issaquah student with severe disabilities, used to love it when other students visited his special-education classroom.
His mother said it helped him learn how to talk to other kids.
So when Jacob, who has been diagnosed with autism and mental retardation, went to live at the state-run Frances Haddon Morgan Center in Bremerton, his mother expected similar success. For years, school-aged Morgan Center residents had attended Bremerton public schools.
But this year the district decided it no longer has the classroom space to accommodate them. Recently, the district reached an agreement with the state Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the Morgan Center, to open a classroom on the institution grounds.
On Wednesday, Disability Rights Washington filed a lawsuit saying that taking these youths out of public school violates state and federal laws against discrimination.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of eight youths ranging in age from 14 to 20, names the school district, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and DSHS as defendants, saying each played a role in the decision.




My Sorority Pledge? I Swore Off Sisterhood



Kelly Valen:

MY life’s greatest sorrow stems from my inability to feel close to other women. At 41, I’ve cautiously cultivated a few cherished female friendships. But generally I feel a kind of skittish distrust and discomfort when dealing with most women, particularly women in packs.
……
I want to remain optimistic. After all, here I am with three daughters. What am I to teach them? Cautionary tales about men’s harmful proclivities abound. But how do we help our girls navigate the duplicitous female maze? How do we ensure that they behave authentically, respect humanity over fleeting alliances, and squash the nasty tribal instincts that can inflict lifelong distress?




Wanted: Top Teachers



Alan Borsuk:

We can hardly get anyone to apply to teach at our school.
The crowd of about 400 Milwaukee Public Schools principals and administrators had gathered in late August for the annual school year kick-off program. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos was taking questions.
The voice – we’re paraphrasing his longer statement – belonged to James Sonnenberg, veteran principal of Westside Academy, a 650-student kindergarten through eighth-grade school in two buildings near N. 35th St. and W. Lisbon Ave. Westside is one of the more successful schools in MPS, with a dedicated staff and eighth-grade test results well above the district average.
But Sonnenberg told Andrekopoulos how few applicants he gets for openings at his school, how he had to push the central office to give him names of candidates to fill a teaching position last summer, how he offered a job to one woman who said she would have to check with her father about working there, and how he never heard back from her.




It’s past time to abandon assembly-line education



Gary Kraeger:

Wisconsin has the worst black/white achievement gap in the country. The Milwaukee Public Schools have big truancy, security and parental apathy problems. The system graduates about 50% of its students. How hard can it be to graduate from MPS with D’s, yet half don’t? Encounter an illiterate adult, and it’ll break your heart.
You’d think parents, the education establishment and politicians would be running around like their hair was on fire, but they’re not even cutting their bangs.
Don’t look to the teachers union for answers. They’re advocates for teachers, not kids. They just go with the slogan “Every kid deserves a great school” because it has a better ring to it than “We want more money.” The slogan also implies that they think MPS is great. They will even protect some bad teachers.




School Administration via Statistics



Winnie Hu:

Assistant school superintendents here are routinely summoned to a 10 a.m. Thursday meeting where they must answer for missing test scores, overdue building repairs and other lapses, which are presented in painful detail on PowerPoint slides. Excuses are not an option.
It is the latest evolution of Compstat, a widely copied management program pioneered by the New York Police Department in 1994. Paterson is one of a half-dozen school districts around the country that have embraced this confrontational approach, known here as SchoolStat, in an effort to improve school performance and overhaul bureaucracies long seen as bloated, wasteful and unresponsive to the public.
SchoolStat borrows the tactics of the Compstat program — regular, intense meetings in which police officials famously pick apart crime data and, just as often, their subordinates — to analyze police performance and crime trends, and to deploy resources to trouble spots. The school version taps into an ever-expanding universe of data about standardized testing and school operations to establish a system of accountability.
In Maryland, the process has been credited with reducing teacher vacancies and increasing student immunization rates in Baltimore schools. In Montgomery County, Md., it has pushed principals to come up with strategies like encouraging students to take the Preliminary SAT by offering a free pancake breakfast if they attend.




Who’s the Old Guy in the White Nikes?



Nicholas Casey:

Late one spring afternoon last year, a mystery man sat in the back of a creative-writing seminar at Stanford. Evidently a student, he was much older than anyone else in the room. He was wearing a black blazer and white Nikes. He said his name was Phil.
As the days passed, the man’s identity gradually came into focus. The instructor “made several vague allusions to Phil taking off in his private jet,” recalls André Lyon, an English major enrolled in the class. And tales about Michael Jordan found their way into the man’s literary discourse.
After a couple of weeks, a rumor began to circulate that the old dude in the Nikes was Philip H. Knight, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest sportswear company.




‘Checkbook Math’ Increasingly Rare



Daniel de Vise:

In her final year at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, Amber Rountree chose to take consumer math, a course designed to teach students how to balance a checkbook and shop for a home loan. She rates it the easiest math class she has taken in high school but also the most useful.
Once a common course offering, consumer math is being phased out as school systems raise their expectations of how much math students should know when they graduate. Twenty or 30 years ago, Algebra I might have sufficed. Today, that course is regarded as an absolute minimum, a gateway to Advanced Placement study and college. Students routinely take it in middle school.
That leaves consumer math and other “checkbook math” classes relegated to a handful of schools, mostly in poor communities. College-bound students generally avoid the class, reasoning that it would look bad on a transcript.
“In a lot of places, this course has been a dead-end street,” said Francis “Skip” Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston.
The gradual elimination of the course from high schools comes as lawmakers, corporate leaders and many parents are decrying the financial illiteracy of the young. Fourteen states, including Virginia, have created new mandates for personal finance




Young, Gifted and Skipping High School



Maria Glod:

As Jackie Robson rushed off to Japanese 101, a pink sign on the main door of her college dorm reminded her to sign out. There were more rules: an 11 p.m. curfew, mandatory study hours, round-the-clock adult supervision and no boys allowed in the rooms.
Jackie is 14. She never spent a day in high school.
Like the other super-bright girls in her dorm, the Fairfax County teen bypassed a traditional education and countless teenage rites, such as the senior prom and graduation, to attend the all-female Mary Baldwin College in the Shenandoah Valley.
The school offers students as young as 12 a jump-start on college in one of the leading programs of its kind. It also gives brainy girls a chance to be with others like them. By all accounts, they are ready for the leap socially and emotionally, and they crave it academically.
Last spring, Jackie finished eighth grade at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. This fall, she’s taking Psychology 101, Japanese 101, English 101, Folk Dance and U.S. History 1815-1877: Democracy and Crisis.




Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges



Larry Abramson:

When today’s college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That’s because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.
For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.
Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.
Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California’s central valley, another in Ohio. They’re all here to talk about Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.




New (Arizona) English learning law brings challenges



Andrew Natekar:

East Valley school districts are preparing for sweeping changes in the way they are required to teach children who do not yet speak English.
A new state law, set to go into effect in August, will require schools to segregate children who cannot pass an English exam into separate classrooms. Those students will take at least four hours of English language instruction, squeezing out much of their time for other subjects such as science, social studies and math.
It’s a big change: Currently, most English learners spend their school days in mainstream classrooms surrounded by English-speaking peers.
The rules will apply to any child who cannot pass the state’s new English proficiency exam, the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, dubbed “AZELLA.”
The impending changes leave some educators uneasy. At a recent meeting of the Mesa Unified School District governing board, some members worried that English learners would graduate late because the required four-hour English lessons wouldn’t give them enough time to earn required credits in other subjects.
“If they don’t pass AZELLA, they can’t go into concept classes. Then they can’t pass AIMS. It’s a double-whammy,” said Superintendent Debra Duvall. “There is community concern about this one-size-fits-all mind-set.”




Unemployment Training (The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools)



Via a kind reader email: Martin Haberman:

For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology “works” for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students’ street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.
The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.
The dropout problem among urban youth–as catastrophic as it is–is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for “successful” youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as “successful” but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.

Clusty Search on Martin Haberman. Haberman is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.




Longer school day appears to boost MCAS scores



Tracy Jan:

Last fall, 10 Massachusetts public schools embarked on an experiment: Lengthen the school day by at least 25 percent, give students extra doses of reading, writing, and math, and let teachers come up with creative ways to reinforce their lessons.
The extra time appears to be working.
As a whole, schools with longer days boosted students’ MCAS scores in math, English, and science across all grade levels, according to a report to be released today. And they outpaced the state in increasing the percentage of students scoring in the two highest MCAS categories.
The data, to be presented at a national conference in Boston on expanded learning time, is the first comprehensive look at the effectiveness of extra time. The promising state test results show that a longer school day, with more opportunities for hands-on learning, has had a positive impact on student achievement, educators said.




New! Improved! It’s School! – Marketing Schools



Peg Tyre:

In an age of media saturation and ubiquitous advertising, some schools are trying professional marketing campaigns to sell the notion that ‘school is cool.’
In most places kids may not be overjoyed to attend school, but they tolerate it. It’s a stepping stone, their parents remind them over and over, to better things, like college, an interesting, well-paying job and a stable family life. In other places, especially poor neighborhoods, though, kids don’t regard school as a necessary evil but rather as a burden. For a lot of kids in poor neighborhoods, school is definitely not cool.
“It’s no secret,” says New York City schools chief Joel Klein. “All you have to do is ask kids in these areas and they’ll tell you: school is not their thing. They don’t want to be identified as being good at it. Studying is not something they want to be seen doing,” he says.
So Klein is setting out to sell school achievement to schoolchildren—much in the same way that kids are sold soda, breakfast cereal or pop music. With the help of an as yet unnamed advertising agency, he’s launching a slick multimedia campaign complete with celebrity pitchmen, viral marketing schemes, free videos and give-away prizes aimed at “rebranding” academics.




Lawmakers Consider School Food Limits



Kim Severson:

Federal lawmakers are considering the broadest effort ever to limit what children eat: a national ban on selling candy, sugary soda and salty, fatty food in school snack bars, vending machines and à la carte cafeteria lines.
Whether the measure, an amendment to the farm bill, can survive the convoluted politics that have bogged down that legislation in the Senate is one issue. Whether it can survive the battle among factions in the fight to improve school food is another.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, has twice before introduced bills to deal with foods other than the standard school lunch, which is regulated by Department of Agriculture.
Several lawmakers and advocates for changes in school food believe that an amendment to the $286 billion farm bill is the best chance to get control of the mountain of high-calorie snacks and sodas available to school children. Even if the farm bill does not pass, Mr. Harkin and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is also sponsoring the amendment, vow to keep reintroducing it in other forms until it sticks.




Putting on Weight for Football Glory





Jere Longman:

When the Desire Street Academy football team plays in a Louisiana state semifinal playoff game Friday night, the Lions will feature three starting linemen who weigh at least 300 pounds and two others who weigh 270 and 280 pounds, reflecting a trend in which high school players are increasingly reaching a size once seen almost exclusively among linemen in college and the N.F.L.
High school football rosters reveal weight issues that go beyond the nation’s overall increase in obesity rates among children. Two studies this year, one published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and another in The Journal of Pediatrics, found that weight problems among high school football players — especially linemen — far outpaced those of other male children and adolescents.
Now coaches and researchers fear that some young athletes may be endangering their health in an effort to reach massive proportions and attract the attention of college recruiters.
“The old saying was, ‘Wait till you get to college to make it a business,’” said Rusty Barrilleaux, the coach at Hammond High in southeastern Louisiana and a former offensive lineman at Louisiana State. “It’s still fun, but if you want to get to college, you have to get that size. The pressure is definitely on.”




Teacher arrested in Web posting



Don Behm:

As readers of a conservative blog debated the subject of teacher salaries, a writer using the pseudonym “Observer” weighed in.
The West Bend teachers’ salaries made him sick, the person wrote, adding that the 1999 Columbine High School killers had the right idea.
“They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time! Too bad the liberls (sic) rip them; they were heros (sic) and should be remembered that way,” the writer said.
But police say the writer was a teacher himself – and the past president of a teachers union – apparently posing as a teacher-hater.




What Exactly are Kids Reading in those “Reading Blocks”?



Karin Chenoweth:

Whenever I hear about elementary schools that have cut out social studies and science instruction in order to devote 90 minutes or even two hours a day to reading instruction, my main question is, “What on earth are the kids reading for all that time?”
It’s a rhetorical question because I pretty much know what they are reading—they are reading folk tales, adventure stories, relationship stories, some humor (the author of Captain Underpants must be very wealthy by now). Sometimes they will read some non-fiction, but not usually in any kind of coherent fashion. The kids will read a story about butterflies and then one about bicycles and one about Martin Luther King, Jr. None of this is objectionable, but it is not providing them the real intellectual nutrition children need and crave—a carefully chosen course of reading in science and history that will allow them to understand those stories about butterflies and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The reading blocks kids have been sentenced to are not devoted solely to reading. They often spend an inordinate amount of time on “reading strategies,” which give me a headache just thinking about them—predicting, summarizing, outlining, making text-to-text connections, identifying the “purpose” of reading a particular work—the list goes on and on. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of them, but a little of them goes a long way. The countless hours that are being spent on reading strategies would be much better spent on building the store of background knowledge children need to be able to comprehend sophisticated text, including textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and all the things educated citizens are expected to be able to read.

Watch or listen to a recent Madison speech by Karin Chenoweth.




California schools move to the head of the class



Mitchell Landsberg:

California public schools dominated a national ranking of high schools released Friday, countering the usual depiction of the state’s schools as lagging behind their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
In a first-ever ranking of high schools by U.S. News & World Report magazine — best-known for its influential and controversial ranking of colleges and universities — 23 of the top 100 schools in the nation were from California, including 10 from the Los Angeles area.
No other state has as many schools on the list, although New York City and its suburbs, with 20 schools, have by far the most of any metropolitan area, and Massachusetts has the highest percentage of its schools ranked among the top 505 profiled.
The top-ranked school in California was Pacific Collegiate School, a charter campus in Santa Cruz, which was ranked No. 2 in the country behind Thomas Jefferson High in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
Also in the top 10 were the Oxford Academy at No. 4, a college preparatory school in the Anaheim Union High School District that accepts students by examination, and the Preuss School at No. 10, a charter school under the joint oversight of the San Diego Unified School District and UC San Diego. The Preuss School is currently under a cloud because of allegations of grade-tampering, but that would apparently not have affected its ranking, since U.S. News relied on standardized test scores, not grades.
In the Los Angeles area, the top-rated school was Gretchen Whitney High in Cerritos, at No. 12. The ranking was the latest in a long list of honors for the school, and Principal Patricia Hager was both proud and circumspect.
“Well, I’d like to be No. 1,” she joked in an interview. “I’m very proud because this is a very special place, and I appreciate any opportunity I get to have that recognized.”
At the same time, she said, “It’s interesting how we define things like ‘successful’ and ‘top performer’ — what does it mean? As a public educator, it concerns me how we use those terms. Every school has something going for it, so in a way it’s unfair to other schools that don’t score highly on tests. Philosophically it’s a dilemma, but I won’t refuse the attention.”




Certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges



Ellen Gamerman:

As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods — consistently getting students into top universities.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year’s freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway — Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall — but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined — that’s more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students’ high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.




Seat belts for all school buses, or just some?



MSNBC:

The Bush administration on Monday proposed a new rule to improve the safety of school bus seats and expand the use of shoulder belts, but stopped short of ordering that all new buses include seat belts.
Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters rode a packed school bus to Morrisville Elementary School — among the first schools in the country to equip some of its new buses with shoulder straps — then announced a proposed rule that would:

  • Increase the height of seat backs on all school buses from 20 inches to 24 inches to help protect older children and adults from being thrown over the seats during accidents.
  • Require all new short school buses — the style more prone to rollover accidents than longer buses — to begin using shoulder straps.




The Secret to Raising Smart Kids



Carol Dweck:

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.
Growing Pains

  • Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
  • Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
  • Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.




US Students Post Flat Scores in Global Literacy Study



Nancy Zuckerbrod:

U.S. fourth-graders have lost ground in reading ability compared with kids around the world, according to results of a global reading test.
Test results released Wednesday showed U.S. students, who took the test last year, scored about the same as they did in 2001, the last time the test was given — despite an increased emphasis on reading under the No Child Left Behind law.
Still, the U.S. average score on the Progress in International Reading Literacy test remained above the international average. Ten countries or jurisdictions, including Hong Kong and three Canadian provinces, were ahead of the United States this time. In 2001, only three countries were ahead of the United States.
The 2002 No Child Left Behind law requires schools to test students annually in reading and math, and imposes sanctions on schools that miss testing goals.
The U.S. performance on the international test of 45 nations or jurisdictions differed somewhat from results of a U.S. national reading test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card. Fourth-grade reading scores rose modestly on the most recent version of that test, taken earlier this year and measuring growth since 2005. During the previous two-year period, scores were flat.
On the latest international exam, U.S. students posted a lower average score than students in Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy and Sweden, along with the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario.

TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center Website.




National Math Panel Unveils Draft Report



Sean Cavanagh:

Students’ success in mathematics, and algebra specifically, hinges largely on their mastering a focused, clearly defined set of topics in that subject in early grades, the draft report of a federal panel concludes.
The long-awaited report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel is still very much in flux. Members of the White House-commissioned group staged their 10th, and what was supposed to be their final, meeting in a hotel here Nov. 28, though they indicated that numerous revisions to the document are yet to come.
The panel spent most of a day debating and rewriting a 68-page draft of the report. The draft makes recommendations and findings on curricular content, learning processes, training and evaluation of teachers, instructional practices, assessment, and research as those topics apply to math in grades pre-K through 8.
“International and domestic comparisons show that American students have not been succeeding in the mathematical part of their education at anything like a leadership level,” the report says. “Particularly disturbing is the consistent finding that American students achieve in mathematics progressively more poorly at higher grades.”
The 19-member panel has reviewed an estimated 18,000 research documents and reports as part of its work, which began in 2006. But its draft document also bemoans the paucity of available research in several areas of math—including instruction and teacher training. Government needs to do more, it says, to support research with “large enough samples of students, classrooms, teachers, and schools to identify reliable effects.”
The draft attempts to define the core features of a legitimate school algebra course as opposed to one, the panelists said, that presents watered-down math under that course title. Topics in an algebra course should include concepts such as symbols and expressions, functions, quadratic relations, and others, it notes.
The working report also spells out specific concepts in math that are too often neglected in pre-K through grade 8 math instruction generally, such as fractions, whole numbers, and particular elements of geometry and measurement.
“We don’t spend enough time on them and we don’t assess them,” panel member Camilla Persson Benbow, an educational psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., said of fractions. “[They’re] really not well mastered by schoolchildren.”
In arguing in behalf of a more focused curriculum in elementary and middle schools, the panel lists several “benchmarks for critical foundations” in prekindergarten through 8th grade math, leading to algebra. The goal is to develop fluency with fractions, whole numbers, and other topics. The panel drew from a diverse assortment of documents, including the 2006 “Curriculum Focal Points,” published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, as well as Singapore’s national standards and a number of U.S. state math standards.

National Mathematics Advisory Panel Website




In Praise of “Thought Competition” (Writing, Math and other Academic Competitions)



Rebecca Wallace-Segall:

Monday: After a long day at his New York City private school, Ben, 16, heads to my creative writing lab to work on his heartfelt memoir about his parents’ bitter divorce. Tuesday: Alison, 15, rushes from her elite private school in the Bronx to work on her short screenplay about a gifted, mean and eccentric boy. Lily, 13, pops in whenever she can to polish her hilarious short story narrated by an insomniac owl.
Ben, Alison and Lily, along with another few dozen who attend my afterschool writing program, also attend top-notch New York private schools that cost upwards of $25,000 a year. So why, one might wonder, do these kids need an extracurricular creative writing coach? The answer is simple, though twisted: Their schools — while touting well-known athletic teams — are offshoots of the “progressive education” movement and uphold a categorical belief that “thought competition” is treacherous.
Administrators of these schools will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions, including the most prestigious creative writing event in the country: the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. So we at Writopia Lab help these kids to join the 10,000 young literati from across the country who are hurrying to meet the event’s January deadline, as well as deadlines for other competitions.
For decades now, psychology and pedagogy researchers have been debating the impact of competition on young people’s self-esteem, with those wary of thought competition taking the lead. Most New York parents of public or private school students have felt the awkward reverberations of this trend — which avoids naming winners — when Johnny takes home a certificate for “participation” in the school’s science fair. (Do you hang that one up on the wall?)
But some, and ironically those who attend some of the most desirable schools in the region, feel the reverberations in deeper, more painful ways. “Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don’t have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they’re not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. “They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they’re doing,” says Dr. Levine.

Links:




Wisconsin K-12 Tax & Spending Outlook



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

Another year and deeper in debt.
No, that’s not some sad-eyed, old country ballad. It’s the state of Wisconsin’s long-term finances.
To pay for highways, buildings and environmental programs over the past decade, the state has increased long-term debt by 87%, a trend that if left unchecked will surely mean increasingly difficult budget decisions down the road.
The Journal Sentinel’s Steven Walters noted in a recent report that the Legislative Fiscal Bureau says the state had $8.28 billion in such debt in 2006, up from $4.41 billion in 1996 (www.jsonline.com/689757). The period studied covered the leadership of Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and Republicans Scott McCallum and Tommy G. Thompson.
In effect, the governors, with legislative acquiescence, have made politically advantageous decisions to have their favorite programs and pay for them later. It’s basically credit card budgeting.
But the bill always comes due.
As Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, told Walters, the growing debt is a risk. Principal and interest payments on general-obligation bonds will exceed $700 million for the first time this year. Payments on transportation bonds will cost $174 million.
While state officials say the debt load is manageable, a major bond agency, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, last week changed its rating outlook from “positive” to “stable.”
Other long-term trends make such budget moves all the more troublesome. Per-capita income in Wisconsin is about $4,000 a year less than in Minnesota, for example, a gap that has widened. And the number of elderly is expected to jump 90% from 702,000 in 2000 to near 1.34 million by 2030 while the percentage of working age people is expected to decline from 61% to 57%, meaning fewer taxpayers supporting more people in need of services. Add to that the need to replace aging roads, bridges and sewers.

Clearly, we are unlikely to see significant increases in redistributed state tax dollars to “rich” school districts like Madison [2007-2008 Citizen’s Budget].
Related: K-12 Tax & Spending Climate:

According to the Wisconsin DPI, per student spending in Wisconsin has increased by 5.1% annually, since 1987. The Madison School District increased at a 5.25% rate during that time. Clearly, our public schools are attempting to address more issues than ever, from academics to breakfast, special education and health care.




In school reform, billions of dollars — but not much bang



Sol Stern:

When Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city’s schools, he made a solemn promise to raise student achievement and rein in a notoriously inefficient and money-wasting school system. In fact, in his January 2003 speech unveiling his administration’s Children First reforms, the mayor suggested that the $12 billion then going to the schools was sufficient to bring about academic improvement. That’s because he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein were now going to “make sure we get the most value for the school system’s dollar.”
Five years later, we have new, unimpeachable data on the schools that allows us to assess whether the mayor’s promise to deliver a much bigger education bang for the taxpayers’ buck has been fulfilled.
The short answer: not by a longshot. First, let’s examine the dollar side of the equation. The 2003 budget for the schools, Bloomberg’s first, was $12.5 billion, including pension costs and debt service. About $1.2 billion of this total came from federal education funds, another $5.6 billion from the state, and $5.6 billion from direct city contributions. The current budget, including pension and debt service, stands at $19.7 billion. This represents an increase of $7 billion – more than 50% – in total education spending in five years.




Wave of the Future: Why charter schools should replace failing urban schools



Andy Smarick:

In a decade and a half, the charter school movement has gone from a glimmer in the eyes of a few Minnesota reformers to a maturing sector of America’s public education system. Now, like all 15-year-olds, chartering must find its own place in the world.
First, advocates must answer a fundamental question: What type of relationship should the nascent charter sector have with the long-dominant district sector? The tension between the two is at the heart of every political, policy, and philosophical tangle faced by the charter movement.
But charter supporters lack a consistent vision. This motley crew includes civil rights activists, free market economists, career public-school educators, and voucher proponents. They have varied aspirations for the movement and feelings toward the traditional system. Such differences are part of the movement’s DNA: a National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) study found that the nation’s charter laws cite at least 18 different goals, including spurring competition, increasing professional opportunities for teachers, and encouraging greater use of technology.
Because of its uniqueness, chartering is unable to look to previous reform efforts for guidance. No K–12 reform has so fundamentally questioned the basic assumptions—school assignments based on residence, centralized administrative control, schools lasting in perpetuity—underlying the district model of public education. Even the sweeping standards and assessments movement of the last 20 years, culminating in No Child Left Behind, takes for granted and makes use of the district sector.

Rotherham has more.




Using Data to Improve Student Achievement



The Data Quality Campaign and the National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA):

conducted a survey in September 2007, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about state data systems to determine the number of states that have built the infrastructure to tap into the power of longitudinal data. Similar surveys were conducted by NCEA in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This website provides an overview of the findings of the survey in addition to a state-by-state analysis of the policy implications of each state’s data system.
The Power of Longitudinal Data
Longitudinal data matches individual student records over time, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and into post secondary education. States are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve student achievement. But without quality data, they are essentially flying blind. Policymakers need to act now to put in place the policies and resources to ensure that each state has a longitudinal data system and the culture and capacity to translate the information into specific action steps to improve student achievement. When states collect the most relevant data and are able to match individual student records over time, they can answer the questions that are at the core of educational effectiveness. Longitudinal data (data gathered on the same student from year to year) makes it possible to:

State specific results.




The Secret Gripes of Professor Klein: An AP-IB Drama



Jay Matthews:

David Klein, a mathematics professor at California State University at Northridge, says he was pleased to review Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate math courses for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He respects institute President Chester E. “Checker” Finn Jr., a longtime leader in the movement to improve U.S. schools. Among the views Klein shares with Finn is that overuse of calculators can interfere with students’ mastery of analytical skills.
But their collaboration on Fordham’s analysis of AP and IB did not turn out the way either of them hoped.
On June 4, Klein submitted his report on two courses, AP Calculus AB and IB Mathematics SL. Klein’s analysis of AP and IB math was more negative and his grades lower than what the experts on AP and IB English, history and biology courses submitted to Fordham. He would have given the AP math course a C-plus and the IB math course a C-minus. The other reviewers thought none of the courses they looked at deserved anything less than a B-minus.
Still, Klein says, he got no indication from the Fordham staff of any problems until the edited version of his material came back to him for review on Sept. 28, a week before the deadline for completing the report. Many of what he considered his strongest points, he discovered, had been deleted. He had Fordham remove his name as a co-author of the report, “Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?” which was released Nov. 14.
After agreeing to the name removal, Finn told Klein in an e-mail: “I imagine we’ll also reduce your overemphasis on calculator use and probably change the grades (upward). Thanks, tho, for your help.” Klein’s grade of C-plus for AP was not changed, but his grade of C-minus for IB got a big jump to a B-minus, meaning the report was saying that IB math was better than AP math, the opposite of what Klein had said.

Related:




New York Grades Set Off Debate on Judging Schools





Elissa Gootman & Jennifer Medina:

Not long after Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced plans last year to give grades of A through F to schools, principals at some of New York City’s coveted specialized high schools grew concerned. With the city looking to reward gains among the lowest-achieving students, how would the elite schools be judged?
The principals peppered the administration with ideas for extra credits for their schools: perhaps counting how many Advanced Placement tests students pass or the college credits they accumulate. In the end, the city decided to tie bonus points for these schools to high scores on state Regents exams.
That served the gold-standard Stuyvesant High School well, propelling it from a high B to a comfortable A. But the principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Randy J. Asher, called the decision “ridiculous,” saying it contradicted a core principle of the report cards: the need to gauge how far students have come, rather than simply how they perform.
“I think we all really came to the table saying, let’s find something fair for schools like ours,” Mr. Asher, whose school earned a B, said in a recent interview. “And I don’t think we succeeded.”




Parents of Disabled Students Push for Separate Classes



Robert Tomsho:

Last fall, groups who favor placing disabled students in regular classrooms faced opposition from an unlikely quarter: parents like Norette Travis, whose daughter Valerie has autism.
Valerie had already tried the mainstreaming approach that the disability-advocacy groups were supporting. After attending a preschool program for special-needs students, she was assigned to a regular kindergarten class. But there, her mother says, she disrupted class, ran through the hallways and lashed out at others — at one point giving a teacher a black eye.
“She did not learn anything that year,” Ms. Travis recalls. “She regressed.”
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, factions are increasingly divided. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers.
Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. People like Ms. Travis believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments — including separate schools.

More on from the Wall Street Journal on Mainstreaming.
Joanne has more.




Voters support casino tax for schools



Guy Clifton:

A statewide poll shows Nevada voters overwhelmingly favor an initiative to raise the state’s gaming tax in order to fund education.
The Research 2000 poll, conducted for the Reno Gazette-Journal, found 68 percent of voters were in favor of the initiative filed by the Nevada State Education Association, which would raise the gaming tax from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent at casinos with a total revenue of more than $1 million a month.
“That’s pretty consistent with our findings as well,” said Lynn Warne, president of the 28,000-member NSEA. “The (Las Vegas Review-Journal) did a poll that came in with over three-fourths in favor.”
The Gazette-Journal poll of 600 Nevadans who vote regularly in state elections was conducted Nov. 16-19 and has a margin of error of 4 percent.




Pennsylvania to revamp gifted education



Melania Hughes:

They’re not mentioned under No Child Left Behind. They’re not assisted by federal funding or programs.
Gifted students in Pennsylvania must rely on the state Department of Education to make sure public schools challenge them intellectually.
So with changes proposed to the state’s gifted education regulations, known as Chapter 16, a network of parents and advocates are weighing in.
As they see it, the changes being reviewed in Harrisburg don’t go far enough.
”The state board missed an opportunity so far in making any meaningful difference to help parents and schools avoid conflicts,” said Jay Clark of Lancaster, a parent of two gifted children who has testified before legislative committees about the proposals.